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Comment Here's the letter and data (Score 5, Informative) 164

This appears to be the letter and the data that started all this:

http://olympicsokuteikai.web.fc2.com/encontents.html

Perhaps the most crucial part of the letter is this:

"Just before the Fukushima power plant accident, the mean value of the atmospheric radiation in Tokyo was estimated as 0.04 Sv/h, and radioactive Cesium was almost non-existent. Therefore, atmospheric radiation value above this level can be regarded as the effect of the nuclear accident."

Is that a valid assumption?

Comment The real reason why the divers cut the cable (Score 4, Interesting) 43

So I ask myself, "Why would those divers cut a cable that is already cut?" And the theory I come up with is that the owners of the ship whose anchor cut the cable didn't want to get into trouble for it, so they hire some stupid divers to go cut the cable, then call the cops on the divers. Problem solved: the ship owners can now deny everything and blame the saboteurs for cutting the line. Explains everything, including the wildly improbable part where the divers get caught in the act.

Comment My mother's garden has earthworms (Score 5, Informative) 398

My mother's garden has earthworms. This may seem unremarkable to you, but she has been living in Fairbanks, Alaska for over 40 years now and last summer was the first time she has ever seen earthworms in her garden. The climate is supposed to be too cold for too long for them to survive in the wild.

I have other relatives who live in Denali Park, Alaska, in the midst of the Alaska Range and near the tallest mountain in North America. Over the past 4 or 5 decades, they have been watching the treeline creep hundreds of feet up the sides of the mountains.

Comment Re:Simple (Score 1) 549

As a sound engineer I find a lot of hearing aids have had major features removed. I'm always getting more and more people who have aids that have no induction loop ("T") setting. Some now come with bluetooth, good for your mobile phone but not easy to pair to a PA system, kiosk or POS.

I was born severely deaf, have worn hearing aids for my entire life, and found the induction loop kind of useful but not great with the old analog phones, back when anyone still had them. Otherwise, the loop was good for hearing funny buzzing sounds in certain locations. I have never in my life encountered anything else that employed them like what you describe. Now I just take out my hearing aids and use a good $40 pair of IEMs on my iPhone when I want to make a call, and that's a thousand times better than the induction loop ever was.

As far as Bluetooth goes, in my experience it sucks. I now use a pair of good $40 IEMs when making calls or listening to music on my iPhone or watching TV, and they sound great, a thousand times better than the induction loop ever did.

Comment Re:Why the anxiety? (Score 1) 807

What application is being used? Something that cripples itself with emulation? See this: http://www.everymac.com/ultimate-mac-comparison-chart/?compare=all-g3-g4-g5-intel-macs&highlight=0&prod1=PowerMacG5014 - I couldn't find any i7 Macs (even the laptops and minis) that weren't at least 3 times faster than the PPC Quad Core 2.5GHz (which is really two CPUs with two cores each).

Comment Why is this a trojan horse and not a virus? (Score 1) 160

From the Intego article about the new variant: "This malware is particularly insidious, as users don’t download anything or double-click any file to launch an installer." Yet Intego repeatedly refers to as a Trojan horse. All of the other articles I can find only reference the Intego report, and don't call it a virus either, including those who would know better, such as Ars Technica and the ISC Diary.

But if it requires no interaction from the user, then why is it not the first true Mac OS X virus?

Comment Re:Trapped films (Score 5, Interesting) 446

It's not a film, but a very significant example of being trapped on VHS is CNN's Cold War documentary. 24 hour-long episodes covering the whole Cold War, start to finish, with an unbelievable roster of interviews including Fidel Castro, Walter Cronkite, Henry Kissinger, Robert MacNamara, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Lech Walesa, Aldritch Ames, Mikhail Gorbachev, and more. Never released to DVD, because the series came out in 1998. Then 9/11 hit, and material in episodes 19 and 20 that covered the Russian Afghan war were re-classified by the Bush administration; CNN would not be allowed to republish that material. The DVD market went big-time shortly after, and CNN decided not to transfer an incomplete product. If you ever get a chance to see it, do so. It's worth your time. It's a pity that you pretty much can't obtain it legally anymore.

Comment Re:Why? (Score 1) 449

Latest estimate is $3 billion dollars for the Fairbanks to Nome road:

http://www.adn.com/2010/01/26/1111745/nome-road-could-cost-27-billion.html

"The road would pass through an estimated 65 miles of mountains, 185 miles of wetlands and require the construction of a new Yukon River crossing."

I think that $5 million per mile estimate is way, WAY low. There are highways in the US that cost $100 million per mile, and the conditions are far, far worse in Alaska. And then you need the railroad between Alaska and the US. Alaska, Canada and the US did a feasibility study in 2007:

http://alaskacanadarail.com/index.html

The Phase I report there refers to a "Nominal US$11 billion investment", and there hasn't been any news about it since.

Comment DRM is not intended to prevent piracy... (Score 1) 642

...it's all about preventing used game sales.

DRM doesn't prevent piracy, never has, never will, and everyone knows this, including the game companies. The money that is lost to piracy is 99% imaginary money that was never going to be spent in the first place, so the game companies don't really care about piracy, even though that's their cover story for why they use DRM.

DRM does effectively prevent used games sales. When a used game is sold, the game company sees money trading hands that they think should be theirs. It's their end-run around the First Sale Doctrine. This is also the real reason you're seeing such a big push for books to go electronic; book publishers can't put DRM on a physical book, but they can on their ebooks.

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