tonyPick - Slashdot User

Submission + - Winners of Oil Cleanup X CHALLENGE announced (gizmag.com)

Submitted by cylonlover on Thursday October 13, 2011 @04:25AM

cylonlover writes: Last July, in the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, the X PRIZE Foundation launched the Wendy Schmidt Oil Cleanup X CHALLENGE. As with previous X PRIZE competitions, this one was intended to encourage private sector scientific research, by offering a cash prize to whichever team could best meet a given challenge. In this case, teams had to demonstrate a system of their own making, that could recover oil from a sea water surface at the highest Oil Recovery Rate (ORR) above 2,500 US gallons (9,463.5 liters) per minute, with an Oil Recovery Efficiency (ORE) of greater than 70 percent. Today, the winning teams were announced with the US$1 million first prize going to Team Elastec/American Marine for their unique grooved disc skimmer.

Submission + - 1,000 London CCTV cameras 'solve one crime' (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by SpuriousLogic on Monday August 24, 2009 @02:44PM

SpuriousLogic writes: Only one crime was solved by each 1,000 CCTV cameras in London last year, a report into the city's surveillance network has claimed. The internal police report found the million-plus cameras in London rarely help catch criminals. In one month CCTV helped capture just eight out of 269 suspected robbers. David Davis MP, the former shadow home secretary, said: "It should provoke a long overdue rethink on where the crime prevention budget is being spent." He added: "CCTV leads to massive expense and minimum effectiveness. "It creates a huge intrusion on privacy, yet provides little or no improvement in security. "The Metropolitan Police has been extraordinarily slow to act to deal with the ineffectiveness of CCTV."

Submission + - Microsoft FAT Patent Fails in Germany

Submitted by

Askmum

on Thursday March 15, 2007 @04:40AM

Askmum writes: "While Microsft has been granted and been reaffirmed a patent on FAT in the US, the German Patent Federal Court ruled that the patent is invalid in Germany, because it is "not based on inventive activity".

Read more (heise.de, in English)"

Comment Re:Worst Episode Ever (Score 1) 339

by tonyPick on Saturday November 24, 2001 @09:42AM (#2606584) Attached to: Andromeda To Become Less Complex?

kinda Late in the discussion, but what the hell

They're giving you thousands of hours of entertainment for free.

This quote deeply hacked me off when I saw it, because I was watching it on Sky, a subscription channel for which I pay money to watch as it's the only place to get new episodes of things like the Simpsons/Star Trek/Andromeda/Angel/Buffy/... (unless you want to wait a couple of years to get a cut-up-edited version on your local terrestrial station...)

And you know the adverts put on in between programmes? They aren't just there for fun, they do it because the broadcasters get paid for it; and the fact is you pay for that through the products you buy every day, most of which you see adverts for on the TV.

The summary is these programmes aren't "for free", some I pay to watch more directly than others, but I do pay to watch them all and that money goes into the pockets of the programme makers - If they want me to not complain then they should give them away for free - How about they stick 'em up as MPEG clips on a webserver and let me download them when I want for nothing?

No?

Thought not....The fact is the programme makers sell them and I buy them, if it turns out that what I was sold was junk then first I'll complain, next I'll stop buying, and I don't think many people from either camp want to see that..

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