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Comment A cunning plan (Score 4, Funny) 103

by Elbelow (#64770072) Attached to: Boeing's Starliner Makes 'Picture Perfect' Landing - Without Its Crew

CAPCOM: What happens now?

Butch Wilmore: Well, now, Sunita and I wait until the capsule has landed, and then leap out of the capsule, taking the New Mexicans by surprise. Not only by surprise, but totally unarmed!

CAPCOM: Who leaps out?

Butch Wilmore: Erm, Sunita and ... I ... leap out of the capsule, and uh...

CAPCOM: <facepalms>

Comment Re:What about region-surfing using VPNs? (Score 1) 150

by Elbelow (#63258193) Attached to: Netflix Unveils Plans To Prevent Password Sharing

True, but it was never explicitly disallowed either - it's been part of the "value" for a Netflix subscription.

From the Netflix terms of service:

4.3. You may access the Netflix content primarily within the country in which you have established your account and only in geographic locations where we offer our service and have licensed such content. The content that may be available will vary by geographic location and will change from time to time.

and

4.5. Some Netflix content is available for temporary download and offline viewing on certain supported devices ("Offline Titles"). [...] Some Offline Titles may not be playable in certain countries and if you go online in a country where you would not be able to stream that Offline Title, the Offline Title will not be playable while you are in that country.

They don't explicitly mention VPNs, but it is clear you are only supposed to watch what is licensed in your country.
The Internet

In France, Most Comments on Gaza Conflict Yanked From Mainstream News Sites 512

Posted by timothy from the national-brotherhood-week dept.
An anonymous reader writes with an unpleasant statistic from France, quoting David Corchia, who heads a service employed by large French news organizations to sift through and moderate comments made on their sites. Quoting YNet News: Corchia says that as an online moderator, generally 25% to 40% of comments are banned. Moderators are assigned with the task of filtering comments in accordance with France's legal system, including those that are racist, anti-Semitic or discriminatory. Regarding the war between the Israelis and Hamas, however, Corchia notes that some 95% of online comments made by French users are removed. "There are three times as many comments than normal, all linked to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict," added Jeremie Mani, head of another moderation company Netino. "We see racist or anti-Semitic messages, very violent, that also take aim at politicians and the media, sometimes by giving journalists' contact details," he added. "This sickening content is peculiar to this conflict. The war in Syria does not trigger these kinds of comments."
Programming

Video Ingy döt Net Tells How Acmeism Bridges Gaps in the Software World (Video) 164

Posted by timothy from the one-for-all-and-all-for-one dept.
Ingy döt Net (yes, that's his name) likes to bridge gaps in the software world. People get religious about their favorite programming languages, he says, but in the end, no matter the language, the methodology or the underlying OS, all programming is about telling computers what to do -- from "add these numbers" to complex text manipulation. Ingy compares a new app or module in the world of Free and Open Source as a gift that the creator has given to others; if that gift can be simultaneously bestowed on users of Perl, Python, and Ruby at the same time, its worth is amplified. So he proposes (and provides a growing set of tools) to make programming language irrelevant, by the sly means of encouraging people to write software using whatever their favorite tools are, but with a leaning toward using only language features which are broadly available to *other* programming languages as well. He's adopted the term Acmeism to describe this approach; Acmeists who follow his lead strive to create software that is broadly re-useable and adaptable, rather than tied only to a single platform.

Comment Re:"Global" temperature has not changed in 15 year (Score 2, Informative) 345

by Elbelow (#41943193) Attached to: Climate Change Could Drive Coffee To Extinction By 2080

Ice levels at the north pole are shrinking, but Antarctic ice levels are setting new records highs. There has been zero net change globally.

Glaciologists appear to disagree: http://climatecrocks.com/2012/11/08/new-video-antarctic-versus-arctic-ice-apples-and-oranges/.
Power

Crushed Silicon Triples Life of Li-Ion Batteries In the Lab 123

Posted by Soulskill from the get-me-a-hammer dept.
derekmead writes "Batteries rule everything around us, which makes breakthroughs a big deal. A research team at Rice says they have produced a nice jump: by using a crushed silicon anode in a lithium-ion battery, they claim to have nearly tripled the energy density of current li-ion designs. Engineer Sibani Lisa Biswal and research scientist Madhuri Thakur reported in Nature's Scientific Reports (it has yet to be published online) that by taking porous silicon and crushing it, they were able to dramatically decrease the volume required for anode material. Silicon has long been looked at as an anode material because it holds up to ten times more lithium ions than graphite, which is most commonly used commercially. But it's previously been difficult to create a silicon anode with enough surface area to cycle reliably. Silicon also expands when it's lithiated, making it harder to produce a dense anode material. After previously testing a porous silicon 'sponge,' the duo decided to try crushing the sponges to make them more compact. The result is a new battery design that holds a charge of 1,000 milliamp hours per gram through 600 tested charge cycles of two hours charging, two hours discharging. According to the team, current graphite anodes can only handle 350 mAh/g."
AMD

AMD FX-8350 Review: Does Piledriver Fix Bulldozer's Flaws? 259

Posted by Soulskill from the driving-piles-and-dozing-bulls dept.
An anonymous reader writes "AMD just officially took the wraps off Vishera, its next generation of FX processors. Vishera is Piledriver-based like the recently-released Trinity APUs, and the successor to last year's Bulldozer CPU architecture. The octo-core flagship FX-8350 runs at 4.0 GHz and is listed for just $195. The 8350 is followed by the 3.5 GHz FX-8320 at $169. Hexa-core and quad-core parts are also launching, at $132 and $122, respectively. So how does Vishera stack up to Intel's lineup? The answer to that isn't so simple. The FX-8350 can't even beat Intel's previous-generation Core i5-2550K in single-threaded applications, yet it comes very close to matching the much more expensive ($330), current-gen Core i7-3770K in multi-threaded workloads. Vishera's weak point, however, is in power efficiency. On average, the FX-8350 uses about 50 W more than the i7-3770K. Intel aside, the Piledriver-based FX-8350 is a whole lot better than last year's Bulldozer-based FX-8150 which debuted at $235. While some of this has to do with performance improvements, that fact that AMD is asking $40 less this time around certainly doesn't hurt either. At under $200, AMD finally gives the enthusiast builder something to think about, albeit on the low-end." Reviews are available at plenty of other hardware sites, too. Pick your favorite: PC Perspective, Tech Report, Extreme Tech, Hot Hardware, AnandTech, and [H]ard|OCP.

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