Well, there's the fact that the government gave away the digital spectrum to existing analog broadcasters. The analog spectrum is being given back to the government who will auction it off. This was a HUGE giveaway to the Telecoms. The government should have instead auctioned off the digital spectrum, allowing the telecoms to sell off the analog frequencies they no longer needed.

Don't even get me started about the whole telecom immunity bullcrap.

Yep, according to Republicans, Welfare is good - as long as it's the corporations getting it....

Sigh. Anyone have any recs for laptop battery sellers? My beloved ThinkPad Z60t's battery is fading (after less than a year and half of use, though admittedly, pretty heavy daily unplugged use), and I'm leery of shelling out $150 or more for an OEM one.

Robotopult: [link]

My favorite part of that, other than the utter absurdity, is the disclaimer at the end.

Which part of California was it that they were lucky to not set ablaze?

I've always wondered what the people who set off the big fires were doing--I'm assuming it's rarely as big as this.

Yeah, I was definitely thinking during a part of that, "I hope you're planning on cleaning up after yourselves, young man."

Google to Host Terabytes of Open-Source Science Data

Sources at Google have disclosed that the humble domain, [link] will soon provide a home for terabytes of open-source scientific datasets. The storage will be free to scientists and access to the data will be free for all. The project, known as Palimpsest and first previewed to the scientific community at the Science Foo camp at the Googleplex last August, missed its original launch date this week, but will debut soon.

Building on the company's acquisition of the data visualization technology, Trendalyzer, from the oft-lauded, TED presenting Gapminder team, Google will also be offering algorithms for the examination and probing of the information. The new site will have YouTube-style annotating and commenting features.

The storage would fill a major need for scientists who want to openly share their data, and would allow citizen scientists access to an unprecedented amount of data to explore. For example, two planned datasets are all 120 terabytes of Hubble Space Telescope data and the images from the Archimedes Palimpsest, the 10th century manuscript that inspired the Google dataset storage project.

FTR, Hubble data is at almost 32 terabytes (virtual, the actual volume is smaller ).They are talking the Hubble Legacy Archive, which is underway, but barely started.

Internet explorer freezes when I load it. It is not do a domain - my home page on explorer is set to "about blank" since I never use except for windows update and few pages which are evil and require it.

I know it is explore not my connection, because I can ping fine, and all other browser work fine. system is windows XP, with all security updates up to when the freeze happened.