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The Media

Submission + - Time's Person of the Year is 'The Protester'

Hugh Pickens writes writes: "Time's editor Rick Stengel announced on 'The Today Show' that "The Protester" is Time Magazine's Person of the Year: From the Arab Spring to Athens, From Occupy Wall Street to Moscow. “For capturing and highlighting a global sense of restless promise, for upending governments and conventional wisdom, for combining the oldest of techniques with the newest of technologies to shine a light on human dignity and, finally, for steering the planet on a more democratic though sometimes more dangerous path for the 21st century." The initial gut reaction on Twitter seems to be one of derision, as Time has gone with a faceless human mass instead of picking a single person like Tunisian fruit vendor Mohamed Bouazizi who Time mentions in the story and is widely acknowledged as the person who set off the "Arab Spring." In 2006, Time chose "You" with a mirrored cover to much disappointment, picked the personal computer as "Machine of the Year" and Earth as "Planet of the Year," proving "that it should probably just be "Story of the Year" if they aren't going to acknowledge an actual person," writes Dashiell Bennett. "By not picking any one individual, they've basically chosen no one.""
China

Submission + - China-Based Hacking of 760 Companies Reflects Unde (bloomberg.com)

lacaprup writes: Chinese-based hacking of 760 different corporations reflects a growing, undeclared cyber war. From giants like Intel and Google to unknowns like iBahn, the Chinese hackers steal everything isn't nailed down. Simply put, it is easier and cheaper to steal rather than develop the legal way.
China has consistently denied it has any responsibility for hacking that originated from servers on its soil, but — based on what is known of attacks from China, Russia and other countries — a declassified estimate of the value of the blueprints, chemical formulas and other material stolen from U.S. corporate computers in the last year reached almost $500 billion

News

Submission + - Publicly available Russian election results show e (samarcandanalytics.com)

gotfork writes: "As some Russians protest the results of the recent election, several commentators (Russian, English) have started looking at the results which are posted to the election commission web site and there's very strong evidence of fraud. Voter turnout correlates strongly with percent voting for the ruling party, United Russia, and there are a lot of polling stations with nearly 100% turnout and 100% voting for United Russia in some unusual places. The raw data is posted so you can do your own analysis."

Comment Start leaving the CEO voicemail (Score 1) 333

I had a similar issue with a company that makes industrial plasma etching equipment. After eight months of trying to get off their mailing list I was able to find the CEO's personal phone extension, and started left him a choice voicemail. I got a phone apology each from their PR and marketing heads within the hour, and haven't heard from them since. This may not work if the whole company is in on it though.

Submission + - GPU Upgrade To Make Jaguar The Fastest Supercomput (gizmocrazed.com)

Mightee writes: "Supercomputers are at the front line of current processing capacity among all the families of computers. They are used for highly intensive tasks such as quantum physics, weather forecasting, climate research and molecular modeling etc.

In November '09 and October '10 Jaguar topped the Top500 lists of world's fastest supercomputers. But it was not until late October 2010 that Jaguar was dethroned by a Chinese supercomputer Tianhe-1A achieving 2.5 quadrillion calculations per second.

Now, after almost a year, the phoenix is going to rise out of the pyre; Jaguar is all set to become the most powerful supercomputer again."

Cloud

Submission + - Facebook: The Law Says You Can't Have Your Data

An anonymous reader writes: After making 22 complaints regarding Facebook’s various practices, the Austrian group Europe versus Facebook stumbled upon an important tidbit: Facebook says it is not required to give you a copy of some of your personal data if it deems doing so would adversely affect its trade secrets or intellectual property. I followed up with Facebook and learned the company insists the law places “reasonable limits” on the data that has to be provided.

Comment Why general relativity? (Score 1) 358

General relativity is only one small part of physics, and focusing on it wouldn't help you understand a lot of the physics articles that go through here. I would suggest a more balanced approach -- with your background you should be able to work through Griffith's E&M and Quantum books which many undergraduate physics majors use. All the purists out there may scoff at them, but let's face it, your not actually going to work through Zee's "QFT in a nutshell" or many of the other books suggested above on your own. With a bit more of a background in the field, you would be in a better place to evaluate what you wanted to study next.

Comment Re:This word does not mean what you think it means (Score 1) 189

I pulled up the IEEE bit since it's written for a very general audience, but Oliver's comment on this paper doesn't sound any more positive that the previous ones: "To be clear, this system was not used to perform any computational algorithm." ( http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/473164a ). The paper is a good first step, but doesn't come anywhere near to proving the claims that the company has made. It is also way less exciting that things that other groups have done, without all the hype, http://arxiv.org/abs/1101.5654 being the most recent example. It's a good illustration through (PoV-ray, wut wut).

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