Charliemopps - Slashdot User

Submission + - Transparent Aluminum is 30 years late, but finally here. (phys.org)

Submitted by Charliemopps on Monday July 20, 2015 @01:21PM

Charliemopps writes: Though it's 30 years late, Transparent Aluminum, as predicted in the 1986 film Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, may finally be here. There have been many attempts to create transparent metals in the pass few years, and some have been somewhat successful, if only for a few femtoseconds.

But now, by modifying metals like Silver and Aluminum at the subwavelength scale, researchers are developing "Meta-Materials" that causes light to interact with these metals in new and interesting ways. One of their more promising goals is to create a "perfect lens" which would allow an every day person to view things as small as a virus with the naked eye. Will this eventually lead to whale sized fish tanks as clear as glass with the strength of aluminum? Only time will tell.

Submission + - Physisists observer the Majorana fermion for the first time (phys.org)

Submitted by Charliemopps on Friday October 03, 2014 @07:02AM

Charliemopps writes: For the first time Princeton University scientists have observed a Majorana fermion. A long predicted but never observed exotic particle that acts as both matter and anti-matter. The material is surprisingly stable. Being in both states at once seems to make it act very weakly with its surrounding. This could also be a major step towards quantum computing.

Submission + - Hewlett-Packard pleads guilty to Bribery (usatoday.com)

Submitted by Charliemopps on Thursday September 11, 2014 @09:42PM

Charliemopps writes: Hewlett-Packard and three subsidiaries pleaded guilty Thursday to paying bribes to foreign officials in Russia, Mexico and Poland and agreed to pay $108 million in criminal and regulatory penalties. For over 10 years Hewlett-Packard kept 2 sets of books to track slush-funds they used to bribe government officials for favorable contracts.

Submission + - FTC Files suit against Amazon for in-app purchases (cnet.com)

Submitted by Charliemopps on Thursday July 10, 2014 @01:51PM

Charliemopps writes: The Federal Trade Commission has filed suit against Amazon for illegally billing parents for in-app purchases of digital goods (My kid bought 100 slingshots on angry-birds) prior to requiring a password for making purchases. Is Google next?

Submission + - LinkedIn spam lawsuit can continue (pcworld.com)

Submitted by Charliemopps on Friday June 13, 2014 @01:50PM

Charliemopps writes: A lawsuit filed in September 2013 in the Northern District of California alleged that LinkedIn mislead its users about the number of times it would attempted to invite their contacts using their name. LinkedIn tried to get the suit dismissed but Thursday Judge Lucy Koh ruled the suit can continue.

Submission + - Vodafone admits warentless wiretaping (vodafone.com)

Submitted by Charliemopps on Friday June 06, 2014 @07:05AM

Charliemopps writes: According to Vodafone 29 governments have installed equipment that collects data on its customers without a warrant. This includes metadata, location, data, and voice. This is a rather long, and very interesting report. Vodafone is the first telecommunications company to voluntarily release this kind of information.

Submission + - Lepton Universality in question, the Standard Model may be in trouble. (phys.org)

Submitted by Charliemopps on Wednesday June 04, 2014 @09:24AM

Charliemopps writes: Over the past few years, more and more experiments have started to question one of the core assumptions of the standard model: Lepton Universality. Simply put, the weak nuclear force is assumed to work equally on all Leptons (electron, muon and tau.)

2 years ago The Babar experimental collaboration reported that measurements indicated this may not have been the case. But the measurements were not accurate enough to be definitive.

Now, a report from The LHC shows that they have analyzed their entire dataset of proton-proton collisions and found a rather large discrepancy. These measurements are still not all that accurate. These decays happen so rarely that even with this huge data set there is still about a 1% change they are incorrect.

One explanation for such measurements is an, as of yet, undiscovered charged Higgs particle. Which would have to be extremely heavy, greater than 109GEV possibly even as high as 150GEV. This is predicted by some models outside of the standard model like Supersymmetry Does this breath new life into Super symmetry? We'll have to wait for the scientific community to chime in to find out.

Submission + - IBM discovers new class of Polymers (wsj.com)

Submitted by Charliemopps on Thursday May 15, 2014 @02:40PM

Charliemopps writes: IBM Research has published a new paper to the journal, Science in which the describe a newly discovered class of Industrial Polymers that promise to revolutionize the fields of transportation, aerospace, and microelectronics. These materials resist cracking, have strength higher than that of bone, the ability to self-heal, and are completely recyclable.

Submission + - NSA confirms it has been searching US citizens data without a warrent (theguardian.com)

Submitted by Charliemopps on Tuesday April 01, 2014 @03:12PM

Charliemopps writes: There have been queries, using US person identifiers, of communications lawfully acquired to obtain foreign intelligence targeting non-US persons reasonably believed to be located outside the United States. These queries were performed pursuant to minimization procedures approved by the Fisa court and consistent with the statute and the fourth amendment.

Basically, if you communicated with someone that is "reasonably believed" to be a terrorist, you've lost constitutional protection against searches without a warrant according to the NSA. This directly contradicts what President Obama has said about the programs in the past.

Submission + - NSA hacked Huawei, stole source code (spiegel.de)

Submitted by Charliemopps on Saturday March 22, 2014 @04:52PM

Charliemopps writes: New documents from Snowden indicate that the NSA hacked into, and stole documents including source code from the Chinese networking firm Huawei. Ironically this is the same firm that the US Government has argued in the past was a threat due the Chinas possible use for the same sort of attacks the NSA committed.

Submission + - Dial 00000000 to blow up the world... no really (todayifoundout.com) 2

Submitted by Charliemopps on Saturday November 30, 2013 @10:38PM

Charliemopps writes: For 20 years the password for the US Nuclear arsenal was 00000000

Kennedy instituted a security system on all nuclear warheads to prevent them from being armed by someone unauthorized. It was called PAL, and promised to secure the entire US arsenal around the world. Unfortunately for Kenedy (and I guess, the whole world) US military leadership was more concerned about delaying a launch than securing Armageddon. They technical obeyed the order but then set the password to 8 Zeros or 00000000

Submission + - NSA scraping internet for address books (washingtonpost.com)

Submitted by Charliemopps on Monday October 14, 2013 @07:02PM

Charliemopps writes: The NSA is collecting hundreds of millions of contact lists from all over the world, many of them belonging to Americans. The intercept them from instant messaging services as they move across global data links. The NSA is gathering contact lists in large numbers that amount to a sizable fraction of the world’s e-mail and instant messaging accounts.

Submission + - Iain M. Banks Gets Asteroid Named after Him (minorplanetcenter.net)

Submitted by Charliemopps on Friday July 05, 2013 @08:21AM

Charliemopps writes: On June 23rd, 2013, asteroid (5099) was officially named Iainbanks by the IAU, and will be referred to as such for as long as Earth Culture may endure.

(Iain M. Banks (1954-2013) was a Scottish writer best known for the Culture series of science ction novels; he also wrote ction as Iain Banks. An evangelical atheist and lover of whisky, he scorned social media and enjoyed writing music. He was an extra in Monty Python & The Holy Grail.)

Submission + - Ron Paul's new primary goal is "internet freedom" (buzzfeed.com)

Submitted by Charliemopps on Thursday July 05, 2012 @05:27PM

Charliemopps writes: Ron and Rand Paul are shifting the central focus of their family's libertarian crusade to a new cause: Internet Freedom.

This seems like welcome news to me. Lets see if they can get more traction here than they did with the Fed.

Submission + - Tech company to build ghost town in NM (ap.org)

Submitted by Charliemopps on Tuesday September 06, 2011 @06:12PM

Charliemopps writes: Pegasus Global (a tech company) announced plans Tuesday to build a 20-square-mile model metropolis that would capable of supporting a population of 350,000 and could be used to test everything from renewable energy innovations to intelligent traffic systems and next-generation wireless networks.

Their projected budget for the project, $200 million would mean that housing for each person would come to $5.71 per citizen.

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