Comment Lord British! (Score 3, Informative) 614
Teenage video-game prodigy and self-made astronaut Richard Garriott!
Check out the new SourceForge HTML5 internet speed test! No Flash necessary and runs on all devices.
×
Comment Potential dissent (Score 1) 187
"The stumbling blocks have included concerns about interference with... wireless microphones"
So what's the over/under for the NSA torpedoing the plan?
Comment Re:Rubric for e-reader ubiquity (Score 1) 324
For some reason I just always imagined Starfleet officers got paid in pajamas.
Comment Re:Rubric for e-reader ubiquity (Score 1) 324
Hey, you FTFM. Thanks!
Comment Rubric for e-reader ubiquity (Score 5, Insightful) 324
When I can casually toss it onto my desk like Picard without worrying about the thing shattering, it will have officially replaced books.
Comment Re:To be fair (Score 1) 276
I think you may have missed the other half of my post -- the infrastructure needs to be in place before innovation (ie, technology that makes use of or requires 100Mbps) can occur. This is a strategic plan for USian telecommunications we're discussing: the FCC's tack puts US businesses at a major R&D disadvantage compared to foreign competitors, and this is a failing of the plan.
Comment Re:To be fair (Score 3, Insightful) 276
100Mbps is for innovation. You're right -- 10 or 25Mbps is plenty for now. So imagine what could be done with 100Mbps; while Americans are imagining it, people from other countries are, in fact, experimenting with and developing it.
"640K ought to be enough for anybody."
Comment Re:Complaining About an Unfinished Spec? (Score 2, Insightful) 426
I agree -- I really look at this message as less a death sentence for HTML5 than an attempt by Youtube (Google) to direct the development of the standard to something more robust.
Comment Re:CIPA Compliance (Score 1) 207
Just about to make the same point. And it's not just public schools -- the Catholic school system in Philadelphia also participates in E-Rate, for example.
Puzzle In xkcd Book Finally Cracked 90
An anonymous reader writes "After a little over five months of pondering, xkcd fans have cracked a puzzle hidden inside Randall Munroe's recent book xkcd: volume 0. Here is the start of the thread on the xkcd forums; and here is the post revealing the final message (a latitude and longitude plus a date and time)."
Submission + - Second 3G GSM Cipher Cracked (threatpost.com) 1
Trailrunner7 writes: A group of cryptographers has developed a new attack that has broken Kasumi, the encryption algorithm used to secure traffic on 3G GSM wireless networks. The technique enables them to recover a full key by using a tactic known as a related-hey attack, but experts say it is not the end of the world for Kasumi. Kasumi, also known as A5/3, is the standard cipher used to encrypt communications on 3G GSM networks, and it's a modified version of an older algorithm called Misty. In the abstract of their paper, the cryptographers say the attack can be implemented easily on one standard PC. "In this paper we describe a new type of attack called a sandwich attack, and use it to construct a simple distinguisher for 7 of the 8 rounds of KASUMI with an amazingly high probability of 214. By using this distinguisher and analyzing the single remaining round, we can derive the complete 128 bit key of the full KASUMI by using only 4 related keys, 226 data, 230 bytes of memory, and 232 time. These complexities are so small that we have actually simulated the attack in less than two hours on a single PC, and experimentally verified its correctness and complexity."
Submission + - Neural Nets Make Art While High (arbornet.org)
brilanon writes: telepathic-critterdrug is a controversial fork of the open source artificial-life sim Critterding, a physics sandbox where blocky creatures evolve neural nets in a survival contest. What we've done is to give these animals an extra retina which is shared with the whole population. It's extended through time like a movie and they can write to it for communication or pleasure. Since this introduces the possibility of the creation of art, we decided to give them a selection of narcotics, stimulants and psychedelics. This is not in Critterding.
The end result is a high-colour cellular automata running on a substrate that thinks and evolves, and may actually produce hallucinations in the user.
The end result is a high-colour cellular automata running on a substrate that thinks and evolves, and may actually produce hallucinations in the user.
Submission + - An Android Developer's Top 10 Gripes (developer.com)
gkunene writes: A veteran mobile application developer vents his frustration with a list of 10 things he loves to hate about Android.
Submission + - Crumbling reactor springs tritium leak (rutlandherald.com) 1
mdsolar writes: The decrepit nuclear reactor Vermont Yankee http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/07/09/08/2036240/New-Legislation-Proposed-For-Nuclear-Safety has sprung a radioactive leak similar to those at other poorly run reactors in Illinois (Braidwood, Byron and Dresden), Arizona (Palo Verde) and New York (Indian Point). The problem of radioactive tritium leaks even threatens Champagne from France http://www.greenpeace.org/international/news/radioactive-champagne-30-06-06 And, 55 people were intentionally poisoned with tritium in India last year http://weblog.greenpeace.org/nuclear-reaction/2009/12/tritium_poisoning_at_indias_ka.html
Tritium and its decay product helium 3 are incredibly valuable and there is currently a shortage of helium 3 http://science.slashdot.org/story/09/11/23/1859204/Program-To-Detect-Smuggled-Nuclear-Bombs-Stalls What, besides shutting down leaky old nuclear plants, could be done to better control release of tritium into the environment?
Tritium and its decay product helium 3 are incredibly valuable and there is currently a shortage of helium 3 http://science.slashdot.org/story/09/11/23/1859204/Program-To-Detect-Smuggled-Nuclear-Bombs-Stalls What, besides shutting down leaky old nuclear plants, could be done to better control release of tritium into the environment?
Submission + - FIRST Robotics Competition 2010 Worldwide Kickoff (singularityhub.com)
kkleiner writes: This past Saturday Dean Kamen’s hugely successful FIRST robotics competition launched its annual kickoff party to hoards of excited high school students, teachers, and sponsors across the globe. Now in its 19th year, the annual competition features 1,809 teams from 12 countries, comprising more than 45,000 high school students. This year’s competition, dubbed “Breakaway”, is a modified version of soccer. Two alliances of three teams each compete on a 27 x 54 field with bumps attempting to earn points by collecting soccer balls in their goals.
