cephah - Slashdot User

Italian Scientists Demonstrate Cold Fusion? 815

Posted by CmdrTaco on Monday January 24, 2011 @12:00PM from the believe-it-when-it-powers-my-toaster dept.

Haffner quotes physorg which says "Italian scientists Andrea Rossi and Sergio Focardi of the University of Bologna announced that they developed a cold fusion device capable of producing 12,400 W of heat power with an input of just 400 W....when the atomic nuclei of nickel and hydrogen are fused in their reactor, the reaction produces copper and a large amount of energy. The reactor uses less than 1 gram of hydrogen and starts with about 1,000 W of electricity, which is reduced to 400 W after a few minutes. Every minute, the reaction can convert 292 grams of 20C water into dry steam at about 101C. Since raising the temperature of water by 80C and converting it to steam requires about 12,400 W of power, the experiment provides a power gain of 12,400/400 = 31."

Thermal Nanotape Promises Cooler, Healthier Chips 48

Posted by CmdrTaco on Monday January 24, 2011 @11:08AM from the what's-wrong-with-grease dept.

Blacklaw writes "A team of researchers comprised of members from the Semiconductor Research Corporation and Stanford University has developed a new thermal nanotape which it claims will lead to chips that run cooler and last longer. The thermal nanotape, constructed of binder materials surrounding carbon nanotubes, promises to lead to the creation of semiconductors — including CPUs and GPUs — that don't suffer from the rigors of frequent temperature changes, known as thermal cycling."

The Matrix Re-Reloaded 640

Posted by CmdrTaco on Monday January 24, 2011 @09:47AM from the you-know-you'd-watch-it dept.

derGoldstein writes "According to Keanu Reeves: ' Matrix 4 and 5 are coming.' At an event that took place at the London International School of Performing Arts, 'Reeves revealed that he met with the Wachowskis around Christmas. They told him that they completed script treatments for two more Matrix installments. They are planning to make the films in 3D and have already met with James Cameron to discuss the advantages and disadvantages of the technology. Reeves added that he's excited to return as Neo and promised that the treatments will truly revolutionize the action genre like the first Matrix film did.'"

Artificial Retinas Can Balance a Pencil On Its End 165

Posted by samzenpus on Sunday January 23, 2011 @06:16PM from the for-all-your-pencil-balancing-needs dept.

mikejuk writes "A team of researchers has built a neural information system that is good enough and fast enough to balance a pencil in real time. If you think it's an easy task, try it! The Institute of Neuroinformatics, ETH / University Zurich have used what look like video cameras to do the job but in fact they are analog silicon retinas. They work so fast that even with fairly basic hardware they can balance a pencil."

Why Doesn't Exercise Lead To Weight Loss? 978

Posted by timothy on Monday November 09, 2009 @02:40AM from the that-would-be-too-easy dept.

antdude writes "The New York Times' Well blog reports that 'for some time, researchers have been finding that people who exercise don't necessarily lose weight.' A study published online in September 2009 in The British Journal of Sports Medicine was the latest to report apparently disappointing slimming results. In the study, 58 obese people completed 12 weeks of supervised aerobic training without changing their diets. The group lost an average of a little more than seven pounds, and many lost barely half that. How can that be?"

What Does Google Suggest Suggest About Humanity? 513

Posted by samzenpus on Friday November 06, 2009 @03:40PM from the fire-makes-things-hot dept.

CNETNate writes "You'll laugh, but mostly you'll cry. Some of the questions Google gets asked to deliver results for is beyond worrying. 'Can you put peroxide in your ear?', 'Why would a pregnancy test be negative?', and 'Why can't I own a Canadian?' being just a selection of the truly baffling — and disturbing — questions Google is regularly forced to answer."

Retrievable iPhone Numbers Raise Privacy Issue 146

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday September 29, 2009 @04:58PM from the how-about-never-is-never-good-for-you dept.

TechnologyResource writes "When a couple of voicemails didn't show up recently, I thought nothing of it until a friend asked me if I'd gotten his message — people just don't call me that often. But the iPhone is indeed a phone, as some users are reportedly being reminded when they get phone calls from the publishers of a free app they've downloaded from the App Store. The application in question, mogoRoad, is a real-time traffic monitoring application. As invasive and despicable as that sounds, it raises another question: how did the company get hold of the contact information for those users? Mogo claims the details were provided by Apple, but Apple doesn't disclose that information to App Store vendors. French site Mac 4 Ever did some digging (scroll down for the English version) and determined it was possible — even easy — for an app to retrieve the phone number of a unit on which it was installed."

IPv6 Adoption Will Grow With Smart Grid Adoption, Hopes Cisco 169

Posted by timothy on Thursday September 17, 2009 @05:36PM from the watch-for-rent-seeking-through-legislation dept.

darthcamaro writes "A lot of people in the US have not seen a use case for the use of IPv6 yet, since we've got plenty of IPv4 addresses. But what happens when the entire electrical grid gets smart? The so-called Smart Grid will need a networking transport mechanism that will connect potentially hundreds of millions of people and devices. Networking giant Cisco sees IP (internet protocol) as the right transport and IPv6 as the logical choice for addressing. 'Pv6 is an interesting discussion and one that occupies a lot of bandwidth at Cisco,' Marie Hattar, Cisco's vice president of network systems and security solutions marketing said. 'Some people say that for smaller deployments, we could get away with IPv4, but the smart grid has a number of parts. The point is that if you're looking to build this [smart grid] out, why not build it out on the scalable protocol from the get-go?'"

Comment Re:How stupid.... (Score 1) 287

by cephah on Thursday August 13, 2009 @04:59PM (#29057603) Attached to: Yahoo Revives Pay-Per-Email, With Charitable Twist

Or he has all his other email addresses forward to his gmail account. It's what I do - that way I don't get bothered by the false positives that e.g. my university account delivers, gmail does it for me.

Orbit Your Own Satellite For $8,000 208

Posted by kdawson on Sunday August 02, 2009 @02:34PM from the be-the-first-on-your-block dept.

RobGoldsmith sends word of Interorbital's TubeSat Personal Satellite Kit, which allows anyone to send a half-pound payload to low-earth orbit for $8,000. Your satellite will fly to orbit from Tonga atop an Interorbital Systems NEPTUNE 30 rocket along with 31 other TubeSats. It will function for several weeks, then its orbit will decay and it will burn up in the atmosphere. Interorbital plans to send up a load of 32 TubeSats every month. If you pay in full in advance, you get slotted onto a particular scheduled launch. Here are Interorbital's product page and brochure (PDF).

Windows and Linux Not Well Prepared For Multicore Chips 626

Posted by timothy on Sunday March 22, 2009 @03:30PM from the until-that-invisible-hand-flexes dept.

Mike Chapman points out this InfoWorld article, according to which you shouldn't immediately expect much in the way of performance gains from Windows 7 (or Linux) from eight-core chips that come out from Intel this year. "For systems going beyond quad-core chips, the performance may actually drop beyond quad-core chips. Why? Windows and Linux aren't designed for PCs beyond quad-core chips, and programmers are to blame for that. Developers still write programs for single-core chips and need the tools necessary to break up tasks over multiple cores. Problem? The development tools aren't available and research is only starting."

Reverse Engineering a Missile Launcher Toy's Interface 118

Posted by Soulskill on Saturday February 14, 2009 @11:44AM from the target-that-explosion-and-fire dept.

nitro writes "A fairly in-depth technical report by the security researchers at TippingPoint was released on how to reverse engineer the proprietary protocol for controlling a USB missile-launching toy system. They develop an iPhone application to control the device. 'The hardware is coupled with a simple GUI controller written in Delphi (MissileLauncher.exe) and a USB Human Interface Device (HID) interface written in C++ (USBHID.dll). The toys lost their allure within minutes of harassing my team with a barrage of soft missile shots. That same night I thought I would be able to extend the fun factor by coding up a programmatic interface to the launchers in Python. ... One interesting thing is that we have a lot more granular control of the turret movement now than we did with the original GUI. I wrote two simple loops to count the number of possible horizontal and vertical ticks and the results were 947 horizontal and 91 vertical versus 54 and 10 from the original GUI respectively. Granular control allows you to slowly and quietly reposition the turret for stealthy attacks.'"

Comment Some day, this will happen... (Score 3, Funny) 414

by cephah on Thursday January 22, 2009 @04:19PM (#26564977) Attached to: Microsoft Brings Back DRM

MS Worker: "Sir, I hear you've decided to reintroduce DRM. Is this true?"
MS Head of Mobile: "Yep, I'm bringin' it back! Hurr!" *clicks on remote, turning on Justin Timberlake - Sexy Back*

Justin Timberlake: I'm bringin' seeexy bac-- **DRM AUTHORIZATION FAILURE, PLEASE CONTACT VENDOR FOR SUPPORT OR REPURCHASE ONLINE. THANK YOU FOR USING MSN MUSIC**

MS Head of Mobile: "Ah damn it all."
MS Worker: "So I'm guessing we're dropping the idea after all?"
MS Head of Mobile: "Nonsense! Call a press conference, I'll just use my cunning wit and charm to sell this idea to the masses. They'll love it!"
MS Worker: "*sigh* Yes, Sir."

Britannica Goes After Wikipedia and Google 385

Posted by CmdrTaco on Thursday January 22, 2009 @10:15AM from the let-us-know-how-that-works-out-for-ya dept.

kzieli writes "Britannica is going to allow viewers to edit articles, with changes to be reviewed by editors within 20 minutes. There is also a bit of a rant against Google for ranking Wikipedia above Britannica on most search terms."

Conficker Worm Could Create World's Biggest Botnet 220

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday January 20, 2009 @06:18AM from the holding-our-collective-breath dept.

nk497 writes "The worm that's supposedly infected almost nine million PCs running Windows, dubbed Cornficker or Downadup, could lead to a massive botnet, security researchers have said. The worm initially spread to systems unpatched against MS08-067, but has since 'evolved and is now able to spread to patched computers through portable USB drives through brute-force password-guessing.'"

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