Comment They've been /.-ed (Score 2, Informative) 246

by fredrik_haard on Monday March 22, 2010 @04:53PM (#31575220) Attached to: <em>Nexuiz</em> Founder Licenses It For Non-GPL Use

Mhm? There's an update up on the Nexuiz news page: "There appears to still be some confusion over this change. I would like to make more things clear: *Illfonic has obtained the rights to the Nexuiz's engine code, along with a license for the Quake1 engine. The engine has been licensed as non-GPL for Sony Playstation 3 and Microsoft Xbox 360, these are very closed platforms and the game had no chance of reaching them under GPL. *The Nexuiz's engine's prime developer (LordHavoc) is currently working on the Illfonic console version. The Nexuiz codebase will benefit from Illfonic's additions *IllFonic actively promotes the GPL Nexuiz for all operating systems."

Caltech Makes Flexible, 86% Efficient Solar Arrays 439

Posted by kdawson on Monday March 01, 2010 @02:46AM from the bend-me-shape-me dept.

strredwolf writes "Caltech has released a flexible solar array that converts 95% of single-wavelength incandescent light and 86% of all sunlight into electricity. Instead of being flat-panel, they stand thin silicon wires in a plastic substrate that scatters the light onto them. The total composition is 98% plastic, 2% wire — the amount of silicon used is 1/50th that of ordinary panels. So as soon as they can get these to market, solar could be very viable and cheap to produce." Update: 03/01 21:02 GMT by KD : Reader axelrosen points out evidence that the 80%+ efficiency figure is wrong. MIT's Tech Review, in covering the Caltech announcement, says that the new panel's efficiency is in the 15%-20% range — which is competitive with the current state of the art. And the Caltech panel should be far cheaper to manufacture.

Submission + - FTL Currents May Power Pulsar Beams (universetoday.com)

Submitted by thomst on Tuesday January 19, 2010 @01:46PM

thomst writes: Space.com is just now getting around to reporting a story that Spaceref.com reported on January 5 (and Universe Today reported on the 6th) about papers presented at the 215th meeting of the American Astronomical Society on a new model explaining the beam emissions from pulsars as products of superluminal currents within the spinning neutron stars' atmospheres. (The actual papers are here, here, and, especially here — all from Cornell University's arXiv.org open archive of half a million or so "eprints" in physics, mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology, quantitative finance and statistics.)

According to the authors' model, the current generated is, itself, faster than light, although the particles that compose it never individually exceed the universal speed limit, thereby preventing Einsteinian post-mortem rotation. The new model is a general explanation of the phenomenon of pulsar beam emissions that explains emissions at all observed frequencies (and different pulsars emit everything from radio waves to x-rays), which no previous model has done.

Comment Re:US Border Laptop Searches (Score 1) 174

by fredrik_haard on Tuesday January 19, 2010 @11:34AM (#30819650) Attached to: The Fourth Amendment and the Cloud

Shouldn't the same privacy logic apply even more to your laptops and personal electronic devices when you're entering U.S. borders? Having these people search your hard drive is an invasion of privacy.

What is it that they think this policy stops, anyway? If I wanted to import illegal electrons into the US, I'd just put them on a nice server right here in terrorist Europe, go to the US with a clean OS installation, and pull it encrypted over the intertubes.

Submission + - IBM Patenting Airport Profiling Technology (informationweek.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 19, 2010 @10:10AM

An anonymous reader writes: InformationWeek's Wolfe's Den reports that IBM has filed a dozen applications to patent a sophisticated airport security system, which supports passive software-based profiling of potentially dangerous passengers off of pre-programmed rules. The set up uses a collection of sensors — video, motion biometric and even olfactory — in terminals and around the airport perimeter, to supply raw data. "These patents are built on the inference engine, which [analyzes sensor data and] has the ability to calculate very large data sets in real time," says co-inventor Roger Angell. A small grid of networked computers delivers the necessary processing power. Two applications go Israeli-style security one better, applying analysis of furtive glances to detect, according to the title of the patent application, "Behavioral Deviations by Measuring Eye Movements," as well as measuring respiratory patterns. Incredibly, Angell was let go last year by IBM when it laid off tens of thousands of workers.

Submission + - A space cannon that might actually work (gizmodo.com)

Submitted by Unequivocal on Friday January 15, 2010 @08:08PM

Unequivocal writes: Chalk another one up to Jules Verne. Physicist John Hunter is proposing a space canon with a new design idea: it's mostly submerged.
Many engineers have toyed with the [space cannon] concept, but nobody has came up with an actual project that may work. Hunter's idea is simple: Build a cannon near the equator, submerged in the ocean, hooked to a floating rig...A system like this will cut launch costs from $5,000 per pound to only $250 per pound. It won't launch people into space because of the excessive acceleration, but those guys at the ISS can use it to order pizza and real ice cream.

Though it won't work on people, with launch costs that low, who cares?

In UK, Oink Admin Cleared of Fraud 156

Posted by kdawson on Friday January 15, 2010 @03:35PM from the bpi-not-best-pleased dept.

krou writes "The BBC is reporting that Alan Ellis, who ran music file sharing site Oink from his flat in the UK, has been found not guilty of conspiracy to defraud. Between 2004 and 2007, the site 'facilitated the download of 21 million music files' by allowing its some 200,000 'members to find other people on the web who were prepared to share files.' Ellis was making £18,000 a month ($34,600) from donations from users, and claimed that he had no intention of defrauding copyright holders, and said 'All I do is really like Google, to really provide a connection between people. None of the music is on my website.'" Reader Andorin recommends Torrentfreak's coverage, which includes summaries of the closing arguments.

Comment Re:Security (Score 2, Interesting) 162

by fredrik_haard on Wednesday September 28, 2005 @08:08AM (#13665757) Attached to: TPM Security Chip For Your Cell Phone

In response to this, and everyone stating "I just want to phone and SMS/MMS" But, the fact that thrird-party software works like crap if at all and integrates not-so-nicely, is the very thing allowing the operators to charge insane prizes for SMS and MMS. The same information could be sent just as easily, for a fraction of the cost (think GPRS). However, applications that allow replacement of SMS and MMS are seen as the great big enemy by the operators, which is why they are doing what they can to stop such foolishness. If API:s and platforms becomes stable enough, 3pp could replace SMS and MMS. With DRM, the operators can stop that for good, and users will just have to settle for paying ridiculous prices for simple messaging. Using expensive GPRS (no data agreement) where I live, a 'MMS' of 30K cost less than $0.1, and a 'SMS' less than $0.0001, including overhead.