24085376
submission
blair1q writes:
Popular (and heavily advertised) poker website Full-Tilt Poker was sued today by the US Government, following an investigation that revealed it to be a massive Ponzi Scheme. The principals in the company set up a complicated system to direct funds from subscribers' poker accounts into their own bank accounts. This was in contravention of their own claim that users' money was untouched. Players' accounts amounted to $390 million, but the company only has $60 million in the bank, having over time distributed $440 million to its own directors and executives.
20766896
submission
blair1q writes:
Today on the White House Blog the President (ok, his staff) released an infographic showing various facts about transportation energy, and how current gas prices need not be so worrisome. Highlights include rapidly increasing domestic production and rapidly decreasing prices for electric-car batteries, requesting congress to shift tax breaks from oil producers to wind/solar/geothermal energy producers, and increasing domestic oil production (yes, there's a paradox there).
20452162
submission
blair1q writes:
Venture Beat reports that a study by Berkeley National Labs has found that homes sold in California earned a premium for solar panels. The benefit ranged from $3900 to $6400 per KW of capacity. An earlier study found that proximity to solar or wind power may also raise home values. These results contradict the arguments based on degrading home values used by putative NIMBY (Not In My Back-Yard) opponents to installing or living near such energy-generating equipment.
20430184
submission
blair1q writes:
cnet reports that Google has lost the lawsuit brought by Bedrock, is infringing on Patent 5,893,120 "Methods and apparatus for information storage and retrieval using a hashing technique with external chaining and on-the-fly removal of expired data," and has exposed the Linux kernel, in which the infringing code reportedly appears, to liability for patent-license fees. RedHat also participated in the suit, arguing that the patent was invalid, but the court decided otherwise.
20280606
submission
blair1q writes:
Mozilla.org has added a new intermediate development state, Aurora, to its Firefox development chain. Coming between Nightly-Build and Beta, it adds a fourth sense to the meaning of "the current version of Firefox" (the Release version fills out the trope). And now they have populated the Aurora channel with what will eventually become Firefox 5. The intent is to reduce Release-version cycle times by allowing more live testing of new features before the integrated code gets into a Beta version. The inaugural Aurora drop includes "performance, security and stability improvements." Firefox 5 is scheduled to enter Beta on May 17, and Release on June 21. Downloads of all of the active channels are available from the Firefox channels webpage.
20214166
submission
blair1q writes:
Story with video. The plane doesn't fly so much as fall with style, but it's the size of an American penny, and it was folded with a surgical waldo (unfortunately called a robot by everyone involved). The intent is to invoke a little amazement and maybe to show that the system isn't much different from a surgeon working with ordinary surgical tools.
20170504
submission
blair1q writes:
The FSB (really just a rebadged KGB) is worried about the abilities that internet communications services such as Hotmail, Gmail, and Skype give to people they consider black-hats. In particular, they don't like the fact that these services allow encryption. (Does Gmail have native encryption?) They say they aren't going to seize or block them, yet, but are just 'studying' the situation, with an eye possibly to implementing controls like those in China. Their increased interest in the tools may be related to a DDoS attack on Russian President Dmitri Medvedev's own LiveJournal account, which he termed 'revolting and illegal'.
13388958
submission
blair1q writes:
When the solar aircraft Solar Impulse lifts off from an airfield in Switzerland on a sunny day at the end of June, it will begin the first ever manned night flight on a plane propelled exclusively by power it collects from the sun. Former Swiss air-force pilot Andre Borschberg and round-the-world balloonist Bertrand Piccard developed the aircraft, and Borschberg will be the pilot for this mission. "The flight will require a lot of attention and concentration — the plane doesn't have an auto-pilot, it has to be flown for 24 hours straight." For him, the most exciting part of the venture is, "being on the plane during the day and seeing the amount of energy increasing instead of decreasing as on a normal aircraft.
12822752
submission
blair1q writes:
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has issued the first permit for a wave-powered desalination plant in American territory to a company called Independent Natural Resources (http://www.inri.us). Waves will operate "Seadog" pumps which will lift water into the plant and onto a water wheel connected to a generator which will create electricity to operate a reverse-osmosis desalination system. The permit runs for four years. Let's hope they don't harm the environment, permanently impact drilling operations, or give Rube Goldberg any crazy ideas...
12424896
submission
blair1q writes:
Using a 5-tiered architecture (from CERN's central computer at Tier 0 to individual scientists' desk/lap/palmtops at Tier 5), CERN is distributing LHC data and computation across resources worldwide to achieve aggregate computational power unprecedented in high-energy physics research. As an example, "researchers can sit at their laptops, write small programs or macros, submit the programs through the AliEn system, find the necessary ALICE data on AliEn servers and then run their jobs" on upper-tier systems. The full grid comprises small computers, supercomputers, compute clusters, and mass-storage data centers. This system allows 1,000 researchers at 130 organizations in 34 countries to crunch the data, which are disgorged at a rate of 1.25 GB per second from the LHC's detectors.
12129780
submission
blair1q writes:
A judge in Brooklyn has excluded Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) lie-detector evidence from a trial there. However, the decision will not set a precedent, as it was made without even conducting a hearing on the method's validity, but on the principle, argued by the defense, that "juries are supposed to decide the credibility of the witness, and fMRI lie detection, even if it could be proven completely accurate, infringes on that right." That principle can be tested in later hearings, such as one scheduled for May 13, 2010, in Tennessee; in this case, the defense wants to use fMRI evidence it has already collected to prove its client is innocent. fMRI is shown to be 76-90% accurate. That number that seems significantly larger than the rate of false convictions.
11186494
submission
blair1q writes:
John McAllister, of Portland, Oregon, following a marathon 3-1/2 day session, has broken the 27-year-old high score for Asteroids, set in 1982 by Scott Safran. The attempt was broadcast via webcam, which may still be operational.
