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Comment Re:I used to take the bus (Score 1) 887

by Foddz (#26441351) Attached to: How do you get to work?
The union is up in arms about the city 'only' increasing their pay by 7% over 3 years and changing how the empoyees schedule themselves. At present the union workers get to pick and choose their shifts (based on seniority) such that the most senior people can work it so they're getting paid overtime to the tune of $100k annual income (not an exaggeration) to drive a bus. The city would stand to save many millions a year by changing the system to 'pre-package' shifts and allow the employees to pick which package they want. As it is, the city's saving $3M per week by not paying the bastards a cent while they're on strike. As a driving tax-payer who commutes opposite to the flow of the morning rush, I say let 'em strike until they come to their senses.

Nvidia 480-Core Graphics Card Approaches 2 Teraflops 261

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the hotter-than-a-thousand-suns dept.
An anonymous reader writes "At CES, Nvidia has announced a graphics card with 480 cores that can crank up performance to reach close to 2 teraflops. The company's GTX 295 graphics cards has two GPUs with 240 cores each that can execute graphics and other computing tasks like video processing. The card delivers 1.788 teraflops of performance, which Nvidia claims is the fastest single graphics card in the market."
Space

Submission + - Did Earth once have multiple moons? (newscientist.com) 2

Submitted by
fyc
fyc writes: "A new study from NASA's Ames Research Center has suggested that the collision of Earth and a Mars-sized object that created the Moon may also have resulted in the creation of tiny moonlets on Earth's Lagrangian points. 'Once captured, the Trojan satellites likely remained in their orbits for up to 100 million years, Lissauer and co-author John Chambers of the Carnegie Institution of Washington say. Then, gravitational tugs from the planets would have triggered changes in the Earth's orbit, ultimately causing the moons to become unmoored and drift away or crash into the Moon or Earth.'"
Earth

Submission + - First superheavy element found in nature (arxivblog.com)

Submitted by
KentuckyFC
KentuckyFC writes: "The first naturally occuring superheavy element has been found. An international team of scientists found several nuclei of unbibium in a sample of the naturally occuring heavy metal thorium. Unbibium has an atomic number of 122 and an atomic weight of 292. In general, very heavy elements tend to be unstable but scientsts have long predicted that even heavier nuclei would be stable. The group that found unbibium in thorium say it has a half life in excess of 100 million years and an abundance of about 10^(-12) relative to thorium, which itself is about as abundant as lead (abstract)."
Censorship

Submission + - New "whisper campaign" against Fair Use (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Big Content is currently engaged in a worldwide 'whisper campaign' against Fair Use. 'The counter-reformation in question takes the form of a "whispering campaign" in which ministries in different countries are told that plans to expand fair use rights might well run afoul of the Berne Convention's "three-step test." The Convention, which goes back to the late 1800s, was one of the earliest international copyright treaties and is now administered by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO).'
Patents

Submission + - The Rush to Patent the Atomic Bomb (npr.org)

Submitted by
dooling
dooling writes: "In case you were thinking of building your own atom bomb, you may want to weigh your intellectual property liability. It seems there are over 2000 patents covering the atom bomb. To avoid publishing the patents, a central tenant of the patent system, "the project made use of an obscure law whereby patent applications could be filed but no one would actually look at them or evaluate them. They would just be stamped secret and stored in a vault at the patent office." The irony here is that while all the patents were essentially stored in the same place at the patent office and written to be understandable by any engineer, the Manhattan Project worked diligently to compartmentalize knowledge, using code names for just about all aspects of the project and keeping tight security on all information. It seems the patents were filed to give the U.S. government an essential monopoly on the burgeoning nuclear industry and protect it against others who might patent similar technologies later."
Communications

Submission + - Nerve-tapping neckband allows 'telepathic' chat (newscientist.com)

Submitted by ZonkerWilliam
ZonkerWilliam writes: Newscientist has an interesting article on tapping the nerve impulses going from the brain to the vocal chords, allowing for 'Voiceless' phone calls, as seen in the video. As quoted,

With careful training a person can send nerve signals to their vocal cords without making a sound. These signals are picked up by the neckband and relayed wirelessly to a computer that converts them into words spoken by a computerised voice.
It's not quite telepathy, but it's pretty close.
Music

Music Pirates Not So Evil After All?

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the black-sheep-of-the-mafiaa dept.
An anonymous reader writes to tell us that a branch of the Australian music industry is reporting that illegal music sharing may not be such a horrible thing after all. "The study, conducted by two researchers at the University of London for the Canadian Government, found people downloaded songs illegally because they wanted to hear them before buying or because they were not available in stores. 'We estimate that the effect of one additional P2P (peer-to-peer) download per month is to increase music purchasing by 0.44 CDs per year,' the researchers found." While I wouldn't hold my breath to suddenly see the RIAA offering all their music for free, it would be nice to get some people to start thinking through things before reaching for the beatstick.
The Internet

Submission + - MLB Fans Who Bought DRM Videos Get Hosed

Submitted by
Billosaur
Billosaur writes: "Found via BoingBoing, Major League Baseball has just strengthened the case against DRM. If you downloaded videos of baseball games from MLB.com before 2006, apparently they no longer work and you are out of luck. MLB.com, sometime during 2006, changed their DRM system. Result: game videos purchased before that time will now no longer work, as the previous DRM system is no longer supported. When the video is played, apparently the MLB.com servers are contacted and a license obtained to verify the authenticity of the video; this is done by a web link. That link no longer exists, and so now the videos will no longer play, even though the MLB FAQ says that a license is only obtained once and will not need to be re-obtained. The blogger who is reporting this contacted MLB technical support, only to be told there are no refunds due to this problem."
Biotech

Submission + - First Fossil Evidence that Raptors Hunted in Packs

Submitted by
Ponca City, We Love You
Ponca City, We Love You writes: "The New Scientist reports that palaeontologists have excavated a fossil trackway in Shandong Province in China 100 to 120 million years old that contains footprints left by six Dromeosaurs, the more formal name for raptors, showing evidence of group behavior. Up until now, the popular stereotype from Jurassic Park of raptors hunting in packs has had no fossil evidence to back it up. The paths of the six 90 kilo raptors do not overlap where the animals walked alongside a river or stream. "The odds of these tracks being made by different individuals that just happen to be moving in the same direction, without their tracks stepping on one another, are small," said Jerry D. Harris, director of paleontology at Dixie State College. "Groups that do that usually have relatively sophisticated behavior, and they're relatively intelligent," Harris added. "By moving together in groups, it's entirely possible that they hunted in groups.""
Data Storage

Submission + - Ubuntu may be killing your laptop's hard drive 1

Submitted by wwrmn
wwrmn writes: There's a debate [bugs.launchpad.net] on whether it's the Ubuntu, BIOS, hard drive manufacturer or pick any player's fault, but Ubuntu (and perhaps any OS) may be dramatically shortening the life of your laptop's hard-drive due to an aggressive power saving feature/acpi bug/OS configuration. Regardless of where the fault lies or how it's fixed, you might want to take some actions now to try to prevent it.

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