Please create an account to participate in the Slashdot moderation system

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×

Submission + - American Judge claims juristiction over data stored in other countries. (reuters.com)

Submitted by sim2com
sim2com writes: An American judge has just added another reason why foreign (non-American) companies should avoid using American Internet service companies? Foreign governments will not be happy having their legal jurisdiction trespassed by American courts that force American companies to turn over customers' data stored in their countries.

The question is... who has legal jurisdiction on data stored in a given country? The courts of that country or the courts of the nationality of the company who manages the data storage? This is a matter that has to be decided by International treaties... and while we're at it, let's try to establish an International cyber law enforcement system. In the meantime, I can see a lot of countries unhappy about this development.

The cloud is the future, and the future is now... IF we can all agree on legal jurisdiction over data storage across national borders.

Submission + - 3D-Printed Lens Turns Smartphones Into a £1 Microscope to Detect Diseases (ibtimes.co.uk)

Submitted by concertina226
concertina226 writes: Australian National University (ANU) researchers have used a 3D-printed lens and a Nexus 4 smartphone to create a £1 microscope that can detect skin diseases almost as well as a £300 clinical microscope.

At the moment, conventional lenses are made by either grinding or polishing a flat disk of glass into a particular curved shape – the same way lenses have been made since the 18th century – or by pouring gel-like materials into moulds.

Droplets of clear water are able to bend light and therefore able to act as a lens. The researchers decided to exploit this phenomenon to see just how good a lens they could make.

When they attached the lens to a Nexus 4 smartphone, together with two LEDS to angle the light and a watch battery, the researchers were able to produce a dermascope able to diagnose skin diseases like melanoma.

Submission + - DARPA Develops Stealth Motorcycle for US Special Forces

Submitted by Hugh Pickens DOT Com
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes: Allen McDuffee reports that DARPA is developing a hybrid-powered motorcycle to soundlessly penetrate remote areas and execute complex, lightning-fast raids. The idea is to develop a hybrid power system that relies on both electric and gas power, allowing special ops to go off-road and zip past enemy forces with the silence of an electric engine, while also being able to handle extended missions and higher speeds with a supplemental gas tank. "Quieted, all-wheel-drive capability at extended range in a lightweight, rugged, single-track vehicle could support the successful operations of U.S. expeditionary and special forces in extreme terrain conditions and contested environments,” says Wade Pulliam of Logos Technologies which was awarded a contract for a preliminary design to see just how viable the project is. “With a growing need to operate small units far from logistical support, the military may increasingly rely on adaptable, efficient technologies like this hybrid-electric motorcycle.” Logos plans to fit its quieted, multifuel hybrid-electric power system with an all-electric bike from San Francisco-based manufacturer BRD Motorcycles that uses an existing (and what BRD calls “barely legal”) racing bike, the RedShift MX, a 250-pound all-electric moto that retails for $15,000. The RedShift MX has a two hour range, but will be extended with a gas tank the size of which will be determined by the military in the research period. The focus on the electric element suggests that DARPA is more concerned with the stealthiness of the motorcycle than it is efficiency. “The team is excited to have such a mature, capable system from which to build, allowing an accelerated development cycle that could not be achieved otherwise,” says Pulliam.

Submission + - Making graphene work for real-world devices (nsf.gov)

Submitted by aarondubrow
aarondubrow writes: Graphene, a one-atom-thick form of the carbon material graphite, is strong, light, nearly transparent and an excellent conductor of electricity and heat, but a number of practical challenges must be overcome before it can emerge as a replacement for silicon in electronics or energy devices. One particular challenge concerns the question of how graphene diffuses heat, in the form of phonons. Thermal conductivity is critical in electronics, especially as components shrink to the nanoscale. Using the Stampede supercomputer at the Texas Advanced Computing Center, Professor Li Shi simulated how phonons (heat-carrying vibrations in solids) scatter as a function of the thickness of the graphene layers. He also investigated how graphene interacts with substrate materials and how phonon scattering can be controlled. The results were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Applied Physical Letters and Energy and Environmental Science.

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: Limited Electric Computing? 1

Submitted by TechForensics
TechForensics writes: Limited Electric Computing

In my fifth decade of computing, having thought for some years I'm pretty well equipped to handle whatever comes my way, I realize I'm wholly ignorant about what for some users may be the most important question they have about computing. We have about five PCs in our house, and my wife came forward with a fairly large electric bill and said she wanted to know what part of it was due to running our computers 24 seven and whether buying a lower energy consumption machine or machines might pay for itself in year or so at current electric rates.

I've heard of the "Kill-a-Watt" device, but frankly I'm too old and arthritic to go climbing down among all of our machines. All I want to know are our very best bets for lowest energy consumption cost for our machines, considering that we don't want to wait for reboot upon each seating.

None of our systems does anything but Internet, Excel, and Word processing (with the exception of mine, which does everything, but I'm not really wondering about that.) I build systems easily so I just want to know what processors, monitors and motherboards drink the least juice? I believe I'll set our systems up with normal flatscreen monitors, keyboards and mice. Most of the people in my house need Windows. Is there some wall wart or mini-form factor PC I can buy off the shelf, or should I assemble the best combination of processor, motherboard and monitor? I'm willing to consider large-screen laptops if those would prevent a significant construction project. Of course, we'll have to have a small, always-on solid state file server, to be built out of something like one SSD and a network card.

Limited electric computing – what are the best ideas by Slashdot?

Submission + - Full 3D on Your LCD with $5. Glasses? 1

Submitted by TechForensics
TechForensics writes: I was floored when I was looking for anaglyph (red-blue) 3D movie trailers and found one, supposedly 3D, with no colors. "Must be one of the polarized ones", I thought, which we all know an ordinary LCD cannot display, right? Just for giggles I slipped on a pair of Real-D glasses from my seeing Spider Man, and my jaw just about hit the floor. I had full 3D, POLARIZED 3D, in the preview of a Real-D IMAX feature (Disney's Christmas Carol) — on my PC monitor, a Gateway model LP2424 (nothing special).

Is real 3D on our TVs at home as easy as buying, or borrowing, a $5. pair of glasses? How can what I saw be?

Here's the link to the trailer, which will be Slashdotted so fast I hope someone can pull it down and host it. The link is http://www.break.com/video/ugc/a-christmas-carol-2009-trailer-1307860

Just what is going on here? This is not supposed to be technically possible, as many slashdotters are going to know. Maybe they can set me straight-- The best I can figure is I'm simply wrong and the movie is unusually vivid with infinite depth-of field so it FOOLS me that it's 3D. But I found many other copies of this trailer that did not exhibit the behavior. But.. this solitary ONE does.

Am I just a dummy or is there something here?

Comment Re:Lo-Tek Solution (Score 1) 353

by TechForensics (#44194893) Attached to: MasterCard and Visa Start Banning VPN Providers

Or actual CASH sent by registered mail. Even if you get ripped off 10% of the time you're ahead.

The recipients could also appoint dozens or hundreds of private citizens to accept payments for them. Let them cut off one and two can spring up in its place.

CitiBank and MBNA may THINK they own the payments systems, Let's show them just how essential they are.

Too many ways around them to even think of all of them.

Yawn.

Comment Adobe's Move No Worry for Pirates (Score 1) 658

by TechForensics (#43648827) Attached to: Adobe Creative Suite Going Subscription-Only

If Adobe did this to convert pirates to payers, boy did they screw up.

Crackers will just crack the bit that says "paid up this month" instead of cracking activation. Activation is not the only thing that can be cracked!

When this becomes obvious, Adobe will suffer and shrink to a less important company.

Adobe, beware the wages of greed!

Comment book scanning technology improvements (Score 1) 648

by TechForensics (#43218565) Attached to: Supreme Court Upholds First Sale Doctrine

This comment is coming in kind of late, so no doubt it will be little seen, but everyone seems to be overlooking that it will take only a slight improvement of book scanning technology to let everyone with a paper book duplicate it as an e-book. Let the publishers try to offer their product by license only; left them try to evade the first sale doctrine; it just won't work. When you can buy a $300 scanner that will turn the pages of your book and produce either PDFs or an optically character recognized file, this whole issue is just going to go away.

Slashdot Top Deals

Marriage is the triumph of imagination over intelligence. Second marriage is the triumph of hope over experience.

Close