Submission + - Lakes found under Antarctic ice using space lasers
Reverse Gear writes: "There is a new study circling the media about these newly found big lakes found underneath the antarctic ice sheets that apparently empty and fills back up quite fast (study has been working in 3 years and has detected massive movements), from the article:
NASA also has some information on the technique used to detect these lakes"The scientists allay fears that global warming has created these pockets of water. They say these lakes lie some 2,300 feet below compressed snow and ice, too deep for environmental temperature to reach. However, it is necessary to understand what causes the phenomenon as it can facilitate an understanding of the impact of climate change on the ice sheet in Antarctica
Submission + - RIAA hires DJ's, then sends in the SWAT team
cancan writes: "The NY times is carrying an article about how the RIAA is hiring hip hop artists to make mix tapes, and then
helping the police raid their studios. In the case of DJ Drama and DJ Don Cannon (myspace warning), they were raided by SWAT teams with their guns drawn. The local police chief said later that they were "prepared for the worst." Men in RIAA jackets helped cart away "evidence"."
Journal Journal: SIP over TCP - using it in NAT friendly way
I have recently browsed through the latest SIP RFC looking for ways to be more NAT friendly for VoIP.
What I found is not very conclusive: The latest RFC indeed tries to push TCP as default transport for SIP (Yessss signalling links are making a come back) but the use of TCP connection is left to a lot of ambiguities.
Beating Procrastination with Self-Imposed Deadlines 213
castironwok writes "Procrastination attracts us because of hyperbolic time discounting: the immediate (guilty) rewards are disproportionally more compelling than the greater delayed cost. Procrastination is the reward itself. An MIT professor found that when he allowed his students to give themselves their own homework deadlines, they would artificially restrict themselves to counter procrastination. However, they did not set deadlines for optimal effectiveness. I am personally a huge procrastinator and it's always a pull between rational logic (giving yourself the most time by choosing end dates as the deadline), and your past experience saying you will put it off so force yourself to start early."
Bookmark Don't upgrade to Vista just yet (daniweb.com)
Neuros OSD Review 55
An anonymous reader writes "The Neuros OSD promises a lot — it claims to be the first open source Linux-based embedded media center and it "records video and links your PC, portables and entertainment center". Bold claims, but can it live up to them? Linuxlookup.com has a two page review of the Neuros OSD."
Submission + - C-SPAN: Liberating & Restricting Floor Footage
bigmammoth writes: "C-SPAN bid to "liberate" the House and Senate floor footage has re-emerged and been shot down. In an aim to build support a recent New York Times editorial called for reality TV for congress. But what is missing from this editorial is the issue of privatization and the subsequent restriction of meaningful access to these media assets. Currently the US government produces this floor footage and it is public domain. This enables projects such as metavid to publicly archive these media assets in high quality ogg theora using all open source software guaranteeing freely reusable access to both the archive and all the media assets. In contrast C-SPAN's view only online offerings disappear into their pay for access archive after two weeks and are then subject to many restrictions.
If C-SPAN succeeds reusable access to floor footage will be lost and sites such as metavid will be forced to stop archiving. Because of C-SPAN's zealous IP enforcement metavid has already been forced to take down all of already "liberated" committee hearings which are C-SPAN produced. Fortunately, the house leadership sees private cameras as a loss of "dignity and decorum" and will be denying C-SPANS request"
If C-SPAN succeeds reusable access to floor footage will be lost and sites such as metavid will be forced to stop archiving. Because of C-SPAN's zealous IP enforcement metavid has already been forced to take down all of already "liberated" committee hearings which are C-SPAN produced. Fortunately, the house leadership sees private cameras as a loss of "dignity and decorum" and will be denying C-SPANS request"
Bookmark Creating PDFs with PDFCreator (newsforge.com)
Journal Journal: Questioning the Second Amendment 16
Scope of 2nd Amendment Questioned
By MATT APUZZO
The Associated Press
Thursday, December 7, 2006; 8:49 PMWASHINGTON -- In a case that could shape firearms laws nationwide, attorneys for the District of Columbia argued Thursday that the Second Amendment right to bear arms applies only to militias, not individuals.
Submission + - Why Do Computers Take Thirty Seconds to Boot Up?
An anonymous reader writes: Computers take too long to boot up, and it doesn't make sense to me. Mine takes around 30 seconds; it is double or triple that for some of my friends' computers that I have used. Why can't a computer turn on and off in an instant just like a TV?
99% of boots, my computer is doing the exact same thing. Then I get to WindowsXP with maybe 50 to 75 megs of stuff in memory. My computer should be smart enough to just load that junk into memory and go with it. You could put this data right at the very start of the hard drive. Whenever you do something with the computer that actually changes what happens during boot, it could go through the real booting process and save the results.
Doing this would also give you instant restarts. You just hit your restart button, the computer reloads the memory image, and you can be working again.
99% of boots, my computer is doing the exact same thing. Then I get to WindowsXP with maybe 50 to 75 megs of stuff in memory. My computer should be smart enough to just load that junk into memory and go with it. You could put this data right at the very start of the hard drive. Whenever you do something with the computer that actually changes what happens during boot, it could go through the real booting process and save the results.
Doing this would also give you instant restarts. You just hit your restart button, the computer reloads the memory image, and you can be working again.
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"The way of the world is to praise dead saints and prosecute live ones." -- Nathaniel Howe
