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NASA's Space Balloon Smashes Car In Australia 174

Humunculus writes "Of more worldly issues, NASA's latest multimillion-dollar stratosphere-bound balloon launch has gone horribly wrong and crashed into a car, turning it over and narrowly missing two elderly people who were observing the launch. The payload fared worse, reportedly being smashed into a 'thousand pieces.'"

Comment Online private spaces don't need to accept all (Score 1) 664

What does it take for people to realise that so-called "free speech" only applies to State controlled places, spaces,etc., or the privately owned "public spaces". Whether online or in meatspace, private places are under no obligation to allow all and sundry to natter on, or for that matter to sell their goods. It is freedom, and private property (real and "virtual") if you can't cope with the concept, please repeat your 5th - 9th form civic (social studies) classes.

Comment Re:Only use a credit card (Score 1) 511

You get NONE of this with a debit card. The only reason a debit card is preferable is if you don't have the self control to spend an amount you can pay off every month

Or if you don't want to pay a fee to have a credit card.
Or if you don't like the terms and conditions.
Or if you care AT ALL about your privacy, and don't want every purchase you ever made in the database of the big three, free for ANYBODY to look up.
Or if you want to ensure that any lucky identity thieves can't do anything to ruin your non-existent credit rating...
Or...

Comment What goes through the mind of a poker player (Score 2, Informative) 104

Poker is a game of incomplete information. You use the information that you do have to draw conclusions and then you make bets based on those conclusions. Good poker players tend to think about poker hands in terms of hand ranges. A hand range is every poker hand that an opponent will take a certain action with. Ideally you'd like to narrow your opponents range down to a single hand because you can then play perfectly against him (it would be very easy to play perfectly against someone who showed you their cards). Unfortunately thats not possible very often as there are 169 non-equivalent poker hands and our opponent is going to play many of them similarly. Each different piece of information that we get from our opponent however allows us to narrow his range and make a better decision. For example if I'm playing in a 9 handed game and someone raises from UTG(stand for under the gun or the first player to act) he is acting with the least amount of information. Therefore he has to player a tighter(better) range of hands. He is more likely to have a premium holding because he made a bet with very little information. If someone were to raise from the button (the last player to act on every street) his range of hands is considerably wider because he has more information with which to make his decisions and can therefore play more hands profitably. Thats a very basic description of hand analysis, but some other information we take into account is our opponents past tendancies, their position, what they perceive our range to be based on the actions that we've taken, and obviously what cards we have and what cards end up coming out of the deck on the flop turn and river.

Comment Re:So many billions wasted for nothing (Score 1) 277

For that matter, there should probably be another level of simplified 1040EE to catch the next most common group of complications that are beyond an EZ.

There is; form 1040A, the "short form", plus Schedule L as noted by others.

Things don't really get messy, though, until you have to do schedule C. The 1040 long form + Schedules A and B is long, but not too complex. Schedule C is an f'ing nightmare because of having to figure out each category of expense, plus possibly worrying about depreciation (if the expense doesn't qualify for Section 179, anyway), inventory (if you have it), etc.

Security

Submission + - Twitter Hackers Take Down Baidu (infoworld.com)

snydeq writes: The group that took down Twitter last month has apparently claimed another victim: China's largest search engine Baidu.com. Offline late Monday, Baidu.com at one point displayed an image saying "This site has been hacked by Iranian Cyber Army," according to a report in the official newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party and other Web sites. The Iranian Cyber Army first gained notoriety with its Dec. 18 Twitter attack. Baidu's domain name records were the focus of the hack. On Monday, the company was using domain name servers belonging to HostGator, a Florida ISP, instead of the Baidu.com nameservers the company normally uses.

Submission + - EU cookie law is ridiculous (webanalyticsdemystified.com)

whencanistop writes: A couple of weeks ago there was some talk about the EU cookie law which has now been passed into law. Whilst the original story broke on the Out-law blog from a law perspective there has been a follow up from a couple of industry insiders. Aurelie Pols of the Web Analytics Association has blogged on how this will affect websites who want to monitor what people are looking at on their sites, whilst eConsultancy has blogged on how this will affect the affiliate industry. All of this is probably ignoring the general public who, if this is actually implemented, will have to proceed through ridiculous screens of text every time they access a website telling them that they are going to put cookies on their computers. I know most of you guys hate them, but it is vital for websites to work out how people are accessing the sites so they can work out how to improve the experience for the user.
Novell

Robert Love Resigns from Novell 143

An anonymous reader writes "Robert Love who was the Chief Architect of Novell's Linux Desktop has resigned today. Robert is a prominent Linux kernel hacker, author and journalist in the Linux community. His blog doesn't specify why he resigned, but after colleague and friend Jeremy Allison's departure from Novell in protest of the Microsoft-Novell deal, this might be the latest fallout from it."
Music

Synchronizing Music Players? 64

orn asks: "Lots of people now have MP3 players in the living room. Some people have players in the kitchen, bedroom, garage, and so on. They are great when it comes to getting to your music from multiple places, but when you walk from room to room, it's almost impossible to get the music aligned. Are there software packages or techniques for synchronizing multiple networked music players? One thought is to use streaming software to stream to all players — but is there any streamer that will let you account for the different delays in different hardware to create a single synchronized whole?"

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