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Earth

The Social Difficulty of Saving Earth From an Asteroid 391

Posted by timothy from the how-to-really-get-godzilla dept.
mantis2009 writes "When it comes to stopping a cataclysmic Earth vs. asteroid event, social science and international political leaders have more difficult questions yet unanswered than physicists do, according to report delivered at this week's American Geophysical Union meeting. Wired has a discussion of an analysis authored by former astronaut Rusty Schweickart, who worries that the international community is nowhere near ready to begin the complex and inevitably controversial task of deflecting an asteroid on a collision course with Earth. Among the questions to be answered is whether to modify the Partial Test Ban Treaty to allow nuclear weapons in outer space. Another possibility to avoid the destruction of civilization would require the international community to choose an area on the globe where an asteroid might be 'aimed.' Who would decide which nations get placed in the asteroid's crosshairs?"
Math

Pi Calculated To Record 2.5 Trillion Digits 432

Posted by samzenpus from the almost-there dept.
Joshua writes "Researchers from Japan have calculated Pi to over 2.5 trillion decimals using the T2K Open Supercomputer (which is currently ranked 47th in the world according to a June, 2009 report from Top500.org). This new number more than doubles the previous record of about 1.2 trillion decimals set in 2002 by another Japanese research team. Unfortunately, there still seems to be no pattern."
Image

Churches Use Twitter To Reach a Wider Audience 169

Posted by samzenpus from the go-tell-it-on-the-internet dept.
In an attempt to reverse declining attendance figures, many American churches are starting to ask WWJD in 140 or fewer characters. Pastors at Westwinds Community Church in Michigan spent two weeks teaching their 900-member congregation how to use Twitter. 150 of them are now tweeting. Seattle's Mars Hill Church encourages its members to Twitter messages during services. The tweets appear on the church's official Twitter page. Kyle Firstenberg, the church's administrator, said,"It's a good way for them to tell their friends what church is about without their friends even coming in the building."
Image

Town Fights Cricket Plague With Led Zeppelin 190

Posted by samzenpus from the certain-mariah-carey-notes-make-dolphins-abduct-and-eat-small-children dept.
The residents of Tuscarora, Nevada are getting ready to fight the annual invasion of mormon crickets with the power of Rock-N-Roll. Trial and error has shown that the crickets don't think much of Led Zeppelin or the Rolling Stones. The residents circle the town with boomboxes at regular intervals to drive off the millions of crickets. "It is part of our arsenal. You'll wake up and there'll be one sitting on your forehead, looking at you." says Laura Moore, an unemployed college professor and one of the town's 13 residents. The crickets devastate crops, cause slicks on the highway and evidently love rap.

Comment Re:FireFox extensions (Score 5, Informative) 308

by lilmunkysguy (#26409521) Attached to: Chrome On the Way For Mac and Linux

Have advertisers sued VCR manufacturers, Tivo, etc?

Yes.

NBC, ABC and CBS filed a lawsuit Wednesday in federal court in California against Sonicblue, claiming the ReplayTV 4000 would violate their copyrights by allowing users to distribute copies of programs over the Internet. The networks also complained that technology in the personal video recorder can automatically strip out commercials. In a joint statement, the networks said the device "violates the rights of copyright owners in unprecedented ways" and "deprives the copyright owners of the means by which they are paid for their creative content and thus reduces the incentive to create programming and make it available to the public."

http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/news/2001/11/48065
Image

World's Oldest Marijuana Stash Found 108

Posted by samzenpus from the it's-a-little-dry dept.
jage2 writes "Researchers say they have located the world's oldest stash of marijuana in a tomb in a remote part of China. The cache of cannabis is about 2,700 years old and was clearly 'cultivated for psychoactive purposes,' rather than as fibre for clothing, or as food, says a research paper in the Journal of Experimental Botany. The 789 grams of dried cannabis was buried alongside a light-haired, blue-eyed Caucasian man, likely a shaman of the Gushi culture, near Turpan in northwestern China."
Power

Submission + - Texas to Build $5B Wind-Power Project

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens
Hugh Pickens writes: "Texas regulators have approved a $4.93 billion wind-power transmission project to carry electricity from remote western parts of the state to major population centers like Dallas, Houston, Austin and San Antonio. The lines will handle 18,500 megawatts of power and will ease a bottleneck that has become a major obstacle to development of the wind-rich Texas Panhandle and other areas suitable for wind generation. The transmission problem is so acute in Texas that turbines are sometimes shut off even when the wind is blowing. "When the amount of generation exceeds the export capacity, you have to start turning off wind generators," said Hunter Armistead, head of the renewable energy division in North America at Babcock & Brown. "We've reached that point in West Texas." Other states may find the Texas model difficult to emulate. The state is unique in having its own electricity grid. All other states fall under the jurisdiction of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, adding an extra layer of bureaucracy to any transmission proposals. "We think it's going to lower costs, lower pollution and create jobs. We think that for every $3 invested, we'll probably see about an $8 reduction in electric costs," says Tom Smith, state director of the consumer advocacy organization Public Citizen."
Software

Submission + - Diebold's GEMS Vote Tabulation Software on Trial (typepad.com)

Submitted by
IntegrityAZ
IntegrityAZ writes: "The Pima County Democratic Party has sued Pima County for public records access to the GEMS database files used to count the votes in past and future elections. The Diebold GEMS software is built on the Microsoft Access database program, the security of which is fundamentally flawed in that it allows any operator to freely manipulate the vote tallies and possibly hide any trace of the exploit. Election integrity experts contend that the only way to ensure oversight over election workers is for all political parties to have access to the database files for forensic analysis following every election election. Uncontested trial testimony established that there is no certified vote tabulation software on the market that is without serious security flaws. Nearly all votes, regardless of the method of recording the vote, are now tabulated by computer, so the security flaws exposing the vote in Pima County to manipulation by elections insiders has applicability to nearly every jurisdiction in America."

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