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Comment Re:GEOS! (Score 1) 654

Yes! I came here to vote for GEOS. My dad installed the 16-bit version on our 486 and it was pretty great. The included apps were solid and fun for a kid to play with. I used GEOS to create a classroom newspaper in the third grade using GEOWrite. I thought it was awesome to be able to create pages with multiple fonts, columns, and graphics. It seemed way better than hacking around in the white on blue screen of WordPerfect. I think we eventually started using Windows 3.1 so we could dial up to the net.
Image

Lucasfilm Unveils "Sandcrawler" Singapore Office Screenshot-sm 159

An anonymous reader writes "The massive, slow moving Sandcrawlers from George Lucas' Star Wars films inspired the form of Lucasfilm's new regional headquarters in Singapore. Designed by Aedas, the Sandcrawler Building will house a 100 seat theater, Lucasfilm Singapore offices, a public podium and other employee spaces. Neither rusty nor slow moving in this case, the glassy and streamlined building will combine a high performance facade with lush gardens and foliage that spills over terraces, resulting in a highly efficient commercial space. With construction already underway, we can look forward to this real life Star Wars manifestation sometime in 2012."

Comment Who needs physical copies? (Score 1) 1162

I no longer see the point in owning physical copies of media. Why spend my limited viewing time watching something I've seen before when my Netflix streaming queue has so much new stuff for me to see?

There's also the DRM issue. DVD players pretty much just work. My in-laws purchased a Blu-Ray player, but no longer use it since it refused to play a handful of movies they had rented. They're not going to bother with updating the firmware on their device when they could just watch a DVD instead.
Math

Erdos' Combinatorial Geometry Problem Solved 170

eldavojohn writes "After 65 years, Paul Erdos' combinatorial problem has been solved by Indiana University professor Nets Hawk Katz. The problem involved determining the minimum number of distinct distances between any finite set of points in a plane and its applications range from drug development to robot motion planning to computer graphics. You can find a description of the problem here and the prepublication of the paper on arXiv. The researchers used the existing work on the problem and included two new ideas of their own, like using the polynomial ham sandwich theorem, to reach a solution that warranted at least half of Erdos' $500 reward posted for solving this problem way back in 1935."

Comment Re:Not unusual (Score 1) 341

Actually the way they find planets outside of our solar system is by measuring the "wobble" caused by the planets gravity as it orbits the star. Thus, it is much easier to find large planets with more gravity and planets that are closer to the star with shorter, more observable orbital periods.
Supercomputing

IBM Building 20 Petaflop Computer For the US Gov't 248

eldavojohn writes "When it's built, 'Sequoia' will outshine every super computer on the top 500 list today. The specs on this 96 rack beast are a bit hard to comprehend as it consists of 1.6 million processors and some 1.6TB of memory. That's 1.6 million processors — not cores. Its purpose? Primarily to keep track of nuclear waste & simulate explosions of nuclear munitions, but also for research into astronomy, energy, the human genome, and climate change. Hopefully the government uses this magnificent tool wisely when it gets it in 2012."
Medicine

3 Cups of Coffee Increases Hallucinations 628

PearsSoap writes "The Telegraph and other sources are pointing out a study on 200 students which has found that a high caffeine intake can cause visual and auditory hallucinations, and can make people think that others are 'out to get them.' The abstract (and full version if you have access) is available. 'The volunteers were questioned about their caffeine intake from products including coffee, tea, energy drinks, chocolate bars and caffeine tablets.'"

Comment Re:INCORRECT Correlation (Score 2, Insightful) 570

Wow. Quit sleeping through your econ classes.

Charging 3 different customers different prices for the same product is called discrimination. Great if you can get away with it (sometimes called a senior citizen or student discount), but not how most businesses operate.

The grandparent was correct, and you pretty much agree with the post in your second paragraph there. Text message market should be in perfect competition. Text messages from Sprint are exactly the same as those from Verizon, they are perfect substitutes. In a correctly functioning market, market forces will push commodities with perfect substitutes down to the marginal cost. Marginal cost is the price it takes to create the last widget, or in this case text message. As per the article, text messages cost almost nothing, therefore, the price of text messages should be almost nothing. The fact that this is not the case indicates that the market is not functioning correctly.

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