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Comment Re:Is that price right? (Score 1) 222

The battery's value comes from its short response on the time scale of milliseconds. Conventional power plants are mechanical systems, and because of that it would take orders of magnitude more time to start them up for backup power generation. For that reason, at all times, coal power plants generate a little bit more power than there's demand for. If some other power plant trips, the frequency drop is detected, and the surplus kinetic energy of the turbine is immediately transmitted to the grid to stabilize the supply. However, there's the cost. The power plant has to generate surplus power at all times just because it can't change its state fast enough in case of emergency. The battery technology, with its response times typical for chemical/solid state systems, slashes the cost of conventional power generation by making this surplus backup power unnecessary.

Comment Compilation flags & vectorization (Score 2) 114

The article is silent about vectorization, and Intel invests a lot in that lately. Do we know anything about the compilation flags of that copy of cinebench? If not, the assessment could be extremely unfair. A newer set of vectorization instructions corresponds to a longer vector size for arithmetic operations that can be carried out concurrently. For example, in HPC applications, enabling the highest available level of AVX can lead to 2x gains compared to code compiled for legacy systems.

Comment Re:This backlash is done by children (Score 1) 626

Can anybody explain why creating US jobs is at the absolute top of the agenda? (I'm not trolling.) With the unemployment rate at 4.8%, you won't get any lower. It's the absolute minimum not only according to Fed, but as a result of the universal laws of free market. For example, there's a contribution to the unemployment rate from those who switch from one job to another right at the moment of the measurement. So what's the problem? (My guess: the unemployment is low, but the jobs available for US citizens are shitty.) Note: I'm an EU citizen; I don't work nor stay in the US.

Comment Re:Good idea, bad name (Score 1) 167

The name "autopilot" isn't confusing at all if you think of it as an analogue of the autopilot in a commercial airplane. The airplane autopilot isn't fully autonomic either; for example, it can't take off on its own. Even at the cruising altitude it requires full attention of the pilots: http://www.cnbc.com/2015/03/26...

Submission + - Linux 3.10 officially released (paritynews.com)

hypnosec writes: Linux 3.10 kernel has been officially released on Sunday evening which makes the 3.10-rc7 the last release candidate of the latest kernel which yields the biggest changes in years. Linus Torvalds was thinking of releasing another rc but, went against the idea and went ahead with official Linux 3.10 commit as anticipated last week. Torvalds notes in the announcement that releases since Linux 3.9 haven’t been prone to problems and 3.10 is no different. However, he added that this release could have gone either but, there was no specific reason for another rc and break the normal pattern of "rc7 is the last rc before the release."
AI

Submission + - Why Ray Kurzweil's Google Project May be Doomed to Fail (technologyreview.com)

moon_unit2 writes: An AI researcher at MIT suggests that Ray Kurzweil's ambitious plan to build a super-smart personal assistant at Google may be fundamentally flawed. Kurzweil's idea, as put forward in his book How to Build a Mind, is to combine a simple model of the brain with enormous computing power and vast amounts of data, to construct a much more sophisticated AI. Boris Katz, who works oh machines designed to understand language, says this misses a key facet of human intelligence: that it is built on a lifetime of experiencing the world rather than simply processing raw information.
Politics

Ask Slashdot: How Should Tech Conferences Embrace Diversity? 343

An anonymous reader writes "The Register is reporting on how debate over diversity has managed to get a Ruby conference in the UK cancelled, as the speakers were 100% white male. The person running the conference, Chuck Hardy, said he 'was not prepared to put [himself] in the position of legal liability and cost ramifications if a sponsor were to pull out under social media strain.' He added, 'The ramifications of comments such as race and gender can have financial and legal consequences for the conference organizer. Raise these issues but allow the conference organizers the chance to highlight and act on these industry level issues. Accusation and slander is not a solution.' Should conferences embrace diversity from the start, or should they go forward even if the speakers are all of the same denomination? How far do we have to go to ensure we are diverse?"
IOS

New iOS App Sends Users' Web Traffic Through Its Proxy Servers 83

New submitter spac writes "AllthingsD has an interesting story about how a startup called Wajam requires users of their service to download a script that sets up a proxy to handle all network requests for the purpose of providing 'Social Recommendations' within built-in apps. The privacy implications of using this profile script isn't clearly presented to users. Are we really to entrust our data to a company founded by a man who comes from the world of browser toolbars? And for social search?!" The company rushes to counter privacy concerns by pointing out that their service has "received security certifications from TRUSTe, McAfee and Norton."
Mars

India Plans Mars Mission in 2013 171

New submitter susmit writes with news of India's new goal for launching a satellite to Mars in 2013. From the article: "India plans to launch a mission to Mars next year, putting an orbital probe around the red planet to study its climate and geology, top space department officials said on Thursday. ... A 320-tonne Indian Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle rocket will be used to carry the orbiter spaceship, blasting off from the ISRO launch site at Sriharikota in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh. Another senior official at ISRO, requesting anonymity, estimated the cost of the mission at 4.0-5.0 billion rupees ($70-90 million dollars)."

Comment Re:Why is this here? (Score 1) 910

Google Trends normalizes against the total volume of search traffic; the graph says what *percentage* of searches were made for this word. Almost every topic is 'losing traffic' because people are searching for more things on the web.

Comment Re:Climate change is the wrong argument (Score 2) 744

Many myths here.

People got alarmist over Global Cooling then Global Warming and then Climate Change when the first two didn't pan out by name at hyped levels.

http://skepticalscience.com/ice-age-predictions-in-1970s.htm

The biggest problem is that people are fighting the wrong fight, being too concerned about CO2 levels.

http://skepticalscience.com/co2-lags-temperature.htm

Climate change is inevitable no matter what we as a species do or don't do. We have a fossil record going back billions of years proving this, forces like plate tectonics and changes from our own solar system or even supernova's all impact our climate.

http://skepticalscience.com/climate-change-little-ice-age-medieval-warm-period.htm
http://skepticalscience.com/solar-cycles-global-warming.htm

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