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Comment Smart (Score 2, Interesting) 204

by pwnies (#33223454) Attached to: Website Lets You Bet On Your Grades
If the "grade insurance" option isn't used much, it looks like a good way to get college kids to work. Direct monetary benefit was one of the reasons my GPA shot up my Junior and Senior year (I had a job that payed me more for better grades).
Math

Possible Issues With the P != NP Proof 147

Posted by Soulskill from the intuitively-obvious-to-the-most-casual-observer dept.
An anonymous reader writes "We previously discussed news that Vinay Deolalikar, a Principal Research Scientist at HP Labs, wrote a paper that claimed to prove P is not equal to NP. Dick Lipton, a Professor of Computer Science at Georgia Tech, analyzed the idea of the proof on his blog. In a recent post, he explains that there have been many serious objections raised about the proof. The post summarizes the issues that need to be answered in any subsequent development, and additional concerns are raised in the comment section."

Comment Deceiving. (Score 5, Insightful) 208

by pwnies (#33077966) Attached to: World's Fastest Hybrid OK'd For Production

"78 miles per gallon on the European cycle"

Sure, and my plug in golf car gets mpg on any test thrown at it. Really that's poor and deceitful advertising. This car is a plug in car - it doesn't generate it's own electricity. It's not like a prius where you just fill it and forget about it, you're supplying another form of energy yourself. Saying what MPG it gets is redundant unless you also show how many Joules of electricity it used in the process as well.

Comment Re:Not just density (Score 2, Interesting) 315

by pwnies (#33037414) Attached to: Why SSDs Won't Replace Hard Drives
The same was said of hard disks and tape about a decade ago. People cried out that disks would never approach the storage capabilities of LTO, and that disks were only good for small amounts of storage at relatively high performance. Lo and behold though, the desktop market drove HDD purchases far beyond LTO, which meant more money was poured into research in that area. History repeats itself. I have a feeling that we'll see the marketing powers that be pushing SSD drives as the latest and greatest, which means there will be a user demand. User demand will create more funding for research, and eventually SSD's will catch up with disk drives.
Cellphones

Cell Phone Interception At Def Con 95

Posted by Soulskill from the can-i-hear-you-now dept.
ChrisPaget writes "I'm planning a pretty significant demonstration of GSM insecurity at Defcon next week, where I'll intercept and record cellular calls made by my attendees, live on-stage, no user-input required. As you can imagine, intercepting cellphones is a Very Big Deal in the eyes of the law; this blog post is an attempt to reassure everyone that their privacy is being taken seriously despite the nature of the demo. I'm not just making it up either — the EFF have helped significantly with the details."
Image

Pacific Trash Vortex To Become Habitable Island? Screenshot-sm 323

Posted by samzenpus from the welcome-to-malignancy-island dept.
thefickler writes "The Pacific Ocean trash dump is twice the size of Texas, or the size of Spain combined with France. The Pacific Vortex, as it is sometimes called, is made up of four million tons of plastic. Now, there's a proposal to turn this dump into 'Recycled Island.' The Netherlands Architecture Fund has provided the grant money for the project, and the WHIM architecture firm is conducting the research and design of Recycled Island. One of the three major aims of the project is to clean up the floating trash by recycling it on site. Two, the project would create new land for sustainable habitation complete with its own food sources and energy sources. Lastly, Recycled Island is to be a seaworthy island. While at the moment the project is still more or less a pipe dream, it's great that someone is trying to work out what to do with one of humanity's most bizarre environmental slip-ups."
NASA

NASA Adds $5M Prizes For Robots, Solar Spacecraft 17

Posted by CmdrTaco from the harvesting-the-day-star dept.
coondoggie writes "NASA today significantly expanded its Centennial Challenges program to include $5 million worth of new competitions to develop robots, small satellites, and solar powered spacecraft. One of the new competitions is the Sample Return Robot Challenge. Its purpose is to demonstrate a robot that can locate and retrieve geologic samples from wide and varied terrain without human control. This challenge has a prize purse of $1.5 million. The objectives are to encourage innovations in automatic navigation and robotic manipulator technologies."

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