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Submission + - Bilateral-control algorithm for Eliminating unexplained Traffic Jams

Submitted by rtoz
rtoz writes: An MIT Professor has developed a new bilateral-control algorithm which will be useful for eliminating unexplained Traffic Jam when implementing it with adaptive cruise-control systems of the cars. Berthold Horn, the professor in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, presented this new algorithm for alleviating traffic flow instabilities at this month’s IEEE Conference on Intelligent Transport Systems. His algorithm is for eliminating the unexplained traffic jams which are NOT caused by actual problems like accident or construction. This Traffic simulation (8 MB GIF) (Video) clearly shows the advantage of Horn’s algorithm. The bilateral-control algorithm is switched on at the one-minute mark in this sample flow. Anyway, the cost of these hardware will come down once mass production starts for these devices. Mostly Google’s Self-driving Car initiative will trigger mass production of rangefinders in new future. The real obstacle to the system’s adoption is not technical but psychological. “Generally, drivers really worry about what is good for me, rather than what is good for the whole platoon or the community of vehicles that are moving on this road with me,” Trivedi, a California University professor says.

Submission + - Company to Balloon Tourists to the Edge of Space for $75,000 (discovery.com)

Submitted by astroengine
astroengine writes: If the thought of a rocket ride to space — or the $250,000 price tag to get there — leaves you feeling queasy, an Arizona firm thinks it has a gentler, less expensive alternative. World View, an offshoot of privately owned Paragon Space Development Corp., is developing a balloon-launched, near-space (30 kilometers) ride for $75,000 — less than one-third the current cost to fly on Virgin Galactic's suborbital SpaceShipTwo. “It really is very gentle. You can be up at altitude for hours, for days for research if you need to be... I think we have the opportunity to give a really, really incredible experience to people — and for a lot less than most of what’s out on the market right now,” project co-founder and Paragon president Jane Poynter told Discovery News.

Submission + - Visual Studio 2013 Released

Submitted by jones_supa
jones_supa writes: Final releases of Visual Studio 2013, .NET 4.5.1, and Team Foundation Server 2013 are now available. As part of the new release, the C++ engine implements variadic templates, delegating constructors, non-static data member initializers, uniform initialization and 'using' aliases. The editor has seen new features, C++ improvements and performance optimizations. Support for Windows 8.1 has been enhanced and the new XAML UI Responsiveness tool and Profile Guided Optimization help to analyze responsiveness in Windows Store apps. Graphics debugging has been furthered to have better C++ AMP tools and a new remote debugger (x86, x64, ARM). As before, MSDN and DreamSpark subscribers can obtain the releases from the respective channels, and the Express edition is available free for all.

Submission + - UK Government To Build 4G Into Rural Broadband Plans (techweekeurope.co.uk)

Submitted by judgecorp
judgecorp writes: The British Government is discussing a role for 4G in the project to extend rural broadband coverage beyond the reach of fibre. There is £250 million of public money to fill in the gaps left by the £530 Broadband Delivery UK (BDUK) programme — BDUK's efforts to extend fibre have been criticised because despite promises of a competitive process, all the BDUK money has gone to BT. At a meeting with mobile operators today, the Department of Culture Media and Sport hopes to set up a more competitive 4G fill-in effort.

Submission + - LinkedIn Fights National Security Letter Gag Orders

Submitted by Trailrunner7
Trailrunner7 writes: LinkedIn on Tuesday joined the fray of Internet companies requesting permission from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to publish data on the number of National Security Letters it receives.

Unlike Google, Microsoft and others that have petitioned the FISA court to lift its ban on the sharing of NSL data, LinkedIn does not offer Web-based email or storage service for its members and therefore does not store the same types of data on individuals that might interest the National Security Agency and the FBI. However, with the NSA’s stated ability and desire to map phone call metadata in order to connect and locate individuals who could be a threat to national security, LinkedIn’s similar mapping between its 238 million members’ professional careers could be of interest to the court.

“When one individual receives a National Security Letter, they have a First Amendment right to speak about that fact under certain conditions,” said Brett Max Kaufman, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). “At a global level, it’s very clear that LinkedIn has a parallel interest in being able to speak about an entire group of individuals whose information is affected by these requests.”

Submission + - Bad Commercial Satellite Imagery Helps Sink a US Navy Ship 1

Submitted by Hugh Pickens DOT Com
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes: Bob Brewin writes in Defense One that a US government agency misplaced a reef in the Philippine Islands by eight miles on its digital nautical charts, which helped cause the USS Guardian to run aground January 17 destroying the ship. Letitia Long, director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, told the Chief of Naval Operations that the digital nautical chart display of the Tubbataha Reef in the Sulu Sea was wrong due to erroneous commercial satellite imagery. The error was compounded by “exclusive reliance” of the minesweeper's crew on GPS as a “single source of navigation.” The crew did not pay heed to lighthouses on the reef, according to an investigation report by the commander of US Pacific Fleet. The investigation blamed the grounding primarily on the crew’s failure to reconcile the differences between digital nautical charts of the area and more refined coastal charts. The Navy report says the grounding and destruction of the minesweeper highlights “potential systemic issues” (PDF) on ships that use the Navy’s computer based vessel management system and its electronic chart and display system. The last time a significant mapping error caused an international incident was in 1999, when the United States bombed China’s embassy in Belgrade, Serbia during the war, killing three people. Some foreign news accounts reported that the strike was deliberate, but US officials have resolutely held to the line that a mapping error occurred.

Submission + - Pioneer in surround sound, noise reduction dies at 80

Submitted by krouic
krouic writes: Ray Dolby, the American inventor who changed the way people listen to sound in their homes, on their phones and in cinemas, died Thursday in San Francisco. A pioneer in the field of sound, Dolby will be remembered as the man who took the hiss out of sound recordings. With a fortune of $2.4 billion at his death, Dolby truly did make silence golden.
"To be an inventor, you have to be willing to live with a sense of uncertainty, to work in the darkness and grope toward an answer, to put up with the anxiety about whether there is an answer," Mr Dolby once said.

Submission + - A Major Advance for Emerging Solar Cell Technology (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: Researchers have figured out that a promising solar cell material called perovskite can be manufactured super simply (and cheaply) and still generate the same amount of electricity. The advance boosts the chance that this material, which is a lot cheaper than its silicon counterparts, will hit the mainstream market.

Submission + - Voyager 1 becomes first man made object to reach interstellar space (nationalgeographic.com)

Submitted by i_want_you_to_throw_
i_want_you_to_throw_ writes: It’s official: Voyager 1 has slipped the surly bonds of the solar system. Launched in 1977, Voyager 1 traveled past Jupiter and Saturn and is now more than 11.66 billion miles (18.67 billion kilometers) from the sun, becoming the first spacecraft to enter interstellar space. Proof of this long-anticipated milestone for the storied spacecraft comes in a study released Thursday by the journal Science.

Submission + - What is it like to be Slashdotted Twice? (blogspot.com)

Submitted by toygeek
toygeek writes: I've been reading Slashdot for over 10 years, and this year decided to start writing more on my blog. I tested the waters by submitting my articles to Slashdot (for me, the ultimate peer review) and managed to make the front page, not just once but twice. Its something I'd never expected to achieve. What's it like to be on the other side of the Slashdot front page, to so speak? What does it to do website stats? Do you get flame broiled in the comments? Does Cowboy Neal call you to personally congratulate you? Read on to find out.

Submission + - Keeping Data Secret, Even From Apps That Use It (slashdot.org)

Submitted by Nerval's Lobster
Nerval's Lobster writes: Datacenters wanting to emulate Google by encrypting their data beyond the ability of the NSA to crack it may get some help from a new encryption technique that allows data to be stored, transported and even used by applications without giving away any secrets. In a paper to be presented at a major European security conference this week, researchers from Denmark and the U.K. collaborated on a practical way to implement a long-discussed encryption concept called Multi-Party Computation (MPC). The idea behind MPC is to allow two parties who have to collaborate on an analysis or computation to do so without revealing their own data to the other party. Though the concept was introduced in 1982, ways to accomplish it with more than two parties, or with standardized protocols and procedures, has not become practical in commercial environments. The Danish/British team revamped an MPC protocol nicknamed SPDZ (pronounced “speeds”), which uses secret, securely generated keys to distribute a second set of keys that can be used for MPC encryptions. The big breakthrough, according to Smart, was to streamline SPDZ by reducing the number of times global MAC keys had to be calculated in order to create pairs of public and private keys for other uses. By cutting down on repetitive tasks, the whole process becomes much faster; because the new technique keeps global MAC keys secret, it should also make the faster process more secure.

Submission + - Belgian ISPs blocking torrent sites, complains are accepted by fax !

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: As stated by http://torrentfreak.com/belgian-isps-quietly-expand-torrent-site-blockade-130828/ , Belgian IPs are now blocking more and more P2P sites in a (most likely) vain attempt to counter illegal P2P. The fun thing here is they redirect to a page which says:
"If you are the owner or administrator of this website and you consider to be wrongly redirected, you can report this by fax at +32(0)2/733.56.16"
I’m not quite sure what is more unlikely: that owners of such P2P sites would still have a fax, or that they would freely report to authorities.

Submission + - Martin Luther King Jr's Children in Court over MLK IP

Submitted by cervesaebraciator
cervesaebraciator writes: Slashdot has reported before about the copyright nightmare of the 'I Have a Dream Speech'. Now questions of intellectual property and the legacy of Dr. King have caused his children to go to court. The estate, run by King's sons, claims the rights to the intellectual property and memorabilia of Dr. King as assets. Accordingly, it has filed suit against the non-profit Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Change, run by King's daughter, for plans to continue using King memorabilia once a royalty-free licensing agreement expires, (which the estate says will be in September). As is the case with increasing frequency, one is left to wonder about the implications intellectual property claims have for free speech when they can be applied to so public a figure as Dr. King.

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