Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×

Comment Sorry, Rail still not happening (Score 4, Insightful) 897

by glyn.phillips (#26238641) Attached to: Can the Auto Industry Retool Itself To Build Rails?

Rail has been a popular environmentalist cure for traffic, pollution and fossil fuel use since at least the Arab oil embargo of 1972.

The issues which have prevented its universal adoption across the United States are still here.

  1. Legal costs
  2. Right-of-way acquisition costs
  3. Construction costs
  4. Traffic Disruption due to construction (an intangible but real cost)
  5. Operating costs
  6. Maintenance costs
  7. Americans still want the freedom that cars give them.

Don't hold your breath on rail.

Comment Re:SUVs (Score 4, Insightful) 897

by glyn.phillips (#26238547) Attached to: Can the Auto Industry Retool Itself To Build Rails?
Detroit didn't come up with SUVs to dupe anybody. SUVs were popular because of their versatility, perceived sturdiness and their status.

The Big 3 have labor costs about three times higher than other auto makers in America. They also pay pension and health care benefits for about twice as many people as are currently working. In order to make a profit they had to sell large high-priced cars.

The high gas prices scared a lot of people away from SUVs for now, but what Americans want in their cars has not changed.

First of all, the automobile represents freedom. Freedom to go where you want, when you want. You are not tied to mass transit schedules and routes.

Americans still want cars that are status symbols. Even those who buy hybrids do so to show how much they care about the environment.

Americans want cars that are safe and useful. A family of five wants a car that can comfortably haul the family plus a couple of friends plus their stuff.
The Internet

China Hijacks Popular BitTorrent Sites 174

Posted by timothy from the state-is-still-not-your-friend dept.
frogger writes "China is not new to censoring the Internet, but up until now, BitTorrent sites have never been blocked. Recently, however, several reports came in from China indicating that popular BitTorrent sites such as Mininova, isoHunt and The Pirate Bay had been hijacked. The sites became inaccessible, instead redirecting to the leading Chinese search engine Baidu."
Biotech

Team Builds Viruses To Combat Harmful "Biofilms" 108

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the who-eats-the-eaters dept.
Scientists from MIT and Boston University are creating viruses that will wipe out "biofilms" that contain harmful bacteria on surfaces of the human body and industrial or medical devices. "Bacterial biofilms can form almost anywhere, even on your teeth if you don't brush for a day or two. When they accumulate in hard to reach places such as the insides of food processing machines or medical catheters, however, they become persistent sources of infection. These bacteria excrete a variety of proteins, polysaccharides, and nucleic acids that together with other accumulating materials form an extracellular matrix, or in Lu's words, a "slimy layer," that encases the bacteria. Traditional remedies such as antibiotics are not as effective on these bacterial biofilms as they are on free-floating bacteria. In some cases, antibiotics even encourage bacterial biofilms to form."
Google

Google Maps Shows Chinese Nuclear Sub Prototype 339

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the pants-meet-ankles dept.
mytrip writes "An image of what could be one of China's new nuclear ballistic missile submarines is available on the Google Maps and Google Earth satellite-image site, a defense blogger claimed Tuesday. The satellite picture was discovered by Hans Kristensen, director of the Nuclear Information Project for the Federation of American Scientists, and announced Tuesday on his blog. Kristensen believes the picture, taken by the Quickbird satellite late last year, reveals China's new Jin-class, or Type 094, nuclear ballistic missile sub. The new sub class is approximately 35 feet longer than its predecessor, the Xia-class, also known as Type 092, according to two images Kristensen compares on the blog. The Jin-class sub has an extended midsection that houses 12 missile tubes and part of the reactor compartment, Kristensen explains."
Encryption

Submission + - DRM Guru: New BluRay Won't Be Cracked For 10 Years (avsforum.com)

Submitted by
Mike
Mike writes: "Supposedly the latest issue of HMM contains a quote from Richard Doherty, a Media analyst with Envisioneering Group which claims that "BD+, unlike AACS, which suffered a partial hack last year, won't likely be breached for 10 years." Doherty also said, "and if so, the damage would affect one film and one player." Will the BD+ format really be impervious to hackers for a decade? I've got ten bucks that says it won't. Any takers?"
Databases

Submission + - PostgreSQL publishes first real benchmark (ittoolbox.com) 1

Submitted by
greg1104
greg1104 writes: "The current version of PostgreSQL now has its first real benchmark, a SPECjAppServer2004 submission from Sun Microsystems. The results required substantial tuning of many performance-related PostgreSQL parameters, some of which are set to extremely low values in the default configuration — a known issue that contributes to why many untuned PostgreSQL installations appear sluggish compared to its rivals. The speed result is close but slightly faster than an earlier Sun submission using MySQL 5 (with enough hardware differences to make a direct comparison of those results unfair), and comes close to keeping up with Oracle on similarly priced hardware — but with a large software savings. Having a published result on the level playing field of an industry-standard benchmark like SPECjAppServer2004, with documentation on all the tuning required to reach that performance level, should make PostgreSQL an easier sell to corporate customers who are wary of adopting open-source applications for their critical databases."
Google

Google to Acquire Postini 147

Posted by CmdrTaco from the must-be-a-monday dept.
Dynamoo writes "Google has announced that it is to acquire Postini, company best known for its corporate spam filtering and security service, but also active in Instant Messaging and compliance area. The deal is to purchase Postini for $625m in cash. The acquisition is slated to enhance Google's application portfolio, and Google will also acquire several very large Blue Chip customers that have previously eluded it."
Power

Submission + - PC Power Management, ACPI Explained In Detail

Submitted by DK
DK writes: Computer performance have increased at an amazing rate in recent years, and unfortunately so does power consumption. An ultimate gaming system equipped with a quad-core processor, two NVIDIA GeForce 8800 Ultra, 4 sticks of DDR2 memory and a few hard drives can easily consume 500W without doing anything! To reduce power wastage, a few industry standards have been developed to make our computers work more efficiently like APM and ACPI. ACPI is the successor of APM and is explained in detail in this article.
Google

Submission + - China's new ballistic-missile sub on Google Earth

Submitted by MsManhattan
MsManhattan writes: A rare public view of China's new ballistic-missile submarine is available on Google Earth, according to Hans Kristensen, a researcher at the Federation of American Scientists. The Chinese military typically keeps a low profile, by the image was captured by the commercial Quickbird satellite late last year. While some features of the sub are discernible from the photograph, such as the overall length, 'the picture was not clear enough to resolve a debate over whether the Jin-class submarine has tubes for 12 or 16 nuclear-tipped missiles,' Kristensen says.
Space

NASA Purchases $19M Russian Space Toilet 245

Posted by CmdrTaco from the i'd-poop-in-that dept.
Gary writes "NASA has paid $19 million for a Russian-built international space station toilet system. The toilet system, similar to the one already in use in the station's Zvezda Service Module, is scheduled to arrive at the space station in 2008 and will offer more privacy for a crew expected to double from three to six by 2009. The space station toilet physically resembles those used on Earth, except it has leg restraints and thigh bars to keep astronauts and cosmonauts from floating away. NASA says purchasing the multi million dollar toilet is a bargain compared to developing one from scratch."
Software

Submission + - Watching cities in 4D 1

Submitted by
Roland Piquepaille
Roland Piquepaille writes: "Computer scientists from the Georgia Institute of Technology and Microsoft Research have developed 4D Cities, a software that shows the evolution of a city over time. New Scientist writes that you can see a city change in four dimensions. So far, the team has only modeled Downtown Atlanta by scanning historical photos. The software automatically sorts these snapshots into date order and then builds an animated 3D model that shows changes. This application will be useful for architects, historians or town planners. Now the researchers want to develop models for other cities. Read more for additional references and a 4D map of Downtown Atlanta."
United States

Submission + - IRS Tracking Party Affiliation (thenewstribune.com) 1

Submitted by
cybermage
cybermage writes: "According to the News Tribune, the IRS is tracking the party affiliation of taxpayers in the over twenty states that require identification of party affiliation on voter registration forms. The IRS is using the voter registration data to try to locate tax cheats. Some in Congress are looking to take steps to have the IRS purge such information and put a halt to IRS plans to outsource collections until the issue is resolved."

Slashdot Top Deals

Scientists will study your brain to learn more about your distant cousin, Man.

Close