InterGuru - Slashdot User

Submission + - MPG of a human (ucsd.edu)

Submitted by

InterGuru

on Saturday December 03, 2011 @12:30AM

InterGuru writes: "Tom Murphy, blogging from UCSD in his Do the Math blog asks
' I am curious to know how potent human fuel can be. How many miles per gallon do we get as our own engines of transportation? '

He finds, after accounting for the energy intensity of American agriculture, which uses ten units of energy to get one unit of food energy, walking consumes 18-34 MPG of oil equivalent, and biking comes in at 70-130 MPG.
Maybe if we switched to a more vegetarian diet, we could improve on this."

Submission + - Light too slow for Wall St. use Neutrinos? (newscientist.com) 4

Submitted by

InterGuru

on Sunday October 02, 2011 @09:12AM

InterGuru writes: "The New Scientist notes that Wall Street traders are frustrated with the limitations caused by relativity.
EVERY microsecond counts in stock trading. The New York Stock Exchange handles a third of the world's stock trading — around 22 billion messages a day. But NYSE Euronext, which operates the exchange, wants it to get even faster.
Slashdot has already noted the construction of a faster transatlatic cable. It seems however that even light is not fast for the casino that is now Wall Street.
"The speed-of-light limitation is getting annoying," Andrew Bach, head of network services at NYSE Euronext, told the European Conference on Optical Communications in Geneva, Switzerland, last week. With global markets currently in turmoil, it might seem a strange time to worry about the speed of trades, particularly when automated trading was implicated in the stock market's May 2010 "flash crash". But traders still want their computers to receive trading data and place orders instantaneously. And customers will go elsewhere if a rival is faster.

Send in the neutrinos!!"

Submission + - $400M cable to save 5ms for flash traders (popsci.com)

Submitted by

InterGuru

on Saturday April 16, 2011 @03:22PM

InterGuru writes: "I just read an article in Popular Science that almost made me sick to the stomach. The headline says it all "Pricey Transatlantic Cable Could Save Milliseconds, Millions by Speeding Data to Stock Traders".

Here is $400M being spent just to give flash traders a 5 ms advantage in trans-atlantic trading. It adds nothing to the economy, just lets the Wall Street Casino operators skim more money from the economy. I addition, it diverts talent from productive projects.

Never has Matt Taibbi's description of Goldman Sachs, and by extension, all the big banks, as "a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money" seem even more apt.

Bookwormhole.net over 30,000 links to published book reviews."

Submission + - I just turned Adblock off

Submitted by

InterGuru

on Thursday September 25, 2008 @09:21AM

InterGuru writes: "After three years of browsing with the Firefox extension, Adblock, I turned it off. This took some doing, as I enjoy the experience of browsing without annoying animated ads blinking at me.

I did not do it because I thought that blocking ads violates some social contract with the advertising industry. I did it because I felt that I was killing the goose that lays the golden eggs. Most of sites I read, including Slashdot, depend on ads for the revenue needed to continue publication.

We all hear how the "mainstream press" (MSM) is a dying anachronism in the face of blogging. Yet when you look at blogs, they are usually responding to a MSM story. In spite of record readership on the Net, the MSM is in real economic trouble as its paper version loses readership. Internet ads do not bring in the revenue that paper does, but it is the future revenue stream.

Well who cares! We all should. Few or no bloggers have the resources to send a reporter out for a few weeks to cover an in depth story, or for that matter, have a reporter sitting in on the city council meetings. If too many of us turn ads off, we will kill off the MSM even faster than it is dying.

I now grin and bear it when a blinking ad disturbs me. I even blink back at it.

Bookwormhole.net — Thousands of published book reviews."

Submission + - An IT lawsuit is better than a nuclear war

Submitted by

InterGuru

on Wednesday May 14, 2008 @01:47PM

InterGuru writes: " Strategy Page notes that China is producing knockoff copies of its diesel submarine.

Russia is getting more and more upset at what it sees as Chinese making unauthorized use of Russian military technology. The latest irritation is the new Chinese diesel electric sub design, the Type 39A, or Yuan class. They look just like the Russian Kilo class.

In retaliation China is threatening a lawsuit.

The Russian sub building organizations are not amused, and are warning China of legal action if Yuans are offered for export (and in direct completion with the Kilos.)

Perhaps we could sic some IT Lawyers on Al Quaeda for violating the business process patents of older terrorist groups."

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