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Submission Summary: 0 pending, 121 declined, 51 accepted (172 total, 29.65% accepted)

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Submission + - Arecibo Dead (livescience.com) 1

jd writes: The Aricebo radio telescope partly exploded in fragments when a snapped high tension cable gouged through a section of the dish and slashed its way through support structures.

It is non-operable, to say the least, until extensive repairs are carried out, which may take some time due to concerns over the safety of the site.

Submission + - Gravity error detected (independent.co.uk)

jd writes: The large scale maps of the universe show something is seriously wrong with current models of gravity and dark matter.

The universe simply isn't clumping right and, no, it's not the new improved formula. As you go from the early universe to the present day, gravity should cause things to clump in specific ways.

It isn't. Which means dark matter can't be cold and general relativity may have a problem.

They need more data to prove it's not just a freaky part of the universe they're looking at, which is being collected.

Submission + - Conspiracy theorists are mainstream (theguardian.com) 1

jd writes: According to a multi-year survey across Europe and America, almost half the population believes in a major national or global conspiracy, with the divide being partly but not strictly on political party lines.

This raises important questions, such as why the beliefs are held.

Submission + - Uncertainty in sequence (sciencemag.org)

jd writes: It has now been shown that time is, indeed, not a linear progression from cause to effect but that these can occur in any order.

This had long been suspected, quantum uncertainty applies to time so an effect whose uncertainty overlaps that of the cause can precede the cause. If there's a special case, you'll often see a more general case.

In this experiment, there is no definite causal order in a system involving polarization controlling a quantum switch. The experiment is agnostic to space and time and they claim an insane confidence level of 18 sigma.

Submission + - SPAM: Jacqueline Pearce Dead

jd writes: Jacqueline Pearce, known to millions as Supreme Commander Servalan in Blake's 7, Miss Raven in Moondial, and to many others for her work in The Avengers, Doctor Who, etc, has died a fewcdats after being diagnosed with lung cancer. A cruel twist, as she had survived breast cancer twice.

She had moved back from her custom-made home in Africa a few years ago for undisclosed reasons, although in her blog she mentioned being in a bit of a hurry and hinted at something ruining the idyll.

Although she played sensual evil supremely well, she admitted that she never liked playing evil characters and was really much more of a good, happy-go-lucky person.

She was a truly wonderful person to chat with on her blog and it's to my eternal regret I never met her in person at any Doctor Who or Blake's 7 convention.

Link to Original Source

Submission + - William Trubridge completes a freedive of 400' (theguardian.com)

jd writes: The world record for freediving now stands at 400'. Competitive freediving requires that a person dive with only one breath of air and without aids to help withstand the pressures. At 400', William was exposed to pressures roughly sixteen times that of the normal atmosphere. His body was compressed such that the internal and external pressures matched, so you can figure out what this would have done to things like his heart, kidneys, eyes, and so on. In order to be considered as completing a dive, the person must return to the surface, get on-board a support ship, make the ok sign and say a phrase, I think it's "dive complete". The object of the ritual is to detect physical damage (to body or brain) that can't otherwise be detected. 400' is not the furthest competitive freedivers have gone. The greatest depth achieved by a living diver (who failed to complete the ritual due to extreme damage) is twice the new record, 800'. Herbert Nitschs so nearly held a record that wouldn't have been broken for decades. He did reach 800' and return to the surface, but the effect of the dive wrecked him utterly. For what it is worth, we now know humans can survive 32x atmospheric pressure, but it's not obvious the cost was worth it.

Submission + - Cancer researcher vanishes with tens of millions of dollars (goerie.com)

jd writes: Steven Curley, MD, who ran the Akesogenx corporation (and may indeed have been the sole employee after the dismissal of Robert Zavala) had been working on a radio-frequency cure for cancer with an engineer by the name of John Kanzius.

Kanzius died, Steven Curley set up the aforementioned parallel company that bought all the rights and patents to the technology before shuttering the John Kanzius Foundation. So far, so very uncool.

Last year, just as the company started aproaching the FDA about clinical trials, Dr Curley got blasted with lawsuits accusing him of loading his shortly-to-be ex-wife's computer with spyware.

Two weeks ago, there was to be a major announcement "within two weeks". Shortly after, the company dropped off the Internet and Dr Curley dropped off the face of the planet.

Robert Zavala is the only name mentioned that could be a fit for the company's DNS record owner. The company does not appear to have any employees other than Dr Curley, making it very unlikely he could have ever run a complex engineering project well enough to get to trial stage. His wife doubtless has a few scores to settle. Donors, some providing several millions, were getting frustrated — and as we know from McAfee, not all in IT are terribly sane. There are many people who might want the money and have no confidence any results were forthcoming.

So, what precisely was the device? Simple enough. Every molecule has an absorption line. It can absorb energy on any other frequency. A technique widely exploited in physics, chemistry and astronomy. People have looked into various ways of using it in medicine for a long time.

The idea was to inject patients with nanoparticles on an absorption line well clear of anything the human body cares about. These particles would be preferentially picked up by cancer cells because they're greedy. Once that's done, you blast the body at the specified frequency. The cancer cells are charbroiled and healthy cells remain intact.

It's an idea that's so obvious I was posting about it here and elsewhere in 1998. The difference is, they had a prototype that seemed to work.

But now there is nothing but the sound of Silence, a suspect list of thousands and a list of things they could be suspected of stretching off to infinity. Most likely, there's a doctor sipping champaign on some island with no extradition treaty. Or a future next-door neighbour to Hans Reiser. Regardless, this will set back cancer research. Money is limited and so is trust. It was, in effect, crowdsource funded and that, too, will feel a blow if theft was involved.

Or it could just be the usual absent-minded scientist discovering he hasn't the skills or awesomeness needed, but has got too much pride to admit it, as has happened in so many science fraud cases.

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: Bitcoin over Tor is a bad idea? (arxiv.org)

jd writes: Researchers studying Bitcoin have determined that the level of anonymity of the cryptocurrency is low and that using Bitcoin over Tor provides an opportunity for a Man-in-the-Middle attack against Bitcoin users. (I must confess, at this point, that I can certainly see anonymity limitations helping expose what machine is linked to what Bitcoin ID, putting users at risk of exposure, but I don't see how this is a function of Tor, as the paper implies.)

It would seem worthwhile to examine both the Tor and Bitcoin protocols to establish if there is an actual threat there, as it must surely apply to any semi-anonymous protocol over Tor and Bitcoin has limited value as a cryptocurrency if all transactions have to be carried out in plain sight.

What are the opinions of other Slashdottians on this announcement? Should we be working on an entirely new cryptocurrency system? Is this a problem with Tor? Is this a case of the Scarlett Fish (aka: a red herring) or something to take seriously?

Submission + - New revokable identity-based encryption scheme proposed (plosone.org)

jd writes: Identity-based public key encryption works on the idea of using something well-known (like an e-mail address) as the public key and having a private key generator do some wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey stuff to generate a secure private key out if it. A private key I can understand, secure is another matter.

In fact, the paper notes that security has been a big hastle in IBE-type encryption, as has revocation of keys. The authors claim, however, that they have accomplished both. Which implies the public key can't be an arbitrary string like an e-mail, since presumably you would still want messages going to said e-mail address, otherwise why bother revoking when you could just change address?

Anyways, this is not the only cool new crypto concept in town, but it is certainly one of the most intriguing as it would be a very simple platform for building mostly-transparent encryption into typical consumer apps. If it works as advertised.

I present it to Slashdot readers, to engender discussion on the method, RIBE in general and whether (in light of what's known) default strong encryption for everything is something users should just get whether they like it or not.

Android

Submission + - Petition to make Patent Trolls PAY (whitehouse.gov)

jd writes: "The makers of X-Plane, Laminar Research, are unhappy. Very unhappy. They are being sued by a patent troll (Uniloc) over using an industry-standard Android library for copy protection. Essentially, if the troll wins, it will shut down Android (and, by implication the Kindle) because existing app writers aren't able to pay the sorts of money being asked. Open Source may survive, but most Android apps are not Open Source.

Copy protection brings its own issues, but setting those aside, this is a serious effort to bring patent trolling (and software patents) under some sort of control. This is one of those times where the Slashdot Effect could really be useful. If enough people sign, given the increasing hatred in industry towards trolls, we might see something done about it for a change."

Programming

Submission + - What modern paradigms are worth pursuing? (aosd.net)

jd writes: "There seem to be a number of new paradigms emerging in the programming world. Templates and other similar features don't seem to have solved the problems of complexity in modern software, with the inevitable result of people inventing other forms of abstraction.

Of these, the two that seem the most significant are Aspect-Oriented Programming (an example of a compiler can be found here) and Feature-Oriented Programming (>a href="http://wwwiti.cs.uni-magdeburg.de/iti_db/forschung/fop/featurec/">again, a sample compiler).

Intel, on the other hand, is disregarding the complexity of the problems and is focusing on the complexity of the solutions. They have bought and fully opened the Cilk++ frontend for G++, which adds instruction-level parallelism to C++ programs.

But are these actually any use? I don't expect to see businesses crying out for coders experienced in FOP, nor do I expect to see complex projects such as KDE exploit such features. Although Cilk and Cilk++ have now been out a while, I can name no program that uses them.

Are they underused because nobody's heard of them or because nobody who has heard of them has found anything they're a good solution for? Are additional layers on top of Object Oriented languages the equivalent of Fifth-Generation Languages — a warning flag that the entire approach has hit a brick wall, requiring a rethink rather than a new layer?"

AMD

Submission + - CPU competition heating up in 2012? (eejournal.com)

jd writes: "2012 promises to be a fun year for hardware geeks, with three new "Aptiv-class" MIPS64 cores being circulated in soft form, a quad-core ARM A15, a Samsung ARM A9 variant, a seriously beefed-up 8-core Intel Itanium and AMD's mobile processors. There's a mix here of chips actually out, ready to be put on silicon, and in last stages of development. Obviously these are for different users (mobile CPUs don't generally fight for marketshare with Itanium dragsters) but it is still fascinating to see the differences in approach and the different visions of what is important in a modern CPU.

Combine this with the news reported earlier on the DDR4, and this promises to be a fun year with many new machines likely to appear that are radically different from the last generation.

Which leaves just one question — which Linux architecture will be fully updated first?"

Submission + - Handling large amounts of data with complex relationships? (google.com)

jd writes: "This is a problem I've mentioned in a couple of posts, but I really need the expert advice only Slashdot can offer. I have a lot of old photos (many hundreds) and old negatives (about 7,500 or so) covering 150 years and four different branches of the family.

The first challenge is to find a way to index every scan (date, geography, people) to be able to relate the images. Google+/Picasa doesn't even come close to what is needed — its capacity to relate information is very limited.

The second challenge is to identify major landmarks. Few of the pictures have any information and whilst I can identify some places I cannot identify everything. Not even close. Searching the web for similar images using the image as the "keyword" — that is an interesting challenge.

The third challenge is to store the images. Each of the scans is around 3.5 gigabytes in size using CCITT 4 compressed TIFF files. That gives me a storage requirement of 28 (SI) terabytes (27.3 real terabytes), which is more than I really want. Since I am producing a digital backup of the negatives, I don't want to lose resolution or detail where I can avoid it. Clearly, I can't avoid it completely — I can't afford a personal data silo — but keeping loss to a minimum is important.

What would people suggest as the best solution to these various technical problems? Besides getting a brain transplant and a new hobby."

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