Follow Slashdot stories on Twitter

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:I actually agree with the Democrat here (Score 1) 239

Even people who are primarily known for their evil often have done good things for the countries they otherwise subjugated. A good example: Adolph Hitler, obviously our poster child for evil, he also orchestrated the building of the autobahn road network in Germany prior to WW2.

Actually, no, Hitler orchestrated nothing, he just happened to come into power around the time the autobahn road network was actually build:

Construction of the Cologne-Bonn autobahn begins in October [1929] - using mostly human labor and very few machines in an effort to create jobs in a period of high unemployment. [...] This first German autobahn segment will be completed in 1932, a year before Hitler comes to power. [emphasis mine]

and

Hitler inaugurates "his" autobahn network with the so-called "first cut of the spade" (erster Spatenstich) near Frankfurt on 23 September [1933]. This would have been impossible without the earlier work of HaFraBa and Stufa in the 1920s.

reference

Comment Re:Well... (Score 1) 413

Any idiot knew back 2 decades ago that computing will move to smaller cheaper and less energy systems.

Too bad they didn't hire more idiots then.

Less energy?

C'mon, you know exactly what he meant: One decade ago I bought a laptop (Toshiba Satellite S3000-214, P3 based) 2.5kg, approx 2000€ and the battery lasted around three hours when used "normally". Now, you can buy a Netbook that that is lighter, cheaper, and also uses less energy providing at least the same performance. Or just look at the N900, it sold for 600€, weight 180g, and without using Wireless or GPS but other apps it usually lasts more then a day without recharging.

Comment Re:Software Patents... (Score 1) 248

Actually, it's worse than zero-sum: As Michael Fitzgerald from the New York Times comments:

[Bessen and Meurer] analyzed data from 1976 to 1999, the most recent year with complete data. They found that starting in the late 1990s, publicly traded companies saw patent litigation costs outstrip patent profits. Specifically, they estimate that about $8.4 billion in global profits came directly from patents held by publicly traded United States companies in 1997, rising to about $9.3 billion in 1999, with two-thirds of the profits going to chemical and pharmaceutical companies. Domestic litigation costs alone, meanwhile, soared to $16 billion in 1999 from $8 billion in 1997.

Things have probably become worse since then. For instance, patent litigation is up: there were 2,318 patent-related suits in 1999, and 2,830 in fiscal 2006 (though that’s down from the peak year, 2004, when 3,075 were filed). Mr. Bessen said awards in patent cases also seemed to be up, though he was less confident in that data. Worse, he says, companies doing the most research and development are sued the most.

Space

Submission + - Astronomers Find Largest Reservoir of Water (nasa.gov)

gerddie writes: Two teams of astronomers have discovered the largest and farthest reservoir of water ever detected in the universe. The water, equivalent to 140 trillion times all the water in the world's ocean, surrounds a huge, feeding black hole, called a quasar, more than 12 billion light-years away.

One team, lead by Matt Bradford, made their observations starting in 2008, using an instrument called "Z-Spec" at the California Institute of Technology’s Submillimeter Observatory, a 33-foot (10-meter) telescope near the summit of Mauna Kea in Hawaii. Follow-up observations were made with the Combined Array for Research in Millimeter-Wave Astronomy (CARMA), an array of radio dishes in the Inyo Mountains of Southern California.

The second group led, by Dariusz Lisused, used the Plateau de Bure Interferometer in the French Alps to find water. In 2010, this team serendipitously detected water in APM 8279+5255, observing one spectral signature. Bradford's team was able to get more information about the water, including its enormous mass, because they detected several spectral signatures of the water.

Comment Re:Um. excuse me? (Score 5, Interesting) 116

After reading TFA: They do not assume that your ISP has this "station", only some ISP. You tag your https request to some unblocked site by using public key code encryption to indicate that you want a secure anonymous connection. When your request packages are routed you might hit a router from an ISP who runs such a "station". This router may identify the tag and and if so, the "station" answers the request by setting up an encrypted between itself and the user (you) who can then use it like a proxy. In other words - the headline is wrong, because you still use a proxy, the only difference is that the IP of the doesn't need to be publicly known. Instead, you need to know the public key of a (group of) station(s) and hope that the traffic gets routes to pass through one of these.

Slashdot Top Deals

He has not acquired a fortune; the fortune has acquired him. -- Bion

Working...