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Submission + - 14 Year Old Boy Smote By Meteorite (telegraph.co.uk) 1

eldavojohn writes: Winning the lottery requires incredible luck and one in a million odds. So does getting hit by a falling space rock. A 14 year old German boy was granted a three inch scar by the gods. A pea sized meteorite smote young Gerrit Blank's hand before leaving a foot sized crater on the road. The boy's account: 'At first I just saw a large ball of light, and then I suddenly felt a pain in my hand. Then a split second after that there was an enormous bang like a crash of thunder. The noise that came after the flash of light was so loud that my ears were ringing for hours afterwards. When it hit me it knocked me flying and then was still going fast enough to bury itself into the road." Curiously, the rock was magnetic and tests were done to verify it is extraterrestrial. The Telegraph notes the only other recorded event of a meteorite striking a person was 'in November 1954 when a grapefruit-sized fragment crashed through the roof of a house, bounced off furniture and landed on a sleeping woman.' Space.com lists a few more anomalies and we discussed the probability of these things downing aircraft recently.
The Internet

Submission + - Disney strikes against net neutrality 1

1 a bee writes: Ars Technica is running a story by Matthew Lasar about how Disney's ESPN360.com is charging ISPs for "bulk" access to their content. According to the article, if you visit ESPN using a "non-subscribing" ISP, you're greeted with a message explaining why access is restricted for you. This raises a number of issues:

..it's one thing to charge users an access fee, another to charge the ISP, potentially passing the cost on to all the ISPs subscribers whether they're interested in the content or not.

Ironically, the issue came to fore in a complaint from the The American Cable Association (ACA) to the FCC. A quoted ACA press release warns

"Media giants are in the early stages of becoming Internet gatekeepers by requiring broadband providers to pay for their Web-based content and services and include them as part of basic Internet access for all subscribers. These content providers are also preventing subscribers who are interested in the content from independently accessing it on broadband networks of providers that have refused to pay."

So is this a real threat to net neutrality (and the end-to-end principle) or just another bad business model that doesn't stand a chance?

Comment Re:So the guy who goofed, is he BLACK? (Score 1) 241

Acknowledging difference is different than racism - while there are small differences between races, our mental plasticity as humans makes it unlikely that any race is significantly different mentally than any other, and really race is an artificial distinction... We're all human, and racism is hate speech, not free speech

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