Comment Flickercladding? (Score 1) 24
Hmmm... sounds like I've read about this somewhere....
Comment Why game? (Score 5, Insightful) 550
Why not do something active?
Why not get out and explore the country that you are in with your wife and kids?
Comment Re:Friend/ employee hates Oracle (Score 4, Funny) 91
So, you use Solaris? Me too. And looking at alternatives now. It's a shame really, as the most stable gear I've run has been Solaris on Sparc.
Firefox Mobile 1.1 Released 57
An anonymous reader writes "Firefox Mobile 1.1 has been released for Maemo devices such as the Nokia N900. Madhava Enros has put together a field guide for Firefox Mobile 1.1 which highlights what's new and notable in this release."
Comment Re:Hmm... (Score 0) 839
I hate to break it to you, but snow in Illinois and Colorado contain the same amount of water.
Comment Re:Solvable. (Score 1) 839
Except that in a 5 light cluster, the bottom lights are always the TURN ARROWS. Green Light is always the 3rd from the top.
And even if it is green it does not mean you are clear to plow through with reckless abandon. Green means that you are clear to proceed through the intersection as long as it is clear of obstructions ( like other cars, pedestrians, etc. ).
Comment Re:Hmm... (Score 5, Informative) 839
The ones you see around Denver *are* designed differently.
The shield around the lights is open on the top, so that it funnels wind downwards and blows the snow off of the light. The ones in Illinois are not. The Colorado shields cost ~$30.
This isn't a case of LEDs being bad. Nor is it "greens run amuck". It's idiots run amuck.
The driver of the truck should be prosecuted. In every light cluster with turn arrows, the turn arrows are on the bottom. They are NOT the solid green. And being from Illinois, in Driver's Ed we were all taught that Green does not mean 'Go'. It means *proceed when the intersection is clear*. So, failure on several points by the driver of the truck.
Illinois needs to install the same snow shields that Colorado and other states have successfully done with their LED light installations.
We'd probably have them already, except we spent all our DOT money on 'Rod R. Blagojevich - Governor' signs.
Big Dipper "Star" Actually a Sextuplet System 88
Theosis sends word that an astronomer at the University of Rochester and his colleagues have made the surprise discovery that Alcor, one of the brightest stars in the Big Dipper, is actually two stars; and it is apparently gravitationally bound to the four-star Mizar system, making the whole group a sextuplet. This would make the Mizar-Alcor sextuplet the second-nearest such system known. The discovery is especially surprising because Alcor is one of the most studied stars in the sky. The Mizar-Alcor system has been involved in many "firsts" in the history of astronomy: "Benedetto Castelli, Galileo's protege and collaborator, first observed with a telescope that Mizar was not a single star in 1617, and Galileo observed it a week after hearing about this from Castelli, and noted it in his notebooks... Those two stars, called Mizar A and Mizar B, together with Alcor, in 1857 became the first binary stars ever photographed through a telescope. In 1890, Mizar A was discovered to itself be a binary, being the first binary to be discovered using spectroscopy. In 1908, spectroscopy revealed that Mizar B was also a pair of stars, making the group the first-known quintuple star system."
Comment Re:Foundation (Score 1) 444
I thought of the same thing when I read the article. "Gee, that sounds like the miniaturized nuclear devices the Foundation created!".
Science Fiction again becoming science reality. Cool.
Space Shuttle Atlantis Will Carry Basketballs Into Space 38
Having figured out everything there is to know about space, and being huge fans of Space Jam, NASA has left some of their sciencey stuff behind and made room for a pair of basketballs on the Space Shuttle Atlantis. One of the balls comes courtesy of The Harlem Globetrotters, and the other is on loan from the University of Chicago. It was used by Edwin Hubble in a 1909 victory against Indiana University. "It is only fitting that the team that has seen more of the world than any other in history would have a presence beyond the stratosphere," Globetrotters chief executive officer Kurt Schneider said in a news release.
