The Minister also boasts that Italy contributed with €45 million to the construction of the tunnel.
This is the woman in charge of the Italian education system. My heart bleeds.
fph il quozientatore writes: The Italian ministry for university and research complimented the researchers for the recent (supposed) discovery of faster-than-light neutrinos. Her press release (Google machine translation) mentions that Italy funded the construction of a "tunnel between the CERN [in Geneva] and Gran Sasso [the labs in Central Italy]". Google maps reports the distance between the two labs as over 900km — but of course once the tunnel is open to traffic the trip will be much faster.
omast writes: It appears that Peter Tattam, creator of Trumpet Winsock, got very little for this piece of software. For those of you who do not remember — or did not need it because were already outside the MS Windows world — Trumpet Winsock was a shareware program that provided TCP/IP functionality to Windows machines back in 1994-1995. It allowed millions to connect to the Internet back then; I was one of them. According to the article, Tattam made very little money from the program as it was widely distributed but rarely paid for.
Wise population centers do not locate themselves near large volcanoes. FTFM.
Well, as far as I know Mount Vesuvius had been dormant for a few hundred years before awakening in 79 AD. The poor souls thought it was just a mountain.
stoolpigeon writes "IBM has made a move to support open source RDBMS PostgreSQL by investing in EnterpriseDB, a company that supports PostgreSQL as well as selling their own proprietary extensions to the database product. IBM participated in a $10 million funding round, though the article doesn't say how much they invested. In the past EnterpriseDB has primarily advertised itself as an Oracle competitor, though the article says, 'Derek Rodner, EnterpriseDB's director of product strategy, explained that Postgres Plus 8.3 also adds in new application quick starts which are supposed to help with installation issues. They will also help in EnterpriseDB's battle against MySQL for open source database supremacy.'"