35401225
submission
QQBoss writes:
Given that Washington state already performs elections by mail and has offered voter registration online since 2008, is offering voter registration via Facebook the next logical step? Or is it an enhanced way of enabling voter fraud? Since it requires entering a drivers license number to validate the registration, if a state subject to preclearence implemented this would it fall afoul of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 according to Eric Holder? Will it be enough to prevent dead dogs and Mickey Mouse from being enabled to register to vote?
So many pins to pull, let the grenades fly!
33451357
submission
QQBoss writes:
Old tech has lasting power, for sure. 80 year old silver glass plates of Greenland from Knud Rasmussen's mapping expedition surveys have been located and are clean enough to allow calculation of glacial melting in the 1930s.
http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v5/n6/full/ngeo1481.html (*paywalled*, sorry)
What is the chance a topic like this could actually revolve around differences in quality of long term archival storage technologies and not devolve into what we all know exactly will happen?
33292253
submission
QQBoss writes:
Coming from the mostly embedded world as I do, where a missed deadline or wrong value can mean destroyed hardware (or, more importantly, dead people), the thought of an inaccurate CPU is more than a little troubling. The authors of this paper from MIT understand that, and so they have developed mathematical frameworks to show you can rigorously limit the possibility of catastrophic failure.
Two years ago, loop perforation was shown to provide results faster and/or more efficiently than traditional CPUs by trading accuracy for performance, but the June paper presentation at the Association for Computing Machinery's Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation should help put minds like mine at ease that we can have it faster and cheaper (which qualifies as better, without the whole death side effect problem).
30186673
submission
QQBoss writes:
How long have you waited for a story to come along that actually uses "library of congress" as a unit of measurement? Your wait is over: At 1 Terabit/sec transfer rate, IBM's new optical transceiver can transmit the entire Library of Congress web archive in about an hour while using less than 5 watts of power using 48 transmit/receive channels. Go network your Beowulf clusters with that!
The new chip was presented at the Optical Fiber Communication Conference in Los Angeles.
28420997
submission
QQBoss writes:
The Air Force is not saying what caused the RQ-170 UAV to crash in Iran, but that Iran's claim to have forced it down is erroneous. At the very least, the plane didn't come down and land gently as Iran had suggested it did. At least Iran got a good photo op, though the more interesting question is what technology will they be able to glean from what they did capture.
