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Comment Re:With the best will in the world... (Score 1) 486

> I read China is experimenting with ultracap vehicles. They can run for minutes between charges. The vehicles are buses, with a pantograph wire at each stop: They recharge in an even shorter time, while passengers are boarding.

--At first glance, that sounds outrageously fragile - especially for a public transportation system. Vagaries of rush-hour traffic delays (and accidents, rubberneckers, etc) aside, all you need is 1 recharge point to break down and you'd have a bunch of people stranded and pissed off - and the next bus would be in the same quandary. Busses are large enough to have a *gigantic* freakin' battery in the base.

Submission + - A Cheap, Ubiquitous Earthquake Warning System (ieee.org)

Submitted by Tekla Perry
Tekla Perry writes: Earthquake alert systems that give a 10 or 20 second warning of an impending temblor, enabling automatic systems to shut down and people to take cover, are hugely expensive to build and operate. (One estimate is $38.3 milllion for equipment to span California, and another $16.1 million annually to operate.) But a Palo Alto entrepreneur thinks he's got a way to sense earthquakes and provide alerts far more cheaply and with much greater resolution. And he's got money from the National Science Foundation to begin the first test of his system--covering the Bay Area from Santa Cruz to Napa and the cities of Hollister, Coalinga, and Parkfield. He starts that test next month.

Comment Re:Cripple Linux? (Score 1) 174

by Wolfrider (#49557663) Attached to: Intel 'Compute Stick' PC-Over-HDMI Dongle Launched, Tested

--You can turn endless scrolling off in your Preferences. Besides it's one of the stupidest ideas ever, once you scroll past something 99% of the time you'll never want to see it again (and if you do there's the "previous page" link, not to mention a lot of times the *same content* gets reposted by different followers) and it's uselessly taking up resources. 2GB of RAM should be _fine_ for web browsing, if people would only design their webpages a little smarter.

Submission + - Robots Step Into the Backbreaking Agricultural Work that Immigrants Won't Do

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: Ilan Brat reports at the WSJ that technological advances are making it possible for robots to handle the backbreaking job of gently plucking ripe strawberries from below deep-green leaves, just as the shrinking supply of available fruit pickers has made the technology more financially attractive. “It’s no longer a problem of how much does a strawberry harvester cost,” says Juan Bravo, inventor of Agrobot, the picking machine. “Now it’s about how much does it cost to leave a field unpicked, and that’s a lot more expensive.” The Agrobot costs about $100,000 and Bravo has a second, larger prototype in development. Other devices similarly are starting to assume delicate tasks in different parts of the fresh-produce industry, from planting vegetable seedlings to harvesting lettuce to transplanting roses. While farmers of corn and other commodity crops replaced most of their workers decades ago with giant combines, growers of produce and plants have largely stuck with human pickers—partly to avoid maladroit machines marring the blemish-free appearance of items that consumers see on store shelves. With workers in short supply, “the only way to get more out of the sunshine we have is to elevate the technology,” says Soren Bjorn.

American farmers have in recent years resorted to brought hundreds of thousands of workers in from Mexico on costly, temporary visas for such work. But the decades-old system needs to be replaced because “we don’t have the unlimited labor supply we once did,” says Rick Antle. "Americans themselves don't seem willing to take the harder farming jobs," says Charles Trauger, who has a farm in Nebraska. "Nobody's taking them. People want to live in the city instead of the farm. Hispanics who usually do that work are going to higher paying jobs in packing plants and other industrial areas." The labor shortage spurred Tanimura & Antle Fresh Foods, one of the country’s largest vegetable farmers, to buy a Spanish startup called Plant Tape, whose system transplants vegetable seedlings from greenhouse to field using strips of biodegradable material fed through a tractor-pulled planting device. “This is the least desirable job in the entire company,” says Becky Drumright. With machines, “there are no complaints whatsoever. The robots don’t have workers' compensation, they don’t take breaks.”

Submission + - New PCIe SSDs load games, apps as fast as old SATA drives

Submitted by crookedvulture
crookedvulture writes: Slashdot has covered a bunch of new PCI Express SSDs over the past month, and for good reason. The latest crop offers much higher sequential and random I/O rates than predecessors based on old-school Serial ATA interfaces. They're also compatible with new protocols, like NVM Express, which reduce overhead and improve scaling under demanding loads. As one might expect, these new PCIe drives destroy the competition in targeted benchmarks, hitting top speeds several times faster than even the best SATA SSDs can muster. The thing is, PCIe SSDs don't load games or common application data any faster than current incumbents—or even consumer-grade SSDs from five years ago. That's very different from the initial transition from mechanical to solid-state storage, where load times improved noticeably for just about everything. Servers and workstations can no doubt take advantage of the extra oomph that PCIe SSDs provide, but desktop users may struggle to find scenarios where PCIe SSDs offer palpable performance improvements over even budget-oriented SATA drives.

Submission + - Mandelbrot zooms now surpass the scale of the observable Universe

Submitted by StartsWithABang
StartsWithABang writes: You’re used to real numbers: that is, numbers that can be expressed as a decimal, even if it’s an arbitrarily long, non-repeating decimal. There are also complex numbers, which are numbers that have a real part and also an imaginary part. The imaginary part is just like the real part, but is also multiplied by i, or the square root of -1. It's a simple definition: the Mandelbrot set consists of every possible complex number, n, where the sequence n, n^2 + n, (n^2 + n)^2 + n, etc.—where each new term is the prior term, squared, plus n—does not go to either positive or negative infinity. The scale of zoom visualizations now goes well past the limits of the observable Universe, with no signs of loss of complexity at all.

Submission + - We the people petition to revoke Scientology's Tax exempt status (whitehouse.gov)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: There has been a lot of interest in the activities of the Church of Scientology recently, especially since the release of Alex Gibney's documentary "Going Clear". A petition against tax-exempt status for Scientology, has been started on the United States white house petition website. If it receives more than 100,000 signatures, it will qualify for an official white house response. Even slashdot has had its own run-ins with Scientology in the past. Has the time come for Scientology go "clear"?

Submission + - US Gov Investigating Highly Sophisticated Russian Hack Of White House (cnn.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The FBI, US Secret Service, and US intelligence agencies are investigating a highly sophisticated hack of White House systems that support the executive office of the President. The attack leveraged the existing compromise of the US State Department network which may still be unresolved, and raises further questions about Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server for her official responsibilities. The attack on the White House is thought to have begun with a phishing email attack. The attack was routed through computers around the world, but signs point to hackers working for the Russian government. Although the systems compromised were not classified they contained data considered to be highly sensitive, including detailed information on President Obama's schedule. US officials have been surprised by the aggressiveness of Russian hackers in recent months. Two months ago Director of National Intelligence James Clapper told a Senate committee that the "Russian cyberthreat is more severe than we have previously assessed." This comes at a time when Russia is increasing flexing its military muscle by supporting separatists in Ukraine, more aggressive probes by Russian bombers and fighter jets along the borders of Baltic nations, the UK, and US, and President Putin's recent revelation that he was willing to order Russia's nuclear combat forces to alert to ensure the success of Russia's covert invasion and annexation of Ukraine's Crimea region.

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