laxian - Slashdot User

Comment The Marginal Cost of SMS is 0 (Score 1) 410

by laxian on Monday May 12, 2008 @02:28PM (#23382504) Attached to: SMS 4x More Expensive Than Data From Hubble

There's all this talk of how much SMS messages cost per byte and how that relates to the bandwidth available on the network and so on yet no one has mentioned one of the best comments from the last time this topic was brought up here on Slashdot: The Marginal Cost of SMS is 0

Read that comment! Basically it says that it costs the telco nothing in terms of bandwidth (or anything else, really) to send your messages back and forth.

That comment was referenced in this blog post. I was so outraged after reading it that I called up AT&T and told them to make it so that I can't send or receive text messages anymore. As a side-effect, I can no longer tell when I have voice messages, but it's totally worth it.

No Passport For Britons Refusing Mass Surveillance 790

Posted by kdawson on Saturday March 10, 2007 @04:43PM from the and-you-thought-Sweden-was-bad dept.

UpnAtom writes "People who refuse to give up their bank records, tax records & details of any benefits they've claimed, and the records of their car movements for the last year, or refuse to submit to an interrogation on whether they are the same person that this mountain of data belongs to — will be denied passports from March 26th. The Blair government has already admitted that this and other data will be cross-linked so that the Home Office and other officials can spy on the everyday lives of innocent Britons. Britons were already the most spied upon nation in Western Europe — more so even than Sweden. Data-mining through this unprecedented level of mass-surveillance allows any future British government to leapfrog even countries like China and North Korea."

Scientists Developing Commercially Viable Synthetic Gecko 122

Posted by Zonk on Sunday December 10, 2006 @11:30PM from the better-than-synthetic-llama dept.

Gordon from Seattle writes to mention a CNN article about a new way to hang out. A British aerospace team is working on a super-sticky substance they're calling "Synthetic Gecko". It mimics the hairs on a gecko's foot, and may eventually be developed as a reusable adhesive. From the article: "Each of the microscopic setae on a gecko's foot has a mushroom shaped cap on the end, less than one-thousandth of a millimeter across. This ensures that the gecko's foot is in very close contact with the surface beneath. The cumulative attractive force, called van der Waals force, of these setae allows the lizard to scurry up walls and ceilings, and even hang from polished glass surfaces. In 2003 scientists at the University of Manchester produced a one centimeter patch of 'gecko tape,' but neither the University of Manchester nor University of California teams managed to produce the material in a greater quantity, unlike Haq and Sargent, who have already tested areas larger than 10 centimeters-squared."

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