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Submission + - A Beautiful Mind and Broken Body for Silicon Valley (businessweek.com)

Submitted by pacopico
pacopico writes: About 30 years ago, a young Marine and math savant named Ramona Pierson was out for a run when she got hit by a drunk driver and had her body shattered. As Businessweek reports, Pierson ended up in coma for 18 months, came out blind and emaciated and was sent to live in an old folks home. Her remarkable story takes off from there to include bike racing through Russia, a PhD in neuroscience, a stint fixing Seattle's public schools and now Declara, a social network run by Pierson and funded by billioniare Peter Thiel, who put the original money into Facebook. One of the more original start-up tales to have ever come out of Silicon Valley or really anywhere.

Submission + - Undiscovered Country of HFT: FPGA JIT Ethernet packet assembly

Submitted by michaelmalak
michaelmalak writes: In a technique that reminds me of the just-in-time torpedo engineering of Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, a company called Argon Design has "developed a high performance trading system" that puts an FPGA — and FPGA-based trading algorithms — right in the Ethernet switch. And it isn't just to cut down on switch/computer latency — they actually start assembling and sending out the start of an Ethernet packet simultaneously with receiving and decoding incoming price quotation Ethernet packets, and decide on the fly what to put in the outgoing buy/sell Ethernet packet. They call these techniques "inline parsing" and "pre-emption."

Submission + - 'Lightsaber Molecules' Discovered (phys.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Harvard and MIT Scientists have reportedly discovered a new form of matter termed 'photonic molecules.' By passing lasers through a chamber with pumped-in rubidium molecules, the researchers have coerced photons into behaving like mass-y particles, including interacting with each other.

"It's not an in-apt analogy to compare this to light sabers", Lukin, one of the researchers states, "When these photons interact with each other they're pushing against and deflect each other. The physics of what's happening in these molecules is similar to what we see in the movies."

Sensationalism or really breakthrough science?

Submission + - The Big Hangup at Burning Man Are Cell Phones

Submitted by Hugh Pickens DOT Com
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes: L. J. Williamson writes in the LA Times that with no running water, no plumbing, and no electrical outlets Burning Man isn't the kind of place to expect full bars on your smartphone and for many of the participants that's a big part of its charm. "If you want to partake in the true Burning Man experience, you should leave your phone at home," says Mark Hansen. In past years, the closest cellular towers, designed to serve the nearby towns of Empire (population 206) and Gerlach (population 217), would quickly get overwhelmed each August when Black Rock City (population 50,000 or so) rose from the featureless playa. Although Burning Man attracts a sizable Silicon Valley contingent including tech giants like Jeff Bezos, Larry Page, and Sergey Brin — the feeling of being "unplugged" has become an integral part of the Burning Man experience. But another part of the event is an intrepid, DIY ethos, and in that spirit, David Burgess, co-creator of OpenBTS, an open-source cellular network software, brought a homemade in 2008, an "almost comical" setup that created a working cellular network that routed a few hundred calls over a 48-hour period. In each subsequent year, Burgess has improved the system's reach and expects to have about three-quarters of this year's event covered. Burning Man proved an ideal test bed for development of Burgess' system, which he has since made available for use in other areas without cellular networks. "People who have a lot of experience in international aid say Burning Man is a very good simulation of a well-organized refugee camp," says Burgess. "Because there's no infrastructure, it forces us to contend with a lot of problems that our rural customers have to contend with in very remote places."

Submission + - The World Fair of 2014 according to Asimov (from 1964) (nytimes.com) 2

Submitted by Esther Schindler
Esther Schindler writes: If you ever needed evidence that Isaac Asimov was a genius at extrapolating future technology from limited data, you'll enjoy this 1964 article in which he predicts what we'll see at the 2014 world's fair. For instance:

Robots will neither be common nor very good in 2014, but they will be in existence. The I.B.M. exhibit at the present fair has no robots but it is dedicated to computers, which are shown in all their amazing complexity, notably in the task of translating Russian into English. If machines are that smart today, what may not be in the works 50 years hence? It will be such computers, much miniaturized, that will serve as the "brains" of robots. In fact, the I.B.M. building at the 2014 World's Fair may have, as one of its prime exhibits, a robot housemaid*large, clumsy, slow- moving but capable of general picking-up, arranging, cleaning and manipulation of various appliances. It will undoubtedly amuse the fairgoers to scatter debris over the floor in order to see the robot lumberingly remove it and classify it into "throw away" and "set aside." (Robots for gardening work will also have made their appearance.)

General Electric at the 2014 World's Fair will be showing 3-D movies of its "Robot of the Future," neat and streamlined, its cleaning appliances built in and performing all tasks briskly. (There will be a three-hour wait in line to see the film, for some things never change.)

It's really fun (and sometimes sigh-inducing) to see where he was accurate and where he wasn't. And, of course, the whole notion that we'd have a world's fair is among the inaccurate predictions.

Submission + - Tencent's WeChat dubbed threat to national security by security researchers (paritynews.com)

Submitted by hypnosec
hypnosec writes: Mobile apps security researchers have claimed that WeChat, a messaging app developed by Tencent, is a threat to national security as China could be potentially spying on Indian citizens as well as all users across the globe. According to Jiten Jain and Abhay Agarwal, who presented their findings at The Hackers Conference in New Delhi, India, the free messaging app doesn't employ the best of encryption and security technologies, which leaves personal information of its users vulnerable to theft. To prove their point the researchers went onto demonstrate the ease with which the messages sent using WeChat can be decrypted and logged, indirectly indicating that service providers as well foreign governments could be doing the same thing for spying and surveillance purposes.

Submission + - Using Pulsars As GPS - A Space Navigation System Fit For A Starship? (sciencecodex.com)

Submitted by cold fjord
cold fjord writes: Science Codex reports, "CSIRO scientists have written software that could guide spacecraft to Alpha Centauri, ... Dr George Hobbs (CSIRO) and his colleagues study pulsars — small spinning stars that deliver regular 'blips' or 'pulses' of radio waves and, sometimes, X-rays. Usually the astronomers are interested in measuring, very precisely, when the pulsar pulses arrive in the solar system. Slight deviations from the expected arrival times can give clues about the behaviour of a pulsar itself, ... "But we can also work backwards," said Dr Hobbs. "We can use information from pulsars to very precisely determine the position of our telescopes." "If the telescopes were on board a spacecraft, then we could get the position of the spacecraft." Observations of at least four pulsars, every seven days, would be required. ... A paper (paywalled) describing in detail how the system would work has been accepted for publication by the journal Advances in Space Research." Related story.

Comment Re:Add DNS for "legitimate" sites (Score 2) 122

by rb12345 (#44530247) Attached to: "Piracy Filter" Blocks TorrentFreak for 4 Million Sky Customers

My post certainly wasn't meant to recommend that it should be attempted! It was intended to reply to the OP's comment that:

If mainstream media sites get (automatically) blocked then perhaps the backlash might force TPTB into either removing the requirement to block or require the ISPs to use a blocking mechanism with less potential for collateral damage.

Blocking "mainstream media sites" would upset journalists more and get far more publicity. TPTB probably care more about their own sites being available and not having to pay more staff to do the work by hand. Either way, this will probably be fixed within the week.

Answering your actual question: perhaps, but I seriously doubt the torrent site will care much either way since they can no doubt get away with blaming Sky or the content industry for the blocks anyway. The cynical view is that they'd get far more self-promotion that way too...

Comment Re:Add DNS for "legitimate" sites (Score 2) 122

by rb12345 (#44530095) Attached to: "Piracy Filter" Blocks TorrentFreak for 4 Million Sky Customers

If they were aiming for truly evil exploitation of automated blocking, they wouldn't block any of those. They'd get the DVLA tax disc renewal site blocked instead and, given the automatic fines now, you'd easily upset a twelfth of Sky's userbase who'd need to switch back to manual methods. Alternatively, you'd aim to block HMRC in late January and block the rare people doing tax-returns at the last minute...

Submission + - SecondReality source code released to public domain

Submitted by JucaBlues
JucaBlues writes: The demoscene has been for a long time a mostly secretive computer art form, with not much public source code demonstrating the tricks used to perform awesome graphics, music and sound effects in a wide range of hardware devices. This August 1st, 2013, the world got the chance to take a look inside the classic SecondReality demo, by the Future Crew. The source code was published on GitHub with a statement releasing it to the public domain. Hopefully, for the sake of documenting the history of computer software development, we'll see more code releases like this one in the future.

If you are the owner of a copy of old computer software source code, please consider doing the same.

Submission + - Doctor Who? Find out this Sunday... (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by b06r011
b06r011 writes: The 12th actor to play Doctor Who will be revealed on BBC1 this Sunday at 1900. Rupert Grint and Peter Capaldi have been tipped as favourites to replace Matt Smith but that is no reason to stop idle speculation on a Friday afternooon. This all raises an interesting point though — particularly for Dr Who, where the replacement of an actor whilst maintaining the character is a key part of the plot. Would you rather find out in advance or wait until the end of the regeneration sequence?

Submission + - 1,700 Websites In Russia Go Dark In SOPA-Style Protest

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Russians are going nuts over a new anti-piracy law that enables Roskomnadzor (the Federal Supervision Agency for Information Technologies and Communications) to ‘blacklist’ Internet resources before the issue of a court order. Indeed, 1700 websites have issued a blackout, just like US firms did in protest at the Stop Online Piracy Act. The law, widely known as the Russian SOPA, has been slammed by some major tech firms from the country, including Yandex. Freedom of speech campaigners are worried it could be used for political censorship, while digital companies say it will slow down the development of Internet services in the country.

Submission + - Pwnie Awards 2013 winners: Barnaby Jack, Edward Snowden, NMap, Evad3rs (paritynews.com)

Submitted by hypnosec
hypnosec writes: Winners of the Pwnie Awards 2013 were announced at a special event during Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas and the highlight of the awards were Edward Snowden, NMap and Barnaby Jack (ofcourse). Barnaby Jack was given posthumous Pwnie award for ‘lifetime achievement’ while Edward Snowden and NSA were jointly given the award of ‘Epic 0wnage’. Nmap on the other hand was awarded ‘Most Epic FAIL’. Best Privilege Escalation Bug award went to David Wang aka planetbeing and the Evad3rs team.

Submission + - Tensor Operations Are NP Hard (i-programmer.info) 1

Submitted by mikejuk
mikejuk writes: A tensor is just the generalization of a matrix — a rank 3 tensor is a cube of numbers compared to a rank 2 tensor which is just a table of numbers or a matrix. Most non-mathematicians might think that tensor operations are pretty hard without any formal proof, but new results prove that they are NP Hard which is not good news if you are trying to work something out using them. Most matrix operations are in P and you might think that just adding one more dimension wouldn't make a great deal of difference — wrong! As a recent paper proves most operation on a rank 3 tensor are NP-Hard. This is a bit of a surprise as there really isn't that much difference between 2d matrix and a 3d cube of numbers — but that extra dimension tips the balance. Should we worry? Tensors are basic to a lot of physical theories including general relativity so perhaps we should.

Submission + - How NASA steers the Int'l Space Station around asteroids & other debris (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by willith
willith writes: I got to sit down with ISS TOPO Flight Controller Josh Parris at the Houston Mission Control Center and talk about how NASA steers all 400 tons of the International Space Station around potential collisions, or "conjunctions," in NASA-parlance. The TOPO controller, with assistance from USSTRATCOM's big radars, keeps track of every object that will pass within a "pizza-box"-shaped 50km x 50km x 4km perimeter around the ISS. Actually moving the station is done with a combination of large control moment gyros and thrusters on both the Zvezda module and visiting vehicles. It's a surprisingly complex operation!

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