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Submission + - Federal wood burning rule prompts rural backlash (wsj.com)

Submitted by SonicSpike
SonicSpike writes: This is a follow-up to what was previously reported here on SlashDot: http://news.slashdot.org/story...

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A federal proposal to clean up the smoke wafting from wood-burning stoves has sparked a backlash from some rural residents, lawmakers and manufacturers who fear it could close the damper on one of the oldest ways of warming homes on cold winter days.

Proposed regulations from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency would significantly reduce the amount of particle pollution allowed from the smokestacks of new residential wood-powered heaters.

Wood-burning stoves are a staple in rural homes in many states, a cheap heating source for low-income residents and others wanting to lessen their reliance on gas or electric furnaces. Outdoor models often cost several thousand dollars, but indoor stoves can cost as little as a few hundred dollars and sometimes double as fashionable centerpieces in homes.

Some manufacturers contend the EPA's proposed standards are so stringent that the higher production costs would either force them out of business or raise prices so high that many consumers could no longer afford their products.

Submission + - Crowded U.S. airwaves desperately in search of spectrum breathing room (networkworld.com)

Submitted by alphadogg
alphadogg writes: Ahead of a major new spectrum auction scheduled for next year, America's four major wireless carriers are jockeying for position in the frequencies available to them, buying, selling and trading licenses to important parts of the nation's airwaves. Surging demand for mobile bandwidth, fueled by an increasingly saturated smartphone market and data-hungry apps, has showed no signs of slowing down. This, understandably, has the wireless industry scrambling to improve its infrastructure in a number of areas, including the amounts of raw spectrum available to the carriers. These shifts, however, are essentially just lateral moves – nothing to directly solve the problems posed by a crowded spectrum. What’s really going to save the wireless world, some experts think, is a more comprehensive re-imagining of the way spectrum is used.

Comment Fix the commenting system (Score 3, Insightful) 60

by snooo53 (#46173793) Attached to: Slashdot BETA Discussion
Besides the overuse of white space on the page, the single biggest thing they could do is copy the current commenting system. I want the same threshold controls I have currently. I want to see more than two comments fit on the screen at a time. I want them to take up most of the page width. This should be the #1 priority... comments are the lifeblood of Slashdot. Rarely does anyone click on the articles. Screw up the comments and you kill Slashdot.

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: Can some of us get together and rebuild this community? 21

Submitted by wbr1
wbr1 writes: It seems abundantly clear now that Dice and the SlashBeta designers do not care one whit about the community here. They do not care about rolling in crapware into sourceforge installers. In short, the only thing that talks to them is money and stupid ideas.

Granted, it takes cash to run sites like these, but they were fine before. The question is, do some of you here want to band together, get whatever is available of slashcode and rebuild this community somewhere else? We can try to make it as it once was, a haven of geeky knowledge and frosty piss, delivered free of charge in a clean community moderated format.

Submission + - Alternatives to Slashdot post beta? 8

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Like many Slashdotters, I intend to stop visiting Slashdot after the beta changeover. After years of steady decline in the quality of discussions here, the beta will be the last straw. What sites alternative to Slashdot have others found? The best I have found has been arstechnica.com, but it has been a while since I've looked for tech discussion sites.

Submission + - Slashdot BETA Discussion (slashdot.org) 60

Submitted by mugnyte
mugnyte writes: With Slashdot's recent restyled "BETA" slowly rolled to most users, there's been a lot of griping about the changes. This is nothing new, as past style changes have had similar effects. However, this pass there are significant usability changes: A narrower read pane, limited moderation filtering, and several color/size/font adjustments. BETA implies not yet complete, so taking that cue — please list your specific, detailed opinoins, one per comment, and let's use the best part of slashdot (the moderation system) to raise the attention to these. Change can be jarring, but let's focus on the true usability differences with the new style.

Comment Re:What about all the new jobs in the "digital" ag (Score 1) 674

by snooo53 (#45889921) Attached to: The Internet's Network Efficiencies Are Destroying the Middle Class
Exactly, there is no shortage of work to do, whether it's fixing crumbling infrastructure, doing maintenance or even just providing customer support. The problem is of course finding the money to do it. Even if the money is available, there's no incentive for a company to spend it. So what is the solution? I suppose you could try to pass a law about maintenance or quality of service, but the companies will fight it tooth and nail. And in the end, even if something like that got passed, it will cost more to the customer for the sake of maintaining a profit margin. Either way, the problem always comes down to money. As a society how do we provide an incentive to do things like this, without driving away business? I don't know that there's an easy answer

Comment Re:What about all the new jobs in the "digital" ag (Score 1) 674

by snooo53 (#45889451) Attached to: The Internet's Network Efficiencies Are Destroying the Middle Class

Exactly. There are plenty of solutions; the problem is there is currently too much momentum built up in the idea that we must work 40 hrs a week to have a relatively high paying job, with no significant gaps in employment. It's going to be difficult for society to accept anything different.

Taking your example, we could set the full time workweek at 20 hrs. In theory, businesses would have to hire twice the people to cover 40hrs worth of shifts. In fact, many large corporations are already starting to do this with job sharing... two people split a job, each works 2-3 days a week, with one day overlapping to get up to speed. It's very popular with working moms. But these are the exception rather than the norm.

Submission + - World's oldest decimal multiplication table discovered (nature.com)

Submitted by ananyo
ananyo writes: From a few fragments out of a collection of 23-century-old Chinese bamboo strips, historians have pieced together what they say is the world's oldest example of a multiplication table in base 10.
Each strip is about 7 to 12 millimetres wide and half a metre long, and has a vertical line of ancient Chinese calligraphy painted on it in black ink. The bamboo pieces constitute 65 ancient texts and are thought to be among the most important artefacts from the Warring States period before the unification of China. But 21 bamboo strips contained only numbers and, on closer inspection, turned out to be a multiplication table.
As in a modern multiplication table, the entries at the intersection of each row and column in the matrix provide the results of multiplying the corresponding numbers. The table can also help users to multiply any whole or half integer between 0.5 and 99.5. The researchers suspect that officials used the multiplication table to calculate surface area of land, yields of crops and the amounts of taxes owed.

Submission + - Intel has put a PC into an SD card-sized casing (theregister.co.uk)

Submitted by mpicpp
mpicpp writes: Intel has put a PC into an SD card-sized casing. Dubbed Edison, the micro-microcomputer marks the chip giant’s first attempt to address the emerging wearable computing business; part of its strategy to cope with a world where punters buy far fewer traditional personal computers.

Edison is based on Intel’s Quark chip, which is a 22nm low power processor

Submission + - Glow-In-The-Dark Civil War Soldiers Explained (mentalfloss.com)

Submitted by Freshly Exhumed
Freshly Exhumed writes: Some of the Shiloh soldiers sat in the mud for two rainy days and nights waiting for the medics to get around to them. As dusk fell the first night, some of them noticed something very strange: their wounds were glowing, casting a faint light into the darkness of the battlefield. Even stranger, when the troops were eventually moved to field hospitals, those whose wounds glowed had a better survival rate and had their wounds heal more quickly and cleanly than their unilluminated brothers-in-arms. The seemingly protective effect of the mysterious light earned it the nickname “Angel’s Glow.” Today we know that it was a bacteria now known as P. luminescens.

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