382155
submission
kiracatgirl writes:
The Royal Astronomical Society (RAS) in the UK has received unfortunate news. Apparently, the Science and Technology Facilities council (STFC) have decided to withdraw the UK from the Gemini Observatory, and the RAS is quite upset. According to their press release, "The Royal Astronomical Society is shocked by the STFC's announcement of withdrawal from the Gemini Observatory." The RAS also states that despite the UK astronomers having access to excellent facilities comparable to the Gemini Observatories, "the Gemini North telescope in Hawaii is crucial for UK astronomers to remain in the front rank of international astronomy." In addition, the president of RAS, Professor Michael Rowan-Robinson gives his own statement: "This decision is a serious mistake and a shock to all of us. If it goes ahead it will deny UK scientists access to large telescopes in the northern hemisphere and hinder their ability to study almost half the sky. I call on the STFC to rethink this proposal."
273753
submission
kiracatgirl writes:
Here's a fun story about a relatively unknown Google employee and his hobby — taking photographs of himself with famous visitors to Google's headquarters. His gallery is posted on the walls at Google HQ, but is also available for our viewing pleasure at his online photo album.
241041
submission
StonyandCher writes:
Although the recent auctioning of the 700MHz wireless spectrum bands have garnered great interest in the media (not to mention the billions of dollars being thrown around to own some of this), it's not the be-all and end-all answer to our wireless hunger.
New research is starting to be conducted in the area of infrared radiation. Cheap to develop infrastructure for, super fast and with huge amounts of spectrum available (literally many terahertz), is this the unlicensed answer to the dearth of wireless spectrum? This article delves deeper into the world of IR and looks at its pros and foibles.
179869
submission
c4colorado writes:
I have recently been looking into efficient power and heating equipment and ran across this device:
enginion SteamCell (Translated to English from German)
This device apparently runs off of "Fuel oil, gasoline, Diesel, propane, various renewable bio fuels as well as hydrogen" with about 30% increased efficiency and reduced emissions. This device is only the size of a 12v car battery and can produce up to 25kw of thermal energy and is capable of jumping from 5% to 100% output in milliseconds.
I was interested in using this device to possibly power a modern steam-powered vehicle using a Quasiturbine or similar high-efficiency motor/engine. This could be a new avenue of research for "green" vehicles.
The information about this device and the company that designed it has disapeared, there was a great deal of information about it around 2003 but since then there has been no news or information about it.
I wanted to ask the community if anyone knows of the fate of this product, did the company change their name, get bought out by a big oil company with ulterior motives, go out of business because nobody cared, etc?
157497
submission
Anonymous writes:
Last week, many in the Linux community praised Dell for saying it would offer Ubuntu Linux on some desktops. Will the good feelings all go away now? Today, Microsoft and Novell said Dell is also joining their alliance — an alliance many have blasted since it was announced last year.
157485
submission
An anonymous reader writes:
When Yahoo!'s Jeremy Zawodny recently asked What the heck is Web 2.0 anyway? he received a set of responses reminiscent of those garnered by The Reg back in 2005, which famously concluded, based on its readers' responses, that Web 2.0 was made up of 12% badger's paws, 6% JavaScript worms, and 26% nothing. Nonetheless, as Social Computing (SoC) widens and deepens its footprint, another Jeremy — Jeremy Geelan — has asked if we are witnessing the death of "Personal" Computing. SoC, Geelan notes, has already become an academic field of study. But isn't Social Computing too maybe just badger's paws?
156609
submission
deviantphil writes:
Linden Labs, the company that runs Second Life, is seeking to roll out a new age verification mechanism which among others things may require residents to turn over their Social Security Number, government ID, or other sensitive personally identifying data in order to access content which is "explicitly sexual or excessively violent in nature". This would be equivalent to requiring a person to give out their Social Security Number before purchasing a game rated "M".
156553
submission
epine writes:
Today I noticed that Google has yet again arbitrarily changed the layout of my Google search results page, and in the process, effectively eliminating an excellent Google feature I've depended upon for as long as I can remember, the search result counter.
Where the banner at the top of the search results page used to include the information 11,300,000 results (0.11 seconds) this information has now been moved to the offscreen banner at the bottom of my search results page, where it is next to useless, as I have long been in the habit of immediately checking the number of results to determine if I've typed my query correctly, before scanning the result set. Common misspellings produce thousands of results where millions of results are normal, and Google suggest doesn't always catch these.
What Google clients or user-agent plug-ins exist to put control back into the hands of the end user concerning the placement of information in Google results pages?
