benmcdavid - Slashdot User

Submission + - Craigslisting of Neighbors' Stuff OK in Texas (dallasnews.com)

Submitted by Quothz on Thursday September 03, 2009 @12:28PM

Quothz writes: Last spring, an Arlington police officer listed his neighbor's athletic gear on Craigslist. After a review, the Tarrant District Attorney's office has decided no crime was committed. "The law just wasn't there", says county prosecutor Dixie Bersano. So, Texans, clean up those yards and lock those doors: Your stuff is free for the giving.

Submission + - First European provider to break Net Neutrality (astute.nl)

Submitted by

Rik van der Kroon

on Sunday August 23, 2009 @08:34AM

Rik van der Kroon writes: "Major Dutch cable provider UPC has introduced a new network management system which caps users their bandwidth for certain services and providers at 1/3rd of the bandwidth during a 12 hour daily time span between 12am and 12pm.

After that COAX, the consumers front for cable providers in The Netherlands, received many complaints about network problems and slow speeds UPC decided to take this as an excuse to introduce their new "network management" protocol which slows down a large amount of traffic. All protocols but HTTP are capped to 1/3rd and within the HTTP realm some websites and services which take up bandwidth are capped as well.

So far UPC hides themselves behind the common excuse: "We are protecting all the users against 1% of the user base which abuses our network"

The original statement in Dutch can be found here: http://www.coax.nl/news/reageer/index.php?NewsID=2218"

Submission + - An Organ Replaced: Fully Functional Bioengineered (medgadget.com)

Submitted by cdrpsab on Saturday August 22, 2009 @09:28PM

cdrpsab writes: The individual in the photo is not displaying his newly acquired gold tooth bling, but rather something more precious: the first fully functioning 3D organ derived from stem cells, described in PNAS as "a successful fully functioning tooth replacement in an adult mouse achieved through the transplantation of bioengineered tooth germ into the alveolar bone in the lost tooth region."

Submission + - The Chemistry of Firework Displays

Submitted by

Ponca City, We love you

on Friday July 03, 2009 @09:29PM

Ponca City, We love you writes: "David Ropeik writes at MSNBC that there's a lot more to making a basic firework display than putting a fuel source and an oxidizer together. Pyrotechnic chemists, who are trying to create bedazzle instead of bang, don't want their work to explode but to burn for a bit so it gives a good visual show. To achieve the desired effect, the size of the particles of each ingredient have to be just right, and the ingredients have to be blended together just right. To slow down the burning, chemists use big grains of chemicals, in the range of 250 to 300 microns and they don't blend the ingredients together very well making it harder for the fuel and oxidizer to combine and burn, and producing a longer and brighter effect. Surprisingly few emitters are used in pyrotechnics and there are no commercially useful emitters in blue-green to emerald green in the 490-520 nm region. Energy from the fire in the basic fuel is transferred to the atoms of the colorant chemicals exciting the electrons in those chemicals into a higher energy state. As they cool down, they move back to a lower state of energy emitting light so you actually see the colors in fireworks as they're cooling down. To get the really tricky shapes, like stars or hearts, the colorant pellets are pasted on a piece of paper in the desired pattern. That paper is put in the middle of the shell with explosive charges above it, and below. When those charges go off, they burn up the paper, and send the ignited colorant pellets out in the same pattern they were in on the sheet of paper, spreading wider apart as they fly. Finally remember that in 2003, six deaths were linked to fireworks and hospital emergency departments treated 9,300 fireworks injuries so read these safety tips and enjoy the 4th."

Submission + - Firefox 3.5RC2 Windows vs Linux Performance (andrewmlawrence.com)

Submitted by

pizzutz

on Monday June 22, 2009 @01:35PM

pizzutz writes: "Andy Lawrence has posted a javascript speed comparison for the recently released Firefox 3.5RC2 between Linux(Ubuntu 9.04) and Windows(XP SP3) using the SunSpider benchmark test. Firefox 3.5 will include the new Tracemonkey javascript engine. The Windows build edges out Linux by just under 15%, though the Linux build is still twice as fast as the current 3.0.11 version which ships with Jaunty."

Submission + - Alienware refusing customers as criminals (tombom.co.uk)

Submitted by

ChrisPaget

on Friday May 08, 2009 @06:04PM

ChrisPaget writes: "Thinking about buying Alienware? Think again. After buying an almost-new Alienware laptop on eBay, I've spent the last week trying to get hold of a Smart Bay caddy to connect a second hard drive (about $150 for $5 of bent metal). 4 different Alienware teams have refused to even give me a price on this accessory, instead accusing me of stealing the machine since I didn't buy it directly from them. Details here. All I have to do is persuade the seller to add me as an authorized user of *his* Alienware account — they have no concept of "ownership transfer" and instead assume that if you're not in their system, you must be a thief."

Comment Re:Flawed... even down to the analogy. God? (Score 1) 965

by benmcdavid on Thursday July 05, 2007 @08:13AM (#19752733) Attached to: Perpetual Energy Machine Getting Lots of Attention

This is going way off topic.

My philosophy teacher in college (Debra Nails, http://www.msu.edu/~nails/, used to teach at Mary Washington) swore up and down that Spinoza was a closet atheist, and that the only way he could carry on conversations with his comptemporaries was to discuss God.

There is some evidence. If you take the premise of his theory about God, then there is no perceived difference between a reality with Spinoza's God existing as the immutable whole of the universe, and a reality that doesn't involve God at all.

Certainly makes me want to break out my copy of Ethics again to see if I remember what I think I read about Spinoza correctly.

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