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Comment Re:Shooting bombs? No bombs trigger when shot? (Score 1) 929

Sure. Have 2 conductive plates separated by an insulator. Each one should be connected to the circuit in the manner of a switch. Make sure that you have redundant circuitry in case a bullet hits a vital part of the circuitry. If the plate is compromised, then it will likely cause a connection, and subsequent triggering. Alternately, you could use a thin container of mercury which when compromised, would spill out and complete the circuit. Dear DHS/FBI, I am not a bomb maker, just a geek that likes to think about problems and hypothetical engineering like this, and express it through his First Amendment right of free speech. Please leave me alone, as I have NO intention of making/using a bomb (baring the odd firecracker or bottle rocket). I am not a threat, and I do not need to be dragged from my house in my underwear, and interrogated for hours on end. There is nothing to see here. Thank you, Ustice
NASA

Submission + - Solar Tsunami - Monster Waves on the Sun are Real (nasa.gov)

mike_v writes: November 24, 2009: Sometimes you really can believe your eyes. That's what NASA's STEREO (Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory) spacecraft are telling researchers about a controversial phenomenon on the sun known as the "solar tsunami."
Years ago, when solar physicists first witnessed a towering wave of hot plasma racing along the sun's surface, they doubted their senses. The scale of the thing was staggering. It rose up higher than Earth itself and rippled out from a central point in a circular pattern millions of kilometers in circumference. Skeptical observers suggested it might be a shadow of some kind—a trick of the eye—but surely not a real wave.

Google

Submission + - How Google is contributing to the Opensource (blogspot.com)

An anonymous reader writes: This post throws some light for the users who are using the services or applications from Google on Linux platform. How Google is expanding the portfolio of its applications on different platforms.
NASA

Submission + - SPAM: NASA to power Mars rover out of sand trap

coondoggie writes: NASA's long running Mars rover Spirit is stuck in a sand trap — a situation the space agency would like to fix. Today NASA said it will begin what it called the long process of extricating Spirit by sending commands that could free the rover.

Spirit has been stuck in a place NASA calls "Troy" since April 23 when the rover's wheels broke through a crust on the surface that was covering a bright-toned, slippery sand underneath. After a few drive attempts to get Spirit out in the subsequent days, it began sinking deeper in the sand trap. Driving was suspended to allow time for tests and reviews of possible escape strategies, NASA stated.

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Link to Original Source
Security

Submission + - Serious Adobe Flash Vulnerability (net-security.org)

An anonymous reader writes: Foreground Security discovered a critical vulnerability in Adobe Flash. This vulnerability allows the same-origin policy of Adobe Flash to be exploited to allow nearly any site that allows user generated content to be attacked. No fix for this vulnerability currently exists. Whether you use Flash or not, you may still be vulnerable because this issue affects users directly and not the servers themselves. Websites that are at risk of being vulnerable include social media sites, major career portals, and Fortune 1000 and government agencies websites. Basically, if you have a website, you could be vulnerable.
Google

Submission + - Slashdot (and the rest of the web) 2X faster?! 1

grmoc writes: As part of the "Let's make the web faster" initiative, we (a few engineers (including me!) at Google, and hopefully people all across the community soon!) are experimenting with alternative protocols to help reduce the latency of web pages. One of these experiments is SPDY (pronounced "SPeeDY"), an application-layer protocol (essentially a shim between HTTP and the bits on the wire) for transporting content over the web, designed specifically for minimal latency. In addition to a rough specification for the protocol, we have hacked SPDY into the Google Chrome browser (because its what we're familiar with) and a simple server testbed. Using these hacked up bits, we compared the performance of many of the top 25 and top 300 websites over both HTTP and SPDY, and have observed those pages load, on average, about twice as fast using SPDY.. Thats not bad!

We hope to engage the open source community to contribute ideas, feedback, code (we've open sourced the protocol, etc!), and test results!

Comment I've heard this scheme before. (Score 1) 287

So, if we all decide to boycot a particular gas company for a month, the price of gas will go down! BRILLIANT! Oi. Why would people pay for something that they use for free. If Yahoo is worried about spam protection, then they should just use Google's spam filter, like they use MS's search engine. Problem solved.

Comment Re:Unfortunate (Score 1) 800

Give her the option. Tell her what you are thinking, since she isn't paying for them. She may just abandon them, or she may pay you. If you are footing the bill, I don't see it as wrong at all. She may just not remember that there IS a cost to it.

Comment Sounds like the "custom books" story from April (Score 1) 219

It sounds like this jack-ass is using the system that Philip M Parker developed to create "custom books" where a computer network scours publicly available sources of information and then pieces together a "book" based on the information that it picks up. To someone scanning the books, you may not notice, but it you try to understand anything in it you can't help but realize that either the person that wrote it was a complete idiot, or it was computer generated.

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