So there's going to be a push to ban assault weapons. I don't think it'll pass much less work. There's way too many of them in circulation. And of course it will end up in the courts, second amendment. And that's been reaffirmed by the Supreme Court a few times. Not going to end any different this time either ( Read more... )

A United Airlines flight at Dulles in DC had to use the chutes in evacuating the passengers and crew.

Somehow, I think if it didn't have a Supreme on board they'd have waited for the mobile stairs.  It was just some smoke, no flame.

Cynical? Yes, a bit.

This article linked to by slashdot describes a plan to make electricity from rising solar heated air, air from a couple of square miles of glass covered greenhouse.

I have major issues with this:
1) who is going to keep that much glass dusted off after every dust storm?
2) doesn't anyone check to see how much fossil fuel needs to be burned to ( Read more... )

So FF5 is out and FF4 is dead.

I say Long Live FireFox 4.

I have had it with updates and new versions that break my add-ons. The only effing reason I use Firefox is the add-ons. Otherwise I'd use Opera which is faster. Or Google's chrome.

Wake up, Firefox developers. You're losing it.

I guess I'll name this the 'free energy from aluminum hoax'.  Aluminum, until the Hall-Héroult process was developed in 1888, was more expensive than gold. After that, it was about twice the cost of iron. This process requires huge amounts of electrical power, about 7 kWh to make a pound of refined metal, so production is located where electricity ( Read more... )

Theatrically it comes to an end July 15 in the USA. It doesn't sadden me as much as the literary end did, since the movie makers always have to piss on the book's structure and stir it about, slopping it onto the cutting room floor. I suppose they think they're improving the flavour by putting their so called creative stamp on it. Just by watching ( Read more... )

This has been another wild spring and getting wilder. Big slug of water is coming down the Missouri right now. It would have been preventable except for politics. See, there are six major flood control dams upstream.  They're supposed to catch the Rockies' spring melt then allow the steady release over the dry summer months, keeping the Missouri ( Read more... )

So, some lab rats say they can get a graphene optical modulator to operate at 1GHz and extrapolate that to 500GHz. And then spin that into claiming exabit data transmission rates are feasible. So what ( Read more... )

Just saw this fark.com link to space battle wallpapers -


( Read more... )

So the GOP wants to privatize FAA jobs after the latest air controller scandal. I don't think that's going far enough ( Read more... )