Comment Re:Bunch of Wank (Score 1) 339
Sliced! That's not the default for bread. That's an option.
Comment Re:Maybe keep the landline? (Score 4, Interesting) 635
When the blackouts come only the landlines keep working. When the cell tower batteries run down, after 4 hours or so, there goes your phone.
Here in NYC we get a major blackout every decade or so, even if the larger region does not, so I always keep a landline at the cheapest rate.
Redundancy isn't just for hard drives.
Why IT Won't Power Down PCs 576
snydeq writes "Internal politics and poor leadership on sustainable IT strategies are among the top reasons preventing organizations from practicing proper PC power management — to the tune of $2.8 billion wasted per year powering unused PCs. According to a recent survey, 42 percent of IT shops do not manage PC energy consumption simply because no one in the organization has been made responsible for doing so — this despite greater awareness of IT power-saving myths, and PC power myths in particular. Worse, 22 percent of IT admins surveyed said that savings from PC power management 'flow to another department's budget.' In other words, resources spent by IT vs. the permanent energy crisis appear to result in little payback for IT."
Comment Industrial Espionage (Score 4, Informative) 132
Unfortunately, while such activities fall under the Economic Espionage Act of 1996, according to our friends at Wikipedia:
"The Act authorizes civil proceedings by the Department of Justice to enjoin violations of the Act, but does not create a private cause of action. Thus, victims or putative victims must work with the U.S. Attorney in order to obtain an injunction."
And we all know how eager the DOJ is to chastise the MPAA.
Comment Big Surprise (Score 1) 222
This is a nation in which it was illegal to sell condoms until 1978.
Comment Slashdotted... or censored? (Score 1) 186
Conspiracy theorists take note.
Suddenly I'm getting 403 errors from the whole domain. Not timeouts, but 403Forbidden.
Comment Re:I am rapt (Score 1) 133
Oh, like you've never told anyone about how you put your thing into another thing.
Then again, maybe you never have.
Comment e-newspapers? (Score 1) 60
Take a flexible OLED, back it with this flexible circuitry, add a flexible battery and you've got an electronic material which could really give paper a run for it's money. Is there flexible memory or storage yet?
Submission + - Nanotube Loudspeakers (physicstoday.org)
ExRex writes: "An article in Physics Today alerts us to a simple loudspeaker design based on nanotubes.
Researchers from Tsinghua University and Beijing Normal University have demonstrated a simple loudspeaker design based on nanotubes: They showed that a thin film of nanotubes can reproduce sounds over a wide frequency range--including the full human audible range--with high sound pressure level, low total harmonic distortion, and no magnets.
There's a nice video of a nanotube speaker membrane being deformed without the audio being distorted. Here's a link to the full article at Nano Letters of the ACS."
Comment Re:Dear Ben (Rothke) (Score 1) 713
Please learn how to better say it.
Are we splitting our infinitives these days? I blame it in Star Trek.
Submission + - Help me Obi-Wan Kenobi... (hammacher.com)
ExRex writes: "Possibly the only way to watch Star Wars at home: The R2-D2 Home Theater System.
Finally we can see Princess Leia's message properly projected."
There are lots of other features, including a remote built into a model of the Millennium Falcon.This is the only home theater system available that is modeled after the famous droid from the Star Wars films.
R2's head houses a DLP projection system with superior 1,500:1 contrast, and can project movies, TV shows, images, and video games from his radar eye at 1024 x 768 resolution onto walls up to 16 1/2' away, equivalent to an 80" screen....
Finally we can see Princess Leia's message properly projected."
