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Comment Re:Red state (Score 2) 470

To cite a Fox News site as you hurl the acusation that the other party is ignorant and needs to be educated implies you are the one with deficiencies that will not be remedied by any call to reason or logic. Only a true true believer can give Fox News as a source that delivers unvarished truth . Thus, cease with the name calling unless and until you are willing tol stand behind your words with a real identity, even then do not expect rapture to follow.

Technology

Gartner Says 3D Printers Will Cost Less Than $2,000 By 2016 170

colinneagle writes "Widespread adoption of 3D printing technology may not be that far away, according to a Gartner report predicting that enterprise-class 3D printers will be available for less than $2,000 by 2016. 3D printers are already in use among many businesses, from manufacturing to pharmaceuticals to consumers goods, and have generated a diverse set of use cases. As a result, the capabilities of the technology have evolved to meet customer needs, and will continue to develop to target those in additional markets, Gartner says."
The Internet

Ship Anchor, Not Sabotaging Divers, Possibly Responsible For Outage 43

Nerval's Lobster writes "This week, Egypt caught three men in the process of severing an undersea fiber-optic cable. But Telecom Egypt executive manager Mohammed el-Nawawi told the private TV network CBC that the reason for the region's slowdowns was not the alleged saboteurs — it was damage previously caused by a ship. On March 22, cable provider Seacom reported a cut in its Mediterranean cable connecting Southern and Eastern Africa, the Middle East and Asia to Europe; it later suggested that the most likely cause of the incident was a ship anchor, and that traffic was being routed around the cut, through other providers. But repairs to the cable took longer than expected, with the Seacom CEO announcing March 23 that the physical capability to connect additional capacity to services in Europe was "neither adequate nor stable enough," and that it was competing with other providers. The repairs continued through March 27, after faults were found on the restoration system; that same day, Seacom denied that the outage could have been the work of the Egyptian divers, but said that the true cause won't be known for weeks. 'We think it is unlikely that the damage to our system was caused by sabotage,' the CEO wrote in a statement. 'The reasons for this are the specific location, distance from shore, much greater depth, the presence of a large anchored vessel on the fault site which appears to be the cause of the damage and other characteristics of the event.'"
Mars

4-Billion-Pixel Panorama View From Curiosity Rover 101

A reader points out that there is a great new panorama made from shots from the Curiosity Rover. "Sweep your gaze around Gale Crater on Mars, where NASA's Curiosity rover is currently exploring, with this 4-billion-pixel panorama stitched together from 295 images. ...The entire image stretches 90,000 by 45,000 pixels and uses pictures taken by the rover's two MastCams. The best way to enjoy it is to go into fullscreen mode and slowly soak up the scenery — from the distant high edges of the crater to the enormous and looming Mount Sharp, the rover's eventual destination."
Technology

Festo's Drone Dragonfly Takes To the Air 45

yyzmcleod writes "Building on the work of last year's bionic creation, the Smart Bird, Festo announced that it will literally launch its latest creation, the BionicOpter, at Hannover Messe in April. With a wingspan of 63 cm and weighing in at 175 grams, the robotic dragonfly mimics all forms of flight as its natural counterpart, including hover, glide and maneuvering in all directions. This is made possible, the company says, by the BionicOpter's ability to move each of its four wings independently, as well as control their amplitude, frequency and angle of attack. Including its actuated head and body, the robot exhibits 13 degrees of freedom, which allows it to rapidly accelerate, decelerate, turn and fly backwards."
Firefox

Emscripten and New Javascript Engine Bring Unreal Engine To Firefox 124

MojoKid writes "There's no doubt that gaming on the Web has improved dramatically in recent years, but Mozilla believes it has developed new technology that will deliver a big leap in what browser-based gaming can become. The company developed a highly-optimized version of Javascript that's designed to 'supercharge' a game's code to deliver near-native performance. And now that innovation has enabled Mozilla to bring Epic's Unreal Engine 3 to the browser. As a sort of proof of concept, Mozilla debuted this BananaBread game demo that was built using WebGL, Emscripten, and the new JavaScript version called 'asm.js.' Mozilla says that it's working with the likes of EA, Disney, and ZeptoLab to optimize games for the mobile Web, as well." Emscripten was previously used to port Doom to the browser.

Comment /. may retain all old postings, however, what use (Score 2) 145

is it when these are impossible to retrieve by a site user?

It has been my experience that several science postings are invisible despite my knowing they existed whether using slashdot's miserable search or external tools, e.g. Google or even DuckDuckGo. Nothing near relevant is brought up for one article and the other only obtained derivate, later citings. [The first pertained to a periodic intensity from a star (did not read original article a the time) and the second the then new observation of micro bubble formation along the axis of the bursting of a larger bubble. The latter was discovered with high speed photography and was an unexpected phenomena. At the time I read the original article. It is the former that has eluded me on multiple tries.]

I have been extremely frustrated trying to go back to several old postings that would have been useful, but now are as good as being non-existent.

Comment Re:CEO has to mark his Territory or simply ... (Score 1) 72

if successful it could make his tenure less secure. That is, from the CEO's perspective it is better to jettison a potentially successful project for which he will garner no credit and could potentially make his efforts seem weak in comparison. Too bad corporate ethics are never enforced, where only the top dog's needs are now met.

Comment Unwarranted Arrogance (Score 1) 648

Perceptions play a major role, hence, to claim victory base upon the public's mass use of ubiquitous of Linux variants hidden in devices will not be perceived as a victorious. That is, when that Public is blissfully ignorant. Moreover, with ready cash in hand and hired help in all fields these victories could so easily be overturned. Premature claims of victory lead to humiliation.

I would suggest several tags be added to this story alone with arrogance and hubris. out-of-touch, unreality, ...

Comment No risk business plan ... (Score 1) 148

HP not being a software powerhouse with years of success can at best seem to imply it might drop Windows on its PCs. That is, if it is not given a cash gift from some outside benefactor.

Even if it does not work it has lost nothing by allowing sales of its OS on a small fraction of the PCs it still sells, i.e. to those that do not insist on having those must have MS applications and games that run only on its OS. So, at worse, for MS it is bled a bit more than it might otherwise, however, if they buy off HP their cash flow from one of their few cash cows has been lessened.

For HP the risks are minimal either way, if their OS sells into the corporate market they lessen the clout of MS. Or if they are bought off, they never promised anything to their customers other than a tablet and some phones. However, their cash flow is enhanced or they can undersell some of the competition. Either way they gain.

Comment Re:food, and off topic (Score 2, Informative) 284

Fine, but do you numbers include the necessary infrastructure costs (plus maintenance) of electrical distribution? Moreover, what of the skills required to safely and temporarily store radio active waste, which we still cannot deal with effectively in the so-called developed world? Local or distributed sources of power might appear less efficient from a global perspective, however, too often that view is skewed towards not including real, long term costs. Plus Uranium will become increasingly expensive were it used everywhere, as you suggest.

Please recalculate with more care. Also throw in the talent to build and maintain these power stations and clean up afterwards when they are obsolete.

Comment Isn't this a duplicate? (Score 1) 147

I aborted my run in the former instance, because the measurement saw only a high burst speed that immediate degraded to piddling one, well below the supposed high rate being advertised. Little different this time, register and run with no real point to communicate. I will fore go this opportunity to help buttress spurious statistics in support of the status quo.

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