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Comment Is there a point? (Score 1) 175

by JBL2 (#32070940) Attached to: Zen Coding
Is it just me, or does anyone else have a hard time believing that anyone (that reads /.) spends THAT much time "coding" HTML, that dealing with a compressed format... which will surely go over well with one's colleagues... and is a good candidate for a code-obfuscation contest... would be useful?

Comment There may be hope (Score 1) 496

by JBL2 (#31855546) Attached to: Maybe the Aliens Are Addicted To Computer Games
"Who here doesn't think a TNG-style Holodeck would lead to the downfall of our civilization?" Don't forget: Lt. Barclay (the one who was always in some sorry circumstance -- turned into a giant spider, or whatever) eventually managed to pull himself out of that trap. If he can do it, so can Humanity!
Space

Russia Doubles Price For Launching US Astronauts 370

Posted by samzenpus from the strange-bedfellows dept.
Third Position writes "NASA on Tuesday signed a contract to pay $55.8 million per astronaut for six Americans to fly into space on Russian Soyuz capsules in 2013 and 2014. NASA needs to get rides on Russian rockets to the International Space Station because it plans to retire the space shuttle fleet later this year. NASA now pays half as much, about $26.3 million per astronaut, when it uses Russian ships."
HP

HP Reports Memory Resistor Breakthrough 141

Posted by samzenpus from the flip-the-switches dept.
andy1307 writes "Hewlett-Packard scientists on Thursday will report advances demonstrating significant progress in the design of memristors, or memory resistors. The researchers previously reported in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that they had devised a new method for storing and retrieving information from a vast three-dimensional array of memristors. The scheme could potentially free designers to stack thousands of switches on top of one another in a high-rise fashion, permitting a new class of ultra-dense computing devices even after two-dimensional scaling reaches fundamental limits."
Science

Fossil of Ant-Eating Dinosaur Discovered In China 64

Posted by samzenpus from the ancient-picnic-defender dept.
thomst writes "Charles Q. Choi of LiveScience reports that a farmer in southern Henan Province in China has dug up the first known ant-eating dinosaur, a half-meter-long theropod (the dinosaur family to which T. Rex belongs), whose fossilized remains were described as 'fairly intact'. The 83- to 89-million-year-old pygmy dinosaur has been named named Xixianykus zhangi by Xig Xu, De-you Wang, Corwin Sullivan, David Hone, Feng-lu Han, Rong-hao Yan, and Fu-ming Du, whose paper on the critter, A basal parvicursorine (Theropoda: Alvarezsauridae) from the Upper Cretaceous of China, was published in the March 29 issue of Zootaxa (the abstract is available in PDF format for free, the full article is paywall-protected.)"
Image

Best Man Rigs Newlyweds' Bed To Tweet During Sex 272

Posted by samzenpus from the nice-feed dept.
When an UK man was asked to be the best man at a friend's wedding he agreed that he would not pull any pranks before or during the ceremony. Now the groom wishes he had extended the agreement to after the blessed occasion as well. The best man snuck into the newlyweds' house while they were away on their honeymoon and placed a pressure-sensitive device under their mattress. The device now automatically tweets when the couple have sex. The updates include the length of activity and how vigorous the act was on a scale of 1-10.
Image

NASA Tests Flying Airbag 118

Posted by samzenpus from the drop-the-cloud-anchor dept.
coondoggie writes "NASA is looking to reduce the deadly impact of helicopter crashes on their pilots and passengers with what the agency calls a high-tech honeycomb airbag known as a deployable energy absorber. So in order to test out its technology NASA dropped a small helicopter from a height of 35 feet to see whether its deployable energy absorber, made up of an expandable honeycomb cushion, could handle the stress. The test crash hit the ground at about 54MPH at a 33 degree angle, what NASA called a relatively severe helicopter crash."
Censorship

Sharp Rise In Jailing of Online Journalists; Iran May Just Kill Them 233

Posted by timothy from the your-ethics-may-vary dept.
bckspc writes "The Committee to Protect Journalists has published their annual census of journalists in prison. Of the 136 reporters in prison around the world on December 1, 'At least 68 bloggers, Web-based reporters, and online editors are imprisoned, constituting half of all journalists now in jail.' Print was next with 51 cases. Also, 'Freelancers now make up nearly 45 percent of all journalists jailed worldwide, a dramatic recent increase that reflects the evolution of the global news business.' China, Iran, Cuba, Eritrea, and Burma were the top 5 jailers of journalists." rmdstudio writes, too, with word that after the last few days' protest there, largely organized online, the government of Iran is considering the death penalty for bloggers and webmasters whose reports offend it.

Comment Re:Anonymous Coward (Score 1) 102

by JBL2 (#29145521) Attached to: ACP, One of the Oldest Open Source Apps
"How it was" -- when the value of the system was concentrated in the hardware. The whole system was set up to serve the most valuable part, and software was seen as "directions to run the hardware" -- important, one supposed, but not the showy part. With commodity hardware, the value is in the bits and bytes now.

Comment Basics (Score 2, Insightful) 1146

by JBL2 (#28953743) Attached to: Navigating a Geek Marriage?
My experience: 1. Find out what's important to HER. For instance, birthdays never seemed a big deal to me, but she likes a little bit of a celebration -- nothing fancy, mind, but a few ribbons here & there. 2. Listen beyond the words. Something that doesn't usually bother her might get to her sometimes; find out why she was unhappy to start with. Work, relationship, family, ... 3. Do something unexpected and nice once in a while. 4. Trust her. I know it sounds obvious, but I was hesitant to tell her about some things first. I did, anyway, and eventually found that it's much less a big deal when you're in it together. Good luck!

Comment Re:That's not a good replacement (Score 1) 891

by JBL2 (#28544115) Attached to: GPS-Based System For Driving Tax Being Field Tested
Agreed. Using odometers to track mileage gets them the information they need, and not the information more subject to abuse, at less cost.
The federal government doesn't need to track individual cars, just the aggregate. Lots of state DOTs already do that, with standard traffic-analysis tools. Why build more bureaucracy?

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