Comment: Obligatory? Kevin Nealon quote: (Score 1) 657
I got one of those new electric cars and I love it. It's great. It's in the shop right now though- I'm having a gas engine put in but other than that it's great!
DefCon Ninja Badges Let Hackers Do Battle 77
Posted
by
timothy
from the that-is-some-nice-schwag dept.
from the that-is-some-nice-schwag dept.
eecue writes "The folks at DefCon, the world's largest hacker convention [previously on Slashdot], have been making awesome badges for years. Last year along with the convention badge, a group of hackers known as the Ninjas created an electronic badge for their exclusive party. This year the Ninjas have taken the whole electronic badge thing to the next level with an interactive, wireless, encrypted ninja battle video game badge. I convinced the Ninjas to give Wired.com an exclusive sneak peek, and let me tell you, this thing is awesome."
Comment: This is why (Score 1) 406
I never trusted Desmond on Lost. I always knew he was an Taliban spy.
Comment: The po-lice stole my baby (Score 1) 957
A friend and I met at a coffee shop (we both drove). Afterwards we hopped into his car and headed to take some sunset pictures of the Atlanta skyline. We headed back to his car only to find the coffee shop closed and his car with a bright orange boot on a wheel with a ticket for 'non-patrons illegally parked blah blah blah'. knowing this was complete bullshit, and not wanting a 3 dollar coffee to cost $178, we proceeded to remove the boot using my tools that I always carry in my truck. Cut the cable, took off the wheel, on went the spare, Victory! Up pulls an Atlanta City cop, a Sergeant in fact, asking 'what y'all boys doing?' We looked him straight in the eye and told him what happened and our intentions were for the boot. He paused for a minute- 'I'm just gonna put in my book that I saw to boys changing a tire, stopped to assist, and I carried on. Have a nice night.'
Not all cops are racist assholes- we are the two whitest guys you'll find in Atlanta and the cop was a big black Sergeant. They have bad days too and take it out on some of us, but especially on us who have bad attitudes and like to fuck with cops anyway.
Not all cops are racist assholes- we are the two whitest guys you'll find in Atlanta and the cop was a big black Sergeant. They have bad days too and take it out on some of us, but especially on us who have bad attitudes and like to fuck with cops anyway.
Which Math For Programmers? 466
Posted
by
CmdrTaco
from the stats-kicked-my-balls dept.
from the stats-kicked-my-balls dept.
An anonymous reader writes "It is no news that the greatest computer scientists and programmers are/were mathematicians. As a kid 'hacking' if-else programs, I was not aware of the importance of math in programming, but few years later, when I read Engines of Logic by Martin Davis I started becoming increasingly more convinced of this. Unfortunately, math doesn't return my love, and prefers me to struggle with it. Now, as the end of the semester approaches, I am faced with a dilemma: What math subject to choose next? I have two choices: 'Discreet structures with graph theory' (discrete math; proofs, sets, algorithms and graphs) on one side, and 'Selected math chapters' (math analysis; vectors, euclidean space, differentials) on the other. I'm scared of the second one because it's said to be harder. But contrary to my own opinion, one assistant told me that it would be more useful for a programmer compared to the first subject. Then again, he's not a programmer. That's why I turn to you for help, fellow slashdotters — any advice?"
New Research Forecasts Global 6C Increase By End of Century 746
Posted
by
Soulskill
from the yelling-match-begins-now dept.
from the yelling-match-begins-now dept.
jamie writes with this snippet from the UK's Independent:
"The world is now firmly on course for the worst-case scenario in terms of climate change, with average global temperatures rising by up to 6C by the end of the century, leading scientists said yesterday. ... [The study] found that there has been a 29 per cent increase in global CO2 emissions from fossil fuel between 2000 and 2008, the last year for which figures are available. On average, the researchers found, there was an annual increase in emissions of just over 3 per cent during the period, compared with an annual increase of 1 per cent between 1990 and 2000. Almost all of the increase this decade occurred after 2000 and resulted from the boom in the Chinese economy. The researchers predict a small decrease this year due to the recession, but further increases from 2010."
HTTP Intermediary Layer From Google Could Dramatically Speed Up the Web 406
Posted
by
timothy
from the sufficient-disclosure dept.
from the sufficient-disclosure dept.
grmoc writes "As part of the 'Let's make the web faster' initiative, we (a few engineers — including me! — at Google, and hopefully people all across the community soon!) are experimenting with alternative protocols to help reduce the latency of Web pages. One of these experiments is SPDY (pronounced 'SPeeDY'), an application-layer protocol (essentially a shim between HTTP and the bits on the wire) for transporting content over the web, designed specifically for minimal latency. In addition to a rough specification for the protocol, we have hacked SPDY into the Google Chrome browser (because it's what we're familiar with) and a simple server testbed. Using these hacked up bits, we compared the performance of many of the top 25 and top 300 websites over both HTTP and SPDY, and have observed those pages load, on average, about twice as fast using SPDY. Thats not bad! We hope to engage the open source community to contribute ideas, feedback, code (we've open sourced the protocol, etc!), and test results."
+ - Shark gives another shark a Caesarian section-> 1
Submitted
by
nut
nut writes "Visitors to an underwater aquarium in Auckland, New Zealand were stunned to see one shark give another shark an impromptu caesarean section. Staff were initially dubious when visitors came running to tell them there were baby sharks spilling from a wound in a female school shark's stomach — courtesy of a large bite by another shark.
It's not uncommon for sharks to take chunks out of each other, in the wild or in captivity, but in this case the bite probably saved the baby sharks' lives. Staff did not know the mother was pregnant and as sharks are commonly born at night they would most likely have been eaten before they were seen."
Link to Original Source
It's not uncommon for sharks to take chunks out of each other, in the wild or in captivity, but in this case the bite probably saved the baby sharks' lives. Staff did not know the mother was pregnant and as sharks are commonly born at night they would most likely have been eaten before they were seen."
Link to Original Source
+ - CoD6: Modern Warfare 2 Under Attack->
Submitted
by
rcolbert
rcolbert writes "The long-awaited and eagerly-anticipated release of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 is upon us. However, there are some 'features' of the game that PC users are taking exception to. As of this morning, the PC version has achieved an abysmal 1.3 out of 10 user rating on IGN.com. It's clear that this is not a subjective review of the game, but instead a statement of protest. One major example is the requirement of Steam technology to make the game work. I find this ironic, since Half-Life 2 and anything else published by Valve has had a Steam requirement for many years, and yet this is the first game I'm aware of that has fallen victim to this level of online social activism. The question is, should IGN do something to moderate the protest when it's quite obvious that most if not all of the users who scored the game '0.0' don't own and have not played the game, or should they let the angry mob have their voices heard? What do you think about submitting highly negative product reviews as a form of protest? Is it the little guy standing up to the man, or is it intellectually dishonest?"
Link to Original Source
Link to Original Source
+ - Chicago Court Throwing Out LIDAR Speeding Tickets->
Submitted
by
bridgeco
bridgeco writes "Chicago Traffic Court Judges have been throwing out speeding cases in which the driver's speed was measured with a LIDAR. Judges are asking for a special "Frye Hearing" to determine the accuracy of these devices.
Many motorists nabbed for speeding by a laser gun, instead of radar, are seeing their tickets thrown out at Chicago's traffic court because of a legal issue that the city's law department has been unable to overcome. Within the past year judges in Cook County Traffic Court in Chicago determined that speeds captured by lidar were not admissible because the devices had not been proven scientifically reliable in an Illinois court, said Jennifer Hoyle, spokeswoman for the law department, which prosecutes most speeding tickets in the city."
Link to Original Source
Many motorists nabbed for speeding by a laser gun, instead of radar, are seeing their tickets thrown out at Chicago's traffic court because of a legal issue that the city's law department has been unable to overcome. Within the past year judges in Cook County Traffic Court in Chicago determined that speeds captured by lidar were not admissible because the devices had not been proven scientifically reliable in an Illinois court, said Jennifer Hoyle, spokeswoman for the law department, which prosecutes most speeding tickets in the city."
Link to Original Source
BSA Says 41% of Software On Personal Computers Is Pirated 569
Posted
by
CmdrTaco
from the only-half-of-that-is-any-good dept.
from the only-half-of-that-is-any-good dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Individuals are turning to P2P networks and auction sites in staggering numbers to acquire or transfer illegal software and in doing so are harming the economy whilst exposing themselves to malware, identity theft and criminal prosecution, according to a report from the Business Software Alliance. Beyond P2P and auction site piracy, the report also draws correlations between Internet piracy and the spread of malware such as viruses, trojans and spyware, which often exploit vulnerabilities in illegal software that does not benefit from security updates provided by manufacturers. Although the correlation is not universal, geographies with high instances of software piracy suffer from high instances of malware."
Bahama Botnet Stealing Traffic From Google 52
Posted
by
timothy
from the now-that's-offsides dept.
from the now-that's-offsides dept.
itwbennett writes "'As part of its design, the Bahama botnet not only turns ordinary, legitimate PCs into click-fraud perpetrators that dilute the effectiveness of ad campaigns. It also modifies the way these PCs locate certain Web sites through DNS poisoning,' explains Juan Carlos Perez in an ITworld article. 'In the case of Google.com, compromised machines take their users to a fake page hosted in Canada that looks just like the real Google page and even returns results for queries entered into its search box. It's not clear where the Canadian server gets these results. What is evident is that the results aren't 'organic' direct links to their destinations, but are instead masked cost-per-click (CPC) ads that get routed through other ad networks or parked domains, some of which are in on the scam and some of which aren't.' 'Regardless, CPC fees are generated, advertisers pay, and click fraud has occurred,' Click Forensics reported on Thursday in a blog posting."
Related: Techcrunch reports on a massive Chinese click-fraud ring controlling 200,000 IP addresses.
RAID's Days May Be Numbered 444
Posted
by
kdawson
from the time-to-try-flit dept.
from the time-to-try-flit dept.
storagedude sends in an article claiming that RAID is nearing the end of the line because of soaring rebuild times and the growing risk of data loss. "The concept of parity-based RAID (levels 3, 5 and 6) is now pretty old in technological terms, and the technology's limitations will become pretty clear in the not-too-distant future — and are probably obvious to some users already. In my opinion, RAID-6 is a reliability Band Aid for RAID-5, and going from one parity drive to two is simply delaying the inevitable. The bottom line is this: Disk density has increased far more than performance and hard error rates haven't changed much, creating much greater RAID rebuild times and a much higher risk of data loss. In short, it's a scenario that will eventually require a solution, if not a whole new way of storing and protecting data."
Ubuntu 9.04 On Kindle 2 194
Posted
by
timothy
from the general-insanity dept.
from the general-insanity dept.
JO_DIE_THE_STAR_F*** writes "Jesse Vincent managed to get Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope running on the Kindle 2. The new functionality was presented in a talk at OSCON 2009."
+ - New NaS battery technology developed in Utah->
Submitted
by
lhouk281
lhouk281 writes "Hyperbole aside, the Utah Daily Herald has an interesting article about a new NaS battery technology. From the article:
Link to Original Source
"In a modest building on the west side of Salt Lake City, a team of specialists in advanced materials and electrochemistry has produced what could be the single most important breakthrough for clean, alternative energy since Socrates first noted solar heating 2,400 years ago.
Inside Ceramatec's wonder battery is a chunk of solid sodium metal mated to a sulphur compound by an extraordinary, paper-thin ceramic membrane. The membrane conducts ions — electrically charged particles — back and forth to generate a current. The company calculates that the battery will cram 20 to 40 kilowatt hours of energy into a package about the size of a refrigerator, and operate below 90 degrees C. The most energy-dense batteries available today are huge bottles of super-hot molten sodium, swirling around at 600 degrees or so. The essence of Ceramatec's breakthrough is that high energy density (a lot of juice) can be achieved safely at normal temperatures and with solid components, not hot liquid.
Link to Original Source