Journal SPAM: Plame Suit Dismissed - by a FISA Court Judge! 2
The judge who just dismissed the Valerie Plame lawsuit serves as a judge on the United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, aka the FISA court.
God Bless AmeriKKKa.
Submission + - Checkers solved, unbeatable database created (nature.com)
tgeller writes: "My story in Nature announced that a team of computer scientists at the University of Alberta has solved checkers. From the game's 500 billion billion positions (5 * 10^20), "Chinook" has determined which 100,000 billion (10^14) are needed for their proof, and run through all relevant decision trees. They've set up a site where you can see the proof, traverse the logic, and play their unbeatable automaton. Congratulations to Dr. Schaeffer and his crew!"
Submission + - Checkers: solved! (sciencemag.org)
John Chew writes: "Jonathan Schaeffer et al. of the University of Alberta report in Science that their 18-year project to fully analyze the game of checkers is complete, and have proven that when correctly played the game always ends in a draw. Their perfect checkers player, Chinook, is available online."
Submission + - FBI Busts Contractor Trying to Sell Secrets (go.com)
Evil W1zard writes: "ABC News is reporting that a contract worker at the Oak Ridge Reservation nuclear research facility in Tennessee has been arrested and charged with attempting to sell classified information to undercover FBI agents posing as foreign buyers. The information that was being sold is allegedly related to methods of enriching uranium. Full story can be read at:
http://abcnews.go.com/TheLaw/story?id=3394036&page =1"
Submission + - Eating Beef is Less Green than Driving (telegraph.co.uk)
Invisible Pink Unicorn writes: "Japanese scientists have calculated the overall effect on the environment of producing beef for consumption, and show that 2.2lb of beef generates as much greenhouse gas as driving a car non-stop for three hours at 50mph. The amount of energy consumed would light a 100-watt bulb for 20 days. Taking into account all the processes involved, they said, four average sized steaks generated greenhouse gases with a warming potential equivalent to 80.25lb of carbon dioxide. Most of these emissions are in the form of methane released from the animals, but over two thirds of the energy is used to produce and transport cattle feed."
Submission + - Teaching sex to little children in pictures (blogspot.com) 1
xco writes: "The way to teach children about where babies come from"
Submission + - Scholastic invokes DMCA for reporting Potter leak
ISurfTooMuch writes: Looks like DMCA abuse has just been taken to a new extreme. TechCrunch is reporting that it has received a takedown notice for simply reporting that the latest Harry Potter book is available on Bittorrent. The post also says that USA Today is reporting that Scholastic is contacting any sites that have written stories on the leaked copy, demanding that the information be taken down. Note that these sites aren't hosting copies of the book; they're being sent notices simply for reporting that it is available. What's next, sites receiving takedown notices for discussing the fact that piracy is occurring on the Internet?
Submission + - Multi-gigabit wireless "within three years" (pressesc.com)
Anonymous Howard writes: "Multi-gigabit wireless technology using of extremely high radio frequencies (RF) to achieve broad bandwidth and high data transmission rates over short distances will be ready within three years making wired computers and peripherals obsolete, a team of Georgia Tech scientists announced today. These wireless data connections will able to transfer an entire DVD in seconds. I wonder what MAFIAA will say about that."
Submission + - Blackberry's new ultraconformist: The 8820 (technewsworld.com)
Ztringz writes: "The soon-to-be-released Blackberry 8820 sports, among other things, a built-in GPS, Wi-Fi and UMA. It also features support for microSD/microSDHC cards up to 32 GB. We're still waiting for 8 GB to be released, but that doesn't matter. As quoted from technewsworld: "The 8820 is clearly a business-centric smartphone. RIM noted the unit's wireless platform allows the remote deployment of many business applications, including those for "CRM, sales force automation, field services, business intelligence, supply chain management and continuity of operations, as well as a broad range of industry-specific applications for sectors including health care, law enforcement, government, financial services, insurance, pharmaceutical, professional services, real estate, manufacturing, wholesale and retail." And this certainly corresponds to the media player improvements, right? I wonder if it will rival the Nokia N95's 5 megapixel camera, as well?"
Submission + - DARPA Urban Challenge - self driving vehicles 1
Colin Smith writes: The DARPA Urban Challenge L.A. to Vegas race is heating up. Qualification is due in October for the November 3rd race.
"On a quiet university campus across the water from San Francisco, an enthusiastic bunch of young computer boffins are working on what could be the car of the future."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/6906162.stm
Here's a question though. If cars can drive themselves, why would I bother to own one? Why not just call one when required, like a taxi. The primary cost of a taxi ride is the driver's wage, without that a taxi ride would be cheaper than a bus or train ride. Ironically this may sound the death knell for the taxi, rail, bus and large scale car industries world wide.
"On a quiet university campus across the water from San Francisco, an enthusiastic bunch of young computer boffins are working on what could be the car of the future."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/6906162.stm
Here's a question though. If cars can drive themselves, why would I bother to own one? Why not just call one when required, like a taxi. The primary cost of a taxi ride is the driver's wage, without that a taxi ride would be cheaper than a bus or train ride. Ironically this may sound the death knell for the taxi, rail, bus and large scale car industries world wide.
Submission + - Should You Switch to DDR3 Memory? (extremetech.com)
mikemuch writes: "DDR3 and the motherboards to support it are here. It offers double the throughput and lower power consumption than DDR2, but in its current form high latencies of CAS 8, among other things, hold it back from showing significant performance improvements over DDR2. ExtremeTech's Loyd Case has an introduction to DDR3 and benchmarks to support his claim that the technology is overpriced at present for what you get. From the article: 'Since DDR3 requires four samples per core clock cycle to be sent, that means that any data that's not relevant to the fetch is discarded. In other words, potentially more unneeded data may be delivered per clock cycle with a quad-pumped architecture.'"
Submission + - Efficient LEDs and drivers offer big energy saving
eeJones writes: Cost-effective LED-drive ICs energize lighting revolution
Efficient LEDs and drivers offer big energy savings
Today, the efficacy of commercial LEDs is approaching that of fluorescent lighting (70 to 80 lumens/W). Fluorescent lighting is a mature technology and little improvement is likely to occur in the near future, while LED lumens/W has been increasing at 20x every 10 years, and is projected to continue to do so.
http://www.electronicproducts.com/ShowPage.asp?Fil eName=FAJHIXYS-EnergyI.jul2007.html
Submission + - Sun launches blade servers with Intel, AMD & S
MsManhattan writes: Sun today unveils three new blade servers, including its first under its alliance with Intel: a two-socket server with dual-core Intel Xeon processors in each socket. But Sun is taking a blanket approach to the market; the other two servers launching today include a two-socket blade powered by dual-core AMD Opteron processors and a one-socket model built around Sun's own UltraSPARC T1 processor. Additionally, the company is offering a blade chassis in which users can install any combination of up to 10 AMD-, Intel- and/or Sun-powered blades. The chassis provides power, cooling and network connections for each server. Sun currently has only 3.4 percent of the blade server market, trailing behind Hewlett-Packard and IBM.
Submission + - Hard Disk Drive Myths Debunked
babyshiori writes: This guide got down to basics and examined some of the common hard disks related fallacies or myths and debunked them. Although many articles have covered these topics, it is apparent that hard disk urban legends are still more popular than the simple truth such as 'formatting a hard drive too many times will cause it to fail' or 'If your hard drive has bad sectors, formatting will cause more bad sectors to appear' and many more. Read on and find out about these myths and most probably you'll get a laugh out of them.
Submission + - Top Ten Tips for Building SPE apps in C
LinucksGirl writes: Make this your top ten list for vector-based Cell Broadband Engine (Cell/B.E) SPU application development. Save time, headache, and a lot of trouble when you're coding your C applications for the Cell/B.E. SPU.
