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The Courts

Irish Judge Orders 'The Internet' To Delete Video 243

Posted by Unknown Lamer
from the when-idiots-and-networks-collide dept.
New submitter edanto writes "A young Irish man wrongly accused of jumping from a taxi without paying the fare has secured a judgement from an Irish court ordering the video removed from the entire Internet. Experts from Google, Youtube, Facebook, and others must tell the court in two weeks if this is technically possible. The thing is, the video is accurate, it is only a comment that wrongly identified Eoin McKeogh as the fare-jumper in the video that is inaccurate. It's not clear if the judge has made any orders about the comment."
Science

Make Your Own Invisibility Cloak With a 3D Printer 80

Posted by samzenpus
from the now-you-see-it-now-you-don't dept.
cylonlover writes "Invisibility cloaks have been around in various forms since 2006, when the first cloak based on optical metamaterials was demonstrated. The design of cloaking devices has come a long way in the past seven years, as illustrated by a simple, yet highly effective, radar cloak developed by Duke University Professor Yaroslav Urzhumov, that can be made using a hobby-level 3D printer."
Government

UN Says: Why Not Eat More Insects? 623

Posted by samzenpus
from the other-other-white-meat dept.
PolygamousRanchKid writes in with news about a U.N. plan to get more bugs in your belly. "The U.N. has new weapons to fight hunger, boost nutrition and reduce pollution, and they might be crawling or flying near you right now: edible insects. The Food and Agriculture Organization on Monday hailed the likes of grasshoppers, ants and other members of the insect world as an underutilized food for people, livestock and pets. Insects are 'extremely efficient' in converting feed into edible meat, the agency said. Most insects are likely to produce fewer environmentally harmful greenhouse gases, and also feed on human and food waste, compost and animal slurry, with the products being used for agricultural feed, the agency said. 'Insects are everywhere and they reproduce quickly,' the agency said, adding they leave a 'low environmental footprint.' The agency noted that its Edible Insect Program is also examining the potential of arachnids, such as spiders and scorpions."

Comment: Re:Victorian Gay Curiosa? (Score 1) 91

by frisket (#43670159) Attached to: Help the OED Find a Lost Book
From which it should be clear that it is a book of poems they are looking for, not prose.

--
A Copy of Verses kept in the Cabinet, and only shewn to a few Friends, is like a Virgin much sought after and admired; but when printed and published, is like a common Whore, whom any body may purchase for half a Crown (Swift, Thoughts on Various Subjects)

Transportation

New Flying Car Design Unveiled 233

Posted by samzenpus
from the better-late-than-never dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Terrafugia has unveiled plans to build a semi-autonomous, hybrid-electric, vertical-takeoff-and-landing vehicle for personal aviation. The new design, called TF-X, is in the works even as the company's first product, Transition, is still awaiting production because of technical and regulatory hurdles. Terrafugia's founder says the goal of TF-X, if it can get past the safety issues in both aviation and automotive industries, is to 'open up personal aviation to all of humanity.' But it will have a lot of competition from companies including AgustaWestland, Pipistrel, and the stealthy Zee.Aero, all of which are working on vertical-takeoff-and-landing vehicles for consumers."

Comment: Insurance (Score 3, Insightful) 329

by frisket (#43624901) Attached to: Is Buying an Extended Warranty Ever a Good Idea?
They're not warranties. They don't warrant anything at all. They're just insurance. Once you get that clear, it's a straight choice on the basis of cost vs benefit. A real warranty penalises the manufacturer for shoddy goods or inadequate service by making them make good the deficit. That is not the case here.
Science

Physicists Attempting To Test 'Time Crystals' 231

Posted by Soulskill
from the where's-The-Doctor-when-you-need-him dept.
ceview writes "This story at Wired seems to have lots of people a bit confused: 'In February 2012, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Frank Wilczek decided to go public with a strange and, he worried, somewhat embarrassing idea. Impossible as it seemed, Wilczek had developed an apparent proof of "time crystals" — physical structures that move in a repeating pattern, like minute hands rounding clocks, without expending energy or ever winding down. ... [A] Berkeley-led team will attempt to build a time crystal by injecting 100 calcium ions into a small chamber surrounded by electrodes. The electric field generated by the electrodes will corral the ions in a "trap" 100 microns wide, or roughly the width of a human hair. The scientists must precisely calibrate the electrodes to smooth out the field. Because like charges repel, the ions will space themselves evenly around the outer edge of the trap, forming a crystalline ring.' The experimental set up is incredibly delicate (Bose Einstein Condensate), so it implies this perpetual motion effect can't really be used to extract energy. What is your take on it? It's unlike to upend anything, as the article suggests, because at a quantum level things behave weirdly at the best of times. The heavy details are available at the arXiv."
Programming

Stop Standardizing HTML 302

Posted by Unknown Lamer
from the remember-xhtml-2.0 dept.
pfignaux writes with an interesting view on the place of centralized standardization in modern browsers. From the article: "When HTML first appeared, it offered a coherent if limited vocabulary for sharing content on the newly created World Wide Web. Today, after HTML has handed off most of its actual work to other specifications, it's time to stop worrying about this central core and let developers choose their own markup vocabularies and processing." Instead, the author proposes that CSS, Javascript+DOM, the W3C's accessibility framework, and Web Components are sufficient to implement the rendering of smaller, domain-specific markups.

Comment: Re:Still fiddly if you RTFA (Score 1) 181

by frisket (#43504557) Attached to: Ars Reviewer is Happily Bored With Dell's Linux Ultrabook

I think the problem here is the razor-thin window edges.

The trouble is that the implementations of X seem to conflate the visible border of the window (possibly 1px wide) with the grabbable area that ought to cause the cursor to change to the "i can move this" double-arrow. That needs to be several pixels thick for most people to grab it. The designers of Unity and other windowing systems appear to place more emphasis on "looking pretty" than on "working well".

"I don't think so," said Ren'e Descartes. Just then, he vanished.

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