Comment Re:As a boxer... (Score 1) 240
That's right! Everyone knows that holding bananas is the real evolutionary use of hands!
Comment Take your daughter to work day? (Score 1) 104
So I guess it was Take Your Daughter To Work Day at Boeing? I wonder who won the science fair, or if there were any survivors?
Comment Re:An Object Lesson For Web Site Designers (Score 1) 106
I hear Time magazine is having trouble moving beyond that demographic, so the transition may be harder than you think.
Comment Re:Did the signal degrade, or the noise increase? (Score 1) 615
Wow. This post was both informative and epic. No sarcasm. I am seriously impressed.
Comment Who in the FedGov is using Bit.ly? (Score 1) 75
This seems like a terrible idea. I wouldn't touch Bit.ly for something official at work now that go.usa.gov is live. That requires a federal gov't e-mail address as a login, and people abusing the system can be stopped at the account level.
Admittedly, before go.usa.gov went live I needed to use a shortening service on occasion, but I always used tinyurl preview links when that came up. I figured that it was the least I could do to improve transparency for users.
Comment Robust, huh? (Score 4, Insightful) 467
I wonder how fast they'll fix this issue after major political figures start getting added to "Gay Studs" and "Scouting for Sex" groups?
Comment Re:Cold? (Score 1) 166
You don't need an atmosphere to radiate heat away. You're thinking of convection. But radiating is the least efficient way to do it.
That's true. However, isn't the temperature of the surrounding atmosphere immaterial to the amount of heat that can be lost via radiation? I just assumed that TFA was talking convection because I didn't see radiation as being viable in that context or dependent in any way on how "cold" the moon was.
Comment Re:Cold? (Score 1) 166
You're probably right. I don't see how we get something like this till we have at least a medium-sized permanent moon base with a data center buried deep enough in the regolith or underlying rock to be reasonably safe from cosmic ray interference. And I still don't think you can use the lunar "atmosphere" for any sort of heat sinking, in any case. For the record, though, IANA Astrophysicist.
Comment Re:You insensitive clod! (Score 1) 166
What about ALW? Anthropic Lunar Warming.
Liberal propaganda. Everyone knows that ALW is really the only thing keeping the next Lunar Glaciation at bay.
Comment Re:Cold? (Score 1) 166
No kidding. That's why I wrote "near-vacuum," which is an accurate description of the "atmosphere" of the moon. The moon has a much more dense "atmosphere" than interstellar or even interplanetary space, but I still don't think it's enough to provide heat-sinking to any noticeable degree.
Comment Cold? (Score 3, Insightful) 166
I thought heat-sinking in near-vacuum conditions was difficult because, although it's very cold temperature-wise, the ability of the "air" to hold heat is so limited that you can't move very much away.
Comment Re:I am more worried about the 49%... (Score 3, Funny) 261
Fuck the cloud. All my data is in Heaven administered by God! Nothing can go wrong. Everything is where it should be. Simply perfect.
Rationalizing disk failure won't bring your data back.
Just wait three days.
Chinese Firms Claims It Can Build World's Tallest Tower in 90 Days 389
An anonymous reader writes "Even since the current world's tallest builing — the Burj Khalifa in Dubai — was completed, there has been a constant battle to build the world's next tallest building. The current record holder stands tall at 828 meters and took five years to build, but a Chinese company called Broad Sustainable Building aims to smash that record by building the 838 meter Sky City tower, in Changsa, China in a mere 90 days. BSB plans to use prefab building techniques to construct the tower in record time."
Diamonds Used To Increase Density, Performance of Phase-Change Memory 115
Lucas123 writes "Researchers at Johns Hopkins University have shown they can increase the density, performance and the durability of phase-change memory (PSM) by using diamonds to change the base alloy material. Instead of using the more typical method of applying heat to the alloy to change its state from amorphous to crystalline, thereby laying down bits in the material, the researchers used pressure from diamond-tipped tools. Using pressure versus heat allowed them to slow down the change in order to produce many varying states allowing more data to be stored on the alloy. 'This phase-change memory is more stable than the material used in current flash drives. It works 100 times faster and is rewritable millions of times,' said the study's lead author, Ming Xu, a doctoral student at the Whiting School of Engineering at Johns Hopkins University. 'Within about five years, it could also be used to replace hard drives in computers and give them more memory.'"
Comment External Hard Drives = mobile (Score 1) 86
If there's a complete devastation warning, I'm getting the heck out. And some of the first things I grab will be the his&hers external backup drives. Together they'll take up a few dozen cubic inches, and you have complete system states on there for our systems. If there's more time, I might grab the towers or at least disassemble them and take out the drives, but the backups are a good, easy-to-grab start. I won't even grab the cords if I'm in a hurry...those are easy enough to replace for cheap.
