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Air Force Blocks NY Times, WaPo, Other Media 372

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday December 14, 2010 @10:42PM from the horses-and-barns dept.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the Air Force, not content with blocking WikiLeaks and its mirrors, has begun blocking media sites carrying WL documents. "Air Force users who try to view the websites of the New York Times, Britain's Guardian, Spain's El Pais, France's Le Monde or German magazine Der Spiegel instead get a page that says, 'ACCESS DENIED. Internet Usage is Logged & Monitored'... The Air Force says it has blocked more than 25 websites that contain WikiLeaks documents, in order to keep classified material off unclassified computer systems. ... The move was ordered by the 24th Air Force... The Army, Navy, and Marines aren't blocking the sites, and the Defense Department hasn't told the services to do so, according to spokespeople for the services and the Pentagon."

Submission + - Microsoft Seeks 1-Click(er) Patent

Submitted by theodp on Friday December 10, 2010 @02:46PM

theodp writes: Assuming things go patent reformer Microsoft's way, answering multiple choice, true/false, or yes/no questions in a classroom could soon constitute patent infringement. Microsoft's just-published patent application for its Adaptive Clicker Technique describes how 'multiple different types of clickers' can be used by students to answer questions posed by teachers. The interaction provided by its 'invention', explains Microsoft, 'increases attention and enhances learning.' Microsoft's Interactive Classroom Add-In for Office (video) provides polling features that allow students to 'answer and respond through their individual OneNote notebooks, hand-held clickers, or computers, and the results display in the [PowerPoint] presentation.' So, did Bill Gates mention to Oprah that the education revolution will be patented?

Submission + - Laser Camera Can See Around Corners (upi.com) 1

Submitted by

Hugh Pickens

on Friday November 19, 2010 @12:01AM

Hugh Pickens writes: "Researchers at MIT have developed a laser camera that can "see" around corners and take pictures of a scene not in its direct line of sight. The camera system fires extremely short bursts of light that can reflect off one object, such as the open door of a room, and then off a second object inside the room before reflecting back to the first object and being captured by the camera, after which algorithms can use the information to reconstruct the hidden scene exploiting the fact that it is possible to capture light at extremely short time scales, about one quadrillionth of a second. By continuously gathering light and computing the time and distance that each pixel has traveled, the camera creates a "3D time-image" of the scene it can't directly see. "It's like having X-ray vision without the X-rays," says Professor Ramesh Raskar. "We're going around the problem rather than going through it.""

Comment Re:Comparing a Car to a Two Stroke Engine?? (Score 1) 528

by runlevel 5 on Tuesday September 04, 2007 @08:02PM (#20472295) Attached to: Green Cars You Can't Buy

Actually, nearly all lawnmowers are built on four-stroke engines. Notice how lawnmowers have separate fuel and oil tanks. Weedwackers and chain saws typically use two-stroke engines because they need to be able to run at different angles and orientations to do their jobs. These engines run on a mixture of fuel and oil, which they use simultaneously as a lubricant and a fuel. In simple four-stroke engines, the oil from the oil pan would run into the piston if the engine were tilted to extreme angles. Four-stroke engines make power 1 out of every 4 strokes, while two-stroke engines make power every other stroke. Four-strokes are generally more powerful, more efficent, and cleaner, though, because they burn a much more pure mixture of fuel and air, with very little oil contamination.

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