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Comment: Re:Antarctica? (Score 1) 262

by iacvlvs (#32041662) Attached to: Gardening On Mars

There are dozens of reasons to prefer Antarctica as a destination. Mars, in my opinion, has one big advantage: it would decouple the continued existence of humanity from the continued habitability of Earth.

Right now we could be destroyed completely by an asteroid impact, a supervolcano, anything that takes terrestrial conditions out of the relatively narrow band we can survive in. Getting off this rock would reduce the risk of something bad happening and wiping us out. Developing the technology to make a Martian colony self sustaining would widen the band of terrestrial conditions we can survive in.

Comment: Re:All the universes where the bread missed a busb (Score 1) 478

by iacvlvs (#30016238) Attached to: LHC Shut Down Again — By Baguette-Dropping Bird
Interesting idea. The baguette isn't a huge deal because it won't delay the activation of the Collider but that's only one of the absurd things to happen to it, many of which have caused delays.

If the sheer number of alternate universes is contributing to our survival
and each time we avoid destruction, the number of universes is reduced
then perhaps it would benefit us to seed the multiverse with more universes.

I'm going to be letting HotBits make my decisions for a while. They supply random numbers based on radioactive decay. I'm hoping my experiment will propagate superposition to the macro world and increasing the chance that some instance of me survives whatever nasty unexpected consequences the LHC's activation may have.

Of course one could argue that my our present existence proof that nothing happens in the future that destroys this universe's past.
Image

SA's Largest Telecomms Provider vs. a Pigeon 149

Posted by samzenpus
from the may-the-best-bird-win dept.
dagwud writes "Just a few days after this Slashdot article, South Africa's largest telecoms provider, Telkom (which has been taking flak for years for its shoddy and overpriced service), is being pitted against a homing pigeon to see which can deliver 4GB of call centre data logs quickest over a distance of around 80km (50 miles). According to the official website, the race is set to take place September 10."
Networking

Coming Soon: Terabit Ethernet->

Submitted by stinkymountain
stinkymountain writes "Pre-standard 40 Gigabit and 100 Gigabit Ethernet products — server network interface cards, switch uplinks and switches — are expected to hit the market later this year. And standards-compliant products are expected to ship in the second half of next year, not long after the expected June 2010 ratification of the 802.3ba standard. Despite the global economic slowdown, global revenue for 10G fixed Ethernet switches doubled in 2008, according to Infonetics. And there is pent-up demand for 40 Gigabit and 100 Gigabit Ethernet, says John D'Ambrosia, chair of the 802.3ba task force in the IEEE and a senior research scientist at Force10 Networks. "There are a number of people already who are using link aggregation to try and create pipes of that capacity," he says. "It's not the cleanest way to do things...(but) people already need that capacity." D'Ambrosia says even though 40/100G Ethernet products haven't arrived yet, he's already thinking ahead to Terabit Ethernet standards and products by 2015. "We are going to see a call for a higher speed much sooner than we saw the call for this generation" of 10/40/100G Ethernet, he says. http://www.networkworld.com/news/2009/042009-terabit-ethernet.html?ts0hb&story=ts_spmc"
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