Comment: How do I love thee? (Score 1) 278
Oh how do I love thee? Let me spell the ways: GATTACA
Comment: hype alert (Score 2, Informative) 118
The title of their paper is "Security Aspects of the Authentication Used in Quantum Cryptography." That would make an awesome title for a book that aimed to cover every single security aspect of the authentication used in QC, but not a paper that simply points out that (duh!) you shouldn't allow the eavesdropper to see the key.
Trust-metric demo of Wikipedia->
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An anonymous reader writes "http://wiki-trust.cse.ucsc.edu/ is a copy of Wikipedia at 6 Feb 2007 colored according to their trust metric. This is part of the stable version plan."
Link to Original Source
Link to Original Source
IBM's Blue Brain project simulates a "rat brai->
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Brian Mingus
Brian Mingus writes "Yesterday at the Supercomputing 2007 Conference, Dharmendra Modha of IBM's Blue Brain project reported that, "we represented a rat-scale cortical model (55 million neurons, 442 billion synapses) in 8TB memory of a 32,768-processor BlueGene/L." (pdf) This model is seven times larger than their previous simulation of half a mouse brain earlier this year, making it the largest cortical model in history. While it doesn't have the large-scale anatomical connectivity of a rat brain, which give rats their smarts, this model of neuron soup is significant in size, speed and efficiency. They were able to simulate one second of rat brain in nine seconds of real time using their C2 cortical simulator."
Link to Original Source
Link to Original Source
Software for reverse engineering the human brain->
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An anonymous reader writes "In his book, "The Singularity is Near", Ray Kurzweil says the future of artificial intelligence may be in reverse engineering the human brain. Now, scientists at the University of Colorado have released software, dubbed "Emergent," that is aimed at allowing you to do just that. Using the ODE library for realistic physics, you can construct a robot with a simulated brain in a simulated world with a simulated body. I've seen neural network software before, but seeing a robot with his brain hovering over his head in 3D was a bit..shocking to say the least. Especially in light of this recent Oxford paper which asks, "Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?." I was even able to "lesion" his brain and see his performance go down. Could this approach possibly bootstrap us into real artificial intelligence? Will these new simulated robotic overlords someday assimilate us?"
Link to Original Source
Link to Original Source
ISP not providing service as advertised. Options?
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Brian Mingus
Brian Mingus writes "I've got a server at the University of Colorado that can upload data faster than I've been able to find a connection to download it (> 15 MB/s). At home, though, we've got Qwest DSL. My roommate set this up before I moved in and we are on a 2 year contract. The service is excruciatingly slow. Downloading something over BitTorrent is unimaginable — it clogs up our entire pipe, making web surfing impossible. I've read lots of stories about how far behind the curve the US is on broadband, especially w.r.t countries such as South Korea, but this is unimaginable. So I decided to check the numbers by running some freely available bandwidth tests. My DSL modem claims we are connected at 192 KB/s and upload at 4KB/s (note: are they kidding me?), but an average over five bandwidth speed tests, including one at the university across the street, shows us downloading at 91 KB/s and uploading at 3 KB/s. Even worse for my plight, my connection is apparantly slightly faster than average for Colorado. Do I have any way to win in this, or am I stuck with pre-2000, 2x dialup speeds for the next two years?"
Father of the remote control: gone, not forgotten!
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chrisgreencouk
chrisgreencouk writes "Dr. Robert Adler, the man credited with co-creating the remote control, died this week leaving behind a legacy of invention and innovation.
His Space Command ultrasonic TV remote control was launched by Zenith back in 1956 and it changed life in the living room for many people.
http://www.itpro.co.uk/blogs/editorial-blogs/maggi e-holland/13015/the-father-of-the-remote-control-g one-but-not-forgotten.thtml"
Egyptian blogger sentenced to 4 years in prison
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An anonymous reader writes "22-year old Egyptian blogger and former law student Abdelkareem Nabil Soliman (aka Kareem Amer) was sentenced by an Egyptian court on Thursday to 4 years in prison, three years for "disparaging religion" and a fourth one added for "defaming the president." Amer, whose blog is still online, has become a cause celebre for human rights activists in Egypt and around the Arab world, who have set up a "Free Kareem!" campaign calling for his release online. Amer's case is interesting in that almost everything, from the crime itself to those rallying to Amer's aid, has been conducted in large part over the Internet. At one point, the legal defense team even tried to force the court to bring in a computer expert who could testify that the blog was hosted outside of Egypt and therefore out of the court's jurisdiction. While for an increasing number of individuals like Amer, blogging has become another form of regulated expression, it is also "an essential communication strategy for many frustrated Arabs who use blogging as a tool to promote democratization," as this editorial by one of the leaders of the "Free Kareem!" campaign claims."
Recovering a Wrecked RAID 175
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Zonk
from the undead-data dept.
from the undead-data dept.
Dr. Eggman writes "Tom's Hardware recently posted an article specifying how the professionals at Kroll Ontrack recover data from a RAID array that has suffered a hard drive failure, allowing for recovery of even RAID 5 arrays suffering two failures. The article is quick to warn this is costly, however, and points out the different types of hard drive failures that occur, only some of which are repairable. Ultimately the article concludes that consistent backups and other good practices are the best solution. Still, it provides an interesting look into the world of data after death."