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Comment Re:Better Idea (Score 1) 227

by tomhath (#49367519) Attached to: Nation's Biggest Nuclear Firm Makes a Play For Carbon Credit Cash

The problem with your argument is that the alternative to generating electricity with fossil fuel isn't growing trees. We still need to generate electricity.

What carbon credits do is tax the polluter and reward the non-polluter. The non-polluting alternative becomes a more cost effective way to generate the electricity we need.

Submission + - Secret Service Plans New Fence, Full Scale White House Replica, But No Moat

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: The NYT reports that the Secret Service is recruiting some of its best athletes to serve as pretend fence jumpers at a rural training ground outside Washington in a program to develop a new fence around the White House that will keep intruders out without looking like a prison. Secret Service officials acknowledge that they cannot make the fence foolproof; that would require an aesthetically unacceptable and politically incorrect barrier. Prison or Soviet-style design is out, and so is anything that could hurt visitors, like sharp edges or protuberances. Instead, the goal is to deter climbers or at least delay them so that officers and attack dogs have a few more seconds to apprehend them. In addition, there might be alterations to the White House grounds but no moat, as recently suggested by Representative Steve Cohen of Tennessee. “When I hear moat, I think medieval times,” says William Callahan, assistant director for the office of protective operation at the Secret Service.

The Times also reports that the Secret Service wants to spend $8 million to build a detailed replica of the White House in Beltsville, Maryland to aid in training officers and agents to protect the real thing. “Right now, we train on a parking lot, basically,” says Joseph P. Clancy, the director of the Secret Service. “We put up a makeshift fence and walk off the distance between the fence at the White House and the actual house itself. We don’t have the bushes, we don’t have the fountains, we don’t get a realistic look at the White House.” The proposed replica would provide what Clancy describes as a “more realistic environment, conducive to scenario-based training exercises,” for instructing those who must protect the president’s home. It would mimic the facade of the White House residence, the East and West Wings, guard booths, and the surrounding grounds and roads. The request comes six months after an intruder scaled a wrought-iron fence around the White House and ran through an unlocked front door of the residence and into the East Room before officers tackled him.

Submission + - Nuclear firm makes a play for carbon credit cash (savannahnow.com)

Submitted by tomhath
tomhath writes: "The biggest player in the beleaguered nuclear power industry wants a place alongside solar, wind and hydroelectric power collecting extra money for producing carbon-free electricity...Exelon Corp., operator of the largest fleet of U.S. nuclear plants, says it could have to close three of them if Illinois rejects the company’s pitch to let it recoup more from consumers since the plants do not produce greenhouse gases...Exelon and other around-the-clock plants sometimes take losses when wind turbines produce too much electricity for the system...Under the system, electric suppliers would have to buy credits from carbon-free energy producers. Exelon says the plan would benefit nuclear plants, hydroelectric dams, and other solar and wind projects."

Submission + - Eyedrops provide Night vision to see up to 50 meters in Darkness.

Submitted by rtoz
rtoz writes: A group of scientists in California have successfully created eye drops that temporarily enable night vision.

They use mixture of Insulin and a chemical known as "Ce6" (Chlorin e6) as eye drop for getting the night vision. It allows the user to view the objects clearly up to 50 meters in darkness.

This chemical "Ce6" is found in some deep-sea fish and is often used to treat cancer and night blindness.

The Ce6 solution will start work in as little as one hour after getting injected into eyes using micropippette. And the Night vision effect will be lasting for “many hours” afterwards, and the test subject's eyesight will become normal the next day.

The organisation "Science for the Masses" has released a paper that detailed the experiment in their website.

Submission + - Final Moments Inside Cockpit Are Heard But Not Seen

Submitted by jones_supa
jones_supa writes: There's no video footage from inside the cockpit of the Germanwings flight that left 150 people dead — nor is such footage recorded from any other commercial airline crash in recent years. Unlike many other vehicles operating with heightened safety concerns, airline cockpits don't come with video surveillance. The reason, in part, is that airline pilots and their unions have argued vigorously against what they see as an invasion of privacy that would not improve aviation safety. The long debate on whether airplane cockpits in the U.S. should be equipped with cameras dates back at least 15 years, when the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) first pushed regulators require video monitoring following what the agency called "several accidents involving a lack of information regarding crewmember actions and the flight deck environment". The latest NTSB recommendation for a cockpit image system came in January 2015. Should video streams captured inside the plane become a standard part of aviation safety measures?

Submission + - Intel Finally Has a Challenger in the Server Market: IBM (itworld.com)

Submitted by itwbennett
itwbennett writes: With AMD's fade out from the server market and the rapid decline of RISC systems, Intel has stood atop the server market all by itself. But now IBM, through its OpenPOWER Foundation, could give Intel and its server OEMs a real fight in China, which is a massive server market. As the investor group Motley Fool notes, OpenPOWER is a threat to Intel in the Chinese server market because the government has been actively pushing homegrown solutions over foreign technology, and many of the Foundation members like Tyan are from China.

Submission + - Newspapers Use Special HTML Tags to Suppress Ads During Tragedies

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: Lily Hay Newman reports that when big news stories evolve into tragedies and people are flocking to read the latest bulletins online, many major newspapers have measures in place so there isn't a dancing Geico newt competing with dire news. The NYT confirmed that the site has a manual switch that can put individual articles in "sensitivity" mode. The settings seem to be either standard, "noads," or finally "tragedy," depending on the content of the story. In the case of Germanwings Flight 4U 9525, the Times eventually upgraded to tragedy. "It’s interesting in part because it’s almost an acknowledgement that ads are invasive and uncomfortable," says Parker Higgins referring to the meta tag: meta property="ad_sensitivity" content="noads". "There are no Google results for the tag, so it looks like it hasn’t been documented," says Parker, "but it seems like a pretty low-tech way to keep possibly insensitive ads off a very sensitive story—an admirable effort." After all, the Internet is filled with lists of unfortunate ad placements, and the worst ones are probably upbeat ads intruding on solemn moments. "In these types of tragedy cases, it’s an editorial decision that we make," says a spokeswoman for CNN Digital.

Comment Preselection before STEM (Score 1) 407

by tomhath (#49353089) Attached to: Millennial Tech Workers Losing Ground In US

Those in the 90th percentile (i.e., the top-scoring) actually scored lower than top-scoring millennials in 15 of the 22 studied countries

In most countries the filter of students who get into STEM programs in the first place is much stricter and earlier than in the US. So it wouldn't surprise me that the US score is diluted. It's a US tradition to give everyone the opportunity to succeed or fail.

Submission + - Details Emerge on Intel's New 60+ Core Chip for High-End Servers (theregister.co.uk)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: As Timothy Prickett-Morgan reveals over at our sister site The Platform, Knights Landing's Silvermont Atom core will have all the instructions of a Broadwell core except for the closed-for-repairs TSX transactional memory feature.
Chipzilla is still holding to its 3 teraflops target for Knights Landing, and for single-precision floating point it's now touting 6 teraflops

Submission + - Facebook Sued For Alleged Theft of Data Center Design (itworld.com)

Submitted by itwbennett
itwbennett writes: British engineering company BladeRoom Group says it contacted Facebook in 2011 about using its technique, which involves constructing data centers in a modular fashion from pre-fabricated parts. What happened next isn’t clear, since much of the public version of BRG’s lawsuit is redacted. But it claims Facebook ended up stealing its ideas and using them to build part of a data center in Lulea, Sweden, that opened last year. 'Facebook’s misdeeds might never have come to light had it decided that simply stealing BRG’s intellectual property was enough,' the company said in its lawsuit, filed Monday at the federal district court in San Jose, California. 'Instead, Facebook went further when it decided to encourage and induce others to use BRG’s intellectual property though an initiative created by Facebook called the ‘Open Compute Project’.'

Comment Niagra Falls (Score 1) 317

by tomhath (#49320543) Attached to: Costa Rica Goes 75 Days Powering Itself Using Only Renewable Energy
For those who keep asking why we can't store water during times of low electrical demand and use it during high, take a look at how the Lewiston Pump-Generating Plant at Niagra Falls does exactly that. Generates massive amounts of electricity during the peak load times. Really an awesome bit of engineering.

At night, a substantial fraction (600,000 US gallons (2,300 m3) per second) of the water in the Niagara River is diverted to the forebay by two 700-foot (210 m) tunnels. Electricity generated in the Moses plant is used to power the pumps to push water into the upper reservoir behind the Lewiston Dam. The water is pumped at night because the demand for electricity is much lower than during the day. In addition to the lower demand for electricity at night, less water can be diverted from the river during the day because of the desire to preserve the appearance of the falls. During the following day, when electrical demand is high, water is released from the upper reservoir through the pump-generators in the Lewiston Dam. The water then flows into the forebay, where it falls through the turbines of the Moses plant. Some would say that the water is "used twice".

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