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Comment This is nothing like a diesel. (Score 1) 379

by kybur (#31416144) Attached to: 50% Efficiency Boost From New Fuel Injection System
This is nothing like a diesel.

In a diesel, the fuel is injected into the cylinder.

FTFA: "Once the fuel is injected into the piston, the heat and pressure are enough to cause the fuel to combust without a spark"

No, what we have here is a true revolution. This company is only one step away from screwing spark plugs directly into the fuel tank.
Intel

Submission + - 8 Core Intel Nehalem-EX To Launch This Month (hothardware.com)

Submitted by
MojoKid
MojoKid writes: "What could you do with 8 physical cores of CPU processing power? Intel's upcoming 8-core Nehalem-EX is launching later this month, according to Intel Xeon Platform Director Shannon Poulin. The announcement puts to rest rumors that the 8-core part might be delayed, and makes good on a promise Intel made last year when the chip maker said it would release the chip in the first half of 2010. To quickly recap, Nehalem-EX boasts an extensive feature-set, including up to 8 cores per processor, up to 16 threads per processor with Intel Hyper-threading, scalability up to eight sockets via Intel's serial Quick Path Interconnect and greater with third-party node controllers, and 24MB of shared cache."
Power

Submission + - MIT Produces Electricity Using Thermopower Waves (inhabitat.com)

Submitted by MikeChino
MikeChino writes: MIT scientists have discovered a never-before-known phenomenon wherein carbon nanotubes can be used to harness energy from “thermopower waves”. To do this they coated the nanotubes with a reactive fuel and then lit one end, causing a fast-moving thermal wave to speed down the length of the tube. The heat from the fuel rises to a temperature of 3,000 kelvins, and can speed along the tube 10,000 times faster than the normal spread of this chemical reaction. The heat also pushes electrons down the tube which creates a substantial electrical current. The system can output energy (in proportion to its weight) about 100 x greater than an equivalent weight lithium-ion battery, and according to MIT the discovery “opens up a new area of energy research, which is rare”.

Submission + - Amazon terminates all Colorado associates (prosperotechnologies.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Dear Colorado-based Amazon Associate:

We are writing from the Amazon Associates Program to inform you that the Colorado government recently enacted a law to impose sales tax regulations on online retailers. The regulations are burdensome and no other state has similar rules. The new regulations do not require online retailers to collect sales tax. Instead, they are clearly intended to increase the compliance burden to a point where online retailers will be induced to "voluntarily" collect Colorado sales tax — a course we won't take.

We and many others strongly opposed this legislation, known as HB 10-1193, but it was enacted anyway. Regrettably, as a result of the new law, we have decided to stop advertising through Associates based in Colorado. We plan to continue to sell to Colorado residents, however, and will advertise through other channels, including through Associates based in other states.

There is a right way for Colorado to pursue its revenue goals, but this new law is a wrong way. As we repeatedly communicated to Colorado legislators, including those who sponsored and supported the new law, we are not opposed to collecting sales tax within a constitutionally-permissible system applied even-handedly. The US Supreme Court has defined what would be constitutional, and if Colorado would repeal the current law or follow the constitutional approach to collection, we would welcome the opportunity to reinstate Colorado-based Associates.

You may express your views of Colorado's new law to members of the General Assembly and to Governor Ritter, who signed the bill.

Your Associates account has been closed as of March 8, 2010, and we will no longer pay advertising fees for customers you refer to Amazon.com after that date. Please be assured that all qualifying advertising fees earned prior to March 8, 2010, will be processed and paid in accordance with our regular payment schedule. Based on your account closure date of March 8, any final payments will be paid by May 31, 2010.

We have enjoyed working with you and other Colorado-based participants in the Amazon Associates Program, and wish you all the best in your future.

Best Regards,

The Amazon Associates Team

Submission + - Commercial personal jetpak for $86,000. (gizmag.com)

Submitted by doug141
doug141 writes: The Jetpack is constructed from carbon fiber composite, has a dry weight of 250 lbs (excluding safety equipment) and measures 5 ft high x 5.5 ft wide x 5 ft long. It's driven by a 2.0 L V4 2 stroke engine rated at 200 hp (150 kw), can reach 8000 ft (estimated) and each of the two 1.7 ft wide rotors is made from carbon / Kevlar composite. At $86,000 it is pitched at the level of a high-end car. As sales and production volume increase they expect this to drop to the price of a mid-range car. A 10% deposit buys you a production slot for 12 months hence; progress payments are made during manufacture with final payment due on delivery.
NASA

Submission + - Bureaucracy at NASA gone mad (nytimes.com)

Submitted by wisebabo
wisebabo writes: Okay, if there was ever a reason to shut down, dismantle and start NASA over it is this. The Supreme Court is deciding whether invasive (to me at least) personal background checks (sex lives, medical records) will be required of all JPL employees/independent contractors. No top secret work is done there and (I suppose) nothing military or even directly industry related. (In fact I thought the work of NASA was "For All Mankind".) Anyway, 28 scientists and engineers have so far refused to comply and if they lose this case will be fired.

While NASA claims that all Federal employees must go through this kind of check, I don't think these guys fit into the "all" category. It IS rocket science and I'm sure most of them have an IQ/educational background/creativity quotient that is extremely rare. I guess there could be a reason to do this if you were afraid that some personal information could be used to blackmail someone but as I mentioned before, what they are creating is destined to be public anyway.

So what if one guy has a fetish for SCUBA gear and chicken feathers? More seriously, look what happened to Alan Turing (father of the computer); if the Brits had had this policy in place and denied him any serious work in the war effort, computer technology would have set way back (and perhaps the decoding of Enigma and the winning of the war). As it is, they only managed to get him to commit suicide AFTER he had done some incredibly important work.

Look, if one of them is committing a crime/becoming a public menace, let the police deal with it. Otherwise keep the Republican religious police out of our bedrooms! (drug dens?).

Submission + - Is Linux on Macs a bad idea? (facebook.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: According to this guy who claims to be an Apple Tech, running Linux directly on Macbook hardware will fry the logic board. He says "The reason is fairly technical, but what it boils own to is that the higher the voltages feeding the CPU, the greater chance there is of electrons "jumping the rails" and causing incorrect logic values, and instead of these voltages being looked after by the BIOS chips on the motherboard, they are handled directly by the operating system. OSX knows how to do this, Ubuntu does not."

Comment Re:Heh (Score 5, Informative) 125

by kybur (#31001480) Attached to: New iPhone Attack Kills Apps, Reroutes Web Traffic
Certain settings can be changed on an iPhone just based on links/downloads clicked on from within Safari (on the device). That is how iphone os 3.0.x users could enable tethering without jailbreaking their phones. It was just a settings file that could be downloaded. I believe it was unsigned, but now, apparently it would be easy to make it look like an apple signed file.

Comment Re:Elementary School in the 80s (Score 1) 266

by kybur (#30998182) Attached to: Dying Man Shares Unseen Challenger Video
I always thought the Need Another Seven Astronauts joke was pretty dumb. Airplanes don't need to sleep, so you always have multiple crews per aircraft. Commercial airlines usually have 4 to 7 complete crews per airplane. If you lose any aircraft, you don't need more crew, because you instantly have a surplus.
Science

Colliding Particles Can Make Black Holes After All 269

Posted by Soulskill from the act-now-while-supplies-last dept.
cremeglace writes with this excerpt from ScienceNOW: "You've heard the controversy. Particle physicists predict the world's new highest-energy atom smasher, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) near Geneva, Switzerland, might create tiny black holes, which they say would be a fantastic discovery. Some doomsayers fear those black holes might gobble up the Earth — physicists say that's impossible — and have petitioned the United Nations to stop the $5.5 billion LHC. Curiously, though, nobody had ever shown that the prevailing theory of gravity, Einstein's theory of general relativity, actually predicts that a black hole can be made this way. Now a computer model shows conclusively for the first time that a particle collision really can make a black hole." That said, they estimate the required energy for creating a black hole this way to be roughly "a quintillion times higher than the LHC's maximum"; though if one of the theories requiring compact extra dimensions is true, the energy could be lower.
Technology

Using EMP To Punch Holes In Steel 165

Posted by timothy from the you'll-need-some-big-batteries dept.
angrytuna writes "The Economist is running a story about a group of researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Machine Tools and Forming Technology in Chemnitz, Germany, who've found a way to use an EMP device to shape and punch holes through steel. The process enjoys advantages over both lasers, which take more time to bore the hole (0.2 vs. 1.4 seconds), and by metal presses, which can leave burrs that must be removed by hand."

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