Conspiracy
The Recycling of the Tevatron
ananyo writes with an excerpt from an article in Nature about the decomissioning of the Tevatron: "It is a 4,000-tonne edifice that stands three stories high, chock full of particle detectors, power supplies, electronics and photomultiplier tubes, all layered like a giant onion around a cylindrical magnet. During 26 years of operation at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois, this behemoth, the Collider Detector at Fermilab (CDF), helped to find the top quark and chased the Higgs boson. But since the lab's flagship particle collider, the Tevatron, was switched off in September 2011, the detector has been surplus stock — and it is now slowly being cannibalized for parts."
Currently other projects are taking small bits and pieces of the Tevatron, but another Fermilab project, ORKA, wants to gut the collider to study kaon decay.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
KDE KWin May Drop Support For AMD Catalyst Drivers
An anonymous reader writes "The KWin window manager maintainer for KDE is looking at removing the legacy OpenGL 1.0 renderer from the KWin code-base due to the costs of supporting legacy hardware. This means dropping support for non-GL2+ graphics cards, which are all over six years old, but in the process would mean that for now there is no longer any support for the AMD Catalyst driver on the KDE desktop. Due to driver bugs, AMD's proprietary Catalyst software only works well with the GL1 renderer even though their latest hardware supports OpenGL 4."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Playbook OS 2.0 Released
Alt-kun writes "On February 21st, The Blackberry Playbook finally received its long-promised overhaul. Called Playbook OS 2.0, this major upgrade provides native email and calendaring apps, limited support for Android applications (the developer has to repackage the app for the Playbook), and a bunch of other features. There are some fairly positive initial reviews, although one can no doubt expect a lot of too-little-too-late naysaying from various quarters as well. The Globe and Mail article also contains this somewhat interesting note: '...until RIM began deep discounting ... the device languished way behind rivals such as the iPad in terms of market share. One recent report by Toronto-based Solutions Research Group, however, pegs RIM's share of the tablet market at around 15 per cent, a big jump after discounting over the holiday buying season.'"
ZDNet has some screenshots of the new features, and El Reg has a piece on an interesting bit of the new software.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
How do I convince them?
Back in November, my friend showed me TheAntiTerrorist and informed me about fluoride. Upon reading more, I did the most that I could to eliminate things like fluoride and MSG from my life. I had already avoided aspartame, and I now will avoid giving my children vaccines. There are certain theories I disagree with, but upon reading all that I have read, I can't quite look at the world the same way again.
Anyway, my friends and family are telling me how stupid and irrational I am, how I've been listening to crazy people, how fluoride is good for me, how MSG and aspartame and vaccines have been proven safe, and there are no studies proving otherwise. They seem to still believe in the bearded man with the tin foil hat living in the basement as the only kind of truthist out there.
How do I convince them that there are tons of scientific studies proving the dangers of these things? I'm not trying to convince them to avoid these things, but I'm just trying to show them that there is actual TRUTH behind what these things are saying.
submitted by aschesklave[link] [comment]
Categories: Conspiracy
Man Ordered To Apologize To Wife On Facebook
New submitter Marillion writes "Photographer Mark Byron was so bothered by his pending divorce and child visitation issues that he blasted his soon-to-be ex-wife on his personal Facebook page. That touched off a battle that resulted in a Hamilton County judge ordering Byron jailed for his Facebook rant — and to post on his page an apology to his wife and all of his Facebook friends, something free speech experts found troubling."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Greece Will Default On March 20
Categories: Conspiracy
Intel Opening Foundry To Third Parties
angry tapir writes "Intel is exploring whether it can branch out as a foundry by opening its chip manufacturing facilities to more third-party customers. Intel has expanded its chip-to-order business by signing up additional customers to take advantage of its 22-nanometer process facilities."
In particular, two FPGA design companies will be using Intel's fabrication plant, and "the unit has more than two customers but others are not disclosing their plans yet."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
One Too Many In The Cuckoo's Nest -- Shock Therapy Still Used to Control Behavior
Categories: Conspiracy
Iran-Thai Bomb Blast Update: Predictable, improbable, and factually-deficient conclusion made by US-run Thai administration.
Categories: Conspiracy
Everything is going according to plan: the eurozone is in deep recession; banks are selling assets and rationing credit, exacerbating the downturn; unmistakable evidence of weakening performance in China and the rest of Asia.
Categories: Conspiracy
ACTA Referred To Europe's Top Court For Analysis
superglaze writes "The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement is to get an extra level of scrutiny in the EU after the European Commission said it would refer it to the European Court of Justice, to check it really does comply with fundamental freedoms in the union. This obviously follows mass protests over ACTA, and it seems justice commissioner Viviane Reding was the one who pushed for ECJ scrutiny. It's not currently clear if this will delay the European Parliament ratification process, but it is hard to imagine the parliament voting on ACTA (scheduled for June at the moment) before the ECJ has had its say — and no-one can say right now how long that will take to happen."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Adobe Makes Flash on GNU/Linux Chrome-Only
ekimd writes "Adobe has anounced their plans to abandon future updates of their Flash player for Linux. Partnering with Google, after the release of 11.2, 'the Flash Player browser plugin for Linux will only be available via the 'Pepper' API as part of the Google Chrome browser distribution and will no longer be available as a direct download from Adobe.' Viva la HTML 5!"
And it appears that Mozilla won't be implementing Pepper anytime soon.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Have Bad Cars Gone Extinct?
Hugh Pickens writes "AP reports that global competition is squeezing lemons out of the market and forcing automakers to improve the quality and reliability of their vehicles. With few exceptions, cars are so close on reliability that it's getting harder for companies to charge a premium. 'We don't have total clunkers like we used to,' says Dave Sargent, automotive vice president with J.D. Power. In 1998, J.D. Power and Associates found an industry average of 278 problems per 100 vehicles, but this year, the number fell to 132. In 1998, the most reliable car had 92 problems per 100 vehicles, while the least reliable had 517, a gap of 425. This year the gap closed to 284 problems. It wasn't always like this. In the 1990s, Honda and Toyota dominated in quality, especially in the key American market for small and midsize cars. Around 2006, General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler were heading into financial trouble and shifted research dollars from trucks to cars after years of neglect and spent more on engineering and parts to close the gap. Meanwhile Toyota's reputation was tarnished by a series of safety recalls, and Honda played conservative with new models that looked similar to the old ones. Now it's 'very hard to find products that aren't good anymore,' says Jeremy Anwyl, CEO of the Edmunds.com automotive website. 'In safety, performance and quality, the differences just don't have material impact.'"
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
