EdhelDil - Slashdot User

Submission + - Iran Awaiting Ayatollah's Order to Build N-bomb (timesonline.co.uk) 3

Submitted by suraj.sun on Monday August 03, 2009 @03:21AM

suraj.sun writes: Iran has perfected the technology to create and detonate a nuclear warhead and is merely awaiting the word from its Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, to produce its first bomb, Western intelligence sources have told The Times.

The sources said that Iran completed a research programme to create weaponised uranium in the summer of 2003 but had halted the research because it had achieved its aim — to find a way of detonating a warhead that could be launched on its long-range Shehab-3 missiles.

They said that, should Ayatollah Khamenei approve the building of a nuclear device, it would take six months to enrich low-enriched uranium to highly-enriched uranium at the Natanz plant, and another six months to assemble the warhead.

Iran's scientists have been trying to master a method of detonating a bomb known as the "multipoint initiation system" — wrapping highly enriched uranium in high explosives and then detonating it.

TimesOnline : http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/middle_east/article6736785.ece

Submission + - Internet Empowers Everyone to "Spy" (wsj.com)

Submitted by

reporter

on Saturday May 23, 2009 @04:47PM

reporter writes: "According to a startling report by the "Wall Street Journal", the Internet has empowered ordinary people and Slashdotters to be part-time intelligence officers uncovering secrets — like military facilities and prison camps — about the landscape of North Korea. The report states, "[Curtis] Melvin is at the center of a dozen or so citizen snoops who have spent the past two years filling in the blanks on the map of one of the world's most secretive countries. Seeking clues in photos, news reports and eyewitness accounts, they affix labels to North Korean structures and landscapes captured by Google Earth, an online service that stitches satellite pictures into a virtual globe. The result is an annotated North Korea of rocket-launch sites, prison camps and elite palaces on white-sand beaches.

'It's democratized intelligence,' says Mr. Melvin.

More than 35,000 people have downloaded Mr. Melvin's file, North Korea Uncovered. It has grown to include thousands of tags in categories such as 'nuclear issues' (alleged reactors, missile storage), dams (more than 1,200 countrywide) and restaurants (47). Its Wikipedia approach to spying shows how Soviet-style secrecy is facing a new challenge from the Internet's power to unite a disparate community of busybodies.""

Submission + - Location-Aware Browsing to become Mainstream (infoq.com)

Submitted by

snitch

on Saturday May 23, 2009 @04:04PM

snitch writes: "With the W3C working on a specification that defines an API for providing scripted access to geographical location information, Mozilla recently announced built-in Geolocation support for Firefox 3.5. This is aligned with an earlier announcement from Opera that also adds support for Geolocation in their browser. Will this make geographically aware applications ubiquitous?

The Geolocation API, as proposed in the W3C draft, is a high-level interface to location information, such as latitude and longitude, associated with the device hosting the implementation. The API itself is agnostic of the underlying location information sources. Common sources of location information include Global Positioning System (GPS) and location inferred from network signals such as IP address, RFID, WiFi and Bluetooth MAC addresses, and GSM/CDMA cell IDs"

Submission + - Creating Artificial Consciousness (discovermagazine.com)

Submitted by

jzoom555

on Saturday May 23, 2009 @11:56AM

jzoom555 writes: "In an interview with Discover Mag, Gerald Edelman, Nobel laureate and founder/director of The Neurosciences Institute, discusses the quality of consciousness and progress in building brain-based-devices (BBD's). His lab recently published details on a brain-model that is self-sustaining and 'has beta waves and gamma waves just like the regular cortex'."

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