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Comment Car bomb? Whatever... (Score 1) 239

There are kits that turn cars into remote controlled vehicles already. It would have already been possible. Meanwhile, self-driving cars still need someone in the seat and still require heavy modification to perform the task. It is not any more attainable with those than is already possible. Stop giving idiots ideas in news headlines, and stop pissing your pants every time there's new tech.
Earth

Fighting Invasive Fish With Forks and Knives 180

An anonymous reader writes NPR commentator Bonny Wolf has a unique solution to battle the threat of invasive fish species in our waterways. She proposes we fight them with a knife, fork, and a few lemon wedges. From the article: "Take the northern snakehead, which has made its way into tributaries of the Chesapeake Bay. It competes with native species for food, and then eats the native species, not to mention the odd frog or bird, with its mouthful of sharp teeth. It's been called "Fishzilla." It breeds fast, has no natural predators and can grow to be 4 feet long. The northern snakehead hangs out in grassy shallows, making it hard to catch. But a couple of years ago, Maryland started promoting the snakehead as an eating fish. Its harvest has increased from zero to 5,000 pounds a year."
Science

Chemists Build First "Buckyball" Made of Boron 39

CelestialScience writes Researchers have built the first "buckyballs" composed entirely of boron. Unlike the original, carbon-based buckyballs, the boron molecules are not shaped like soccer balls, with tessellating pentagons and hexagons. Instead, they are molecular cages made up of hexagons, heptagons and triangles. As Lai-Sheng Wang of Brown University and colleagues report in the journal Nature Chemistry, each one contains 40 atoms, compared with carbon buckyballs which are made of 60. Boron is not the first element after carbon to get "buckyballed", but the boron balls may be the closest analogue to the carbon variety. Because of their reactivity, they could be useful for storing hydrogen.

Comment Noticed this before (Score 1) 112

I've noticed this before but haven't been able to figure out how to delete it. I guess it has to do with the device searching for stored WiFi networks to establish a connection? Still annoying. According to the article, if you connect to hidden networks then you won't be able to get around this, unfortunately that's almost all the networks I connect to. Couldn't it just do a scan of nearby networks and look up the MAC address of the hidden networks, and, on a match, then try to establish a connection?

Comment If it's the govts job to review code... (Score 1) 178

If it's the government's job to review code, why not use OSS and have control as well as peace of mind? If they have experts capable of reviewing/understanding code, then wouldn't it be more productive to be using OSS so they could make changes that benefit themselves? Or BSD so they could own the solution? Being forced to review code to make sure it's safe pretty much eliminates the benefit* of the closed source software anyway.

*The benefit being that someone else is supposedly reliably curating the code for you, and you pay for that service

Comment Good thing we use less paper now (Score 2, Insightful) 69

Less reason to cut down trees. I still know some people at work who print emails before reading them though, what is wrong with these people? I try to be a good example and casually mention how I avoid using paper in various ways when describing my tasks to others as well as in meetings, but it doesn't seem to make an impression...
Democrats

After Non-Profit Application Furor, IRS Says It's Lost 2 Years Of Lerner's Email 372

As reported by the Associated Press, via US News & World Report, the IRS says that it cannot locate much of the email sent by a former IRS official over a two-year period. "The IRS told Congress Friday it cannot locate many of Lois Lerner's emails prior to 2011 because her computer crashed during the summer of that year. Lerner headed the IRS division that processed applications for tax-exempt status. The IRS acknowledged last year that agents had improperly scrutinized applications for tax-exempt status by tea party and other conservative groups." Three congressional committees are investigating the agency because of the allegations of politically motivated mishandling of those applications, as is the Justice Department and the IRS's own inspector general. As the story says, "Congressional investigators have shown that IRS officials in Washington were closely involved in the handling of tea party applications, many of which languished for more than a year without action. But so far, they have not publicly produced evidence that anyone outside the agency directed the targeting or even knew about it." CBS News has a slightly different version, also based on the AP's reporting.

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