Oracle of Bandwidth - Slashdot User

Comment Re:I'll go ahead and say it (Score 1) 925

by Oracle of Bandwidth on Monday June 22, 2009 @02:33AM (#28417595) Attached to: US House Democrats Unveil a Health Care Plan

It's a good thing we don't have a concept like minority rights, I mean it'd be silly if someone could interfere with my life liberty or happiness just because more people on their side thought they were right.

Comment Re:I'll go ahead and say it (Score 1) 925

by Oracle of Bandwidth on Monday June 22, 2009 @02:31AM (#28417581) Attached to: US House Democrats Unveil a Health Care Plan

Thanks, I as I was re-thinking this in my head I thought it sounded high.

Comment Re:I'll go ahead and say it (Score 4, Insightful) 925

by Oracle of Bandwidth on Saturday June 20, 2009 @08:12PM (#28405919) Attached to: US House Democrats Unveil a Health Care Plan

If it is so popular there should be no need to mandate participation, right? People will just opt in because they love it so much.

Comment Re:I'll go ahead and say it (Score 2, Insightful) 925

by Oracle of Bandwidth on Saturday June 20, 2009 @07:38PM (#28405583) Attached to: US House Democrats Unveil a Health Care Plan

Except that national health care is highly unlikely to be unpopular. In countries that have national health care, again such as Britain and Germany, the national health care program is enormously popular. This is part of why the Republicans are fighting the idea so hard; they know that, much like Social Security, once a large national program is established to provide for everyone something that they want (cheaper health care), it will be impossible to kill again later.

Wait? People like Social Security? That pit my employer and I throw money into every month? You realize in the United States there is a huge industry to actually save for retirement because we have no illusion that social security works right? If I could opt out tomorrow I'd be waiting in the queue before dawn. 15% from me, 15% from my employer and 100% worthless.

Submission + - Intel Releases Superchip with 80 Cores!

Submitted by

Jason Jacobs

on Tuesday February 13, 2007 @10:42PM

Jason Jacobs writes: "Just when you thought Dual Core was cool Intel has decided to leap lightyears ahead in the CPU arena and will reveal details on Monday of a processor capable of more than a thousand billion calculations per second. Intel Corporation researchers have developed the world's first programmable processor that delivers supercomputer-like performance from a single, 80-core chip not much larger than the size of a finger nail while using less electricity than most of today's home appliances. This is the result of the company's innovative 'Tera-scale computing' research aimed at delivering Teraflop — or trillions of calculations per second — performance for future PCs and servers. Technical details of the Teraflop research chip will be presented at the annual Integrated Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) this week in San Francisco. Intel Super CPU"

Submission + - Teacher's porn conviction sparks tech debate

Submitted by

Steve Davis

on Tuesday February 13, 2007 @09:01PM

Steve Davis writes: "Substitute teacher Julie Amero faces up to 40 years in prison after being convicted of exposing seventh-grade students to pornographic images on their classroom computer in Norwich, Conn. She claims spyware and adware caused pornographic popup ads to show up on their own, which her students saw."

Submission + - Google News criminal in Belgium?

Submitted by

Elektroschock

on Tuesday February 13, 2007 @08:39PM

Elektroschock writes: "Copiepress vs. Google. A Court in Belgium just decided that Google News is illegal and infringes copyright. Google could not reproduce story titles and summaries. In the European Parliament a bill is discussed that mandates that all intentional Intellectual property rights infringements on a commercial scale and inciting and abetting are to be considered as criminal offences. Red Herring explains the larger impact of the Belgium ruling

Copyright infringement... has become an increasingly sensitive issue. Google has also been under fire for wanting to scan in books without publishers' permission for its Google Print program.
Google announced they want to appeal the decision."

Submission + - Light and Matter United

Submitted by

win32mfc

on Tuesday February 13, 2007 @08:30PM

win32mfc writes: "Light and matter united: Opens the way to new computers and communication systems

Story and video clips at http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2007/02.08/99- hau.html

Details of the experiments appear as the cover story of the Feb. 8 issue of Nature.

From the Article:
Lene Hau has already shaken scientists' beliefs about the nature of things. Albert Einstein and just about every other physicist insisted that light travels 186,000 miles a second in free space, and that it can't be speeded-up or slowed down. But in 1998, Hau, for the first time in history, slowed light to 38 miles an hour, about the speed of rush-hour traffic.

Now Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics and of Applied Physics, Hau has done it again. She and her team made a light pulse disappear from one cold cloud then retrieved it from another cloud nearby. In the process, light was converted into matter then back into light. For the first time in history, this gives science a way to control light with matter and vice versa."

Atom Smasher May Create "Black Saturns" 423

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday February 13, 2007 @08:26PM from the distinctive-Hawking-radiation dept.

David Shiga writes "If we ever make black holes on Earth, they might be much stranger objects than the star-swallowing monsters known to exist in space. According to a new theory, any black hole that pops out of the Large Hadron Collider under construction in Switzerland might be surrounded by a black ring — forming a microscopic 'black Saturn'. This could happen if extra dimensions exist, as string theory suggests, and if they are large enough." An evocative excerpt from the article: "...there is an outside chance that in a few years in a tunnel near Geneva, physicists will make a black hole far smaller than a proton and circled by a squashed four-dimensional black doughnut."

Feed New RIAA Site Pimps P2P Malware (wired.com)

From feed by wiredfeed on Tuesday February 13, 2007 @08:12PM

P2PLawsuits.com, registered recently by the Recording Industry Association of America, serves up ads for nasty file-sharing clients. The site is described in a leaked strategy letter allegedly sent by the group. In Listening Post.

Submission + - Canadian Quantum Computer Demonstration

Submitted by

lost eden

on Tuesday February 13, 2007 @07:35PM

lost eden writes: ""D-Wave of British Columbia has promised to demonstrate a quantum computer next Tuesday, which can carry out 64,000 calculations simultaneously, thanks to a new technique, which rethinks the already-uncanny world of quantum computing."

Does this yet have any 'real world' implications, or is it merely a scientific milestone to simply document & brag about?"

Web Censorship Proposed For Norway 338

Posted by kdawson on Monday February 12, 2007 @11:36PM from the great-firewall dept.

Aqwis writes "A Norwegian Web filtering system (link in Norwegian), comparable to the Great Firewall of China, has been proposed to the Norwegian legislature. It would, if enacted, block all Web sites and servers that contain hate material (racial hate, pro-Nazi sites, hate towards the government, etc.), most kinds of pornography (not only child pornography), foreign gambling sites, and sites that share copyrighted or other material that it is not legal to share (such as most BitTorrent sites and services such as LimeWire). Reactions have been mixed; however they are mostly negative."

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