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Comment Other way (Score 3, Informative) 321

I'm a volunteer firefighter, and our dispatch center already sends us texts, as well as the typical page out over radio. That system proves incredibly useful for us. There is no way for us to text back through the system though, and the number is not a 911 number, it's a normal SMS short code number. Of course, going the other way is a different situation entirely, but my point is, I think that this shows that it is inevitable that texting is going to soon become a part of normal 911 operations.

Submission + - RIAA's Tenenbaum verdict cut from $675k to $67.5k (blogspot.com) 1

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes: In SONY BMG Music Entertainment v. Tenenbaum, the Court has reduced the jury's award from $675,000, or $22,500 per infringed work, to $67,500, or $2,250 per infringed work, on due process grounds, holding that the jury's award was unconstitutionally excessive. In a 64-page decision (PDF), District Judge Nancy Gertner ruled that the Gore, Campbell, and Williams line of cases was applicable to determining the constitutionality of statutory damages awards, that statutory damages must bear a reasonable relationship to the actual damages, and that the usual statutory damages award in even more egregious commercial cases is from 2 to 6 times the actual damages. However, after concluding that the actual damages in this case were ~ $1 per infringed work, she entered a judgment for 2250 times that amount. Go figure.

Comment Re:but I thought HTML was supposed to fix all that (Score 1) 347

Java is significantly better now that it was years ago. It's not slow anymore, and I can make Java look exactly like any Win XP or Linux native app in just a few lines of code. Granted, I'm not aware of any easy way (if any) to make it look like a Win 7 native app, but it's looking like it will just be a matter of time before that happens. We are writing a Java Desktop application at work, and we are even doing things like allowing the user to select the theme of the app. Java has very much improved over the last several years.
NASA

NASA Launches Giant Magnifying Glass Into Space 115

ByronScott writes "Early this morning NASA kicked off Operation LENS, an ambitious plan to concentrate and collect solar power using a giant magnifying glass in outer space. Long speculated to be a rumor, the 7,000,000 ft. wide lens was fabricated over the course of the past three years and launched from Cape Canaveral much to the dismay of almost every scientist in the world. While the first phase went exactly as planned, the plan hit a major snag when the magnifying glass began to work a bit too well, and ended up scorching large regions in the western hemisphere."

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