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Comment Not the most powerful (Score 2) 299

by Deuxsonic (#37834492) Attached to: US's Most Powerful Nuclear Bomb Being Dismantled
The B53 was not the most powerful bomb the US had in service. the B41 (https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/B41_nuclear_bomb) had a theoretical maximum yield of 25 megatons, making it more powerful than even the Castle Bravo Shrimp device which had a yield of 15 megatons. The only stronger detonation was the Soviet RDS-220, or "Tsar Bomba", which had a yield of 57 megatons, reduced from 100 by replacing the uranium tamper with a lead one in order to reduce fallout.

Comment Disassembly (Score 1) 1016

by Deuxsonic (#37563940) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Best Way To Destroy Hard Drives?
If you're like me and enjoy taking stuff apart, you can do what I do and just disassemble the drive, bend up the platters, and then throw everything away (and keep the screws, one can never have enough types of screws for various projects.) If it has multiple platters, then actually just taking the platters out makes them unusable as the platters are in a very precise alignment that's set at the factory that is screwed up and impossible to undo when the platters are taken out.
Censorship

Submission + - Scientology Attempts to Censor German Documentary (guardian.co.uk)

Submitted by eldavojohn
eldavojohn writes: Slashdot posts on operating thetans aren't the only things Scientologists are trying to censor. The Guardian is reporting on the strained relationship that Scientology is having with the German government and the airing of a pesky documentary on Southwest Broadcasting. "Until Nothing Remains," a $2.3 million documentary, is slotted to air live on German television at the end of this month. It recounts the true story of Heiner von Rönn and his family's suffering when he tried to leave the Church of Scientology. A Scientology Spokesperson called the film false and intolerant and also said they are investigating legal means to stop the film from being aired. Despite an unusually high degree of caution and secrecy about the filming, anyone involved with the film suffered from the usual harassment from Scientologists when investigations of wrong doing in Scientology are undertaken. More details on the film can be gleaned here. Commencing Streisand Effect in 3 ... 2 ... 1 ...
Medicine

Submission + - Researchers: AIDS virus can hide in bone marrow (google.com)

Submitted by suraj.sun
suraj.sun writes: The virus that causes AIDS can hide in the bone marrow, avoiding drugs and later awakening to cause illness, according to new research that could point the way toward better treatments for the disease.

Dr. Kathleen Collins of the University of Michigan and her colleagues report in this week's edition of the journal Nature Medicine that the HIV virus can infect long-lived bone marrow cells that eventually convert into blood cells.

The virus is dormant in the bone marrow cells, she said, but when those progenitor cells develop into blood cells, it can be reactivated and cause renewed infection. The virus kills the new blood cells and then moves on to infect other cells, said.

In recent years, drugs have reduced AIDS deaths sharply, but patients need to keep taking the medicines for life or the infection comes back, Dr. Collins said.

AP: http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5jIzw5TNPc3bTHfHDOrmqk5VNd9rgD9E9UL400
Piracy

Ubisoft's Authentication Servers Go Down 634

Posted by kdawson from the single-point-of-well-you-know dept.
ZuchinniOne writes "With Ubisoft's fantastically awful new DRM you must be online and logged in to their servers to play the games you buy. Not only was this DRM broken the very first day it was released, but now their authentication servers have failed so absolutely that no-one who legally bought their games can play them. 'At around 8am GMT, people began to complain in the Assassin's Creed 2 forum that they couldn't access the Ubisoft servers and were unable to play their games.' One can only hope that this utter failure will help to stem the tide of bad DRM."

Microsoft Demos Three Platforms Running the Same Game 196

Posted by Soulskill from the pick-up-and-play dept.
suraj.sun writes with this excerpt from Engadget: "Microsoft's Eric Rudder, speaking at TechEd Middle East, showed off a game developed in Visual Studio as a singular project (with 90% shared code) that plays on Windows with a keyboard, a Windows Phone 7 Series prototype device with accelerometer and touch controls, and the Xbox 360 with the Xbox gamepad. Interestingly, not only is the development cross-platform friendly, but the game itself (a simple Indiana Jones platformer was demoed) saves its place and lets you resume from that spot on whichever platform you happen to pick up."

Submission + - ABC Pulls Channels From Cablevision (washingtonpost.com) 1

Submitted by wkurzius
wkurzius writes: Cablevision and ABC have failed to come to agreement after two years of negotiations, and as a result ABC has pulled all their channels from the Cablevision lineup. The dispute is over $40 million in retransmission fees that Cablevision says they won't give to ABC. On the other side, Cablevision has been accused of pocketing $8 billion last year and not being fair to their customers.
Intel

Submission + - Newegg Customers Receiving Fake Intel Core 17 920 (overclock.net) 4

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: This first surfaced on TribalWar around seven o'clock last evening and on Overclock.net around midnight last night. Newegg still hasn't commented on this. It's not known whether this happened as fraud by another Newegg customer or it happened in shipping. The "processors" are made of Aluminum, and the "fans" look to be made of some kind of synthetic molded material. The "factory seal" was printed onto the box. The holographic stickers on the boxes were also faked.

More links:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eDU7Xoju4LM

http://www.tribalwar.com/forums/showthread.php?t=606966
The Internet

Submission + - U.K. bill would outlaw open Wi-Fi (zdnet.co.uk)

Submitted by suraj.sun
suraj.sun writes: The government will not exempt universities, libraries and small businesses providing open Wi-Fi services from its Digital Economy Bill copyright crackdown, according to official advice released earlier this week.

This would leave many organizations open to the same penalties for copyright infringement as individual subscribers, potentially including disconnection from the internet, leading legal experts to say it will become impossible for small businesses and the like to offer Wi-Fi access.

"This is going to be a very unfortunate measure for small businesses, particularly in a recession, many of whom are using open free Wi-Fi very effectively as a way to get the punters in.

Even if they password protect, they then have two options — to pay someone like The Cloud to manage it for them, or take responsibility themselves for becoming an ISP effectively, and keep records for everyone they assign connections to, which is an impossible burden for a small cafe" Lilian Edwards, professor of internet law at Sheffield University told ZDNet UK.

ZDNet : http://news.zdnet.co.uk/communications/0,1000000085,40057470,00.htm

Comment Re:That's no moon (Score 5, Informative) 113

by Deuxsonic (#29003849) Attached to: Strange New Objects Seen In Saturn's Rings
It was changed to Jupiter for the movie because Stanley Kubrick couldn't find a good image of Saturn (this was 1968, so a lot of the great images we have today didn't exist.) The book retains the original planet of Saturn, yet strangely it gets changed to Jupiter in the later books (I guess to be canon with the movie?)

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