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Comment For Ohio students (Score 1) 177

by awesie (#38624664) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Tech-Related Summer Camps For Teenagers?
Not useful for the original poster, but Ohio high school students can apply for a two week camp at the Ohio Supercomputing Center (http://www.osc.edu/education/si/). I went a few years ago and really enjoyed it. Most students don't get an opportunity to do massively parallel programming across thousands of processors.
Space

Submission + - New 'Horava Gravity Theory' Decouples Spacetime (scientificamerican.com)

Submitted by eldavojohn
eldavojohn writes: Petr Horava, a physicist at the University of California in Berkeley, has a new theory about gravity and spacetime. A high energies, it actually snips any ties between space and time (as opposed to the Theory of General Relativity at low energies that binds them together). It is picking up steam and gaining popularity with physicists because it fits a lot of observed models better than Einstein's or Newtonian solutions. It better predicts the movement of the planets and has a potential to create the illusion of dark matter--something we've been trying to decipher for a long time.

Submission + - Pittsburgh Will Tax Students (cmu.edu)

Submitted by societyofrobots
societyofrobots writes: "Local government officials are in the process of approving an operating budget for fiscal year 2010. Pittsburgh Mayor Luke Ravenstahl has proposed taxing college and professional students for the privilege of receiving an education in the city. The proposed tax will charge students in the city at a rate of 1% of their yearly tuition — which, at Carnegie Mellon, would mean roughly a $400 tax on most students. As the tax proposal hit local media outlets this week, the mayor repeatedly emphasized the burden that college students have placed on city services, and the need for students to pay their 'fair share.'"
Google

Submission + - Google releases open source NX server (techworld.com.au)

Submitted by
wisesifu
wisesifu writes: "Amid the fanfare of last week's Chrome OS announcement, Google quietly released an open source NX server, dubbed Neatx, for remote desktop display. NX technology was developed by NoMachine to handle remote X Window connections and make a graphical desktop display usable over the Internet. "FreeNX's primary target is to replace the one closed component and is written in a mix of several thousand lines of Bash, Expect and C, making FreeNX difficult to maintain," according to Google."Designed from scratch with flexibility and maintainability in mind, Neatx minimizes the number of involved processes and all code is split into several libraries." Neatx is written in Python, with a few wrapper scripts in Bash and one program written in C "for performance reasons". There has already been some speculation that Neatx will be the default display server for the upcoming Chrome OS. Google insists the release date was just a coincidence."
Government

Submission + - Hackers get serial numbers of new U.S. passports

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Fox News has an AP story on a SF Hacker driving around and needing as little as 20 minutes to be successful in acquiring a passport number.

Zipping past Fisherman's Wharf, his scanner detected, then downloaded to his laptop, the unique serial numbers of two pedestrians' electronic U.S. passport cards embedded with radio frequency identification, or RFID, tags. Within an hour, he'd "skimmed" the identifiers of four more of the new, microchipped PASS cards from a distance of 20 feet.

Meanwhile, Homeland Security has been promoting broad use of RFID even though its own advisory committee on data integrity and privacy warned that radio-tagged IDs have the potential to allow "widespread surveillance of individuals" without their knowledge or consent.

In its 2006 draft report, the committee concluded that RFID "increases risks to personal privacy and security, with no commensurate benefit for performance or national security," and recommended that "RFID be disfavored for identifying and tracking human beings.
Patents

Microsoft Puts C# and the CLI Under "Community Promise" 465

Posted by timothy from the if-it's-a-trap-please-clarify dept.
FishWithAHammer writes "Peter Galli of Microsoft posted a blog entry on Port25 today, regarding the explicit placement of C# and the Common Language Infrastructure (the ECMA standard that underpins .NET) under their Community Promise: 'It is important to note that, under the Community Promise, anyone can freely implement these specifications with their technology, code, and solutions. You do not need to sign a license agreement, or otherwise communicate to Microsoft how you will implement the specifications. ... Under the Community Promise, Microsoft provides assurance that it will not assert its Necessary Claims against anyone who makes, uses, sells, offers for sale, imports, or distributes any Covered Implementation under any type of development or distribution model, including open-source licensing models such as the LGPL or GPL.'" Adds reader anshulajain: "Understandably, Miguel De Icaza is jumping with joy."
Businesses

Hospital Confirms Steve Jobs's Liver Transplant 402

Posted by kdawson from the so-just-say-so-already dept.
CNet is reporting that the hospital where Apple's CEO reportedly got a liver transplant two months ago has now confirmed the truth of these reports. "Steve Jobs underwent his liver transplant about two months ago at Methodist University Hospital in Memphis, the hospital confirmed Tuesday. Jobs, who returned to work Apple's campus in Cupertino, Calif., on Monday after a six-month medical leave, 'is now recovering well and has an excellent prognosis,' according to a statement by Dr. James D. Eason, the program director of the Methodist University Hospital Transplant Institute. ... While Eason said the confirmation was being provided with Jobs's approval, he cited patient confidentially in saying that he could not reveal any further information on the specifics of Jobs's surgery."
The Internet

How Microsoft Degrades Their Users (In a Good Cause) 174

Posted by kdawson from the whoa-there-nelly dept.
blackbearnh writes "We all know that slow Web pages drive users crazy, but where is the boundary between too slow and too simple? As Microsoft's Eric Schurman points out, the fastest-loading page of all is a blank one, but it's also the most useless. In an interview with O'Reilly Radar leading up to his appearance at the Velocity Conference, Schurman talks about his experiences working on some of Microsoft's highest-volume sites, including the home page and Live Search. In particular, he discusses how Microsoft will selectively degrade the performance of pages to small sets of users so that they can see how various amounts of delay at different times and places affect user behavior. 'In cases where we were giving what was a significantly degraded experience, the data moved to significance extremely quickly. We were able to tell when we delayed people's pages by more than half a second, and it was very obvious that this had a significant impact on users very quickly. We were able to turn off that experiment. The reasoning... was it helps us make a strong argument for how we can prioritize work on performance against work on other aspects of the site.' He also talks about what it's like to be one of the most often-targeted DDoS sites on the planet."
Earth

Submission + - Infrared Fibers can Protect Against Chemoterrorism

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens
Hugh Pickens writes: "Although most Americans take the safety of their drinking water for granted, ordinary tap water can become contaminated within minutes, says Prof. Abraham Katzir of Tel Aviv University's School of Physics and Astronomy who has developed a fiberoptic system that can detect poisons such as pesticides in water in amounts well below the World Health Organization safety threshold using "colors" in the infrared spectrum which distinguish between pure and contaminated water. "With our naked eyes we can't distinguish between pure water and water that contains a small amount of alcohol or acetone. They're all clear," says Katzir. "But we can clearly distinguish between liquids using an infrared spectrometer which can distinguish between 'colors' in the invisible infrared spectrum." Connected to a commercial infrared spectrometer, the fibers serve as sensors that can detect and notify authorities immediately if a contaminant has entered a water reservoir, system, building or pipeline." Toxic materials are readily available as pesticides or herbicides in the agriculture industry, and can be harmful if consumed even in concentrations as low as few parts per million," says Katzir. Cities like New York are especially susceptible to a chemoterrorist threat. With many skyscrapers holding water reserves on the top of the building, a terrorist only needs to introduce poison into a tank to wreak havoc. "A terrorist wouldn't have to kill tens of thousands of people. Only 50 deaths — as horrible as that would be — would cause nationwide panic," says Katzir."
The Internet

Submission + - New Data Center Will Heat Homes in London (datacenterknowledge.com)

Submitted by
1sockchuck
1sockchuck writes: "The heat generated by thousands of servers at the new Telehouse West data center in London will soon be used to heat nearby houses and businesses. The Greater London Authority has approved a plan in which waste heat from the colocation facility will be used in a district heat network for the local Docklands community. The project is expected to produce up to nine megawatts of power for the local community."
Space

Submission + - NASA names space station treadmill after Colbert (sfgate.com)

Submitted by
willith
willith writes: "Looks like the SF Chronicle is jumping the gun by an hour or so, but they've got an AP article up detailing the results of the International Space Station Node 3 naming contest (previously on Slashdot). Comedian and fake-pundit Stephen Colbert conducted a bombastic write-in campaign and repeatedly urged his show's fan base (the "Colbert Nation") to stuff the ballot box with his name, which resulted in "Colbert" coming in first in the write-in contest with almost a quarter-million votes. Although the Node 3 component will not be named "Colbert"--NASA has instead chosen to call it "Tranquility"--one of the Node 3 components will bear the honor: the second ISS treadmill, which will be installed in Node 3, will be named the Combined Operational Load Bearing External Resistance Treadmill. The formal announcement will be made on air tonight at 22:30 EDT on the Colbert Report on Comedy Central by astronaut Sunita Williams."

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