ShadoCat - Slashdot User

Submission + - 3D-Printed Aircraft Successfully Takes Flight (geekyportal.com)

Submitted by geekspy on Wednesday October 24, 2012 @12:40PM

geekspy writes: Steven Easter, a university undergraduate, has came up with a unique idea of making an aircraft using 3D printing technology. Steven belongs to University of Virginia’s School of Engineering and Applied Science and has carried out an aircraft project which is capable of flying at 45 miles per hour.

Submission + - Google Street View Heads into the Grand Canyon (slashdot.org)

Submitted by

Nerval's Lobster

on Wednesday October 24, 2012 @12:03PM

Nerval's Lobster writes: "Google is taking Street View down—into the Grand Canyon, that is.

“On its first official outing, the Street View team is using the Trekker—a wearable backpack with a camera system on top—to traverse the Grand Canyon and capture 360-degree images of one of the most breathtaking natural landscapes on the planet,” read an Oct. 24 posting on Google’s Official Blog.

The Trekker automatically records high-quality images as the operator walks. Google’s initial foray into the canyon will take place around the South Rim of Grand Canyon National Park, which includes some famous paths such as the Bright Angel Trail. Google promised to make the images live (at some point) on Google Maps. “The narrow ridges and steep, exposed trails of the Grand Canyon provide the perfect terrain for our newest camera system,” the blog added."

Submission + - Experts warn about security flaws in airline boarding passes (washingtonpost.com)

Submitted by

concealment

on Wednesday October 24, 2012 @09:57AM

concealment writes: "Butler said he had discovered that information stored within the bar codes of boarding passes is unencrypted, and so can be read in advance by technically minded travelers.

Simply by using a smartphone or similar device to check the bar code, travelers could determine whether they would pass through full security screening, or the expedited process."

Submission + - Hackers steal customer data from Barnes & Noble keypads (cnet.com)

Submitted by

helix2301

on Wednesday October 24, 2012 @08:29AM

helix2301 writes: "Hackers broke into keypads at more than 60 Barnes & Noble bookstores and made off with the credit card information for customers who shopped at the stores in the last month. At least one point-of-sale terminal in 63 different stores was compromised recording card details. Since discovering the breach, the company has uninstalled all 7,000 point-of-sale terminals from its hundreds of stores for examination."

Submission + - Physicists Invent Working Tractor Beam, World Becomes Instantly More Awesome (geekosystem.com)

Submitted by anavictoriasaavedra on Wednesday October 24, 2012 @07:46AM

anavictoriasaavedra writes: We have tractor beams now! Like where you zap a thing with a laser and pull it toward you with beam power? We have those now. Even though they are super tiny and effective only on microscopic items like silica spheres suspended in water for right now, they are still working tractor beams.

Submission + - Man saves Star Trek TNG Set, Will Put on Display (pamhoffman.com)

Submitted by

ShadoCat

on Sunday October 21, 2012 @11:06AM

ShadoCat writes: "This isn't the original set unfortunately (which was destroyed making the ST:Generations movie). This is one that Paramount created for display in 1991. Huston Huddleston saved the pieces of the set late 2011 when they were about to be trashed by Paramount.

Huddleston and crew will be refitting the set with working displays and controls. They plan to host parties and educational events in the set which, apparently, is big enough to hold a large number of students.

For safety though, I hope they add circuit breakers (a technology along with seat belts that seems to have been lost in the 25th century)."

Submission + - The Land of the Censored (wiredforchange.com)

Submitted by

PerlJedi

on Friday November 18, 2011 @07:36PM

PerlJedi writes: "While our government cries out against other countries censoring their people's access to the internet, it is also busy passing legislation to allow it to do just that to us. The EFF is urging people to take action by sending email to their representatives in the house and senate expressing displeasure with the bill's.
"The government would be able to force ISPs and search engines to redirect or dump users' attempts to reach certain websites' URLs"

Though its jhust "Piracy" today, its a slippery slope from "Stop Piracy" to "Stop any anti-establishment sentiment".

And if that's not bad enough, the version in the house "SOPA" could sanction any site that doesn't "take sufficient action to prevent" such unwanted activities.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protect_IP_Act
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Online_Piracy_Act"

Comment That is a very interesting article (Score 1) 2

by ShadoCat on Friday November 18, 2011 @07:30PM (#38104574) Attached to: Neutrinos break Light speed AGAIN

I just wish that you had included more description and, possibly, a short quote in your submission.

Submission + - Minecraft officially released (joystiq.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 18, 2011 @07:10PM

An anonymous reader writes: Minecraft, everyone's favorite block-bashing and building game and indie developer success story, has finally reached the 1.0 milestone and was released today by Notch during his keynote address at MineCon in Las Vegas. Unsurprisingly, the servers used to process the purchases of the game are experiencing a few difficulties under the strain.

Submission + - Thank Sarah Josepha Hale for Thanksgiving Day (blogspot.com)

Submitted by

ShadoCat

on Friday November 18, 2011 @07:02PM

ShadoCat writes: "She is the one who convinced Abraham Lincoln to declare it a national holiday.

I wrote a short article about it here.

If you click through, you can see President Lincoln's full proclamation."

Submission + - Folding@home client can now run on supercomputers (extremetech.com)

Submitted by

MrSeb

on Friday November 18, 2011 @06:40PM

MrSeb writes: "Earlier this week at the supercomputing SC11 conference, researchers from the long-running Folding@home project demonstrated a new distributed framework named Copernicus that's designed to allow F@h to scale across geographically-dispersed supercomputing clusters. Folding@home's primary mission is to understand each step in the protein-folding process. Copernicus, in contrast, lets the user specify the desired end results — and then the Copernicus run-time, taking into account all of the available computational resources, then breaks down the desired end results into specific, efficient task packages. "It opens the door to huge crowds of people using these methods, which have matured with Folding@home," Vijay Pande (F@h's founder) said. "This method should be able to use any supercomputer on the planet completely," Pande said. "Strong scaling to these extremes is unusual.""

Submission + - An Israeli Electronic/Cyber Strike Could End Iran, (yahoo.com)

Submitted by

MarkWhittington

on Friday November 18, 2011 @05:49PM

MarkWhittington writes: "If and when (and it is increasingly seeming like the latter) Israel attacks Iran, the first sign will not consist of explosions rising from Iranian nuclear and missile sites. Instead the first sign of an attack will be Iran's power and communications going down.

In effect, Iran as it exists today will die, not with a bang, but with a whimper as the lights go out and as the phones go silent. Israel has developed a sophisticated electronic and cyber war force that would take down Iran's power grid and phone system in the first moments of an attack. Welcome to the 21st Century way of waging war, which in one way could be as devastating as a nuclear attack."

Submission + - Full disk encryption is too good, says US intellig (extremetech.com) 4

Submitted by

MrSeb

on Friday November 18, 2011 @04:33PM

MrSeb writes: "A new research paper, titled "The growing impact of full disk encryption on digital forensics," illustrates the difficulty that CSI teams have in obtaining enough digital data to build a solid case against criminals. According to the researchers, one of which is a member of US-CERT — the US government's primary defense against internet and digital threats — there are three main problems with full disk encryption (FDE): First, evidence-gathering goons can turn off the computer (for transportation) without realizing it's encrypted, and thus can't get back at the data (unless the arrestee gives up his password, which he doesn't have to do); second, if the analysis team doesn't know that the disk is encrypted, it can waste hours trying to read something that's ultimately unreadable; and finally, in the case of hardware-level disk encryption, tampering with the device can trigger self-destruction of the data. The paper does go on to suggest some ways to ameliorate these issues, but ultimately the researchers aren't hopeful: "Research is needed to develop new techniques and technology for breaking or bypassing full disk encryption.""

Submission + - Naked Mole Rats from Outer Space (slate.com)

Submitted by Maximum Prophet on Friday November 18, 2011 @02:21PM

Maximum Prophet writes: Apparently, Naked Mole Rats don't get cancer, get when zapped with Gamma Rays or fed 50 times the carcinogens that would kill a mouse. (or us)

Submission + - Dual-Core Android PC now comes on a USB Stick (fxitech.com)

Submitted by absolut.evil on Friday November 18, 2011 @01:48PM

absolut.evil writes: FXI has taken a dual core smartphone-esque computer and put it into a little USB stick.. neat. So now you can literally plug into anything with a screen and play angry birds. There's a cloud-sharing component as well so It's not all just for games.. interesting!

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