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Power

Russia Set To Extend Life of Nuclear Reactors Past Engineered Life Span 215

Posted by Soulskill from the tempting-fate dept.
Harperdog writes "Yikes! Russia is extending the lifetime of nuclear power reactors beyond their engineered life span of 30 years, including the nation's oldest reactors: first-generation VVERs and RBMKs, the Chernobyl-type reactors. This goes against existing Russian law, because the projects have not undergone environmental assessments. 'Many of the country's experts and non-governmental organizations maintain that this decision is economically unjustifiable and environmentally dangerous — to say nothing of illegal. The Russian nuclear industry, however, argues that lifetime extensions are justified because the original estimate of a 30-year life span was conservative; the plants have been significantly upgraded; and extensions cost significantly less than constructing new reactors.'"
Graphics

NVIDIA Launches GeForce GTX 560 Ti 448-Core GPU 127

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the more-cores-more-powers dept.
MojoKid writes "NVIDIA has just launched the GeForce GTX 560 Ti with 448 cores. Though perhaps a bit unimaginative in terms of branding, the new GeForce GTX 560 Ti with 448 cores is outfitted with the same GF110 GPU powering high-end GeForce GTX 570 and GTX 580 cards, but with a couple of its streaming multiprocessors fused off. The card has 448 CUDA cores arranged in 14 SMs, with 56 texture units and 40 ROPs. Reference specifications call for a 732MHz core clock with 1464MHz CUDA cores. 1.2GB of GDDR5 memory is linked to the GPU via a 320-bit bus and the memory is clocked at an effective 3800MHz data rate. Performance-wise, the new GPU proved to be about 10 to 15 percent faster than the original GeForce GTX 560 Ti and a few percentage points slower than the GeForce GTX 570."
Canada

Toronto School Bans Hard Balls 319

Posted by samzenpus from the watch-how-you-play dept.
In an attempt to finally "think of the children," Earl Beatty Public school has prohibited students from playing with balls after a "few serious incidents" in which students and staff were hit or almost hit by balls. From the article: "The happy days of kicking a ball around at recess ended Monday after students took home a letter advising that henceforth, no child could bring a soccer ball, football, volleyball or even tennis ball to the junior and senior school in the area of Coxwell and Danforth Aves." I assume all lunches will soon be taken via feeding tube to minimize choking hazards.
The Gimp

The GIMP Now Has a Working Single-Window Mode 403

Posted by timothy from the how-long-were-the-contractions dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Phoronix is reporting that The GIMP now has a working single-window mode, a long desired feature by the open-source graphics community to be more competitive with Adobe Photoshop. There's also a number of other user highlights in the new GIMP 2.7.3 release. The GPLv3 graphics software can be downloaded at GIMP.org."
The Internet

Ask Slashdot: Living Without Internet At-Home Access? 462

Posted by timothy from the you-thought-your-uncle-was-weird dept.
An anonymous reader writes "I've decided that the internet is no longer a positive influence on my life, and am interested in canceling my service. In the interest of not forgoing all digital conveniences, I plan to set up a small intranet, hosting a few resources that I think I'd like to have access to on a regular basis (e.g. a text dump of Wikipedia). I'll also still have access to the internet at my office, and have easy access to public Wi-Fi at libraries and coffee shops. My questions are thus: Does anybody have any experience living without the internet? What major nuisances did you encounter? What resources should I put on my intranet? Is there anything I'm overlooking?"
Microsoft

Microsoft Pursues Botnet Herders Via Newspaper Ads 28

Posted by samzenpus from the trouble-makers-wanted dept.
itwbennett writes "Although it is extremely unlikely that anyone associated with Rustock will step forward, Microsoft has taken out ads in two Russian newspapers to notify unnamed defendants in the legal suit. The move is a legal formality required as part of Microsoft's ongoing lawsuit in the U.S. against operators of Rustock. The advertisements will run for 30 days in the Delovoy Petersburg newspaper, located in St. Petersburg, and in The Moscow News, a daily newspaper, wrote Richard Boscovich, a senior attorney with Microsoft's Digital Crimes Unit."
The Internet

Georgia Tech's ShaperProbe Detects ISP Traffic Manipulation 113

Posted by timothy from the shaping-is-such-a-euphemism dept.
An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from Ars Technica: "Two researchers at Georgia Tech can tell you exactly how American ISPs shape Internet traffic, and which ones do so. Bottom line: of the five largest Internet providers in the country, the three cable companies (Comcast, Time Warner, Cox) employ shaping while the telephone companies (AT&T, Verizon) do not — though that fact is less significant for the user experience than it might first sound."

Comment Re:Less non-corporate info (Score 1) 385

by X_Bones (#35703648) Attached to: US Open Government Sites To Close
decent radio as we know it just DIED across most of rural America

um no. The House voted to defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), from which NPR gets some but not all of its money. The provision won't make it out of the Senate, and even if it does the President still has to sign it into law, and even if he does NPR still gets revenue from user donations and from local stations subscribing to its content.

It's a damn shame that House Republicans are playing games like this when they promised to make this legislative session all about job creation, and I donated my sixty bucks to NPR as soon as I heard of this happening, but let's not distort the facts here. That makes you just as untrustworthy as Fox News.

Comment Re:All this effort, just to avoid the real problem (Score 3, Interesting) 1306

by X_Bones (#35614298) Attached to: US Contemplating 'Vehicle Miles Traveled' Tax
Oh dear - you just imagined a government providing no safety net to citizens and no confidence to investors until some vaguely-defined point in the future! How silly of you!

State and federal governments are not spending too much money - if anything, they're not spending enough (and not only that but they're taxing the wrong people to get it). The job of the government is to provide for the security and well-being of its citizens. Cutting spending during a massive economic downturn is absolutely no way to do that job. Providing help through stimulus and job creation is.

I swear, it's like the only lesson all the small-government starve-the-beast meatheads learned from the Great Depression is to have a couple of wars when your country is going to shit.
Google

Bing Becomes No.2 Search Engine at 4.37% 366

Posted by CmdrTaco from the now-that's-a-gap dept.
suraj.sun writes "Bing overtook Yahoo for the first time worldwide in January, and increased its lead in February, according to web analytics company, StatCounter. Its research arm StatCounter Global Stats finds that globally Bing reached 4.37%, in February ahead of Yahoo! at 3.93%. Both trail far behind Google's 89.94% of the global search engine market." Just a little more plagiarizing to go!

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