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Education

Submission + - Ocean Floor Crust Wound to Be Explored

eldavojohn writes: "A group of scientists are disembarking right now to study an open gash in the ocean floor where earth's mantle lays exposed without any crust covering it. The scientists describe these as similar to stretch marks that a person might experience on their skin from a growth spurt. Either that or the mantle was never covered by the crust and just has always been like this. From the article, "Regardless of how they formed, the exposed mantle provides scientists with a rare opportunity to study the Earth's rocky innards. Many attempts to drill deep into the planet barely get past the crust.""
Windows

Submission + - It's official: Vista copy protection 100% cracked

Slinky Sausage writes: "There's been a steady stream of 'sort of' cracks for Vista coming out of the piracy groups, but a crack has been released this morning by "Pantheon" which is doesn't avoid Vista's activation — it exploits it! Apparently despite the requirements for everyone including volume licence customers to activate, Microsoft built in the capability for OEM system builders to pre-install copies of Vista without activating it over the internet. The crack works on any Acer, HP, Lenovo, Hewlett Packard or custom machine (as long as you have the BIOS of that machine available)."
Announcements

Submission + - Kiwi scientist proposes solution to global warming

bunbuntheminilop writes: "
A New Zealand scientist has claimed to have developed a way to extract carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and will submit into Richard Branson's global warming competition. From the article:

Graeme Brown has invented a substance which can absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. The substance, dubbed Planetite, is derived from the naturally occurring mineral crystal Zeolite. Brown says Planetite can absorb carbon dioxide and separate the molecule into carbon and oxygen which can be re-used.
"
OS X

Submission + - PC World Picks OSX Over XP, Vista (and, uh, Linux)

DenmaFat writes: "The article is buried in PC World's web site, but the ordinarily Redmond-centric magazine comes right out and says that OS X is the best operating system for its readers, over Linux and Windows XP, with Windows Vista ranked dead last. The review is the subjective assessment of just one author, but he provides a lengthy qualitative comparison chart to back up his recommendations. On a related note, chilled beverages now available in Hades."
Hardware

Ionic Winds Chilling Your Computer 89

Iddo Genuth writes to mention The Future of Things online magazine is reporting that Kronos Advanced Technologies in cooperation with Intel and the University of Washington claims to have developed a new type of ultra-thin, silent cooling technology for processors. The piece covers many of the cooling technologies currently available, how their new corona discharge cooler works, and a short interview with several of the key team members.

Henry's Python Programming Guide 143

An anonymous reader writes "Seems like someone else has put up another Python programming guide, although this one seems to be a little easier to get through. From the article: 'My name is Henry the Adequate, and I am a Python programming Guru. I know all of their movies, and their TV shows, and can quote the dead parrot sketch in my sleep. In fact I do quote it in my sleep. That may explain why I am single, although it could also have something to do with the flamethrower. Naturally many old-timers want to know what this new-fangled Python thing is all about. "Henry," they say, "What is this new-fangled Python thing all about?" See what i mean? So, here, at last, is the article you have all been waiting for...'"

Comment Could file storage services use this?... (Score 3, Interesting) 237

Since this is nothing more than an API to access data, I wonder if this couldn't be used as the backend storage for existing file storage services, instead of paying for servers and bandwidth yourself...

This limits costs to storage actually used (at $0.15/GB which is a very fair rate), and bandwidth actually used. The cost that could add up is the bandwidth, where you'd obviously have to direct users to the amazon URL directly to avoid using bandwidth to get the file then to pass it on too.

Plus, at $0.20/GB of bandwidth, upload/download could get expensive still, with no cap on that cost. For example, 2,000 GB of bandwidth, which is bundled with most low-end dedicated servers nowadays (ie. even the sub-$99/mo. machines), this would cost you $400 from Amazon. That's pretty steep, and may be the limiting factor making it unfeasible for this idea. Interesting nonetheless.

Comment Re:Vimes is not a Vigilante (Score 1) 411

He lost his badge briefly in _Men_at_Arms_, but only in an act of reverse psychology from Vetinari, so that doesn't really count. He resigns in protest of the military coup in Jingo and takes up his duties as a knight instead. Neither of these is vigilante-ism.

More importantly, Vimes is always determined to maintain himself and those under him as officers of the law (even though no one knows what the law actually is) who do not (for example) just kill the accused, even if ordered to. This becomes very important in many books, including Jingo, Fifth Elephant and Night Watch.

He's still the coolest character listed, though.

User Journal

Journal Journal: A slow and painful Slashdot death

Slashdot is successfully killing the possibility for rational discussion amongst technically-minded people to occur. Its model is a vastly inferior medium for discourse than any other the web has thus far offered, with the exception of web logs (blogs are to the intellect as shit is to digestion -- read: no vitamin content, stop opining, the equivalent of shitting in ones own mouth!).

User Journal

Journal Journal: The G-String 2

A friend of mine is a music teacher. In one of the beginner classes, he was explaining the different strings on a guitar.

"This here is the G-String."

A kid pipes up, "Wow, I thought the G-String was just a myth."

"No son, you're thinking of something else"

User Journal

Journal Journal: American FUD

To the tune of Don McLean's American Pie.

A long long time ago, I can still remember
How Unix used to be so great
Tape drives were as big as cars
For saving files, known as tars
And perhaps, we could save it from its fate

But Richard Stallman surely shivered
When Windows NT was delivered
With icons on the desktop
And a flying toaster backdrop

It's funny.  Laugh.

Journal Journal: The Dot Com Boom (Those were the days)

Boy the way Steve Ballmer said,
Unix now is finally dead,
Windows was king they all said
those were the days.
Didn't need no business plan
so said the investor man
And now the stocks are in the can
Those were the days.
We all ran Windows 98
Blue screens that we had to hate
Gee our Packard Bell ran great
Those were the days
Everyone had a website then
And posted pictures of their kin
Mr. we can use a man like Linus Torvalds again
Those were the days

The Courts

Journal Journal: Why copyright isn't a fundamental right 1

A lot of people are arguing about copyright, and many are claiming that it is equivalent to physical property, not in that it resembles it (it doesn't really), but because they are both fundamental rights. Many others have declared that copyright is not a fundamental right. However, neither side has been particularly eager to show reasons.

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You can bring any calculator you like to the midterm, as long as it doesn't dim the lights when you turn it on. -- Hepler, Systems Design 182

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