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Comment This is effective, and efficient (Score 1) 301

by JumpingBull (#34222642) Attached to: GE To Buy 25,000 EVs, Starting With the Chevy Volt
Consider it this way, using the electric grid is the most effective use of energy transmission. By using large plants, we can use every trick that an engineer can conceive to wring the last watt out of fuel. So far, so good. But by combining the electrical storage potential of any hybrid, with a tuned engine for maximal efficiency gets the best of both worlds. It's easier to design to, also. It's an old trick called co-generation, used in pulp and paper plants. Now, if we can store the "waste heat" for our homes ... well, we just reduced the total energy demand. Any takers? JB

Comment Fiction or non Fiction? (Score 1) 363

by JumpingBull (#33775492) Attached to: I typically read about __ books per year.
Lots more non fiction then I voted. There are advantages in reading a lot of SF when I was a tad; 5 books in a weekend. Now that I'm older, I read tech books in sciences and math - and some of them take a page a day to digest; especially the math (combinatorics, abstract algebra, that sort of thing). And I'm tackling literature and languages, and those are slow going too. But I am having fun, but the to-learn list keeps getting longer the more I understand. Dang these short lifespans... JB

Comment staying together (Score 1) 404

by JumpingBull (#33757276) Attached to: My Job Is..
while battling depression/anxiety. Who knew that they co-exist? Try to avoid that fate. However, I have managed to catch up on my non technical reading; I have an ever lengthening to-learn list; and am helping others through their own rough spots; and am still keeping up with my own discipline, EE. It hasn't been a total waste of time, but I am inpatient to get back into harness, so to speak. I think I'll find some hairy problem to apply myself to. Improving education comes to mind. Cheers, JB
Robotics

Submission + - TuxDroid is dead ... please help us

Submitted by adedommelin
adedommelin writes: Kysoh, the manufacturer of the TuxDroid went out of business in July. Since this day, wiki, packages and sources are not longer available.

TuxDroid is an OpenSource robot / smart companion working on GNU/Linux or Win32 platforms. With him, you can access to Internet services, WebRadios, and a lot of other things, you're just limited to what you can imagine.

We are currently working on setting up a new community website and a project on sourceforge to keep our beloved TuxDroid alive. If you have an offline copy of the wiki / documentation / packages / sources we would be very interested in getting them.
We really need your help if we want to keep this project alive

IRC channel is available on freenode #tuxdroid
Science

Submission + - Obstruction of research on Mexican Gulf oil spill (npr.org)

Submitted by indogiree
indogiree writes: "Some scientists say they're being locked out of research on the oil spill because they refuse to sign confidentiality agreements."..."The only information or the facts that are allowed to be collected belong to the parties involved. That's BP and the U.S. government. And because both BP and the feds have a vital and monetary interest in the amount of oil still in the water and on the wetlands, you have to get past the lawyers first, before you can go on to public property and waterways.'..."Much of the information obtained from research and monitoring will be tied up in the courts rather than being made publicly available and scrutinized."...

Submission + - Enlightenment Foundation Libraries goes Alpha ! (enlightenment.org)

Submitted by dvlhrns
dvlhrns writes: Several core EFL libraries have now been released as alpha. !!!

Enlightenment is not just a window manager for Linux/X11 and others, but also a whole suite of libraries to help you create beautiful user interfaces with much less work than doing it the old fashioned way and fighting with traditional toolkits, not to mention a traditional window manager. It covers uses from small mobile devices like phones all the way to powerful multi-core desktops (which are the primary development environment).

Comment Ummm, this is slashdot (Score 1) 1

by JumpingBull (#33314524) Attached to: Lelo Elise - Plum

Now that may be enough for most readers, but this is, after all the slashdot crowd. Vitally important information is missing!

It mentions "running out of steam". Is there a safety hazard to said device? Possibility of nasty scalds requiring a trip to smirking emergency room staff? Does it require carbon based fuels, like stoking it with coal? Or, worse yet, a coal fired power generating station? Can I have a solar powered charging station, as an option? Wilderness trips, ya know...

It seems that it is dynamically imbalanced, on purpose. Will bits of the device shake off with extended use? What about the interior design? Can it survive international shock, shake and vibration standards? What about electrical safety? Does it pose a risk to public health and safety? Does it have a breath metering device so as to prevent impaired operation?

And most important, what kind of microcontroller does it use? Does it have an SDK? Which languages does it support? Can it be re-programmed? Will it run Linux? Is there a logging function that permits peak useage times and rates? Does it have WiFi?

Hope this helps spark a discussion.
Oracle

Submission + - Java Developer: Oracle-Google Spat About Ego

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: The father of Java programming language James A. Gosling has derided Oracle's lawsuit against Google, citing ego, money and power as underlying motivation. In a blog entry, James Gosling commented on Oracle's lawsuit saying, "Oracle finally filed a lawsuit against Google. Not a big surprise." He revealed that after Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems it grilled Sun employees over the patent issues between Sun and Google during the integration process. Gosling said he could see "the Oracle lawyer's eyes sparkle".

Submission + - German ascent ascribed to lack of copyright (spiegel.de)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: In No Copyright Law, The Real Reason for Germany's Industrial Expansion, Frank Thadeusz presents the work of economic historian Eckhard Hoffner, who argues that Germany's ascent relative to other nascent industrial nations like England and France was due in large part to Germany's lack of copyright law.

The German proliferation of knowledge created a curious situation that hardly anyone is likely to have noticed at the time. Sigismund Hermbstädt, for example, a chemistry and pharmacy professor in Berlin, who has long since disappeared into the oblivion of history, earned more royalties for his "Principles of Leather Tanning" published in 1806 than British author Mary Shelley did for her horror novel "Frankenstein," which is still famous today.
Education

Submission + - Teachers Union Boycotts LA Times Over Evaluations (newsweek.com)

Submitted by Atypical Geek
Atypical Geek writes: According to Newsweek, the local teachers union is infuriated over the disclosure of teacher performance metrics.

Do parents have the right to know which of their kids' teachers are the most and least effective? That's the controversy roaring in California this week with the publication of an investigative series by the Los Angeles Times's Jason Song and Jason Felch, who used seven years of math and English test data to publicly identify the best and the worst third- to fifth-grade teachers in the Los Angeles Unified School District. The newspaper's announcement of its plans to release data later this month on all 6,000 of the city's elementary-school teachers has prompted the local teachers' union to rally members to organize a boycott of the newspaper.

According to the linked Times article, United Teachers Los Angeles president A.J. Duffy said the database was "an irresponsible, offensive intrusion into your professional life that will do nothing to improve student learning."
Google

Submission + - Parked Domains: Malware's Hidden Long Tail (threatpost.com)

Submitted by Trailrunner7
Trailrunner7 writes: They're the dusty corners of the Web: so-called "parked" domains. But these little trafficked sites are attracting the attention of security experts, who say that it's time for hosting firms and others that profit from them to clean up malware infections that may be exposing millions of Web users to attacks. The topic of what to do about the millions of parked domains was put back on the front burner this week after Web hosting firm Network Solutions acknowledged, on Monday, that unknown hackers had compromised a popular Web template it offered to customers, placing code in a widget to serve up malicious content from hundreds of thousands — perhaps millions of parked Web domains that the company manages. The company declined to say how long the sites had been serving the malicious content, but the mass compromise may go back more than eight months, to a breach that first came to light in January, 2010.

A spokesperson for Google said that the company has systems to help detect parked domains, and will often not show them in the company's search index. "If they do appear in the index, they are scanned with the same technology we use on other sites to help detect and flag malware and phishing attempts," the spokesman said.

Some are suggesting tougher approaches. Huang and other Armorize researchers have suggested that search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing stop crawling parked domains to reduce even the small amounts of traffic that make their way to the parked pages -especially since visitors to such mothballed pages will often not bother to report when are subject to an attack. Daswani notes that Web sites already face a still penalty for infection: black listing by Google and other search engines.
Programming

Submission + - Throwing Out Software That Works

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: Just as the iPhone rendered circa-2007 smartphones obsolete, points out Marco Arment, the iPad is on the verge of doing the same to circa-2010 netbooks. Should this succeed, cautions Dave Winer, we may be entering an era of deliberate degradation of the user experience and throwing overboard of software that works, for corporate reasons. Already, Winer finds himself having to go to a desktop machine if he wants to view web content that's inaccessible with his iPhone and iPad. 'There was no bottleneck for software in the pre-iPad netbooks,' notes Dave. 'It matters. What I want is the convenient form factor without the corporate filter. It's way too simplistic to believe that we'll get that, but we had it. That's what I don't like — deliberate devolution.'
Hardware

Submission + - Quantum Zeno Effect Allows Interaction-free Switch (technologyreview.com)

Submitted by KentuckyFC
KentuckyFC writes: The quantum zeno effect is one of the more fascinating consequences of quantum mechanics. It applies to quantum systems that are evolving from one state to another, say from a state representing 0 to one representing a 1. If the quantum system starts in the 0 state, it evolves into a superposition of 0 and 1 states. A measurement can then cause it to collapse into one state or the other. But a measurement very soon after this evolution begins is much more likely to produce a 0 than a 1 and repeating this measurement rapidly enough ensures the chances of a 1 occurring approach zero. In effect, the process of repeated measurement prevents the 0 state evolving into a 1. Now a group of physicists have shown how this can be used to make a switch. The basic idea is to take a signal wave in state 0 which will evolve into a 1 when it passes it through a nonlinear waveguide. But measuring this wave will prevent this evolution. This can be done by making the signal wave interact with another "control" wave. The presence of the control wave maintains the signal wave in a 0 state while the absence of the control waves causes the signal wave to switch to a 1. The result is an all-optical switch that is interaction-free because it is the absence of the control wave that causes the switch. Such a device offers a number of important advantages over conventional all-optical switches. First, this type of switch should operate at extremely low power since there is no signal loss associated with the switching process. Second, the quantum state of the signal wave is preserved. That's a biggie. It means this kind of switch could become the heart of quantum routers that will make a kind of quantum internet possible.
NASA

Submission + - Super-volcano erupts in outer galaxy 1

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: A galactic super-volcano is erupting in massive galaxy M87 and blasting gas outwards, and NASA scientists view that the huge volcano in M87 is very similar to the recent Icelandic volcano that caused heavy air traffic disruptions across Europe. According to NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, M87 is relatively close to the Earth at a distance of about 50 million light years and lies at the center of the Virgo cluster, which contains thousands of galaxies.
Security

Submission + - Apple might photo unauthorized iOS users (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by AHuxley
AHuxley writes: Apple has applied for a patent on a method to differentiate between authorized and unauthorized users of a particular iOS device.
Once detected, certain features would be automatically disabled. Sensitive data could be sent to a remote server and the device before been deleted. Apple hopes to lock out thieves, and alerting the owner of possible intrusion. Pictures of the unauthorized user could be taken andGPS coordinates transmitted. How long before Jailbreak users are also tracked?

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