Slashdot is powered by your submissions, so send in your scoop

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:Ban drive thru restaurants while you're at it (Score 1) 509

Actually many newer european cars have a start-stop-automatic (as soon as your car stops, the engine turns off; if you press the gas-pedal it turns on automatically), so there does not have to be any idling. IIRC this is not popular in the US because its savings would not be included in the official MPG ratings, but some manufacturer (can't remember which) is going to introduce it in the US soon.

Comment Re:Given how much oil it takes to make plastic.... (Score 2) 223

Hmm.. but in that case, the bottle would be made of less valuable components. Which would mean that the demand for the components required for a plastic bottle is lower than the demand for the other components, and thus plastic bottle are merely a by-product. So I wonder, would reducing the number of plastic bottle have any impact on the general oil consumption?

After all, even if there wouldn't be any plastic bottles anymore, the oil would still be needed because of the other components.

Comment Re:Given how much oil it takes to make plastic.... (Score 2) 223

"So your average plastic water bottle requires about 1/4 a litre of refined oil products to be produced."

I have no idea of plastic production, but it looks wrong to me: if oil costs about $40 per barrel (159l), 1/4 litre is about $0.05. I can't imaging a plastic bottle costing that much - I can buy a bottle of water in a supermarket for not much more than 5 cent. Am I missing something?

Comment Re:Hyperbole or stupidity (Score 5, Insightful) 571

Back in 1999, a teacher at my High School was injured because a kid thought a dry ice bomb in a trash can would be a "funny" prank. I don't know how much dry ice was placed in the soda bottles -- I suspect they were 2L bottles -- but he put several bottles of dry ice in different trash cans around the school:

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4179/is_19990402/ai_n11719980/

It's not mentioned in the article, but the teacher did suffer lacerations on his face -- an inch or two to either side, and he might have actually been blinded.

I don't see how you can not call it a bomb. It's a device that explodes. Improperly placed (or designed), and it can hurt innocent bystanders. Putting dry ice and water in a sealed bottle can *ONLY* result in an explosion. What else would you call it?

Submission + - Panasonic 'Home Batteries' Power Houses for a Week (nexus404.com)

tjansen writes: Panasonic has announced plans to create 'home batteries'. They are lithium-ion batteries large enough to power a house for a week, making energy sources such as solar and wind power more feasible. Also, you can buy energy when it is cheapest, and don't need to worry about power outages anymore.

Comment The real story... (Score 1) 91

The real story is the massive STFC spending cuts that impact their group. Those spending cuts were announced the same day, and are being blogged about by the same folks:

http://herschelmission.wordpress.com/2009/12/16/so-here-it-is-physics-doomsday/
http://herschelmission.wordpress.com/2009/12/16/blood-on-the-floor-for-uk-physicists/

20% cuts here, 15% cuts there, and soon enough you won't have enough money to fund anything at all.

Comment Re:So it's a fnacy nmae (Score 1) 1345

Same thing applied to me, some decades earlier; I learned to read, write and spell before kindergarten in order to be able to beat an old Atari game (Castle Hexagon).

most games don't require reading in order to figure out what to do next; with Castle Hexagon, you had to know what you had picked up, and you had to know the room to which it belonged.. it was fairly logical, but if you couldn't read the name of the item you were holding or the title of the room you were in, you wouldn't get far.

Comment Gigantic Building Projects (Score 2, Insightful) 296

Researchers (and sci-fi writers) always talk about things like gigantic space elevators and star-encompassing spheres; works that would take an entire world's focus (and several generations of dedicated work) to accomplish. I always figured that those were unaccomplishable dreams...

But then I read this story and got to thinking... Why not make a gigantic net and scoop up all that garbage?

Comment Re:The next WoW Expansion... (Score 2, Informative) 259

They've never said 100 is the max level. That statement is GENERALLY attributed to the fake "expansion list" that people keep linking to. Here's the original source for that list:
http://wow.allakhazam.com/forum.html?forum=21;mid=119012268058738816

It's fake. The 1st expansion, Burning Crusade went live in January 2007 -- but Wrath of the Lich King was announced (INCLUDING zone information) in August of that year. By September, all of that info was everywhere, including approximate level of the zones, preliminary notes about possible raid zones, etc. Basically, the list used readily available data based on RPG sourcebook material, in-game quests, and instruction manuals for previous Warcraft games.

Further, even if the list was legitimate: It makes no sense why a multi-billion dollar company would continue to base its video game's success or failure on a sole wordpad document transformed into a PDF.

Comment Re:Terrorists aren't stupid. (Score 3, Interesting) 285

SIGINT isn't just data collection -- it's also data distribution. Make the person you're listening to think they're being listened to by another group, or exchange information with an informant without them knowing who "you" are, and without them suspecting anything's wrong with the transaction.

I heard a story once [citation needed], where "we" were feeding a terrorist fake info to relay to his friends, and the terrorist gobbled it up and told his superiors... which then changed the location of some meeting, which resulted in them getting blown up (with relatively fewer civilian casualties).

Comment Maybe, but... (Score 1) 1079

Whether Calixte's guilty or not (and whether or not he's committed any crime) the warrant wasn't requested because of a scary demon -- it was because there's a strong connection between Calixte and a (hate crime?) e-mail that was sent to the entire student body, and (possibly) because Calixte has apparently got a history of suspicious (criminal) activity previously:

On 1/27/09, "_____ advised Officer Eng that Mr. Calixte has changed grades for students by accessing the Boston College computer system." and on 1/28/09, "Mr. Calixte was also a suspect in a stolen Boston College laptop computer report I investigated previously."

After the outing e-mail, "Mr. Escalante told me ... this IP address ... indicat[ed] the sender was on BC campus and was using a wired connection in Gabelli residence hall." further, that Calixte registered the computer name and info of the computer that was using the connection at the time. Additionally, they got info from GMail and Yahoo regarding how the e-mail was sent, including a screenshot of another site that also happened to have misc. info connecting the site visitor with Calixte.

Basically, it's not Linux that got this kid in trouble, it's his own stupidity. And he's supposedly a smart CS student, to boot. Where were his 7 proxies? :p

Slashdot Top Deals

All I ask is a chance to prove that money can't make me happy.

Working...