Alamoth - Slashdot User

Submission + - Starcraft 2 Mac Client available (softsailor.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 29, 2010 @04:49PM

An anonymous reader writes: Blizzard has released the Mac client of the Starcraft 2 Multiplayer Beta. If you already have an in on the PC beta, the mac client is available under your Batle.net account.

Submission + - Companies Skeptical of Commercial Space

Submitted by

Hugh Pickens

on Monday April 12, 2010 @10:58AM

Hugh Pickens writes: "The NY Times reports that Boeing and Lockheed Martin will happily sell rockets to carry astronauts into space, but are leery about taking a leading role in President Obama’s vision for a revamped NASA that relies on commercial companies to provide taxi transportation to the ISS. “I don’t think there is a business case for us,” says Lockheed Martin's John Karas about space taxis. Both Boeing and Lockheed were stung during the last burst of optimism for the commercial space business about a decade ago. They invested several billion dollars — Lockheed to develop its Atlas V, Boeing for the Delta IV — in the hopes that the huge market for commercial satellites would supplement their traditional business of launching American military spy satellites. The market did not materialize, and what business there was went to European and Russian rockets that were cheaper. The hoped-for commercial market for space taxis hinges on one small company, Bigelow Aerospace, which is developing inflatable space habitats that it hopes to market as research facilities to companies and foreign nations looking to establish a space program. “I think people who have been in the launcher business for many years find it hard to take the president’s plan seriously,” says Loren B. Thompson, an analyst at the Lexington Institute. “They think it sounds like an elaborate wake for the human spaceflight program more than a plan for moving forward.”"

Submission + - MIT Researchers Harness Viruses to Split Water (inhabitat.com) 2

Submitted by ByronScott on Monday April 12, 2010 @10:58AM

ByronScott writes: A team of researchers at MIT has just announced that they have successfully modified a virus to split apart molecules of water, paving the way for an efficient and non-energy intensive method of producing hydrogen fuel. The team engineered a common, harmless bacterial virus to assemble the components needed to crack apart a molecule of water, yielding a fourfold boost in efficiency over similar processes.

Comment Sounds like a job for Google (Score 2, Interesting) 128

by Alamoth on Thursday February 25, 2010 @11:30AM (#31272410) Attached to: Web Heritage Could Be Lost

I would imagine that Google could easily expand their caching technology to facilitate the preservation of everything everyone has to say on the internet. I can understand where the Libraries are coming from. In an effort to chronicle the growth of human culture they keep archives of literature, periodicals and most other media, so why not the internet?

Comment Is all the hate really necessary? (Score 1) 677

by Alamoth on Monday February 08, 2010 @05:40PM (#31065522) Attached to: Verizon Blocking 4chan

4Chan is just a community. Sure it is full of immature people who participate in illicit and often illegal activity, but the last time I checked, Verizon is not the enforcers of Federal, State or Local law in any jurisdiction. If Verizon thinks that members of 4Chan are participating in illegal activities on American soil, then they are well within their rights (as far as I know) to present their information to the proper authorities who can then take action. Of course this will raise the usual "Your Rights Online" discussions about whether it is legal or a breech of privacy for Verizon to release that information. Nonetheless, you can't have Net Neutrality and then kick 4Chan off the internet. It just doesn't work that way (except in China).

Comment Re:This is kind of a stupid article. (Score 1) 269

by Alamoth on Tuesday November 14, 2006 @03:49PM (#16842488) Attached to: PS3 and Wii — Head To Head

But what if you want to PLAY GAMES and WATCH MOVIES?!?!?!

Then what will you do? Will you buy a movie player and buy a gaming console. I had a similar question when I wanted a portable gaming system and I wanted an MP3 player that could display images and play video.

Then the Playstation Portable solved my dilemma.

Why should you go out and buy multiple tools to do the job of one tool, it's inefficient.

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