Respawner - Slashdot User

Comment Re:Supply & demand (Score 2) 265

by Respawner on Wednesday February 13, 2013 @06:23AM (#42881405) Attached to: Earth-buzzing Asteroid Would Be Worth $195B If We Could Catch It

Because markets behave rationally ?
The prospect of a sudden influx of rare earth materials or fuels couldn't drive down the commodity pricing ? Even if this prospect seems baseless right now (cost of recovering the materials seems rather high) it could still have an effect on pricing.

Besides that, OP was wrong to (didn't RTFA I guess), unless you want to "land" the astroid on earth, the $195B isn't added directly on the market, rather it decreases the amount of materials needed to be send into space @ $10m /tonne.
However, for this you would need to create refineries and more in space (right now they are still in prototype scale, with "70-lb DragonFlies"). As such I highly doubt that the exact cost/benefit could be determinned at this point in time, since (space program) estimates are inaccurate.

Tricked Into Buying OpenOffice.org? 543

Posted by timothy on Thursday January 15, 2009 @05:03PM from the sucker-born-jede-Minute dept.

mldkfa writes "Recently I told a friend about OpenOffice and how it was a great alternative to the big name pay office suites. She went home and searched on Google for it and thought she found the website, filled typical registration information, and downloaded OpenOffice.org 3.0. The next time she opened her e-mail she found a request for 98 [Euro] for her 1-year subscription to OpenOffice.org 3.0 from the company that she downloaded it from. Apparently the EULA stated this cost and here in Germany she is required to pay up. So I thought I would ask Slashdot, should she pay? On the OpenOffice.org German website there is a warning of these schemes being legal. Shouldn't Sun change the license of OpenOffice.org to protect their fans or are they doing this to protect someone else? It has really made me think about recommending it to any more friends." Below, read Google's translation of the warning; it wouldn't be the first time that open source software has been lightly repackaged and sold in ways that should raise eyebrows among anyone familiar with the wide, free availability of the same apps.

Woman Claims Ubuntu Kept Her From Online Classes 1654

Posted by samzenpus on Thursday January 15, 2009 @11:54AM from the learning-is-hard dept.

stonedcat writes "A Wisconsin woman has claimed that Dell computers and Ubuntu have kept her from going back to school via online classes. She says she has called Dell to request Windows instead however was talked out of it. Her current claim is that she was unaware that she couldn't install her Verizon online disk to access the Internet, nor could she use Microsoft Word to type up her papers."

Hacker Publishes Notorious Apple Wi-Fi Attack 114

Posted by Zonk on Wednesday September 19, 2007 @07:39AM from the ponying-up dept.

inkslinger77 writes "It's been about a year since David Maynor claimed to have found a way to take over a Mac using a flaw in a Wireless driver. He's now published his work for public scrutiny. Maynor had been under a nondisclosure agreement, which had previously prevented him from publishing details of the hack, but the NDA is over now and by going public with the information, Maynor hopes to help other Apple researchers with new documentation on things like Wi-Fi debugging and the Mac OS X kernel core dumping facility."

TV Viewing Linked to Attention Problems 301

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Wednesday September 05, 2007 @01:57PM from the tired-of-being-told-to-go-play-outside dept.

oDDmON oUT writes "While your mother may have told you that sitting too close to the TV was bad for your eyes, the folks over at New Scientist are reporting that too much television may be linked to a bad attention span 'The study is not proof that TV viewing causes attention problems, Landhuis notes, because it may be that children prone to attention problems may be drawn to watching television. "However, our results show that the net effect of television seems to be adverse."'"

After 10,000 Years, Farming No Longer Dominates 332

Posted by kdawson on Wednesday September 05, 2007 @01:05PM from the long-row-to-hoe dept.

Peter S. Magnusson writes "As reported widely in business and mainstream press, the ILO recently released world market employment statistics. Most outlets focused on US economic competitiveness vs. China and Europe. Few noticed the gem hidden away in the ILO report: for the first time since the invention of agriculture, farming is not the biggest sector of the global economy — services is. (Aggregate employment numbers often divide the economy into agriculture, industry, and services.) Workers are now moving directly from agriculture to services, bypassing the traditional route of manufacturing."

Where To Find Opus On Sunday 495

Posted by kdawson on Sunday August 26, 2007 @04:22AM from the what-has-our-boy-gone-and-done-now dept.

Berkeley Breathed has a note up on his site: "Note to Opus readers: The Opus strips for August 26 and September 2 have been withheld from publication by a large number of client newspapers across the country, including Opus' host paper The Washington Post. The strips may be viewed in a large format on their respective dates at Salon.com.."

Students Embarrass eBay With Firefox Add-On 269

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday May 15, 2007 @03:31PM from the doing-it-right dept.

An anonymous reader sends along a posting from the Grooveking blog on a group of Stanford students who got together to help promote Firefox and ended up releasing a long overdue eBay Toolbar for Firefox before Mozilla and eBay could release their jointly developed extension in Europe. Mozilla's COO said the preemptive release of the eBay Toolbar had ruffled some feathers among European eBay execs. "Besides basic search features, it removes external ads on the site and allows users to see thumbnail pictures on ALL search items, even those sellers didn't pay for. An eBay toolbar has been long overdue... eBay can't be too enthusiastic about this toolbar since it cuts directly into its main sources of revenue: ads and thumbnail fees. But eBay users get a really good deal."

A Detailed Profile of the Hadron Super Collider 191

Posted by Zonk on Tuesday May 15, 2007 @12:41PM from the big-science dept.

davco9200 writes "The New York Times has up a lengthy profile of the Large Hadron Collider. The article covers the basics (size = 17 miles, cost = 8 billion, energy consumption = 14 trillon electron volts) and history but also provides interesting interviews of the scientists who work with the facility every day. The piece also goes into some detail on the expected experiments. 'The physicists, wearing hardhats, kneepads and safety harnesses, are scrambling like Spiderman over this assembly, appropriately named Atlas, ducking under waterfalls of cables and tubes and crawling into hidden room-size cavities stuffed with electronics. They are getting ready to see the universe born again.' There are photos, video and a nifty interactive graphic."

Congress May Outlaw 'Attempted Piracy' 768

Posted by Zonk on Tuesday May 15, 2007 @10:03AM from the i-see-what-you-were-trying-to-do-there dept.

cnet-declan writes "Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is asking Congress to make 'attempted' copyright infringement a federal crime. The text of the legislation as well as the official press-release is available online. Rep. Lamar Smith, a key House Republican, said he 'applauds' the idea, and his Democratic counterpart is probably on board too. In addition, the so-called Intellectual Property Protection Act of 2007 would create a new crime of life imprisonment for using pirated software in some circumstances, expand the DMCA with civil asset forfeiture, and authorize wiretaps in investigations of Americans who are 'attempting' to infringe copyrights. Does this go too far?"

Surprise, Windows Listed as Most Secure OS 499

Posted by Zonk on Thursday March 22, 2007 @05:49PM from the opposite-day dept.

david_g17 writes "According to a Symantec study reported by Information Week, Microsoft has the most secure operating system amongst its commercial competitors. The report only covered the last 6 months of vulnerabilities and patch releases, but the results place Microsoft operating systems above Mac OS X and Red Hat. According to the article, 'The report found that Microsoft Windows had the fewest number of patches and the shortest average patch development time of the five operating systems it monitored in the last six months of 2006.' The article continues to mention the metrics used in the study (quantity and severity of vulnerabilities as well as the amount of time one must wait for the patch to be released)."

Doctor Who Series Four Is A Go 259

Posted by Zonk on Thursday March 22, 2007 @04:37PM from the killl-the-dokkkkktoooorr dept.

netglen writes to mention that the fourth series of Doctor Who is a go. The BBC confirms that another season of the popular sci-fi series will be made, although the article is sketchy about the current doctor and his attachment to the next season. The third series starts at the end of this month in Britain with new companion Martha Jones, played by Freema Agyeman, replacing Billie Piper's Rose. "Tennant, who plays the time-travelling hero, would not talk to reporters about his role in future series. 'Do you know how many times I have been asked that question? Do you know how many times I have answered it?' said the actor. "

Trolltech Qtopia Greenphone and SDK Review 37

Posted by Hemos on Monday March 12, 2007 @06:58AM from the for-the-wee-little-ones dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The Greenphone comes at a time when there are countless mobile Linux platforms, but not many of them are open for easy development. This little device aims to fill a niche for a community-oriented mobile development platform. How does it perform? Linuxlookup.com has the Trolltech Qtopia Greenphone and SDK review."

Wednesday Is Pi Day 282

Posted by kdawson on Monday March 12, 2007 @05:21AM from the secant-tangent-cosine-sine dept.

mrbluze points us to an AP writeup on the upcoming Pi Day — 3-14 (which some will observe at 1:59 pm). The article notes: "[T]he world record [for reciting the number Pi] belongs to Chao Lu, a Chinese chemistry student, who rattled off 67,890 digits over 24 hours in 2005. It took 26 video tapes to submit to Guinness," and mentions in passing a Japanese mental health counselor who last fall recited 100,000 digits, but did not choose to submit proof to the record book.

Opera's Slashdot Easter Egg and Speed Dial 157

Posted by kdawson on Monday March 12, 2007 @02:27AM from the easter-already? dept.

Thelomen writes "Opera Browser contains an Easter egg that is not widely known, recently reported over at OperaWatch.com: type /. in the address bar and you are taken directly to slashdot.org. Other recent news from Opera is their new Speed Dial feature, present in the most recent build from Desktop Team. At first glance Speed Dial just looks like 9 bookmarks you can open with CTRL+1 to CTRL+9. However, the pages on the Speed Dial are shown in thumbnail and are automatically pre-fetched in background — a useful thing if you have some heavy pages among your top bookmarks."

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