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Transportation

Heroic Engineer Crashes Own Vehicle To Save a Life 486

Posted by kdawson from the delta-vee dept.
scottbomb sends in this feel-good story of an engineer-hero, calling it "one of the coolest stories I've read in a long time." "A manager of Boeing's F22 fighter-jet program, Innes dodged the truck, then looked back to see that the driver was slumped over the wheel. He knew a busy intersection was just ahead, and he had to act fast. Without consulting the passengers in his minivan — 'there was no time to take a vote' — Innes kicked into engineer mode. 'Basic physics: If I could get in front of him and let him hit me, the delta difference in speed would just be a few miles an hour, and we could slow down together,' Innes explained."
Programming

The State of Ruby VMs — Ruby Renaissance 89

Posted by Soulskill from the take-your-pick dept.
igrigorik writes "In the short span of just a couple of years, the Ruby VM space has evolved to more than just a handful of choices: MRI, JRuby, IronRuby, MacRuby, Rubinius, MagLev, REE and BlueRuby. Four of these VMs will hit 1.0 status in the upcoming year and will open up entirely new possibilities for the language — Mac apps via MacRuby, Ruby in the browser via Silverlight, object persistence via Smalltalk VM, and so forth. This article takes a detailed look at the past year, the progress of each project, and where the community is heading. It's an exciting time to be a Rubyist."
Image

Stoned Wallabies Make Crop Circles 104

Posted by samzenpus from the trippity-hop dept.
It's the tripnaut! writes "The BBC reports that Australian wallabies are eating opium poppies and creating crop circles as they hop around 'as high as a kite', a government official has said. 'The one interesting bit that I found recently in one of my briefs on the poppy industry was that we have a problem with wallabies entering poppy fields, getting as high as a kite and going around in circles,' says Lara Giddings, the attorney general for the island state of Tasmania. 'Then they crash,' she added."
Spam

Lexus To Start Spamming Car Buyers In Their Cars 317

Posted by timothy from the even-as-they-sleep dept.
techmuse writes "Lexus has announced plans to send targeted messages to buyers of its cars based on the buyer's zip code and vehicle type. Unlike regular spam, these messages will be delivered directly to the buyer's vehicle, and will play to the vehicle's occupants as audio. Lexus has promised to make the messages relevant to the car buyers." Imagine the fun that some targeted malware could do — not that such a thing could happen to a Lexus.
Power

Submission + - Water from wind

Submitted by ghostcorps
ghostcorps writes: Columnist Phillip Adams writes about a new windmill design that literally extracts water from air. http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867 ,21123007-12272,00.html


Usually a windmill has three blades facing into the wind. But Whisson's design has many blades, each as aerodynamic as an aircraft wing, and each employing "lift" to get the device spinning. I've watched them whirr into action in Whisson's wind tunnel at the most minimal settings. They start spinning long, long before a conventional windmill would begin to respond. I saw them come alive when a colleague opened an internal door.

And I forgot something. They don't face into the wind like a conventional windmill; they're arranged vertically, within an elegant column, and take the wind from any direction.

The secret of Max's design is how his windmills, whirring away in the merest hint of a wind, cool the air as it passes by. Like many a great idea, it couldn't be simpler — or more obvious. But nobody thought of it before.


With three or four of Max's magical machines on hills at our farm we could fill the tanks and troughs, and weather the drought. One small Whisson windmill on the roof of a suburban house could keep your taps flowing. Biggies on office buildings, whoppers on skyscrapers, could give independence from the city's water supply. And plonk a few hundred in marginal outback land — specifically to water tree-lots — and you could start to improve local rainfall.

Comment Onsite backup is not real backup (Score 1) 715

by no_choice (#16013626) Attached to: It's 2006 and Backups For Home User Still Tricky?
I understand a lot of people do home 'backups' by using an external hard drive...but unless you are moving the external drive to a safe site outside of your home, you have not truly protected your data.

I'm not saying that having a good onsite backup is useless. It basically protects you from hardware failure or accidental deletion of your data. But it does nothing to protect your data from the risk of fire, flooding, theft, or other natural or manmade threats and disasters that can effect your entire home and its contents.

Yes, the odds of a given disaster striking over a short time frame are low. But over the course of a lifetime, it is far from unlikely that you may be affected by such an event.

How valuble is your data to you? Music, software, and the like can be replaced by spending money. But what about decades worth of photographs, home videos, diaries? What about manuscripts, source code or other data that could be the work of a lifetime?

Whatever method you choose for home backup, if your data matters to you it is essential to find a way to keep backups offsite...but this is acutally done all too rarely. It's unfortunate that more effort has not been made to create widely-availible, easy to use, and reasonably priced solutions for this problem.

Suspended Animation Tests Successful 392

Posted by CowboyNeal from the rip-van-winkle dept.
chrisb33 writes "Wired News reports that suspended animation tests have been successfully carried out with pigs. From the article: 'Long the domain of transhumanist nut-jobs, cryogenic suspension may be just two years away from clinical trials on humans (presuming someone can solve the sticky ethical problems).'" The pig that was the subject of the article was kept in suspended animation for two hours, and Duggan and his team have successfully suspended hundreds of pigs for an hour at a time. It's still a far cry from a spaceship filled with sleep pods, but would be just the ticket for doctors who need to buy extra time to save lives.

Computer Control, by Bug and by Brain 76

Posted by timothy from the different-domains dept.
electric_mongoose writes "NewScientistTech has a fascinating story about a paralysed man who can control a computer and robot arm using electrodes implanted in his brain. The electrodes measure neural signals generated when he concentrates on trying to move one of his paralysed limbs and software translates these imagined gestures into the movement of an on-screen cursor or a robotic arm. Other researchers have also revealed a way to dramatically boost the efficiency of similar brain implants in monkeys." If you don't have a handy human brain to play with, 9x320 writes points to a report on LiveScience of Wim van Eck's graduation project: a computer game similar to Pac-Man controlled, not by conventional computer code, but by the brain of an insect. From the article:"Instead of computer code, I wanted to have animals controlling the ghosts. To enable this, I built a real maze for the animals to walk around in, with its proportions and layout matching the maze of the computer game. The position of the animals in the maze is detected using colour-tracking via a camera, and linked to the ghosts in the game. This way, the real animals are directly controlling the virtual ghosts."

Western Union Blocking Money Transfers to Arabs 904

Posted by timothy from the no-get-the-even-broader-brush dept.
lowrydr310 writes "Western Union is blocking money transfers to people with Arab names. They have delayed or blocked thousands of cash deliveries on suspicion of terrorist connections simply because senders or recipients have names like Mohammed or Ahmed. 'In one example, an Indian driver here said Western Union prevented him from sending $120 to a friend at home last month because the recipient's name was Mohammed.' Western union claims they are merely following U.S. Treasury Department guidelines that scrutinize cash flows for terrorist links. I agree that Western Union shouldn't allow anyone supporting terrorism to use their service, however I'm fairly certain there are millions of people named Mohammed or Ahmed who aren't terrorists. I wonder if any other financial companies such as banks are doing the same thing."

GPL Causing Problems for Derivative Linux Distros 386

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the rules-just-make-everything-harder dept.
NewsForge (Also owned by VA) is reporting on a recent discovery by Warren Woodford about how the GPL could affect derivative Linux distributions. This could make life difficult for those small distros that are being maintained by one or two people in their spare time due to the high amount of work it creates. From the article: "Woodford does supply the source code for MEPIS' reconfigured kernel in a Debian source-package. His mistake seems to have been the assumption that, so long as the source code was available somewhere, he did not have to provide it himself if he hadn't modified it. While he has not contacted any other distributions, he suspects that he is far from the only one to make this assumption. 'We, like 10,000 other people, probably, believed we were covered by the safe harbor of having an upstream distribution available online,' Woodford says. 'I think, of the 500 distributions tracked by DistroWatch, probably 450 of them are in trouble right now per this position.'"

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