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Comment Re:OK, I'll bite. (Score 0, Redundant) 685

by mewrei (#34060696) Attached to: 1928 Time Traveler Caught On Film?
Ok, I'm going to be a buzz kill and respond with a non-sarcastic idea, but maybe it was a device that communicates via quantum entanglement. Technically those could communicate without regard to time as well, and entanglement communications is dirt simple compared to the massive effort of time travel.

Comment Re:OK, I'll bite. (Score 1) 685

by mewrei (#34060686) Attached to: 1928 Time Traveler Caught On Film?
Ok, I'm going to be a buzz kill and respond with a non-sarcastic idea, but maybe it was a device that communicates via quantum entanglement. Technically those could communicate without regard to time as well, and entanglement communications is dirt simple compared to the massive effort of time travel.
Encryption

Submission + - Cyber-warfare: fact or fantasy?

Submitted by smellsofbikes
smellsofbikes writes: This week's New Yorker magazine has an investigative essay by Seymour Hersh about the USA and its part in cyber-warfare that makes for interesting reading. Hersh talks about the financial incentives behind many of the people currently pushing for increased US spending on supposed solutions to network vulnerabilities and the fine and largely ignored distinction between espionage and warfare. Two quotes that particularly stood out: one interviewee said "Current Chinese officials have told me that [they're] not going to attack Wall streat, because [they] basically own it", and Whitfield Diffie, on encryption, "I'm not convinced that lack of encryption is the primary problem [of vulnerability to network attack]. The problem with the Internet is that it's meant for communication among non-friends." The article also has some interesting details on the Chinese disassembly and reverse-engineering of a Lockheed P-3 Orion filled with espionage and eavesdropping hardware that was forced to land in China after a midair collision.

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: Induction cooktop fun

Submitted by fishfrys
fishfrys writes: Besides generating heat quickly and efficiently in ferromagnetic pans, what sorts of fun things can you do with an induction cooktop? This seems like a pretty serious piece of electromagnetic equipment — boiling water can't be the only thing it's good for. I went to youtube expecting to find all sorts of crazy videos of unsafe induction cooktop shenanigans, but only found cooking. What sort of exciting, if not stupid, physics experiments can be performed with one? Hard drive scrubber... DIY Tesla coil? There's got to be something. Thanks.
Power

Submission + - TFETs as an alternative to MOSFTs in CMOS chips (idg.com.au)

Submitted by
angry tapir
angry tapir writes: "A number of chip manufacturers and European research institutions have banded together to figure out how redesign microprocessors so that they consume less energy when in use and leak less energy when in stand-by mode. Called Steeper, the three-year research project will explore an alternative design to the standard CMOS (complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor) designs used to build virtually all commercially available computer chips today. The new approach will use nanowire-based TFETs (tunnel field effect transistors), as an alternative to the MOSFTs (metal--oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistors) used in CMOS chips."
Security

Submission + - China Reverse Engineered Classified NSA OS 2

Submitted by
Pickens
Pickens writes: "Seymour M. Hersh writes in the New Yorker that China has managed to reverse-engineered a Classified NSA operating system, estimated at between thirty and fifty million lines of computer code, giving China a road map for decrypting the US Navy’s classified intelligence and operational data. The story begins after an American EP-3E Aries II reconnaissance plane on an eavesdropping mission collided with a Chinese interceptor jet over the South China Sea in 2001 and landed at a Chinese F-8 fighter base on Hainan Island, the 24 member crew were unable to completely disable the plane’s equipment and software. Hersh writes that crew of the EP-3E managed to erase the hard drive—“zeroed it out”—but did not destroy the hardware, which left data retrievable: “No one took a hammer.” The Navy’s experts didn’t believe that China was capable of reverse-engineering the plane’s NSA-supplied operating system, but over the next few years the US intelligence community began to “read the tells” that China had gotten access to sensitive traffic and in early 2009, Admiral Timothy J. Keating, then the head of the Pacific Command, brought the issue to the new Obama Administration. "If China had reverse-engineered the EP-3E’s operating system, all such systems in the Navy would have to be replaced, at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars," writes Hersch. "After much discussion, several current and former officials said, this was done.""
Security

Submission + - Boonana Trojan Cross Platform Trojan for Mac OS X (securemac.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: SecureMac has discovered a new cross-platform trojan horse in the wild that affects Mac OS X, including Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6), the latest version of OS X. The trojan horse, trojan.osx.boonana.a, is spreading through social networking sites, including Facebook, disguised as a video. The trojan is currently appearing as a link in messages on social networking sites with the subject "Is this you in this video?" The advisory for boonana includes full details and analysis as well as removal instructions and tool for Mac OS X.
HP

HP Reports Memory Resistor Breakthrough 141

Posted by samzenpus from the flip-the-switches dept.
andy1307 writes "Hewlett-Packard scientists on Thursday will report advances demonstrating significant progress in the design of memristors, or memory resistors. The researchers previously reported in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that they had devised a new method for storing and retrieving information from a vast three-dimensional array of memristors. The scheme could potentially free designers to stack thousands of switches on top of one another in a high-rise fashion, permitting a new class of ultra-dense computing devices even after two-dimensional scaling reaches fundamental limits."

Comment Re:Easy (Score 1) 1091

by mewrei (#29159169) Attached to: How To Prove Someone Is Female?
Well we could always go with the classical definition of female within most mammals (yes I know exceptions exist) in ability to bear young. She may be a sterile subject or she might be a hostile subject for such, but does she have the remote capability of doing so =naturally=
Privacy

Sensor To Monitor TV Watchers Demoed At Cable Labs 302

Posted by kdawson from the audience-has-reached-critical-mass dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Cable operators at the semi-annual CableLab's Innovation Showcase have informally voted as best new product a gizmo that can determine how many people are watching a TV. Developed by Israeli company PrimeSense, the product lets digital devices see a 3-D view of the world (the images look like something from thermal imaging). In other words, that cable set-top box will know whether three people are sitting on the sofa watching TV and how many are adults vs. children. Do we really need cable and/or video service operators knowing this? It all happens via a chip that resides in a camera that plugs into the set-top box."
Education

Submission + - Best Research Oriented Graduate Program

Submitted by mewrei
mewrei writes: As a CS undergraduate, I'm debating what to do for graduate school. I'd like to get into high level research jobs like for NASA or DARPA (as an example, maybe not specifically), and bearing that in mind, I know I'll need a post-graduate degree (preferably as high as doctoral). I've looked into CS graduate but it seems as if the overwhelming majority focus on IT for a corporate environment rather than theoretical CS or research oriented CS. Therefore I've been looking at getting a second bachelor's degree in either physics or electrical engineering and moving into post-graduate in one of those fields. Does anyone have a better suggestion or experience with the same situation to give further advice?

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