Science News Article | Reuters.com
A trio of supergiants — red, cool, bright stars at the end of their lives — may be the biggest stars ever identified, astronomers reported on Monday.
All three have diameters of more than 1 billion miles, or 1,500 times the sun’s girth. If they were in the same location as the sun, they would completely engulf Earth and their outer layers would extend to a point between the orbits of Jupiter and Saturn.
GmailFS provides a mountable Linux filesystem which uses your Gmail account as its storage medium. GmailFS is a Python application and uses the FUSE userland filesystem infrastructure to help provide the filesystem, and libgmail to communicate with Gmail.
GmailFS supports most file operations such as read, write, open, close, stat, symlink, link, unlink, truncate and rename. This means that you can use all your favourite unix command line tools to operate on files stored on Gmail (e.g. cp, ls, mv, rm, ln, grep etc. etc.).
A bill introduced in California’s Legislature last week has raised the possibility of jail time for developers of file-swapping software who don’t stop trades of copyrighted movies and songs online.
Get the @#^& out of here.
One in four people have a valve-like hole, which can be closed using keyhole surgery, but it is twice as common among a type of migraine sufferer.
During President Bush’s campaign for re-election, his backers were quick to invoke the name of Franklin Roosevelt. As in 1944, they argued, the people should not change leaders in the middle of a war.
But now that Bush is about to be sworn in for a second term, his supporters do not make FDR analogies so often. Roosevelt reasoned that amid the Second World War, a lavish inauguration was inappropriate. There were no parades or balls. His speech, delivered at the White House rather than the Capitol, was a little longer than this editorial and was followed by a buffet luncheon.
Bush, on the other hand, is planning a $40 million extravaganza, funded by donations of as much as $250,000 from corporations, trade associations and executives with an interest in pending legislation and regulations. It will be spread over three days this week, with nine balls and a host of other parties, concerts, lunches and fireworks.
Bad taste indeed. This $40M is not even accounting for the tens of millions in security for the Tyco-esque extravaganza that amounts to nothing more than Capital Socialism. As lobbyist vie for the affections of law-makers and the White House our troops scrounge dumps for vehicle armor.
German scientists have found a new way to prevent the HIV virus from replicating, offering hope in the face of the virus’s increasing resistance to existing drugs.
Joachim Hauber, a professor at the Heinrich-Pette Institute in Hamburg, told Reuters on Tuesday his team had identified a protein in human cells that the HIV virus uses to reproduce and run tests on a chemical that blocks this protein’s action.
Drugs such as GlaxoSmithKline’s AZT and existing inhibitors produce drug resistance because they work on viral proteins, which can mutate when the HIV virus replicate.
I remember these photos. I do not believe this was for Teen Beat though. Hehe, although that makes the comments awfully amusing. My personal favorite has to be:
Whats the best music to accompany the picture?
My first though was “Do You Really want to Hurt Me”.
Thanks to inspiration from an octopus, fuzzy images from your cell-phone camera could soon be a thing of the past. Case Western Reserve University professor Eric Baer and a team he’s working with at the Naval Research Laboratory have developed a low-cost, single plastic lens that could match the quality of expensive lenses used in cameras. And soon, the lens will also be flexible — allowing people to zoom in and out by giving it a squeeze.
In New York City, Mayor Michael Bloomberg officially proclaimed today as “Social Capitalist Day” in honor of the 25 groundbreaking nonprofits gracing the January issue of Fast Company. The honorees of the Social Capitalist Awards are part of the greater trend of social entrepreneurship
This guy is stealing my terminology. While Socialism is defined as the government controlling the major centers of production I once defined Social Capitalism as the major centers of production within a country owning said country’s government. A la the United States. This is really a bad term for what I was trying to convey. What I should have dubbed it, and will continue to call it from here on, is Capital Socialism. Take a look at our current administration. They rode a record setting wave of cash from corporations and special interest groups. It is my assertion that we have reached a point in the United States in which our gorvernment is almost entirely in the control of powerful industry lobbyist groups and multi-national conglamerates. This isn’t some conspiracy theory. This is the reality of the dollar. So, Captial Socialsim is what we have achieved. The almighty corporation has more legal rights than I do and has less of a tax burden. At any rate, Social Entrepreneurism good, Capital Socialism bad, the former seems to be making progress, the latter seems to have fully taken root.
In 1999 or so I was working at a fairly large consumer software company. It was before the crash so good help was in short supply. As a result we ended up with some real winners. This one guy somehow convinced a VP and HR that he was a hotshot senior Java developer that wanted to transition into the project management side of the world.
I flipped the bozo bit on this guy after two weeks of dealing with him. Anything involving him would also involve a huge waste of time and effort and nothing would get accomplished. Somehow no one else had figured this out, so everybody just thought I was being overly critical of the guy.
My vindication came when we were in a meeting trying to figure out how to make a Delphi- SQL 7.0 e-commerce system in Iowa talk to a JD Edwards AS/400 backend system in Massachusetts for real-time inventory data and sales tax figures. This guy listened to us discuss the complexities of making these two highly disparate systems talk to each other in a meaningful and efficient way. He wanted to contribute his expertise so he waited for the perfect time to jump in with his $.02.
“Have you tried JavaScript?”
That sentence instantly became part of our corporate folklore. His solution to everything was “Have you tried.JavaScript?” It was apparently the only buzzword he picked up before coming to work for us.
Things went downhill from there. He discovered how to schedule meetings in Outlook and was then able to waste many peoples time simultaneously with a minimum of effort on his part. It was about that time I wrote a rule in Outlook to delete any email from him.
In a fitting end to his career with our company, he quit 2 days before he was going to be laid off with severance. Ironically he left to work for a company called Brightware.
This reminds of an incident I had the other day. I worked on a project for a non-profit organization while I was finishing up my degree in CS. It was a web portal written using Java Servlets with a MySQL back end. Periodically I will get a call from the NPO with a request for new features. I always try to help them as much as I can, which typically takes the form of me guiding them architecturally. Invariably they team me up with a some ‘expert’ that ‘really knows his stuff — I mean he is really very capable — this guy is really smart.’ And every bloody time the person turns out being a total momo. This last time I was talking about the arch, mind you I mentioned the components were Java, MySQL, and JSP with custom tagLibs, and then I did a quick walkthrough only to discover the guy only has a rudimentary grasp of JavaScript. The real killer here is that every previous expert had exactly the same skill set. None of them had ever even looked at Java. What is it with JavaScript that makes someone think if they can swap images on a web page on mouse over they are suddenly software engineers? I think that each of these experts are certainly Straight Shooters with Upper Management written all over them.
Aaron Fulkerson 