Comment Re:ha! (Score 2, Informative) 277
If you take a look at the website hosting the blog (Ksplice), you might notice that "this guy" works for a company that produces software which eliminates the need for reboots...
StarCraft II Beta Signups Open 123
motang writes "StarCraftWire reports that Blizzard has started taking beta sign-ups for StarCraft II. Quoting: 'Interested parties must simply visit their Battle.net profile page, choose to opt-in for the beta, and re-submit their current system specs by way of a small downloadable piece of software.' Blizzard's Chris Sigaty said in an interview, 'As with previous betas for our real-time strategy games, the StarCraft II beta test will be multiplayer only, and players will have access to all three races — terrans, protoss, and zerg — and all of their units. We'll include a selection of multiplayer maps, but they won't necessarily include all of the maps that will be in the final version of the game. We're making some great progress on the single-player campaign, but we don't plan to do a public beta since we want to keep the story under wraps until the game's out.'"
MIT Tracking Campus Net Connections Since 1999 125
An anonymous reader writes "MIT has been monitoring student internet connections for the past decade without telling them. There is no official policy and no student input." The Tech article says, though, that the record keeping is fairly limited in its scope (connection information is collected, but not the data transferred) and duration (three days, for on-campus connections).
Technology Scans Giant Fish Schools 31
rhettb writes "Employing a new technology, MIT engineers have studied the origins of a mass gathering of hundreds of millions of fish and their subsequent migration. This is the first time a mass migration of animals has been studied from beginning to end, according to their paper published in Science. Until now biologists have depended on theory rather than data from the field, employing computer simulations and experiments in the lab. The MIT engineers employed a new technology, Ocean Acoustic Waveguide Remote Sensing (OAWRS), to record the mass migrations in detail. Developed by Makris and his team in 2006, the OAWRS is able to take images of an area 62 miles (100 kilometers) in diameter every 75 seconds. The system relies on sending sound waves that locate objects by bouncing off of them."
Comment Similar story at MIT (Score 1) 412
Funnily enough, something like this happened at MIT about a month ago. The whole MIT subnet went down for about 2 hours. Cause? Switch that was plugged into itself.
Comment Conservation of energy is broken? (Score 2, Interesting) 104
I was reading TFA that was linked, and the author said something about the monopole inducing a current "without dying out."
So I presume that he is using some sort of metal in a device to test this current. If the current doesn't die out, isn't there constant heat loss in the metal due to resistance from the current? Where is that heat loss made up, concerning conservation of energy?
Comment Look at Senator Ford's bio (Score 1) 849
http://www.scstatehouse.gov/members/bios/0606818109.html
Arrested 73 times during the civil rights movement.
US's First Internet Votes To Be Cast This Friday 143
longacre writes "If you thought online voting in America was a distant pipe dream (nightmare?), think again: the nation's first Internet-based voting system goes online this Friday, just days after the release of the Damning Report On Sequoia E-Voting Machine Security we discussed yesterday. In the first real world run of the Okaloosa Distance Ballot Piloting (ODBP) test program, election officials from Okaloosa County, Florida have set up kiosks in Germany, the UK and Japan where 600-700 absentee voters — mostly military personnel — are expected to cast ballots. Security experts still have many questions, of course, particularly on the potential for interception of voting data while it travels across oceans (via 'secure VPN'), the security of the kiosks ('hardened laptops' with no hard drives and other sensitive components disabled) and the security of the three data centers (one of which is itself housed overseas, in Barcelona, Spain), not to mention the fact that Florida doesn't exactly have a stellar record when it comes to vote counting. Florida's Dept. of State also has a fairly detailed outline of ODBP's components and processes [PDF]."
Comment Irony of NYTimes (Score 1) 888
I found it interesting that this article is embedded deep in NYTime's website. The article isn't found on the front page, and even on the technology page it only makes the "More Technology news" section.
