A Godfather - Slashdot User

Submission + - Droughts linked to global warming (wired.com)

Submitted by Layzej on Saturday October 29, 2011 @06:51AM

Layzej writes: Two new papers indicate that we are likely already seeing some of the predicted impacts of global warming, The first used Monte Carlo simulations to analyze how many new record events you expect to see in a time series with a trend. They applied the technique to the unprecedented Russian heat wave of July 2010, which killed 700 people and contributed to soaring wheat prices. According to the analysis, there’s an 80 percent chance that climate change was responsible. The authors describe the methods and how they improved on previous studies here. The second studied Wintertime droughts in the Mediterranean region. They found that 'the magnitude and frequency of the drying that has occurred is too great to be explained by natural variability alone. This is not encouraging news for a region that already experiences water stress, because it implies natural variability alone is unlikely to return the region’s climate to normal.'

Submission + - Quiet cellular antenna technology for SKA - world' (mybroadband.co.za)

Submitted by slash-sa on Friday October 28, 2011 @04:16PM

slash-sa writes: Two South Africans have given their home country a boost with its Square Kilometre Array (SKA) bid by inventing cellular antenna technology which reduces 'noisy' emissions from cellular base stations in the area. They reduced emissions by using an antenna based on phased-array principles, providing omnidirectional coverage but also blocking the RF transmissions along a single direction (that would correspond with the bearing of the SKA core site). The antenna has been tested and performs extremely well. Trialling measurements have shown that the RF signal levels at the proposed SKA core site can be reduced significantly, while at the same time, much of the original GSM coverage can be retained

Submission + - When Having the US Debt Paid Off was a Problem 4

Submitted by

Hugh Pickens writes

on Thursday October 27, 2011 @08:57PM

Hugh Pickens writes writes: "NPR reports that not so long ago, the prospect of a debt-free US was seen as a real possibility with the potential to upset the global financial system. As recently as 2000, the US was running a budget surplus, taking in more than it was spending every year and economists were projecting that the entire national debt could be paid off by 2012. So the government commissioned a secret report outlining the possible harmful consequences of retiring the debt completely. For one thing, paying off the national debt would mean the end of Treasury bonds, a pillar of the global economy. Treasury securities are crucially important to the world financial system in a number of ways: banks buy them as low-risk assets, the Fed uses them for executing monetary policy, and mortgage interest rates vary based on Treasury rates. "It was a huge issue ... for not just the US economy, but the global economy," says Diane Lim Rogers, an economist in the Clinton administration. In the end, Jason Seligman, the economist who wrote most of the report entitled "Life After Debt," (PDF) concluded it was a good idea to pay down the debt — but not to pay it off entirely. "There's such a thing as too much debt," says Seligman. "But also such a thing, perhaps, as too little.""

Comment The EUCD, EU enlargement and DVD region codes (Score 2, Interesting) 281

by A Godfather on Monday July 14, 2003 @12:28PM (#6434685) Attached to: DMCA-Alikes Sweep Europe

On May 1st 2004, the three Baltic countries, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, will join the European Union (EU). These countries, as former USSR republics, belong to DVD region 4, while all the other members in 2004 will belong to DVD region 2.

From the very beginning, the EU has been about the creation of a single market and the removal of internal barriers against the circulation of people, goods, services, and capital. So if a good is legally in the EU, it is free to move anywhere within the EU without any restriction.

What will happen with DVDs? Manufacturers of DVD players are supposed to sell their products only in the area covered by the applicable region code. The same goes for the disks themselves. Thus manufacturers will try to prevent the free circulation of goods (DVD and players) between the Baltic countries and the other members, because these countries are in another DVD region.

Isn't that likely to render the DVD region coding scheme simply illegal under the EU internal market rules, since it amounts to voluntary fragmentation of EU markets? And if so, won't the circumvention of the region code, illegal under the EUCD, be authorised because the region coding itself would be illegal?

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