Golashes - Slashdot User

A Telescope In a Cubic Kilometer of Ice 118

Posted by timothy on Wednesday December 10, 2008 @06:53PM from the from-the-research-group-that-brought-you-donvier dept.

Roland Piquepaille writes "University of Delaware (UD) scientists and engineers are currently working at the South Pole under very harsh conditions. This research team is one of the many other ones working on the construction of IceCube, the world's largest neutrino telescope in the Antarctic ice, far beneath the continent's snow-covered surface. When it is completed in 2011, the telescope array will occupy a cubic kilometer of Antarctica. One of the lead researchers said that 'IceCube will provide new information about some of the most violent and far-away astrophysical events in the cosmos.' The UD team has even opened a blog to cover this expedition. It will be opened up to December 22, 2008. I guess they want to be back in Delaware for Christmas, but read more for additional details and references, including a diagram of this telescope array built inside ice."

Tips For Taking Your Laptop Into and Out of the US? 940

Posted by timothy on Thursday October 09, 2008 @03:30PM from the hug-a-tsa-agent-with-fervor-and-passion dept.

casualsax3 writes "I'm going to be taking a week long round trip from NYC to Puerto Vallarta Mexico sometime next month, and I was planning on taking my laptop with me. I'll probably want to rip a few movies and albums to the drive in order to keep busy on the flight. More important though, is that I'm also going to be taking pictures while I'm there, and storing them on the laptop. With everything in the news, I'm concerned that I'll have to show someone around the internals of my laptop coming back into the US. The pictures are potentially what upsets me the most, as I feel it's an incredible violation of my privacy. Do I actually need to worry about this? If so, should I go about hiding everything? I've heard good things about Truecrypt. Is it worth looking into or am I being overly paranoid?"

Comment Re:The Marketplace (Score 1) 110

by Golashes on Friday May 09, 2008 @11:40AM (#23350820) Attached to: MPAA Seeks $15 Million From The Pirate Bay

What strikes me is that the target market in the Pirate Bay's case is (according to the **AA spin) a bunch of freeloaders and pirates who won't pay for anything, so why would advertisers pay good money to access that market?

Most of the advertising on TPB, if you haven't noticed, isn't for things that can be pirated or freeloaded easily, if at all, but rather for services like web hosting, personal ads, vacations, weight loss plans, etc. etc. Unless you've come up with a way to download a torrent of any of these (web hosting apps don't count, since even a huge majority of semi-tech-savvy users like those on TPB don't have a decent box and/or connection to host on), it sounds like the freeloading quality of the audience doesn't have any impact on the result.

Linux Kernel 2.6 Local Root Exploit 586

Posted by kdawson on Sunday February 10, 2008 @04:23PM from the batten-the-hatches dept.

aquatix writes "This local root exploit (Debian, Ubuntu) seems to work everywhere I try it, as long as it's a Linux kernel version 2.6.17 to 2.6.24.1. If you don't trust your users (which you shouldn't), better compile a new kernel without vmsplice." Here is millw0rm's proof-of-concept code.

Gaming Mag Circulation Numbers May Not Mean That Much 74

Posted by Zonk on Monday October 29, 2007 @06:36PM from the warning-business-terminology-ahead dept.

The regular Game Mag Weasling column at the blog GameSetWatch usually runs down the contents of publications that recently hit the newsstands. This week, blogger Kevin Gifford tackles the thorny subject of falling subscriptions as they apply to game magazines. He references a discussion of falling subscriptions in the magazine publishing industry at large, which notes that a metric just as important as real subscribers is the number of readers-per-copy. Re-reading among friends and the appearance of a magazine in a doctor's office is another important factor to consider in a magazine's success. "Game Informer's [readers-per-copy] audience is 'only' about 68% larger than EGM's, despite having over four times the paid circulation. If you put enough credence to the numbers, it means that GameStop is spending a lot of money printing, mailing, and distributing those two million-odd copies of GI each month, yet not being as efficient in attracting an audience with those printed copies as EGM and GamePro is."

HD VMD Shows Up Late For the Format War 280

Posted by kdawson on Sunday September 09, 2007 @05:37PM from the other-guys-will-kill-each-other-off-see dept.

Fishead writes "As the fight heats up between HD DVD and Blu-ray, and as consumers seem to care less and less, a new contender has entered the fray. Next month, New Medium Enterprises will be selling a 1080p player through Amazon and stores such as Radio Shack and Costco for around $150 — half what the cheapest HD DVD player costs, and a quarter the cost of a low-end Blu-ray. The difference this new HD VMD (Versatile Multilayer Disc) format brings is that the discs are created with the same (cheap) red laser as DVDs. From the article: 'HD VMD discs, which hold up to 30GB on a single side, are encoded with a maximum bit rate of 40 megabits per second... between HD DVD's 36 Mpbs and Blu-ray's 48 Mbps. The format uses MPEG-2 and VC1 video formats to encode at 1080p resolution for the time being, and will possibly move to the H.264 format in the future.'"

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