176365
submission
alphadogg writes:
Award-winning Carnegie Mellon computer scientist Steven Rudich defends having had a 20th century mathematician named Kurt Godel as his "luminary hero."
"When I was 12, I stumbled upon a little book called "Gödel's Proof" by Ernest Nagel. It had an unintimidating format and used full English sentences to avoid presuming mathematical background....Now the human reason I even picked up the book was not that I was a prefabricated, poised little prodigy, but rather that I was very short for my age, brutally picked on, and had no friends. By the time I finished the book my life was changed — Gödel was new friend."
Rudich is now passing along his love of math and challenging proofs to high schoolers during a yearly summer program.
172771
submission
teflonscout writes:
When I think of bulletproof vests, the first word that comes to mind is Kevlar. Wired is running a story on Dynema SB61, a bulletproof material that is made of polyethylene. It is a higher grade of the plastic found in Tupperware. The story also mentions the recall of Second Chance bulletproof vests that were made from Zylon, a material that degraded slowly when exposed to moisture. At least one police officer was injured when a bullet penetrated his Zylon vest. Polyethylene is impervious to moisture. The first vests made from this new material are 5mm thick and can stop at 9mm bullet traveling at 1777 feet per second, which is slightly better than other top of the line vests.
165131
submission
Gabriel Landau writes:
I've been trying to download Skype all weekend to talk to my friend in Prague from my home Verizon DSL connection. Every time I went to http://www.skype.com/download, the page took nearly forever to load, and the connection timed out before it loaded completely. Assuming their server was under heavy load all weekend, I came into work this morning and checked the site again; it loaded very quickly through my office T1 (non-Verizon). I just checked my home computer again, and the page still times out.
Is Verizon intentionally throttling all traffic to Skype servers to force customers to use their own for-pay services? Is this behavior illegal and anti-competitive?
