Become a fan of Slashdot on Facebook

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Submission + - Chinese University Tested Fully Recoverable Winged Rocket (dailymail.co.uk)

hackingbear writes: Xiamen University of China, in partnership with a private aerospace company in Beijing, claimed to have launched and landed a hypersonic prototype winged rocket that could travel faster than five times the speed of sound. The success of the experiment means that Chinese engineers are one step closer to building a full-fledged rocket that is capable of flying faster than 6,174kmh (3,836mph) and be recycled. The success of the experiment means that Chinese engineers are one step closer to building a full-fledged rocket that is capable reaching anywhere in the world within two hours and be recycled. The rocket, named Jia Geng 1, reached a maximum altitude of 26.2 kilometres (16.3 miles) — about one-third of the way to space — before returning to the ground during the landmark launch on Tuesday over Gobi Desert, said the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics of Xiamen University. The design enables the rocket to ride on two layers of extremely hot gas known as "shock waves" – one under its belly and the other in the air-inlet duct for its ramjet engine, unlike other experimental hypersonic vehicles such as Boeing's X-51 Waverider which rides on one layer of “shock wave,” according to South China Morning Post citing members of the team. The new design has some intriguing advantages: it can make the transition from supersonic to hypersonic speeds more smoothly, create more lift and allow the aircraft to travel farther using less fuel.

Submission + - Amazon's Alexa Team Can Access Users' Home Addresses (bloomberg.com)

An anonymous reader writes: An Amazon team auditing Alexa users’ commands has access to location data and can, in some cases, easily find a customer’s home address, according to five employees familiar with the program. The team, spread across three continents, transcribes, annotates and analyzes a portion of the voice recordings picked up by Alexa. The program, whose existence Bloomberg revealed earlier this month, was set up to help Amazon’s digital voice assistant get better at understanding and responding to commands.

Team members with access to Alexa users’ geographic coordinates can easily type them into third-party mapping software and find home residences, according to the employees, who signed nondisclosure agreements barring them from speaking publicly about the program. While there’s no indication Amazon employees with access to the data have attempted to track down individual users, two members of the Alexa team expressed concern to Bloomberg that Amazon was granting unnecessarily broad access to customer data that would make it easy to identify a device’s owner.

Comment Re:Not if, but when... (Score 2) 166

As someone who was stuck in the middle of the 'Silicon Alley' Dot-Com bubble in NYC, it certainly did seem like companies would appear overnight, flush with cash for a little while, throw outrageous parties, and then disappear as quickly as they came. And every company had a stupid name like Muffinhead, Razorfish, or Funny Garbage.

We had a company go out of business owing us $28,000 for work we did for them. The CEO was trying to give me chairs and computers in lieu of payment. Ridiculous.

Comment Never Underestimate Brute Force (Score 2) 114

Here's the thing about 'brute force' in computing. Computers can go through millions of computations and thousands of strategy scenarios in a second. As we are seeing today, a computer can simply brute force its way through encryption, simply by trying *everything* until you get the desired result, simply because the machines are so damn fast.
Brute Force can be an exceptionally powerful way of doing something, if it is tweaked to and pointed at a particular problem, in Kasperov's case, it was Chess.
Yes, the computer wasn't intelligent, but then again, neither are half the people I meet. Those people are simply brute forcing their way through life, without a single thought in their heads.....

 

Comment And by your logic... (Score 1) 91

Lots of people are in jail because we have laws against drugs. And yet, drug companies and doctors have drugs. But some drugs are just illegal because of regulation. We need to remove these excessive regulations regarding drugs, then we would not have to pay so much in taxes to imprison people. It started with Reagen and his war on drugs. It's all the right's fault. They are the reason we pay too much in taxes to support jails full of prisoners because we have too much regulation regarding drugs.

Comment You obviously do not work for a bank (Score 5, Insightful) 91

The banks make plenty of money. If you don't know how to make money being a bank, you're in the wrong business. It's like running a casino, and you're always the winner. There's a fee for everything and everything has a fee. Plus, I get to take your money and invest it in risky financial constructs, plus, I get to act as broker for every financial transaction that passes through me, which also allows me to charge more fees.

The true reason for this was pure greed, you're shilling for billionaires crying about regulations that prevent them from being trillionaires, mostly by stealing even more of your money.

Why don't you look up the CEOs salaries of say, the three largest banks in America, and tell me again how banks are not making any money? You do understand that banks make billions in profits quarterly. And that's despite paying the top dogs salaries and bonuses that the average person would never see after a lifetime of work.

But sure, go ahead a cry a river about how the ultra rich aren't ultra ultra rich because of a few regulations. I can only assume I'm addressing Jared Kusher or his dad. Or maybe his paid Russian shill.

Comment So long slashdot... (Score 1, Troll) 810

Too many right wing nut jobs here. This place is starting to sound like Fox News in the comment section.

If you people are supporting Trump, the dumbest idiot ever to get elected president, on a site for geeks and nerds (hey, he's good at the cyber!), then something here is seriously wrong.

So long, and thanks for all the fish. I'm sure that reference will go over the heads of the right wing nutjobs.

Slashdot Top Deals

Decaffeinated coffee? Just Say No.

Working...