astro128 - Slashdot User

Comment University of Southern California is a.... (Score 2, Informative) 490

by astro128 on Thursday August 13, 2009 @11:41AM (#29053157) Attached to: US Colleges Say Hiring US Students a Bad Deal

I just wanted to clarify something - the summary is a little misleading when it states USC... "and other public universities" - USC is a PRIVATE university and one of the largest in the country at that.Trust me I spent 4 years there.

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An armed society is a polite society. Manners are good when one may have to back up his acts with his life.

Robert A. Heinlein

Damning Report On Sequoia E-Voting Machine Security 200

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday October 21, 2008 @06:15PM from the worse-than-you-thought dept.

TechDirt notes the publication of the New Jersey voting machine study, the attempted suppression of which we have been discussing for a while now. The paper that the Princeton and Lehigh University researchers are releasing, as permitted by the Court, is "the same as the Court's redacted version, but with a few introductory paragraphs about the court case, Gusciora v. Corzine." What's new is the release of a 90-minute evidentiary video — the researchers have asked the court for permission to release a shorter version that hits the high points, as the high-res video is about 1 GB in size. See TechDirt's article for the report's executive summary listing eight ways the AVC Advantage 9.00 voting machine can be subverted.

FireFox 3.1 Leaves IE in the Dust 435

Posted by CmdrTaco on Monday October 20, 2008 @11:00AM from the i-just-want-fewer-beachballs dept.

Anonymous writes "Granted, FireFox 3.1 is just a beta and IE 8 is also in beta, but it looks like Microsoft has some ground to make up when it comes to browser performance. Given that Mozilla appears to be on a much faster cycle than Microsoft with this stuff, it's also possible that it could increase the gap even more before IE 8 is GA, no?"

Colliding Galaxies Reveal Colossal Black Holes 134

Posted by CmdrTaco on Thursday October 16, 2008 @12:22PM from the duck-and-cover dept.

Matt_dk writes "New observations made with the Submillimeter Array of telescopes in Hawaii suggest that black holes — thought to exist in many, if not all, galaxies — were common even in the early Universe, when galaxies were just beginning to form. Astronomers have found two very different galaxies in the distant Universe, both with colossal black holes at their hearts, involved in a spectacular collision."

FBI Warns of Sweeping Global Threat To US Cybersecurity 134

Posted by CmdrTaco on Thursday October 16, 2008 @10:46AM from the only-a-matter-of-time dept.

GovIT Geek writes "The FBI's newly appointed chief of cyber security warned today that 'a couple dozen' countries are eager to hack US government, corporate, and military networks. While he refused to provide country-specific details, FBI Cyber Division Chief Shawn Henry told reporters at a roundtable that cooperation with foreign law enforcement is one of the Bureau's highest priorities and added the United States has had incredible success fostering overseas partnerships."

First Official Photos From New Star Trek Movie 410

Posted by CmdrTaco on Thursday October 16, 2008 @08:39AM from the please-jj-don't-hurt-em dept.

Philias Fog writes "The most secret project in Hollywood is finally lifting its skirt. Today Paramount released a number of images for their new Star Trek movie directed by JJ Abrams. Shots include images of the bridge of the Enterprise, the villain Nero, a ship (not the Enterprise) and all of the crew in uniform. TrekMovie.com has a complete set of photos and links to all the new shots."

Submission + - Using File-sharing to launch a DDoS attack

Submitted by astro128 on Wednesday May 30, 2007 @01:52PM

astro128 writes: They [Athina Markopoulou and colleagues at the University of California in Irvine] created modified versions of BitTorrent files, and their own "tracker" a computer, which stores the databases that peers use to find one another on the network. Then, using 25 bogus files, they were able to trick more than 50,000 computers into cooperating within a few hours. "We needed to do some hacking in the BitTorrent code," says Karim El Defrawy, a member of Markopoulou's group. "But anyone with some small programming experience could do this."

Submission + - eBay Ivory Trade Threatens Elephants' Survival

Submitted by

travdaddy

on Wednesday May 30, 2007 @01:29PM

travdaddy writes: "The International Fund for Animal Welfare studied eBay's internationally illegal ivory trade and reported "over 2,200 elephant ivory items listed on eBay Web sites and found that more than 90% of the listings breached even eBay's own respective national wildlife policies." Normally banned items are delisted from eBay but the report continues, "very few of the suspected illegal items reported by IFAW investigators to eBay during the snapshot survey were removed from sale.""

Submission + - Venezuela Gov't shuts down oldest TV station

Submitted by Seakip18 on Tuesday May 29, 2007 @01:14PM

Seakip18 writes: The Venezuela State Governement did not renew a license for it's oldest television station, RCTV, this past Sunday. The station was the nations longest broadcasting station for 54 years. After the license expired at midnight, a state-owned Television station, VTV, immediately took over and began broadcasting. The Gov't also begin filing complaints against Univision and CNN for the broadcasting of "a lie which linked President Chavez to violence and murder" and general defamation of President Chavez. The incident refered to is CNN's mistaken broadcasting of images and stories that appeared next to the name of Venezuela President, Hugo Chavez. The EU and US have both issued codemnations of the Venezuleas actions.

Submission + - Prizes vs. Patents: a Nobel laureate's perspective

Submitted by

benesch

on Monday May 21, 2007 @02:37PM

benesch writes: "Joseph Stiglitz, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economics, points out the flaws of our patent system "The fundamental problem with the patent system is simple: it is based on restricting the use of knowledge. Because there is no extra cost associated with an additional individual enjoying the benefits of any piece of knowledge, restricting knowledge is inefficient." He goes on to suggest prizes as a more efficient alternative "Of course, the patent system is itself a prize system, albeit a peculiar one: the prize is temporary monopoly power, implying high prices and restricted access to the benefits that can be derived from the new knowledge. By contrast, the type of prize system I have in mind would rely on competitive markets to lower prices and make the fruits of the knowledge available as widely as possible. With better-directed incentives (more research dollars spent on more important diseases, less money spent on wasteful and distorted marketing), we could have better health at lower cost.""

Submission + - The psychology of banner ads

Submitted by Mr. Subliminal on Monday May 21, 2007 @02:09PM

Mr. Subliminal writes: Blinking banner ads are one of the scourges of Internet advertising, but a new study says that they are effective because repeated expsoure gives consumers a positive feeling towards a particular product — one that can vanish upon a critical reevaluation. 'Advertisers have a few things to consider. The first is that banner ads may provide a valuable function in fostering familiarity even if those that view them never click through to the source of the ads. The downside for advertisers is that any evaluation of the positive impressions that this familiarity creates, even one based on false premises, is enough to make those positive feelings vanish.'

Submission + - Comet wiped out mammoths, early hunters

Submitted by brian0918 on Monday May 21, 2007 @02:02PM

brian0918 writes: Researchers speaking at the American Geophysical Union meeting in Acapulco, Mexico, this week will outline a new theory for the extinction event and subsequent global cooling that occured about 13,000 years ago. From the Guardian: 'A group of US scientists have found a layer of microscopic diamonds at 26 different sites in Europe, Canada and America. These are the remains of a giant carbon-rich comet that crashed in pieces on our planet 12,900 years ago.' According to geophysicist Allen West, the comet was 'about 2km-3km in diameter and broke up just before impact, setting off a series of explosions, each the equivalent of an atomic bomb blast. The result would have been hell on Earth. Most of the northern hemisphere would have been left on fire.'

Submission + - USDA approves rice producing human proteins

Submitted by

Roland Piquepaille

on Monday May 21, 2007 @01:51PM

Roland Piquepaille writes: "This is not the first time that a food crop designed to produce future drugs is approved by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), but it's one of the first food crops containing genes that produce human proteins according to Nature. The USDA justified its decision by saying that the future rice farm, located in Kansas, will be too far from other rice farms to contaminate rice grown for human consumption. It also said that this genetically-modified (GM) rice will exclusively be used to produce pharmaceuticals. As you can guess, not everyone agrees... Read more for additional arguments for and against this decision. And check a previous Slashdot article on the same subject."

Submission + - MySpace agrees to share sex offender data

Submitted by

mikesd81

on Monday May 21, 2007 @01:20PM

mikesd81 writes: "Seattle Times has an article about MySpace providing a number of state attorneys general with data on registered sex offenders who use the popular social networking Web site.

Attorneys general from eight states demanded last week that the company provide data on how many registered sex offenders are using the site and where they live. MySpace obtained the data from Sentinel Tech Holding Corp., which the company partnered with in December to build a database with information on sex offenders. Attorneys general in North Carolina, Connecticut, Georgia, Idaho, Mississippi, New Hampshire, Ohio and Pennsylvania asked for the Sentinel data last week."

Submission + - Nuclear Plant Disabled -- Possible Net Attack

Submitted by StCredZero on Monday May 21, 2007 @01:08PM

StCredZero writes: Was this a Denial of Service Attack? Still unknown.

From the article: "The U.S. House of Representative's Committee on Homeland Security called this week for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to further investigate the cause of excessive network traffic that shut down an Alabama nuclear plant."

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