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Comment Solar vs Skylights (Score 1) 292

I wonder what the return would have been if they had installed skylights instead. Surely skylight provide more usable light then converting solar energy into usable AC. Sure, one could say that skylights don't allow you to store power, or return power to the grid and get something like a Feed in Terrif (Ontario, Canada). Even compared to solar on a overcast or rainy day, I would assume they would still be more efficient. Maybe I shouldn't assume.
Space

Submission + - BORG a mere light-decade away (wired.com)

Cmdrm writes: A mysterious object discovered near a brown dwarf doesn’t fit into any known astronomical category.

The newly discovered mystery companion forms a binary system with the brown dwarf, located 460 light-years away in the Taurus star-forming system. The object is too light to be another brown dwarf, but it’s too young to have formed by accretion, the way a typical planet does.

After looking at the image, I am sure the BORG are on the way. I for one, welcome our new assimilators.

Comment Re:More like a translation error (Score 1) 437

Well the US built software didn't quite fit with the SI units they used; when they turned the 6 foot fall into a 1.8288 metre fall there was a slight disconnect in the statement of the problem. So basically it is a translation error, instead of crashing into a planet, they just sent less prioritized help. I kinda also want to point out that there is no sure way to say that the downgrade of the call was directly linked to the death of the patient.

Submission + - the Oldest Trees on the Planet (wired.com)

Cmdrm writes: WIRED posted a gallery with images and information about trees that potentially predate humans and our ancestors by possibly 200,000 years.

Comment It's like they know me (Score 1) 234

As a university student my sleep patterns aren't really patterns, in fact sleep is something I barely recognize anymore. Bed time; does that count time in bed with laptop or other reading material? Oh, if you want really awesome dreams, on like 4 hours of sleep, eat peanutbutter before bed. Best Dreams EVER!
The Courts

Court Rules Photo of Memorial Violates Copyright 426

WhatDoIKnow sends in a story about an appeals court ruling in a singular case that might have the effect of narrowing "fair use" rights for transformative uses of artworks. "The sculptor who designed the Korean War memorial [in Washington DC] brought suit against the Postal Service after a photograph of his work was used on a postage stamp. Though first ruled protected by 'fair use,' on appeal the court ruled in favor (PDF) of the sculptor, Frank Gaylord, now 85."
Wikipedia

Developing a Vandalism Detector For Wikipedia 116

marpot writes "In an effort to assist Wikipedia's editors in their struggle to keep articles clean, we are conducting a public lab on vandalism detection. The goal is the development of a practical vandalism detector that is capable of telling apart ill-intentioned edits from well-intentioned edits. Such a tool, which will work somewhat like a spam detector, will release the crowd's workforce currently occupied with manual and semi-automatic edit filtering. The performance of submitted detectors will be evaluated based on a large collection of human-annotated edits, which has been crowdsourced using Amazon's Mechanical Turk. Everyone is welcome to participate."
Input Devices

Will the Serial Console Ever Die? 460

simpz writes "Will the serial port as a console connection ever be displaced — especially for devices such as switches, routers, SAN boxes, etc.? In one sense it's a simple connection. But it is the only current port that, in order to use, you need to know about wiring / baud rates / parity, etc. It has non-standard pinouts. And it is becoming too slow to upload firmware to dead devices, as the firmware updates get larger. Also, the serial port is rapidly disappearing from new laptops — which is where you often really need it, in data centers. Centronics, PS/2, and current loop are mostly defunct. Is there any sign on the horizon of a USB console connection?"

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