Follow Slashdot stories on Twitter

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×
Image

Woman Tells State Judiciary Committee, "DoD Implanted A Microchip Inside Me" 222

The Georgia House Judiciary Committee took up a bill that would "prohibit requiring a person to be implanted with a microchip," and would make violating the ban a misdemeanor. Things started to get weird at the hearing when a woman who described herself as a resident of DeKalb County told the committee, "I'm also one of the people in Georgia who has a microchip." Not sure of what she was trying to say, she was allowed to continue and added, "Microchips are like little beepers. Just imagine, if you will, having a beeper in your rectum or genital area, the most sensitive area of your body. And your beeper numbers displayed on billboards throughout the city. All done without your permission." Further prodding revealed that the woman's co-workers would torture her by activating the chips with their cell phones and that the chips were implanted by "researchers with the federal government." The committee thanked the woman for her input, and later approved the bill.
Earth

Cooling the Planet With a Bubble Bath 219

cremeglace writes "A Harvard University physicist has come up with a new way to cool parts of the planet: pump vast swarms of tiny bubbles into the sea to increase its reflectivity and lower water temperatures. 'Since water covers most of the earth, don't dim the sun,' says the scientist, Russell Seitz, speaking from an international meeting on geoengineering research. 'Brighten the water.' From ScienceNOW: 'Computer simulations show that tiny bubbles could have a profound cooling effect. Using a model that simulates how light, water, and air interact, Seitz found that microbubbles could double the reflectivity of water at a concentration of only one part per million by volume. When Seitz plugged that data into a climate model, he found that the microbubble strategy could cool the planet by up to 3C. He has submitted a paper on the concept he calls “Bright Water" to the journal Climatic Change.'"
Image

Best Man Rigs Newlyweds' Bed To Tweet During Sex 272

When an UK man was asked to be the best man at a friend's wedding he agreed that he would not pull any pranks before or during the ceremony. Now the groom wishes he had extended the agreement to after the blessed occasion as well. The best man snuck into the newlyweds' house while they were away on their honeymoon and placed a pressure-sensitive device under their mattress. The device now automatically tweets when the couple have sex. The updates include the length of activity and how vigorous the act was on a scale of 1-10.

Comment No-Lag Performance Is Why We Buy Faster Computers (Score 1) 519

Most of us spend money to get computers that don't "get in the way" of our work with irritating lag. We spend hundreds of dollars for faster CPUs and more memory to avoid breaking the flow.

Wireless mice and keyboards add annoying delays several times per hour. My anecdotal experience is that Bluetooth is significantly worse than proprietary RF. Is it the protocol, or the drivers? The original poster is right - there is no good survey of this problem, and no explanation from the vendors. I'd expect them to compete on reducing this problem, because it far exceeds the "break the flow" delays I suffer from any other part of my system (except for Comcast!)

I have a Microsoft 8000 Bluetooth keyboard / mouse on my Macbook Pro, and I'm pretty sure I'd be better off with a corded keyboard and Logitech proprietary wireless mouse.

My interest in wireless keys & mouse is eliminating some wire-plugging every time I move my laptop between home & office. Now I think a USB hub is a better solution.

Power

Submission + - How Do I Protect 'Ground' From Lightening?

randyjparker writes: Daily thunderstorms are typical in Atlanta this time of year. Last week, lightning struck a giant pine in my backyard, stripping bark for 80 feet. All my gear is on surge protectors and AVR UPS units, none of which even tripped, but I still lost a cable modem, router, two ethernet switches and a Shuttle computer motherboard. All my data was recovered from backup, but this is the third time in ten years I've lost equipment to lightning. My theory is that the billion-volt / 40,000 amp strike brought the voltage of 'ground' up enough to kill gear.

House electrical Ground is wired to my copper plumbing, which enters the house 10 yards from the strike. My Comcast coax cable is directly grounded to the plumbing in two places to eliminate TV ghosting from a couple of nearby broadcast towers. Both ends of the Comcast link were killed (the circuit board traces on the phone pole trunk tap, and the aforementioned cable modem), leading me to suspect the surge came over the coax grounding and then traveled over the ethernet. Is this theory plausible? If it is, what can be done? Some sort of capacitor? (I realize no surge protector can stop an actual strike to the cable, but what seems to have happened all three times is that a nearby lightning strike momentarily increased the voltage of a few hundred tons of wet surface dirt which contains my copper grounding.)

Slashdot Top Deals

An Ada exception is when a routine gets in trouble and says 'Beam me up, Scotty'.

Working...