Comment Re:Blue hollows (Score 1) 90
Alright, well, the main article on Sirens of Titan turned out not to have anything about the harmoniums. But this will do.
Comment Blue hollows (Score 1) 90
I knew it! The harmoniums are real!
Comment Troll headline? (Score 3, Informative) 300
Urine? Well, yes, but also the feces and the nasty water from industry. As someone has pointed out already, if your WTP collects from the river, you are already drinking treated sewage water.
At our plant, we have a water reclamation facility at the end of our process, the same type of facility used at the water treatment plant upstream. A WRF is common, iirc, in CA, but is, afaik, the first of its kind here in MN. It is far more common to discharge without the additional filtering and contaminant removal provided by a WRF.
The water we discharge is tested biweekly for ammonia and phosphorus and daily for total coliforms and biological oxygen demand. Ammonia and coliforms are non-detectable ~99% of the time. We are doing a very good job turning sewage into drinking water for the next town on the river.
/lab intern at a WWTP
At our plant, we have a water reclamation facility at the end of our process, the same type of facility used at the water treatment plant upstream. A WRF is common, iirc, in CA, but is, afaik, the first of its kind here in MN. It is far more common to discharge without the additional filtering and contaminant removal provided by a WRF.
The water we discharge is tested biweekly for ammonia and phosphorus and daily for total coliforms and biological oxygen demand. Ammonia and coliforms are non-detectable ~99% of the time. We are doing a very good job turning sewage into drinking water for the next town on the river.
Phone Customers Pay $2B Yearly In Bogus Fees 220
Hugh Pickens writes writes "CNN reports that a one-year study by the Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee shows about $2 billion a year in 'mystery fees' show up on the landline phone bills of Americans. Known as cramming, the extra charges include:long distance service, subscriptions for Internet-related services, access to restricted websites, entertainment services with a 900 area code, collect calls, and club memberships. The Commerce Committee's report says phone companies receive a small fee — often just a dollar or two — for allowing charges from third-party vendors to appear on their bills but due to the large number of customers the charges eventually add up. Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan told the panel people are unaware their phone numbers can be charged almost like a credit card and her investigations indicate customers are not even getting services in return. 'My office has yet to see a legitimate third-party charge on a bill,' says Madigan, who added most customers don't detect the charges on their bills. Senator Jay Rockefeller says Congress needs to pass legislation to protect customers from unauthorized third-party charges on their phone bills because the telephone industry has failed to prevent the practice. 'It's pretty obvious at this point that voluntary guidelines aren't solving this problem,' says Rockefeller. 'It's time for us to take a new look at this problem and find a way to solve it once and for all.'"
Comment Re:Uh, no (Score 1) 815
Your logic is bad and you should feel bad!
Comment Re:Try it? (Score 1) 165
I enjoyed this post quite a lot. Kudos. Also, maybe you should find someone to drive you to the hospital
Comment Re:the arrogance of this (Score 1) 88
Don't worry. The researchers have asked the colony for volunteers. All paramecia you see are in the game of their own free will
Preserving Great Tech For Posterity — the 6502 290
trebonian writes "For great old hardware products like the MOS 6502 (used in the Apple II, the C64, the Nintendo NES), the details of the designs have been lost or forgotten. While there have been great efforts to reverse engineer the 6502 from the outside, there has not been the hardware equivalent of the source code — until now. As Russell Cox states: 'A team of three people accumulated a bunch of 6502 chips, applied sulfuric acid to them to strip the casing and expose the actual chips, used a high-resolution photomicroscope to scan the chips, applied computer graphics techniques to build a vector representation of the chip, and finally derived from the vector form what amounts to the circuit diagram of the chip: a list of all 3,510 transistors with inputs, outputs, and what they're connected to. Combining that with a fairly generic (and, as these things go, trivial) "transistor circuit" simulator written in JavaScript and some HTML5 goodness, they created an animated 6502 web page that lets you watch the voltages race around the chip as it executes. For more, see their web site visual6502.org.'"
Playstation 3 Code Signing Cracked For Good 534
ReportedlyWorking writes "It appears that Sony's PS3 has been fatally compromised. At the Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin, a team named 'fail0verflow' revealed that they had calculated the Private Keys, which would let them or anyone else generate signed software for the PS3. Additionally, they also claim to have a method of jailbreaking the PS3 without the use of a Dongle, which is the current method. If all these statements are true, this opens the door to custom firmware, and homebrew software. Assuming that Sony doesn't take radical action and invalidate their private keys, this could mean that Jailbreaking is viable on all PS3, regardless of their firmware! From the article: 'Approximately a half hour in, the team revealed their new PS3 secrets, the moment we all were waiting for. One of the major highlights here was, dongle-less jailbreaking by overflowing the bootup NOR flash, giving complete control over the system. The other major feat, was calculating the public private keys (due to botched security), giving users the ability to sign their own SELFs. Following this, the team declared Sony's security to be EPIC FAIL!'"
Microchips Now In Tombstones, Toilets, & Fish Lures 83
Hugh Pickens writes "Steve Johnson writes in the Mercury News that microchips are going into a staggering array of once decidedly low-tech items — from gravestone markers and running shoes to fish lures and writing pens. In the future, 'where won't we find chips?' asks analyst Jordan Selburn. 'The answer is pretty close to nowhere.' For example, one company sells a coin-size, stainless steel-encased microchip for gravestone markers that tells the dead person's story in text, photos, video or audio histories, which visitors can access by pointing their Internet-enabled cell phones at it. The company says it has sold thousands of 'Memory Medallions.' There's AquaOne Technologies, who sell a toilet containing chips that automatically shut off the water when it springs a leak or starts to overflow, but Japanese company Toto goes one better with an intelligent toilet that gathers health-related data from the user's urine. Pro-Troll puts a chip in its fish lures that 'duplicates the electrical nerve discharge of a wounded bait fish,' prompting other fish to bite it."
Comment Re:Error in TFS (Score 1) 160
As a chemistry undergrad currently studying physical chemistry...
He holds the liquid gold at 1127C. It would take an approximate pressure of 2.1 * 10^-7 atm for liquid gold to boil at 1127C. Now, it strikes me as very unlikely that he is using a close-to-perfect vacuum for this, especially since running any vacuum at all will encourage evaporation, but without further data, who knows, right?
Sir Isaac Newton, Alchemist 330
Hugh Pickens writes "Natalie Angier writes in The Hindu that it is now becoming clear that Newton spent thirty years of his life slaving over a furnace in search of the power to transmute one chemical element into another. Angier writes, 'How could the ultimate scientist have been seemingly hornswoggled by a totemic pseudoscience like alchemy, which in its commonest rendering is described as the desire to transform lead into gold?' Now new historical research describes how alchemy yielded a bounty of valuable spinoffs, including new drugs, brighter paints, stronger soaps and better booze. 'Alchemy was synonymous with chemistry,' says Dr. William Newman, 'and chemistry was much bigger than transmutation.' Newman adds that Newton's alchemical investigations helped yield one of his fundamental breakthroughs in physics: his discovery that white light is a mixture of colored rays that can be recombined with a lens. 'I would go so far as to say that alchemy was crucial to Newton's breakthroughs in optics,' says Newman. 'He's not just passing light through a prism — he's resynthesizing it.'"
GoDaddy Up For Auction 191
An anonymous reader writes "GoDaddy.com, the closely held website that registers Internet domain names, has put itself up for sale in an auction that could fetch more than $1 billion, people familiar with the matter said. The company, which currently has more than 43 million domains under management, is well known for its edgy advertising, including Super Bowl commercials and ads featuring different 'Go Daddy Girls,' including racing car driver Danica Patrick."
Comment Re:please change your sig (Score 1) 490
Gender is between your ears. That said, the request for ggp to change their sig is moronic. It's a joke
Survey Says Most iPhone Users Love AT&T 490
Hugh Pickens writes "In a report sure to raise eyebrows, CNN Money claims that despite a very vocal group of detractors, the vast majority of iPhone users love AT&T. A survey released this week by Yankee Group reports that 73% of iPhone owners scored their satisfaction with the carrier as an 8, 9, or 10 on a 10-point scale. The results seem surprising, given the pounding AT&T has taken in the media and on the blogosphere about its service-related issues with the iPhone and AT&T's recent iPad-related security glitch. For its part, AT&T says its network really isn't as bad as many people think. 'There's a gap between what people hear about us and what their experience is with us. We think that gap is beginning to close,' says Mark Siegel, an AT&T spokesman. 'It doesn't mean we're perfect; we still have work to do. But that's no surprise to us, because we have a great network.'" Buried in the penultimate paragraph is the somewhat alarming note that "77% of iPhone owners say they'll buy another iPhone, compared to 20% of Android customers who say they'll buy another Android phone."
