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Submission + - Former Director of the ISS Division at NASA Talks About Science Behind 'Elysium' (slashdot.org)

Submitted by Nerval's Lobster
Nerval's Lobster writes: In the new movie “Elysium,” Earth a century and a half from now is an overtaxed slum, low on niceties like clean water and riddled with crime and sickness. The ultra-rich have abandoned terra firma in favor of Elysium, an orbital space station where the champagne flows freely and the medical care is the best possible. Mark Uhran, former director of the International Space Station Division at NASA headquarters, talked with Slashdot about what it would take (and how much it would cost) to actually build a space station like that for civilians. It turns out NASA did a report way back in 1975 describing what it would take to build a Stanford torus space station like the one in the movie: rotation for artificial gravity, a separate shield for radiation and debris, the ability to mine materials from astroids or possibly the moon, and $190.8 billion in 1975 dollars (the equivalent of $828.11 billion today). Looks like the ultra-rich are stuck on Earth for the time being.

Submission + - Chrome's Insane Password Security Strategy

Submitted by jones_supa
jones_supa writes: One day web developer Elliott Kember decided to switch from Safari to Chrome and in the process, discovered possibly a serious weakness with local password management in Chrome. The settings import tool forced the passwords to be always imported, which lead Kember to further investigate how the data can be accessed. For those who actually bother to look at the 'Saved passwords' page, it turns out that anyone with physical access can peek all the passwords in clear text very easily with a couple of mouse clicks. This spurred a lenghty discussion featuring Justin Schuh, the head of Chrome security, who says Kember is wrong and that this behavior of Chrome has been evaluated for years and is not going to change.
Censorship

Submission + - Bloggers could face fines for Libel under new UK legislation (guardian.co.uk)

Submitted by Diamonddavej
Diamonddavej writes: The Guardian newspaper warns that Bloggers in the UK could face costly fines for libel with exemplary damages imposed if they do not sign up with a new press regulator under legislation (Clause 21A — Awards of exemplary damages) recommended by The Leveson Inquiry into press behaviour and ethics. Kirsty Hughes, the chief executive of Index on Censorship, said this a "sad day" for British democracy, “This will undoubtedly have a chilling effect on everyday people's web use". Exemplary damages, imposed by a court to penalise publishers who remain outside regulation, could run into hundreds of thousands of pounds, easily enough to close down smaller publishers such as Private Eye and local newspapers. Harry Cole, who contributes to the Guido Fawkes blog says he does not want to join a regulator, he hopes his blog will remain as irreverent and rude as ever, and continue to hold public officials to account; it's servers are located in the US. Members of Parliament voted on Clause 21A late last night, it passed 530 to 13.
Canada

Submission + - Canadian Parliamentary Report Fabricates Support IP Provisions in TPP & CETA (michaelgeist.ca)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The Canadian Standing Committee on Industry, Science and Technology released its report on the Intellectual Property Regime in Canada yesterday. While most the recommendations are fairly innocuous, the report involves a classic case of policy laundering as the government has fabricated support for the Canada — EU Trade Agreement and Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) provisions that were not even raised at committee. The report recommends ratifying four intellectual property treaties, despite the fact the treaties weren't discussed before committee. Why? Leaked versions of CETA and TPP both include requirements to ratify them.

Comment Re:CPUs? why not GPUs? (Score 5, Informative) 254

by chalsall (#42799287) Attached to: New Largest Known Prime Number: 2^57,885,161-1

Yes. And both are used for GIMPS.

See the Mersenne Forum's GPU Computing sub-forum for details.

There are, however, many more CPUs than GPUs out there, so most of the work is still done by CPUs. Two different GPUs using different software (CUDALucas) were used to confirm that 2^57,885,161-1 was prime, in addition to two other CPUs (one using different software than the GIMPS standard Prime95/mprime).

Comment Re:Wrong (Score 5, Informative) 254

by chalsall (#42799015) Attached to: New Largest Known Prime Number: 2^57,885,161-1

As is well known, there is no direct mathematical benefit from finding these primes.

It is, however, a very useful "driving problem" to developing new algorithms, software, and distributed computing infrastructure which have wide ranging real-world applications.

Check out the Mersenne Forum where all types of interesting mathematical, software and computer issues are discussed.
Math

Submission + - New largest known prime number found: 2^57,885,161-1 (mersenne.org) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: ORLANDO, Florida — On January 25th at 23:30:26 UTC, the largest known prime number, 257,885,161-1, was discovered on Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS) volunteer Curtis Cooper's computer. The new prime number, 2 multiplied by itself 57,885,161 times, less one, has 17,425,170 digits. With 360,000 CPUs peaking at 150 trillion calculations per second, 17th-year GIMPS is the longest continuously-running global "grassroots supercomputing"[1] project in Internet history.
Google

Submission + - Google Employees Caught Up Lying To Businesses (techcrunch.com)

Submitted by SharkLaser
SharkLaser writes: Looks like Google is facing an another PR disaster, as an Kenyan startup Mocality, which operatores the country's largest online business directory, has caught Google employees lying to business owners. "Not long after Google helped kickstart a program to get Kenyan businesses online, the startup suddenly started fielding calls from Kenyan business owners with questions about a supposed partnership / joint-venture Mocality had set up with the Internet search and advertising giant". As the number of calls rose, Mocality got suspicious and set up a traffic monitoring system with a smart sting operation. They noticed that certain IP address was accessing all the business details on their site, so they started serving that IP address numbers that lead to Mocality's call centre instead of the real business owners. Soon Mocality found out that Google Kenya employees and Indian call centre employees working for Google were calling up businesses they found on Mocality and tried to get them to sign up for a competing product by lying about a supposed partnership with Mocality and spreading misinformation about Mocality's business model. On some of the calls Google claimed that Mocality is engaging in bait-and-switch practices to try and charge businesses later for their listings. Mocality says it has never and will never charge for listings.

Submission + - GPU to 72 (mersenne.info)

Submitted by chalsall
chalsall writes: Those who own a GPU might be interested in a new sub-project of the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search distributed computing effort — the GPU to 72 Tool.

What we're doing is using the incredible computing power of GPUs to trial factor Mersenne Prime candidates in order to speed up the discovery of the next largest known prime number.

There is software available for both CUDA (nVidia) and OpenCL (AMD et al) hardware.

If you have a GPU and enjoy geeky projects, please consider joining us. We have a very active forum to answer any questions anyone might have.

Comment Plastic Aircraft (Score 1) 366

by chalsall (#37516802) Attached to: Boeing To Deliver First 787 Today

I remember about six years ago sitting in JFK awaiting to board a plane home (3400 km). The Captain happened to sit down beside me. We got talking, and I mentioned that I come from a family of airline pilots, and helped build two home-built aircraft in my youth; both of which were the "Quickie" design by Burt Rutan.

"Oh," says the Captain, "I don't trust composites. That's why I won't fly Airbus aircraft -- they have composite tails. I want metal everywhere."

I wonder if this same Captain is about to retire, or if he's going to limit himself to legacy, short-haul routes?

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