Comment Re:Eh, what is illegal? (Score -1) 377
Where did you get your UK knowledge from?
Sort out the United Kingdom, it is easy, just sort out Ireland, Schotland, Wales and Brittain
The United Kingdom comprises England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. The rest of Ireland is the Republic of Ireland (or Eire) and it is not part of the UK; though it could contentiously be included as part of the British Isles. And that's where the trouble starts, so instead of Great Britain it is now the United Kingdom with the Republic of Ireland as a completely seperate entity.
But I'm just being pedantic, there are, as you say, many issues to sort out among these friendly countries before we can even start to hammer out peace in the Middle East.
Submission + - NASA Telescopes Spy Ultra-Distant Galaxy (nasa.gov)
DevotedSkeptic writes: "With the combined power of NASA's Spitzer and Hubble space telescopes, as well as a cosmic magnification effect, astronomers have spotted what could be the most distant galaxy ever seen. Light from the young galaxy captured by the orbiting observatories first shone when our 13.7-billion-year-old universe was just 500 million years old.
The far-off galaxy existed within an important era when the universe began to transit from the so-called cosmic dark ages. During this period, the universe went from a dark, starless expanse to a recognizable cosmos full of galaxies. The discovery of the faint, small galaxy opens a window onto the deepest, most remote epochs of cosmic history.
Light from the primordial galaxy traveled approximately 13.2 billion light-years before reaching NASA's telescopes. In other words, the starlight snagged by Hubble and Spitzer left the galaxy when the universe was just 3.6 percent of its present age. Technically speaking, the galaxy has a redshift, or "z," of 9.6. The term redshift refers to how much an object's light has shifted into longer wavelengths as a result of the expansion of the universe. Astronomers use redshift to describe cosmic distances."
The far-off galaxy existed within an important era when the universe began to transit from the so-called cosmic dark ages. During this period, the universe went from a dark, starless expanse to a recognizable cosmos full of galaxies. The discovery of the faint, small galaxy opens a window onto the deepest, most remote epochs of cosmic history.
Light from the primordial galaxy traveled approximately 13.2 billion light-years before reaching NASA's telescopes. In other words, the starlight snagged by Hubble and Spitzer left the galaxy when the universe was just 3.6 percent of its present age. Technically speaking, the galaxy has a redshift, or "z," of 9.6. The term redshift refers to how much an object's light has shifted into longer wavelengths as a result of the expansion of the universe. Astronomers use redshift to describe cosmic distances."
Comment Your want to read? E-Ink. (Score 1) 415
You stated reading as your primary goal so the only answer is an e-ink e-reader. Tablets are capable of providing reading apps but none of them provide anything like a "printed page" experience. An e-ink e-reader looks and reacts like a printed page; it is non-reflective, non-glossy, non-backlit. The lack of back lighting is a plus not a negative because the lights used to illuminate most tablet screens are in the spectrum that triggers your brain into the "wake up, wake up, dawn is here" state. That's not so good for reading at bedtime. Step outside with a tablet and it's unreadable; you end up looking at a mirror (with smeared fingerprints). Step outside with an e-ink e-reader and you can read naturally.
I've been careful not to push you to a particular brand of e-ink e-reader but I would push for one that supports as many formats as possible especially those that are DRM free. If you get tied down now to Amazon formatted material you may find you regret it in the long run; some of their practices have been Orwellian.
Submission + - Retro: Turn your iPad into an Etch a Sketch (kickstarter.com)
An anonymous reader writes: It was bound to happen: Someone created an Etch a Sketch for the iPad. Looks to work exactly like the original, but the software will be open source so you can hack at will!
Who knows, with a new Etch a Sketch 2.0, perhaps Romney will get his fair "shake" ;-).
Who knows, with a new Etch a Sketch 2.0, perhaps Romney will get his fair "shake"
Submission + - Physicist Bets $200,000 Against Scalable Quantum Computing
quax writes: Fringe theoretical physicist Joy Christian challenges quantum computing luminary Scott Aaronson. He bets double the amount that Scott promised anyone who proves Quantum Computing to be a mirage. Joy has some unconventional ideas and claims his work disproves the famous Bell inequality. Scott blogs about it an hilarity ensues.
If they stand by their bets, one of them will most likely lose a lot of money in the not to distant future.
If they stand by their bets, one of them will most likely lose a lot of money in the not to distant future.
Submission + - Why You Can't Dump Java (Even Though You Want To) (infoworld.com)
snydeq writes: "So many recent exploits have used Java as their attack vector, you might conclude Java should be shown the exit, but the reality is, Java is not the problem, writes Security Advisor's Roger Grimes. 'Sure, I could opt not to use those Java-enabled services or install Java and uninstall when I'm finished. But the core problem isn't necessarily Java's exploitability; nearly all software is exploitable. It's unpatched Java. Few successful Java-related attacks are related to zero-day exploits. Almost all are related to Java security bugs that have been patched for months (or longer),' Grimes writes. 'The bottom line is that we aren't addressing the real problems. It isn't a security bug here and there in a particular piece of software; that's a problem we'll never get rid of. Instead, we allow almost all cyber criminals to get away with their Internet crime without any penalty. They almost never get caught and punished. Until we solve the problem of accountability, we will never get rid of the underlying problem.'"
Submission + - TSA's mm-Wave Body Scanner Breaks Diabetic Teen's $10K Insulin Pump (abc4.com)
OverTheGeicoE writes: Savannah Barry, a Colorado teenager, was returning home from a conference in Salt Lake City. She is a diabetic and wears an insulin pump to control her insulin levels 24/7. She carries documentation of her condition to assist screeners, who usually give her a pat-down search. This time the screeners listened to her story, read her doctor's letter, and forced her to go through a millimeter-wave body scanner anyway. The insulin pump stopped working immediately, and of course, she was subjected to a full invasive manual search. 'My life is pretty much in their hands when I go through a body scan with my insulin pump on,' she says. She wants TSA screeners to have more training. Was this a predictable outcome, considering that no one outside TSA has access to millimeter-wave scanners for testing? How powerful must the body scanner's emitter be to destroy electronic devices? Would oversight from the FDA or FCC prevent similar incidents from happening in the future?
Submission + - The wretched state of GPU transcoding (extremetech.com)
MrSeb writes: "Excerpt from the story (which reportedly turned the writer, Joel Hruska, quite mad): "This story began as an investigation into why Cyberlink’s Media Espresso software produced video files of wildly varying quality and size depending on which GPU was used for the task. It then expanded into a comparison of several alternate solutions. Our goal was to find a program that would encode at a reasonably high quality level (~1GB per hour was the target) and require a minimal level of expertise from the user. The conclusion, after weeks of work and going blind staring at enlarged images, is that the state of "consumer" GPU transcoding is still a long, long way from prime time use. In short, it's simply not worth using the GPU to accelerate your video transcodes; it's much better to simply use Handbrake, which uses your CPU. Read the story for the full analysis, and some hints of some truly awful coding from Cyberlink."
Submission + - The Avengers: Why Pirates Failed To Prevent A Box Office Record (torrentfreak.com)
TheGift73 writes: "Despite the widespread availability of pirated releases, The Avengers just scored a record-breaking $200 million opening weekend at the box office. While some are baffled to see that piracy failed to crush the movie’s profits, it’s really not that surprising. Claiming a camcorded copy of a movie seriously impacts box office attendance is the same as arguing that concert bootlegs stop people from seeing artists on stage."
Comment Couldn't they use a pair of robots? (Score 3, Funny) 53
Say one, perhaps gold in colour with a slightly annoying, camp voice, that's humanoid and another that's really the brains of the operation in a tri-wheeled body that communicates with a series of clicks & beeps (it's also got a useful rotary arm for shutting off that valve).
It would make for a more entertaining video at the end of the competition.
Comment Creepy (Score 1) 106
Woah! I was getting a bit creeped out by some of the more paranoid comments from our brethren and just at the right/wrong moment a junior spider abseils off my ceiling light across the room and onto my keyboard. The slightest movement of my hand makes it scurry in and under the ] (right angle bracket) key. It shall feast well tonight!
And my comment... don't use Xbox it's Microsoft shit. Easy.
Comment A chance to laugh at Microsoft (Score 1) 337
The Azure "cloud" is a new thing, built on shiny new servers running new code. Surely nothing as simple as a leap day could cause any trouble? We learned all the "this-date-is-coming" lessons over 12 years ago didn't we?
Well done Microsoft, you made me smile.
Well done Microsoft, you made me smile.
Comment Thinking without spoken language (Score 1) 147
If you are born completely deaf, what language do you think in?
Comment No. Not Flash. (Score 1) 87
Please don't let them put anything else "in Flash". It isn't necessary (WebGL). It isn't secure (ever). It isn't needed (full stop).
It's been hard enough to play video streams "through" flash on Linux, don't push the next gaming craze down the same toilet.
It's been hard enough to play video streams "through" flash on Linux, don't push the next gaming craze down the same toilet.
