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Comment The aliens are allready on earth (Score 1) 576

Some alien scouts have recently landed on earth. Right now, the alien scounts are investigating the best way to invade earth. They have found 'humans', and learned that humans use something called 'internet' to ask for information.

The aliens were detected when they submitted a question to slashdot to investigate if their invasion would be detected.

Comment Hypoxic air technology for fire prevention (Score 2) 148

Hypoxic air technology for fire prevention

Hypoxic air technology for fire prevention, also known as oxygen reduction system, is an active fire protection technique based on a permanent reduction of the oxygen concentration in the protected rooms. Unlike traditional fire suppression systems that usually extinguish fire after it is detected, hypoxic air is able to prevent fire.

Design and operation

Air with a reduced oxygen content is injected to the protected volumes to lower the oxygen concentration until the desired oxygen concentration is reached.

Air with low oxygen concentration is produced by hypoxic air generators, also known as air splitting units.

Effects on health

Fire-prevention systems which result in the oxygen content being less than 19.5% are not permitted for occupied spaces by federal regulation (OSHA) in the United States [3].

However, hypoxic air is considered by some to be safe to breathe for most people.[6] Medical studies have been undertaken on this topic. Angerer and Novak's conclusion is that "working environments with low oxygen concentrations to a minimum of 13% and normal barometric pressure do not impose a health hazard, provided that precautions are observed, comprising medical examinations and limitation of exposure time".[7] Küpper et al.[8] say that oxygen concentration between 17.0-14.8% does not cause any risk for healthy people by hypoxia. It also does not cause risks for people with chronic diseases of moderate severity.

Read more about it on wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H...

Comment TRAFFIC "EXPERIMENTS" AND A CURE FOR WAVES & J (Score 2) 178

TRAFFIC "EXPERIMENTS" AND A CURE FOR WAVES & JAMS
1998 William Beaty Electrical Engineer

My first 'experiment': accidentally erasing waves!
Once upon a time, years ago, I was driving through a number of stop/go traffic waves on I-520 at rush hour in Seattle. I decided to try something. On a day when I immediately started hitting the usual "waves" of stopped cars, I decided to drive smoothly. Rather than repeatedly rushing ahead with everyone else, only to come to a halt, I decided to try to move at the average speed of the traffic. I let a huge gap open up ahead of me, and timed things so I was arriving at the next "stop-wave" just as the last red brakelights were turning off ahead of me. It certainly felt weird to have that huge empty space ahead of me, but I knew I was driving no slower than anyone else. Sometimes I hit it just right and never had to touch the brakes at all. Other times I was too fast or slow. There were many "waves" that evening, and this gave me many opportunities to improve my skill as I drove along.

    I kept this up for maybe half an hour while approaching the city. Finally I happened to glance at my rearview mirror. There was an interesting sight.
It was dusk, the headlights were on, and I was going down a long hill to the bridges. I had a view of miles of highway behind me. In the neighboring lane I could see maybe five of the traffic stop-waves. But in the lane behind me, for miles, TOTALLY UNIFORM DISTRIBUTION. I hadn't realized it, but by driving at the average speed of the traffic around me, my car had been "eating" the traffic waves. Everyone ahead of me was caught in the stop/go cycle, while everyone behind me was forced to go at a nice smooth 35MPH or so. My single tiny car had erased miles and miles of stop-and-go traffic. Just one single "lubricant atom" had a profound effect on the turbulent particle flow within the entire miles of "tube."

http://amasci.com/amateur/traffic/trafexp.html

http://www.google.com/search?q=traffic+site:amasci.com

Comment Some sort of coprocessor (Score 1) 211

128 processors on a dimm............... Not every program is suitable for parellel execution.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl_law

So this might only be useful for task that can be parallelized. Then it will be a parallel coprocessor.

This might be exactly suitable to speed up things like the integer fractal program fractint, but what else can benefit?

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