15286574
submission
blair1q writes:
Today, at The Magnetic Recording Conference at UCSD, Toshiba is revealing bit-patterned media for hard drives that they claim raises the maximum bit density from 541 Gb/in^2 to 2.5 Tb/in^2. The technology reduces the number of magnetic grains needed to store a bit by prealigning the grains into stripes when manufacturing the platter, rather than leaving them in a random organization.
14509778
submission
blair1q writes:
Facebook, the sleepy little school-oriented social-networking site that overtook MySpace as most-popular some time ago, has passed 500,000,000 users,
according to cnet news, the BBC, AFP, and Tech Crunch (love that picture, btw. really shows how much he cares, ya think?). Of course, none of them mention that many of these "users" are spam avatars or aliases created for various purposes, not least of which is the armies of aliases some users have created to improve their scores in facebook-application games.
14443498
submission
blair1q writes:
The United States Air Force needs civilian cybersecurity workers. 680 of them (job postings at http://www.usajobs.gov/ ). And to ramp up staffing the Office of Personnel Management has allowed the Air Force to bypass competitive bidding by preferring people with qualifying disabilities. What kind of jobs are these? "Cyberrisk and strategic analysis; incident handling and malware/vulnerability analysis; cyberincident response; cyberexercise facilitation and management; cybervulnerability detection and assessment; network and systems engineering; enterprise architecture; intelligence analysis; investigation; investigative analysis; and cyberrelated infrastructure interdependency analysis." If that doesn't light up your sonic screwdriver you're not fully materialized. But there's a catch: Schedule A is part of a streamlining process that front-loads hiring with qualifying individuals. If you read the pdf file (link in TFA) you can deduce that you may not get hired any quicker than normal, but the hiring office may fill its positions quicker because others are already in line for the jobs. Regardless, it's jobs for nerds. Stuff that matters.
13388958
submission
blair1q writes:
When the solar aircraft Solar Impulse lifts off from an airfield in Switzerland on a sunny day at the end of June, it will begin the first ever manned night flight on a plane propelled exclusively by power it collects from the sun. Former Swiss air-force pilot Andre Borschberg and round-the-world balloonist Bertrand Piccard developed the aircraft, and Borschberg will be the pilot for this mission. "The flight will require a lot of attention and concentration — the plane doesn't have an auto-pilot, it has to be flown for 24 hours straight." For him, the most exciting part of the venture is, "being on the plane during the day and seeing the amount of energy increasing instead of decreasing as on a normal aircraft.
12822752
submission
blair1q writes:
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has issued the first permit for a wave-powered desalination plant in American territory to a company called Independent Natural Resources (http://www.inri.us). Waves will operate "Seadog" pumps which will lift water into the plant and onto a water wheel connected to a generator which will create electricity to operate a reverse-osmosis desalination system. The permit runs for four years. Let's hope they don't harm the environment, permanently impact drilling operations, or give Rube Goldberg any crazy ideas...
12424896
submission
blair1q writes:
Using a 5-tiered architecture (from CERN's central computer at Tier 0 to individual scientists' desk/lap/palmtops at Tier 5), CERN is distributing LHC data and computation across resources worldwide to achieve aggregate computational power unprecedented in high-energy physics research. As an example, "researchers can sit at their laptops, write small programs or macros, submit the programs through the AliEn system, find the necessary ALICE data on AliEn servers and then run their jobs" on upper-tier systems. The full grid comprises small computers, supercomputers, compute clusters, and mass-storage data centers. This system allows 1,000 researchers at 130 organizations in 34 countries to crunch the data, which are disgorged at a rate of 1.25 GB per second from the LHC's detectors.
12129780
submission
blair1q writes:
A judge in Brooklyn has excluded Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) lie-detector evidence from a trial there. However, the decision will not set a precedent, as it was made without even conducting a hearing on the method's validity, but on the principle, argued by the defense, that "juries are supposed to decide the credibility of the witness, and fMRI lie detection, even if it could be proven completely accurate, infringes on that right." That principle can be tested in later hearings, such as one scheduled for May 13, 2010, in Tennessee; in this case, the defense wants to use fMRI evidence it has already collected to prove its client is innocent. fMRI is shown to be 76-90% accurate. That number that seems significantly larger than the rate of false convictions.
11895744
submission
blair1q writes:
After a robot failed to shut off a valve on the broken pipe left in the sea bottom by the sinking of the Deepwater Horizon (operated by BP and Transocean), the U.S. Coast Guard is considering setting a 75,000 km^2 oil slick on fire to protect the swampy Louisiana coast, which is just 30 km away. Other ideas: drilling a second well to starve the leaking well of oil, and covering the wellhead with a collection dome then pumping the oil to tankers on the surface. The U.S. Departments of the Interior and Homeland Security are setting up investigations into the accident. And nobody seems to be able to locate Aquaman.
11186494
submission
blair1q writes:
John McAllister, of Portland, Oregon, following a marathon 3-1/2 day session, has broken the 27-year-old high score for Asteroids, set in 1982 by Scott Safran. The attempt was broadcast via webcam, which may still be operational.
