Comment Charge for Talking Section of Plane (Score 1) 513
Charge extra for those wanting to TALK on the phone. Make them all sit in the back.
Comment DR would have been nice to have in the first place (Score 1) 290
Had they had DR in the first place, the exposure would have been less traumatic. HA, of course, doesn't buy them anything in a disaster.
Comment Re:What about Google driverless car? (Score 1) 603
People seem to want to have their front left tire next to my back right tire all the time. Since I drive an SUV, that makes them virtually invisible.
Comment Re:Was Microsoft Riight? (Score 1) 716
"Making a good tablet" includes providing a platform and a market for apps, correct? So far, with only a single Honeycomb tablet on the market (with limited distribution), that part of the model has failed. Apple is unique in that they have a market following that is both immediate and sustaining. The rest of the vendors need to be part of a big wave, no one vendor has the legs to stand on their own. If (when?) everyone else finally pulls the trigger on getting their tablets out there, we may finally see a sustainable overall market open up. But if the rest of the Honeycomb vendors don't get off the dime soon, patience will clearly run out.
Comment This poll doesn't tell the whole story (Score 1) 364
For example, most of my storage is clearly hard disk. However, most of my CRITICAL DATA is stored in the cloud (Dropbox). This would be an important distinction.
Gubernatorial Candidate Wants to Sell Speeding Passes for $25 825
If Nevada gubernatorial candidate Eugene "Gino" DiSimone gets his way, $25 will buy you the right to drive up to 90mph for a day. DiSimone estimates his "free limit plan" will raise $1 billion a year for Nevada. From the article: "First, vehicles would have to pass a safety inspection. Then vehicle information would be loaded into a database, and motorists would purchase a transponder. After setting up an account, anyone in a hurry could dial in, and for $25 charged to a credit card, be free to speed for 24 hours."
Yellowstone Hot Spot Shreds Ancient Pacific Ocean 69
jamie passes along this excerpt from DiscoveryNews:
"If you thought the geysers and overblown threat of a supervolcanic eruption in Yellowstone National Park were dramatic, you ain't seen nothing: deep beneath Earth's surface, the hot spot that feeds the park has torn an entire tectonic plate in half. The revelation comes from a new study (abstract) in the journal Geophysical Research Letters that peered into the mantle beneath the Pacific Northwest to see what happens when ancient ocean crust from the Pacific Ocean runs headlong into a churning plume of ultra-hot mantle material."
Craigslist Removes Its Controversial Adult Section 522
Cyrus writes "The online classified website Craigslist has removed its controversial Adult Services portion of its website. Technology blog TechCrunch was the first to report the section had been blacked out with the word 'Censored.'"
NASA Preps Closest-Ever Sun Mission 111
coondoggie writes "NASA today said it had picked five experiments that will ride aboard one of its most ambitious space missions to explore the Sun. The Solar Probe, a car-sized spacecraft, is scheduled to launch no later than 2018 and will fly closer to the Sun's surface than any other probe, NASA stated. Ultimately the spacecraft's goals are to help scientists understand why the sun's outer atmosphere so much hotter than the sun's visible surface and what propels the solar wind that affects Earth and our solar system, NASA said."
Kepler Spacecraft Finds System With Multiple Planets Transiting the Star 136
rhaas writes "NASA's Kepler spacecraft has discovered the first confirmed planetary system with more than one planet crossing in front of, or transiting, the same star. They found two planets almost the size of Saturn, and possibly a third, small, very hot planet with a radius about 1.5 times that of Earth."
Follow Up On Solar Neutrinos and Radioactive Decay 183
An anonymous reader writes "A few days ago, Slashdot carried a story that was making the rounds: a team of physicists claimed to have detected a strange variation in radioactive decay rates, which they attributed to the mysterious influence of solar neutrinos. The findings attracted immediate attention because they seemed to upend two tenets of physics: that radioactive decay is constant, and that neutrinos very, very rarely interact with matter (trillions of the particles are zinging through your body right now). So Discover Magazine's news blog 80beats followed up on the initial burst of news and interviewed several physicists who work on neutrinos. They are decidedly skeptical."
How Star Wars Trumped Star Trek For Scientific Accuracy 495
An anonymous reader writes "When George Lucas added the 'ring around the Death Star' effect to his 1997 re-release of Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope, the revision was almost as hated as Greedo shooting first, and to boot was seen as a knock-off of the seminal 'Praxis effect' in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991). But a debunking astronomer claims that the Federation got it wrong and the fan-boys should thank Lucas for adding some scientific accuracy to his fictional universe."
Air Force Uses Falcons To Protect Falcons 148
coondoggie writes "Birds and high-performance jet aircraft don't mix. So at a base in Germany, the Air Force is fighting birds with birds — specifically trained falcons that patrol the base and help eliminate at least some of the feathered threat to the F-16 Fighting Falcons and other aircraft."
Drunken Employee Shoots Server 309
Target Practice writes "A drunken mortgage worker at RANLife Home Loans decided for unknown reasons to take out the company's $100,000 server with a .45-caliber automatic, blaming the damage on an imagined assailant who: mugged him, assaulted him with his own weapon, drugged him, and then broke into his office to shoot said server. According to acquaintances, he had threatened earlier that day to shoot the server and maybe himself."
Grad Student Invents Cheap Laser Cutter 137
An anonymous reader writes "Peter Jansen, a PhD student and member of the RepRap community, has constructed a working prototype of an inexpensive table-top laser cutter built out of old CD/DVD drives as an offshoot of his efforts to design an under $200 open-source Selective Laser Sintering (SLS) 3D printer. Where traditional laser cutters use powerful, fixed-focus beams, this new technique dynamically adjusts the focal point of the laser using a reciprocating motion similar to a reciprocating saw, allowing a far less powerful and inexpensive laser diode to be used. The technique is currently limited to cutting black materials to a depth of only a few millimeters, but should still be useful and enabling for Makers and other crafters. The end-goal is to create a hybrid inexpensive 3D printer that can be easily reconfigured for 2D laser cutting, providing powerful making tools to the desktop."
