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Submission + - Legal Tender? Maybe not. (klfy.com)

fyngyrz writes: "Lousiana has passed a bill that says people may no longer use cash for second hand transactions. The idea being to make all transactions traceable, thus foiling copper theft, etc. This move has profound implications that range from constitutional rights to bitcoin, Craigslist and so forth; I wonder if there are any slashdotters at all that support such a move."

Comment Re:Here's my guess (Score 1) 1088

LOL. Its particle physics. Considering almost the entire world has to pool resources to do this science I think cheap parts is the last thing we have to worry about. They were not detecting light sent from CERN btw. Light is notorious for its poor transmission though the earth. More likelythey both have atomic clocks and record their events.

Comment My Experience (Score 5, Informative) 472

I work at a major chip manufacturing plant. At 4.10 I was conferencing with another fab when all our PCs shutdown. 10 minutes later the place was in chaos. Now don't get me wrong the fab keeps going but my god the cost to the company of this. Say 10 sites world wide with 2-5k employees each the majority of which can't do any meaningful work. McAfee have a lot to answer for.

Comment Re:Randomness (Score 1) 94

This only applies to the Fisher-Yates method for fast shuffling cards. In this method a number is selected at random and that number corresponds to a random looking (but deterministic and repeatable) sequence of cards. Its fast but its far from perfect - just use a slower method (I'm sure on mondern hardware you would never notice anyway) and you will get back the full state space of the deck. Even still you would have to play a lot of hands before you notice. Note: I'm sure Fisher-Yates is not used on the Poker sites. If it were the sites would be open to statistical methods for mining money out of them.

Comment Re:Finally... (Score 5, Insightful) 100

Virtually ideal transistors that are easy to fabricate will revolutionize the nanoprocessor industry.

I didn't see anything that suggested fabrication would be easy. In fact the article mentions that e-beam lithography was used. If e-beam lithography is a neccessary component then you won't see this in the mainstream anytime soon. The process is slow. So slow it is never used for industrial applications. That said, it is used in acidemia all the time because nothing allows you to get build smaller structures.

Comment Re:WHY does this NEVER hapen to me? (Score 1) 926

I'll admit I'm Irish but I will also admit I have no faith in my Police. Even so, your suggestion is bordering on the mad and reeks of coverup. It also does not match in any detail what the RTE news is reporting, and I do have faith in that news service.

I would suggest that when one government smuggles explosive into another country the standard proceedure should not be just to call the airport to give them a heads up and then assume all is well.

How was Dublin Airport able to sit on the mess? You can only sit on something when your the only one who knows about it. The only ones in that position in this mess were the Slovak police.

Why did the Slovak police and government not contact thier Irish eqivelents and keep on contacting them until the explovises were returned? This is a diplomatic incident its not the sort of thing you send an email about asking for an update.

Why was the pilot allowed to take off. How is that even his decission? Its mad I tell you.

If you really think this is the way it went down then I have a bridge I think you might like.

Idle

Submission + - D.C. detective pulls gun at snowball fight (washingtonpost.com)

langelgjm writes: The Washington Post reports that during Saturday's record-breaking snowfall, hundreds of twenty- and thirty-somethings gathered in a mostly-empty area of the city and proceeded to have an enormous snowball fight. Things were all fun and games until a D.C. detective in plainclothes stopped in the middle of the fight, leaving his Hummer and confronting the crowd with his gun drawn. At first, D.C. police denied the claims, but the incident was caught on tape. The detective is currently on desk duty pending an investigation. The tech angle to all of this? 25-year-old Yousef Ali, a one-time Apple Genius, said he was inspired to start the snowball fight by a friend's Facebook status and used a dormant personal blog and extensive Twitter promotion to expand the participant list: "Basically, I used a lot of my social media promotions techniques... to really push this thing pretty big."
Science

Submission + - How to build a quantum propulsion machine (technologyreview.com)

KentuckyFC writes: According to quantum mechanics, a vacuum will be filled with electromagnetic waves leaping in and out of existence. It turns out that these waves can have various measurable effects, such as the Casimir-Polder force which was first measured accurately in 1997. Just how to exploit this force is still not clear. Today, however, a researcher at an Israeli government lab suggests how it could be possible to generate propulsion using the quantum vacuum. The basic idea is that pushing on the electromagnetic fields in the vacuum should generate an equal and opposite force. The suggestion is that this can be done using nanoparticles that interact with the vacuum's electric and magnetic fields, generating the well known Lorentz force. In most cases, the sum of Lorentz forces adds up to zero. But today's breakthrough is the discovery of various ways to break this symmetry and so use the quantum vacuum to generate a force. The simplest of which is simply to rotate the particles. So the blueprint for a quantum propulsion machine described in the paper is an array of addressable nanoparticles that can be rotated in the required way. Although such a machine will need a source of energy, it generates propulsion without any change in mass. As the research puts it with masterful understatement, this might have practical implications.

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