Comment Re:When disarming someone . . . (Score 1) 457
Don't most muggers take peoples watches anyway?
Comment Re:Wait hold on mugger... (Score 1) 457
Yeah, when someone takes my gun away to use it against me, they'll have to use it as a blunt force weapon, because it'll be empty.
Comment Re:How would that work (Score 2, Insightful) 550
You're obligated to comply with a lawful order from a police officer. Failing to do so is unlawful. So if the cop says,"tell them to leave [because you've created a dangerous situation by being here]" you'd better comply, or you'll get sent down. Just because they told him to do it with twitter makes no difference.
Wow, what country do you live in? Mine has a constitution with due process protection, freedom of speech, and other useful constraints on government to prevent them from just ordering me to do things like that.
Submission + - Small Asteroid Making 400,000 Mile Pass by Earth
AtariKee writes: Universe Today is reporting that a small 10m asteroid, discovered earlier this month and named 2009 BD, is passing within 400,000 miles of Earth. Although the asteroid poses no threat to the planet, the site reports that the asteroid is still very interesting, as it may be a rare co-orbital asteroid (as in, shares the same orbit as Earth).
Submission + - Visual Effects Society Releases Top 50 List
theguru writes: The Visual Effects Society has released it's list of the 50 most influential visual effects films of all time. Star Wars tops the list along with other effects blockbusters from the recent past, but there are some surprising classics on there that some readers may have overlooked. PDF link here. Let the debates about what they left off begin...
Submission + - Sunglasses changing color in a second
Roland Piquepaille writes: "Wouldn't it be nice to wear sunglasses that change colors according to the weather or to your new skiing suit? According to the American Chemical Society (ACS), scientists at the University of Washington have developed a new lens material that makes this possible. Their 'smart' sunglasses can change color on demand almost instantly. The key to this improved eyewear technology is an electrochromic polymer that has the ability to change levels of darkness and color in the presence of an electric current. By pushing a button on the frame, your glasses will become red, green, blue or virtually any color. Still, you might have to wait a couple of years before buying such sunglasses. Read more for additional references and pictures showing how these lenses work."
Submission + - A possible explanation of Saturn's Hexagon
__aahgmr7717 writes: A possible solution to the mystery of the hexagonal pattern found in Saturn's north pole
was presented previously in:
Science News week of June 3, 2006; Vol. 169, No. 22 , p. 348
As waters part, polygons appear
Peter Weiss
Imagine a hurricane with an eye in the shape of a propeller amid the swirling clouds. Physicists have observed something almost as strange in whirlpools that they made by swirling liquids in a novel way. Within the whirlpools, they've seen three-blade-propeller shapes as well as regular polygons, including squares and hexagons.
(picture of pentagonal shape)
CURRENT EVENT. A whirlpool, viewed from above, takes a pentagonal shape just above the spinning platter that's causing the water to swirl.
T. Jansson, et al./Physical Review Letters
The behavior of liquids in rotating containers has long fascinated physicists. For instance, in a famous late-1600s study, Isaac Newton pondered why the surface of water in a rotating bucket becomes concave.
In the new experiments, Tomas Bohr and his colleagues at the Technical University of Denmark in Lyngby observed liquids in a cylindrical, Plexiglas container that doesn't actually turn. Instead, a plate attached to a motor-driven shaft spins at up to 7 revolutions per second inside the container, while the vessel itself remains still.
As expected, in experiments with water or with viscous ethylene glycol, the spinning platter swirled the liquid above it to create whirlpools. But the throats of those whirlpools tapered to surprising shapes at the platter's surface, the team reports in the May 5 Physical Review Letters.
In the water experiments, those shapes transformed as speed increased, changing from circular to elliptical to propeller-shaped to square to pentagonal and finally to hexagonal. Ethylene glycol whirlpools formed shapes with no more than three sides.
Curiously, the polygons themselves rotated, although more slowly than their parent whirlpools.
Rotating fluids play important roles in systems ranging from industrial equipment, such as pumps, to atmospheric disturbances, such as tornadoes and hurricanes. Although the newfound shapes remain unexplained, Bohr says that their discovery may eventually lead scientists to a deeper understanding of fluids' rotational behaviors.
Submission + - Yahoo! Unlimited mail storage
osmansantos writes: "Apparently Yahoo! will provide unlimited mail storage starting in May, the webmail wars open a new chapter and I look forward to know how Google and Microsoft will respond to this. Is necessary unlimited storage in a webmail or the 2.8 GB of Gmail will be enough for most people? What do you think?"
Submission + - Terabyte-Capacity Optical Disc Demoed
An anonymous reader writes: Various sources report on a technology demo of the 'TeraDisc' by Israeli startup Mempile, where 100 layers of data were recorded and read back on a single optical disc. Recording and readback are achieved by 2-photon absorption, and a DVD-sized, removable, 1 TB-capacity WORM disk is promised in 2010. And that's only with a red laser!
Submission + - Update: Falcon 1 launch reset to Tuesday
unixfan writes: The launch was scrubbed apparently due to wrongly set valves. The countdown was less than 2 minutes from launch when the call to terminate was made. Mission control will attempt a third launch at 4pm PST on Tuesday.
SpaceX is launching from the Marchall Islands's Kwajalein Atoll which is on lease to the US Army as a missile test range and communications & tracking facility. The launch pad is on the tiny island Omelek which is part of the Kwajalein Atoll.
If you have Google Earth you can find the island at N9deg 2'53" & E167deg 44'35". It is a tropical paradise some 2500 miles west of Hawaii. Being at only 9 degree north it is closer to the equator than Cape Carneval at 28 degree north. By using Earths rotational speed orbit can be reached faster using less fuel and a larger cargo capacity.
For the crew to be stuck at Kwajalein means some of the best snorkeling in the world. The main island also has hotels, shops, a cafeteria and sports facilities.
SpaceX was formed by Elon Musk, the 33-year-old South African founder of Paypal, which he sold for $1.5B to eBay. The company is expecting to being able to put satellites in orbit at a third of normal cost.
SpaceX is launching from the Marchall Islands's Kwajalein Atoll which is on lease to the US Army as a missile test range and communications & tracking facility. The launch pad is on the tiny island Omelek which is part of the Kwajalein Atoll.
If you have Google Earth you can find the island at N9deg 2'53" & E167deg 44'35". It is a tropical paradise some 2500 miles west of Hawaii. Being at only 9 degree north it is closer to the equator than Cape Carneval at 28 degree north. By using Earths rotational speed orbit can be reached faster using less fuel and a larger cargo capacity.
For the crew to be stuck at Kwajalein means some of the best snorkeling in the world. The main island also has hotels, shops, a cafeteria and sports facilities.
SpaceX was formed by Elon Musk, the 33-year-old South African founder of Paypal, which he sold for $1.5B to eBay. The company is expecting to being able to put satellites in orbit at a third of normal cost.
Submission + - John W Backus, Fortran Developer Dies at 82
westlake writes: John W. Backus, lead developer for the Fortran team has died at age 82. Fortran changed the terms of communication between humans and computers, moving up a level to a language that was more comprehensible by humans. So Fortran is considered the first successful higher-level language. Fortran was also extremely efficient, running as fast as programs painstakingly hand-coded by the programming elite, who worked in arcane machine languages. This was a feat considered impossible before. It was achieved by the masterful design of the Fortran compiler, a program that captures the human intent of a program and recasts it in a way that a computer can process. In the Fortran project, Mr. Backus tackled two fundamental problems in computing — how to make programming easier for humans, and how to structure the underlying code to make that possible. John W. Backus
Submission + - Microsoft Tracks Down Mass Fake Web Pages
An anonymous reader writes: According to an article on New York Times, Microsoft researchers discovered tens of thousands of junk Web pages, created only to lure search-engine users to advertisements, are generated by a small group of shadowy operators. By following the money trail, Microsoft researchers were able to track that flows from big-name advertisers to search engine spammers. Many use Google blogspot.com to set up spam doorway pages. The report is available at Microsoft Strider Search Ranger project page.
Submission + - A Cockroach Can Live without Its Head
Ant writes: "This Scientific American article says cockroaches are claimed that they can live without their heads. It turns out that this is right. Headless roaches are capable of living for weeks. To understand why cockroaches — and many other insects — can survive decapitation, it helps to understand why humans cannot...
Seen on Boing Boing."
Submission + - White House circumventing their own E-Mail ?
CTMET writes: In light of e-mails released by the House Judiciary Committee this week in response to the on-going U.S. Attorney firing scandal, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) sent a letter today to Chairman of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA), asking for an investigation into whether the White House has violated its mandatory record-keeping obligation under the Presidential Records Act (PRA).
One email, sent to Justice Department Chief of Staff D. Kyle Sampson from J. Scott Jennings, White House Deputy Political Director, uses an email account, SJennings@gwb43.com, on a server owned by the Republican National Committee. This raises serious questions about whether the White House was trying to deliberately evade its responsibilities under the PRA, which directs the president to take all necessary steps to maintain presidential records to provide a full accounting of all activities during his tenure.
Theres more...
http://www.citizensforethics.org/press/newsrelease .php?view=214
Journal Journal: Amateur Mechanics: Epilogue 7
Sure enough, the spark plug wires were the entire cause of the rough running. Looking at the old ones, the insulation had more or less completely broken down on the spark plug end on two of them.
We changed the plugs as well as the wires, it's likely the spark plugs had been in the car just as long and were about due.
