Wed Tech News

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Dell is expanding its customer call center operations in Oklahoma City by adding 1,000 new employees and erecting a new building, the company said Tuesday. Plans call for a new 120,000 square-foot facility, which is scheduled to open by March 31, 2006, the computer maker said. It will be a mirror image of Dell's existing plant on the Oklahoma River.

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A government representative said that 648 out of 729 members of Parliament voted Wednesday to reject the proposal, called the Computer Implemented Inventions Directive, which critics said would widen the extent to which software could be patented.

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This sensitive task requires Astro-E2’s main instrument, the X-Ray Spectrometer (XRS), to be cooled to just 0.06 degrees above absolute zero. This will allow it to detect extremely small changes in photon energies - representing a 10-fold improvement in sensitivity compared to existing detectors. “It’s interesting that we have to fly this thing so cold to look at things that are so hot,” Mushotzky says. To keep the device cold, three layers insulate it from the relative warmth of space, which is 2.7 degrees above absolute zero (2.7 Kelvin). Liquid helium at 1.3 K provides the innermost layer around the refrigerator holding the XRS. A layer of solid neon at 10 K blankets that, followed by a layer of insulation that wraps around the entire setup like a thermos.

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They found that, regardless of outside air temperature, the car heated up at a similar rate – gaining 80% of its final temperature within 30 minutes. Cars that started out comfortable 22°C, for example, rocketed to over 47°C after 60 minutes in the sun. And keeping the windows open a crack hardly slowed the rise at all.

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The plume of gas and dust kicked up by the impact was much bigger, brighter and less transparent than expected. As a result, the crater itself, hidden behind the plume, will be very difficult to detect in the images taken by the flyby spacecraft. But the science team has already figured out some indirect ways of determining the crater's dimensions, if the optical images cannot provide enough information. In any case, any problem with getting data on the crater challenge is far outweighed by the wealth of information returned from the first-ever deliberate comet impact.

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Computers that perform calculations by harnessing the bizarre properties of quantum physics – such as the superposition or entanglement of particles – could one day operate at extraordinary speeds. Quantum computers should, for example, be able to perform multiple calculations at once simply by exploiting the fact that quantum particles can simultaneously occupy two distinct states.