Hugh Pickens writes "Rachel Swaby reports that a self-driving car and a seasoned race-car driver recently faced off at Northern California's three-mile Thunderhill Raceway loop. The autonomous vehicle is a creation from the Center for Automotive Research at Stanford (CARS). 'We tried to model [the self-driving car] after what we've learned from the best race-car drivers,' says Chris Gerdes (who talks more about the development of autonomous cars in this TED talk). So who won? Humans, of course. But only by a few measly seconds. 'What the human drivers do is consistently feel out the limits of the car and push it just a little bit farther,' explained Gerdes. 'When you look at what the car is capable of and what humans achieve, that gap is really actually small.' Because the self-driving car reacts to the track as if it were controlled in real time by a human, a funny thing happens to passengers along for the ride. Initially, when the car accelerates to 115 miles per hour and then brakes just in time to make it around a curve, the person riding shotgun freaks out. But a second lap looks very different. Passengers tend to relax, putting their faith in the automatically spinning wheel. 'We might have a tendency to put too much confidence in it,' cautioned Gerdes. 'Watching people experience it, they'll say, oh, that was flawless.' Gerdes reaction: 'Wait wait! This was developed by a crazy professor and graduate students!'"

Qedward writes "The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has objected to a variety of new generic top-level domains (gTLDs) ranging from .porn and .sexy to .wine and .bar and .bible, according to records of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). The organisation said in June it had received 1930 applications for gTLD 'strings,' of which 911 came from North America and 675 from Europe. Saudi Arabia's Communication and Information Technology Commission, the IT and communications regulator, has objected to the .gay string and asked ICANN to refuse the application for the new gTLD. 'Many societies and cultures consider homosexuality to be contrary to their culture, morality or religion,' CITC said. 'The creation of a gTLD string which promotes homosexuality will be offensive to these societies and cultures,' it added."

Several readers sent word that Microsoft has selected a release date for Windows 8: October 26th. Steven Sinofsky made the announcement today at the company's annual sales meeting. The new version of the operating system will be sent to manufacturers next month, giving them plenty of time to prepare for general availability.

ElementOfDestruction writes "Italy has joined Germany in halting the production of energy from atomic power generation. This differs from Germany in that the Italian decision was made by a public vote, rather than a government mandated shutdown. 57% of Italian Households voted in this public measure. While democracy should trump all, is it wise to hold majority opinion so high that it slows down progress?"

eldavojohn writes "Recent research on bumble bees has proven that the tiny bee is better than computers at the traveling salesman problem. As bees visit flowers to collect nectar and pollen they discover other flowers en route in the wrong order. But they still manage to quickly learn and fly the optimally shortest path between flowers. Such a problem is NP-Hard and keeps our best machines thinking for days searching for a solution but researchers are quite interested how such a tiny insect can figure it out on the fly — especially given how important this problem is to networks and transportation. A testament to the power of even the smallest batch of neurons or simply evidence our algorithms need work?"

brumgrunt sent in a fun little piece to get your brain going on a cloudy monday morning. Despite countless viewings of BTTF I still never thought of a few of these. "Throughout Back To The Future Part III, there has to be two Deloreans in 1885. Also, why don't George and Lorraine recognize their son? Why doesn't the time machine disappear in the alternative 1985? These and more Back To The Future paradoxes explored..."

tekgoblin writes "Joshua Walker spent the last few months creating a masterpiece. He created the Starship Enterprise 1701-D from Star Trek: The Next Generation in Minecraft using just blocks. He recorded a short video of him explaining how he did it and even gave us a sneak peek at the partially completed ship." He also posted on the Penny-Arcade forums about how he did it. If you aren't impressed by that, perhaps you should check out a 16-Bit ALU also implemented in Minecraft which totally reminded me of one of my favorite XKCD comics.

krulgar writes "On January 10, 2011, Xmarks will be closing their doors. A free service being replaced by free software. It would still be nice to have a single way to keep my bookmarks from my work machine in sync with my home machines and my mobile devices without exerting much effort. Xmarks seemed to be the only ones with that clear vision, maybe the replacement tools can grow into this space, but it's still a little sad to see a useful tool wave goodbye."

An anonymous reader writes "Apple yesterday applied for a patent to allow remotely disabling electronic devices when 'unauthorized usage' is detected. The patent application covers using the camera to take pictures of the unauthorized user and using GPS to determine location, and it involves ascertaining whether the phone has been hacked or jailbroken, using those as criteria for detecting 'suspicious behavior.' The patent would allow the carrier or any other 'authorized' party to disable or restrict the functionality of the device. Is this Apple's latest tool to thwart jailbreaking?"

jamie spotted this eye-opening presentation (here's a longer explanation) about how easy it is to access sensitive data on many sites using memcached, writing "If you already know what memcached is, skim to slide #17. The jaw-drop will happen around slide #33. Turns out many websites expose their totally-non-protected memcached interface to the Internet, including gowalla, bit.ly, and PBS."

An anonymous reader writes "The Droid X forums have posted a procedure to root the new Motorola Droid X, putting to rest Andoid fans' fears that they would never gain access to the device's secrets due to a reported eFuse that would brick the phone if certain boot files were tampered with. Rooting the phone is the first step in gaining complete control over the device."

eDarwin writes "Researchers have discovered two previously unknown species of bottom-dwelling fish in the Gulf of Mexico, living right in the area affected by the BP oil spill. Researchers identified new species of pancake batfishes, a flat fish rarely seen because of the dark depths they favor. They are named for the clumsy way they 'walk' along the sea bottom, like a bat crawling."

Julie188 writes "Thousands of people got a nasty e-mail this morning from Cisco. The company was warning people that its attendee registration database for its Cisco Live 2010 event was hacked. Cisco Live 2010 is the company's annual user conference, held last week in Las Vegas with an estimated 18,000 in attendance. If it's not embarrassing enough for a company that sells security gear to get hacked, the e-mail also went out to people who didn't register and didn't attend the event. That raises questions about exactly what database was pried open and how bad the damage is. Cisco's e-mail said the hole was quickly closed and only business-card type information was exposed."

tekgoblin writes "Today Apple releases the much anticipated iOS 4 for iPhones and iPod Touches. No word on when we will see this update on the iPad." Can't wait to see all the neat new stuff that won't run on my stale phone.

arcticstoat writes "Solid state disks could soon catch up with mechanical hard drives in terms of cost and capacity, thanks to a new data-packed chip developed by a scientist at the University of North Carolina. Using a uniform array of 10nm nanodots, each of which represents a single bit, Dr. Jay Narayan created a data density of 1 terabit per square centimeter. The end result was a 4cm2 chip that holds 4Tb of data (512GB), but the university says that the nanodots could have a diameter of just 6nm, enabling an even greater data density. The university explains that the nanodots are 'made of single, defect-free crystals, creating magnetic sensors that are integrated directly into a silicon electronic chip.' Dr. Narayan says he expects the technology overtaking traditional solid state disk technology within the next five years."