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Comment Michael Connelly - Harry Bosch Novels (Score 1) 647

by cosmicpossum (#38447728) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: What Do You Like To Read?
Michael Connelly knows how to write a police procedural that you can't put down. His main line of novels feature a hard boiled LA detective named Hieronymus 'Harry' Bosch. Bosch has his own code and is forever finding crooked cops. He has, literally, a love-hate relationship with the Feds - he has bedded at least two FBI agents, one of whom he married. Get the whole Connelly opus and you won't stop reading until you've been through them all.

Submission + - Virginia Tech Wins the 2010 Solar Decathlon (inhabitat.com) 3

Submitted by formaggio
formaggio writes: The winners to the 2010 Solar Decathlon were just announced minutes ago, and the winner is Virginia Tech for their solar-powered Lumenhaus. The Solar Decathlon is a design-build competition that pits engineering and architecture college teams against each other to see who can build the most energy-efficient solar house. Considering that German teams have triumphed at the U.S. Solar Decathlon for three years running now, this is a big deal and a great victory for the Virginia Tech team, who competed with the same house in last year's competition and were beaten out by a German team in 2009.
Transportation

Submission + - High Depreciation May Slow Electric Car Acceptance 1

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens
Hugh Pickens writes: "The NY Times reports that as cars like the Nissan LEAF, Coda Sedan and others become available for sale and lease, one question that may give electric car buyers cold feet is bubbling to the surface: How much will these next-gen vehicles be worth a few years down the road? According to a report from the UK’s Glass Guide, unless manufacturers properly address customer concerns regarding battery life and performance, the new breed of electric vehicles (EVs) soon to be launched will have residual values well below those of rival gasoline and diesel models with a typical electric vehicle retaining only 10 percent of its value after five years of ownership, compared to gas and diesel-fueled counterparts retaining 25 percent of their value in that time period. According to Andy Carroll, Managing Director at Glass's, the alarming rate of depreciation is a function of customer recognition that the typical EV battery will have a useful life of up to eight years and will cost thousands of dollars to replace. "Potential used EV buyers fear this cost, but the key issue is that buyers will assume that their specific battery will need replacing in the near future regardless of the manufacturers' predictions of battery life," says Carroll adding that manufacturers could address this problem by leasing the battery to users. "If the anticipated £8,000 cost of the battery in such a car were taken off the list price, and recovered instead through a long-term £100-per-month battery lease scheme, the retained value in monetary terms would make it one of the best performing used cars in its segment, rather than one of the worst.""
It's funny. Laugh.

What If They Turned Off the Internet? 511

Posted by timothy from the very-funny-now-where-is-slashdot dept.
theodp writes "It's the not-too-distant future. They've turned off the Internet. After the riots have settled down and the withdrawal symptoms have faded, how would you cope? Cracked.com asked readers to Photoshop what life would be like in an Internet-addicted society learning to cope without it. Better hope it never happens, or be prepared for dry-erase message boards, carrier pigeon-powered Twitter, block-long lines to get into adult video shops, door-to-door Rickrolling, Lolcats on Broadway, and $199.99 CDs."
Transportation

Gigantic Air Gun To Blast Cargo Into Orbit 384

Posted by timothy from the phwipt-phwipt dept.
Hugh Pickens writes: "The New Scientist reports that with a hat tip to Jules Verne's From the Earth to the Moon , physicist John Hunter has outlined the design of a gigantic gun that could slash the cost of putting cargo into orbit. At the Space Investment Summit in Boston last week, Hunter described the design for a 1.1-kilometer-long gun that he says could launch 450-kilogram payloads at 6 kilometers per second. A small rocket engine would then boost the projectile into low-Earth orbit. The gun would cost $500 million to build, says Hunter, but individual launch costs would be lower than current methods. 'We think it's at least a factor of 10 cheaper than anything else,' Hunter says. The gun is based on the SHARP (Super High Altitude Research Project) light gas gun Hunter helped to build in the 1990s while at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in California. With a barrel 47 meters long, it used compressed hydrogen gas to fire projectiles weighing a few kilograms at speeds of up to 3 kilometers per second."

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