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Comment It's a disease (Score 1) 578

by semiazas (#37786822) Attached to: TSA Doing Random Truck Searches On Tennessee Highway
Only a matter of time before mandatory radiation exposure and/or hand rape. What's the next step? Body cavity searches? TSA needs to change or go away. It's absolutely unconscionable that TSA can impose ANY method of search, regardless of how obtrusive, in the name of security. Adding insult to injury, anyone who complains is immediately flagged as a terrorist sympathizer, dragged off and given the third degree with a bonus of no refund on missed flights.
Education

Submission + - Man captures entire univers in on image (skysurvey.org)

Submitted by katarn
katarn writes: Nick Risinger traveled the world, using a robotic camera mount and six air cooled cameras each fitted with their own lenses and filters, to capture the entire universe in one image; the largest full true-color sky survey. The project took a year of time and logged 60,000 miles. The final image is made up of 37,000 individual photos, has a resolution of 5000 megapixels, and took months to piece together. Risinger states: "Travel was necessary as capturing the full sphere of the night sky brought with it certain limitations. What might be seen in the northern hemisphere isn't always visible from the south and, likewise with the seasons, what may be overhead in the summer is below the horizon in the winter. Complicated by weather and moon cycles, this made for some narrow windows of opportunity which we chased through the remote areas of Arizona, Texas, Nevada, Colorado, California and Oregon."
Patents

Submission + - Google Patents Detecting, Tracking, Targeting Kids

Submitted by
theodp
theodp writes: "A newly-issued Google patent for Rendering Advertisements With Documents Having One or More Topics Using User Topic Interest describes how to detect the presence of children by 'using evidence of sophistication determined using user actions' and tracking their behavior using the Google Toolbar and other methods to deliver targeted ads. Which is interesting, since the Google Terms of Service supposedly prohibit the use of Services by anyone 'not of legal age.' The inventor is Google Principal Scientist Krishna Bharat, who is a co-inventor of another pending Google patent for inferring searchers' ethnicity, reading level, age, sex and income (and storing it all)."
Technology

Stanford Team Developing Super 3D Camera 105

Posted by samzenpus from the worth-a-thousand-words-cubed dept.
Tookis writes "Most of us are happy to take 2D happy snaps with single lens digital cameras. Imagine if you had a digital camera that could more accurately perceive the distance of all objects in its field of vision than your own eyes and brain. That's exactly what a team of researchers from Stanford University are working on — and it could even be affordable for ordinary consumers."
The Internet

The International Cyber Cop Unit 127

Posted by samzenpus from the cool-job-title dept.
coondoggie writes "A group of international cyber cops is ramping up plans to fight online crime across borders. The unit, known as the Strategic Alliance Cyber Crime Working Group, met this month in London and is made up of high-level online law enforcement representatives from the U.S., Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom. One of the main goals of the group is to fight cyber crime in a common way by sharing intelligence, swapping tools and best practices, and strengthening and synchronizing their respective laws."
Technology

Silent Microchip 'Fan' Has No Moving Parts 136

Posted by samzenpus from the cool-off dept.
Stony Stevenson writes "Researchers in the US have developed a microchip fan with no moving parts that operates silently and generates enough wind to cool a laptop computer. The solid-state fan, developed with support from the US National Science Foundation (NSF), is touted as the most powerful and energy efficient fan of its size. The device produces three times the flow rate of a typical small mechanical fan and is one-fourth the size. The technology has the power to cool a 25W chip with a device smaller than one cubic-cm and can someday be integrated into silicon to make self-cooling chips, according to the researchers."
Science

Scientists Create Room Temperature Superconductor 380

Posted by samzenpus from the not-that-cold-anymore dept.
StarEmperor writes "A team of Canadian and German scientists have fabricated a room-temperature superconductor, using a highly compressed silicon-hydrogen compound. According to the article,"The researchers claim that the new material could sidestep the cooling requirement, thereby enabling superconducting wires that work at room temperature.""
Windows

Windows Vista SP1 Meeting Sour Reception In Places 501

Posted by Zonk from the just-a-bit-more-testing dept.
Stony Stevenson writes "A day after it was released for public download, Windows Vista SP1 is drawing barbs from some computer users who say the software wrecked their systems. 'I downloaded it via Windows Update, and got a bluescreen on the third part of the update,' wrote 'Iggy33' in a comment posted Wednesday on Microsoft's Vista team blog. Iggy33 was just one of dozens of posters complaining about Vista Service Pack 1's effect on their PCs. Other troubles reported by Vista SP1 users ranged from a simple inability to download the software from Microsoft's Windows Update site to sudden spikes in memory usage. To top it all off, the service pack will not install on computers that use peripheral device drivers that Microsoft has deemed incompatible."
Music

Apple Mulls Flat-Rate "Unlimited Music" Option 355

Posted by Zonk from the sounds-delicious dept.
Mike writes "Apple is in discussions with the big music companies about an 'all you can eat' model for buying music that would give customers free access to its entire iTunes music library in exchange for paying a premium for its iPod and iPhone devices. Finally, it looks like the industry (or at least Apple) is 'getting it'. The real question is not whether the big music companies will go for it, but rather, who will be the first one to get smart and agree to offer it?"
Government

Ohio Investigating Possible Vote Machine Tampering Last Year 213

Posted by Zonk from the bit-of-dirty-pool dept.
MozeeToby writes "The Columbus Dispatch is reporting on a criminal investigation currently being performed in Franklin County Ohio. It seems several voting machines listed a candidate as withdrawn from the race when in fact he wasn't. By the time the investigations tracked down which machines had been affected, the candidate's name was back on the ballot. Normally, we could dismiss this as confusion or a mistake on the part of the voter(s) who noticed it. In this case, the person who first noticed the discrepancy was Ohio Secretary of state Jennifer Brunner. Further compounding matters, the Franklin County Board of Elections had disabled virtually all logging on the machines to speed setup of the ballot. Naturally, the county board remains skeptical of these accusations."
The Internet

Canadian TV to Adopt DRM-Free BitTorrents 229

Posted by Zonk from the would-love-that-from-pbs dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Canada's public broadcast network, CBC, is to adopt DRM free BitTorrent distribution of one of its major primetime shows, Canada's Next Great Prime Minister. The effort has already been hailed by Canadian copyright guru Michael Geist, who expects the decision to add fuel to Canada's net neutrality debate. A CBC producer behind the show told CNET that the motivation for the move was that CBC 'wanted the show to be as accessible as possible to as many Canadians as possible, in the format that they want it in.' As for DRM, she said 'I think DRM is dead, even if a lot of broadcasters don't realize it.' She added that 'if it's bad for the consumers, its bad for the company.'"
Idle

Doctor Uses Cordless Drill to Perform Brain Surgery 2

Posted by samzenpus
Neurosurgeon Henry Marsh used a $65 Bosch drill to perform an emergency operation on a Ukrainian woman's head while traveling through her country. They had trouble finding an anesthetist so the woman was just given a local anesthetic and was conscious during the procedure. The BBC will air a show about the rather remarkable surgical procedure on March 30 and people in the US can read all about it in Time-Life Books Complete Home Improvement and Brain Surgery Manual.
The Internet

Comcast Says FCC Powerless to Stop P2P Blocking 377

Posted by CmdrTaco from the impotence-is-a-troubling-issue dept.
Nanoboy writes "Even if the FCC finds that Comcast has violated its Internet Policy Statement, it's utterly powerless to do anything about it, according to a recent filing by the cable giant. Comcast argues that Congress has not given the FCC the authority to act, that the Internet Policy Statement doesn't give it the right to deal with the issue, and that any FCC action would violate the Administrative Procedures Act of 1946. '"The congressional policy and agency practice of relying on the marketplace instead of regulation to maximize consumer welfare has been proven by experience (including the Comcast customer experience) to be enormously successful," concludes Comcast VP David L. Cohen's thinly-veiled warning to the FCC, filed on March 11. "Bearing these facts in mind should obviate the need for the Commission to test its legal authority."'"
Businesses

JP Morgan's Insider Trading How-To On Wikileaks 246

Posted by kdawson from the ten-bee-five-dash-one dept.
An anonymous reader writes "In an internal JP Morgan document published recently, Wikileaks exposes JPM's efforts to circumvent insider trading regulations, enabling their wealthy clients to profit even when others are losing. The document reads like a how-to and explains how to take advantage of SEC Rule 10b5-1, which has long been considered ripe for abuse. Now this abuse is publicly documented and will be hard to ignore."
Sci-Fi

Arthur C. Clarke Is Dead At 90 538

Posted by kdawson from the pod-bay-doors-are-open dept.
Many readers are sending in word that Arthur C. Clarke has died in Sri Lanka. He wrote over 100 books including 2001: A Space Odyssey and Rendezvous With Rama, and popularized the ideas of geosynchronous communications satellites and space elevators.

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