Domain: sci-tech-today.com
Stories and comments across the archive that link to sci-tech-today.com.
Comments · 19
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Re:Advertising is not a freedom of speech issue
Seems like freedom of speech to me
All spammers could claim the same "freedom of speech" defence.
Fortunately the world is not quite stupid enough to accept that as a valid excuse for what is very clearly unsolicited advertising.
http://www.sci-tech-today.com/...
MARCH 03 2008
The Virginia Supreme Court has upheld the nation's first felony spam conviction. The ruling Friday decided Virginia's antispamming law does not infringe on the First Amendment right to free speech. -
Re:What a scumbag
One of the ironies is that the guy who's sheltering him calls his opponents rapists and is big on secret surveillance.
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Re:and then the human factor...
Well, I think if wind farms needed to pay the same costs and penalties as other systems I wonder what the ROI would be then? We could start with the $200,000 - $500,000 fine per bald eagle -- not to mention someone going to jail for the sheer amount of endangered birds destroyed.
Study: Wind Farms Killed 67 Eagles in 5 Years
Don't see nuclear plants slaughtering animals on this scale.
Why wind farms kill eagles with federal impunity
... Oil companies are prosecuted when a bird drowns in a waste pit. But the Obama administration has never fined or prosecuted a wind-energy company for similar protected bird deaths. An estimated 573,000 birds are killed by US wind farms each year.
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Re:War on blogs?
Bzzt, wrong:
"The U.S. Air Force Cyber Command has blocked access to any Web site with the word "blog." The new Internet filters for the Air Force also block access to content that gets a negative review from supervisors and any unapproved news sources. The Cyber Command's policy for Air Force personnel is to block information first, then review."
From: http://www.sci-tech-today.com/news/Air-Force-Blocks-Access-to-Blogs/story.xhtml?story_id=13100G0EZ8OF
So not only is it not the Army that's doing it, it's this General's command that's doing it. In all likelihood, the order to block all blogs came from this individual, or someone on his staff. Seems like a pretty good question to pose to General Lord, since he's taking interview questions from a blog, himself. -
Selected Vota Quotes"There is no doubt that if it was just competing on hardware, OLPC wins every time," Vota said. But when ministers of education ask about the service and support solution, OLPC doesn't have an answer, he said. "Intel has an answer. Microsoft has an answer."
On another front, Vota said that the "Give 1, Get 1" program's distribution is " totally messed up."
http://www.sci-tech-today.com/story.xhtml?story_id=0200021S1YOK
"Interestingly enough, I don't think OLPC has made Intel an enemy," Vota said. "I think it will essentially go back to May of this year, where we had a very strong, open competitive environment. And to some extent, I think having Intel as a competitor will improve OLPC,"
http://www.linuxinsider.com/story/61061.html
He consistently uses what my mother used to call backhanded compliments.
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AMD & 64-bit CAD/CAM/OpenGL
I mean, the only "innovation" here is that one company is making the CPU, chipset and graphics card. You know, like Intel have been for years. But AMD make one where the graphics card is targeted at gamers. Whoop-de-fucking-do.
Soon ATI/AMD will be releasing a new high-end GPU series, called Stream, as a competitor to nVidia's Quadro FX series.
Traditionally, ATI supported only 24-bit floating point numbers on their consumer-grade GPU's [whereas nVidia & Matrox supported 32-bits on their consumer-grade GPU's], but Stream will support 64-bit floating point numbers, which, in combination with the AMD hypertransport bus, has the potential to produce a signal-processing workstation which might very well find itself on the DOD "Banned-For-Export" list. -
Two words
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All you do is promise you'll be good
Say, in 2009 and you get the top billing.
Greenpeace is weird. But we already know that :) -
Re:Better Yet
Have you looked into using real neural tissue???
Over the years, a number of researchers have done things with "brain on a chip" kind of circuits.
I'm sorry I don't have a more recent link - but here is one from 2004
http://www.sci-tech-today.com/story.xhtml?story_id =28418 -
Re:Eating our seed corn
The Chinese will do no such thing because it would be a moronic and purposeless waste of huge amounts of money. As to private enterprise not being able to come up with innovative space technologies, a recent news item indicates otherwise.
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Re:Mac Users
Same thing reported by another source here
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Re:Wonder what they'll find
From http://www.sci-tech-today.com/story.xhtml?story_i
d =0100000094LG [sci-tech-today.com] :
Watching too much violent TV and playing too many violent video games takes a toll on children's social and physical development, researchers report.
"We found that the more TV they watch, the less time they spend with their friends," says researcher David S. Bickham, a research scientist at the Center on Media and Child Health at the Harvard School of Public Health. However, "this relationship really only holds true for violent TV," he adds.
Another study found that violent video games appear to instill poor attitudes in children when it comes to their own health, while promoting risky behaviors. A third report found that mature-rated video games often include explicit sexual imagery and language content not included on warning labels
http://www.forbes.com/lifestyle/health/feeds/hscou t/2006/04/03/hscout531930.html [forbes.com]
TV and Video-Game Violence Harms Kids
MONDAY, April 3 (HealthDay News) -- Watching too much violent TV and playing too many violent video games takes a toll on children's social and physical development, researchers report.
http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansascity/news/loca l/14256547.htm [kansascity.com]
Studies link media to modern ills
By ALAN BAVLEY
The Kansas City Star
Media and Children | Archives of Pediatric & Adolescent Medicine, Journal of the American Medical Association
"We are conducting an ongoing, uncontrolled experiment on this generation in terms of media exposure and potential future behavioral and physical consequences, and it seems unopposed by the media industry and most parents."
-- Donald Shifrin, American Academy of Pediatrics
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Chinese will beat Negroponte to the finish line!
I am writing this in an internet cafe in Khartoum Sudan. I had to bite into this one. Nicolas Negroponte is a brilliant guy but I think he has been listening too much to RedHat.com executives. They think only in terms of Gnome or KDE desktops which are bloated. After all Red Hat mainly produce for Multinational Businesses who can afford state of the art hardware. You can run lighter desktops such as fluxbox or xfce. Incidentally the Chinese might beat Negroponte to the finish. They are looking like making a linux laptop for US 187 already: http://www.sci-tech-today.com/news/A-Linux-Laptop
- for--187-/story.xhtml?story_id=10000B5Y3P5W Plus this: http://cebitvideo.com/?p=20 I can tell you my Local Sudanese Security Officer would give anything to have my HP laptop multi-booting Ubuntu/Fedora/FreeBSD and dare I say it Windows. At the moment teaching him the Linux Professional Institute tutorials from the IBM website. The guy is a sponge for information. Probably try to get him a job at my organisation in The Hague so he can afford an education at Leicester University's Security Management Program by which time he can go back into the UN System as a Professional Grade Officer. He will probably finish up being my boss! I have been surprised by the number of Linux/BSD nerds I have met in the internet cafe! Two sites of interest for Low Resource Linux for the third world or poorly funded non-profits in the developed world: http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/ http://www.rule-project.org/ There seems to be a lot of Americans on this site who think all Africans live in mud huts and are all starving. There are a lot of smart people here and a when the government gets out of the way quite a lot of entrepeneural skill. Africa's problem is predominantly corruption and our Western Governments are pretty much responsible for that. In particular big oil companies. There are a lot of evil people in government here...but the same could be said of the USA, UK and Australia for that matter. For the record I am dual/national Australian/British and if I could I would denationalise altogether. -
Re:Best part of the decision
Very good points.
The judgement not only goes against common sense, it is contradicted by the latest scientific research:
From http://www.sci-tech-today.com/story.xhtml?story_id =0100000094LG :
Watching too much violent TV and playing too many violent video games takes a toll on children's social and physical development, researchers report.
"We found that the more TV they watch, the less time they spend with their friends," says researcher David S. Bickham, a research scientist at the Center on Media and Child Health at the Harvard School of Public Health. However, "this relationship really only holds true for violent TV," he adds.
Another study found that violent video games appear to instill poor attitudes in children when it comes to their own health, while promoting risky behaviors. A third report found that mature-rated video games often include explicit sexual imagery and language content not included on warning labels
http://www.forbes.com/lifestyle/health/feeds/hscou t/2006/04/03/hscout531930.html
TV and Video-Game Violence Harms Kids
MONDAY, April 3 (HealthDay News) -- Watching too much violent TV and playing too many violent video games takes a toll on children's social and physical development, researchers report.
http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansascity/news/loca l/14256547.htm
Studies link media to modern ills
By ALAN BAVLEY
The Kansas City Star
Media and Children | Archives of Pediatric & Adolescent Medicine, Journal of the American Medical Association
"We are conducting an ongoing, uncontrolled experiment on this generation in terms of media exposure and potential future behavioral and physical consequences, and it seems unopposed by the media industry and most parents."
-- Donald Shifrin, American Academy of Pediatrics -
Re:Stupid headline
Not to mention, according to any other article that you check out there, you'll see that the gas giant (which of course, could not sustain life on its nonexistent surface), is far outside of the habitable region of the star. It orbits at a distance of only 4 million miles.
That means that a year on that planet lasts less than 4 of our days, and the surface of any rocky moon of that gas giant would be hotter than even Venus or Mercury -- a toasty 1,300 degrees F.
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Re:Powerhouse
Many analysts feel the same..
Article from Sci-Tech Today
Still, its chip sales to Apple contribute less than 1 percent of IBM's total revenue of $99 billion, suggesting the financial impact of Apple's decision will be minimal.
"The headline risk is greater than the actual risk," wrote Goldman Sachs analyst Laura Conigliaro, who left her profit estimates for IBM this year unchanged.
Another clip
The loss of Apple means a 10-15 percent reduction in IBM's semiconductor revenues coming through its Microelectronics unit, or less than 0.5 percent of total IBM revenues.
I understand many people have high sales expectations for Apple computers but many people are still only forecasting 3 million in sales compared to about 200 million PC's worldwide for 2005. IMHO, Apple will make up larger and larger % of sales but just like the diehard Washington Redskin fans have found out, even with Joe Gibbs, it takes time to get to that level. -
Apple/Intel FAQ
http://appleintelfaq.com/
What did Apple announce at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) on June 6, 2005?
Apple announced that it is transitioning from PowerPC processors provided by IBM and Freescale (formerly Motorola) to x86 architecture processors from Intel. The first Intel-based Macs will ship before mid-2006, and the transition will be complete by the end of 2007.
Where can I find out more official information about this announcement?
Apple press release
Intel press release
WWDC keynote address (Transcript)
Why did Apple make this change?
The following scenario likely contributed to this decision:
IBM has been unable to meet its performance commitments for the PowerPC 970 family (G5) processors. In mid-2003, IBM promised 3 GHz G5s to Apple by mid-2004. As of mid-2005, 3 GHz G5s are still not available, over two years after the initial announcement, and over one year after the promised delivery.[1]
Meanwhile, Microsoft has announced that IBM will make 3.2 GHz triple-core G5 derivatives available to Microsoft for Xbox 360.[2] IBM is also concentrating efforts on chips for Nintendo Revolution and Sony PlayStation 3.[3, 3.1] With IBM concentrating on expensive high-end server class processors and the console and embedded markets, and with Apple at less than 2%[4] of IBM's PowerPC business, it was clear IBM's priorities were focused elsewhere.
Apple is also less than 3%[4] of Freescale's PowerPC business, with Freescale focusing on embedded, communications, and automotive markets. The priorities of IBM and Freescale do not coincide with performance and other needs of the traditional desktop and portable computing marketplace.
What has Apple done to prepare for this transition?
Apple has been publicly maintaining the core OS of Mac OS X, Darwin, for both PowerPC and x86 platforms since the release of Mac OS X. Internally, Apple has been secretly maintaining Mac OS X in its entirety and all Apple applications for both PowerPC and x86 for over 5 years, since before Mac OS X's public release.[5] Mac OS X's predecessors also ran on x86.
Apple has made available Xcode 2.1, which adds the capability of creating PowerPC/x86 universal binaries. Xcode 2.1 can be used on either PowerPC or x86 systems to create universal binaries. Application developers already using Xcode in most cases need only recompile their application with an additional checkbox adding x86 architecture support.
Apple has also licensed[6] QuickTransit from Transitive Corporation for Rosetta, a realtime binary translation system to support PowerPC binaries seamlessly on x86 hardware. The current performance of Rosetta -
Re:I call hoax
It's an AP story. See also Sci-Tech today for the same story.
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try again
You should be sympathetic.
No, no I should not.
The thumb keyboard isn't a software patent, it's not a submarine patent
Duh.
and it's not obvious.
Wrong.
Nobody thought to just build a tiny keyboard optimized for thumb typing.
Nobody, that is, except for Motorola, in 1996, two years before RIM filed their patent:
http://www.sci-tech-today.com/perl/story/12414.htm l
That's spelled "Prior Art", and it took me about 20 seconds of searching to find the picture.
Full disclosure: I work for RIM
No shit. Your regard for the facts is right in line with that of every other employee of your company I've ever had the misfortune of encountering.