aktbar - Slashdot User

Verizon, Fiber Or Die? 291

Posted by kdawson on Saturday March 08, 2008 @11:41PM from the copper-kiss-off dept.

dynamator writes "I live about 550 meters from my Verizon central office. I pay for their higher-tier 'Power Plan' DSL service, which boasts 3 Mbps down and 758 Kbsp up. For the past year, I've enjoyed excellent performance on this line. However, this past month Verizon has been hooking up my neighbors with FiOS, their new fiber-to-the-home system, and guess what, my connection speed and dependability have taken a nosedive. What can I do to build the case that this is really happening? Will anyone, least of all Verizon, care? Are they making me a fiber offer I can't refuse?" We discussed a few times last year what Verizon may be up to.

Comment Re:scared of hydrogen (Score 5, Informative) 168

by aktbar on Tuesday November 13, 2007 @09:52PM (#21344699) Attached to: Microbes Churn Out Hydrogen at Record Rate

What happens if you repeat the cycle of: {snip}
an infinite amount of times? You run out of water.

There are a few reasons to not worry about this:

(1) The volume of the earths oceans is enough that if we were destroying water in them at the rate at which we burn oil, it would take a few hundred million years to run out. We wouldn't be destroying it at that rate (I would guess, since you can make a lot of hydrogen from just a little water), but even if we were we have a while to figure out a solution.

(2) Hydrogen and ozone react really well -- the hydrogen wouldn't make it out of the atmosphere before it got bound back up as water.

The down side of (2) is that we could damage the ozone layer with leaked hydrogen (http://gcep.stanford.edu/research/factsheets/effects_climate.html)

Submission + - Ohio audit reveals more Diebold problems

Submitted by armb on Thursday April 26, 2007 @07:47AM

armb writes: From http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2007/04/diebold_v ote_da.html "Problems found in an audit of Diebold tabulation records from an Ohio November 2006 election raise questions about whether the database got corrupted during the tabulation of election results" They were using the Microsoft Jet engine, which Microsoft do not recommend for serious use with concurrent updates. Perhaps most surprising of all, Diebold initially claimed that the raw election results were a protected trade secret.

Submission + - New Algorithms Improve Image Search

Submitted by

bc90021

on Tuesday April 03, 2007 @09:47AM

bc90021 writes: "Electrical engineers from UC San Diego are making progress on a different kind of image search engine — one that analyzes the images themselves. At the core of this Supervised Multiclass Labeling (SML) system is a set of simple yet powerful algorithms developed at UCSD. Once you train the system, you can set it loose on a database of unlabeled images. The system calculates the probability that various objects or "classes" it has been trained to recognize are present — and labels the images accordingly. After labeling, images can be retrieved via keyword searches. Accuracy of the UCSD system has outpaced that of other content-based image labeling and retrieval systems in the literature."

Comment Re:Still Risky (Score 4, Interesting) 573

by fireloins on Monday April 11, 2005 @10:31PM (#12208099) Attached to: Secure Hard Drive Deletion Appliance?

I always figured that the safest way to wipe a hard drive would be to heat it up above the Curie temperature. Once all of those domains are randomized, there ain't no information left. Anyone have any idea what T_C is for a hard drive platter? I would guess its in the 700K range, which unfortunately is too hot for your standard oven. But if you have a friend who works at a brick oven pizza parlor, that would probably do the trick.

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