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Submission + - Science Channel buys rights to Firefly (ew.com)

Submitted by
citking
citking writes: "The Science Channel has purchased the rights to Firefly and plans to air all episodes in order and in high definition. In addition, physicist Dr. Michio Kaku will appear to explain the theoretical science behind the show's sci-fi concepts. There's a brief interview in the article as well with Nathan Fillion, who chimes in with his thoughts on Firefly and playing Mal."
IT

Submission + - The Uk Government Playing With Time (telegraph.co.uk)

Submitted by
Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward writes: "In England it has been proposed that the clocks move forward by 2 hours this summer time to give us more daylight time in the day, and hopefully in turn stimulate the economy. My question is what impact will this hold for computers that automatically adjust the time to British Summer Time? Could this cause another 'millennium Bug' fiasco?"

Comment Airplay: No; Like ‘The Incident’: Yes (Score 1) 194

by grebonoj (#35172440) Attached to: Will the Apple TV Become a Gaming Platform?
AirPlay is a streaming protocol that buffers video before playback. Delay is unnoticeable when your sharing media, but would be unacceptable for gaming. However look at the (fantastic!) iOS game The Incident: when playing on iPad with iPad sending output to TV, you can use your iPhone/iPod Touch as a controller. Swap iPad for Apple TV and you get this rumor. Many other examples that use ios devices as controllers in intresting ways, for example Chopper 2 and Scrabble. As for "walled garden", isn't every existing game platform tightly managed? (ps3, xbox, wii)

Comment Re:This is Why -- Corporate Taxes (Score 1) 509

by grebonoj (#34972890) Attached to: IRS Nails CPA For Copying Steve Jobs, Google Execs
"...public corporate taxes (though not much, usually...") I believe one of Apple's current advantages is that its doing a good job of managing taxes globally. Good job meaning: 25% of earnings (not including payroll taxes). 30% would be more typical. Marginal US tax rates for families earning under $200K is currently around 28%. Additionally, corporate earnings (either distributed as dividends or recognized at the sale of shares) are subject to additional taxes (dividend and capital gains rates). Summary: ethical US corporations pay comparable taxes to typical earners.
Businesses

Apple, RIM, Google All Bid On Palm 117

Posted by timothy from the face-palm-apple dept.
imamac writes "It seems HP was only one of many bidders for the struggling Palm. The others included Apple, RIM and even Google. You may now commence speculation on why the various companies wanted Palm."
Toys

Man Repairs Crumbling Walls With Legos 106

Posted by samzenpus from the one-block-at-a-time dept.
Lanxon writes "German-born artist Jan Vormann, 27, has spent the past three years traveling the world repairing crumbling walls and monuments with Lego, reports Wired. His "Dispatchwork" began in 2007 in the small village of Bocchignano, Italy, as part of the contemporary art festival 20 Eventi. Developing the work in situ, he became intrigued by the makeshift repairs that had been made to the crumbling walls. The approach favored function over appearance, reminding Vormann of the haphazard Lego designs created by children."
Space

Astronomers Solve the Mystery of 'Hanny's Voorwerp' 123

Posted by kdawson from the do-not-look-directly-into-the-quasar dept.
KentuckyFC writes "In 2007, a Dutch school teacher named Hanny van Arkel discovered a huge blob of green-glowing gas while combing though images to classify galaxies. Hanny's Voorwerp (meaning Hanny's object in Dutch) is astounding because astronomers have never seen anything like it. Although galactic in scale, it is clearly not a galaxy because it does not contain any stars. That raises an obvious question: what is causing the gas to glow? Now a new survey of the region of sky seems to have solved the problem. The Voorwerp lies close to a spiral galaxy which astronomers now say hides a massive black hole at its center. The infall of matter into the black hole generates a cone of radiation emitted in a specific direction. The great cloud of gas that is Hanny's Voorwerp just happens to be in the firing line, ionizing the gas and causing it to glow green. That lays to rest an earlier theory that the cloud was reflecting an echo of light from a short galactic flare up that occurred 10,000 years ago. It also explains why Voorwerps are so rare: these radiation cones are highly directional so only occasionally do unlucky gas clouds get caught in the crossfire."
Software

Preserving Virtual Worlds 122

Posted by Soulskill from the how-will-they-play-starcon-2-in-2150 dept.
The Opposable Thumbs blog has an interview with Jerome McDonough of the University of Illinois, who is involved with the Preserving Virtual Worlds project. The goal of the project is to recognize video games as cultural artifacts and to make sure they're accessible by future generations. Here McDonough talks about some of the technical difficulties in doing so: "Take, for example, Star Raiders on the Atari 2600. If you're going to preserve this, you've got a couple of problems. The first is that it is on a cartridge that is designed to work on a particular system that is no longer manufactured. And as long as you've got a hardware dependency there, you're really not going to be able to preserve this material very long. What we have been looking at is how feasible is it for things that fundamentally all have some level of hardware dependency there — even Doom has dependencies on DLLs with an operating system, and on particular chipsets and architectures for playing. How do you take that and turn it into something that isn't as dependent on a particular physical piece of hardware. And to do that, you need information about that platform. You need technical specifications that allow you to basically reproduce a virtualization that may enable you to run the software in its original form in the future. So what we're trying to do is preserve not only the games, but preserve the knowledge that you would need to create a virtualization platform to play the game."
The Courts

Writer Peter Watts Sentenced; No Jail Time 299

Posted by timothy from the new-spirit-of-openness dept.
shadowbearer writes "SF writer Peter Watts, a Canadian citizen, whose story we have read about before in these pages, was sentenced three days ago in a Port Huron, MI court. There's not a lot of detail in the story, and although he is still being treated like a terrorist (cannot enter or pass through the US, DNA samples) he was not ordered to do any time in jail, was freed, and has returned home to his family. The judge in the case was, I believe, as sympathetic as the legal system would allow him to be."
Novell

Novell Bringing .Net Developers To Apple iPad 315

Posted by timothy from the odd-confluence dept.
GMGruman writes "Paul Krill reports that Apple's new iPad could be easier to write apps for, thanks to Novell's MonoTouch development platform, which helps .Net developers create code for the iPad and fully comply with Apple's licensing requirements — without having to use Apple's preferred Objective-C. This news falls on the footsteps of news that Citrix will release an iPad app that lets users run Windows sessions on the iPad. These two developments bolster an argument that the iPad could eventually displace the netbook."

Comment Shanghai is Airport to .... uh, no where! (Score 2, Informative) 297

by grebonoj (#20750429) Attached to: Germany To Build New Maglev Railway
If you're headed to Shanghai *don't* take the maglev.

The Shanghai system doesn't actually go anywhere... it gets about halfway (30KM?) from downtown before it just stops.

Interesting in a "we're hip, we've got a maglev" way, but sure would be more useful if you could take it to and from the airport.

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... though his invention worked superbly -- his theory was a crock of sewage from beginning to end. -- Vernor Vinge, "The Peace War"

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