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Students Banned From Bringing Pencils To School 426

mernilio writes "According to UPI: 'A Massachusetts school district superintendent said a memo banning sixth graders from carrying pencils was written without district approval. North Brookfield School District interim Superintendent Gordon Noseworthy said Wendy Scott, one of two sixth-grade teachers at North Brookfield Elementary School, did not get approval from administrators before sending the memo to all sixth-grade parents, the Worcester Telegram & Gazette reported Thursday. The memo said students would no longer be allowed to bring writing implements to school. It said pencils would be provided for students in class and any students caught with pencils or pens after Nov. 15 would face disciplinary action for having materials 'to build weapons.'"
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Jetman Attempts Intercontinental Flight 140

Last year we ran the story of Yves Rossy and his DIY jetwings. Yves spent $190,000 and countless hours building a set of jet-powered wings which he used to cross the English Channel. Rossy's next goal is to cross the Strait of Gibraltar, from Tangier in Morocco and Tarifa on the southwestern tip of Spain. From the article: "Using a four-cylinder jet pack and carbon fibre wings spanning over 8ft, he will jump out of a plane at 6,500 ft and cruise at 130 mph until he reaches the Spanish coast, when he will parachute to earth." Update 18:57 GMT: mytrip writes: "Yves Rossy took off from Tangiers but five minutes into an expected 15-minute flight he was obliged to ditch into the wind-swept waters."
Privacy

How To Stop Businesses Storing SSNs Indefinitely? 505

The Angry Mick writes "My wife and I recently moved, and during the course of providing change-of-address information to the many companies we do business with, I asked each if they were storing a full Social Security number in their databases, and if so, could they remove it or replace it with an alternate identifier. Neither the experience nor the results were particularly enjoyable. On the positive end of the spectrum, some companies were more than willing to make a change, even offering suggestions for a suitable alternate such as a driver's license number. In the middle were companies that made things a little more difficult, requiring several steps up the management tree before speaking to someone with some actual authority to address the issue. Then there was DirectTV. This company not only flatly refused to consider the suggestion, but also informed me that even if I were to discontinue service with them, they still intended to keep my full SSN on file indefinitely. There is no logical reason for them to do this, and I'm not keen on the idea of being left vulnerable to identity theft should they have experience any security breaches at any future point in my life. So, my questions to the Slashdot community are: Has anyone else tried getting your SSN replaced or removed in corporate databases, and what were your experiences? And short of Armageddon, is there any way to force a company to erase your SSNs after you cease doing business with them, or is this a job for a lawyer or regulatory body?"

Comment Location based services are hell on BB (Score 1) 207

Wait until you try programming a GPS app. Every different telecom has different settings needed to get the GPS to work at all (even when they allow you to use the GPS without having to get special permission, like Verizon). Many of the documented API settings *don't* work, particulary on CDMA blackberries. Some telecoms have disabled BlackBerry Maps because they want you to buy their gps nav application, so you can't count on it being available, or even installable, and even the built-in map objects that you can in theory use inside your apps on OS 4.5 or greater relies on BlackBerry Maps being installed, so you can't rely on that either.

Programming

An Experiment In BlackBerry Development 207

ballwall writes "We've all read the stories about how lucrative selling apps on the iPhone can be (or not), but what about other platforms? BlackBerry accounts for twice as many handsets shipped as Apple, according to Gartner, so I decided to find out. I wrote about my experiences developing my first BlackBerry application including sales, platform issues, and a bunch of other things I thought new mobile developers might want to know about."

Comment This is a Fake (Score 1) 280

You can see the goole map image here: http://maps.google.ca/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&q=Russia,+oblast+Tscheljabinsk,+Tscheljabinsk&ie=UTF8&cd=1&ll=55.160251,61.403317&spn=0.003561,0.007381&t=h&z=17&iwloc=addr Notice that its the same picture as there are cars in the same places with a few vehicles removed near the smiley face as well to help wit the blending. Cars parked in rows near the bottom of the screenshot are all identical to the current map image.

Comment Re:Iron Man's Suit Defies Physics -- Mostly (Score 2, Interesting) 279

Hydrogen peroxide powered rocket packs fly for around 30 seconds, because they have a specific impulse of around 125, meaning that one pound of propellant can make 125 pound-seconds of thrust, meaning that it takes about two pounds of propellant for every second you are in the air. Mass ratios are low for anything strapped to a human, so the exponential nature of the rocket equation can be safely ignored.

A pretty hot (both literally and figuratively) bipropellant rocket could manage about twice the specific impulse, and you could carry somewhat heavier tanks, but two minutes of flight on a rocket pack is probably about the upper limit with conventional propellants.

However, an actual jet pack that used atmospheric oxygen could have an Isp ten times higher, allowing theoretical flights of fifteen minutes or so. Here, it really is a matter of technical development, since jet engines have thrust to weight ratios too low to make it practical. There is movement on this technical front, but it will still take a while.

John Carmack

Comment Other devices (Score 1) 595

If they're that worried about what's on your laptop, they'd better start inspecting every mp3 player, digital camera, and oh, now that you can get 12 Gig microSD cards, every cell phone too. Never mind the fact that I could probably hide terabytes of contraband in microSD cards inside my wallet, belt, socks, pockets, etc. Can't wait to see how long the lines are going to get at security.

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