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Comment Re:watching commercials (Score 1) 297

by Dimitrii (#29955470) Attached to: DVRs Help Some TV Shows Improve Ratings

And yet if you had no pause button and needed to take a longer bathroom break you'd be SOL. So trying the "pause" button, and you can stop far a break for however long you need.

I like breaks where natural breaks happen. Sure, if the phone rings or someone is at the door I stop where I am. But otherwise I will take breaks at a commercial.

I have been known to hit the slow button at the beginning of a break to leave the room. That way I have much longer than the break and I am not burning anything into my screen. A few times I have gotten into a conversation and it has even gone into the show. But not so far that a few presses of the 8 seconds back button on my Tivo won't set me up.
Earth

Submission + - Green Cement Absorbs Carbon

Submitted by
Peace Corps Online
Peace Corps Online writes: "Concrete accounts for more than 5 percent of human-caused carbon-dioxide emissions annually, mostly because cement, the active ingredient in concrete, is made by baking limestone and clay powders under intense heat that is generally produced by the burning of fossil fuels. Now Scientific American reports that British start-up company Novacem has developed a "carbon-negative" cement that absorbs more carbon dioxide over its life cycle than it emits. The trick is to make cement from magnesium silicates rather than calcium carbonate, or limestone, since this material does not emit CO2 in manufacture and absorbs the greenhouse gas as it ages. "The building and construction industry knows it has got to do radical things to reduce its carbon footprint and cement companies understand there is not a lot they can do without a technology breakthrough," says Novacem Chairman Stuart Evans. Novacem estimates that for every ton of Portland cement replaced by its product, around three-quarters of a ton of CO2 is saved, turning the cement industry into a big emitter to a big absorber of carbon. Major cement makers have been working hard to reduce CO2 emissions by investing in modern kilns and using as little carbon-heavy fuel as possible, but reductions to date have been limited. Novacem has raised $1.7 M to start a pilot plant that should be up and running in northern England in 2011."

Comment Re:Ya I would compare it to long division (Score 1) 731

by Dimitrii (#27774785) Attached to: Old-School Coding Techniques You May Not Miss

Regardless of if you are in a math heavy career or not, you aren't going to waste your time doing it by hand, you'll use a calculator which is faster and more accurate.

Well, strictly not if that calculator gives you decimals instead of a remainder besides the whole number and that number has to be carried over elsewhere.

Or you need a better calculator or learn to better use the one you have. Even the MS Calculator has an Int function and a memory.

big/little = big / little MS = - Int = * MR =

The superior RPN is left to others.

Comment Re:Well... (Score 2, Interesting) 481

by Dimitrii (#27698077) Attached to: Opting Out Increases Spam?

Also, your email address increases in value when being sold inbetween spammers. Effectively, you make the A-list among spammers.

More like B-list. A-list is for those saps who actually buy the stuff. I've helped someone whose mother fell for a "charity" that ended up with more spam that I thought an individual could get. It even got to be a hassle dealing with tons of snail mail.
Networking

The Other Side of the Sprint Vs. Cogent Depeering 174

Posted by kdawson from the working-it-out dept.
Swoolley writes "A month back this community discussed the Sprint vs. Cogent depeering. Now a story I wrote for Forbes.com tells the inside story of the fight, based on the lawsuits the two companies filed against each other in Virginia state court. For once, thanks to those suits, the public gets to see the details of a confidential peering agreement between two of the Internet's largest autonomous systems, as well as the circumstances leading up to the depeering. (Which company is in the right? Read the facts and decide for yourself.) While some people have argued that the depeering is reason for more government regulation, the Forbes story makes the case that details of the recent Cogent vs. Sprint fight argue for exactly the opposite: keeping the Internet backbones free of government meddling."

Comment Re:INEXPENSIVE (Score 1) 372

by Dimitrii (#25733855) Attached to: Gadgets For a Budding Geek?

For a small one look for a violet wand, an old quack medical device that is a mini handheld tesla coil. They are still being made for "sensation enthusiasts" so most sites that sell them are very NSFW. Prices are all over the place, but can be cheap at rummage sales and flea markets. The older/cheaper ones had a wax core and would overheat with extended use the newer designs can run for very long times.

For building: look up plans and scrounge. Or go the route we went through and get your company to sponsor you for the fall festival haunted house.

 

Comment Re:Anyone ever have to carry 3 or more pagers? (Score 1) 584

by Dimitrii (#25720725) Attached to: Where Have All the Pagers Gone?

For a short while we had a rotating on call pager as well as our personal work pager. We changed companies on the personal ones while I had the on call. So I had 3 for a week of the overlap. Since I kept my pager on a silver chain leash (they leash me I leash it) I would just clip the other(s) to the chain.

I pulled the whole lot out to check the time at a SCA meeting and got a lot of questions about my collection. I told them I was taking donations, and ended up with 9 on the chain for the rest of the meeting. Wish I got a photo. None got a page while I had them.
Image

Little Hitler Screenshot-sm 5

Posted by samzenpus from the from-the-baby-dictator-collection dept.
I know he's one of the worst dictators in history but just look how cute those cheeks are.
Power

Home Wind-Power Turbines Make Headway 163

Posted by samzenpus from the the-answer-is-blowing-in-the-wind dept.
Pickens writes "Wind turbines, once used primarily for farms and rural houses far from electrical service, are becoming more common in heavily populated residential areas as homeowners are attracted to ease of use, financial incentives and low environmental effects. Experts on renewable energy say a convergence of factors, political, technical and ecological, is causing a surge in the use of residential wind turbines, especially in the Northeast and California. "Back in the early days, off-grid electrical generation was pursued mostly by hippies and rednecks, usually in isolated, rural areas," said Joe Schwartz, editor of Home Power magazine. "Now, it's a lot more mainstream." Some of the new "plug and play" systems can be plugged directly into a circuit in the home electrical panel and homeowners can use energy from the wind turbine or the power company without taking action. Schwartz says that even with the economic benefits, it can take 20 years to pay back the installation cost. "This isn't about people putting turbines in to lower their electric bills as much as it is about people voting with their dollars to help the environment in some small way," he said."
The Media

Submission + - Polaroid done with instant film by end of 2008 (nytimes.com) 3

Submitted by
joe_n_bloe
joe_n_bloe writes: "Polaroid will cease production of instant film by the end of 2008.

The company, which stopped making instant cameras for consumers a year ago and for commercial use a year before that, said today that as soon as it had enough instant film manufactured to last it through 2009, it would stop making that, too. Three plants that make large-format instant film will close by the end of the quarter, and two that make consumer film packets will be shut by the end of the year, Bloomberg News reports.
This makes me sad, not because people won't be able to use Polaroid to take "instant" photos any longer, but because all of the other artistically important things you can do with Polaroid film will become more expensive (as stocks gradually run out) and, perhaps, eventually come to an end. To me, it's like discontinuing oil paint because you have painting tools in Photoshop."
The Courts

Submission + - TiVO Patent Upheld, Dish May Have to Disable DVR (arstechnica.com) 1

Submitted by
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes: "The US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit upheld a ruling by a lower court that Dish Network DVRs infringe upon TiVO's patent on a 'multimedia time warping system'. According to some analysts, this could not only make Dish liable for damages, it could force them to shut down their DVR service, harming their customers. The patent in question has already been reexamined once and the ruling on appeal (PDF) was unanimous."

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