Comment Re:Duh? (Score 1) 633
"We are all lying in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars"
-Oscar Wilde
Comment First with obligatory Toto reference (Score 1) 363
Hurry, boy.
Sahara Solar To Power Half the World By 2050 363
eldavojohn writes "A Japanese/Algerian effort called The Sahara Solar Breeder Project employs a simple concept revolving around the pure silica in the sand of the Sahara Desert. The silica can be used to build vast solar arrays which will then provide the power and means to build more solar arrays in a classic breeder model. They would then use DC powerlines utilizing high temperature superconductors. The lead of the project points out that silica is the second most abundant resource in the Earth's crust. The project's lofty goals to harness the Sahara's energy has a few requirements — including 100 million yen annually — but also the worldwide cooperation of many nations and the training of the scientists and engineers to create and man these desert plants. The once deadly wasteland of the Sahara now looks like a land rich in an important resource: sunlight."
Comment Re:Transparency (Score 1) 833
Because it CAN BE! Woo-hoot!
This is the world that diplomats live in, not the 18th century, or WWI or the 1970's; but keep pretending, it makes for great entertainment!
Submission + - Using Nature As Your Data Center Chiller (datacenterknowledge.com)
1sockchuck writes: A small but growing number of data centers are slashing their cooling costs by using nature as their chiller, tapping nearby rivers, underground lakes and wells for cool water. A data bunker known as the "Swiss Fort Knox" taps an underground lake for chilled water, while a Google data center in Finland will use the Baltic Sea to cool its thousands of servers. These companies estimate major savings from eliminating the use of energy-hungry refrigeration systems, a practice pioneered by Google.
Submission + - Cinnamon + gold salts + water = Nontoxic nano (scienceblog.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Gold nanoparticles are used in electronics, healthcare products and as pharmaceuticals. Despite their positive uses, the process to make them requires toxic and potentially dangerous chemicals, leading some researchers to worry over the environmental impact of nanotechnology's growing presence. Now a University of Missouri research team has found a simpler, and non-toxic method to achieve the same end product: Use cinnamon instead of poisons. Better still, the resulting nanoparticles have an inherent anti-cancer property thanks to phytochemicals released by the spice in the production process.
Submission + - Improving Pagerank by Pissing Off Customers (nytimes.com)
McGruber writes: NY Times Reporter David Segal has an amazing article about Vitaly Borker, who discovered that his google page rank was directly related to the number of negative things said about his page. Says Borker, "just wanted to let you guys know that the more replies you people post, the more business and the more hits and sales I get. My goal is NEGATIVE advertisement."
Let's hope this submission doesn't give CmdrTaco any ideas.
Let's hope this submission doesn't give CmdrTaco any ideas.
Submission + - Leaked cables show danger and foolishness of Bush (nytimes.com)
DusterBar writes: This is an interesting read and, if it is correct, shows the complexities of the region was not lost on most and that the foolishness of the Bush administration was much worse than most anyone has publicly discussed. Very interesting reading.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/29/world/middleeast/29iran.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=a2&pagewanted=all
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/29/world/middleeast/29iran.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=a2&pagewanted=all
Submission + - Leaked cables show blindness of Bush... (nytimes.com)
An anonymous reader writes: This is an interesting read and, if it is correct, shows the complexities of the region was not lost on most and that the foolishness of the Bush administration was much worse than most anyone has publicly discussed. Very interesting reading.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/29/world/middleeast/29iran.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=a2&pagewanted=all
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/29/world/middleeast/29iran.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=a2&pagewanted=all
Submission + - US Intel Rethinks Data Sharing after Wikileaks
Ponca City writes: "Ellen Nakashima writes in the Washington Post that after the intelligence community came under heavy criticism after 9/11 for having failed to share data, officials sought to make it easier for various agencies to share sensitive information giving intelligence analysts wider access to government secrets but WikiLeaks has proved that there's a downside to better information-sharing. "One of the consequences [of 9/11] is you gave a lot of people access to the dots," says Jeffrey H. Smith, a former CIA general counsel. "At least one of the dots, apparently, was a bad apple." The director of U.S. national intelligence, James Clapper, says he believes the WikiLeaks releases will have a "chilling effect" on information-sharing. "We have to do a much better job of auditing what is going on on any [intelligence community] computer," he said this month. "And so if somebody's downloading a half-million documents . . . we find out about it contemporaneously, not after the fact." To prevent further breaches, the Pentagon announced Sunday it had ordered the disabling a feature that allows material to be copied onto thumb drives or other removable devices on its classified computer systems and the DOD will limit the number of classified systems from which material can be transferred to unclassified systems requiring that two people be involved in moving data from classified to unclassified systems. The bottom line is that recent leaks "have blown a hole" in the framework by which governments guard their secrets. According to British journalist Simon Jenkins "words on paper can be made secure, electronic archives not.""
Submission + - Confirmation of Lone Wikileaks Hacker
An anonymous reader writes: Yesterday, Wikileaks came under "a massive denial of service attack" which knocked the site and its Swedish hosting provider off the net (at least until Wikileaks migrated its DNS to point to Amazon AWS). Today, reports suggest the attack could be the work of a lone hacker calling himself the Jester. Arbor's report this morning showing the attack at 2-4Gbps and coming from a small number of sources seems to back the lone hacker theory. I still prefer the government conspiracy theory, but this was a fairly lame DDoS (and presumably a government could do a far more effective DDoS if they tried).
Submission + - Microsoft to start own TV service on Xbox 360 (tekgoblin.com)
tekgoblin writes: It seems that Microsoft may be in talks with media companies to license TV shows and movies for a new streaming service. With the addition of ESPN to the Xbox 360 over Xbox Live Microsoft may be in a position to do the same for different content providers and charge a subscription fee for them separately. The idea is to better personalize content and only pay for what you want to watch instead of paying cable companies for all the channels you don't watch. Microsoft is looking into duplicating what they have done with ESPN to include channels such as Showtime or HBO and possibly Disney.
Submission + - Feds kill Torrent-finder.com, ignore .info mirrror (itworld.com)
jfruhlinger writes: Despite COICA being blocked, the US government is still using existing powers to shut down sites it views and contributing copyright infringement. One particularly odd case is Torrent-finder.com, which was shuttered despite the fact that it doesn't itself host copyrighted materials. But user's shouldn't fret, as Torrent-finder.info is alive and well.
Submission + - Two Kinects join forces to create better 3D video (engadget.com)
suraj.sun writes: Oliver Kreylos blowing minds and demonstrating that two Kinects can be paired and their output meshed — one basically filling in the gaps of the other. He found that the two do create some interference, the dotted IR pattern of one causing some holes and blotches in the other, but when the two are combined they basically help each other out and the results are quite impressive.
As you can see in the video, Oliver is able to rotate the camera perspective and basically film himself from a new camera angle that exists somewhere in between the position of the two Kinects, and do-so in real-time. Sure, the quality leaves a lot to be desired, but still. Wow.
Engadget: http://www.engadget.com/2010/11/29/two-kinects-join-forces-to-create-better-3d-video-blow-our-mind/
YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-w7UXCAUJE
As you can see in the video, Oliver is able to rotate the camera perspective and basically film himself from a new camera angle that exists somewhere in between the position of the two Kinects, and do-so in real-time. Sure, the quality leaves a lot to be desired, but still. Wow.
Engadget: http://www.engadget.com/2010/11/29/two-kinects-join-forces-to-create-better-3d-video-blow-our-mind/
YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-w7UXCAUJE
Submission + - IEEE Spectrum: Ray Kurzweil's Slippery Futurism (ieee.org)
wjousts writes: Well-known futurist Ray Kurzweil has made many predictions about the future in his books The Age of Intelligent Machines (1990), The Age of Spiritual Machines (1999) and The Singularity is near (2005), but how well have his predictions held up now that we live "in the future"? IEEE Spectrum has a piece questioning the Kurzweil's (self proclaimed) accuracy.
Quoting:
Quoting:
Therein lie the frustrations of Kurzweil's brand of tech punditry. On close examination, his clearest and most successful predictions often lack originality or profundity. And most of his predictions come with so many loopholes that they border on the unfalsifiable. Yet he continues to be taken seriously enough as an oracle of technology to command very impressive speaker fees at pricey conferences, to author best-selling books, and to have cofounded Singularity University, where executives and others are paying quite handsomely to learn how to plan for the not-too-distant day when those disappearing computers will make humans both obsolete and immortal.
