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Submission + - The UK "Porn" Filter Blocks Kids' Access To Tech, Civil Liberties Websites (blogspot.ca)

Submitted by badger.foo
badger.foo writes: It fell to the UK Tories to actually implement the Nanny State. Too bad Nanny Tory does not want kinds to read up on tech web sites such as slashdot.org, or civil liberties ones such as the EFF or Amnesty International. Read on for a small sample of what the filter blocks, from a blocked-by-default tech writer.

Comment Just imagine this... (Score 2) 85

by Chronus1326 (#45202341) Attached to: Cow Burps Tapped For Fuel
(to be funny) Imaging this implemented on an industrial scale...Warehouses filled with pens of cows hooked up to all sorts of tubes, and strange looking devices, possibly a treadmill, lol. This is interesting in theory, but in practice...I don't see it working.lol

Submission + - First Evidence Of Comet Striking Earth Found (ibtimes.com)

Submitted by starr802
starr802 writes: A 28-million-year-old comet that collided with Earth over Egypt, killing all signs of life in its path has been identified by a team of scientists. The discovery is the first evidence of a comet striking Earth.

New research, published in Earth and Planetary Science Letters, reveals how the comet entered Earth’s atmosphere over Egypt, exploding and heating up the sand to a sweltering 3,632 degrees Fahrenheit. What remained became a 2,316 square mile area of yellow silica glass in the Sahara Desert known as Libyan Desert Glass – a remnant of which was found in Tutankhamun’s brooch.

Submission + - AMD Launches Radeon R7 260X, Radeon R9 270X, and Radeon R9 280X (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: AMD officially launched their Radeon R7 and R9 series graphics cards today, with three new midrange to high end boards. The Radeon R9 280X is built around AMD’s Tahiti GPU, which also powers the Radeon HD 7970. The R9 270X features the same GPU core as the Radeon HD 7870 GHz Edition and the Radeon R7 260X is powered by AMD’s Bonaire GPU, which first arrived on the Radeon HD 7790. These new cards, however, have been tweaked and enhanced in a number of ways. The Radeon R7 260X sports higher engine and memory clocks than the HD 7790 and 260X’s default memory configuration is 2GB as well. The R9 270X’s clocks have been goosed up as well with a GPU clock that peaks at 1.05GHz and its memory clock has been increased to an effective 5.6Gbps. The Radeon R9 270X offers slightly higher compute performance but much more memory bandwidth--179.2GB/s vs. 153.6GB/s to be exact. Finally, the Radeon R9 280X isn’t clocked higher than AMD’s current flagship Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition. In fact, the R9 280X has a slightly lower peak engine clock, though memory bandwidth is similar. All told, AMD's new Radeons offer competitive performance to NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 650 Ti Boost, GeForce GTX 760 and GeForce GTX 770 cards but at significantly better price points.

Submission + - Pluto's 'Thick' Air Isn't Going Anywhere (discovery.com)

Submitted by astroengine
astroengine writes: When the proposition for NASA's New Horizons mission to Pluto was put forward, there was an air of urgency. The dwarf planet is moving away from the Sun in its eccentric orbit, so astronomers were concerned that the Pluonian atmosphere would freeze out and collapse onto the surface as fresh nitrogen-methane snow before they could get a spacecraft out there to observe it. But according to new research [arXiv], it appears there's little risk of a Pluto air freeze-out. From recent occultation measurements, it appears the atmosphere is becoming denser and more buoyant, meaning it will remain as an atmosphere all (Pluto) year 'round — 248 Earth years long.

Submission + - New Snowden Revelation: Canadian Spies Targeted Brazil (enquirerherald.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The Enquirer Herald reports, "A Brazilian television report that aired Sunday night said Canadian spies targeted Brazil's Mines and Energy Ministry. The report on Globo television was based on documents leaked by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden and was the latest showing that Latin America's biggest nation has been a target for U.S., British and now Canadian spy agencies. The report said the "metadata" of phone calls and emails from and to the Brazilian ministry were targeted by Canada's Communications Security Establishment to map the ministry's communications, using a software program called Olympia. It didn't indicate if emails were read or phone calls listened to. Brazilian Mines and Energy Minister Edison Lobao told Globo that "Canada has interests in Brazil, above all in the mining sector. I can't say if the spying served corporate interests or other groups." " — More at the CBC.

Submission + - It's Time to Stop Lionizing Steve Jobs (slashdot.org)

Submitted by Nerval's Lobster
Nerval's Lobster writes: Steve Jobs died on Oct. 5, 2011 after a long battle with cancer. As seemingly everyone on the planet is well aware, Jobs started a quirky little company named Apple that eventually morphed into a massive technology behemoth. Apple helped popularize PCs as a home device, kicked off the current obsession with tablets and smartphones, and made investors very rich in the bargain. When he died, Jobs was lionized as the greatest chief executive of the past twenty years. In many ways, that hyperbole was justified: having returned to Apple in 1996 after a long absence, he took a company teetering on the edge of bankruptcy and gave it a renewed sense of focus, which in turn resulted in a series of market-defining products, including the iPod, iPhone, and iPad. But it pays to remember that, whatever his strengths, Jobs wasn’t a perfect CEO. Apple under his watch released some notable flops, including the Power Mac G4 Cube and MobileMe; throw in controversies over working conditions in factories producing Apple products, as well as Jobs' legendary temper, and it's clear that his veneration as something close to a Tech God may be premature. To make a rough sports analogy, he was more like a Major League baseball player with excellent stats who, every three to five years, managed to hit a 100-mile home run.

Submission + - Fukushima nuclear worker accidentally toggles OFF cooling pumps @ #4 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A TEPCO employee carelessly pressed a button shutting off cooling pumps that serve the spent fuel pool in reactor #4 — thankfully a backup kicked in before any critical consequences resulted. The question remains just how vulnerable to simple mistakes (such as a single button push) are these spent fuel pools, filled nearly to capacity as they are with over 12,000 spent fuel rods?

How probable is another major nuclear accident at the crippled Fukushima site?

Given this is one site out of hundreds, is human civilization gambling heavily on the "success" of such regulation cumulatively as these systems age and are tested in the real world?

Submission + - Thousands protesters in Beijing street, Chinese media and websites in lockdown

Submitted by centralcommittee
centralcommittee writes: Thousands of people, mostly migrant workers from Anhui province, held protest today (5/8/2013) on the 2nd Ring Road of Beijing, south of Temple of Heaven. The protest is in response to Beijing police's mishandling of the death of a girl from Anhui province, who was alleged to be gang-raped by shopping mall security guards and fell to her death last Friday. The government has deployed hundreds of police plus helicopters against the protesters, traffic near the protest site was blocked for miles. Currently the name of the shopping mall "Jingwen" has become a restricted word in major Chinese websites, user cannot post anything containing this word. The Chinese search engine Baidu also refuses to display any result for this word while Google returns more than 800,000 results for this word.

Submission + - LMAX Exchange Getting Up To 50% Improvement in Latency From Azul's Zing JVM (infoq.com) 2

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: LMAX Exchange is one of a growing number of firms to use Java in a low latency environment. It has become well known, even outside of financial services, at least in part by dint of being willing to talk publicly about technology choices. The firm open-sourced a key component of its software stack, the Disruptor framework, in March 2011. At the end of last year, LMAX Exchange completed the latest re-build of its production data centre, moving from Hewlett-Packard servers with Intel's HexaCore Dunnington processor to Dell 520 and 720 with dual socket, 8 core, Intel Sandy Bridge CPUs. The Dells have 64 and 128 GB of memory respectively. CentOS 6 is used as the OS. Recently the firm have begun testing Azul's Zing JVM in place of Oracle's HotSpot as a way of improving their already impressive response times and throughput rates. The results are impressive; a 10-20% improvement in the mean latency, increasing to around a 50% improvement at the 99th percentile.

Submission + - China's Allwinner outsold Intel, Qualcomm in tablet processors in 2012 (eetimes.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The Chinese are coming. ARM-licensee Allwinner sold more application processors for tablet computers in 2012 than Intel and Qualcomm put together, according to this EE Times article that references market researcher Strategy Analytics. Overall one in five tablet processors was provided by a Chinese vendor in 2012, according to the article, partly because they sell chips at half the price of similarly specified chips from better known vendors.

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