Peak oil isn't about quantity of oil, it's about rate of oil extraction. For example, Mexico's Cantarell field at its peak produced oil at a greater rate than the entire Canadian tar sands despite being around 0.1% of the size of what Canada has. We don't yet know whether the rate of production from this field will do anything at all to when peak oil happens.

It's not at all unusual for the 5v and 0v (Vcc and GND) lines to be in the middle of a DIP package (the Slashdot summary sort of implies it's an odd thing). It means the leads within the package are shorter for those lines, lowering parasitic inductance and capacitance for the power supply to the chip, generally you want the decoupling capacitors to be as close to the actual chip as possible so they can be as effective as possible as the power demands change. Putting the supply pins at opposite corners (like it's done on things like 14 pin 74-series standard logic) would very significantly lengthen the distance that the actual supply rails on the chip are from the decoupling capacitors.

The Z80 is still manufactured in classic form. It may be considered a trade secret and Faggin might not be at liberty to divulge anything about the inner workings of the chip without you signing an NDA.

As light passes by a sun it is subject to an asymmetric situation where the solar atmosphere is in a magnetice field closer to one pole than another, rotating and having a gradient both radially and with the azimuth. thus there's a strong symmetry breaking effect on this light. On average, for all light passing the sun it's an equal handed effect. But if your planet happens to be subject to light that cam from the left side of the sun versus the right, that light could have a net polarization.

this effect would likely be orders of magnitude greater than this weak force polarization effect.

All life we know about came from a single origin since all life is based on DNA, RNA and proteins. whatever the origin was it would have had left or right handed DNA and thus so did everything that followed. there's no reason to suppose the need for a bias for one or the other. one of them was going to win. it's like vhs and betamax.

don't need 16Megs. People on slashdot criticize apple for forcing you to buy features you don't need. Now you critize apple for making the base model something not geek worthy. they are offering what their customers need. Chances are the number of songs or photos you want to keep stored on your iphone at any time isn't geoing with time. and that's the majority of the space usage on most people's phones. With icloud and beats streaming that need is going to dramatically shrink as well. The only thing likely to really be a space hog is more tricked out games and things that use the greater pixels of the large phones. But as I said, at the moment it's photos and music that dominate the storage needs and those will be going down not up.

Yes alibaba is a theives market. Alibaba does little to root this out too. Moreover the entire china small items trade competiveness relys on the rediculous postage rates (low) that allows delivery in the US for a mere $1 worth of postage. Finally all the small vendors lie about the item in the postage to evade customs charges.

Amazon could make great noises and will.

On the other hand who owns Alibaba's 120 billion? Americans now. If the congress sicks their dogs on ALibaba it's the same as pilfering 120 billion from investors.

Meanwhile amazon has a PE nearing 1000 (who are they kidding?). AMazon's 1000 PE is justifed only on the basis of their growth rate not their earnings. If their growth is threatened (enter alibaba) their stock price crashes. if it crashes to a P/E ratio of 30 or 100 then 90% of the stockholder calue is whiped out. Gone. Not transfered. Gone.

So what's your poor bribed congressman to do. Act on alibaba's theivery to save Amazon, or not?

tough choice.

Alibaba's stock price over the next year will be a race between their growth in value, and the trees Amazon and E-bay fell in their path. I predict it goes up for 1/4 then down in response to regulatory pressure after the elections. THen eventually back up if their revenues grow,.

This is one of the most informative and insightful comments I've ever read on slashdot. thanks!

I love his Geraldine character.

Why not delegate them a third level domain? Your stuff on example.com, give your CDN control of cdn.example.com.

I was going to say the same thing. It's total rubbish in it's claims. Being just yet-another-linear combination of MiMo modes it provides no additional channel capacity. But there is the possibility that the demodulation/modulation methodology is easier to implement than other fast modulation schemes.

But ERM 2 is a pre-requisite of joining the euro, and there are no deadlines to join ERM 2, so Scotland could delay joining the Euro forever despite committing to adopt it by simply never joining ERM 2.

I don't think it will take as long as you expect to rejoin the EU (the UK will continue to exist on Friday if the vote is yes, it's at least a couple of years away for the first day of Scotland as a new sovereign nation in the event of a yes vote). The EU will make sure that Scotland is in by that deadline - for one, the Spanish fishing fleets won't tolerate being denied access to Scottish waters.

I don't see what the beef over immigration is -- it actually works both ways. There are about 1 million Britons living in Spain right now under the same rules.

What happens is this: older Britons who are more likely to be in poor health and a drain on the NHS, and who are frequently trying to dodge taxes move to Spain, and burden the Spanish economy (I know some of these people - they basically do everything they can to avoid paying any tax in Spain where they are consuming public services). Basically, economically inactive people who burden public services. In return, the immigrants we get from the EU are young, healthy, fit people who are eager to work and contribute, do not put a burden on the health service and contribute more than they take. A win-win situation.

The funniest thing I saw was a rant from a British person (in the Daily Fail of course) who had immigrated into Spain about how Spain was much better at keeping immigrants out than the UK...despite the fact that he himself was an immigrant into Spain!

While many plane enthusiasts lamented the exit of the DC-10 from passenger service, I did not.

That aircraft had an awful, awful 2-5-2 seat arrangement in economy. More often than not I ended up in the middle seat of that set of 5 and had to crawl over 2 people if I wanted to use the toilet in the middle of the night, and didn't get the compensation of a view out the window which at least makes up for it in aircraft with the 3-4-3 configuration). Inevitably, it would be a parent and a very noisy child occupying BOTH sides.

Good riddance, DC-10. You won't be missed.