Comment Re:phonon is a widely accepted term (Score 1) 100
I think it's in quotes because it's not an established word for people outside your(physics?) discourse community.
Comment Re:What can the US do? (Score 1) 177
In some places its even better. Mine is 40Mbit down/20Mbit up (attainable), which is near the top of what VDSL can do(AFAIK)
Comment why not a record then? (Score 1) 440
Saying tape has a longer life is silly. I'd have no idea where to get an 8-track player today even though it's an analog format.
Same with a record player, but I could make one pretty easily. (there's a reason why we shot a record into space instead of a tape)
Really, though a documented and uncompressed digital file, properly kept track of, could last forever similar to a record even if we lost our codecs it would be easy to write a new one.
Comment Re:Hmmm... could this be a solution...? (Score 1) 92
Other respondents to this comment pointed out that these are fluorescent (ie need an excitation light source) not "glowing".
But another problem with this idea is that, in a population neutral alleles maintain their frequency (though can drift randomly) and deleterious alleles will decline in frequency. In other words, you'd have to release a LOT of rabbits before the glowing allele would be common enough to have an effect on average fitness and that allele would be unstable in the population. Unless you don't believe in evolution, but then you're better off praying for the rabbits to go away.
Ask Slashdot: Best Software For Med-School Note-Taking? 217
First time accepted submitter spencj writes "I'm just starting year two of medical school, and I've been rethinking the way I make and create notes/study guides. One of the problems I've considered is that we learn about the same topic in several arenas. For example, if I consider some disease like coronary artery disease, I will likely learn about this topic in cardiology, radiology, pharmacology, and then in outside study resources such as Kaplan guides, online resources, etc.. Further, it will come up in August, October, March, April, etc.. My dream app is some combination of Excel, Visio, Word, and a blog where I could tag selections of text. If I then 'filtered' by certain parameters, it would collapse all the information I'd collected from different resources. For example, say I create a flowchart in Visio, take some notes in Word, create a table in Excel, and save from text from a web resource. I tag each item with 'coronary artery disease,' then I want to quickly query for all of my items with this tag. Is there any kind of app or resource that can pull this off? Medical students everywhere would be grateful."
Submission + - Bell Labs Break Record with 31Tbps via a Single 7200km Optical Fibre (ispreview.co.uk)
Mark.JUK writes: Alcatel-Lucent's research and development division, Bell Labs, has successfully broken yet another record after it used 155 lasers (each operating at different frequencies and carrying 200Gbps of data over a 50GHz frequency grid) and an enhanced version of Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM) to send information at a staggering speed of 31 Terabits per second over a single 7200km long optical fibre cable. Previous experiments have been faster but only over shorter distances or by using a different type of fibre optic cable entirely.
United States Begins Flying Stealth Bombers Over South Korea 567
skade88 writes "The New York Times is reporting that the United States has started flying B-2 stealth bomber runs over South Korea as a show of force to North Korea. The bombers flew 6,500 miles to bomb a South Korean island with mock explosives. Earlier this month the U.S. Military ran mock B-52 bombing runs over the same South Korean island. The U.S. military says it shows that it can execute precision bombing runs at will with little notice needed. The U.S. also reaffirmed their commitment to protecting its allies in the region. The North Koreans have been making threats to turn South Korea into a sea of fire. North Korea has also made threats claiming they will nuke the United States' mainland."
DOJ Often Used Cell Tower Impersonating Devices Without Explicit Warrants 146
Via the EFF comes news that, during a case involving the use of a Stingray device, the DOJ revealed that it was standard practice to use the devices without explicitly requesting permission in warrants. "When Rigmaiden filed a motion to suppress the Stingray evidence as a warrantless search in violation of the Fourth Amendment, the government responded that this order was a search warrant that authorized the government to use the Stingray. Together with the ACLU of Northern California and the ACLU, we filed an amicus brief in support of Rigmaiden, noting that this 'order' wasn't a search warrant because it was directed towards Verizon, made no mention of an IMSI catcher or Stingray and didn't authorize the government — rather than Verizon — to do anything. Plus to the extent it captured loads of information from other people not suspected of criminal activity it was a 'general warrant,' the precise evil the Fourth Amendment was designed to prevent. ... The emails make clear that U.S. Attorneys in the Northern California were using Stingrays but not informing magistrates of what exactly they were doing. And once the judges got wind of what was actually going on, they were none too pleased:"
Google Pledges Not To Sue Any Open Source Projects Using Their Patents 153
sfcrazy writes "Google has announced the Open Patent Non-Assertion (OPN) Pledge. In the pledge Google says that they will not sue any user, distributor, or developer of Open Source software on specified patents, unless first attacked. Under this pledge, Google is starting off with 10 patents relating to MapReduce, a computing model for processing large data sets first developed at Google. Google says that over time they intend to expand the set of Google's patents covered by the pledge to other technologies."
This is in addition to the Open Invention Network, and their general work toward reforming the patent system. The patents covered in the OPN will be free to use in Free/Open Source software for the life of the patent, even if Google should transfer ownership to another party. Read the text of the pledge. It appears that interaction with non-copyleft licenses (MIT/BSD/Apache) is a bit weird: if you create a non-free fork it appears you are no longer covered under the pledge.
Comment About time (Score 2, Informative) 150
It is seriously about time! The D-pad on the current controllers is absolutely awful (for those who don't know, often times it registers the wrong direction due to poor mechanical design). It has made some games (especially live-arcade games like megaman 9) incredibly frustrating.
Comment Re:Fast Disks? (Score 1) 122
Its naive to think that buses are only good for storage.
1080p video is 1080*1920pixels/frame*32bits/pixel*60frames/second is roughly 4Gb (uncompressed). If history is any indication displays will get larger and denser (also remember bandwidth needed will scale by the square of the number of lines). Or what if you want an external GPU? 16x pci express is about 32Gbits/sec. Also more speed reduces latency, which may be helpful too depending on what you use it for.
Comment You've all got the wrong idea (Score 5, Interesting) 174
This is not some boring super scaler! Nor is it some vector processor!
in fact this is a complete departure from a von Neuman architecture. The architecture is called a Dataflow architecture. In one sentence a dataflow architecture is one where instruction execution is based on the availability of the instructions inputs not a program counter.
The article does a very bad job at conveying the fact that this is a relatively new idea. Like most reporting they report something thats been in research for some time as a huge breakthrough without describing it at all. Instead its really just an incremental step in dataflow computing research.
I work in a lab at the University of Washington on another dataflow architecture. Its a really interesting idea but it will take some time to develop and you're not going to get one on your desk for some years to come.
in fact this is a complete departure from a von Neuman architecture. The architecture is called a Dataflow architecture. In one sentence a dataflow architecture is one where instruction execution is based on the availability of the instructions inputs not a program counter.
The article does a very bad job at conveying the fact that this is a relatively new idea. Like most reporting they report something thats been in research for some time as a huge breakthrough without describing it at all. Instead its really just an incremental step in dataflow computing research.
I work in a lab at the University of Washington on another dataflow architecture. Its a really interesting idea but it will take some time to develop and you're not going to get one on your desk for some years to come.
