magickal1 - Slashdot User

Black Holes May Mature Early In Galaxy Evolution 63

Posted by samzenpus on Sunday January 09, 2011 @10:06PM from the they-grow-up-so-fast dept.

masterwit writes "From Scientific American: 'An accidental find in a star-forming dwarf galaxy shows that black holes may mature early in galaxy evolution.' Also, 'if giant black holes in star-forming dwarf galaxies prove to be common — that is, if Henize 2-10 is not an outlier but a representative of a larger population — they may have much to tell about the formation of primordial black holes and galaxies in the early universe.'"

Twitter Fights US Court For WikiLeaks Details 268

Posted by samzenpus on Sunday January 09, 2011 @08:18PM from the we're-not-gonna-take-it dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Micro-blogging site Twitter is opposing an order from a US court to reveal the account details of supporters of WikiLeaks. Twitter has called on Facebook and Google to reveal whether they also received similar court orders. As part of the US government's investigation into WikiLeaks, a court ordered Twitter, in mid-December, to give details of accounts owned by supporters of the whistle-blower site. Twitter has protested against the subpoena and informed the individuals whose account information has been requested, while raising the possibility that other social networking players have received similar orders."

EMC Engineer Steals Almost $1 Million of Kit One Piece at a Time 235

Posted by samzenpus on Sunday January 09, 2011 @06:30PM from the and-it-didn't-cost-me-a-dime dept.

aesoteric writes "An EMC test engineer has pleaded guilty to stealing almost $1 million worth of kit from his employer. He reportedly stole the unspecified goods from the storage giant's North Carolina factory using 'a small bag' to smuggle the kit out before selling it on the internet under a pseudonym."

Linux 2.6.37 Released 135

Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday January 05, 2011 @04:59PM from the new-and-improved dept.

diegocg writes "Version 2.6.37 of the Linux kernel has been released. This version includes SMP scalability improvements for Ext4 and XFS, the removal of the Big Kernel Lock, support for per-cgroup IO throttling, a networking block device based on top of the Ceph clustered filesystem, several Btrfs improvements, more efficient static probes, perf support to probe modules, LZO compression in the hibernation image, PPP over IPv4 support, several networking microoptimizations and many other small changes, improvements and new drivers for devices like the Brocade BNA 10GB ethernet, Topcliff PCH gigabit, Atheros CARL9170, Atheros AR6003 and RealTek RTL8712U. The fanotify API has also been enabled. See the full changelog for more details."

Submission + - Does the iPhone's Closed Nature Foster Innovation? (nytimes.com)

Submitted by aussersterne on Sunday April 11, 2010 @09:11AM

aussersterne writes: The heated debate over Apple's "walled garden" has ranged for years now, only growing more intense with the rise of iPhone apps and the recent release of the iPad. Contrary to conventional wisdom, however, some are suggesting that Apple's particular approach to closedness has actually been a boon for innovation and egalitarianism in ways that few had previously thought possible. In a recent NYT article, Steven Johnson says, "I’ve long considered myself a believer in this gospel and have probably written a hundred pages of book chapters, essays and blog posts spreading the word. Believing in open platforms is not simple techno-utopianism. Open platforms come with undeniable costs. The Web is rife with pornography and vitriol for the very same reasons it’s so consistently ingenious. It’s not that the Web is perfect, by any means, but as an engine of innovation and democratization, its supremacy has been undeniable. Over the last two years, however, that story has grown far more complicated, thanks to the runaway success of the iPhone (and now iPad) developers platform — known as the App Store to consumers." Can a walled garden, as Johnson suggests, actually give rise to a "rainforest" if executed in Apple-like ways?

Submission + - China is cheating (skunkpost.com)

Submitted by crimeandpunishment on Sunday April 11, 2010 @07:34AM

crimeandpunishment writes: If a lazy college student gets caught using a ghost-written or plagiarized paper, he might fail the course. But if a college professor or researcher gets caught doing it, it could have far-reaching implications. That's what could happen in China....where academic cheating is so widespread, it could seriously impact China's goal of world leadership in science.

VisLab Sponsors Milan-to-Shanghai Driverless Trek 133

Posted by timothy on Sunday April 11, 2010 @01:51AM from the with-a-bit-of-human-assistance dept.

incuso writes "VisLab announced the most advanced challenge so far ever organized for autonomous vehicles. Two driverless electric cars will perform a trip from Italy to China to demonstrate the feasibility of autonomous driving in real traffic conditions. Each vehicle will be equipped with five laser scanners, seven cameras, GPS, inertial measurement unit, three Linux PCs, and an x-by-wire driving system. The mission will start on July 10 in Milan, Italy, and will reach Shanghai, China, on October 10 (10/10/10) on a 13,000 km route though Italy, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Romania, Ukraine, Russia, Kazakhstan, and finally China."

Scientists Turn T-Shirts Into Body Armor 213

Posted by timothy on Saturday April 10, 2010 @08:59PM from the will-stick-with-the-regular-kind-for-now dept.

separsons writes "Scientists at the University of South Carolina recently transformed ordinary T-shirts into bulletproof armor. By splicing cotton with boron, the third hardest material on the planet, scientists created a shirt that was super elastic but also strong enough to deflect bullets. Xiaodong Li, lead researcher on the project, says the same tech may eventually be used to create lightweight, fuel-efficient cars and aircrafts."

Comment Re:This is ridiculous. (Score 1) 633

by dosius on Saturday January 23, 2010 @08:06PM (#30873930) Attached to: Rockstar Employees Badly Overworked, Say Wives

Sounds like what happened to the Apple ///, 30 years ago. Some things never change...

-uso.

PayPal Freezes the Assets of Wikileaks.org 403

Posted by kdawson on Saturday January 23, 2010 @05:40PM from the thought-money-was-speech dept.

matsh sends word that PayPal has frozen the assets of wikileaks.org. From their Web site: "Paypal has as of 23rd of January 2010 frozen WikiLeaks assets. This is the second time that this happens. The last time we struggled for more than half a year to resolve this issue. By working with the respected and recognized German foundation Wau Holland Stiftung we tried to avoid this from happening again — apparently without avail." The submitter adds: "Hopefully we can pressure PayPal to resolve this quickly, since this seems like a dangerous political decision."

Submission + - Crazy Firewall Log Activity by Country and Hour (youtube.com) 1

Submitted by arkowitz on Saturday January 23, 2010 @05:26PM

arkowitz writes: I happened to have access to five days worth of firewall logs from a US state government agency. I wrote a parser to grab unique ip's out, and sent several million of them to a company called Quova, who gave me back full location info on every 40th one. I then used Green Phosphor's Glasshouse visualization tool to have a look at the count of inbound packets, grouped by country of origin and hour. And it's freaking crazy looking. So I made this video of it and I'm asking the Slashdot community: What the frak is going on?

Submission + - PayPal freezes the assets of wikileaks.org (twitter.com)

Submitted by matsh on Saturday January 23, 2010 @05:20PM

matsh writes: PayPal has frozen the assets of paypal.org. From their website, http://www.wikileaks.org/

"Paypal has as of 23rd of January 2010 frozen WikiLeaks assets. This is the second time that this happens. The last time we struggled for more than half a year to resolve this issue. By working with the respected and recognized German foundation Wau Holland Stiftung we tried to avoid this from happening again — apparently without avail."

Hopefully we can pressure PayPal to resolve this quickly, since this seems like a dangerous political decision.

Submission + - Sourceforge Bans the "Evils" from Free Software 7

Submitted by

neo00

on Saturday January 23, 2010 @02:36PM

neo00 writes: "Syrians, Sudanese, N. Koreans, Cubans and Iranians will now be prohbitied from downloading or contributing to FOSS projects hosted by Sourceforge.net. According to sf.net terms of use, persons residing one of the countries on which the US government imposes sanctions, will be banned from accessing the site contents. An act that violates the Freedoms of Free Software and the "No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups" from the OSS definition.
US sanctions on these countries were initiated or hardened during the administration of Bush who called them the "Axis of Evil"."

Mediterranean Might Have Filled In Months 224

Posted by kdawson on Sunday December 13, 2009 @06:16AM from the white-water-to-die-for dept.

An anonymous reader writes "A new model suggests that the Mediterranean Sea was filled in a gigantic flood some 5.3 million years ago. According to Daniel Garcia-Castellanos' paper in Nature, the sill at the Straight of Gibraltar gave way rather suddenly, with 40 cm of rock eroding and the water level rising by 10 m per day at its peak. They imagine a shallow, fast-moving stream of water (around 100 km/hr) several kilometers wide pouring into the basin with a flow greater than a thousand Amazon rivers — that's about 100,000,000 cubic meters per second." The flood would have dropped worldwide sea levels by 9.5 meters, probably triggering climate changes. In this model the Mediterranean filled in anywhere from a few months to two years at the outside.

Nanotech Ink Turns Paper Into a Low-Cost Battery 129

Posted by kdawson on Saturday December 12, 2009 @03:26PM from the power-your-wallet dept.

jangel writes "Stanford University researchers have demonstrated a way to turn ordinary paper into a battery, which may be crumpled or pressed into any form. It's said the technology promises greater durability, higher efficiency, and faster energy transfer than traditional batteries. The technique uses special ink made of carbon nanotubes and silver nanowires. Thanks to the small diameters of these materials, the ink sticks strongly to the fibrous paper, allowing the battery to be extremely durable. The paper battery could last through 40,000 charge-discharge cycles — at least an order of magnitude more than lithium batteries. According to the researchers, the paper batteries will be low-cost, may be crumpled or folded, and can even be soaked in acidic or basic solutions, yet their performance does not degrade. 'We just haven't tested what happens when you burn it,' one of the researchers quipped." This is the same Stanford research team, lead by Yi Cui, whose work with nanotechnology for battery applications we have discussed before. We've also delved into alternate routes to the holy grail of the ultra-thin battery.

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