Comment Re:Treat yourself and avoid United (Score 1) 74
Come back and talk to me after you've endured a night on the floor in DIA, and then wake up in the morning and realize that you are literally trapped in the airport, with no foreseeable way home.
Comment Treat yourself and avoid United (Score 1) 74
After spending 36 hours in DIA (Denver Intl Airport) due to a spring snowstorm that shut down the entire airport, I will never again fly United if I can help it and DIA (United's major western hub) is to be avoided at all costs.
The most demoralizing thing in the world is to wake up from a night sleeping on the airport floor and watch freshly scrubbed local customers board the plane that you could not fly out of town the night before. That's right: United dumped all (paid, booked) passengers from our previous night's canceled flight on standby.
Want to feel a real kick in the nuts? Walk up to a departure gate and ask how many passengers are wait-listed to your home town...Ans: 99.
The only way we escaped DIA in a relatively short period of time was due to my wife's "constructive confrontation" with a United ticketing agent.
Comment nobel physics prize is sewed up (Score 2) 210
Built his own fusion reactor...excellent...and also figured out a way to make sure that the resulting neutron flux doesn't turn his carcass into a smouldering ash heap. Bonus.
Colliding Particles Can Make Black Holes After All 269
cremeglace writes with this excerpt from ScienceNOW:
"You've heard the controversy. Particle physicists predict the world's new highest-energy atom smasher, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) near Geneva, Switzerland, might create tiny black holes, which they say would be a fantastic discovery. Some doomsayers fear those black holes might gobble up the Earth — physicists say that's impossible — and have petitioned the United Nations to stop the $5.5 billion LHC. Curiously, though, nobody had ever shown that the prevailing theory of gravity, Einstein's theory of general relativity, actually predicts that a black hole can be made this way. Now a computer model shows conclusively for the first time that a particle collision really can make a black hole."
That said, they estimate the required energy for creating a black hole this way to be roughly "a quintillion times higher than the LHC's maximum"; though if one of the theories requiring compact extra dimensions is true, the energy could be lower.
Comment Re:Attacks targeted IE6 (Score 1, Insightful) 318
The stupid but obvious question: why are people at these companies using IE6?
Some companies employ IT as an afterthought and, consequently, staffing suffers as a result. Typically, the help desk is outsourced and the local IT employees are simply not empowered to make bold decisions (like, say, forcing everyone to fix their IE6-dependent apps).
At the company where I work, I suspect we'll migrate off IE6 when some external entity forces our hand. For example, if/when Google withdraws support for IE6.
Comment Bing is screwed at Daimler Trucks North America (Score 1) 319
Our company-wide web filter (Websense) blocks all access to bing.com .
Guess our employees won't be using Bing
