wigginz - Slashdot User

The Rocky Road To Wind Power 281

Posted by timothy on Thursday July 23, 2009 @07:40PM from the must-save-many-megawatts-to-outweigh dept.

Hugh Pickens writes "The NY Times has an interesting story on the logistical problems involved in transporting disassembled towers that will reach more than 250 feet in height from ports or factories to the remote, windy destinations where the turbines are erected. In Idaho trucks laden with tall turbine parts have slammed into interstate overpasses requiring hundreds of thousands of dollars in repairs. In Texas the constant truck traffic is tearing up small roads in the western part of the state where the turbines are being rapidly erected. And in Maine a truck carrying a big piece of turbine got stuck for hours while trying to round a corner near Searsport."

F-22 Raptor Cancelled 829

Posted by timothy on Wednesday July 22, 2009 @02:25PM from the waiter-there's-a-fly-in-my-fighter dept.

BayaWeaver writes "Slate reports that the F-22 Raptor has been cancelled by the Senate. At an estimated price tag of $339 million per aircraft, even the powerful military-industrial-congressional complex couldn't keep this Cold War program alive in these hard times. They look very cool though and have appeared in movies like Hulk and Transformers. But not to worry too much about the future of the military-industrial-congressional complex: the F-35 Lightning II begins production next year! As a side note, in 2007 a squadron of Raptors became deaf, dumb and blind when they flew over the International Date Line."

Comment Re:LHC may never activate? (Score 1) 224

by wigginz on Wednesday July 22, 2009 @12:46PM (#28783549) Attached to: Vacuum Leaks Lead To Another LHC Delay

Found it! Interesting read: http://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/230

Comment LHC may never activate? (Score 1) 224

by wigginz on Wednesday July 22, 2009 @12:44PM (#28783513) Attached to: Vacuum Leaks Lead To Another LHC Delay

I really wish I could find this article again, but I remember reading a paper from a couple physicists that offered the possibility that the LHC wont let itself activate because of the risks to spacetime or some other quantum effects. They mentioned previous experiments that posed the same risks have never actually been successful. Damn, anyone know the report I'm talking about? I swear I'm not making it up ;)

Comment Re:They can stop it: Installs locked to hardware. (Score 1) 590

by wigginz on Thursday July 16, 2009 @02:40PM (#28720591) Attached to: Why Game Developers Should Shut Up About Used Games

It never will. Publishers have too much invested and make too much money (along with retailers) selling games off the shelf. It will never go away or let digital distribution take over. Steam has been around how long? It hasn't made much of a dent especially when the console market is so huge.

Global Warming Irreversible, NOAA Scientist Finds 1061

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday January 27, 2009 @03:57AM from the is-it-hot-in-here dept.

Tibor the Hun writes "NPR reports that Susan Solomon, one of the world's top climate scientists, finds in her new study that global warming is now irreversible. The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, concludes that even if we could immediately cease our impact on pollution and greenhouse gasses emissions, global climate change would continue for more than a thousand years. The reason is the saturation of oceans with carbon dioxide. Her study looked at the consequences of long-term effect in terms of sea-level rise and drought."

Black Holes From the LHC Could Last For Minutes 672

Posted by kdawson on Friday January 23, 2009 @12:05PM from the becoming-greyer dept.

KentuckyFC writes "There is absolutely, positively, definitely no chance of the LHC destroying the planet (or this way either) when it eventually switches on some time later this year. And yet a few niggling doubts are persuading some scientists to run through their figures again. One potential method of destruction is that the LHC will create tiny black holes that could swallow everything in their path, including the planet. Various scientists have said this will not happen because the black holes would decay before they could do any damage. But physicists who have re-run the calculations now say that the mini black holes produced by the LHC could last for seconds, possibly minutes. Of course, the real question is whether they decay faster than they can grow. The new calculations suggest that the decay mechanism should win over and that the catastrophic growth of a black hole from the LHC 'does not seem possible' (abstract). But shouldn't we require better assurance than that?"

Nanocar Wins Top Science Award 175

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Monday December 22, 2008 @04:31PM from the more-than-meets-the-eye dept.

Lucas123 writes "A researcher who built a car slightly larger than a strand of DNA won the Foresight Institute Feynman Prize for experimental nanotechnology. James Tour, a professor of chemistry at Rice Univ. built a car only 4 nanometers in width in order to demonstrate that nanovehicles could be controlled enough to deliver payloads to build larger objects, such as memory chips and, someday, even buildings, like a self-assembling machine. Tour and a team of postgraduate and postdoctoral researchers constructed a car with chassis, working suspension, wheels and a motor. 'You shine light on it and the motor spins in one direction and pushes the car like a paddle wheel on the surface,' Tour said. The team also built a truck that can carry a payload."

Comment Re:Time to do what we did to the USSR (Score 1) 205

by wigginz on Friday November 21, 2008 @08:03PM (#25853393) Attached to: Chinese Hacking of American Military Networks On the Rise

I believe that would be called counter-intelligence. That's one of my favorite stories BTW.

How To Make Money With Free Software 187

Posted by timothy on Thursday October 30, 2008 @05:54PM from the actual-money dept.

fons writes "Dutch Python hacker/artist Stani took part in a contest organised by the Dutch Ministry Of Finance to design a 5 euro commemorative coin. And he won, using only free software: 'The whole design was done for 100% with free software. The biggest part consists of custom software in Python, of course within the SPE editor. For the visual power I used PIL and pyCairo. From time to time also Gimp, Inkscape and Phatch helped quite a bit. All the developing and processing was done on GNU/Linux machines which were running Ubuntu/Debian. I would have loved to release the coin under the GPL, which could maybe solve the financial crisis. However for obvious reasons I was not allowed to do that.'"

Virtual Fence Could Modernize the Old West 216

Posted by CmdrTaco on Monday October 06, 2008 @09:32AM from the too-strange-for-a-topic-icon dept.

Hugh Pickens writes "For more than a century, ranchers in the West have kept cattle in place with fences of barbed wire, split wood and, more recently, electrified wires. Now, animal science researchers with the Department of Agriculture are working on a system that will allow cowboys to herd their cattle remotely via radio by singing commands and whispering into their ears and tracking movements by satellite and computer. A video of Dean Anderson, a researcher at the USDA's Jornada Experimental Range at Las Cruces, NM., shows how he has built radios that attach to an animal's head that allow a person at the other end to issue a range of commands — gentle singing, sharp commands, or a buzz like a bee or snake — to get the cattle to move where one wants them to. Anderson says it would cost $900 today to put a radio device on one head of cattle, but he says costs will fall and the entire herd wouldn't have to be outfitted, just the 'leaders.' Much of the research has focused on how cattlemen can identify which cattle in their herds are the ones that the others follow."

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