Cybernot - Slashdot User

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: Cracking for Programmers?

Submitted by

trollertron3000

on Wednesday February 23, 2011 @02:54PM

trollertron3000 writes: "I've been a programmer for 15 years and I'm bored. So I'd like to start cracking to bring back the excitement a little. I know my way around both *nix and windows and can code in most of the well-known languages. If you were me, where would you start? I feel this knowledge could really pay off in the long run."

Submission + - Carnegie Mellon Professor Challenges Sony (psx-scene.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 12, 2011 @05:25PM

An anonymous reader writes: Dave Touretzky, a Research Professor in the Computer Science Department and the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition at Carnegie Mellon University, has challenged Sony's legal standing in the case against PS3 hackers and mirrored Geohot's site on the university's servers.

Submission + - 10 Useful JQuery Uses (wordpress.com)

Submitted by poetwarrior on Wednesday January 12, 2011 @05:25PM

poetwarrior writes: JQuery is the most popular JavaScript library available. It allows for some rather dynamic web pages and webmasters who have used it effectively have reported much versatility in their web design and development initiatives.

Submission + - Website Bandhack.com Promoting Local Bands

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 12, 2011 @05:25PM

An anonymous reader writes: A new website, Bandhack.com, launched today with a unique idea: Catalog bands and their events and shows into one website that is easy to navigate. Bandhack is the first website of its kind and will provide a needed service to those looking for local bands and local music.

All content streams directly from the artist's 'Musician/band' Facebook page, ensuring information is always current and relavent. Because of this, the site serves as a meaningful layer to Facebook's less than impressive music platform.

Visit the site Bandhack.com and provide any feedback or comments using the links at the top of the page.
If you are a local musician with a 'Musician/band' page on Facebook, visit Bandhack.com/connect to add your band to the directory.

Local Bands Local Shows

Submission + - Mozilla hopes to release Firefox 4 next month 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 12, 2011 @03:44PM

An anonymous reader writes: Damon Sicore, Senior Director of Platform Engineering at Mozilla, has announced that the company is almost ready to ship Firefox 4.
On its mailing list, Mozilla has revealed it has around 160 hard blockers to fix, before proceeding to Release Candidate stage.
Both the RC and the final version would arrive in February, according to Sicore. Mozilla was originally planning on having Firefox 4 out by the end of last year, but it had to delay the release till 2011. Last month, Firefox 4 Beta 8 was released for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux 32-bit/64-bit, with support for 57 languages.
Mozilla's roadmap says it still wants to release a Beta 9, a Beta 10, and at least one Release Candidate build before the final version.

Submission + - Hackers find new way to cheat on Wall Street (infoworld.com)

Submitted by GMGruman on Thursday January 06, 2011 @12:35PM

GMGruman writes: The high-speed trading exchanges that conduct the business of buying and selling stocks and mutual funds are so fast that hackers can introduce delays of a few microseconds completely unnoticed by today's network monitoring technology — and manipulate prices in the process to reap millions of dollars to the detriment of everyone else, InfoWorld's Bill Snyder reports. This kind of activity creates new reason to distrust Wall Street and shows how the computer networks we all rely on for conducting business and moving information are ripe for undetectable hacking.

Submission + - Is the Hornet Our Key to Renewable Energy?

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 05, 2011 @11:32AM

An anonymous reader writes: As every middle-school child knows, in the process of photosynthesis, plants take the sun's energy and convert it to electrical energy. Now a Tel Aviv University team has demonstrated how a member of the animal kingdom, the Oriental hornet, takes the sun's energy and converts it into electric power — in the brown and yellow parts of its body — as well. "The interesting thing here is that a living biological creature does a thing like that," says physicist Prof. David Bergman of Tel Aviv University's School of Physics and Astronomy, who was part of the team that made discovery. "The hornet may have discovered things we do not yet know." In partnership with the late Prof. Jacob Ishay of the university's Sackler Faculty of Medicine, Prof. Bergman and his doctoral candidate Marian Plotkin engaged in a truly interdisciplinary research project to explain the biological processes that turn a hornet's abdomen into solar cells.

Submission + - Doctor Who to marry Doctor Who's daughter (theregister.co.uk)

Submitted by Google85 on Wednesday January 05, 2011 @11:27AM

Google85 writes: Doctor Who the 10th, David Tennant, is planning to get hitched to his fictional daughter Georgia Moffett, who also happens to be the real daughter of his fictional fifth incarnation: Peter Davison.

Submission + - Cause of Male Baldness Discovered

Submitted by

lee1

on Wednesday January 05, 2011 @11:20AM

lee1 writes: "Experts believe the male hormone testosterone is involved somehow in
producing make pattern baldness (as John Glenn said, ‘the good Lord
only gave men so many hormones, and if others want to waste theirs on
growing hair, that’s up to them.’) But up to now, the actual mechanism
of baldness remained a mystery. A recent discovery has revealed that
the ‘problem’ is not a lack of hair, but rather a defect with the new
hair that is produced. A ‘manufacturing defect’ in the stem cells that
make new hair creates hair that is so small it is invisible to the naked
eye, leading to an apparent bald spot or receding hairline. The
researchers hope that it may be possible to ‘cure’ male baldness by
restoring the correct function of these cells, possibly with a cream
that could be applied to the scalp to help the stem cells grow normal
hair."

Submission + - Hypersonic Radio Black-Out Problem Solved (technologyreview.com)

Submitted by KentuckyFC on Wednesday January 05, 2011 @08:28AM

KentuckyFC writes: Russian physicists have come up with a new way to communicate with hypersonic vehicles surrounded by a sheath of plasma. Ordinarily, this plasma absorbs and reflects radio waves at communications frequencies leading to a few tense minutes during the re-entry of manned vehicles such as the shuttle. However, the problem is even more acute for military vehicles such as ballistic missiles and hypersonic planes. Radio black out prevents these vehicles from accessing GPS signals for navigation and does not allow them to be re-targeted or disarmed at the last minute. But a group of Russian physicists say they can get around this problem by turning the entire plasma sheath into a radio antenna. They point out that any incoming signal is both reflected and absorbed by the plasma. The reflected signal is lost but the absorbed energy sets up a resonating electric field at a certain depth within the plasma. In effect, this layer within the plasma acts like a radio antenna, receiving the signal. However, the signal cannot travel further through the plasma to the spacecraft. Their new idea is to zap this layer with radio waves generated from within the spacecraft. These waves will be both absorbed by the plasma and reflected back inside the spacecraft. However, the key point is that the reflected waves ought to be modulated by any changes in the electric field within the plasma. In other words, the reflected waves should carry a kind of imprint of the original external radio signal. That would allow the craft to receive external signals from GPs satellites or ground control. And the same process in reverse allows the spacecraft to broadcast signals too.

Submission + - China's J-20 stealth fighter leaks

Submitted by on Wednesday January 05, 2011 @08:08AM

An anonymous reader writes: China plans to begin test flight of its first J-20 stealth fighter as early as this month and plans to deploy them by 2017. Beijing appears to have completed a prototype of the stealth fighter, which Chinese experts are comparing to the US F-22 fighter, reinforcing the country's rapid military build-up, Japanese newspaper Ashai Shimbun reported quoting Chinese military sources.

Submission + - Coffee spill diverts United Airlines flight (cnn.com) 1

Submitted by PolygamousRanchKid on Wednesday January 05, 2011 @04:59AM

PolygamousRanchKid writes: A United Airlines flight from Chicago to Frankfurt, Germany, was diverted to Toronto this week after the pilot dumped a cup of coffee on the plane's communication's equipment. The unwanted liquid triggered a series of emergency codes, including one for a hijacking, according to Transport Canada, the agency that regulates transportation in Canada.

Survey Shows That Fox News Makes You Less Informed 1352

Posted by samzenpus on Thursday December 16, 2010 @01:58PM from the fair-balanced-and-simple dept.

A survey of American voters by World Public Opinion shows that Fox News viewers are significantly more misinformed than consumers of news from other sources. One of the most interesting questions was about President Obama's birthplace. 63 percent of Fox viewers believe Obama was not born in the US (or that it is unclear). In 2003 a similar study about the Iraq war showed that Fox viewers were once again less knowledgeable on the subject than average. Let the flame war begin!

EPA Knowingly Allowed Pesticide That Kills Bees 410

Posted by Soulskill on Tuesday December 14, 2010 @01:02AM from the how-could-that-bee dept.

hether writes "The mystery of the disappearing bees has been baffling scientists for years and now we get another big piece in the puzzle. From Fast Company: 'A number of theories have popped up as to why the North American honey bee population has declined — electromagnetic radiation, malnutrition, and climate change have all been pinpointed. Now a leaked EPA document reveals that the agency allowed the widespread use of a bee-toxic pesticide, despite warnings from EPA scientists.' Now environmentalists and bee keepers are calling for an immediate ban of the pesticide clothianidin, sold by Bayer Crop Science under the brand name Poncho."

4chan Declares War On Snow 201

Posted by samzenpus on Monday December 13, 2010 @03:16PM from the common-enemy dept.

With all the recent hacktivism in the news, Anonymous has decided to take on a new and powerful enemy: snow. On Sunday the group announced that it will "do everything in its power to shut snow down by attacking the Weather Channel and North Face websites, boycotting outerwear, and voting for the sun as Time’s 2010 Person Of The Year." I'm sure there are a lot of people in Minneapolis right now that would wish them luck.

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