Signs of Water Found On Saturnian Moon Enceladus 79

Posted by Soulskill on Tuesday February 09, 2010 @12:23PM from the moon-names-that-make-me-hungry dept.

Matt_dk writes "Scientists working on the Cassini space mission have found negatively charged water ions in the ice plume of Enceladus. Their findings, based on analysis from data taken in plume fly-throughs in 2008 and reported in the journal Icarus, provide evidence for the presence of liquid water, which suggests the ingredients for life inside the icy moon. The Cassini plasma spectrometer, used to gather this data, also found other species of negatively charged ions including hydrocarbons."

US Blocking Costa Rican Sugar Trade To Force IP Laws 441

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Monday January 18, 2010 @02:40PM from the if-you-can't-beat-em-squeeze-harder dept.

For the last couple of days news has been trickling in about how the US is trying to ram IP laws down Costa Rica's throat by blocking their access to the US sugar market. Techdirt has a good summary of the various commentaries and a related scoop in the Bahamas where the US is also applying IP pressure. "The first is in Costa Rica, which is included in the Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA). Yet like with other free trade agreements that the US has agreed to elsewhere, this one includes draconian intellectual property law requirements. I still cannot understand why intellectual monopoly protectionism — the exact opposite of 'free trade' — gets included in free trade agreements. At least in Costa Rica, a lot of people started protesting these rules, pointing out that it would be harmful for the economy, for education and for healthcare. So the Costa Rican government has not moved forward with such laws. How has the US responded? It's blocking access to the US market of Costa Rican sugar until Costa Rica approves new copyright laws."

YouTube Revamp Imminent? 297

Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday January 13, 2010 @10:49PM from the how-about-3D dept.

An anonymous reader writes "YouTube's latest blog post indicated that some changes are on the way. Google has opened up a call to submit and vote on ideas. HTML 5 open video with Free formats has dominated the vote, maintaining over twice as many votes as the next-highest item almost since the vote opened up. You may vote here (Google login required). Perhaps we don't even need to since their blog post comes suspiciously soon after their revised merger with On2. Could these improvements be a completely overhauled YouTube 2.0?"

NASA Tests Flying Airbag 118

Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday December 09, 2009 @03:10PM from the drop-the-cloud-anchor dept.

coondoggie writes "NASA is looking to reduce the deadly impact of helicopter crashes on their pilots and passengers with what the agency calls a high-tech honeycomb airbag known as a deployable energy absorber. So in order to test out its technology NASA dropped a small helicopter from a height of 35 feet to see whether its deployable energy absorber, made up of an expandable honeycomb cushion, could handle the stress. The test crash hit the ground at about 54MPH at a 33 degree angle, what NASA called a relatively severe helicopter crash."

Comment Re:Wiping the whole disk by writing 1010 (Score 1) 369

by Gathers on Thursday May 07, 2009 @02:23PM (#27864045) Attached to: Unclean Military Hard Drives Sold On eBay

Yes, I know that addressing a nibble (4 bits) to a byte is not possible unless you have a 4-bit computer like the Intel 4004, Toshiba TLCS-47 etc. That's the whole reason why you, to get that effect, have to read-modify-write the whole byte.

It is actually kind of the same as how you must read-modify-write a whole sector to change one byte on a disk.

Also, and perhaps more importantly; I was only joking/trolling and I have no idea why anyone would want to describe my post as Informative. Perhaps they found "Most modern drives are much larger than 4 bits." to be informative? :P

Cheers!

Comment Wiping the whole disk by writing 1010 (Score 2, Funny) 369

by Gathers on Thursday May 07, 2009 @09:17AM (#27858609) Attached to: Unclean Military Hard Drives Sold On eBay

The problem with writing 1010 all over the disk is that it only covers an extremely tiny fraction of the disk. Most modern drives are much larger than 4 bits.

It is also highly inefficient since the OS would always have to read a whole sector (typically 512 bytes) and modify it in memory before writing it back again to avoid changing any bits outside of those 4 that are to be wiped!

So, why not just sell it on eBay and hope the buyer wipes the disk before using it?

Comment Re:strange (Score 5, Informative) 273

by Gathers on Friday March 09, 2007 @07:22PM (#18295462) Attached to: Sweden Admits Tapping Citizens' Phones for Decades

I can only speak for myself, a Swede who recently turned 26, but to me this is probably the first time I've ever heard the word terrorism and the murder of Olof Palme in the same context. I'd think any awareness of terrorism on my part is totally unrelated to Olof Palme.

--
But what about the awareness of state sponsored terrorism?

Journal SPAM: '...something I have never witnessed before on this scale' 14

Journal by Jeremiah Cornelius on Thursday February 15, 2007 @07:25PM

Carl Bernstein:

"Nixon's relationship to the press was consistent with his relationship to many institutions and people. He saw himself as a victim. We now understand the psyche of Richard Nixon, that his was a self-destructive act and presidency.