Bruce Schneier's latest blog entry points out an interesting analysis of how quantum computing will affect public encryption. The author takes a look at some of the mathematics involved with using a quantum computer to run a factoring algorithm, and makes some reasonable assumptions about the technological constraints faced by the developers of the technology. He concludes that while quantum computing could be a threat to modern encryption, it is not the dire emergency some researchers suggest.
Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia HOW SHOULD I clean my tarnished silver jewelry? Tarnish on silver is caused when the metal reacts with sulfur, a chemical found in the air, as well as in wool and foods such as onions and eggs. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 23 Mar 2008 | 2:00 pm
SEATTLE _ The odds of growing up aren't good for baby sand dollars. Smaller than the head of a pin, the larvae drift in the ocean _ easy prey for anything with a mouth. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 23 Mar 2008 | 2:00 pm
By NANCY YOUNG By Nancy Young The Virginian-Pilot Bon Secours Hampton Roads Health System will appeal a state decision to reject its plan to build two new hospitals in Virginia Beach and Suffolk and replace its DePaul Medical Center with a much smaller new facility, officials said Saturday. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 23 Mar 2008 | 2:00 pm
By KEVIN E. MARTINGAYLE By KEVIN E. MARTINGAYLE ON FEB. 23 AND MARCH 14, The Pilot published articles regarding pending Alcoholic Beverage Control legislation dealing with lewd, noisy and disorderly conduct in ABC establishments. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 23 Mar 2008 | 2:00 pm
ECO warrior Umamah Ebrahim was thrilled to triumph in our environment category. The 13-year-old, of Pollokshields, Glasgow, battled to save the park at the end of her street. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 23 Mar 2008 | 2:00 pm
RALEIGH, N.C. _ A tiny, exotic pest that is devastating forests of hemlock trees from the Carolinas to Maine has so far confounded scientists' efforts to check the destruction. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 23 Mar 2008 | 2:00 pm
THE HODGES FARM looked like this in the 1940s. It had been purchased in the late 1870s to early 1880s by William Lomas Hodges, who was born in Mathews County. The land was in what is now Great Bridge, near the bypass on Mount Pleasant Road. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 23 Mar 2008 | 2:00 pm
By MARY REID BARROW By Mary Reid Barrow Correspondent The beautiful bunting - feathered in blue, red and green - arrives to dine among the commonplace chickadees, house finches, wrens and goldfinches at Vicki Dixon's feeder. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 23 Mar 2008 | 2:00 pm
Text of report headlined "BBC Sanglap suggests alternative barrage to tackle Farakka" published by Bangladeshi newspaper New Age website on 23 March Effects of withdrawal of water by India, especially at Farakka Barrage point [near India, Bangladesh border], is manifested in further deterioration of poverty in the country's south-western region, observed experts and members of the civil society. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 23 Mar 2008 | 2:00 pm
By Ban Ki Moon At the United Nations, Saturday is World Water Day. We don't expect people to stop what they are doing and observe a moment of silence - though maybe they should. Every 20 seconds, a child dies from diseases associated with a lack of clean water. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 23 Mar 2008 | 2:00 pm
The New York Times is running a story about how hope is fading for the implementation of municipal wireless access in cities across the US. Major cities and small towns alike are finding that ISPs are withdrawing from such plans due to the low profitability of ventures that are similar to Philadelphia's incomplete network. We've previously discussed Chicago's and San Francisco's wireless status, and also some of the stumbling blocks other cities have faced. From the Times: "In Tempe, Ariz., and Portland, Ore., for example, hundreds of subscribers have found themselves suddenly without service as providers have cut their losses and either abandoned their networks or stopped expanding capacity. EarthLink announced on Feb. 7 that 'the operations of the municipal Wi-Fi assets were no longer consistent with the company's strategic direction.' Philadelphia officials say they are not sure when or if the promised network will now be completed."
Engineers are trying to fix a problem affecting BT's server which stopped customers' emails working. A small number of customers using BT Yahoo! email accounts have... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNewsTech | 23 Mar 2008 | 12:25 pm
wanderindiana brings us an update on the White House missing emails mess, which we have discussed before. It seems the hard drives of many White House computers are gone beyond the possibility of recovery. Is it unusual in your experience for, say, a corporate IT department to destroy hard drives by policy? "Older White House computer hard drives have been destroyed, the White House disclosed to a federal court Friday in a controversy over millions of possibly missing e-mails from 2003 to 2005. The White House revealed new information about how it handles its computers in an effort to persuade a federal magistrate it would be fruitless to undertake an e-mail recovery plan that the court proposed."
Swansea University chiefs have revealed plans to build a new multi-million pound 100-acre innovation campus at a city site off Fabian Way. Plans would see the creation... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNewsTech | 23 Mar 2008 | 11:03 am
By Jennifer Garza, The Sacramento Bee, Calif. Mar. 23--Other churches have budgets to promote their Easter services. Pastor Dave Novak has a sign. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 23 Mar 2008 | 11:00 am
By Tim Logan, St. Louis Post-Dispatch Mar. 23--A building in East St. Louis sits behind a razor wire-topped fence in a woodsy part of town. It looks like a bunker, squat and windowless. And through it runs every phone call, text message, picture and data package sent to or from a U.S. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 23 Mar 2008 | 11:00 am
By Pam Kelley, The Charlotte Observer, N.C. Mar. 23--"Welcome to the Writingest State!" declares the banner atop the N.C. Writers' Network's newly redesigned Web site. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 23 Mar 2008 | 11:00 am
By Journal-World, Lawrence, Kan. Mar. 23--The Douglas County Democratic Party will be host to a Chocolate Extravaganza from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. Tuesday at the Union Pacific Depot, 402 N. Second St. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 23 Mar 2008 | 11:00 am
By Sarah Bryan Miller, St. Louis Post-Dispatch Mar. 23--Ludwig van Beethoven wrote only one opera, "Fidelio." It's a heroic story and contains some of Beethoven's most inspired music. David Robertson, the St. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 23 Mar 2008 | 11:00 am
Gone (thankfully) are the days when women matched the color of their hat with their gloves, their belt and their shoes, today's woman matches her cell phone with her nail polish. At least that's what... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 23 Mar 2008 | 10:24 am
Environmentally friendly electric cars will dominate the future as car manufacturers join the fight against global warming, Nissan chief executive Carlos Ghosn believes. Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNewsTech | 23 Mar 2008 | 9:40 am
Retrosabotage makes subversive and hilarious remixes of classic video-games, including little mockumentaries explaining their backstories. Alice from Wonderland explains, "In the amusing mockumentary piece,... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 23 Mar 2008 | 9:19 am
Reporting on a Science and Technology Law Review article about copyright and ebooks, Gizmodo's Matt Buchanan has written a great piece on the way that hardware ebook readers (Kindle, Sony Reader) run on... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 23 Mar 2008 | 9:05 am
Rob sez, "Jason Lane is a Bristol-based artist who has been making moving robot sculptures from junk for years. Link (Thanks, Rob)... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 23 Mar 2008 | 8:59 am
This gorgeous steampunk headset status-indicator uses gears, magnets and illuminated panels to warn cow-orkers that you're on the phone and don't bug me. I work in an office cubicle and regularly use a... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 23 Mar 2008 | 8:57 am
"Delirious Beijing" in Metropolis Magazine is an evocative account of the unbelievable pace of construction in Beijing in the Olympic run-up; when I was there in September, I was staying in a guest-house... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 23 Mar 2008 | 8:53 am
With their fifth and final spacewalk under their belt, Endeavour's astronauts are taking some well-deserved time off before starting the journey home. Astronauts... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNewsTech | 23 Mar 2008 | 8:35 am
covertbadger notes a developer's blog entry on a novel way of judging progress in refactoring code. "Software quality tools can never completely replace the gut instinct of a developer — you might have massive test coverage, but that won't help with subjective measures such as code smells. With Wodehouse-style refactoring, we can now easily keep track of which code we are happy with, and which code we remain deeply suspicious of."
By David Allen, The Shelby Star, N.C. Mar. 23--SHELBY -- For the first time since Wednesday, Sue Ross said she could breathe again. Her granddaughter, Sarah Fraser, was found early Saturday morning in Gastonia. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 23 Mar 2008 | 8:00 am
By Joe Rodriguez, The Wichita Eagle, Kan. Mar. 23--The tornado that devastated Greensburg last year didn't spare the houses of God. As it did with most buildings in the town on May 4, 2007, the storm flattened every church. It left little to salvage. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 23 Mar 2008 | 8:00 am
By Muhammed El-Hasan The Internet has become virtually ubiquitous. And small businesses have noticed. As a result, small companies often promote themselves online with their own Web sites. Web designers are plentiful. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 23 Mar 2008 | 8:00 am
By Dan Abendschein A Web site that portrayed a Diamond Bar woman who fled with her children as a dedicated mother protecting them from a congressman's son has been taken down. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 23 Mar 2008 | 8:00 am
With their fifth and final spacewalk under their belt, Endeavour's astronauts planned to take some well-deserved time off on Sunday before starting the journey home. Astronauts Michael Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNewsTech | 23 Mar 2008 | 7:11 am
I love Billy Bragg, his attitude, his on the sleeves politics, his music, everything about him. So I read his op-ed in today's Times with interest. In it he argues that Bebo, which may or may not have... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 23 Mar 2008 | 7:07 am
The educator made fundamental contributions to game theory and economics, and worked to popularize math. ... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNPaperTech | 23 Mar 2008 | 7:00 am
The startup allows video from cellphones to be streamed live on the Web. In the future, will any bad behavior may go unnoticed? ... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNPaperTech | 23 Mar 2008 | 7:00 am
Monse, Wash., was up for sale but no one closed the deal. But broken up into parcels, the weathered burg has attracted one family and a nostalgic horse-lover. ... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNPaperTech | 23 Mar 2008 | 7:00 am
Ready to experiment with getting films via the Internet? Before you sit down on the couch with the bag of microwave popcorn, ready to enjoy the latest video release, there's a bit of advance planning... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNPaperTech | 23 Mar 2008 | 7:00 am
Bar owner Rufus Terrill has built what he calls the Bum Bot 2000, a remote-controlled device to chase loiterers away. Homeless advocates object. ... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNPaperTech | 23 Mar 2008 | 7:00 am
This is a video of the winner of Stanford's Entrepreneurship Week innovation tournament. The challenge for the tournament was to use an everyday object to create as much value as possible. The "RubberBandTogether"... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 23 Mar 2008 | 6:11 am
Narrative Fallacy writes "If you've ever written about Apple products with even a hint of negativity, you'll appreciate Salon's excerpt from Farhad Manjoo's True Enough, about why the Apple tribe is so rabid. 'There are many tribes in the tech world: TiVo lovers, Blackberry addicts, Palm Treo fanatics, and people who exhibit unhealthy affection for their Roomba robotic vacuum cleaners,' writes Manjoo. 'But there is no bigger tribe, and none more zealous, than fans of Apple, who are infamous for their sensitivity to slams, real or imagined, against the beloved company.' Wall Street Journal columnist Walt Mossberg has even coined a name for the phenomenon — the 'Doctrine of Insufficient Adulation.' 'If I see the world as all black and you see the world as all white and some person comes along and says it's partially black and partially white, we both are going to be unhappy,' says psychologist Lee Ross at Stanford University. 'You think there are more facts and better facts on your side than on the other side. The very act of giving them equal weight seems like bias. Like inappropriate evenhandedness.'"
Whether Arthur C. Clarke is measured by such enduring science-fiction novels as 2001: A Space Odyssey, in which he conceived of a space-travel program before man walked on the moon, or purely scientific... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNPaperTech | 23 Mar 2008 | 4:37 am
The folks at Rocketboom released a lovely, dreamlike episode this week in which host Joanne Colan appears to move forward in time through a reverse-time New York City.... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 23 Mar 2008 | 3:55 am
Last Friday's post on the gloriously textured Neptune Bar has inspired an energetic conversation in Comments, and if you're interested in 3D graphics, it's catnip. There, Neptune Lighting's Tories Canetti... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 23 Mar 2008 | 3:21 am
Endeavour's astronauts embarked on the fifth and final spacewalk of their mission Saturday, this time attaching a 50-foot inspection pole to the international space station for use by the Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNewsTech | 23 Mar 2008 | 2:52 am
SAN FRANCISCO Shoppers are discovering an upside to the down economy. They are getting price breaks by reviving an age-old retail strategy: haggling. A bargaining culture once confined largely to car... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNPaperTech | 23 Mar 2008 | 2:37 am
Predictions Market sends us to Gizmodo for an interesting take on the question: when you "buy" "content" for Amazon's Kindle or the Sony Reader, are you buying a crippled license to intellectual property when you download, or are you buying a book? If the latter, then the first sale doctrine, which lets you hawk your old Harry Potter hardcovers on eBay, would apply. Some law students at Columbia took a swing at the question and Gizmodo reprints the "surprisingly readable" legal summary. Short answer: those restrictive licenses may very well be legal, and even if you had rights under the first sale doctrine, you might only be able to resell or give away your Kindle — not a copy of the work.
DENVER (Billboard) - Leave it to the gadget industry to turn concern over electronic waste into a sales opportunity. Simply put, they're offering to buy back old devices to recycle or... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNewsTech | 23 Mar 2008 | 12:51 am
CNN is reporting on the widening brouhaha that began when Barack Obama's passport file was accessed illegally on three occasions beginning in January. Now it seems that John McCain's file was also snooped; and that last year Hillary Clinton's file suffered the same fate. Ars Technica nails the real importance of these breaches, saying that the Presidential hopefuls are "...currently providing the country with a very public lesson in why the 'privacy advocates' who oppose initiatives like Real ID and the executive branch's domestic surveillance programs should really be called 'democracy advocates.' In short..., the entire incident shows exactly why citizens' privacy is critical in a country where citizens compete with one another for control of the government."
ANYONE who uses a computer knows what its like to have the system crash. Crashes are the digital worlds addition to that short list of inevitables, death and taxes. But what if you could record the crash... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNPaperTech | 22 Mar 2008 | 9:35 pm
SAN FRANCISCO Shoppers are discovering an upside to the down economy. They are getting price breaks by reviving an age-old retail strategy: haggling. A bargaining culture once confined largely to car... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNPaperTech | 22 Mar 2008 | 9:35 pm
Chroniton writes with news of a Silicon Valley company, Luxim, that has developed a tiny, full-spectrum light bulb, based on a plasma of argon gas, that gives off as much light as a streetlight while using less power. The Tic Tac-sized bulb operates at temperatures up to 6000K and produces 140 lumens/watt, almost ten times as efficient as standard incandescent lamps, and twice the efficiency of high-end LEDs. The new bulbs also have a lifetime of 20,000 hours. There's no mention of mercury or other heavy metals, which pose a problem for compact fluorescents.
their mission Saturday, this time to attach a 50-foot inspection pole to the international space station for use by the next shuttle visitors. Michael Foreman and Robert Behnken... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNewsTech | 22 Mar 2008 | 8:43 pm
Wired has an article on the national fusion centers in the US, which were created to aid intelligence-sharing in the fight against terrorism but are increasingly being used to look at other sorts of crimes. The keynote of these centers is "all hazards, all threats" — the LA police chief is quoted: "Information that might seem innocuous may have some connection to terrorism." The ACLU has up an interactive US map to help you become acquainted with your local fusion center.
trogador writes "Researchers from Imperial College London are improving the Da Vinci surgical robot by installing an eye-tracker, which allows surgeons to control the robot's knife simply by looking at the patient's tissues on a screen. Tracking the eyes can generate a 3D map, which in turn can make moving organs — like a beating heart — appear to stand still for easier operation. Other features include 'see-through' tissues on the surgeon's screen (so tumors can be seen underneath tissues) and 'no-cut' zones, places where the robot won't allow the surgeon to cut by mistake. Says ICL Professor Guang Zhong Yang, 'We want to empower the robot and make it more autonomous.'"
The Graveyard, a free indie game for PC and Mac, only takes about ten minutes to play, but its story of an old woman in a graveyard might get a big emotional response from you.
Each autumn, millions of Monarch butterflies embark on a treacherous journey across North America to the same forest in central Mexico -- a migration that baffles scientists as much as it... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNewsTech | 22 Mar 2008 | 5:42 pm
After a final inspection of Endeavour's thermal shield, astronauts aboard the linked shuttle-station complex begin to prepare for a spacewalk to store the laser-tipped boom they use to search for damage.
The Air Force has come up with an ambitious plan to wean itself from foreign oil by turning to a new and unlikely source: coal. But analysts say the costs of coal-to-liquids plants could be astronomical, and experts on Capitol Hill say the conversion plants could produce twice the amount of greenhouse gases as oil.
