Comment Re:One more reason (Score 1) 171
people consume, consume and consume all the time
And then we wonder why we have an obesity epidemic. Hint: it's all the consuming.
Comment Re:Big Fish (Score 1) 360
I am not a marine biologist, but I would imagine that having top predators present is a necessary criterion for classifying a reef habitat as "healthy." The relevant question therefore is "why are large predators not present?" To me, Global warming, fishing, changing pH of the seawater, and other factors all would seem to be plausible answers. Simply saying "a coral reef without top predators is not healthy therefore removing top predators made the reef unhealthy" is not a useful statement. Can you provide a link to the study?
Comment Re:400 foot wingspan, no unimproved airfields (Score 1) 271
Maybe they'll just have a few dozen in the air at all times spaced evenly around the world. In the meantime they could be performing scientific or even commercial functions.
Open Source OCR That Makes Searchable PDFs 133
An anonymous reader writes "In my job all of our multifunction copiers scan to PDF but many of our users want and expect those PDFs to be text searchable. I looked around for software that would create text searchable pdfs but most are very expensive and I couldn't find any that were open source (free). I did find some open source packages like CuneiForm and Exactimage that could in theory do the job, but they were hard to install and difficult to set up and use over a network. Then I stumbled upon WatchOCR. This is a Live CD distro that can easily create a server on your network that provides an OCR service using watched folders. Now all my scanners scan to a watched folder, WatchOCR picks up those files and OCRs them, and then spits them out into another folder. It uses CuneiForm and ExactImage but it is all configured and ready to deploy. It can even be remotely managed via the Web interface. Hope this proves helpful to someone else who has this same situation."
Comment Re:The pill is CHEAP (Score 1) 637
The pill
Yes, but how many slashdotters don't already have built-in birth control?
Comment Pre-paid mobile phone (Score 1) 637
I use T-mobile for a pre-paid mobile phone, and the amount I use it comes to about $15/month, so for me it is both affordable and rationable. Even if I was unemployed and homeless I'd still keep the same plan.
I recently lived in a developing country (Kenya, 2007-2008). Judging by the high prevalence of pre-paid cell phones there even among those in extreme poverty, and the low prevalence of everything else* listed in the poll, I suspect most people on here would find a way to continue some form of mobile phone service even in the face of abject poverty.
*excludes birth control, which slashdotters have built-in
Submission + - FBI failed to break the encryption of hard drives (globo.com)
benoliver writes: Not even FBI was able to decrypt files of Daniel Dantas (Brazilian banker accused of "financial crimes" by the Brazilian justice). Hard drives were seized by the feds during Operation Satyagraha, in 2008. Information is protected by sophisticated encryption system. The hard drives seized by federal police at the apartment of banker Daniel Dantas, in Rio de Janeiro, during Operation Satyagraha. The operation began in July 2008. According to a report published on Friday (25) by the newspaper Folha de S. Paulo, after a year of unsuccessful attempts, the U.S. federal police returned the equipment to Brazil in April. According to the report, the fed only requested help from USA in early 2009, after experts from the National Institute of Criminology (INC) failed to decode the passwords on the hard drives. The government has no legal instrument to compel the manufacturer of the American encryption system or Dantas to give the access codes.
Comment Re:price not efficiency (Score 2, Insightful) 112
Those rural/poor areas don't need the same amount of electricity as your house to make a world of difference. A roof covered with 1% effecient solar cells plus a deep cycle battery would power lights, run a radio, and charge cell phones.
Make it cheap enough and it would be nothing short of revolutionary.
Make it cheap enough and it would be nothing short of revolutionary.
Comment Re:Hello, think a little! (Score 1) 372
Failure to make a decision is indistingishable from deciding to do nothing.
Comment Re:obviously (Score 1) 454
My guess is that evolving to tolerate higher temperatures results in some kind of significant disadvantage to the resulting sperm. Maybe the molecular change required for tolerating high temperatures causes a drop in speed or endurance. Maybe there's an essential chemical reaction necessary for the production of sperm that simply doesn't happen above 95 degrees F.
I agree that it's counterintuitive, and as far as I know the actual mechanism hasn't been uncovered yet, but you can bet there's some kind of trade-off keeping the status quo in place.
I agree that it's counterintuitive, and as far as I know the actual mechanism hasn't been uncovered yet, but you can bet there's some kind of trade-off keeping the status quo in place.
