Comment Re:Good (Score 1) 642
Its job is to enforce law and order (keeping others from doing me harm)
Like beverage corporations?
Comment Re:Republicans know there constituency... (Score 5, Interesting) 834
So you say people become Republicans when money becomes more important to them than their ideals?
Comment Re:So both and get it done! (Score 1) 954
Easy to imagine. Take a look at what's been happening in Wisconsin.
Comment Re:Einstein replied "Check your measurements, son" (Score 1) 1088
It would only mean that our prior measurements of the value of c were slightly off, and we now have a better measurement.
Nope. The value of c is defined precisely as 299,792,458 m/s. The precision of light time-of-flight calculations as done by OPERA are limited by the precision of the clocks; the best atomic clocks are precise to better than 1 part in 10^15. The 60 ns difference reported by OPERA is an O(10^-6) effect and can be measured even by cheap clocks.
The difficulty in this measurement is that the clocks at CERN and the detector at Gran Sasso, a distance of over 732km, have to be synchronized at the ~10ns level. This cannot be done reliably with GPS clocks and generally is extremely difficult; it is the most likely source of error.
Comment Re:Then get rid of.... (Score 1) 395
The damned requirement for it to be in the gasoline. IT ruins gas mileage and the gas stations are NOT selling it for 5%-10% cheaper because that is what your gas mileage loss is from running E10. They sell that crap at full price because consumers are too stupid to know better. (Most people think that "premium" is a better gas! The lack of education in fuel that is used daily by the population is incredible)
I have a flex fuel car, it get's 25% less gas mileage when running on E85 but it's designed to run on the stuff. And all the stations around here selling it are price gouging it so hard that it's only 20% below the price of the E10.
This makes E85 a net loss for me to even use it. I can be with the enviro-freaks and waste 5% gas mileage by running E85 or I can run the E10 and get optimum gas mileage at the quality of fuel available and get the most Dollars per mile out of my expense. When E85 first came out it was 40% to 50% cheaper than gasoline so I was running it all the time in the flex fuel van. But in Michigan it's $3.29 a gallon while Indiana it's $2.59 a gallon (as seen this past weekend on a trip to Chicago) There is no $1.00 a gallon tax on it, IT's that Michigan only retailer of E85 is Meijer and they are price gouging it.
I'm done with Ethanol. Until they start using real sources like switchgrass that produce more of it per acre and actually try to make it a viable fuel that is not based on corn subsudies... it needs to go away...
EXCEPT: IT's a fantastic racing fuel. I have 10 friends that are in racing and all of them have modified their cars to use ethanol instead of racing gas. IT's cheaper and they are getting MORE power from it One friend has went from 12.2 on the quarter mile to 11.9 just by changing fuel. Plus they can afford to race at $3.29 a gallon instead of $6.89 a gallon.
Ethanol has a lower energy density than gasoline, but a much higher octane rating. The high octane rating allows much higher engine compression ratios resulting in better thermodynamic efficiency. This is why your racing friends see a benefit; their engines are designed for high octane fuel. Flex fuel engines are designed to tolerate the 87 octane rating fuel at the pump and have normal compression ratios. This is the problem with flex fuel; E85 results in worse performance because the engines can't take advantage of the high octane rating.
Comment Re:Dark matter? (Score 1) 181
This possibility was strongly considered in the 1990s. Such sub-luminal objects were termed MACHOS, as opposed to the other leading theory, where dark matter is composed of WIMP particles which rarely interact with ordinary matter (except gravitationally). The MACHO theories
are now strongly disfavored by observations of the cosmic microwave background. The universe didn't produce enough baryons (the particles which give stars, planets, and all ordinary matter most of its mass) to account for all of the dark matter.
Comment Re:Spam (Score 1) 211
This is incorrect.
Blue photons are not more useful for photosynthesis than red. The extra energy is just thermally dissipated in the plant. Plants have no real need to use extra energy anyway, since the rate limiting step of photosynthesis is carbon fixation. This is the fundamental reason why plants do not use green wavelengths.
This is not to say that blue photons are not useful to the plant; they control the phototropic response (e.g. bending toward light).
Comment Re:Does not fempute? (Score 1) 201
They aren't cut open in the photo. The outer surface isn't particularly spicy.
2010 Election Results Are In 1530
The election results are in, and there are one trillion web pages now up helping you find out what happened. The short story is that the Republicans cleaned up, although the Democrats maintain a one-seat majority in the Senate. The GOP now has 239 seats in the house, giving them a huge lead over the Dems' 183.
The World's Smallest Full HD Display 243
An anonymous reader writes "Ever heard of Ortustech? Probably not. But you have heard of Casio, right? Ortustech is a joint venture between Casio Computer and Toppan Printing to develop small and medium sized displays. Today, the company is announcing a doozy with its 4.8-inch 1920 x 1080 pixel HAST (Hyper Amorphous Silicon TFT) LCD with 160-degree viewing angle, 16.8 million colors, and a pixel density of 458ppi. Amazing when you compare that to the lauded 326ppi of iPhone 4's Retina display."
The Best Video Games On Awful Systems 272
Buffalo55 writes "For the most part, classic games manage to reappear on different systems. Just look at Nintendo. The publisher has done an excellent job bringing NES, SNES, Genesis and even old school Neo Geo titles to the Wii's Virtual Console, while Microsoft's Game Room brings the best of Atari's 2600 into the living room. Of course, not every console was a success. The '90s, in particular, saw quite a few flops from companies like Panasonic, Sega and Atari. Just because a system is a failure, though, doesn't mean all of its games suck. On the contrary, most of these machines have a few gems that fell between the cracks once the console croaked."
What overlooked game on a failed platform would you like to see revived?
Whisky Made From Diabetics' Urine 226
It's doubtful that any other distillery will come up with a whisky that tastes like Gilpin Family Whisky because of its secret ingredient: urine. Researcher and designer James Gilpin uses the sugar rich urine of elderly diabetics to make his high-end single malt whisky. From the article: "The source material is acquired from elderly volunteers, including Gilpin's own grandmother, Patricia. The urine is purified in the same way as mains water is purified, with the sugar molecules removed and added to the mash stock to accelerate the whisky's fermentation process. Traditionally, that sugar would be made from the starches in the mash."
Grad Student Invents Cheap Laser Cutter 137
An anonymous reader writes "Peter Jansen, a PhD student and member of the RepRap community, has constructed a working prototype of an inexpensive table-top laser cutter built out of old CD/DVD drives as an offshoot of his efforts to design an under $200 open-source Selective Laser Sintering (SLS) 3D printer. Where traditional laser cutters use powerful, fixed-focus beams, this new technique dynamically adjusts the focal point of the laser using a reciprocating motion similar to a reciprocating saw, allowing a far less powerful and inexpensive laser diode to be used. The technique is currently limited to cutting black materials to a depth of only a few millimeters, but should still be useful and enabling for Makers and other crafters. The end-goal is to create a hybrid inexpensive 3D printer that can be easily reconfigured for 2D laser cutting, providing powerful making tools to the desktop."
What To Do About CC License Violations? 437
An anonymous reader writes "In the past, I've seen my pictures used by big commercial companies despite the Creative Commons license that clearly limits them to non-commercial use. I just let it slide because a friend who's a lawyer says that all I can do is sue. They've ignored emails and comments. Today, I saw two other examples that show this is pretty rampant. These big commercial corporations are some of the most tech savvy publications around, but they just grabbed the image. One, BoingBoing, even reprinted the 'non-commercial' clause, warning others to stay away. But they've got their ads from Cheerios, HP and Mazda running alongside. Does anyone care that we've gone to all this trouble to create new, more flexible licenses? Does it even matter when very smart people just flip the bird to the license? Is the only alternative to sue? I wouldn't mind asking for $150k and settling for $1 for each copy made, but that seems a bit crazy. I hate to type out DMCA notices but their attitude is that only uncool people complain about this and I should be happy about the publicity. Then they can be happy about not sharing their ad revenue with artists or photographers. What can I do?" Update: 08/30 18:39 GMT by T : (Very belated; mea culpa.) Cory Doctorow writes: "The anonymous submitter is not the creator of the photo. The creator of
that photo is Jennifer Trant, a friend and colleague of mine who has no
trouble with my use of her photo. I have just gotten off the phone with
her and confirmed that she did not submit the story and also that she is
happy to have this photo on Boing Boing." The photo has since been added back to BoingBoing.
A Flood of Stable Linux Kernels Released 105
Julie188 writes "Greg Kroah-Hartman has released five new stable Linux kernels, correcting minor errors of their predecessors and including improvements which are unlikely to generate new errors. As so often with kernel versions in the stable series, it remains undisclosed if the new versions contain changes which fix security vulnerabilities, although the number of changes and some of the descriptions of those changes certainly suggest that all the new versions contain security fixes."
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