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Comment Two irrelevant statistical numbers (Score 1) 264

The post has two completely irrelevant numbers: 1. fires "about 17 every hour" (why the rate of fires in the whole country important? Many cars -> many fires per hour). 2. "one fire for every 33 million miles" - useless number without providing comparable stats for gasoline cars, and normalizing to the car age, adjusting for causes of fire, etc. C'mon editors and writers, don't be lazy bums - there is enough of this stupid garbage in "mainstream media".

Comment Re:Physical mechanism? (Score 1) 555

Do you have any information about the absolute heating caused? I dunno, but a 4W light bulb is still hot to the touch - not sure I'd want to poke my brain with a 1W heat source.

Here's a simple experiment: wrap you hand around your cellphone antennae and call someone. Do you feel ANY heat? Didn't think so.

There are several problems with your bulb analogy. 1) While human body is almost opaque to the infrared light (i.e. absorbs most of the heat from the bulb) it is almost transparent to radio waves (that's why you don't lose cell phone signal when in a crowd of people). 2) Only a small spot heats up from the bulb - spread the same heat over the whole hand and you'd barely feel it. Spread over the volume of your body and you won't feel anything.

Btw, photons from Bluetooth headset ~3 times more energetic than the ones from your cell phone (2.4GHz vs 850MHz) :) (Still negligible compared to the energy of photons at 300THz for visible light. Remember Herr Planck: E=h_bar*omega...).

Google

Submission + - YouTube debuts online video advertising strategy

Stony Stevenson writes: YouTube is making its biggest push into video advertising on its Internet site, a key strategy by owner Google to capture an even greater share of Web marketing budgets.

On Wednesday, YouTube will launch a way to link video clips with advertising it says makes sense contextually, with the aim of spurring viewers to seek more information. The company found that 73 percent of Web users who were polled about the advertising said they didn't mind commercial messages as long as the site's entertainment remained free. Some 67 percent said the ads did not interfere with their use of YouTube.

What percentage of Slashdotters care?
Sun Microsystems

Submission + - Sun Enters the Commodity Silicon Business (sun.com)

Samrobb writes: According to Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz, Sun has decided to release its UltraSPARC T2 processor under the GPL. According to Schwartz, "We're announcing the fastest microprocessor we've ever shipped this week — delivering 89.6 Ghz of parallel computing power on a single chip — running standard Java applications and open source OS's. Simultaneously, we've said we're entering the commodity marketplace, and opening the chip up to our competition... To add fuel to the fire, the blueprints for our UltraSPARC T2... the core design files and test suites, will be available to the open source community, via its most popular license: the GPL."
KDE

Submission + - KDE 4.0 Beta 1 Released (kde.org)

An anonymous reader writes: August 2, 2007 (The INTERNET). The KDE Community is happy to announce the immediate availability of the first Beta release for KDE 4.0. This release marks the beginning of the integration process which will bring the powerful new technologies included in the now frozen KDE 4 libraries to the applications. Almost two months after the foundations of KDE 4 have been laid with the first alpha, KDE enters the stage of a full freeze of the library interface. From now on, the applications will focus on integrating the new technology refined during the last months, and the library developers will try to fix all bugs found during this process. No new applications will enter the official KDE modules and usability and accessibility work is of course an ongoing process. In the following weeks KDE developers will be able to add features to their applications until the next beta is released and the application features will be frozen as well.

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