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Submission + - New food-growth product a bit hairy (publicradio.org)

Submitted by MeatBag PussRocket
MeatBag PussRocket writes: An article from Marketplace.org ( http://marketplace.publicradio.org/display/web/2009/04/28/pm_hairmats/ ) reports: "A Florida company has developed an all-natural product that it says could revolutionize how food is grown in the U.S. It's called Smart Grow, but it might be a tough sell. It's inexpensive. It eliminates the need for pesticides, so it's environmentally friendly, but its human hair... Plant pathologists at the University of Florida have found the mats eliminate weeds better than leading herbicides... University of Florida researchers have found that hair mats can also make plants grow up to 30 percent larger."
Cellphones

South Carolina Wants To Jam Cell Phone Signals 601

Posted by CmdrTaco from the oooo-oooo-me-too dept.
Corey Brook writes "The South Carolina state prison system wants the FCC to grant them and local officers permission to block cell phone signals. News has been out about the growing problem of them perps smuggling cell phones into prisons for a while now. Inmates use cell phones as commerce, to implement fraud, smuggle drugs and weapons, and to order hits. Of course, some may use it to just talk to a loved one any time they can." Hopefully movie theaters and restaurants do it next.
Space

Massive Martian Glaciers Found 314

Posted by timothy from the could-be-a-trick dept.
Kozar_The_Malignant writes "Scientific American is reporting that 'data from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter point to vast glaciers buried beneath thin layers of crustal debris.' Data from the surface-penetrating radar on MRO revealed that two well-known mid-latitude features are composed of solid water ice. One is about three times the size of the City of Los Angeles. This certainly makes the idea of establishing a station on Mars far more plausible."
Upgrades

How Big Should My Swap Partition Be? 900

Posted by timothy from the wait-until-ram-is-infinite-then-double-it dept.

For the last 10 years, I have been asking people more knowledgeable than I, "How big should my swap be?" and the answer has always been "Just set it to twice your RAM and forget about it." In the old days, it wasn't much to think about — 128 megs of RAM means 256 megs of swap. Now that I have 4 gigs of RAM in my laptop, I find myself wondering, "Is 8 gigs of swap really necessary?" How much swap does the average desktop user really need? Does the whole "twice your RAM" rule still apply? If so, for how much longer will it likely apply? Or will it always apply? Or have I been consistently misinformed over the last 10 years?
Security

Submission + - Domains May Disappear After Search 1

Submitted by
Ponca City, We Love You
Ponca City, We Love You writes: "A perfect domain name pops into your mind, a quick check at your registrar reveals that the domain is available, you put off the registration a few minutes and when you come back to register the domain, it's taken by someone else. How much time has elapsed between the search and the attempted registration — in one case, less than 90 seconds. Daily Domainer has an interesting story alleging that there may be a leak that allows domain tasters to intercept, analyze and register your domain ideas in minutes. "Every time you do a whois search with any service, you run a risk of losing your domain," says one industry insider. ICANN's Security and Stability Advisory Committee (SSAC ) has not been able to find hard evidence of Domain Name Front Running but they have issued an advisory (pdf) for people to come forward with hard evidence it is happening. Here is how domain name research theft crimes can occur and some tips to avoiding being a victim."
Biotech

Submission + - Researchers Simulate Rat's Brain (guardian.co.uk) 3

Submitted by slick_shoes
slick_shoes writes: Researchers working on the 'Blue Brain' project have developed a computer simulation of the neocortical column — the basic building block of the neocortex, the higher functioning part of our brains — of a two-week-old rat, and it behaves exactly like its biological counterpart. The machine that simulates this column is an IBM Blue Gene/L supercomputer. Project director Henry Markram believes that with the state of technology today, it is possible to build an entire rat's neocortex. From there, it's cats, then monkeys and finally, a human brain.
Math

Submission + - MIT Student disproves Stephen Wolfram

Submitted by Richard Pritches
Richard Pritches writes: MIT errata expert, Evangelos Georgiadis, attains a milestone by actually disproving 44 conjectures set by Dr Wolfram (owner of the Makers of Mathematica and owner of the new kind of cult ANKS). Paper was published in the latest issue of the Journal of Cellular Automata and has also appeared free of charge at Prof Edwin Clark's Collection of Wolfram's NKS Reviews at the following link http://www.math.usf.edu/~eclark/jca_georgiadis.pdf I believe that this is a nice Xmas present for the ANKOS spirit. Richard
Microsoft

Submission + - Microsoft eyes Apple with virtualization stance (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Pisces
Pisces writes: Over the past several days, Microsoft flip-flopped on virtualization in Vista, with one ascribing the change in policy to concerns over DRM. A piece at Ars Technica raises another, more likely possiblity: fear of Apple. Apple is technically an OEM, and could offer copies of Vista at a discounted price. 'All of this paints a picture in which Apple could use OEM pricing to offer Windows for its Macs at greatly reduced prices and running in a VM. The latter is absolutely crucial; telling users that they need to reboot into their Windows OS isn't nearly as sexy as, say, Coherence in Parallels. If you've never seen Coherence, it's quite amazing. You don't need to run Windows apps in a VM window of Vista. Instead, the apps appear to run in OS X itself, and the environment is (mostly) hidden away. VMWare also has similar technology, dubbed Unity.' Is Microsoft terrified of a world where Windows can be virtualized and forced to take a back seat to Mac OS X or Linux?

Comment Re:Thank God! (Score 1) 3360

by KhanAFur (#11357413) Attached to: Creationist Textbook Stickers Declared Unconstitutional
I disagree, there is evolution occuring at an observable rate. Probably the best example of this is in antibiotic resistant bacteria. As bacteria reproduces it doesn't reproduce perfectly and as a result small mutations occur. Some of these mutations make the bacteria resistant to antibiotics. The bacteria with the mutations are the ones that survive in an enviroment with antibiotics and reproduce.
Games

Journal Journal: Silly Andy

Journal by xobes

Too much Warcraft III on my computer...

-Mary

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