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Comment Re: Screw the cameras! (Score 1) 132

According to the (freely available) article, they started out with the goal of extending optical wavelength MDL lenses to the infrared, so they could be used in night vision goggles and UAVs. The application to cellphones came from reporters who couldn't be bothered to look at the TFA's citations of papers that demonstrated such lenses for optical wavelengths.

Submission + - PayPal Told Customer Her Death Breached Its Rules (bbc.com) 2

Submitted by dryriver
dryriver writes: The BBC reports: "PayPal wrote to a woman who had died of cancer saying her death had breached its rules and that it might take legal action as a consequence. The firm has since acknowledged that the letter was 'insensitive', apologised to her widower, and begun an inquiry into how it came to be sent. Lindsay Durdle died on 31 May aged 37. She had been first diagnosed with breast cancer about a year-and-a-half earlier. The disease had later spread to her lungs and brain. PayPal was informed of Mrs Durdle's death three weeks ago by her husband Howard Durdle. He provided the online payments service with copies of her death certificate, her will and his ID, as requested. He has now received a letter addressed in her name, sent to his home in Bucklebury, West Berkshire. It was headlined: 'Important: You should read this notice carefully.' It said that Mrs Durdle owed the company about £3,200 and went on to say: 'You are in breach of condition 15.4(c) of your agreement with PayPal Credit as we have received notice that you are deceased... this breach is not capable of remedy.' "

Submission + - Slashdot Suffers Multi-day Outage

Submitted by apoc.famine
apoc.famine writes: While the website remained down, the current owners did nothing to communicate about the outage. Once the website was restored, they didn't even bother to post a root cause analysis, which everyone with a tech background would expect. It was a sad commentary on what used to be a pretty decent tech website.

Submission + - Tiny Silicon Valley Satellites May Help Track North Korea Missiles (nytimes.com)

Submitted by cdreimer
cdreimer writes: According to The New York Times: "For years before North Korea fired its first intercontinental ballistic missile this week, the Pentagon and intelligence experts had sounded a warning: Not only was the North making progress quickly, spy satellite coverage was so spotty that the United States might not see a missile being prepared for launch. That set off an urgent but quiet search for ways to improve America’s early-warning ability — and the capability to strike missiles while they are on the launchpad. The most intriguing solutions have come from Silicon Valley, where the Obama administration began investing in tiny, inexpensive civilian satellites developed to count cars in Target parking lots and monitor the growth of crops. Some in the Pentagon accustomed to relying on highly classified, multibillion-dollar satellites, which take years to develop, resisted the move. But as North Korea’s missile program progressed, American officials laid out an ambitious schedule for the first of the small satellites to go up at the end of this year, or the beginning of next. Launched in clusters, some staying in orbit just a year or two, the satellites would provide coverage necessary to execute a new military contingency plan called “Kill Chain.” It is the first step in a new strategy to use satellite imagery to identify North Korean launch sites, nuclear facilities and manufacturing capability and destroy them pre-emptively if a conflict seems imminent."

Comment A headline, but not an effective law. (Score 3, Informative) 225

by ColoradoAuthor (#53720875) Attached to: Three States Propose DMCA-Countering 'Right To Repair' Laws
The proposed Nebraska statute says "Sec. 7: Nothing in the Fair Repair Act shall apply to motor vehicle manufacturers." As for other manufacturers, they get to take into account whether compliance would be too expensive, and the maximum penalty is $500. So regardless of whether or not you think these laws are a good idea, it's nothing close to being a Tech Writer Full Employment Act, an Everybody Can Repair Their Own Car Act, or a Put All The Small Manufacturers Out Of Business Act.

Submission + - CERN Engineers Have to Identify and Disconnect 9,000 Obsolete Cables

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: CERN, home to the Large Hadron Collider, has grand plans to update the world’s largest particle accelerator complex in the next few years. But engineers have identified a barrier to the upgrade: there’s no space for new cables in the injectors that accelerate particles before they enter the LHC.

Comment Nothing new under the sun (Score 5, Informative) 90

by ColoradoAuthor (#50970069) Attached to: The Information Theory of Life
Alternate headline: "Academic incrementally advances an established line of thought."

Lila Gatlin was writing about this in the 1960s and 70s.

"Life may be defined operationally as an information processing system—a structural hierarchy of functioning units—that has acquired through evolution the ability to store and process the information necessary for its own accurate reproduction." --Lila Gatlin, Information Theory and the Living System, 1971

I'd like more insight on how Adami's contributions are especially significant (which they may be, but TFA doesn't make that clear). Or is it just that he's a really good spokesman?

Comment Minkwitz is the key (Score 2) 464

Since you're on /., you probably will care to understand the Minkwitz relationship:
deltaA/deltaX = 2 × deltaM/deltaY
where A is the astigmatism created by the lens, M is the power of the correction provided by the lens, and X and Y are the usual coordinates. Thus progressive lenses always get blurry in direct proportion to the difference between your near and far correction, and in inverse proportion to the vertical distance between the near and far sweet spots.

In practice, some advanced techniques such as grinding both sides of the lens and applying wavefront or raytracing optical simulations can make the problem less noticeable (mainly by moving the worst areas from one spot to another). Some brands of lenses are better than others, and some labs do a better job of making them than others. If you go for progressive ("PAL") lenses, ask to see the "occupational" lenses from several different manufacturers. Learn how to see the "invisible" manufacturing codes printed on your lenses.

My solution at the moment: fixed-distance computer glasses, plus Hoya Summit iQ PAL lenses adjusted to increase the size of the reading zone a bit.

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