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Submission + - NVIDIA Gets Away With Bait-and-Wwitch (pointoflaw.com)

Submitted by racquetballguy
racquetballguy writes: As part of a December 2010 settlement agreement, NVIDIA agreed to provide all owners of laptops with a defective NVIDIA GPU with a laptop of similar kind and value. In February, NVIDIA announced a $279 single-core Compaq CQ56 would be provided as a replacement to all laptops — from $2500 dual-core tablet PCs to $2000 17" entertainment notebooks. Ted Frank, from the Center for Class Action Fairness, filed an objection to the court, which was overruled by Judge Ware today. Once again, the consumers of a class action lawsuit lose.
News

Submission + - Leslie Valiant Wins 'Nobel Prize' of Computing (ispyce.com)

Submitted by
autospa
autospa writes: "ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery today named Leslie G. Valiant of Harvard University the winner of the 2010 ACM A.M. Turing Award for his fundamental contributions to the development of computational learning theory and to the broader theory of computer science. Valiant brought together machine learning and computational complexity, leading to advances in artificial intelligence as well as computing practices such as natural language processing, handwriting recognition, and computer vision. He also launched several subfields of theoretical computer science, and developed models for parallel computing. The Turing Award, widely considered the "Nobel Prize in Computing", is named for the British mathematician Alan M. Turing. The award carries a $250,000 prize, with financial support provided by Intel Corporation and Google Inc."
Facebook

Submission + - Facebook may bust up the SMS profit cartel (cnn.com) 3

Submitted by
AndyAndyAndyAndy
AndyAndyAndyAndy writes: " Fortune has a very interesting article today about wireless providers and their exorbitant profit margins for SMS handling, especially when looking at modern data plans.

'Under the cell phone industry's peculiar pricing system, downloading data to your smartphone is amazingly cheap — unless the data in question happens to be a text message. In that case the price of a download jumps roughly 50,000-fold, from just a few pennies per megabyte of data to a whopping $1000 or so per megabyte.'

A young little application called Beluga caught the attention of Facebook, which purchased the company yesterday.

The app aims to bring messaging under the umbrella of data plans, and features group messaging, picture and video messaging, and integration with other apps.

The author argues that, if successful, Beluga (or whatever Facebook ends up calling it) could potentially be the Skype/Vonage or Netflix-type competitor to the old-school cellular carriers and their steep pricing plans."
Cloud

Submission + - Facebook Resumes Talks With Skype (zdnet.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: You may soon be able to start a Skype video call with your friends on Facebook. The latest rumor suggests that Facebook and Skype have resumed talks about integrating the video conferencing technology on the social network.

The two companies first talked about a potential partnership in September 2010, but they could not reach an agreement. When Skype 5.0 was released in October 2010, the new version offered voice calling between Facebook friends, but it did not include a video chatting feature.
Space

Submission + - How to Built a Telescope That Trumps Hubble (discovermagazine.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: In cleanrooms around the country NASA and its contractors are building the James Webb Space Telescope, a marvel of engineering scheduled to launch in 2014. This gallery shows the features that will allow Webb to take the universe's baby pictures in infrared — most notably an 18-segment mirror and a 5-layer sunshield. I can't wait until Webb settles into its Lagrangian point way out beyond the moon and gets to work.
Math

Submission + - Scientists overclock people's brains (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by arshadk
arshadk writes: "Applying a tiny electrical current to the brain could make you better at learning maths, according to Oxford University scientists."
"The effects were not short-lived, either. When the volunteers whose performance improved was re-tested six months later, the benefits appear to have persisted."
Programming

Submission + - Mr. Pike, Tear Down This ASCII Wall! 2

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: To move forward with programming languages, argues Poul-Henning Kamp, we need to break free from the tyranny of ASCII. While Kamp admires programming language designers like the Father-of-Go Rob Pike, he simply can't forgive Pike for 'trying to cram an expressive syntax into the straitjacket of the 95 glyphs of ASCII when Unicode has been the new black for most of the past decade.' Kamp adds: 'For some reason computer people are so conservative that we still find it more uncompromisingly important for our source code to be compatible with a Teletype ASR-33 terminal and its 1963-vintage ASCII table than it is for us to be able to express our intentions clearly.' So, should the new Hello World look more like this?
Google

Submission + - Can Google predict election results? (blogspot.com) 1

Submitted by destinyland
destinyland writes: Google announced they've searched for clues about the upcoming U.S. election using their internal tools (as well as its "Insights for Search" tool, which compares search volume patterns for different regions and timeframes.) "Looking at the most popular searches on Google News in October, the issues that stand out are the economy," their official blog reported, adding "we continue to see many searches for terms like unemployment and foreclosures, as well as immigration and health care." But one technology reporter also notes almost perfect correspondence between some candidate's predicted vote totals from FiveThirtyEight and their current search volume on Google, with only a small margin of error for other candidates. "Oddly enough, the race with a clear link between web interest and expected voting is the unusual three-way contest [in Florida], where the breakdown between candidates should if anything be less clear-cut and predictable." And Google adds that also they're seeing national interest in one California proposition — Proposition 19, which would legalize marijuana.

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: Induction cooktop fun

Submitted by fishfrys
fishfrys writes: Besides generating heat quickly and efficiently in ferromagnetic pans, what sorts of fun things can you do with an induction cooktop? This seems like a pretty serious piece of electromagnetic equipment — boiling water can't be the only thing it's good for. I went to youtube expecting to find all sorts of crazy videos of unsafe induction cooktop shenanigans, but only found cooking. What sort of exciting, if not stupid, physics experiments can be performed with one? Hard drive scrubber... DIY Tesla coil? There's got to be something. Thanks.
Movies

Submission + - Unions urging Actors not to work on Hobbit movie

Submitted by lbalbalba
lbalbalba writes: Last we heard about The Hobbit, Guillermo Del Toro dropped out, Peter Jackson was unofficially directing and secretly auditioning actors, the movie had yet to be green-lit, and Ian McKellen was getting super-antsy about the whole thing and threatening not to play Gandalf. This shouldn't help the long-gestating movie happen any quicker: Actors guilds including SAG issued actual alerts yesterday against working on any of the Hobbit films, advising their members not to take parts in the non-union production, should they be offered them.
Link to Original Source

Submission + - US Hunters Shoot Down Google Fibre (itnews.com.au)

Submitted by aesoteric
aesoteric writes: Google has revealed that aerial fibre links to its data center in Oregon were "regularly" shot down by hunters, forcing the company to put its cables underground. Hunters were reportedly trying to hit insulators on electricity distribution poles which also hosted aerially-deployed fibre connected to Google's $US600 million data center in The Dalles. "I have yet to see them actually hit the insulator, but they regularly shoot down the fibre," Google's network engineering manager Vijay Gill told a conference in Australia. "Every November when hunting season starts invariably we know that the fibre will be shot down, so much so that we are now building an underground path [for it]."

Comment Re:Can we put one of these factories on a ship? (Score 3, Informative) 315

by WindBourne (#29453075) Attached to: Transforming Waste Plastic Into $10/Barrel Fuel
Much of the plastic is decomposing. Any net will ONLY catch large pieces while ignoring the bulk of it. Worse, it will destroy a lot of life. A decent skimmer boat would instead allow, in fact encourage, biologicals (seen as contaminate to the process) to get out of the way.

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