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Sorry. "Frosty piss".

Why the fuck is this message's parent being modded insightful? Seems to me it's obviously being ironic, like... people DO use that way of fact checking, but it's only cause they are fucking lazy/retarded, not because it is last century.

svefg cbfg

...reasonable smokers...

There's the main flaw in your logic. Anyone who pays (way too much) for the privilege of habitually inhaling toxic smoke and gases (which is contrary to any living creature's survival instinct) cannot be described as "reasonable". Reason doesn't come into the equation for estimating how nicotine addicts will profit the tobacco companies.

Somebody once told me that it's not the days in your life that count, but the life in your days. Is your entire goal in life to live to the oldest age possible? If so, you should probably avoid driving cars or being near major roads, stay away from computers to prevent blindness and spend most of your day maintaining whatever the currently accepted level of aerobic exercise is.

Fuck that. Life is about having some fun too. If I enjoy inhaling toxic smoke, then maybe that is the way I want to have the fun in my life, and if me choosing what I want to do for fun doesn't match your "reason" or Big Brother's "reason" then fuck you both.

It's called compact shelving. Libraries have been using it for decades.

An anonymous reader notes that Hotmail's full version doesn't work with Firefox 3. Users get the following message when they try to log in: You are temporarily on the classic version of Windows Live Hotmail due to an error encountered during login. Before trying again, please clear your cache and cookies. (Clearing cache and cookies doesn't fix it.) At least 8 other bug reports have been duped to this one. The fault apparently lies with the Hotmail site, not Mozilla — maintainer Dave Garrett assigned the bug to Tech Evangelism, explaining: "I'll... move this over to TE, as my guess is this [is] the site's fault (just bad user agent sniffing?)."

courteaudotbiz writes "Canada and all members of the U5 (United States, Germany, United Kingdom, France and New-Zealand) state that they all suffered government-directed attacks between June and September 2007. These seemed to be Chinese government sponsored attacks." It's a Google translation, so it's a bit hard to read, but it seems to be a recurring story these last few months.

Don't we already have two rovers on Mars that seem to have MUCH better capabilities than this thing?

The rovers can't dig as deep, nor could they have survived more than a season at these polar latitudes either. There isn't as much ice (or for that matter, any ice that we've been able to find) at the latitudes where the rovers are operating.

As for what we already have on Mars, we have rovers that have amazingly gone almost 10km each. That's about 1% of the distance they'd have to cover to get to where this one is. So in terms of "what we have on mars" that "are capable of finding out what the polar ice caps are like", we currently had nothing until Phoenix.

The team visited Lake Cheko complete with their own catamaran

Is it really that hard to spell 'cameraman' correctly? C'mon editors! Get on it!

CarbonRing writes "The Bad Astronomy blog tells the story of hard work and good luck that lead to the recent observation of the explosion of a star going super nova for the first time."
http://www.badastronomy.com/bablog/2008/05/21/birth-cry-of-a-supernova/

Stony Stevenson writes "Pirated microchips based on stolen blueprints could soon be a thing of the past thanks to computer engineers at Rice University and the University of Michigan. The engineers have devised a way to head off this costly infringement by giving each chip its own unique lock and key. The patent holder would hold the keys, and the chip would securely communicate with the patent holder to unlock itself. The chip could operate only after being unlocked. The Ending Piracy of Integrated Circuits (Epic) technique relies on established cryptography methods, and introduces subtle changes into the chip design process without affecting performance or power consumption. With Epic protection enabled, each integrated circuit would be manufactured with a few extra switches that behave like a combination lock."

Echostorm writes with word that Windows Vista SP1, which began rolling out via Automatic Update, has left some users' machines unbootable. The update loops forever on "Configuring updates: Stage 3 of 3 — 0% complete. Do not turn off your computer." "Shutting down"... restart and loop. Echostorm notes having found traces of what sounds like the same bug in early beta releases of SP1. It's unclear how many users are affected. So far there is no word on a fix from Microsoft.

CNN is reporting that the 100-day Hollywood writers walkout is now officially over. The new contract managed to snag two of the three major points the Writers Guild was looking for. The writers will now have "jurisdiction" for content created especially for new media (Internet, cell phones, etc) and will get paid for the reuse of content on new media when the studios get paid. "Leslie Moonves, chief executive officer of CBS Corp., told The Associated Press, 'At the end of the day, everybody won. It was a fair deal and one that the companies can live with, and it recognizes the large contribution that writers have made to the industry. [...] It's unclear how soon new episodes of scripted programs will start appearing, because production won't begin until scripts are completed, the AP reported. It will take at least four weeks for producers to get the first post-strike episodes of comedies back on the air; dramas will take six to eight weeks, the AP said.'"

The Knife writes "Amazon secretly canceled orders for a large jazz CD set after realizing that it had mis-priced the item at $31 instead of its MSRP of $499. At first, inventory shortages caused the online merchant to string customers along for over a month after they placed their orders. But when Amazon realized that the box set was under-priced by $470, it simply erased all records of customers' order in their account history. No emails were sent to customers informing them of the price change or of the order cancellation. Probably because it violates Amazon's highly publicized price guarantee policy. A customer who called to complain and request the CD set at the $31 price was given a $20 discount off of his next Amazon order." A caveat: there is no external confirmation that Amazon did what is claimed here.