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Submission + - Bridge for Switching Left/Right Side Drivers (gizmag.com)

smitty777 writes: There is an interesting article in Gizmag about a very creative traffic design solution. Apparently, the road on the Pearl River between China and Hong Kong also divides folks who drive on the left and right side. This unique bridge not only reverses the direction of the flow of traffic, but also puts the drivers in the cognitive mindset to switch sides. While a really cool design concept, the design team unfortunately lost the bid.

Comment My Experience (Score 5, Informative) 472

I work at a major chip manufacturing plant. At 4.10 I was conferencing with another fab when all our PCs shutdown. 10 minutes later the place was in chaos. Now don't get me wrong the fab keeps going but my god the cost to the company of this. Say 10 sites world wide with 2-5k employees each the majority of which can't do any meaningful work. McAfee have a lot to answer for.

Comment Re:Randomness (Score 1) 94

This only applies to the Fisher-Yates method for fast shuffling cards. In this method a number is selected at random and that number corresponds to a random looking (but deterministic and repeatable) sequence of cards. Its fast but its far from perfect - just use a slower method (I'm sure on mondern hardware you would never notice anyway) and you will get back the full state space of the deck. Even still you would have to play a lot of hands before you notice. Note: I'm sure Fisher-Yates is not used on the Poker sites. If it were the sites would be open to statistical methods for mining money out of them.
Idle

Submission + - Computer Glitch Prompts 50 Raids on Elderly Couple (theregister.co.uk)

spun writes: "New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg apologized to an elderly Brooklyn couple on Friday for about 50 door-pounding visits police made to their home resulting from a glitch in one of the department's computers. The couple's address was used in an automated test and never removed from the system. Now the police department claims to have a foolproof solution: they have flagged the address with a note telling officers not to go there."

Comment Re:Finally... (Score 5, Insightful) 100

Virtually ideal transistors that are easy to fabricate will revolutionize the nanoprocessor industry.

I didn't see anything that suggested fabrication would be easy. In fact the article mentions that e-beam lithography was used. If e-beam lithography is a neccessary component then you won't see this in the mainstream anytime soon. The process is slow. So slow it is never used for industrial applications. That said, it is used in acidemia all the time because nothing allows you to get build smaller structures.

Encryption

Submission + - 768-bit RSA encryption has been cracked (siliconrepublic.com)

jaq1an writes: SilconRepublic is reporting that 768-bit RSA encryption has been cracked using a cluster PC approach. Quote from article "Whilst this crypto cracking feat is impressive, it highlights the fact that the days of relying on encryption alone as a means of defending private data are now drawing to a close."

Is nothing safe anymore?

Submission + - iPhone users unite against parking fines (apple.com)

An anonymous reader writes: new year resolution: spend less money on parking fines. To help, the ParkWatch iPhone app (free) crowdsources parking inspector reports and allows users to receive live alerts of parking inspectors present near their parked cars, as reported by other users. ParkWatch leverages GPS, Push notifications and google maps of the iPhone to create a community of 'reporters', and allow users to stay one step ahead of parking fines. ParkWatch also allows users to remember their car parking location, and view the history of parking inspectors reports on the embedded map.

Comment Re:WHY does this NEVER hapen to me? (Score 1) 926

I'll admit I'm Irish but I will also admit I have no faith in my Police. Even so, your suggestion is bordering on the mad and reeks of coverup. It also does not match in any detail what the RTE news is reporting, and I do have faith in that news service.

I would suggest that when one government smuggles explosive into another country the standard proceedure should not be just to call the airport to give them a heads up and then assume all is well.

How was Dublin Airport able to sit on the mess? You can only sit on something when your the only one who knows about it. The only ones in that position in this mess were the Slovak police.

Why did the Slovak police and government not contact thier Irish eqivelents and keep on contacting them until the explovises were returned? This is a diplomatic incident its not the sort of thing you send an email about asking for an update.

Why was the pilot allowed to take off. How is that even his decission? Its mad I tell you.

If you really think this is the way it went down then I have a bridge I think you might like.

Space

Submission + - Has Kepler Discovered New Class of Cosmic Object? (discovery.com)

astroengine writes: NASA's Kepler planet-hunting observatory has found two normal stars orbited by objects that are too blistering hot to be planets but too small to be stars. So what are they? It's anybody's guess. They're simply called "objects of interest" by the Kepler team.
Idle

Submission + - D.C. detective pulls gun at snowball fight (washingtonpost.com)

langelgjm writes: The Washington Post reports that during Saturday's record-breaking snowfall, hundreds of twenty- and thirty-somethings gathered in a mostly-empty area of the city and proceeded to have an enormous snowball fight. Things were all fun and games until a D.C. detective in plainclothes stopped in the middle of the fight, leaving his Hummer and confronting the crowd with his gun drawn. At first, D.C. police denied the claims, but the incident was caught on tape. The detective is currently on desk duty pending an investigation. The tech angle to all of this? 25-year-old Yousef Ali, a one-time Apple Genius, said he was inspired to start the snowball fight by a friend's Facebook status and used a dormant personal blog and extensive Twitter promotion to expand the participant list: "Basically, I used a lot of my social media promotions techniques... to really push this thing pretty big."

Submission + - Drone incident serves up data encryption lesson

cyclocommuter writes: Excerpts from the ComputerWorld article:In a story that's receiving widespread attention, the Wall Street Journal yesterday reported that Iranian-backed groups in Iraq and Afghanistan were tapping into live feeds from Predator drones using a $26 software tool called SkyGrabber from Russian company SkySoftware. The hitherto largely unknown software product doesn't require Internet connectivity and is designed to intercept music, photos, video and TV satellite programming for free. Insurgents in Iraq, however, were able to use SkyGrabber to grab live video feeds from unmanned Predator drones because the transmissions were being sent unencrypted to ground control stations.

Once again, yet another multi-billion dollar system is rendered vulnerable by cheap off-the-shelf components.

Submission + - Scientists announce possible discovery of dark mat (timesonline.co.uk)

Arvisp writes: Scientists working on the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search (CDMS), in the disused Soudan iron ore mine in Minnesota, announced last night that they had detected two events with the signature of the weakly-interacting massive particles (WIMPs) that are thought to make up dark matter.

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