lrohrer - Slashdot User

Astrium Hopes To Test Grabbing Solar Energy From Orbit 144

Posted by timothy on Thursday January 21, 2010 @02:48PM from the don't-stand-underneath-when-they-fly-by dept.

goldaryn writes "Word from the BBC today is that Europe's biggest space company is seeking partners to help get a satellite-based solar power trial into orbit: 'EADS Astrium says the satellite system would collect the Sun's energy and transmit it to Earth via an infrared laser, to provide electricity. Space solar power has been talked about for more than 30 years as an attractive concept because it would be 'clean, inexhaustible, and available 24 hours a day.' However, there have always been question marks over its cost, efficiency and safety. But Astrium believes the technology is close to proving its maturity.'"

Submission + - Surprising evolutionary discovery (uta.edu)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 07, 2010 @05:19AM

An anonymous reader writes: About 8 percent of human genetic material comes from a virus and not from our ancestors, according to an article by University of Texas at Arlington biology professor Cédric Feschotte published in the Jan. 7, 2010 issue of Nature magazine.

Comment Re:Use Thorium-based reactors instead (Score 2, Informative) 581

by lrohrer on Tuesday November 17, 2009 @01:08PM (#30130692) Attached to: CERN Physicist Warns About Uranium Shortage

There is a company that knows how to include thorium into existing power plants and they have contracts to experiment in Russia and India: Thorium Power.

Their technology couuld quickly be included in existing plants refueling cycles.

Oh bomb making from Thorium is tricky as U233 has less than a 2 year half life. It is very radioactive.

Comment hardly. Ever try reading All of the IRS manuals? (Score 1) 13

by lrohrer on Wednesday August 26, 2009 @11:27AM (#29202405) Attached to: The Longest Poem In the World

Really, if it is running our lives, is not the IRS manuals poetry? If not why not?

Comment More Politically Correct BS - The SUN is the prblm (Score 1) 435

by lrohrer on Thursday April 09, 2009 @11:33AM (#27519031) Attached to: Sunspot Activity Continues To Drop

Extremely simple explanation for global warming is *sunspots*:

http://www.321gold.com/editorials/hoye/hoye040909.pdf

NASA s latest report (March 2009) on sunspots is that there will be a massive ramp up of activity in 2010. It does not look that way to me nor the above author. Still another year or so is required to truly show the statistical trend.

Real science will prevail.

Comment ah the exploits of P1 (Score 1) 242

by lrohrer on Thursday March 19, 2009 @02:09PM (#27259023) Attached to: Intel CPU Privilege Escalation Exploit

This sounds way to similar to the exploit used in the book P1 -- over thirty years ago.

sigh.

Comment a very tiny yellow bikini comes to mind... (Score 1) 241

by lrohrer on Thursday February 26, 2009 @11:54AM (#26998805) Attached to: Motor Made From Liquid Film

a very tiny yellow bikini comes to mind going round and round.

Comment or is that a Z80? (Score 3, Funny) 135

by lrohrer on Friday October 17, 2008 @01:12PM (#25414693) Attached to: Mainframe OpenSolaris Now Available

I have some Z80 boxes in my basement...

Submission + - EBay Deal Signals the End for Individual Auctions (nytimes.com) 1

Submitted by

Dekortage

on Monday July 14, 2008 @05:56AM

Dekortage writes: "EBay's recent deal with Buy.com appears to be seriously irritating its veteran individual sellers. The deal allows Buy.com and other large fixed-price retailers to list millions of items on eBay without paying listing fees, and appears to be the direction that eBay will follow in the future. Understandably, individual sellers are outraged, like this blogger: "I've paid eBay many hundreds of thousands in fees over the past several years and believed them when they talked about a level playing field. And they just plain and simple are going back on their word." This comes after the dire prediction that eBay is losing its popularity. Will eBay recover from this?"

Submission + - Bird navigation based on quantum Zeno effect (arxivblog.com)

Submitted by

KentuckyFC

on Friday April 18, 2008 @05:42AM

KentuckyFC writes: "How birds use the earth's magnetic field to navigate has puzzled researchers for decades. In recent years, a growing body of evidence points to the possibility that a weak magnetic field can influence the outcome of a certain type of chemical reaction involving the recombination of pairs of ions in bird retinas. The trouble is that the ion recombination is known to happen too quickly for the Earth's weak magnetic field to have any effect. So how can this mechanism work? Now it looks as if the quantum Zeno effect explains all, says one researcher (abstract). This is the watched-pot-never-boils effect in which the act of observing a quantum system maintains it for longer than expected. That's extraordinary news because it means a quantum sensor is determining the macroscopic behavior of living birds."

Submission + - SPAM: IBM Invests in MySQL/Oracle Competitor

Submitted by

stoolpigeon

on Tuesday March 25, 2008 @12:20PM

stoolpigeon writes: "IBM has made a move to support Open Source RDBMS PostgreSQL by supplying $10 million in funding to EnterpriseDB, a company that supports PostgreSQL as well as selling their own propietary extensions to the database product. In the past EnterpriseDB has primarily advertised itself as an Oracle competitor, though the article says, "Derek Rodner, EnterpriseDB's director of product strategy, explained that Postgres Plus 8.3 also adds in new application quick starts which are supposed to help with installation issues. They will also help in EnterpriseDB's battle against MySQL for open source database supremacy.""
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