Cartzca - Slashdot User

1,500-Ship Fleet Proposed To Fight Climate Change 692

Posted by timothy on Sunday September 07, 2008 @03:41PM from the sponsored-by-viagra dept.

Roland Piquepaille writes "According to UK and US researchers, it should be possible to fight the global warming effects associated with an increase of dioxide levels by using autonomous cloud-seeding ships to spray salt water into the air. This project would require the deployment of a worldwide fleet of 1,500 unmanned ships to cool the Earth even if the level of carbon dioxide doubled. These 300-tonne ships 'would be powered by the wind, but would not use conventional sails. Instead they would be fitted with a number of 20 m-high, 2.5 m-diameter cylinders known as Flettner rotors. The researchers estimate that such ships would cost between £1m and £2m each. This translates to a US$2.65 to 5.3 billion total cost for the ships only."

An Imaginative Use For CCTVs 191

Posted by kdawson on Monday June 02, 2008 @03:13AM from the one-man's-privacy-is-another-man's-publicity dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Everyone knows we're being watched by CCTVs everywhere — particularly in the UK — and virtually everyone (at least on Slashdot) complains about that fact. But have you ever stopped to consider the ways you can use all those CCTVs to your advantage? The Get Out Clause, an unsigned band from Manchester in the UK, did just that; they played in front of 80 different CCTVs around Manchester, and then asked for the video via Freedom of Information Act letters. (About 25% of the CCTV owners complied with the law and turned them over.) The result isn't too bad."

EMI May Cut Funding To RIAA, IFPI 158

Posted by kdawson on Thursday November 29, 2007 @10:10AM from the return-on-investment dept.

Teen Bainwolf notes a report that Big Four record label EMI, which is under new ownership, is considering a big cut in its funding for the IFPI and RIAA. Each of the labels reportedly contributed over $132 million per year to fund industry trade groups, and EMI apparently believes that money could be better spent elsewhere. "One of the chief activities of the RIAA is coordinating the Big Four labels' legal campaign, and those thousands of lawsuits have done nothing but generate ill will from record fans, while costing the labels millions of dollars and doing little (if anything) to actually reduce the amount of file-sharing going on."

Comment Re:Physical security? (Score 1) 172

by Cartzca on Saturday March 10, 2007 @11:24AM (#18299770) Attached to: British Military Deploys Skynet

Surely it's much better for it to get shot down than hacked/eavesdropped upon. Expensive, though.

Analysis of .NET Use in Longhorn and Vista 479

Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday March 15, 2006 @10:57PM from the what-would-bill-do dept.

smallstepforman writes "In a classic example of "Do as I say, not as I do", Richard Grimes analyses the ratio of native to managed code in Microsoft's upcoming Vista Operating System. According to the analysis at Microsoft Vista and .NET, "Microsoft appears to have concentrated their development effort in Vista on native code development. Vista has no services implemented in .NET and Windows Explorer does not host the runtime, which means that the Vista desktop shell is not based on the .NET runtime. The only conclusion that can be made from these results is that between PDC 2003 and the release of Vista Beta 1 Microsoft has decided that it is better to use native code for the operating system, than to use the .NET framework.""

Comment And "standard" libraries.... (Score 1) 661

by genneth on Monday July 11, 2005 @11:29AM (#13033246) Attached to: Stroustrup on the Future of C++

... aren't that standard. Look at the effort that it takes to get Java ported to somewhere. Kaffe is/has been ready for years. Classpath (your standard library) is only getting useful (it compiles Eclipse!) And how many "deprecated" components are there in Java? C++ has plenty of people working on less-than-set-in-stone projects, but those shouldn't be considered standard. Use gktmm by all means. Use Qt. Use ACE. None of them can be considered standard, but you can use them today and Get Shit Done (TM). Hell, even Boost isn't standard. The day anything turns standard in C++ is the day that niche is basically done (on the scale short of introsort pushing out quicksort). GUI programming is by no means a done deal yet; the Adobe people are working up some very interesting tools; Mozart is investigating along similar lines; there's also a smaller personal project that uses embedded DSL in C++ (Boost.Spirit style). Until the One-True-Abstraction blows everything else away, you get the choice of making your own bed and lying in it.

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