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Submission + - Most powerful laser to be built in Romania as part of a larger EU funded project (europa.eu)

Submitted by cripkd
cripkd writes: The 3rd pillar from the ELI program has been given the go ahead yesterday.
"In Romania, Magurele, the ELI pillar will focus on laser-based nuclear physics. For this purpose, an intense gamma-ray source is forseen by coupling a high-energy particle accelerator to a high-power laser."
Specs and details about why this is not your regular key-chain laser here.

Comment Re:IEEE Shameless Promotion for Speek (Score 5, Interesting) 76

by ckaylin (#40724911) Attached to: FCC Tariff Changes Mean No More Free Conference Calls

I work for FreeConference

The USF is not an "access fee", it's a tax. Companies like FreeConference do benefit from access fees, which is the settlement mechanism present in virtually all calls you make and receive. Carriers charge each other access fees to transport a call through the network. When AT&T hands off a call to a local exchange carrier (LEC), the LEC gets a small piece of the bill they collect from their customer. This is how it has worked at least since the telecom reforms of 1996. Just about any call you make on the public switched telephone network generates access fees for all the entities that handle your call. However, if all those entities are AT&T, AT&T doesn't complain about it. When they have to hand off the call to an independent, entrepreneurial LEC, they scream bloody murder.

USF is entirely different. This is a tax, not a tarif, and although some rural LECs benefit from that, that money does NOT flow to conference service providers.

Comment Re:There IS such a thing as a free lunch... (Score 2) 76

by ckaylin (#40724807) Attached to: FCC Tariff Changes Mean No More Free Conference Calls

The free conference providers do not "eat on the government's dime". They eat into AT&T's profits. Boo hoo. Unless you're an AT&T shill you should not bemoan this.

The FCC merely established a ceiling for the tariffs that rural telephone companies can collect, but otherwise did not close any "loophole".

Comment IEEE Shameless Promotion for Speek (Score 4, Informative) 76

by ckaylin (#40724745) Attached to: FCC Tariff Changes Mean No More Free Conference Calls

Sadly, the IEEE did not do its research when publishing this blatant promotion for Speek.

The free conference companies absolutely do NOT receive money from the Universal Service Fund, either directly or indirectly. In fact, they collect taxes from end users that contribute to this fund.

Free conference companies make money indirectly from access fees, which are paid to the rural telephone company via tariffs, the very mechanism that underpins our entire public switched telephone network. There is nothing nefarious, or even remotely illegal about this. In fact, in its recent ruling the FCC made it explicitly clear that this practice is legitimate.

The term “traffic pumping” is used by companies that compete with the free conference providers to attempt to put this practice in a negative light. In fact, anyone that hopes to receive a telephone call (e.g. almost every business that has a telephone number) engages in “traffic pumping”.

Who is opposed to the free conference providers? The long distance companies (who operate their own high-cost conference services), Speek (who offers a competing service), and anyone else who charges more money for less service. The simple fact is that if the free conference services have successfully commoditized what was once a high cost service.

Submission + - The Fight Against Dark Silicon

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: What do you do when chips get too hot to take advantage of all of those transistors that Moore's Law provides? You turn them off, and end up with a lot of dark silicon — transistors that lie unused because of power limitations.

As detailed in MIT Technology Review, Researchers at UC San Diego are fighting dark silicon with a new kind of processor for mobile phones that employs a hundred or so specialized cores. They achieve 11x improvement in energy efficiency by doing so.
Businesses

California Rare-Earth Mine Reopens 244

Posted by kdawson from the antimony-arsenic dept.
burnin1965 writes in to let us know that the looming crisis in rare-earth materials (which we have discussed recently) has prompted Molycorp, the erstwhile operator of a California mine closed in 2002, to announce plans to reopen it. "With increasing prices on rare earth ore, tariffs raised by the Chinese government, and the threat of embargoes that would damage United States high-tech manufacturing Molycorp now has the needed incentive to reopen the California Mountain Pass mine. They will spend the capital needed to implement badly needed updates to environmental controls that will mitigate the radioactive waste water releases that plagued the mine in the past. Chinese imports in the 90s nearly halved ore prices and the California mine experienced multiple failures in environmental controls that resulted in the release of huge volumes of radioactive waste water. Updating the mine to address the environmental issues was not financially viable due to the cheap Chinese imports so it was closed in 2002." Within two years the mine could be producing 20% of the amount of rare earths we import from China.
Science

North Magnetic Pole Racing Toward Siberia 187

Posted by kdawson from the slowly-swinging-needles dept.
RogerRoast sends along a backgrounder from Scientific American on the best current theory as to why the north magnetic pole drifts. "The NMP, also known as the dip pole, is the point on Earth where the planet's magnetic field points straight down into the ground. Scottish explorer James Clark Ross first located the NMP in 1831 on the Boothia Peninsula in what is now northern Canada... [T]he NMP drifts from year to year as geophysical processes within Earth change. For more than 150 years after Ross's measurement its movement was gradual, generally less than 15 kilometers per year. But then, in the 1990s, it picked up speed, ... bolting north–northwest into the Arctic Ocean at more than 55 kilometers per year. If it keeps going it could pass the geographic north pole in a decade or so and carry on toward Siberia."
The Internet

After IPv4, How Will the Internet Function? 320

Posted by kdawson from the fractal-connectivity dept.
An anonymous reader writes "36 countries in the world have over 100% per-capita usage of mobile phones, and this is driving a real crunch on IPv4 addresses as more and more of these devices are data-capable. The mobile network operators are acting fast to deploy IPv6, and T-Mobile USA has had an IPv6-only trial going on for over 9 months now using NAT64 to bridge to IPv4 Internet content. It is interesting to note that the original plan for IPv6 transition, dual-stack, has failed since IPv4 addresses are effectively already exhausted for many people who want them. Dual-stack also causes many other issues and has forced the IETF to generate workarounds for end users called happy eyeballs (implying that eyeballs are not happy with dual-stack), and a big stink around DNS white-listing. How will you ensure that your network, users, and services continue to work in the address-fractured world of the future where some users have only IPv4 (AT&T ), some users have only IPv6 (mobile and machine-to-machine as well as developing countries), and other Internet nodes have both?"
Earth

African Villages Glow With Renewable Energy 172

Posted by kdawson from the don't-need-no-steenkin'-grid dept.
Peace Corps Online writes "The NY Times reports that as small-scale renewable energy becomes cheaper, more reliable and more efficient, it is providing the first drops of modern power to people who live far from slow-growing electricity grids and fuel pipelines in developing countries playing an epic, transformative role. With the advent of cheap solar panels and high-efficiency LED lights, which can light a room with just 4 watts of power instead of 60, these small solar systems now deliver useful electricity at a price that even the poor can afford. 'You're seeing herders in Inner Mongolia with solar cells on top of their yurts,' says energy adviser Dana Younger. In addition to small solar projects, renewable energy technologies designed for the poor include simple subterranean biogas chambers that make fuel and electricity from the manure of a few cows, and 'mini' hydroelectric dams that can harness the power of a local river for an entire village. 'It's a phenomenon that's sweeping the world; a huge number of these systems are being installed,' says Younger."
Crime

Assange Has Signed Book Deals Worth $1.5 Million+ 452

Posted by CmdrTaco from the that's-a-lotta-leaks dept.
cold fjord writes "Julian Assange has signed a major book deal for his autobiography worth more than one million pounds (1.2 million euros, 1.5 million dollars). Assange told Britain's Sunday Times newspaper that the money would help him defend himself against allegations of sexual assault made by two women in Sweden. 'I don't want to write this book, but I have to,' he said. 'I have already spent 200,000 pounds for legal costs and I need to defend myself and to keep WikiLeaks afloat.' The Australian said he would receive 800,000 dollars (600,000 euros) from Alfred A. Knopf, his American publisher, and a British deal with Canongate is worth 325,000 pounds (380,000 euros, 500,000 dollars). Money from other markets and serialisation is expected to raise the total to 1.1 million pounds, he said. Assange is currently out on £240,000 bail under what his lawyer refers to as not so much 'house arrest' as 'manor arrest', fighting extradition to Sweden for questioning. The Telegraph adds, 'Mr Assange said he regarded himself as a victim of Left-wing radicalism. Sweden is the Saudi Arabia of feminism,' he said. 'I fell into a hornets' nest of revolutionary feminism.' .... A full extradition hearing is due in London on February 7th."
Crime

Is Reading Spouse's E-Mail a Crime? 496

Posted by timothy from the ask-the-judge dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "The Detroit Free Press reports that Leon Walker is charged with unlawfully reading the e-mail of Ciara Walker, his wife at that time, which showed she was having an affair with her second husband, who once had been arrested for beating her in front of her son. Walker says he gave the e-mails to her first husband, the child's father, to protect the boy. 'I was doing what I had to do,' says Walker. 'We're talking about putting a child in danger.' Now prosecutors, relying on a Michigan statute typically used to prosecute crimes such as identity theft or stealing trade secrets, have charged Leon Walker with a felony for logging onto a laptop in the home he shared with his wife. Prosecutor Jessica Cooper defended her decision to charge Walker. 'The guy is a hacker,' says Cooper, adding that the Gmail account 'was password protected, he had wonderful skills, and was highly trained. Then he downloaded [the emails] and used them in a very contentious way.'"
Science

Structure In Brain Linked To Varied Social Life 96

Posted by timothy from the party-node-for-party-mode dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Scientists have discovered that the amygdala, a small, almond-shaped structure deep within the temporal lobe, is important to a rich and varied social life among humans. The finding was published this week in a new study in Nature Neuroscience and is similar to previous findings in other primate species, which compared the size and complexity of social groups across those species."

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