adiemus - Slashdot User

Submission + - 'Floating Bridge' Property of Water Found (physorg.com)

Submitted by

eldavojohn

on Friday September 28, 2007 @10:05AM

eldavojohn writes: "When exposed to high voltage, water does some interesting things. From the article, ' When exposed to a high-voltage electric field, water in two beakers climbs out of the beakers and crosses empty space to meet, forming the water bridge. The liquid bridge, hovering in space, appears to the human eye to defy gravity. Upon investigating the phenomenon, the scientists found that water was being transported from one beaker to another, usually from the anode beaker to the cathode beaker. The cylindrical water bridge, with a diameter of 1-3 mm, could remain intact when the beakers were pulled apart at a distance of up to 25 mm.'"

Submission + - Lobbyists brainwash bureaucrats for REAL ID (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by

Christopher Blanc

on Tuesday September 25, 2007 @11:40AM

Christopher Blanc writes: "State bureaucrats have converged in Washington DC for a two-day conference on REAL ID compliance. It's a panel discussion called "Bringing your public onboard for smoothing legislative changes." The summary states that "every State DMV needs to find a way to educate their public so that they can ensure the legislature changes necessary to become Real ID compliant." The panel will also "examine how much of your (i.e., the DMV's) budget a public relations exercise is worth." Such a "public relations exercise" would presumably be conducted at taxpayer expense. The conference is sponsored by Digimarc, Viisage, NXP, and JPMorganChase, all of whom sell the sort of high-tech identification equipment that states will need to comply with the REAL ID Act. In effect, the conference provides a forum for vendors to lobby state bureaucrats to support REAL ID implementation and to encourage them to go back to their states and lobby their legislators for "necessary" legislative changes. And presumably, most of the bureaucrats are attending the conference at the expense of their state's taxpayers.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070924-state-bureaucrats-trained-to-lobby-for-real-id.html"

Submission + - FTC wants to hear your comments on SSN use (commentworks.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 04, 2007 @12:24AM

An anonymous reader writes: The FTC is allowing people to voice their concerns and opinions on the private sector's use of SSNs (Social Security Numbers). The page to voice your comments can be found here: https://secure.commentworks.com/ftc-SSNPrivateSect or/ Note that the only required fields are: Last name, state, and country.

Submission + - NASA to build largest Supercomputer ever (linuxworld.com.au) 1

Submitted by Onlyodin on Friday August 03, 2007 @09:04PM

Onlyodin writes: The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has given the green light to a project that will build the largest ever supercomputer based on Silicon Graphics' (SGI) 512-processor Altix computers.

Called Project Columbia and costing around $160-million, the 10,240-processor system will be used by researchers at the Advanced Supercomputing Facility at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California.

What makes Project Columbia unique is the size of the multiprocessor Linux systems, or nodes, that it clusters together. It is common for supercomputers to be built of thousands of two-processor nodes, but the Ames system uses SGI's NUMAlink switching technology and ProPack Linux operating system enhancements to connect 512-processor nodes, each of which will have more than 1,000G bytes of memory.

Full Story at Linuxworld

Submission + - Ruling by Secret US Court Allegedly Reduces Spying

Submitted by conspirator57 on Friday August 03, 2007 @01:20AM

conspirator57 writes: TFA http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la- na-spying2aug02,0,5813563.story?coll=la-home-cente r states that the US Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (a court that no citizen can establish standing to appear before) has ruled against Executive requests for so-called "basket warrants" as violating the 4th amendment to the Constitution, namely that such warrants do not meet the clearly expressed criteria in the second half of the amendment. To accomplish this they must have looked startlingly like British general warrants which were the original motivation for the 4th amendment. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warrant_(law) for more.

TFA is very sympathetic to the Executive branch, going on to depict ways in which we're all less safe because of this ruling. Personally, I feel safer with more rulings like this one. Just wish the process were a bit more transparent.

"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."

Submission + - Last-Minute Senate Amendment to appease RIAA

Submitted by Rodrigo on Tuesday July 24, 2007 @12:05AM

Rodrigo writes: Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has found the time to forget about fighting that pesty Iraq War and focus on the issues that really matter: making the influence of the RIAA and MPAA a mainstay in our college campuses. The EFF has put a call to arms against the proposed Senate amendment to the Higher Education Act. The amendment aims to force certain schools to police their network or risk losing federal funding for student aid. Naturally, this policing will come at the school's expense and through "technology-based deterrents," which raise privacy concerns. Please call your representatives and make sure they know what they're voting for under Senate Amendment 2314.

Submission + - Amendment Would Require University P2P Filtering (mistakengoal.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 23, 2007 @11:31PM

An anonymous reader writes: MistakenGoal, Inside Higher Ed and ArsTechnica are reporting on a new amendment to the the Higher Education Reauthorization Act, entitled "Campus-Based Digital Theft Protection". Introduced by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV), it would require that that the Secretary of Education single out the 25 schools that have "received during the previous calendar year the highest number of written notices...alleging infringement of copyright," and require those schools to "Provide evidence to the Secretary [of Education] that the institution has developed a plan for implementing a technology-based deterrent to prevent the illegal downloading or peer-to-peer distribution of intellectual property." The bill will likely pass within the next week, without any mainstream media coverage, so if you want to call your Senators, you had better do it quickly!

Submission + - Data Visualization Tools for Linux

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 23, 2007 @05:43PM

An anonymous reader writes: In this article, I provide a survey of a number of popular Linux data visualization tools and include some insight into their other capabilities. Finally, I identify the strengths of each tool to help you decide which is best for your application. The open source tools that I explore in this article are gnuplot, GNU Octave, Scilab, MayaVi, Maxima, and OpenDX.

Submission + - /. and geek stock

Submitted by

ArcadeX

on Wednesday July 18, 2007 @01:12PM

ArcadeX writes: "Been playing the stock market recently based solely on /., and curious if anyone else has done anything similar. I know the few months that I've been playing are by no means a decent picture of what to expect, and for the most part I actually expect my good fortunes to crater like most imerging tech stocks, but so far I've gotten about a 50% return on my investments... course I haven't exactly invested much, I work helpdesk after all. One example would be GBRC (disclaimer: google finance is in beta for a REASON) mentioned a few weeks back on /. which has had a really decent short term return (yeah, yeah, doesn't mean anything for long term). Just curious if anyone has any long term input about what I've seen the last few months."

Submission + - Easy TV Data to pick up where Zap2it leaves off (easytvdata.org)

Submitted by Nedward on Wednesday July 18, 2007 @11:06AM

Nedward writes: Wondering what will happen to your myth-box when zap2it goes offline? From the mythTV wiki: ``A group of developers from various open source and free-as-in-beer projects have formed a new company called Easy TV Data, which will replace Zap2it Labs to become the official provider of US and Canadian TV Listings for MythTV (and other projects). Please see http://easytvdata.org/ for more information."

Submission + - TV station transmits over kitchen wok

Submitted by nut on Saturday February 24, 2007 @05:59PM

nut writes: A new local tv station at the bottom end of New Zealand, 45 South chose a $10 wok over a $20 000 commercial transmission dish. They claim better performance than their previous commercial aerials, as the solid metal of the wok prevents interference from behind the dish that plagued earlier wire mesh aerials.

The technology was originally developed by computer programmer Ken Jones to get broadband access at his rural property. Instruction on build your own Wok wireless acess point can be found here.

Submission + - AACS broken for all HD and Blu-ray disks

Submitted by on Monday February 12, 2007 @11:26AM

An anonymous reader writes: Two months after Muslix64 initially publicized his method for getting AACS keys, a user on Doom9 has found the processing key, which is able to decrypt all disks for both formats released thus far. The exploit can even be reused for future keys. This will allow the creation of a one-click backup utility and is a major blow against DRM.

Submission + - Windows Vienna due in 2009

Submitted by Mytob on Monday February 12, 2007 @09:40AM

Mytob writes: With Vista just out the door, Microsoft is now drawing up plans to deliver its follow-up client operating system by the end of 2009, according to the executive in charge of building the product's core components. http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/news/index.cfm?newsid=8 377

Submission + - Girls of Engineering Calendar Released

Submitted by

on Monday February 12, 2007 @09:16AM

An anonymous reader writes: According to the Chicago Sun-Times, "The women in the "Girls of Engineering" calendar were accepted to the Downstate campus' nationally ranked engineering program, where students on average scored a 31 on the ACT college entrance exam and graduated in the top 12 percent of their high school classes. " This calendar has upset some people in the engineering community because they find it offensive. Does the slashdot community find a calendar with girls in engineering offensive?

Submission + - Congressman calls for email and IM monitoring

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 12, 2007 @07:59AM

An anonymous reader writes: vnunet.com covers a story on a bill introduced to the US House of Representatives that would require ISPs to record all users' surfing activity, IM conversations and email traffic indefinitely. ynot.com has the same story.

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