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Submission + - Airline pilots allowed to dodge security screening (wired.com)

Submitted by OverTheGeicoE
OverTheGeicoE writes: Wired has a story about TSA's known crewmember program, which allows airline pilots to bypass traditional airport security on their way to the cockpit. Pilots will be verified using a system known as CrewPASS that relies on uniforms, identity cards, fingerprints, and possibly other biometrics to authenticate flight deck crews. Once they are authenticated, they can enter secure areas in airports without any further screening. Participation at present is voluntary, and applies at Baltimore/Washington (BWI), Pittsburg (PIT), Columbia (CAE) and now Chicago O'Hare (ORD) airports. TSA is hoping to expand the program nationally.

Bruce Schneier thinks this program is "a really bad idea". Pilots are already avoiding scanners and patdowns at security checkpoints. Is this new program just a way for TSA to hide this fact from the flying public?
Apple

Submission + - Four injured in iPad fight at Beijing Apple store (physorg.com)

Submitted by
fysdt
fysdt writes: "Four people were taken to hospital and a glass door smashed as a near-riot broke out at Beijing's top Apple store among crowds rushing to snap up the popular iPad 2 tablet computer, state press said Sunday.

Angry consumers began rushing the store on Saturday afternoon after a "foreign" Apple employee allegedly stepped into the crowd to push and beat people suspected of queue jumping, the Beijing News said."
Science

Submission + - Supercomputers Crack Sixty-Trillionth Binary Digit (energy.gov) 1

Submitted by Dr.Who
Dr.Who writes: According to http://blog.energy.gov/blog/2011/04/28/supercomputers-crack-sixty-trillionth-binary-digit-pi-squared, "a value of Pi to 40 digits would be more than enough to compute the circumference of the Milky Way galaxy to an error less than the size of a proton." The article goes on to cite use of computationally complex algorithms to detect errors in computer hardware.

The article references a blog http://experimentalmath.info/blog/2011/03/Pi-goes-on-forever/ which has more background.

Disclaimers: I attended graduate school at U.C. Berkley. I am presently employed by a software company that sells an infrastructure product named PI.
NASA

Submission + - NASA Satellite Shows Southern Tornadoes From Space (ibtimes.com)

Submitted by
gabbo529
gabbo529 writes: "NASA has gotten pretty good at using satellites to track natural disasters; and a tornado that twisted through the south was no different. Like it has done previously with earthquakes, hurricanes and tsunamis, a NASA satellite has captured a devastating natural disaster from a space satellite. An image acquired by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) from NASA's Aqua satellite on April 28, distinctly shows three tornado tracks in Tuscaloosa, Ala."

Submission + - Rumors of Higgs boson discovery at LHC (livescience.com)

Submitted by Magnifico
Magnifico writes: LiveScience is reporting that scientists are abuzz over a controversial rumor that the 'God particle' has been detected by a particle-detection experiment at LHC at CERN.

The Higgs boson "rumor is based on what appears to be a leaked internal note from physicists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a 17-mile-long particle accelerator near Geneva, Switzerland. It's not entirely clear at this point if the memo is authentic... The buzz started when an anonymous commenter recently posted an abstract of the note on Columbia University mathematician Peter Woit's blog, Not Even Wrong."

This could be a flat-out hoax or a statistical anomaly or... confirmation of the particle that bestows mass on all the other particles.
PlayStation (Games)

Submission + - Playstation Network Hacked (playstation.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The Playstation network servers were taken offline on April 20th due to a outside network attack in order to verify the security of their servers.

Comment Re:cultural information (Score 5, Funny) 113

by zsimic (#30713168) Attached to: A Peek Into Netflix Queues
And then, you can take it to the next level: stats on which zip code examined which other zip code stats... The possibilities are endless: - which zip code is the most "self absorbed", (ie looked at its own stats) - which zip code is the most popular (stats looked up by other zip codes) - which zip code has the most self-confidence problems (looked at other zip codes' stats more than their own..) - which zip code is the most popular homophobic (stats most looked up by other zip codes, while the renting trend of homo movies is high) - and so on

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The algorithm for finding the longest path in a graph is NP-complete. For you systems people, that means it's *real slow*. -- Bart Miller

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