Professor_Quail - Slashdot User

Submission + - Sprint Received 8M Location Data Requests in 2009 (eff.org)

Submitted by Professor_Quail on Wednesday January 06, 2010 @09:58PM

Professor_Quail writes: The EFF reports that Sprint received over 8 million requests for its customers' information in the past 13 months. That doesn't count requests for basic identification and billing information, or wiretapping requests, or requests to monitor who is calling who, or even requests for less-precise location data based on which cell phone towers a cell phone was in contact with. That's just GPS. And, that's not including legal requests from civil litigants, or from foreign intelligence investigators. That's just law enforcement. And, that's not counting the few other major cell phone carriers like AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile. That's just Sprint.

Submission + - Mexico decriminalizes small-scale drug possession 4

Submitted by Professor_Quail on Friday August 21, 2009 @08:10AM

Professor_Quail writes: Mexico enacted a controversial law Thursday decriminalizing possession of small amounts of marijuana, cocaine, heroin and other drugs while encouraging free government treatment for drug dependency. The law sets out maximum "personal use" amounts for drugs, also including LSD and methamphetamine. People detained with those quantities will no longer face criminal prosecution when the law goes into effect Friday.

Comment Re:Who cares (Score 1) 80

by Professor_Quail on Thursday August 20, 2009 @05:50PM (#29139833) Attached to: PCI Express 3.0 Delayed Till 2011

For some applications (like CUDA), it's better to be able to 'burst' at a higher speed (like that provided by PCI Express 3.0) rather than a sustained transfer at high speeds (though obviously both would be the best). I submitted the article because frankly I was a bit disappointed when I read it. I've been holding off on getting a new graphics card for CUDA development because I was hoping that PCI Express 3.0 would be out towards the end of the year. Now I have to debate whether to get one now, or wait for the GT300 at the end of the year.

Submission + - PCI Express 3.0 Delayed Till 2011

Submitted by Professor_Quail on Thursday August 20, 2009 @12:57PM

Professor_Quail writes: PC Magazine reports that the PCI SIG has officially delayed the release of the PCI Express 3.0 specification until the second quarter of 2010. Originally, the PCI Express 3.0 specification called for the spec itself to be released this year, with products due about a year after the spec's release, or in 2010.

Submission + - Transparent aluminium is 'new state of matter' (physorg.com) 2

Submitted by Professor_Quail on Tuesday July 28, 2009 @10:36AM

Professor_Quail writes: Oxford scientists have created a transparent form of aluminum by bombarding the metal with the world's most powerful soft X-ray laser. 'Transparent aluminum' previously only existed in science fiction, featuring in the movie Star Trek IV, but the real material is an exotic new state of matter with implications for planetary science and nuclear fusion.

Submission + - CUDA-Based SHA Hash Cracker for EngineYard Contest (nvidia.com)

Submitted by Professor_Quail on Monday July 20, 2009 @12:06PM

Professor_Quail writes: The EngineYard Programming Contest will be starting today, but chances are if you haven't heard about it, then you won't have the time to put a solution together. However, if you have an nVidia-based graphics card, one nVidia forum member put together some code that is able to check over 200 million hashes/sec on a fast card, making it your best bet to win the contest (unless you have access to a Beowulf cluster you can use ;). The grand prize is an iPhone 3GS and $2000 of cloud computing credits. Good luck!

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