Cellphone companies must allow customers of competing wireless carriers to use their networks for the Internet and e-mail when outside their home territory, a federal appeals court said here on Tuesday.
The United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia said that just as the Federal Communications Commission required wireless carriers to allow voice-service roaming by customers of other carriers, it also can require the same, at commercially reasonable rates, for data customers — in essence, those who use smartphones, tablets and other wireless devices.
Hooray for the courts giving the FCC the power to do something, it’s been a while since something like that happened.
It appears to be Kunitaka Watanabe time once again here on Nullary Sources. Have you ever wanted to hear a version of “Hello, Dolly!” on Otamatone and banjolele? Well now you can, courtesy of Mr. Watanabe and Takashi Nakamura.
So on yesterday’s NBC broadcast of Sunday Night Football, Bob Costas had a ninety second segment during halftime. He used it to talk about Jovan Belcher, who shot and killed his girlfriend and himself on December 1.
Costas spent most of the segment talking about and quoting an online piece for FOX Sports by Jason Whitlock about gun culture and gun control. I’m not going to express an opinion on gun control or focus on that. What I will say is that I’m really just amazed this happened during a nationally televised football game, and I’d have had the same reaction even if Costas expressed the opposite opinion.
What I really want to talk about are the first thirty seconds of the segment, where Costas dropped one of the fiercest burns on the platitudes of sports press conferences that I’ve ever heard:
In the aftermath of the nearly unfathomable events in Kansas City, that most mindless of sports cliches was heard yet again: “Something like this really puts it all in perspective.” Well if so, that sort of perspective has a very short shelf life, since we will inevitably hear about the perspective we have supposedly again regained the next time ugly reality intrudes upon our games. Please. Those who need tragedies to continually recalibrate their sense of proportion about sports would seem to have little hope of ever truly achieving perspective.
Sports press conferences are a disgustingly hollow spectacle where the same words are repeated day in and day out until they no longer mean anything. After Costas finished this thought, I just stared slack-jawed at the television for a while, and then I slow clapped harder than I’ve slow clapped in quite some time.
While many factors involving FTL travel are purely theoretical — and may remain in the realm of imagination for a very long time, if not ever — there are some concepts that play well with currently-accepted physics. The Alcubierre warp drive is one of those concepts.
Proposed by Mexican theoretical physicist Miguel Alcubierre in 1994, the drive would propel a ship at superluminal speeds by creating a bubble of negative energy around it, expanding space (and time) behind the ship while compressing space in front of it. In much the same way that a surfer rides a wave, the bubble of space containing the ship and its passengers would be pushed at velocities not limited to the speed of light toward a destination.
Of course, when the ship reaches its destination it has to stop. And that’s when all hell breaks loose.
Click the link to read the horrifying consequences.
Shabnam Dastgheib writing for Stuff.co.nz on something that happened yesterday:
Coffee will cost 10 per cent more for men than for women at Wellington’s Victoria University Law School campus this morning.
In an effort to highlight the continued lack of pay equity between men and women, a campaign by the YWCA is calling on Parliament to do something about the problem. A coffee cart has been set up on the Law School lawn this morning, which was as close as organisers could legally get to Parliament grounds, to illustrate the issue in real terms.
Long blacks and flat whites would cost $3.50 and $4 respectively for women, while the same drink would cost $3.85 and $4.40 for men.
This story is so ridiculous I’m just going to quote the punchline and save you all some time. Eric Pfiffer, Yahoo! News:
And finally, where exactly did Ketchum get her DNA sample? After all, if she was working from a reliable source, that alone might be the real story because no physical evidence of Bigfoot exists on record.
As it turns out, Ketchum says her DNA sample was obtained from a blueberry bagel left in the backyard of a Michigan home that, according to the owner, sees regular visits from Sasquatch creatures.
A new kind of engine under development, called a detonation engine, could save the military hundreds of millions of dollars in fuel costs every year. The technology, which military researchers are working on together with scientists at GE and other companies, could reduce fuel consumption at power plants, in ships, and on airplanes by as much as 25 percent. The Navy alone estimates that retrofitting its ships with the technology would reduce annual fuel costs by $300 to $400 million.
…
The most highly developed form of detonation engine, which has been in the works for many years, is the pulse detonation engine, the type GE is developing. Whereas combustion occurs continuously in a conventional jet engine, pulse detonation involves setting off a series of detonations—say, 60 to 100 per minute.
The Naval Research Laboratory has another idea. It involves the use of a specially designed doughnut-like combustion chamber. One explosion is set off with a spark in one part of the chamber. As the shock wave propagates out from that explosion, the researchers keep it going by feeding in a precise mixture of fuel and air ahead of it. A handful of research groups have tested small versions of the engine that burn hydrogen. And the Navy researchers recently published a paper that shows the idea can work with hydrocarbon fuels like the ones that would be used in a ship, at least in detailed computer simulations.
I’ve never heard of a detonation engine before, but that’s pretty cool.
