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Communications

UK Team Misses Balloon Altitude Record, But Beats a Few Others 34

An anonymous reader writes with this report from Hackaday, which recently covered an attempt at the UK altitude record for an amateur balloon launch. Says the story: "Things don't always go as planned, but the APEX team did manage to beat the several other UK records, including ones for the longest distance and flight duration for a latex balloon." The balloon drifted east from its launching point England, being tracked by Ham radio operators for much of the way, but eventually fell out of range, and is suspected to have ended its flight in Poland or Russia: "The APEX team is offering a reward for finding Alpha, so if you see a small styrofoam box in Eastern Europe, drop the APEX boys a line."
Idle

Directed Energy Weapon Downs Mosquitos 428

wisebabo writes "Nathan Myhrvol demonstrated at TED a laser, built from parts scrounged from eBay, capable of shooting down not one but 50 to 100 mosquitos a second. The system is 'so precise that it can specify the species, and even the gender, of the mosquito being targeted.' Currently, for the sake of efficiency, it leaves the males alone because only females are bloodsuckers. Best of all the system could cost as little as $50. Maybe that's too expensive for use in preventing malaria in Africa but I'd buy one in a second!" We ran a story about this last year. It looks like the company has added a bit more polish, and burning mosquito footage to their marketing.

Comment what will happen.... (Score 1) 579

International net gambling companies will either go broke or will become rather small, US government "rethinks" it's decision and allows internet gambling again. In the mean time the US gambling corps will have had enough time to create competing products or prepare hostile takeovers which will go live when the law is cancelled. Well done US!
User Journal

Journal Journal: Been a while... Finally settled on an OS!

Well, after many times wrestling with Linux moves away from Windows I have finally switched from Windows. To a supposedly expensive Mac: it cost less than equivalent Thinkpads, which is what I used to buy.

Now I have wonderful Unix at my fingertips with a 'proper' user interface on top. Very nice machine and very nice OS.

User Journal

Journal Journal: fun week...

Well.
Well well.
Interesting week.
This is how it was for me, no stories, nothing making sense, just shards of "stuff"...

(1)

I especially liked the following quotes from this week:

"Deep in the darkness of the psyche, vandals and arsonists no doubt have their reasons - and so, presumably, do the run-of-the-mill geeks who wreak damage on the unsuspecting computer user."

and:

User Journal

Journal Journal: Back to work, damn-it!

Moving from WXP to Linux is all well-and-good, but it has certainly stopped me from doing any "personal work". So I'll leave Linux running in it's current state (which is stable, solid and working very nicely thank-you-very-much) and just keep moving my projects away from Windows and DirectX so that I can use Linux a little more than I do now. It's been over a month now since I've done any real work on my little game, some of it due to procrastination, and some due to trying to replace Window

User Journal

Journal Journal: RH9 co-existing nicely with WXP, "best" of both worlds...

Hhmmmm, still happy with my RH9. It has certainly saved me from some WXP horror moments: (1) PartitionMagic8 crashed during datamove on the NTFS partition, and (2) WXP screwed the partitiontable a few weeks later when all I got it to do was look at the disk layout in admintools! It great fun to see Linux read (and backup) the NTFS partition when WXP can't start from it, and no other Windows based boot can see the NTFS partition :).

User Journal

Journal Journal: Yes! My first Linux originated entry!

This, for me, is momentous. I have successfully installed Red Hat 9 2.4.20-8, configured a kernel, installed NTFS access, and connected to the "net".
Now, I have to get my wireless to work (actiontec mini-pci IBM laptop), my powermanagement tweaked and my screen to stay normal after a standby-resume.

User Journal

Journal Journal: SCO vs LINUX (with Microsoft)

Oh dear.

(My thoughts on this are still a little messy, so my following blurb will be VERY disjointed, they are just my thoughts. I'm trying to get them in order...)

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