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Transportation

Researchers Demonstrate Quantum Levitation 133

Posted by samzenpus from the floating-around dept.
UnknownSoldier writes "Wired reports that researchers at Tel Aviv University have discovered you can 'lock' a magnetic field into place with a superconductor. They have a very cool demonstration of a frozen puck and some of the neat things you can do with it while its orientation remains locked but its location is movable. Might we someday see high speed trains that will be 'impossible' to tip over, or a new generation of batteries with this technology?"
Desktops (Apple)

Ask Slashdot: Passively Cooled Hardware For Game Emulation? 229

Posted by timothy from the such-nice-toys dept.
akutz writes "I recently sold a 2011 Mac mini on Craigslist because after using it to rip my Blu-ray collection, I tried to use it as an emulation station connected to my TV. However, emulators like Dolphin, BSNES, etc. would cause the Mac mini's fans to spin up like turbine engines — much too loud for my liking. I ask, therefore: What hardware would you recommend for building a passively cooled mini-system that will serve as a media center's emulation station?"
Piracy

US ISPs, Big Content Reaching Antipiracy Agreement 342

Posted by Soulskill from the i-would-download-a-car dept.
Chaonici writes "The word from CNet is that an antipiracy agreement between a number of ISPs (including Verizon, AT&T, and Comcast) and the RIAA & MPAA is nearing completion. Under the agreement, ISPs will step up their responses to copyright infringement complaints against subscribers. If a subscriber accumulates enough complaints, the ISP can throttle their bandwidth, limit their Web access to only the top 200 websites, and/or require participation in a 'copyright awareness' program that explains the rights of content creators. ISPs and rights holders will share the costs of the system. Ars Technica confirms the story with notes from an industry source, who mentions that the Obama administration is 'generally supportive' of the agreement."
Businesses

ICANN Domain Expansion Could Increase Phishing 142

Posted by CmdrTaco from the salmon-is-yummy dept.
Orome1 writes "The ICANN board gave final approval to what some are calling 'the most dramatic change to the Internet in four decades,' allowing the expansion of new TLDs. Some argue this ICANN initiative could force a land grab of domains by businesses to protect their company reputation. However, they aren't the only ones who are likely to try to snag these new top level domains. There's a very legitimate concern that cybercriminals could also seek these new domains to create legitimate looking websites using well-known brand names. These can then be used for phishing attacks or delivery of Trojan malware to unsuspecting visitors."

Comment Re:CMU (Score 1) 432

by synthparadox (#36401776) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Linux Support In Universities?

I suspect its more because the electrical & computer engineering (ECE) department pretty much only operates *nix clusters. I'm not sure on the specifics but I'm sure its out of practicality more than anything. They don't offer some of these super expensive software packages as downloadable software, but rather only have them installed on the clusters, and using X windows through SSH tunnels may have been more practical than Windows terminal services. (Most cluster computers are accessible directly - CMU owns a lot of IP addresses)

Comment CMU (Score 2) 432

by synthparadox (#36399610) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Linux Support In Universities?

As an alumnus of Carnegie Mellon, I'm going to assume this is no big deal, but possibly at least confirms what people think. CMU has several Unix clusters, as well as Mac clusters. All of the downloadable software is supported on as many platforms as the software is created with. In fact, several classes (especially the digital IC design with CADENCE) are operated only in *nix environments.
VPN access to on-campus resources are also provided in all operating environments, and having used both the PC and *nix ones, I can say documentation is quite complete. This is a relatively recent development, however, as the documentation and support has greatly improved since I started at CMU.
It greatly helps when the professors are experts in the software they're teaching and help debug problems with the IT department. (The Hadoop cluster was especially fun to debug, especially with the broken JAR file passing in 0.20.1).

Comment Re:Thought this was The Onion for a second .. (Score 2) 192

by synthparadox (#36375004) Attached to: Man Tries to Patent His "Godly Powers"

I think the letter he wrote in reply to the non-final rejection was the most representative of this person's delusion. I reuploaded it at scribd for easy access: http://www.scribd.com/doc/57372518/USPTO-05-27-2008-Miscellaneous-Incoming-Letter

As I read it, all I could think of is if you're god why do you need the patent office to enforce the sue of your abilities?
The Internet

Submission + - ICANN Wants To Change Rules For gTLDs (thedomains.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The May 10th deadline for comments on the .net registry agreement renewal has arrived with new domain name dispute changes that aid corporations. Instead of UDRP, the new agreement proposes adding the Uniform Rapid Suspension (URS) process to the .net TLD. The URS is a quick $200 process for a trademark holder to disable and take ownership of a domain. URS also reduces the panel size from 1-3 people to a single person. You can still comment on the proposal by sending an email to ICANN (net-agreement-renewal@).

Comment Re:stupid (Score 1) 196

by synthparadox (#35669208) Attached to: FCC Giving Away Wi-fi Routers For Broadband Tests

Agreed. I'm participating in this and I've had my router since around November.
Also they're not "giving them away" per se. The routers have custom firmware on them and they come with a letter saying when we're done we want the routers back otherwise we're sending you a bill (as agreed on when you signed up for the program).

Comment Re:strange progress (Score 1) 755

by synthparadox (#35622178) Attached to: CMU Eliminates Object Oriented Programming For Freshman

As a CMU student who heard from a professor who shall remain unnamed, the future of computing doesn't lie in "parallelization across a single resource," but massively parallelizable computing, or distributed-resource computing. OO languages are not great at that as message-passing has massive overhead when serializing and deserializing. Thus, in the interest of the "future" they're moving away from OO as a freshman course, and instead leave it for the more specific courses. (15-211, etc).

That could be all speculation by the professor who shall remain unnamed but it also could be that the silly drama students have to take a programming course and they have no use for OO so they're dumbing it down so that not all the drama students fail. I suspect the latter.
Transportation

Digital Dashboard Device Detects Driver Drowsiness 117

Posted by timothy from the string-between-ceiling-and-nostril dept.
Pickens writes "Science Daily Headlines reports that researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Media Technology have developed a self-contained, dashboard-mounted assistant system that tracks a driver's eye movements and issues a warning before the driver has an opportunity to nod off to sleep. 'What we have developed is a small modular system with its own hardware and programs on board, so that the line of vision is computed directly within the camera itself,' says Professor Husar. 'Since the Eyetracker is fitted with at least two cameras that record images stereoscopically — meaning in three dimensions — the system can easily identify the spatial position of the pupil and the line of vision.' The cameras, which can be installed in any model of car, evaluate up to 200 images per second to identify the line of vision. If the camera modules detect that the eye is closed for longer than a user-defined interval, it sounds an alarm. The Eyetracker also has applications in computer games where players could look around themselves without requiring a joystick to change their viewing direction, and in marketing and advertising, where researchers could determine which parts of a poster or advertising spot receive longer attention from their viewers."

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