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Earth

Supervolcano Drilling Plan Gets Go-Ahead 109

Posted by Soulskill from the what-could-possibly-go-wrong dept.
sciencehabit writes "A project to drill deep into the heart of a 'supervolcano' in southern Italy has finally received the green light, despite claims that the drilling would put the population of Naples at risk of small earthquakes or an explosion. Yesterday, Italian news agency ANSA quoted project coordinator Giuseppe De Natale of Italy's National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology as saying that the office of Naples mayor Luigi de Magistris has approved the drilling of a pilot hole 500 meters deep. The project’s organizers originally intended to bore a 4-kilometer-deep well in the area of the caldera late in 2009, but the plan was put on hold by then-mayor Rosa Russo Iervolino after scientists expressed concerns about the risks."

Comment A CSV File? (Score 2, Interesting) 702

by shades66 (#23484436) Attached to: F/OSS Flat-File Database?
Can be used by all spreadsheet programs (Excel,Gnumeric,OOCalc probably even Google's online offerings) for complete portability

Depends what you want to be able to do with your data? If it's just quick searches to find local wifi points then it seems overkill to use a multi-platform/FOSS database

Comment Re:What is the point? (Score 1) 593

by mario64 (#19566395) Attached to: Manhunt 2 Banned In Britain
My son was always getting into trouble at school for starting fights (got very close to being excluded). Then I let him loose on some of my PC games to get some of the aggression out of his system. Over a short period of time he got into less and less trouble and is now doing a lot better with his studies and hardly ever gets into fights.
He now saves up all his frustration and anger for games and is a better person for it. Banning him from playing violent games would leave him with no release except for fighting at school...

I think someone needs to re-do their study into game violence and it's effects, not just looking at the very small number of people who Kill (that happen to have played a comuter game in the past).

Feed Manhunt 2 banned (theregister.com)

From feed by registerfeed
Censor acts to prevent game's sale

Rockstar Games' Manhunt 2 has been to all intents and purposes banned in the UK after the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) refused to certify the PS2 and Wii title. Without a BBFC certificate, the game can't legally be sold here.
Encryption

Decryption Keys For HD-DVD Found, Confirmed 473

Posted by kdawson from the house-of-cards dept.
kad77 writes "It appears that, despite skepticism, 'muslix64' was the real deal. Starting from a riddle posted on pastebin.com, members on the doom9 forum identified the Title key for the HD-DVD release 'Serenity.' Volume Unique Keys and Title keys for other discs followed within hours, confirming that software HD-DVD players, like any common program, store important run-time data in memory. Here's a link to decryption utility and sleuthing info in the original doom9 forum thread. The Fair Use crowd has won Round One; now how will the industry respond?"
Security

Submission + - What does your dead man's switch do?

Submitted by
LqdEngineer
LqdEngineer writes: "How many of the Slashdot crowd use or have used a Dead Man's Switch designed to perform some action if you don't check in for a certain amount of time? Recently, I decided to put one together using MySQL and some Cron jobs, but I wanted to see what others have their Switches set up to do in the event you fail to check in. E-mails to loved ones? Send encryption keys to friends/family? Hate mail to your boss? Has anyone ever been on the receiving end of a Dead Man's e-mail? I can't even imagine how creepy that would feel."
Google

Google Tops 100 Best Places To Work 317

Posted by kdawson from the perks-galore dept.
inetsee writes "Fortune Magazine's annual '100 Best Companies to Work For' list is out, and Google topped the list in their debut appearance. Some highlights of the benefits of working for Google that caught my eye were the free gourmet meals and the massages. The chance to spend 20% of your time working on your own personal projects also sounds very appealing. Of course, with resumes rolling in at the rate of thousands a day, the competition is fierce."
Space

Submission + - NASA Will Go Metric on the Moon

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Space.com is reporting that NASA has decided to use the metric system for its new lunar missions. NASA hopes that metrication will allow easier international participation and safer missions. The loss of the Mars Climate Orbiter was blamed on an error converting between English units and metric units. 'When we made the announcement at the meeting, the reps for the other space agencies all gave a little cheer,' said a NASA official.
User Journal

Journal Journal: Dealing With Slowvertising 2

Journal by gbulmash
I've noticed both on my own pages and on the pages of others (like Yahoo) that sometimes a page will hang mid-render while waiting for a script-sourced ad to fill in a table cell or a div.

I thought this was only a problem on older browsers where the size of the ad/div wasn't specified, but I'm finding that this still happens on the newest browsers with divs and table cells.
Space

Submission + - Detection of Earth-like Civilizations Now Possible

Submitted by
Mr. McGibby
Mr. McGibby writes: "Astronomers have proposed an improved method of searching for intelligent extraterrestrial life using instruments like one now under construction in Australia. The Low Frequency Demonstrator (LFD) of the Mileura Wide-Field Array (MWA), a facility for radio astronomy, theoretically could detect Earth-like civilizations around any of the 1,000 nearest stars. The original paper describes the details."
Television

Choose the New PBS Science Show 143

Posted by kdawson from the new-nova dept.
chinmay7 writes "PBS has posted three different pilots for a new science show, and they want viewers to weigh in and help choose one as the regular science feature. All three pilots are viewable as vodcasts. Wired Science aired on January 3rd. The pilot certainly is polished, as one might expect from Wired Magazine, and deals with interesting topics: 'Meet rocket-belt inventors, stem cell explorers and meteorite hunters.' Science Investigators (air date: January 10) seems to be the most 'science' show: 'The investigators examine 30,000-year-old Neanderthal DNA, vanishing frogs, mind-boggling baseball pitches and more.' 22nd Century (air date: January 17) is pretty gimmicky and loud for my taste, but delivers interesting content — 'In the coming decades will all our brains be wired together like networked computers?' So watch and vote."
Microsoft

Submission + - Developers: Pawns worthy of a one-night stand

Submitted by jcatcw
jcatcw writes: At the Comes vs. Microsoft antitrust case, last Friday's testimony included evidence that James Plamondon, a Microsoft technical evangelist,in a 1996 speech referred to independent software developers as "pawns" and compared wooing them to wooing a one-night stand.

Last week's testimony also included Alepin, a former CTO at Fujitsu Software Corp. and currently an adviser to the law firm Morrison Foerster LLP. He said that Lotus 1-2-3 was killed, in part, by Microsoft encouraging Lotus' programmers to use the Windows API even though Microsoft's own developers found it too complicated to use.

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