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Comment Re:They had ONE advantage (Score 2) 276

by makitso (#64701504) Attached to: Locking Up Items To Deter Shoplifting Is Pushing Shoppers Online

Brick and mortar had two significant advantages over online. You could easily hold the product in your hands to make your decision, and you could just grab it and head directly to checkout to have it today.

The same places that lock everything up are the ones that never have adequate staff. You're lucky if you don't find the checkout uninhabited, much less getting someone with the right key to show up any time soon to unlock the case.

If you're not going to get a good look at it anyway and can't just grab and go, might as well get it cheaper online and you don't have to go beyond your front door. When you shop online, nobody cares if you're in your underwear.

Went to Home Depot to buy a power tool. The poser tools were locked up so looked for someone to open the case but there was no one around so went home and bought it at Amazon.

Comment Dell Docks suck (Score 1) 48

by makitso (#63943307) Attached to: How Ubuntu Linux Snuck Into High-End Dell Laptops
I have always bought Thinkpad laptops. Due to eyesight issues I needed to replace my Thinkpad 450s with a new 15 inch laptop. Now, my wife has a Dell XPS 15 laptop running Ubuntu Budgie and it is a very nice machine so I bought the latest XPS 15 for my use. The keyboard is not as good as my old Thinkpad but I can live with it. I dual booted with Ubuntu Budgie and all is well. However, there is one issue that was a pain in the ars – a docking station. With the 450s, I bought a Lenovo dock and it worked out-of-the-box. With the XPS, I tried three Dell docks and all had problems. Finally, I picked up a off brand dock and it works OK.
NASA

Low Quality Alloy Cause of Shuttle Main Tank Issue 118

Posted by Soulskill from the heisenberg-compensators-were-acting-up dept.
BJ_Covert_Action writes "NASA engineers have finally discovered the root cause of the cracks that have been found on space shuttle Discovery's main external tank. The main tank, one of the 'Super Lightweight Tank' models developed by Lockheed-Martin, employs an aluminum-lithium alloy developed by Lockheed-Martin specifically for this application. The new alloy is used in various structural stringers throughout the SLWT design. Unfortunately, the batch of this alloy used in the tank that is currently mated with the Discovery shuttle appears to be of low quality. The alloy used in the stringers has a 'mottled' appearance, compared to the nominal appearance typically used in the main tank stringers (see picture in article). This appearance is indicative of a fracture threshold that is significantly lower than typical. NASA has determined, through testing, that this low grade alloy has only 65% of the fracture strength of the nominal alloy typically used. NASA engineers have devised a potential fix to the problem that they are currently testing to ensure the repair will cause no unintended consequences. NASA plans to have the Discovery shuttle ready to launch again by February 24th, 2011."
Image

IT Worker's Revenge Lands Her In Jail 347

Posted by samzenpus from the bad-idea dept.
aesoteric writes "A 30-year-old IT worker at a Florida-based health centre was this week sentenced to 19 months in a US federal prison for hacking, and then locking, her former employer's IT systems. Four days after being fired from the Suncoast Community Health Centers' for insubordination, Patricia Marie Fowler exacter her revenge by hacking the centre's systems, deleting files, changing passwords, removing access to infrastructure systems, and tampering with pay and accrued leave rates of staff."
Earth

40 Million Year Old Primate Fossils Found In Asia 91

Posted by samzenpus from the look-who's-coming-to-dinner dept.
sosaited writes "It has been widely believed that our ancestors originated out of Africa, but a paper published in Nature by Carnegie Museum of Natural History scientists puts this in doubt. The paper is based on the fossils of four primate species found in Asia which are 40 million years old, during which period Africa was thought to not have these species. The diversity and timing of the new anthropoids raises two scenarios. Anthropoids might simply have emerged in Africa much earlier than thought, and gone undiscovered by modern paleontologists. Or they could have crossed over from Asia, where evidence suggests that anthropoids lived 55 million years ago, flourishing and diversifying in the wide-open ecological niches of an anthropoid-free Africa."
Idle

Physicists Discover Universal "Wet-Dog Shake" Rule 97

Posted by samzenpus from the thank-you-science dept.
Dog owners can sleep easy tonight because physicists have discovered how rapidly a wet dog should oscillate its body to dry its fur. Presumably, dogs already know. From the article: "Today we have an answer thanks to the pioneering work of Andrew Dickerson at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta and a few buddies. But more than that, their work generates an interesting new conundrum about the nature of shaken fur dynamics. Dickerson and co filmed a number of dogs shaking their fur and used the images to measure the period of oscillation of the dogs' skin. For a labrador retriever, this turns out to be 4.3 Hz."

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