DedHerring - Slashdot User

Comment Re: Ground out of service lines. (Score 1) 78

by DedHerring on Monday February 24, 2025 @05:33AM (#65190613) Attached to: Useless High-Voltage Power Lines Risk Sparking California Fires

Meth heads stealing the lines for scrap seems like a win-win for the "remove a potential fire source on the cheap" problem.

Or, if we insist the utility does it all, they could start prioritizing the segments closest to energized lines and go back later for the isolated segments too remote for this induction risk to arise.

Comment Re:A stopped clock is still right twice a day. (Score 4, Insightful) 126

by DedHerring on Friday December 31, 2010 @08:29PM (#34725934) Attached to: Four IT Consultants Charged With $80M NYC Rip-Off

So many accusations of criminal behavior are made on Slashdot daily that sooner or later one was bound to be right.

True, but not the real question here: what is fmic's personal ratio of accusations:indictments? Better than most Slashdot commenters, I reckon. That's worth noting.

A Guitar Robot That Can Really Shred 88

Posted by timothy on Thursday December 30, 2010 @06:42PM from the just-feed-it-carrots dept.

botPatrol writes "As reported today by Create Digital Music and the Wired blog, PAM (Polytangent Automatic (multi-)Monochord) is a robot who has discovered a love for vintage Metallica riffs, and can churn them out non-stop at superhuman speeds without ever requiring anger management therapy or treatment for drug abuse." (Read more, below.)

Watch 200 Years of Global Growth In 4 Minutes 270

Posted by CmdrTaco on Tuesday December 14, 2010 @02:53PM from the statistics-are-fun dept.

kkleiner writes "A professor of international health in Sweden, Hans Rosling has a long history of exploring the facts and figures that surround our changing world. In the a segment of the BBC series, Rosling gives one of his most famous lectures with a new twist. Using 120,000+ bits of data and augmented reality, the exuberant professor takes us through the last 200 years of global history and its uneven growth of wealth and health." This is really worth watching. Seriously.

iRacing World Champion Gets a Shot At the Real Thing 168

Posted by samzenpus on Sunday November 28, 2010 @06:40PM from the greger-was-race-car-driver dept.

jamie sent in a link to the story of iRacing World Champion Greger Huttu, who caught the attention of the Top Gear guys and got a chance to drive a real Star Mazda racer. iRacing is a realistic driving simulator that recreates the exact physics of race cars and tracks from around the world, and nobody is better than Greger. Top Gear wanted to see how the virtual champion would do with the real thing. Even though he was eventually unable to put up with the physical demands, Greger drove really well.

USCG Sues Copyright Defense Lawyer 360

Posted by samzenpus on Sunday November 28, 2010 @12:03PM from the nip-it-in-the-bud dept.

ESRB writes "The US Copyright Group has sued Graham Syfert, an attorney who created a packet of self-representation paperwork for individuals sued for P2P sharing of certain movies and moved to have sanctions placed against the defense attorney. Syfert sells these packets for $20, and the USCG claims the 19 individuals who have used it have cost them over $5000."

F1 Simulators Revealed 72

Posted by timothy on Sunday August 15, 2010 @08:14AM from the that-is-the-simulator-I-want dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Racecar Engineering has posted an exclusive look inside the simulator of a leading grand prix team. Particularly interesting is that the Formula 1 team uses software based on the free simulator Racer (with source code available) albeit with a custom vehicle model and hardware interface via CAN-bus. The article highlights the importance that mainstream racing sims (rFactor, iRacing) have in simulation at the pinnacle of the worlds most advanced sport." Along similar lines, reader PatPending writes "Engineers at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Germany (surely the greatest of all institutes) have turned a massive robot arm into a Ferrari F1 simulator, discovering a new strain of awesome in the process. The contraption, known as the CyberMotion Simulator, consists of an industrial robotic arm fitted with a racing seat, a force feedback steering wheel and a 3D simulation of the Monza Formula 1 track beamed from a projector on to a curved display."

How Bad Is the Gulf Coast Oil Spill? 913

Posted by Soulskill on Monday May 03, 2010 @05:53PM from the exxon-who dept.

Dasher42 writes "Claims are circulating on the Internet that the Coast Guard fears the Deepwater Horizon well has sprung two extra leaks, raising fears that all control over the release of oil at the site will be lost. The oil field, one of the largest ever discovered, could release 50,000 barrels a day into the ocean, with implications for marine life around the globe that are difficult to comprehend. So, considering that losing our oceanic life, with subsequent unraveling of our land-based ecosystems, is a far more possible apocalyptic scenario than a killer asteroid — what do we do about it?" Other readers have sent some interesting pictures of the spill. One set shows the Deepwater Horizon rig as it collapsed into the ocean. Others, from NASA, indicate that the spill's surface area now rivals that of Florida. The US government has indicated that it intends to require BP to foot the bill for the cleanup. And the Governator has just withdrawn support for drilling off the California coast.

What Chernobyl Looks Like In 2010 413

Posted by samzenpus on Thursday April 08, 2010 @04:24AM from the quiet-neighborhood dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The editor of Phoronix.com has toured Chernobyl's Zone of Alienation (the 30km zone surrounding the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant) to see what the area looks like 24 years after the world's largest nuclear disaster. Many photographs from Chernobyl in 2010 have now been published, showing off the power plant and its RBMK reactors, the town of Pripyat, the town of Chernobyl, and the Red Forest. The 24th anniversary of this deadly nuclear disaster will be on April 26."

Geomagnetic Storm In Progress 110

Posted by Soulskill on Monday April 05, 2010 @03:13PM from the sky-is-falling dept.

shogun writes "The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reports a strong geomagnetic storm is in progress. The shuttle, ISS and GPS systems may be affected." They think this storm was caused by a weak solar flare on April 3rd. As you may expect, this has caused some unusually impressive northern lights since it started. What you may not expect is a photograph from Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi aboard the International Space Station showing the aurora from orbit. He apparently tweets a lot of pictures from space. He and his crewmates have taken over 100,000 pictures since coming aboard the ISS.

Auto-Scanning the Names People Choose For Their Wireless APs 422

Posted by timothy on Saturday March 20, 2010 @08:07PM from the just-name-them-all-hidden dept.

MichaelSmith writes "I code on the tram, going to and from work, and I noticed that there are a lot of WiFi access points along the way. So one week I made it my job to write an automatic scanner which runs from a cron job every minute during commuting times. My backup script pushes the new AP names to my web server and you can read it online. It is a mixture of the straightforward, naive and funny, with a few pop culture references along the way. The first column in the file is the number of access points with that name. The second column is the AP name, in brackets to pick up white space." Why can't "Dress Me Slowly" and "Domestic Bliss" just share an AP?

Students Build 2752 MPG Hypermiling Vehicle 233

Posted by timothy on Saturday February 20, 2010 @03:26PM from the seattle-to-vegas-and-back dept.

MikeChino sends along this awe-inspiring excerpt: "Think claims of electric vehicles that get over 200 MPG are impressive? Try this on for size: a group of mechanical engineering students at Cal Poly have developed a vehicle that can get up to 2752.3 MPG — and it doesn't even use batteries. The Cal Poly Supermileage Team's wondercar, dubbed the Black Widow, has been under construction since 2005. The 96 pound car has three wheels, a drag coefficient of 0.12, a top speed of 30 MPH, and a modified 3 horsepower Honda 50cc four-stroke engine. It originally clocked in at 861 MPG and has been continuously tweaked to achieve the mileage we see today." It's not quite as street-worthy, though, as Volkswagen's 235 MPG One-Liter concept. Updated 20:01 GMT: The Cal Poly car's earlier incarnation achieved 861 MPG, not MPH; corrected above.

"Logan's Run" Syndrome In Programming 599

Posted by CmdrTaco on Wednesday February 17, 2010 @01:11PM from the stay-off-my-lawn dept.

Ian Lamont writes "InfoWorld has an interesting analysis of the reasons behind the relative dearth of programmers over the age of 40. While some people may assume that the recession has provided a handy cover for age discrimination, a closer look suggests that it's the nature of IT itself to push its elderly workers out, in what the article describes as a 'Logan's Run'-like marketplace. A bunch of factors are listed as reasons, including management's misunderstanding of the ways in which developers work: 'Any developer can tell you that not all C or PHP or Java programmers are created equal; some are vastly more productive or creative. However, unless or until there is a way to explicitly demonstrate the productivity differential between a good programmer and a mediocre one, inexperienced or nontechnical hiring managers tend to look at resumes with an eye for youth, under the "more bang for the buck" theory. Cheaper young 'uns will work longer hours and produce more code. The very concept of viewing experience as an asset for raising productivity is a non-factor — much to the detriment of the developer workplace.'"

Astronauts Having Trouble With Tranquility Module 300

Posted by timothy on Sunday February 14, 2010 @06:00PM from the now-release-your-anger dept.

Coldeagle writes "Astronauts ran into trouble while trying to connect up the new Tranquility module onto the ISS. A critical insulating cover didn't fit quite right: 'The fabric, multilayered cover is supposed to go between Tranquility and its observation deck, but the metal bars are not locking down properly because of interference from a hand rail or some other structure at the hatch.' One has to wonder if this is another imperial/metric snafu."

Video Game Music Recognition Gets a Boost 112

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Monday January 18, 2010 @06:32PM from the still-no-historical-category-for-8-bit-glory dept.

kghapa writes to tell us that for the first time ever, video game music is getting a much higher level of recognition through inclusion in this year's Ivor Novello Awards in London. "With the growing recognition of the immense detail and complex music compositions that are dedicated to video games, it seemed only a matter of time until game music was given some rightful spotlight. As the huge success and popularity of the fully orchestrated 'Video Games Live' concert has proved, modern and even classic games of days past have truly awe-inspiring musical scores. This concert alone has sold up to half a million tickets and featured music from a wide variety of games and gaming eras, from World of Warcraft to Zelda."

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