Comment Not Enough Red Ballons (Score 4, Funny) 252
There should have been 99.
Comment Re:Some More Numbers (Score 2, Insightful) 1137
You appear to have forgotten to convert between dollars and cents.
0.85 cents x 60000 miles = 51000 cents = $510
Which isn't overly high for a set of tires.
BYU Prof. Says University Classrooms Will Be "Irrelevant" By 2020 469
dragoncortez writes "According to this Deseret News article, University classrooms will be obsolete by 2020. BYU professor David Wiley envisions a world where students listen to lectures on iPods, and those lectures are also available online to everyone anywhere for free. Course materials are shared between universities, science labs are virtual, and digital textbooks are free. He says, 'Higher education doesn't reflect the life that students are living ... today's colleges are typically tethered, isolated, generic, and closed.' In the world according to Wiley, universities would still make money, because they have a marketable commodity: to get college credits and a diploma, you'd have to be a paying customer. Wiley helped start Flat World Knowledge, which creates peer-reviewed textbooks that can be downloaded for free, or bought as paperbacks for $30."
CFLs Causing Utility Woes 859
dacut writes "We've seen compact fluorescent lamps start to take over shelf space at the local hardware store. Replacing a 60 watt incandescent with a 13 watt CFL seems like a great savings, though many consumers are disappointed with the slow warm-up times, lower-than-advertised lifetimes, and hassles of disposing the mercury-containing bulbs. Now EDN reports they may use more energy than claimed due to their poor power factor. Mike Grather, of Lumenaire Testing Laboratory, 'checked the power factor for the CFLs and found they ranged from .45 to .50. Their "real" load was about twice that implied by their wattage.' The good news: you're only billed for the 13 watts of real power used. The bad news: the utilities have to generate the equivalent of 28 watts (that is, 28 VA of apparent power for you EEs out there) to light that bulb. Until they fix these issues, I'll hold on to my incandescents and carbon arc lamps, thanks."
Comment Re:Slashdot achievements (Score 1) 1582
Personally, I don't have a problem with it.
Comment Re:$40 billion? (Score 2, Informative) 290
Who do you think builds the transceivers now?
Despite the somewhat high cost of the avionics, the real expense is the ground stations and the infrastructure to process all the data.
