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Comment Not Unreasonable (Score 1) 430

A couple years ago I would have been against a company like Verizon trying to traffic shape. But since working in the telecommunications industry my perspective has changed due to my better understanding of how things really work. Verizon owns a good portion of the network infrastructure in north america but not ALL of it. If they were to traffic shape, it would only be on lines and nodes which they own, which would very well probably affect you since if you talk to a remote server somewhere in north america there is a high probability that somewhere along the way, you will go through a verizon network. You must also understand that ISPs and Carriers are not always the same thing. Carriers are companies which own, operate and maintain the actual infrastructure, while ISPs sell the service. Sometimes they are the same company but sometimes they are not. In the end, the Carriers are the ones with the most power since they are the ones who are doing the purchases of everything else. Everything that is done in terms of network equipment industry and mobile phone industry is driven at least in part by the Carrier. If you work in the telecom or mobile phone industry, your ONLY customer is the Carrier. In the mobile phone industry including iphones, android etc, products are not created to interest you directly as the consumer, they are designed to interest the Carrier. Carriers buy mobile phones from Apple, HTC, Samsung, etc, NOT you. You buy from the Carriers. Say you work hard every day and acquire a large sum of money over a long time and through great effort. You build a communications system using a lot of money so that your friends around you can talk to each other. You never change their messages, however sometimes you prioritize the messages of users you think deserve a higher priority. This is all that traffic shaping is, lower priority packets still eventualy get delivered, just slower. Remember you are the one who owns this communications network. You built it, and you maintain it every day. Net neutrality to you would mean having no control over something that YOU own. If you wan't net neutrality, then the infrastructure should ideally be owned by the government instead of multiple private organizations. As long as the infrastructure is divided among multiple private organizations, the policies of one Carrier affects the whole group of users using the communications network. And as long as the Carriers own, operate and maintain the infrastructure on their own, it's not unjustified that they would want at least SOME control over how traffic flows through THEIR network.
Earth

MIT Making Super Efficient Origami Solar Panels 140

ByronScott writes "Could the next solar panels be in the shapes of origami cranes? They could be if MIT power engineering professor Jeffrey Grossman has his say. Standard flat solar panels are only optimized to capture sunlight at one point of the sun's trajectory — otherwise they need automated tracking systems to follow the sun. But Grossman found that folded solar cell systems could produce constant power throughout the day sans tracking and his new designs are up to two and a half times more efficient per comparative length and width than traditional flat arrays."
Robotics

Submission + - 5 Axis Robot Carves Metal Like Butter (singularityhub.com) 1

kkleiner writes: Industrial robots are getting precise enough that they’re less like dumb machines and more like automated sculptors producing artwork. Case in point: Daishin’s Seki 5-axis mill. The Japanese company celebrated its 50th anniversary last year by using this machine to carve out a full scale motorcycle helmet out of one piece of aluminum. No breaks, no joints, the 5-Axis mill simply pivots and rotates to carve metal at some absurd angles. Every cut is guided by sophisticated 3D design software

Comment Solution to DRM (Score 1) 375

Make online games? You can't pirate a game and expect to be able to play online. Look at starcraft, people are still buying that to play on battle.net. I don't buy single player games because there isn't a single player game that doesn't get boring after a couple days.
Real Time Strategy (Games)

Heroes of Newerth Open Beta About To Start 118

You may recall last summer when we discussed Heroes of Newerth, a title from S2 Games that's based on the popular Defense of the Ancients mod from Warcraft III. We passed out some closed beta keys, and there seemed to be a ton of interest, in part due to the fact that they have a Linux client. Well, if any of you missed it or want to see how the game has progressed since then, now is your chance — the open beta begins tonight (March 31). There's a countdown on the sign-up page that shows when you can register.
Mars

How Do You Land a Nuke-Powered Mini-Cooper On Mars? 218

tcd004 writes "Miles O'Brien narrates this video simulation of NASA's next Mars shot, which promises to out-gun all previous efforts. The Mini Cooper-sized Mars Science Laboratory, which is now named Curiosity, will crawl the Martian surface under steam from a nuclear powerplant — but it's a gentle giant compared to its predecessors. Recent theories have emerged that previous attempts at identifying organic compounds in Martian soil may have actually cooked away any signs of life-giving elements. Curiosity will go to great pains to avoid scorching the Earth ... erm ... Mars."
Piracy

Ubisoft's Authentication Servers Go Down 634

ZuchinniOne writes "With Ubisoft's fantastically awful new DRM you must be online and logged in to their servers to play the games you buy. Not only was this DRM broken the very first day it was released, but now their authentication servers have failed so absolutely that no-one who legally bought their games can play them. 'At around 8am GMT, people began to complain in the Assassin's Creed 2 forum that they couldn't access the Ubisoft servers and were unable to play their games.' One can only hope that this utter failure will help to stem the tide of bad DRM."
Encryption

Ubisoft's New DRM Cracked In One Day 678

Colonel Korn writes "Ubisoft's recent announcement that upcoming games would require a constant internet connection in order to play has been discussed at length on Slashdot ('The Awful Anti-Pirate System That Will Probably Work'). Many were of the opinion that this new, more demanding DRM would have effectiveness to match its inconvenience, at least financially justifying its use. Others assumed that it would be immediately cracked, as is usually the case, leaving the inconvenience for paying customers and resulting in a superior product for pirates. As usual, the latter group was right. Though Ubisoft won't yet admit it, Skid-Row managed to crack the new DRM less than a day after it was first released."
Power

Creating Electric Power From Light Using Gold Nanoparticles 77

cyberfringe writes "Professor of Materials Science Dawn Bonnell and colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania have discovered a way to turn optical radiation into electrical current that could lead to self-powering molecular circuits and efficient data storage. They create surface plasmons that ride the surface of gold nanoparticles on a glass substrate. Surface plasmons were found to increase the efficiency of current production by a factor of four to 20, and with many independent parameters to optimize, enhancement factors could reach into the thousands. 'If the efficiency of the system could be scaled up without any additional, unforeseen limitations, we could conceivably manufacture a 1A, 1V sample the diameter of a human hair and an inch long,' Prof. Bonnell explained. The academic paper was published in the current issue of ACS Nano. (Abstract available for free.) The significance? This may allow the creation of nano-sized circuits that can power themselves through sunlight (or another directed light source). Delivery of power to nanodevices is one of the big challenges in the field."
Idle

Directed Energy Weapon Downs Mosquitos 428

wisebabo writes "Nathan Myhrvol demonstrated at TED a laser, built from parts scrounged from eBay, capable of shooting down not one but 50 to 100 mosquitos a second. The system is 'so precise that it can specify the species, and even the gender, of the mosquito being targeted.' Currently, for the sake of efficiency, it leaves the males alone because only females are bloodsuckers. Best of all the system could cost as little as $50. Maybe that's too expensive for use in preventing malaria in Africa but I'd buy one in a second!" We ran a story about this last year. It looks like the company has added a bit more polish, and burning mosquito footage to their marketing.
Portables

Submission + - Optimus transforms notebook power, performance (pcper.com)

Vigile writes: Transformers jokes aside, NVIDIA's newest technology offering hopes to radically change the way notebook computers are built and how customers use them. The promise of both extended battery life and high performance mobile computing has seemed like a pipe dream and even the most recent updates to "switchable graphics" left much to be desired in terms of the user experience. Having both an integrated and discrete graphics chip in your notebook does little good if you never switch between the two. Optimus allows the system to seamlessly and instantly change between IGP and discrete NVIDIA GPUs based on the task being run including games, GPU encoding or Flash video playback. Using new software and hardware technology notebooks using Optimus can power on and pass control to the GPU in a matter of 300ms and power both the GPU and PCIe lanes completely off when not in use. This can be done without being forced to reboot or even close out your applications making it a hands-free solution for the customer.

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