__aamdvq1432 - Slashdot User

Submission + - Damaged US passport chip strands travelers (kdvr.com)

Submitted by

caseih

on Tuesday February 21, 2012 @12:30PM

caseih writes: "Damaging the embedded chip in your passport is now grounds for denying you the ability to travel in at least one airport in the US. Though the airport can slide the passport through the little number reader as easily as they can wave it in front of an RFID reader, they chose to deny a young child access to the flight, in essence denying the who family. The child had accidentally sat on his passport, creasing the cover, and the passport appeared worn. The claim has been made that breaking the chip in the passport shows that you disrespect the privilege of owning a passport, and that the airport was justified in denying this child from using the passport."

Submission + - wireshark as a web app (cloudshark.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 21, 2012 @12:04PM

An anonymous reader writes: Saw this on hacker news, and thought slashdot folks would appreciate it. Cloudshark is like a web version of wireshark. Deep linked to the interesting bits. Is it becoming increasingly common to see low level/userland application data being presented realtime with html5 interfaces?

Submission + - Recording Industry stealing from YouTube creators (aardvark.co.nz)

Submitted by

dingram17

on Tuesday February 21, 2012 @12:07AM

dingram17 writes: "Bruce Simpson from Aardvark.co.nz has found that the automatic pattern matching used by YouTube to identify copyright violations has flagged his videos. As he says "if the dull monotone voice you'll find on my RCModelReviews channel now qualifies as "music" (as they've claimed it does) then there can be little hope for that industry". Homeshot videos without any music at all are being flagged. The sinister aspect to this is that the 'claimant' then gets the advertising revenue from the video, not the creator that spent all the effort making the video. In Bruce's case, this ad revenue puts food on the table."

Comment Re:Rayon isn't synthetic (Score 1) 166

by __aamdvq1432 on Monday February 20, 2012 @11:25PM (#39106533) Attached to: Carbohydrate-Based Synthesis To Replace Petroleum Derived Hydrocarbons?

"I can live without rayon (products manufactured from non-petroleum based bio-sources), but, dang, I'm gonna miss polyvinyl chloride (long-chain, synthetic polymer products that are tremendously more difficult and expensive to produce, when one has to start with relatively simple hydrocarbons derived from bio-sources instead of cracked and fractionated petroleum)!"

Submission + - Fedora remix: Raspberry Pi Video (raspberrypi.org)

Submitted by

TheNextCorner

on Monday February 20, 2012 @06:06PM

TheNextCorner writes: "What software runs on the Raspberry Pi $25 laptop? This video shows some of the preparation of the software package run from a SD card using the Fedora open source OS Fedora"

Comment Moore's Law and Corollaries...Coming to an FBI Off (Score 1) 95

by __aamdvq1432 on Monday February 20, 2012 @06:00PM (#39103997) Attached to: Commercial, USB-Powered DNA Sequencer Coming This Year

Once it's in round three or four of evolution and the price drops through the floor for the entire process, expect an invitation to trot down to your friendly, neighborhood, federal building, county courthouse, city police precinct, etc. to give a blood sample for, um, voter registration purposes.

"Trouble? I call it sport."

Submission + - GPU Simulations Curing Cancer (smartertechnology.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 20, 2012 @05:31PM

An anonymous reader writes: A detailed simulation using Nvidia graphics processing unit or GPU, has uncovered a new protein folding techniques that could lead to a cure for cancer. Using GPUs to simulate physical processes is not new, but if drugs can be found to block this newly discovered protein folding method uncovered in this cell-level simulation, then a cure for all kinds of cancer could be the result. No time line is given on how long it might take, but at least a general method for curing cancer may be in the works.

Submission + - The Pirate Bay: Banned in the UK? (ibtimes.com)

Submitted by

redletterdave

on Monday February 20, 2012 @05:29PM

redletterdave writes: "Swedish filesharing website The Pirate Bay may soon be blocked in the UK after a London judge ruled that the site breaches copyright laws on a large scale, and that both the platform and its users illegally share copyrighted material like movies and music. In addition to finding legal fault with The Pirate Bay and its users, the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) also wants all British Internet service providers (ISPs) to block access to The Pirate Bay in the UK."

Submission + - Google breaks IE user privacy settings (msdn.com) 1

Submitted by

Dupple

on Monday February 20, 2012 @04:56PM

Dupple writes: "Google have not only violated Safari users privacy settings, but it seems that the they violated IE's privacy settings as well."

Submission + - Dark Humor: The Transparency Grenade

Submitted by __aamdvq1432 on Monday February 20, 2012 @01:07PM

__aamdvq1432 writes: Thom Holwerda over at OSNews reports on the The Transparency Grenade, an explosive expression of disaffection with all things 'back-room.'

Submission + - Drones to fight bark beetles? (suasnews.com)

Submitted by

garymortimer

on Monday February 20, 2012 @11:45AM

garymortimer writes: "Our nation’s forests face blight on a scale rarely seen before. This is a pestilence that threatens to engulf our natural resources, laying them to waste. It not only is destroying the health of our forests, as well as their majestic look, but is ruining whole industries that rely on trees as a resource. It is raising the fire danger in these areas, taking homes away from animals, and makes thinning of the forests difficult with the debris of its passing due to fallen trees. This is the plague of the bark beetle and it is currently near unstoppable.

While some remote telemetry is used, most of the finding of the beetles (the first step to defeating them) is mainly ground work, and therefore the paper will then propose a few new methods using unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) as a way to find the bugs."

Submission + - Carbohydrate-Based Synthesis to Replace Petroleum Derived Hydrocarbons?

Submitted by __aamdvq1432 on Monday February 20, 2012 @11:28AM

__aamdvq1432 writes: From PhysOrg's Taking biofuel from forest to highway, University of British Columbia biofuel expert, Jack Saddler, offers that:
we will become less dependent on fossil fuels and will become more dependent on fuels made from the sugars and chemicals found in plants.

Nothing too new there, i.e., the idea of biofuels eventually taking over from petroleum distillates. However, Saddler contends further that:
Similar to an oil refinery that processes crude oil to make thousands of supplementary products like plastics, dyes, paints, etc., the biorefinery would use leftover agricultural and forest material to make many of the same products, but from a sustainable and renewable resource.

I remember my organic chem instructor back in '81 telling us that eventually the textbooks would have to be rewritten. There would be no presumption of fractional distillation of thousands of basic compounds from petroleum, and the teaching emphasis would shift to synthesis from simple hydrocarbons. He noted that we'd all miss 'the good, ole days' when synthetic fibers, plastics, etc. were cheap...or even an economically viable option. I can live without rayon, but, dang, I'm gonna miss polyvinyl chloride!

Submission + - Nuclear Truckers Haul Warheads Across US

Submitted by

Hugh Pickens writes

on Monday February 20, 2012 @02:08AM

Hugh Pickens writes writes: "As you weave through interstate traffic, you're unlikely to notice a plain-looking Peterbilt tractor-trailer and have no idea that inside the cab an armed federal agent operates a host of electronic countermeasures to keep outsiders from accessing his heavily armored cargo: a nuclear warhead. Adam Weinstein writes that the Office of Secure Transportation (OST) employs nearly 600 couriers to move bombs, weapon components, radioactive metals for research, and fuel for Navy ships and submarines between a variety of labs, reactors and military bases. Hiding nukes in plain sight, and rolling them through major metropolitan centers raises a slew of security and environmental concerns, from theft to terrorist attack to radioactive spills. "Any time you put nuclear weapons and materials on the highway, you create security risks," says Tom Clements, a nuclear security watchdog for Friends of the Earth. For security, cabs are fitted with custom composite armor and lightweight armored glass, a redundant communications systems that link the convoys to a monitoring center in Albuquerque, and the driver has the ability to disable the truck so it can't be moved or opened. The OST hires military veterans, particularly ex-special-operations forces (PDF), who are trained in close-quarters battle, tactical shooting, physical fitness, and shifting smoothly through the gears of a tractor-trailer. But accidents happen. In 1996, a driver flipped his trailer on a two-lane Nebraska hill road after a freak ice storm, sending authorities scrambling to secure its payload of two nuclear bombs and in 2003, two trucks operated by private contractors had rollover accidents in Montana and Tennessee while hauling uranium hexafluoride, a compound use to enrich reactor and bomb fuel."

Journal Journal: Is the GPL running out of steam? 3

Journal by tomhudson on Sunday February 19, 2012 @09:47PM

The number of projects released under permissive licenses (Apache, MIT, BSD) continues to ries, and the popularity of the GPL continues to drop.

Comment Re:Nostalgia ... (Score 2) 215

by __aamdvq1432 on Sunday February 19, 2012 @12:12PM (#39092821) Attached to: Tetris In 140 Bytes

Reminds me of those very same days and renews my joy that we now have the freedom to use "inefficient," mnemonically useful names for variables and functions along with coding conventions that give the next programmer at least a remote chance to understand and support the code without great genius.

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