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Transportation

Bugatti's Latest Veyron, Most Ridiculous Car on the Planet? 790

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the gas-guzzlers-that-make-your-eyes-bleed dept.
Wired has an amusing writeup that accurately captures the most recent ridiculous addition to Bugatti's automobile catalog. The $2.1 million Veyron sports over 1,000 horsepower, a 16-cylinder engine, and a top speed of 245 mph. The guilty conscience comes for free. "That same cash-filled briefcase could buy seven Ferrari 599s or every single 2009 model Mercedes. You could snap up a top-shelf Maybach and employ a chauffeur until well past the apocalypse. Hell, in this economy, $2.1 million is probably enough to make you a one-man special-interest group with some serious Washington clout."
Mozilla

Firefox 3.5 Benchmarked, Close To Original Chrome 338

Posted by timothy from the ramping-up-tracking-down dept.
CNETNate writes "The tests prove it: It's the third-fastest browser in the world, and over twice as fast as Firefox 3. In terms of Javascript performance, Firefox 3.5's new rendering engine places it squarely above Opera 10's beta and Internet Explorers 7 and 8 (based on previous benchmarks), plus it's getting on for being almost as quick as the original version of Google Chrome. Also, the new location-awareness feature was testing in central London, and pinpointed yours truly to within a few hundred meters — easily enough for, say, a Starbucks Web site to tell you where your nearest Starbucks is."

Comment Re:Craigslist's standard of non-culpability... (Score 4, Insightful) 258

by harks (#28002607) Attached to: Craigslist Fires Back Over Adult Services Accusations
But Craigslist isn't committing the crime. They're providing a means of communication in the same way Google Gmail or AT&T do - or any Internet provider. And they should bear no more legal responsibility for the communications people make with their service than AT&T, Google, or Comcast do. To modify your examples, it would be like prosecuting the manufacturer of the car for letting people speed with it, or prosecuting the manufacturer of the Louisville Slugger that someone gets beaten with.

Comment Re:And Krugman says his bank bail out... (Score 1) 904

by harks (#27520557) Attached to: EFF Says Obama Warrantless Wiretap Defense Is Worse than Bush

He just put off the bad economy by using short term loans.

There was far less government borrowing under Clinton than under Reagan/Bush before him or W Bush after him.

http://www.headybrew.net/images/content/budget_deficit_or_surplus.gif

Of course, Obama looks like he'll be borrowing quite a bit more.

Comment Re:Flaws in our democracy (Score 1) 904

by harks (#27520489) Attached to: EFF Says Obama Warrantless Wiretap Defense Is Worse than Bush
On "soverign immunity," I agree with you.
And I will say that "state secrets" is a huge magnet for abuse. . . but I don't think you can say that the government should not be able to keep any secrets whatsoever. Must the government publicize all nuclear secrets? Troop locations? Weapons and surveillance capabilities? Surely not.

The solution, in my opinion, is to have an independent court with access to all information which can determine what is and isn't a legitimate case of a "state secret."

Comment Re:Huh. (Score 1) 1297

by harks (#27517399) Attached to: South Park Creators Given Signed Photo of Saddam Hussein

Yes, if you count consciously witnessing yourself suffocate because your diaphragm is paralyzed as "painless". Of course, the audience won't notice any of this, so it's fairly painless to them.

I find this a very strange situation - doctors around the world induce unconsciousness for surgeries hundreds of times per day with ease. They've been able to do so for decades. Why are they unable to do so for a lethal injection?
Media

DivX 7 Adds Support For Blu-ray Rips (H.264/MKV) 294

Posted by timothy from the matroska-navratilova dept.
mrspin writes "DivX looks set to continue to be the video format of choice for 'grey' content, with the company announcing that version 7 adds support for H.264 video and, more significantly, the Matroska (MKV) container. Anybody familiar with Blu-ray rips found on BitTorrent sites or other filesharing networks will instantly recognize the MKV file format in combination with the H.264 codec as a popular way to deliver High Definition video on a PC. And now that DivX is throwing its weight behind the Matroska container, MKV support should increasingly find its way on a range of non-PC devices, such as Blu-ray players, HD digital televisions and set-top boxes."
Software

Linux 2.6.27 Out 452

Posted by timothy from the not-all-fancy-like-gnu dept.
diegocgteleline.es writes "Linux 2.6.27 has been released. It adds a new filesystem (UBIFS) for 'pure' flash-based storage, the page-cache is now lockless, much improved Direct I/O scalability and performance, delayed allocation support for ext4, multiqueue networking, data integrity support in the block layer, a function tracer, a mmio tracer, sysprof support, improved webcam support, support for the Intel wifi 5000 series and RTL8187B network cards, a new ath9k driver for the Atheros AR5008 and AR9001 chipsets, more new drivers, and many other improvements and fixes. Full list of changes can be found here."
Security

Does Anonymity In Virtual Worlds Breed Terrorism? 295

Posted by samzenpus from the threat-of-the-week dept.
An Anonymous Coward writes "The Washington Post has an article about the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity's take on the numerous virtual worlds (e.g. Second Life) that have cropped up in recent years. IARPA's thesis is that because the Government can't currently monitor all the communication and interaction, terrorists will plot and scheme in such environments."
Space

Opportunity Takes a Dip Into Victoria Crater 79

Posted by CmdrTaco from the probably-not-skinny dept.
Muad'Dave writes "From the NASA News Release 'Today, NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity entered Victoria Crater for the first time. It radioed home information via a relay by NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter, reporting its activities for the day. Opportunity drove far enough in — about four meters (13 feet) — to get all six wheels past the crater rim. Then it backed uphill for about three meters (10 feet). The driving commands for the day included a precaution for the rover to stop driving if its wheels were slipping more than 40 percent. Slippage exceeded that amount on the last step of the drive, so Opportunity stopped with its front pair of wheels still inside the crater.' This marks the beginning of perhaps the greatest 'Opportunity' for new discoveries on Mars."

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