Comment Re:No Clue (Score 1) 327
we pay 33c/kW.hr in Australia, plus $20/month supply charge.
we pay 33c/kW.hr in Australia, plus $20/month supply charge.
I tested my HTC phone chargers. When plugged in but not charging a phone, they drew less than the minimum 0.1 W that the test apparatus could record.
I also tested my plasma TV. 3 W when not being used.
My router, 12 W.
I use about 7 kW.hrs/day, mostly gaming laptops and TV at night. That router is 0.3 kW.hrs of that, 4% of my overall usage, costing me 8.6 c/day.
If you are happy to leave your router/modem turned on, then power draw from idle chargers fades into insignificance.
Christmas Island is 1600 km from the Australian mainland, and 351 km from Indonesia (Java).
It is because of its proximity to Indonesia that people smugglers take their boats there, plus Jakarta is on Java so there are a lot of people there.
Papua New Guinea: 170 km
Tasmania: 220 km
Indonesia (Java to Christmas Island): 351 km
Indonesia (Timor to mainland Australia): 440 km
East Timor: 513 km
I heard New Zealand had claimed Tasmania, and Australia didn't bother to object.
Yes, it is worth remembering East Timor, they get forgotten fairly often, like Papua New Guinea.
But they are a bit further away. From closest point on mainland Australia to nearest point of other places, distances are:
Papua New Guinea: 170 km
Tasmania: 220 km
Indonesia (Timor): 440 km
East Timor: 513 km
That far north the kangaroos don't work properly. They tend to climb trees and then fall out instead of the usual behaviour of offering bouncy rides.
Australia's nearest neighbour was and is Papua New Guinea. You can almost walk from Papua to Australia at low tide (if you have very long legs).
Second nearest is Tasmania, followed by Indonesia.
I do not think [classified] means what you think it means.
Logged in post the same thing and was beaten to it.
The Classic Mode option doesn't make it look like the classic Slashdot. It still looks like the beta anorexic Slashdot.
"Whatever is happening is probably a relatively common, though difficult to detect, phenomenon. Extrapolating from the research, astronomers estimate there are as many as about 10,000 similar high-energy millisecond radio bursts happening across the sky every day."
Seems like a lot.
No, that plant was proven to be very reliable. It survived a severe earthquake and began automatically shutting down before the tsunami hit.
It was designed to withstand tsunamis, just not one as big as actually occurred. When hit by the over design limit tsunami, it suffered damage but did not fail dangerously. No one was killed, and radiation tests show that the only people to be exposed to significant radiation levels were site workers, none of which received a fatal dose.
So, if a nuclear power plant can safely shut down after such natural disasters, it shows that nuclear power is very safe. The engineers who designed that plant should be commended.
Sources:
Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_effects_from_Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disaster)
Preliminary dose-estimation reports by the World Health Organization and United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation indicate that 167 plant workers received radiation doses that slightly elevate their risk of developing cancer, but that it may not be statistically detectable. Estimated effective doses from the accident outside of Japan are considered to be below (or far below) the dose levels regarded as very small by the international radiological protection community.
World Nuclear News (http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/rs_fear_and_stress_outweigh_fukushima_radiation_risk_3105131.html)
The most extensive international report to date has concluded that the only observable health effects from the Fukushima accident stem from the stresses of evacuation and unwarranted fear of radiation.
Agreed. I run groundwater simulation models that take 48 hours to complete. My Xeon CPU is the bottleneck.
At my charge out rate of $200/hour, a modest increase in CPU speed could lead to saving over $1000 per model run.
But Xeons aren't overclockable, and our IT department wouldn't allow them to be overclocked even if they could be.
So, yes MHz/GHz still matters. But, no I'm not too fussed about the overclocking issue in the article.
Given that astronauts and cosmonauts on the station are engineers and techs, it is hardly surprising they decided not to 'upgrade' to Windows 8.
They probably want to get work done.
Besides, all that start menu manual swiping to slide across to the Skype app would end up spinning you in circles in zero grav.
From the article, if you can't be bothered clicking the link:
The words not, that, we, who, and give are cognates in five language families, and nouns and verbs including mother, hand, fire, ashes, worm, hear, and pull are shared by four. Going by the rate of change of these cognates, the model suggests that these words have remained in a similar form since about 14,500 years ago, thus supporting the existence of an ancient Eurasiatic language and its now far-flung descendants.
From Google:
Mother in England
Matr in Russia
Motina in Lithuanian
Mater in Latin
Manman in Haitian Creole
Ma in Chinese
Mwtr in Yiddish
Mteay in Khmer
I guess this would be a good time to bring up the fact that batteries often fail explosively.
...for unusual definitions of "usually", yes.
"If I do not want others to quote me, I do not speak." -- Phil Wayne