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Comment Re: Really? (Score 1) 58

by kzanol (#57716514) Attached to: Nike and Boeing Are Paying Sci-Fi Writers To Predict Their Futures
This really triggers a deja vu moment for listeners of the escape pod podcast just in September there was a two part episode perfectly Matched to this topic: The revolution, brought to you by Nike. http://escapepod.org/2018/09/0... Also shows that the results probably aren't necessarily what you wanted...

Comment Re:What a breathtakingly awesome announcement! (Score 1) 168

by kzanol (#55178745) Attached to: Volkswagen To Build Electric Versions of All 300 Models By 2030

I see one huge flaw with this plan: The way to get a successful electric car is NOT to stick a battery+electric motor onto an existing design - that just gets you yet another bunch of compliance cars with sub-par performance and driving characteristics that no one actually wants to use.

Concentrate on just a few models.

Design these new models as all electric models from the ground up.

Distribution of components is radically different than classic internal combustion based cars- you can have multiple small motors, not necessarily located under the hood. You want the battery as an integral part of the chassis right at the bottom. You definitely want to put way more effort into aerodynamics to get best range. Since you just got rid of engine noise, concentrate on wheel noise and wind noise to actually make the most of the low-noise experience possible with electric cars.

The resulting cars may not look exactly like today's cars because of the changed parameters - but they'll actually work and be fun to drive. I guess it'll be a challenge to get there without creating weirdomobiles (BMW i3 anyone?).

Submission + - RIP Dr. Henry Heimlich, inventor of the Heimlich Maneuver

Submitted by tomhath
tomhath writes: Dr Heimlich died at the age of 96. He invented the lifesaving technique, which uses abdominal thrusts to clear a person's airway, in 1974.

In May he used the technique himself to save a woman at his retirement home.

He dislodged a piece of meat with a bone in it from the airway of an 87-year-old woman, telling the BBC: "I didn't know I really could do it until the other day."

Comment Re:MythTV (Score 1) 236

by kzanol (#50775391) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: What's Your Media Setup?
Also Mythtv.

Backend: Headless server in the tech closet:
2x pcie dual dvb-s2 receivers.
8x4TB HDD
1x payTV subscription card (Sky), used by all the sat receivers via oscam and sasc-ng

A couple of tvs in the house, all w/ Acer aspire revo ion-based mini PCs running mythtv frontends.

Submission + - When Nerds Do BBQ 1

Submitted by Rick Zeman
Rick Zeman writes: On this 4th of July, the day that Americans flock to their grills and smokers, Wired has a fascinating article on a computerized smoker designed by Harvard engineering students. They say, "In prototype form, the smoker looks like a combination of a giant pepper mill, a tandoori oven, and V.I.N.CENT from The Black Hole. It weighs 300 pounds. It has a refueling chute built into the side of it. And it uses a proportional-integral-derivative controller, a Raspberry Pi, and fans to regulate its own temperature, automatically producing an ideal slow-and-low burn."

After cooking >200 lbs of brisket fine-tuning the design, the students concluded, "“Old-school pitmasters are like, ‘I cook mine in a garbage can,’ and there’s a point of pride in that,” Parker says. “A lot of the cutting edge is when you take an art form and drag it back onto scientific turf and turn it into an algorithm. I don’t think we’ve diluted the artistic component with this."

Submission + - Lt. Uhura Hospitalised in LA After Stroke

Submitted by WheezyJoe
WheezyJoe writes: The Register tells us that Nichelle Nichols, who played the lovely Lt. Uhura, communications officer of the original starship Enterprise (original series and animated series), has been hospitalized after a mild stroke. She is reported to have undergone a CAT scan and MRI, and was awake and eating as of Thursday evening. Nichols has shown minor signs of loss of mobility but otherwise no signs of paralysis.

Submission + - World's 1st Penis Transplant Done in South Africa (webmd.com)

Submitted by PolygamousRanchKid
PolygamousRanchKid writes: The world's first successful penis transplant has been performed by surgeons in South Africa, Bloomberg News reported Friday. The 21-year-old recipient has made a full recovery and regained all functions in the transplanted organ. The nine-hour operation was done Dec. 11 by surgeons from Stellenbosch University and Cape Town's Tygerberg Hospital, the university said Friday in a statement.

The unidentified patient had his penis amputated three years ago in a life-saving procedure after he developed complications from a traditional circumcision.

"Our goal was that he would be fully functional at two years and we are very surprised by his rapid recovery," said Dr. Andre van der Merwe, head of the university's urology division, who led the surgical team.
User Journal

Journal Journal: Props to Bill Maher 76

Journal by smittyoneeach

"Terrorism is really just bullying, extreme bullying. And I thought we hated bullying now," Maher said.
"Yeah, liberals hate bullying, all right, but they're not opposed to using it. When they casually throw out words like 'bigot' and 'racist,' it does cow people into avoiding this debate," he said.

Credit where due: he's spot on.

Comment Re:This is nothing new for me. (Score 2) 164

Up to now, this only happened when the retailer had a branch where the customer was located; US Retailer w/ branch in Germany selling to a German customer.

Now, all retailers in Europe have to deal with the hassle of having to individualy deal with the seperate tax offices in all the (european) countries its customers are located in.

Abslolute nightmare.

One exception: for b2b deals where the customer has an european tax ID, it's possible to bill without tax and the customer has to pay the tax to its local tax office.

Submission + - Los Angeles Science Teacher suspended over student science fair projects (scpr.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: "A high school science teacher at Grand Arts High School in Los Angeles was suspended from the classroom in February, after two of his science fair students turned in projects deemed dangerous by the administrators. " "One project was a marshmallow shooter—which uses air pressure to launch projectiles. The other was an AA battery-powered coil gun—which uses electromagnetism to launch small objects. Similar projects have been honored in past LA County Science Fairs and even demonstrated at the White House."

Submission + - Fifty Years Ago IBM 'Bet the Company' on the 360 Series Mainframe

Submitted by Hugh Pickens DOT Com
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes: Those of us of a certain age remember well the breakthrough that the IBM 360 series mainframes represented when it was unveiled fifty years ago on 7 April 1964. Now Mark Ward reports at BBC that the first System 360 mainframe marked a break with all general purpose computers that came before because it was possible to upgrade the processors but still keep using the same code and peripherals from earlier models. "Before System 360 arrived, businesses bought a computer, wrote programs for it and then when it got too old or slow they threw it away and started again from scratch," says Barry Heptonstall. IBM bet the company when they developed the 360 series. At the time IBM had a huge array of conflicting and incompatible lines of computers, and this was the case with the computer industry in general at the time, it was largely a custom or small scale design and production industry, but IBM was such a large company and the problems of this was getting obvious: When upgrading from one of the smaller series of IBM computers to a larger one, the effort in doing that transition was so big so you might as well go for a competing product from the "BUNCH" (Burroughs, Univac, NCR, CDC and Honeywell). Fred Brooks managed the development of IBM's System/360 family of computers and the OS/360 software support package and based his software classic "The Mythical Man-Month" on his observation that "adding manpower to a late software project makes it later." The S/360 was also the first computer to use microcode to implement many of its machine instructions, as opposed to having all of its machine instructions hard-wired into its circuitry. Despite their age, mainframes are still in wide use today and are behind many of the big information systems that keep the modern world humming handling such things as airline reservations, cash machine withdrawals and credit card payments. "We don't see mainframes as legacy technology," says Charlie Ewen. "They are resilient, robust and are very cost-effective for some of the work we do."

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