Comment Continuous Flow (Score 3, Insightful) 151
It's worth noting that this would have something most other renewables (solar, wind, ... ) lack - a power output that is more or less constant day and night.
Comment relevant xkcd: (Score 1) 332
http://xkcd.com/369/
Comment How much energy? (Score 1) 193
How much energy will it take to run this thing? If the ship is using something like an Ion engine that already demands tons of power, this could be a problem.
Submission + - Fear of thinking war machines may push U.S. to exascale (computerworld.com) 1
dcblogs writes: Unlike China and Europe, the U.S. has yet to adopt and fund an exascale development program, and concerns about what that means to U.S. security are growing darker and more dire. If the U.S. falls behind in HPC, the consequences will be "in a word, devastating," Selmer Bringsford, chair of the Department. of Cognitive Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, said at a U.S. House forum this week. "If we were to lose our capacity to build preeminently smart machines, that would be a very dark situation, because machines can serve as weapons." The House is about to get a bill requiring the Dept. of Energy to establish an exascale program. But the expected funding level, about $200 million annually, "is better than nothing, but compared to China and Europe it's at least 10 times too low," said Earl Joseph, an HPC analyst at IDC. David McQueeney, vice president of IBM research, told lawmakers that HPC systems now have the ability to not only deal with large data sets but "to draw insights out of them." The new generation of machines are being programmed to understand what the data sources are telling them, he said.
Submission + - Internet Defense League to be deployed against CISPA (internetdefenseleague.org)
yanom writes: "Slashdotters may remember the launch of the Internet Defense League, a network for website owners that would allow for the replication of a media campaign similar to the one that took down SOPA. Now it plans to spring into action in response to the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, which is now making it's way through Congress. The IDL wants its members to embed anti-CISPA banners into their websites, which will be activated tomorrow, March 19th."
Submission + - AirBNB opensources Chronos - A Cron replacement (airbnb.com)
victorhooi writes: "AirBNB has open-sourced Chronos- a scheduler built around Apache Mesos (a cluster manager).
The scheduler is distributed and fault-tolerant, and allows specifying jobs in ISO8601 repeating notation, as well as creating dependent jobs.
There's also a snazzy web interface to track and manage jobs, as well as a RESTful API."
The scheduler is distributed and fault-tolerant, and allows specifying jobs in ISO8601 repeating notation, as well as creating dependent jobs.
There's also a snazzy web interface to track and manage jobs, as well as a RESTful API."
Submission + - Ask Slashdot: How to donate semi-old computers to worthwhile charities? 1
yanom writes: "My school gave me several circa-2006 computers with no operating system. I fixed them up, and now they run Lubuntu fairly well, making them great internet/LibreOffice/general Linux workstations. I've been wanting to donate them to local nonprofits where they'll go to good use — for example, I've already given several to a local church for them to use in their afterschool care/tutoring program. However, I'm having trouble finding other places where these machines could go to good use. How should I best conduct this search? How can I find nonprofits that could benefit from these workstations?"
Comment Fermi Paradox (Score 5, Interesting) 99
If laser communication overtakes radio for our own space equipment, it might explain the Fermi paradox - we cannot detect alien civilizations because the communicate with lasers (emitting no radio signals at all), making them undetectable to those not in the path of the beam.
Submission + - Cox Comm. injects code into customers' web traffic to announce email outage (twitter.com) 2
An anonymous reader writes: Cox Communications appears to be injecting JavaScript and HTML into subscriber's traffic, as part of their effort to announce an email service outage. Pictures showing the popup: http://pics.lockerz.com/s/269216895 https://www.dropbox.com/sh/a160036xd1ww4gs/Nbkd3O9aLj https://twitter.com/anthonykava/status/280004999419944960/photo/1
Feed Engadget: Solidoodle 3 is an $800 3D printer that you can stand on, we go hands (and feet) (engadget.com)
Companies will go to fascinating lengths to demonstrate their belief in a product, but there was still something refreshing in watching Solidoodle founder Sam Cervantes climbed atop his company's latest creation, beaming. After all, the announcement of a $500 printer back in April left us wondering what sorts of corners the company would have to cut to offer a product at a fraction the cost of what Cervantes' former employer, MakerBot, has brought to the market. Asked whether Solidoodle had to make any compromises to hit such an impressive price point, the one-time aerospace engineer stood by his product's build quality. And then he stood on it.
Announced in November and due out next month, the company's latest product doesn't quite hit that price point. Solidoodle had to drive cost up a fair amount to double the last generation's build platform to 512 cubic inches. Still, $799 seems like chump change for entrance into the nascent world of home 3D printing, particularly for a device that is built as solidly as Cervantes claims. The team popped by our New York offices to drop off and stand on the Solidoodle 3. Cervantes was quick to point out that the printer is still firmly in prototype mode (in fact, it's the first prototype to leave the confines of the company's headquarters), with his team doing its damnedest to get the product in the hands of customers by early next month. A quick glance at the rear of the printer confirms this -- there's a fair amount of exposed wiring back there and the spool of plastic hangs on an exposed PVC pipe.
Filed under: Misc
Submission + - Ask Slashdot: Replacing a TI-84 with software on a Linux box?
yanom writes: "I'm currently a high school student using my TI-84 for mathematics courses. It has all the functionality I need (except CAS), but saying that the hardware is dated is putting it nicely. Waiting 4-5 seconds for a simple function to be graphed on it's 96x64 screen just makes me want to hurl it at the wall. Recently, I've begun to notice the absurdity of doing my math homework on a 70's era microchip when I have an i7 machine with Linux within arm's reach. I've begun looking for software packages that could supposedly replace the graphing calculator's functionality, including Xcas and Maxima, but both lack what I consider basic calculator functionality — xcas can't create a table of values for a function, and maxima can't use degrees, only radians. So, does anyone know of a good software package to replace my graphing calculator (and maybe provide CAS to boot)?"
Submission + - And the Noose Tightens (dropbox.com)
interval1066 writes: "In a breathtaking new move by (another) little-known national security agency, the personal information of all US citizens will be available for casual perusal. The "National Counterterrorism Center" (I've never heard of this org) may now "examine the government files of U.S. citizens for possible criminal behavior, even if there is no reason to suspect them." This is different from past bureaucratic practice (never mind due process) in that a government agency not in the list of agencies approved to to certain things without due process may completely bypass due process and STORE (for up to 5 years) these records, the org doesn't need a warrant, or have any kind of over-site of any kind. They will be sifting through these records looking for "counter-insurgency activity", supposedly with an eye to prevention. If this doesn't wake you up and chill you to your very bone, not too sure there is anything that will anyway.
The story is behind a pay wall that I have access too so I copied the web page from the WSJ and put it in my public drop box folder."
The story is behind a pay wall that I have access too so I copied the web page from the WSJ and put it in my public drop box folder."
Comment Had my website there (Score 1) 70
I had my personal website up registered there, brrk.co.cc . It wasn't really public, but it was just a fileserver/webserver for my personal use while on the road. Guess I have to go back to the numerical IP now...
Submission + - Is the Universe a Simulation? (phys.org) 2
olsmeister writes: Ever wonder if the universe is really a simulation? Well, physicists do too. Recently, a group of physicists have devised a way that could conceivably prove one way or the other whether that is the case. There is a paper describing their work on arXiv. Some other physicists propose that the universe is actually a giant hologram with all the action actually occurring on a two-dimensional boundary region.
Submission + - Stallman on Unity: Canonical will have to hand over users' data to governments (benjaminkerensa.com)
Giorgio Maone writes: "Ubuntu developer and fellow mozillian Benjamin Kerensa chatted with various people about the new Amazon Product Results in the Ubuntu 12.10 Unity Dash. Among them, Richard Stallman told him that this feature is bad because:
1. "If Canonical gets this data, it will be forced to hand it over to various governments."; 2. Amazon is bad. Concerned people can disable remote data retrieval for any lens and scopes or, more surgically, use sudo apt-get remove unity-lens-shopping."
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