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NASA

NASA To Investigate Mysterious 'Space Ball' 192

redletterdave writes "In mid-November, a hollow space ball fell from the sky and crashed into the earth in Namibia, the African nation situated above South Africa and west of Botswana and Zimbabwe. Authorities recovered the sphere in a grassy village north of Windhoek, the country's capital. The hollow ball, which appears to be made of 'two halves welded together,' has a rough surface, a 14-inch diameter and measures 43 inches around. The strange globe created a crater 13 inches deep and almost 12.5 feet wide, but was found almost 60 feet from the landing spot. Paul Ludik, the police forensics director investigating the case, says the dense ball weighs 13 pounds and is made of a 'metal alloy known to man.' NASA and the European Space Agency will both help investigate the strange occurrence."

Comment To the right... even further to the right... (Score 1) 639

Great caption from german "left leaning" daily Taz for a photo showing only two people in an article on the the (still legal) ultra-right-wing german NPD-party -- many of whose members apparently actively aided and abetted the nazi-terrorists of the NSU-gang:

NPD-Spitzenkandidat Matthias Faust (rechts) und Parteichef Udo Voigt (noch weiter rechts) am Mittwoch in Bremen.
NPD front runner Matthias Faust (right) and party leader Udo Voigt (even further right) in [the town of] Bremen on wednesday.

By the way: the connections between NSU and NPD are serious -- very, very serious -- business (NSU committed at least ten murders over the last 10 years). The way those terrorists were underestimated and the hunt for them was botched (sometimes deliberately as it appears) will hopefully be a major issue for german law enforcement in the years to come.

Still a good caption, though.

Comment Re:RIP please? (Score 1) 122

You, as a hotmail-user, may not have had a problem with receiving spam, but many people (me included) had massive problems with spam from hotmail-accounts during the late nineties/early noughts. It's not for nothing that hotmail at some point became synonymous with "dodgy-offer-by-nigerian-royalty-mail". Those were the days before many of us had good hosters/providers with grade-A server-side spam-filtering. At one point I simply stopped bothering, set up a local rule that would automatically move anything received from a hotmail-account to the thrash and told anyone I knew to stay the hell away from hotmail if they still wanted to communicate with me via e-mail.

hotmail may be a decent mail provider today, but they burned a lot of trust in the early days. So much, that to this day anyone with a @hotmail.com-address feels kind of dodgy/unprofessional to me, even though I know hotmail isn't as bad as it used to be.

Comment Been there, done that (Score 1) 243

The polish science fiction author Stanislaw Lem describes this (in a humorous fashion) in one of his Ijon Tichy / Professor A. Donda short stories.

Prof. Donda has the theory that information = mass, proceeds to create a new field of study as a pretext to cram the maximum amount of information into the smallest space possible. He succeeds, creating an information singularity that makes all of the fixed, stored information in the universe go kablooie. Tichy and Donda end up somewhere in the jungle, looking at old copies of Playboy magazine.

Comment Re:After losing the carts and the cost of each gam (Score 1) 425

The iPod Touch just seems a whole lot sturdier too

Seconded. My 4 year old daughter has been using my old 1st Gen. Touch for a year now... dropped it, smeared it with whatever gunk was on her fingers... sometimes the screen was so encrusted with god-knows-what it felt like a relief-map of the alps. At one point some sugary goo must have entered the device, because the home-button stopped working. I figured I hadn't much to lose, so I soaked the bottom half in an alcoholic cleaner... whaddaya know -- it works again like on day one.

I initially bought the thing as a (rather expensive) toy for myself, but it turned out to be an invaluable Device For Peace And Harmony On Long Road Trips And Train Rides. :-)

She doesn't yet play games, but loves to watch old Sesame Street clips, Shaun The Sheep, look at the family photos I loaded onto it and listens to music. At 3 years old she had the interface figured out in about two days.

P.S.: Being a Responsible Parent I obviously severely limit her time with the iPod, also I used the parental controls to lower the maximum volume.

Comment To zap my history on a Mac I use Automator... (Score 2) 110

... I created an Automator-Script that moves these files/folders:

~/Library/Cookies/Cookies.plist
~/Library/Safari/History.plist
~/Library/Safari/HistoryIndex.sk
~/Library/Safari/LastSession.plist
~/Library/Safari/Downloads.plist
~/Library/Safari/Databases
~/Library/Safari/LocalStorage
~/Library/Safari/TopSites.plist
~/Library/Safari/WebpageIcons.db
~/Library/Preferences/Macromedia/Flash Player
~/Library/Caches/com.apple.Safari
~/Library/Caches/QuickTime
~/Library/Caches/Adobe/Flash Player/AssetCache
~/Library/Caches/Metadata/Safari

... to the thrash.

Did I miss anything?

Books

Internet Abbreviations Added To Oxford Dictionary 101

f1vlad writes "Philologists have added popular internet abbreviations to the one hundred twenty-six year-old Oxford English Dictionary. Among these are the popular OMG, LOL, and FYI. 'Dictionary compilers said that although the terms are associated with modern electronic communications, some are surprisingly old. The first confirmed use of "OMG" was in a letter in 1917. "Things people think are new words normally have a longer history," Graeme Diamond, the dictionary's principal editor for new words, said Friday.'"

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