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+ - Life-sized, Drivable 500,000 Piece Lego Car Runs on Air->

Submitted by cartechboy
cartechboy writes "Two guys have made a life-sized Lego car that runs on air. That's right, the 256-piston, air-powered Lego working vehicle built with half a million black and yellow Lego pieces can actually be driven up to 18 mph. It was designed and built by 20-year-old Romanian Raul Oaida in 20 months after he and his partner, Australia-based Steve Sammartino raised "tens of thousands" of crowdfunded dollars with their prospectus entitled quite simply: "Super Awesome Micro Project." The car was built in Romania and then moved to Melbourne, Australia (presumably not brick-by-brick.) In the video, the only visible non-Lego components are the gauges, wheel rims, and tires (though the wheels have Lego faces--literally.)"
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+ - Comparing g++ and Intel Compilers and Vectorized Code->

Submitted by Nerval's Lobster
Nerval's Lobster writes "A compiler can take your C++ loops and create vectorized assembly code for you. It’s obviously important that you RTFM and fully understand compiler options (especially since the defaults may not be what you want or think you’re getting), but even then, do you trust that the compiler is generating the best code for you? Developer and editor Jeff Cogswell compares the g++ and Intel compilers when it comes to generating vectorized code, building off a previous test that examined the g++ compiler's vectorization abilities, and comes to some definite conclusions. "The g++ compiler did well up against the Intel compiler," he wrote. "I was troubled by how different the generated assembly code was between the 4.7 and 4.8.1 compilers—not just with the vectorization but throughout the code." Do you agree?"
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+ - Apple Forced to Change iPhone Charger by 2017->

Submitted by DavidGilbert99
DavidGilbert99 writes "Apple is staring down the barrel of conformity. It has long railed against the calls to follow the microUSB sheep and change the charging and data transfer port of its iPhone and iPad. But, based on draft EU legislation passed on Thursday, Apple could have no choice but to change and follow everyone else, as the EU adopts a common battery charger standard for all mobile phones."
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+ - Why Charles Stross Wants Bitcoin to Die in a Fire

Submitted by Hugh Pickens DOT Com
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "SF writer Charles Stross writes on his blog that like all currency systems, Bitcoin comes with an implicit political agenda attached and although our current global system is pretty crap, Bitcoin is worse. For starters, BtC is inherently deflationary. There is an upper limit on the number of bitcoins that can ever be created so the cost of generating new Bitcoins rises over time, and the value of Bitcoins rise relative to the available goods and services in the market. Libertarians love it because it pushes the same buttons as their gold fetish and it doesn't look like a "Fiat currency". You can visualize it as some kind of scarce precious data resource, sort of a digital equivalent of gold. However there are a number of huge down-sides to Bitcoin says Stross: Mining BtC has a carbon footprint from hell as they get more computationally expensive to generate, electricity consumption soars; Bitcoin mining software is now being distributed as malware because using someone else's computer to mine BitCoins is easier than buying a farm of your own mining hardware; Bitcoin's utter lack of regulation permits really hideous markets to emerge, in commodities like assassination and drugs and child pornography; and finally Bitcoin is inherently damaging to the fabric of civil society because it is pretty much designed for tax evasion. "BitCoin looks like it was designed as a weapon intended to damage central banking and money issuing banks, with a Libertarian political agenda in mind—to damage states ability to collect tax and monitor their citizens financial transactions," concludes Stross. "The current banking industry and late-period capitalism may suck, but replacing it with Bitcoin would be like swapping out a hangnail for Fournier's gangrene.""

+ - Printing Retinal Cells

Submitted by Rambo Tribble
Rambo Tribble writes "The BBC reports on research that points to the possibility of using inkjet technology to print retinal ganglion and glial cells. While the research is preliminary, it is thought to hold great promise for treating certain kinds of eye problems."

+ - "Approximate computing" improves energy efficiency->

Submitted by hessian
hessian writes ""Computers were first designed to be precise calculators that solved problems where they were expected to produce an exact numerical value. However, the demand for computing today is driven by very different applications. Mobile and embedded devices need to process richer media, and are getting smarter – understanding us, being more context-aware and having more natural user interfaces. On the other hand, there is an explosion in digital data searched, interpreted, and mined by data centers."

(Hessian's note: what is interesting here is that this is how our brains work. There's an intelligent design and/or radical Darwinism argument in there somewhere.)"
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+ - New modulation scheme said to be 'breakthrough' in network performance->

Submitted by alphadogg
alphadogg writes "A startup plans to demonstrate next month at CES a new digital modulation scheme that promises to dramatically boost bandwidth, capacity, and range, with less power and less distortion, on both wireless and wired networks. MagnaCom, a privately held company based in Israel, now has more than 70 global patent applications, and 15 issued patents in the U.S., for what it calls and has trademarked Wave Modulation (or WAM), which is designed to replace the long-dominant quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) used in almost every wired or wireless product today on cellular, microwave radio, Wi-Fi, satellite and cable TV, and optical fiber networks. The vendor, which has released few specifics about WAM, promises extravagant benefits: up to 10 decibels of additional gain compared to the most advanced QAM schemes today; up to 50% less power; up to 400% more distance; up to 50% spectrum savings."
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Comment: Re:Maybe this corn can be used for food again? (Score 3, Interesting) 312

by dpilot (#45718077) Attached to: Lawmakers Out To Kill the Corn-Based Ethanol Mandate

Blasted flip-flopper!

(Sarcasm alert)

In "Earth" David Brin tried to come up with 3 culturally neutral definitions for sanity. One was the ability to be satiated - to say you have enough of something, and stop. Another was the ability to evaluate how things are going, and change your plans and actions based upon events and results. I forget the third. I once went back and located it again, trying to remember it. I forgot it, again.

Comment: Re:costs (Score 4, Interesting) 260

by dpilot (#45704585) Attached to: Streaming and Cord-Cutting Take a Toll On the Pay-TV Industry

I've found that MythTV helps me watch less TV.

Because MythTV is on the job, you don't have to watch the show NOW, when it's scheduled. Because MythTV lets you put gobs of hard drive there for recordings, you don't even have to watch it this week. At some point, you realize that you don't really have to watch it at all.

As long as the computer is doing something useful besides MythTV, the only "wasted" cost is the tuner and the dedicated hard drive space.

Plus some time you might actually WANT to watch that TV show or movie - "Day of the Doctor", anyone?

Biology is the only science in which multiplication means the same thing as division.

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