lilmunkysguy - Slashdot User

Town Fights Cricket Plague With Led Zeppelin 190

Posted by samzenpus on Tuesday April 28, 2009 @02:11PM from the certain-mariah-carey-notes-make-dolphins-abduct-and-eat-small-children dept.

The residents of Tuscarora, Nevada are getting ready to fight the annual invasion of mormon crickets with the power of Rock-N-Roll. Trial and error has shown that the crickets don't think much of Led Zeppelin or the Rolling Stones. The residents circle the town with boomboxes at regular intervals to drive off the millions of crickets. "It is part of our arsenal. You'll wake up and there'll be one sitting on your forehead, looking at you." says Laura Moore, an unemployed college professor and one of the town's 13 residents. The crickets devastate crops, cause slicks on the highway and evidently love rap.

Comment Re:FireFox extensions (Score 5, Informative) 308

by lilmunkysguy on Sunday January 11, 2009 @04:43PM (#26409521) Attached to: Chrome On the Way For Mac and Linux

Have advertisers sued VCR manufacturers, Tivo, etc?

Yes.

NBC, ABC and CBS filed a lawsuit Wednesday in federal court in California against Sonicblue, claiming the ReplayTV 4000 would violate their copyrights by allowing users to distribute copies of programs over the Internet. The networks also complained that technology in the personal video recorder can automatically strip out commercials. In a joint statement, the networks said the device "violates the rights of copyright owners in unprecedented ways" and "deprives the copyright owners of the means by which they are paid for their creative content and thus reduces the incentive to create programming and make it available to the public."

http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/news/2001/11/48065

World's Oldest Marijuana Stash Found 108

Posted by samzenpus on Monday December 01, 2008 @07:19PM from the it's-a-little-dry dept.

jage2 writes "Researchers say they have located the world's oldest stash of marijuana in a tomb in a remote part of China. The cache of cannabis is about 2,700 years old and was clearly 'cultivated for psychoactive purposes,' rather than as fibre for clothing, or as food, says a research paper in the Journal of Experimental Botany. The 789 grams of dried cannabis was buried alongside a light-haired, blue-eyed Caucasian man, likely a shaman of the Gushi culture, near Turpan in northwestern China."

Submission + - Texas to Build $5B Wind-Power Project

Submitted by

Hugh Pickens

on Saturday July 19, 2008 @12:49PM

Hugh Pickens writes: "Texas regulators have approved a $4.93 billion wind-power transmission project to carry electricity from remote western parts of the state to major population centers like Dallas, Houston, Austin and San Antonio. The lines will handle 18,500 megawatts of power and will ease a bottleneck that has become a major obstacle to development of the wind-rich Texas Panhandle and other areas suitable for wind generation. The transmission problem is so acute in Texas that turbines are sometimes shut off even when the wind is blowing. "When the amount of generation exceeds the export capacity, you have to start turning off wind generators," said Hunter Armistead, head of the renewable energy division in North America at Babcock & Brown. "We've reached that point in West Texas." Other states may find the Texas model difficult to emulate. The state is unique in having its own electricity grid. All other states fall under the jurisdiction of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, adding an extra layer of bureaucracy to any transmission proposals. "We think it's going to lower costs, lower pollution and create jobs. We think that for every $3 invested, we'll probably see about an $8 reduction in electric costs," says Tom Smith, state director of the consumer advocacy organization Public Citizen."

Comment Re:OpenSource medicines (Score 1) 365

by lilmunkysguy on Friday July 11, 2008 @11:27PM (#24161433) Attached to: What Would Benefit Most By Adopting an Open-Source Development Method?

Maybe I'm wrong, but I thought most research is government funded...

Submission + - Diebold's GEMS Vote Tabulation Software on Trial (typepad.com)

Submitted by

IntegrityAZ

on Friday December 07, 2007 @10:07PM

IntegrityAZ writes: "The Pima County Democratic Party has sued Pima County for public records access to the GEMS database files used to count the votes in past and future elections. The Diebold GEMS software is built on the Microsoft Access database program, the security of which is fundamentally flawed in that it allows any operator to freely manipulate the vote tallies and possibly hide any trace of the exploit. Election integrity experts contend that the only way to ensure oversight over election workers is for all political parties to have access to the database files for forensic analysis following every election election. Uncontested trial testimony established that there is no certified vote tabulation software on the market that is without serious security flaws. Nearly all votes, regardless of the method of recording the vote, are now tabulated by computer, so the security flaws exposing the vote in Pima County to manipulation by elections insiders has applicability to nearly every jurisdiction in America."

Slashdot Top Deals