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Comment Re:"Breakthrough" Now a Meaningless Word (Score 1) 164

by b0g0n (#34710172) Attached to: IBM Makes a Super Memory Breakthrough

Yeah, that was thirty years ago. Every year there's an announcement of some new memory technology that's going to revolutionize the computer industry. The last time I checked we're all still using DRAM or Flash, we still need lots of batteries, and we still have to reboot after powering down. Whatever happened to MRAM and half a dozen other pretenders?
Censorship

Italy Floats Official Permission Requirement for Web Video Uploads 131

Posted by timothy from the state-v.-man dept.
An anonymous reader writes with some bad news from Italy, noting that new rules proposed there would "require people who upload videos onto the Internet to obtain authorization from the Communications Ministry similar to that required by television broadcasters, drastically reducing freedom to communicate over the Web." Understandably, some say such controls represent a conflict of interest for Silvio Berlusconi, "who exercises political control over the state broadcaster RAI in his role as prime minister and is also the owner of Italy's largest private broadcaster, Mediaset."
NASA

NASA Tests New Moon Engine 75

Posted by Soulskill from the rocket-fuel-green-cheese-hybrid dept.
Iddo Genuth writes "Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne of West Palm Beach, Florida has successfully completed the third round of its Common Extensible Cryogenic Engine (CECE) testing for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). CECE is a new deep throttling engine designed to reduce thrust and allow a spacecraft to land gently on the moon, Mars, or some other non-terrestrial surface." NASA is also set to launch a new satellite on Tuesday — the Orbital Carbon Observatory — that will monitor the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. On the research front, NASA has announced this year's Centennial Challenges. $2 million in prizes are available for a major breakthrough in tether strength (one of the major obstacles for developing a space elevator), and another $2 million is being offered to competitors who are able to beam power to a device climbing a cable at a height of up to one kilometer.
Space

Most Extreme Gamma-Ray Blast Yet Detected 128

Posted by Soulskill from the in-a-galaxy-far,-far-away dept.
Matt_dk sends in a quote from a story at NASA: "The first gamma-ray burst to be seen in high-resolution from NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope is one for the record books. The blast had the greatest total energy, the fastest motions and the highest-energy initial emissions ever seen. ... Gamma-ray bursts are the universe's most luminous explosions. Astronomers believe most occur when exotic massive stars run out of nuclear fuel. As a star's core collapses into a black hole, jets of material — powered by processes not yet fully understood — blast outward at nearly the speed of light. The jets bore all the way through the collapsing star and continue into space, where they interact with gas previously shed by the star and generate bright afterglows that fade with time. ...Fermi team members calculated that the blast exceeded the power of approximately 9,000 ordinary supernovae, if the energy was emitted equally in all directions."

Comment Re:Formation of facts? (Score 1) 278

by b0g0n (#25114149) Attached to: Nielsen Sends Wikipedia DMCA Takedown For Station Descriptions

Seems to me the information in question is public, i. e. each television station broadcasts to hundreds of thousands of people, any one of which could describe the station and its market area. That's about as public as it gets.
Wikipedia presents information in a well-known format of its own. (IANAL but) I really don't see how Nielsen could possibly have a legal leg to stand on. This looks like a great opportunity to exercise the false claim provision of the DMCA.

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