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Comment: Re:Earth-like lights (Score 1) 90

by CyberBill (#42427693) Attached to: Odds Favor Discovery of Earth-Like Exoplanet in 2013

It doesn't make much of a difference to Kepler.

Kepler measures the light level over time, and uses the amount of obstructed time to make most of it's calculations. It does also use the total light output difference to determine the size of the planet (really the ratio of the size of the planet to the size of the star) - but the error bars are pretty big anyway, way more than the total light output of dark side of the Earth.

The only way that Kepler would miss the planet all together was if the alien civilization made their planet put out as much light as their star.... Not very likely. An advanced civilization might want to make their planet as bright as daylight all the time, but that would be much less bright than the star.

Comment: Remote Desktop (Score 3, Insightful) 386

by CyberBill (#40422963) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: No-Install Programming At Work?

Use a web-based (GoToMyPc.com?) or pre-installed remote administration app (Windows Remote Desktop? maybe VNC?) - or install RealVNC and use it's web app. Then control your home PC and run whatever IDE and language you prefer. I'd recommend Visual Studio Express and C# or C/C++, but that's just personal preference.

Comment: Re:I must be misunderstanding (Score 3, Insightful) 162

by CyberBill (#38287210) Attached to: Gas Powered Fuel Cell Could Help EV Range Anxiety

You're not comparing apples to apples.

First of all, you're ignoring the amount of energy required to import and refine the gasoline. I've heard estimates as high as 8kWh per gallon for refining. Most of the power plants in the country use coal, which doesn't have an energy intensive refining process.

Secondly, you're ignoring the fact that 40% of electric vehicle owners have solar panels. This negates that pesky coal power plant and its transmission deficiencies.

If you compare the efficiency of the vehicle itself, when you put electricity into an EV, it is 85%+ efficient. If you put gasoline into a car, it is 25% efficient (max). With a gasoline car, no matter what technology comes out, that vehicle will never be more than 25% efficient. With an EV, if you want to have a green car, you can buy solar panels and charge your car that way. Or you can live in an area with wind, solar, geothermal, or nuclear sources (Southern California) and offset pollution that way. Or you can join a program with your electricity provider, and pay a little extra, and get a higher percentage of your electricity from renewable sources.

Piracy

Music Industry Pushing For BT To Block Pirate Bay 175

Posted by timothy
from the dear-sirs-it's-about-these-pirates dept.
First time accepted submitter mariocki writes "British music industry body BPI has requested BT block access to Pirate Bay. In response, BT say they will only do so if they receive a court order. But after BT recently lost a court case forcing them to block Newzbin, it looks like it's a case of when — not if — this will happen."

Comment: Re:50 mile range may not be the end of the world (Score 3, Interesting) 344

by CyberBill (#36647874) Attached to: Toyota Scion IQ Electric Car To Launch In 2012

In California, you could buy this car and get $5,000 state and $7,500 federal tax credits - lowering the cost of the car by $12,500. The standard gas version of this car is looking to run ~$16,000... well equipped probably $20k. So long as this is in the same ballpark, you -could- be driving an EV for under $10k, and that is a steal for a brand new car.

Comment: Re:Watch for Hidden Warming (Score 3, Informative) 569

by CyberBill (#36442716) Attached to: Big Drop In Solar Activity Could Cool Earth

Local solar astronomer here - Current global warming trend is definitely not Sun driven. We went through a prolonged period of solar inactivity over the last 5 years and what do you know, temperatures kept going up. We also monitor the Sun in every conceivable wavelength and from multiple angles, so it would be pretty hard to have some significant amount of energy hitting us that we don't know about.

Comment: I wish he wouldn't have admitted it immediately (Score 4, Insightful) 112

by CyberBill (#34600698) Attached to: Exposing the Link Between Cell Phones and Fertility

This guy should have let the "honeypot" article sit around and see what happens first, rather than having the explanation article AND have it be posted on slashdot. Doing this interferes with the experiment by making it less likely to be picked up - anyone who reads the slashdot article (or the article it links to) first will not believe and propagate the honeypot article.

Comment: Re:Attempt at justifying religion again? (Score 3, Informative) 277

by CyberBill (#34519392) Attached to: A Lost Civilization Beneath the Persian Gulf?

There was not a single female ("Eve") alive at that time, there were at least thousands of females, and those females were all reproducing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitochondrial_Eve

This image explains it pretty well:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:MatrilinealAncestor.PNG

Comment: Re:Fellatio Witness (Score 1) 215

by CyberBill (#33307808) Attached to: How Statistics Can Foul the Meaning of DNA Evidence

I was thinking the exact same thing!

Its not like they randomly selected this guy off the street, swabbed his johnson, and said "This might be the rapist!"

They must have already had pretty substantial evidence to be able to get him, so really the low probability doesn't matter, because 1/13 means that 12/13 chance it would have cleared him by finding someone else's spit on his stick. The DNA evidence still makes the case against him stronger.

GUILTY!

All generalizations are false, including this one. -- Mark Twain

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