Journal museumpeace's Journal: How not to write for Slashdot posting
useless rationalizations for why the dice don't come up "Accepted"
- Physicist betting 50/50 chance time travel is even possible.
News@nature.com gives a readable description of physicist Amos Ori's article in Physical Review Letters on a better way to build a time machine. Expert Paul Davies rates it as more feasible than ideas that require the manipulation of black holes. Researchers are divided over whether any solution to the fundamental problem of a time machine, regardless of design, blowing up due to quantum mechanical instabilites will ever be found. Says Ori: "Perhaps we shall have to await the formulation of the full theory of quantum gravity before we know whether quantum instabilities provide chronology protection or not". CHRONOLOGY PROTECTION: physics lingo for "the past is unreachable".rejected 6PM EST 2005.07.18 [resubmitted and rejected again...whats wrong? too technical? time travel is not sexy enough?]
- SIT stealthy spinoff to sell unjammable radios to police
The Technogenesis program at Stevens INstitute of Technology has spun off a start up, Attila Technologies LLC, to make wireless communications devices and services providing continuous broadband, on-demand communication devices and services. It may be a while before you get your hands on one of these things...they are marketing to cops and DHS who want to communicate even when normal cell service is broken or degraded. A former AOL VP Operations will be CEO of Attila. Search engines found nary a hint this work was afoot and SIT pages had no or broken links; the news was from a press release found on AAAS's eureakalert. A stealth mode startup that leaves me hungry for technical details!rejected Monday July 25, @08:06PM
suspected reasons for rejection: factual error (SIT does have an april press release page with a slightly different name for this start-up.) - CISCO coverup at Black Hat conference?
In the Washington Post Brian Krebs reports that at the last minute, someone ripped out 30 pages of the Black Hat conference proceedings that describe a recently discovered vulnerability in Cisco routers. Michael Lynn, the researcher who was to have presented the information has not shown up at the conference as scheduled. Was this a security flawrejected Wednesday July 27, @02:33PM
- VMWare to head off MSFT by sharing technology
Hoping to keep whatever moves Microsoft may make in Virtual Machine technology from swamping its increasingly successful offerings, VMWare is sharing its technology with a who's who of system vendors. News.com replays a NYTimes story explaining how the EMC subsidiary hopes to make its virtual machines a standard before Microsoft, which has been slow to work with VM's they can't own, makes its move. The consortium will include Advanced Micro Devices, Cisco Systems and Red Hat, in addition to IBM, Intel and Hewlett-Packard. Where's Sun Microsystems? Don't they have some kind of VM?Rejected instantly on Monday August 08, @12:24PM, I think Zonk is getting even with me.
- Mich. State U. offers Video Game Design minor
Though not yet a full degree program, the Detroit News reports today on a new program at MSU that "... will give students a chance to study video games and design through its Specialization in Game Design and Development program.... as an academic minor and will provide students with 15 credit hours for a four-course sequence of classes on video game design and the history and social aspects of video games." Robert MacMillan also covered the story in the Washington [cookie eating] Post. You may be the master of the dungeon but when are you going to get a Bachelor of Video Game Design?Rejected Wednesday August 03, @12:22PM
[not really news, lots of such programs exist and this was PR] - Pentagon paying scientists to learn script writing
If I hadn't read it in the NYTimes I would suspect the report was a hoax. Martin Gundersen, a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Southern California and sometime Hollywood technical adviser, convinced the Pentagon to put up $25,000 in research grants so the American Film Institute can coach a classroom of scientists and engineers from various disciplines on how to WRITE AND SELL SCREEN PLAYS FOR HOLLYWOOD. This is actually a DoD tactic to drum up more domestic interest in science careers and thus boost the ebbing supply of engineers for defense laboratories where US citizenship is needed for the required security clearances. No...it couldn't be a hoax, you can't make this stuff up!REJECTED Thursday August 04, @11:44AM
perhaps I overdramatized?..I even put in a no-registration link. - Microsoft crawling for malicious sites
Simpson Garfinkle at Technology Review pionted out an interesting article in InformationWeek describing one way Microsoft is finding exploits that work against its browsers and which sites are serving those exploits. In a client-side form of the honeypot idea, MS runs a farm of XP + IE clients surfing lists of suspect URLs. The machines are at various patch levels and instrumented to detect unsolicited downloads. When a weaker machine is breached it passes the URL to a more protected system. So far over 700 sites are identified and some can infect even the most patched up XP/SP2 client. Its actually a pretty effective idea, I think.shows as "accepted" but was actually rejected..the later author's submission that was posted was better informed than mine since I didn't detect the story had previous
- Sun Grid Utility goes live for employees
CNET is reporting that Sun Microsystems turned on its Grid computing utility, hosting large ERP applications for its employees to test out the server infrastructure and user acceptance of the Computing-as-metered-utility model. General availability is scheduled for October. The rates? "Sun is offering processing and storage in a pay-as-you-go arrangement of $1 per CPU per hour, delivered via an Internet connection". Sun is still retooling its Thin Client interfaces and support SW. Experts quoted in the article wonder if Sun can make any money this way.Accepted Wednesday August 24, @12:27PM, oh well, you can't loose 'em all.
- wireless USB: problem or solution?
I am familliar with rats nests but I am unfamiliar with wireless USB and according to CNET, Intel thinks we all should be using it. The ink hasn't dried on a perfected WHCI standard so I can't tell if it would address some basic requirements. Surely a fewRejected. Thursday August 25, @01:22PM
overlong, and by - Blogging as press freedom in repressive places
CNN.COM is carrying an AP story from France on the release of guidelines to help bloggers working under threat of suppressive governments to get out their stories without getting caught. "Reporters Without Borders' "Handbook for Blogger and Cyber-Dissidents" is partly financed by the French government and includes technical advice on how to remain anonymous online." Makes me proud to be a developer of communication software. - pro and con of what satellite photos reveal
On the one hand hi-res satellite photos could be a huge help to rescuers scouting mountainous regions for lanslides, collapsed dams and bridges etc. On the other hand most countries think they have assets no one else should know about. One of those news stories where the comments almost write themselves.2:30 2005.10.18
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Nature is reporting today that an anti-gravity device has been patented. Despite longstanding USPTO policy to not grant patents when the claimed invention violates known laws of physics, Patent 6,960,975 is issued to Boris Volfson for a propulsion system claimed to bend spacetime using superconductors. Like other
- Giving Thanks for Roasted Laptop
Storing your laptop in the oven as a way to hide it from burglars might not be the best solution. This gal got her's done medium rare and the pictures are not pretty...but it still computes! Now itsREJECTED 2005.11.29
- Wiretapping Weaknesses: questionable evidence?
The NYTimes has a story this morning about findings of Matt Blaze and others at U. Penn that call in question the effectiveness of wiretapping techniques that have long been a backbone of evidence in federal anti-racketeering and other cases. Not only do Blaze et al show how to avoid a wire tap, they claim one can cause falsified records of numbers dialed. I imagine a line of dons and cons is forming at the penitentiary phone booth to call their lawyers.Rejected 2005.11.30
its clearly a
dozens of submissions to chose from? -
ESA has more powerful electric thruster
ESA has confirmed the principle of a new space thruster that may ultimately give much more thrust than today's electric propulsion techniques. Based on demonstration of plasma double layers by Christine Charles and Rod Boswell at the Australian National University in Canberra, ESA prototypes indicate a thruster with many times the power of the main electric thruster on ESA's SMART-1 mission could be built with the same size and efficiency.Accepted
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Simpson Garfinkle on privacy in a Googled world
Writing in Tech Review about some of the privacy issues of Gmail that haven't been in recent headlines, Simpson Garfinkle puts the financial realities that impact your privacy in thoughtfully stark terms: "Although Google is often called a search company or an e-mail provider, it earns its billions by selling clicks on targeted advertisements. Everything else is merely the honey designed to attract enough attention that some of it will spill onto those ads. Gmail's users are not Google's customers; they are its product. I personally find advertisements highly distasteful and have shied away from Gmail for that reason."Rejected Wednesday February 01, @10:19AM
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I submited the UT nano fuelcell muscle storey 2 days before someone elses submission of a derivative story was posted...WTF is that about?
2006-03-16 21:53:46 new artifical muscle 100x strength of natural (Science,Robotics) (rejected)
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Really fat gravitons detected?
In attempts to confirm general relativity, physicists may have been looking for gravitons and Gravitomagnetism in places where the noise swamps the signal. Today, ESA scientists have reported a spinning superconducting ring produces gravational acceleration in the space around it and can only account for the strength of the effect by assuming gravitons trillions of times "heavier" than general relativity predicts. Its not the first time someone thought superconductors were messing with gravity.submitted Thursday March 23 13:50PMEST
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Harvard researchers to patent optical media breakthrough
Harvard researchers have used nanofabrication methods to join an antenna of optical wavelength dimensions directly to a laser to produce sub-wavelength focus control. Should enable any new applications. from the art.: "Eventually, we envision the laser integrated into new probes for biology like optical tweezers -- which can manipulate objects as small as a single atom," says Crozier. "It could also be used for integrated-circuit fabrication or to test impurities during the fabrication process itself. One day, consumers might be able to back up three terabytes data on one disk."submitted Weds Sept 6 2:40PMEST. Status: Rejected
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Paczkowski packs it in at GMSV
I have no idea why the last time John Paczkowski's writing was mentioned insubmitted feb 3 2007
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