doomsday_device - Slashdot User

Submission + - FCC Commish Leaves FCC to Become Lobbyist (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 11, 2011 @05:45PM

An anonymous reader writes: Meredith Attwell Baker, one of the FCC Commissioners, is leaving the FCC to become a lobbyist for Comcast-NBC, just four months after approving their merger deal. She refused to put any significant conditions on the merger, saying that the deal would 'bring exciting benefits to consumers that outweigh potential harms.' Comcast has released an official statement saying that, 'Meredith’s executive branch and business experience along with her exceptional relationships in Washington bring Comcast and NBCUniversal the perfect combination of skills.'

Submission + - It's official: cell phones are killing bees (inhabitat.com) 5

Submitted by greenerd on Wednesday May 11, 2011 @03:39PM

greenerd writes: Scientists may have found the cause of the world’s sudden dwindling population of bees – and cell phones are to blame. Research conducted in Lausanne, Switzerland has shown that the signal from cell phones not only confuses bees, but also leads to their death. Over 83 experiments have yielded the same results.

Submission + - Sailing the Titan Seas (jhuapl.edu)

Submitted by gpronger on Wednesday May 11, 2011 @02:04PM

gpronger writes: NASA has awarded The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) to manage a proposed exploration of the methane oceanon Titan. Next year APL will be submitting a project plan to NASA, which will be one of three submittals. If chosen launch would be in 2016 with arrival at Titan in 2023.

The "Titan Mare Explorer" or TiME would be the first exploration of an extraterrestrial ocean with the craft landing and floating on the ocean. The mission would be led by principal investigator Ellen Stofan of Proxemy Research Inc. in Gaithersburg, Md. Lockheed Martin in Denver would build the TiME capsule, with scientific instruments provided by APL, Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., and Malin Space Science Systems in San Diego.

This is part of NASA's Discovery Program and would be the next mission, funded and supported by NASA.

Submission + - Google Lobbies Nevada To Allow Self-Driving Cars (nytimes.com) 1

Submitted by b0bby on Wednesday May 11, 2011 @02:02PM

b0bby writes: The NY Times reports that "Google, a pioneer of self-driving cars, is quietly lobbying for legislation that would make Nevada the first state where they could be legally operated on public roads. ...The two bills, which have received little attention outside Nevada’s Capitol, are being introduced less than a year after the giant search engine company acknowledged that it was developing cars that could be safely driven without human intervention. "

Submission + - Vanderbilt creates more effective insect repellant (vanderbilt.edu)

Submitted by schwit1 on Wednesday May 11, 2011 @01:23PM

schwit1 writes: Imagine an insect repellant that not only is thousands of times more effective than DEET — the active ingredient in most commercial mosquito repellants — but also works against all types of insects, including flies, moths and ants.

That possibility has been created by the discovery of a new class of insect repellant made in the laboratory of Vanderbilt Professor of Biological Sciences and Pharmacology Laurence Zwiebel and reported this week in the online Early Edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

In preliminary tests with mosquitoes, the researchers found the new class of repellant, called Vanderbilt University Allosteric Agonist or VUAA1, to be thousands of times more effective than DEET. The compound works by affecting insects' sense of smell through a newly discovered molecular channel.

Submission + - Experimental app could keep ISPs honest (networkworld.com)

Submitted by alphadogg on Wednesday May 11, 2011 @12:19PM

alphadogg writes: A browser-based app developed by Georgia Tech researchers is designed to help Internet users make better use of their bandwidth – and to make sure ISPs are holding up their end of the bandwidth bargain. The Kermit app, which is being shown off Wednesday at the CHI 2011 Conference on Human Factors in Computing in Vancouver, emerges at a time when service providers are starting to place bandwidth caps not just on wireless services, but on wireline services, too. AT&T, for example, is putting such caps in place this month for its DSL and U-verse customers. At least initially, such caps aren't expected to affect all but the very heaviest bandwidth users.

Submission + - Secure Firefox 4 Inside A Debian Virtual Machine (conceivablytech.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 11, 2011 @12:08PM

An anonymous reader writes: A German security company has released a unique version of Firefox 4 that isolates the browser from the host OS and promises more security than any other browser released so far. BitBox comes with a stripped Debian 6 Linux virtual machine, which is returned to its default state every time it is launched — which means that downloaded malware is automatically deleted. The software was originally developed for the German government and is now offered as a general download for private users free of charge.

Submission + - Mainstream Media Looks at Anonymous (guardian.co.uk)

Submitted by

ScuttleMonkey

on Wednesday May 11, 2011 @11:45AM

ScuttleMonkey writes: "In an uncharacteristically accurate writeup of Anonymous, the Guardian has published a look at the assembled mob behind the mask. A great place to send those unfamiliar with who or what Anonymous really is. 'This collective identity belongs to no one in particular, but is at the disposal of anyone who knows its rules and knows how to apply them. Anonymous, the collective identity, is older than Anonymous, the hacktvist group – more to the point, I propose that the hacktivist group can be understood as an application of Anonymous, the collective identity.'"

Comment Re:It will be interesting (Score 1) 60

by doomsday_device on Saturday May 07, 2011 @05:09PM (#36058562) Attached to: Rocket Blasts Off With Missile-Warning Satellite

Well let's hope that with the incredible power of a computer, they can distinguish commercial space traffic from global thermonuclear war.

Your typical first strike would involve lots of simultaneous launches. And the trajectories of icbm's would be suspiciously suborbital. Complicated equipment doing complicated pattern recognition. Built by the lowest bidder. What could possibly go wrong...

Submission + - How to stop cats pissing on your car (guardian.co.uk)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 07, 2011 @05:14AM

An anonymous reader writes: In this unusual Caturday video special: this clever man took action against hormonal cats that were pissing on everything in his possession, from his front door to his car windscreen

Comment Re:3D Transistors. Seriously? (Score 1) 141

by doomsday_device on Wednesday May 04, 2011 @06:23PM (#36029738) Attached to: Intel Designs Faster, 3D Transistor

Yes. You may note, that was my original point. Intel fielding them before AMD and the rest does is what the real news is about here.

Nevermind the tautology. I'm tired and drunk. Sorry. ;-)

But a link to the inventors would have been ... well ... informative.

And the kind of FinFET technology used is more a matter of what is more effective in your semiconductor process. Whether it's twingsate, trigate, quadgate, whatever. There's a good chance what they published years ago is not all that similar to what they did for this.

Comment Re:3D Transistors. Seriously? (Score 1) 141

by doomsday_device on Wednesday May 04, 2011 @05:51PM (#36029314) Attached to: Intel Designs Faster, 3D Transistor

Well, the original FinFETs were twingate (as were some similar transistors before the term FinFET was coined for them), intel invented trigate. In the end, this still is the first kind of FinFET coming to market.

I just think inventing them in the first place is more inventive then refining them.

My point of them having been quite a long time in the making still stands. Just note the age of that press release (2002).

Oh dear. They called them 3D-Transistors even back then.

Comment 3D Transistors. Seriously? (Score 1) 141

by doomsday_device on Wednesday May 04, 2011 @05:11PM (#36028886) Attached to: Intel Designs Faster, 3D Transistor

What is indeed news is that intel is fielding them first.

Well, while it is nice a slashdot article has finally been written about FinFET's - there may already have been one, I just can't remember - these devices have been widely guessed to be a part of the 22 nm technology node for quite some time. (see: http://www.itrs.net/ and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/22_nanometer ).

They offer more effectivity for your gates as the field is not coming from one, but from 3 sides to the channel. That means a bit more scalability, but not much more. There is only a bit of improvement possible for the future in putting the gate below the channel as well (as hard as that may be, i, personally, don't think it would be worthwhile), so this won't save moore's law in the end.

It may not surprise you that they actually haven't been invented by intel, and are not new.

The term has been coined more than 10 years ago ( http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=823848 ) (find one of the free pdf's of this classic paper for yourself)

What is more interesting is how far down these transistors will scale in the extreme ultraviolet processes that are emerging right now.

Comment Re:Still think Wikileaks knows what they're doing? (Score 1) 632

by doomsday_device on Wednesday May 04, 2011 @02:25AM (#36020976) Attached to: Leaked Doc May Have Forced US To Speed Up Bin Laden Raid

Do you really believe what you said there?

If you believe there is a valid military objective to be obtained here, then you shouldn't talk about Gitmo.

five posts further up

No, it would be better to live in a representative democracy with checks, balances and a centuries-long tradition of government accountability, the rule of law [...].

Shut up about it? Now that's a great tradition of rule of law if you ask me.

You know, laws and military objectives are not supposed to be contradictory. Two parties, in a combined 10 year effort, with all checks and balances in place, could not come up with a legal way of locking up and _interrogating_ their prisoners of war short of keeping them on extrajudicial territory. That is pretty much a low for the united states.

And those politicians knew, at least after 9/11, that they would fight a war against terrorists.

Submission + - Silicon odometer might soon boost your CPU (extremetech.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 29, 2011 @05:15PM

An anonymous reader writes: Manufacturers like Intel and AMD criminally underclock their processors because they lack a way to accurately measure the aging of MOSFET transistors. A new silicon odometer, which uses a pair of ring oscillators to measure the "beat" of transistors, should enables on-die monitoring of transistor aging, and thus allows for much higher clock speeds.

Slashdot Top Deals