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Science

LHC Success! 1007

Posted by CmdrTaco from the good-news-everybody dept.
Tomahawk writes "It worked! The LHC was turned on this morning and has been shown to have worked. Engineers cheered as the proton particles completed their first circuit of the underground ring which houses the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). (And we're all still alive, too!)" Here is a picture from the control room which I'm sure makes sense to someone that isn't me.
Cellphones

Submission + - TELUS Exec. Info Leaked in Response to SMS Charges (nowpublic.com)

Submitted by Adam Schumacher-Darling
Adam Schumacher-Darling writes: According to an article submitted to NowPublic, personal contact information has been/will be leaked for several high-ranking executives at Telus, in response to the recent unilateral TOS changes that will cause users to be charged for incoming text messages. From the article:

Canadian mobile subscribers were surprised Friday morning when private information on TELUS Executives began to leak out via the popular mobile phone website "Howard Forums". ... "The information was leaked to combat the new (as of August 24th, 2008) $0.15 charges for inbound text messages to Bell and TELUS Mobility clients. I wouldn't have leaked the information if I thought there was any other way. What TELUS is doing to Canadians is absolutely inexcusable" said the source. "I'm sorry it had to take this route but TELUS executives are clearly more interested in rolling around in piles of our hard-earned Canadian money than listening to the largest customer objection in company history."

Comment Inspiration from Half-Life (Score 1) 700

by Adam Schumacher (#23219438) Attached to: Is Cheap Video Surveillance Possible?
Ever since playing through Half-Life 2, I've wanted to implement the automatic security cameras they have in the game.

The idea is to set up a pan & tilt camara mount, with a high-quality flash camera co-axial with a low-light/IR webcam. The webcam is plugged into motion/feature recognition software, and controls the pan/tilt, keeping the largest moving object in the middle of the frame. Once a certain threshold for size/movement is reached, a buzzer and red light activate, and the camera takes 3 or 4 flash pictures in rapid succession.

Anyone who's played HL2 can attest to the strong sense of Big Brother that these cameras evoke. Not to mention the fact that it would produce superior images, as it would wait until the target is sufficiently large in the frame, and the light/buzzer should cause the target to reflexively look towards the camera to investigate.

Thoughts? It's not so much a practical solution to the original stated problem, but maybe a fun project for someone with more mechanical skill and free time than I have...
Networking

Internet Bandwidth to Become a Global Currency? 115

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the the-almighty-bit dept.
ClimateCrisis writes to tell us that internet bandwidth could become a global currency under a new model of e-commerce developed by researchers from Delft University of Technology, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam and Harvard's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. "The application, available for free download at http://TV.seas.harvard.edu, is an enhanced version of a program called Tribler, originally created by the Dutch collaborators to study video file sharing. 'Successful peer-to-peer systems rely on designing rules that promote fair sharing of resources amongst users. Thus, they are both efficient and powerful computational and economic systems,' David Parkes, John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Natural Sciences at Harvard said. 'Peer-to-peer has received a bad rap, however, because of its frequent association with illegal music or software downloads.' The researchers were inspired to use a version of the Tribler video sharing software as a model for an e-commerce system because of such flexibility, speed, and reliability."

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