A collection of stories tagged 'mechanisms' from Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/ Copyright 2006 RoomforMilk.com. RoomforMilk is not affiliated with Slashdot.org. Fri, 21 Nov 2008 06:49:09 EST A startup company based in Vancouver has developed a new kind of generator that could harvest much more energy from the wind. The design could not only lower the cost of wind turbines but increase their power output by 50 percent to as much as 100 percent, in some locations. Normally, when wind speeds drop, a turbine's engine becomes less efficient. The new engine, from ExRo Technologies, runs efficiently over a wider range of conditions. The design replaces a mechanical transmission with what amounts to an electronic one. Magnets attached to a rotating shaft create a current, but individual coils can be turned on and off electronically at different wind speeds." The company will begin field-testing a small, 5KW wind turbine by early next year.Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/26235 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/D5x9yABuAlE/article.pl Tue, 18 Nov 2008 15:05:06 EST Dr Paul Mockapetris is looking to lfix the flaws in the Domain Name System he helped invent. 'It was never meant to be the only security mechanism for naming data on the internet, but was intended for additional security measures to be added to it later.' The flaws, first uncovered by security researcher Dan Kaminsky over the summer, lets attackers redirect genuine URLs to malicious ones — a problem Mockapetris believes could be solved using digital signatures."Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/26075 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/cv1oU-k9SF4/article.pl Mon, 10 Nov 2008 11:05:02 EST An EU document on the Anti-Counterfeiting Treaty was leaked. The main purpose of the trade agreement is to impose the European enforcement measures for IPR infringements on the US and emerging economies, widen the enforcement measures to include criminal sanctions for patent infringements, and introduce internet content filtering measures. Civil society groups such as the FFII criticize the ACTA process because negotiation documents are not made publicly available by the governments. The EU document ('fact sheet') from the EU Trade Commissioner explicitly mentions: 'Internet distribution and information technology — e.g. mechanisms available in EU E-commerce Directive of 2000, such as a definition of the responsibility of internet service providers regarding IP infringing content.'" And an anonymous reader adds Michael Geist's push for more transparency around ACTA negotiations in Canada.Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/25964 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/JLnFayOLJxY/article.pl Tue, 04 Nov 2008 15:05:02 EST While James Gleick, Lawrence Lessig, and other pundits have reacted positively to this week's proposed settlement of the publishing industry's lawsuit against Google over the Google Book Search project, a deeper study of the agreement turns up some worrisome provisions that could make online access to books much more costly and difficult than it needs to be. Harvard University's libraries, for example, declined to endorse the settlement over concerns that it provides no mechanism for keeping the cost of access to books reasonable. And while the parties to the settlement have made much of the clause providing public libraries with free full-text access to Google's database of over 7 million out-of-print books, Xconomy has a post pointing out that this access is restricted to exactly one Google terminal per library. So, you can read books for free — as long as you're the first person to get to your public library's computer room in the morning."Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/25898 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/g5bho-O4J9w/article.pl Fri, 31 Oct 2008 15:05:02 EDT Wired reports on the Enriched Xenon Observatory 200, a particle detector scientists hope will answer the question of why there is significantly more matter than antimatter in the universe. Quoting: "The new detector will try to fill in the picture, determining basic features of [neutrinos], like their mass and whether or not they, unlike almost all other particles, are their own antiparticles. That quirk is why some scientists believe neutrinos could be the mechanism for the creation of our matter-filled universe. Almost all other particles have an antiparticle twin that, if it comes into contact with the particle, immediately annihilates it. But if neutrinos are their own antiparticles they could conceivably be knocked onto matter's 'team,' thereby causing the cascading win for matter over antimatter that we know occurred. As the Indian theoretical physicist G. Rajasekaran put it in a speech [PDF] earlier this year, neutrinos that are their own antiparticles would explain 'how, after [the] annihilation of most of the particles with antiparticles, a finite but small residue of particles was left to make up the present Universe.'"Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/25760 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/JB68wfAil-M/article.pl Sat, 25 Oct 2008 06:05:07 EDT My brother is an architect and sculptor and wants to create kinetic sculptures powered by wind, steam, and sun. He wants to avoid electrical systems and keep this mechanical. He's prepared to cast metals for custom parts if necessary, but is hoping to find a cheap source of gears, axles, and bearings for the internal mechanical workings of these contraptions. We'll need things like miter/bevel/spur/helical gears, standard and thrust bearings, and axles." Read on below for more on the details of what sneakyimp is looking for — dismembered Capsela units won't do it.Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/25714 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/6jh26tZPqv0/article.pl Wed, 22 Oct 2008 18:05:10 EDT From the fresh press release: 'Investigations at CERN following a large helium leak into sector 3-4 of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) tunnel have confirmed that cause of the incident was a faulty electrical connection between two of the accelerator's magnets. This resulted in mechanical damage and release of helium from the magnet cold mass into the tunnel. Proper safety procedures were in force, the safety systems performed as expected, and no one was put at risk. Sufficient spare components are in hand to ensure that the LHC is able to restart in 2009, and measures to prevent a similar incident in the future are being put in place.'"Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/25589 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/RdMLohGqiuk/article.pl Thu, 16 Oct 2008 21:05:01 EDT Presto Vivace and others sent us this CNet report on a just-released NRC report coming to the conclusion, which will surprise no one here, that data mining doesn't work very well. It's all those darn false positives. The submitter adds, "Any chance we could go back to probable cause?" "A report scheduled to be released on Tuesday by the National Research Council, which has been years in the making, concludes that automated identification of terrorists through data mining or any other mechanism 'is neither feasible as an objective nor desirable as a goal of technology development efforts.' Inevitable false positives will result in 'ordinary, law-abiding citizens and businesses' being incorrectly flagged as suspects. The whopping 352-page report, called 'Protecting Individual Privacy in the Struggle Against Terrorists,' amounts to [be] at least a partial repudiation of the Defense Department's controversial data-mining program called Total Information Awareness, which was limited by Congress in 2003."Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/25349 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/hF3X38taJrw/article.pl Tue, 07 Oct 2008 17:05:04 EDT The 2008 Nobel Prize in Physics has been jointly awarded to Yoichiro Nambu of the University of Chicago 'for the discovery of the mechanism of spontaneous broken symmetry in subatomic physics.' and Makoto Kobayashi of the KEK lab and Toshihide Maskawa of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics, both in Japan, 'for the discovery of the origin of the broken symmetry which predicts the existence of at least three families of quarks in nature.'"Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/25338 http://rss.slashdot.org:80/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/b_3npd4783w/article.pl Tue, 07 Oct 2008 14:05:09 EDT The 2008 Nobel Prize in Physics has been jointly awarded to Yoichiro Nambu of the University of Chicago 'for the discovery of the mechanism of spontaneous broken symmetry in subatomic physics.' and Makoto Kobayashi of the KEK lab and Toshihide Maskawa of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics, both in Japan, 'for the discovery of the origin of the broken symmetry which predicts the existence of at least three families of quarks in nature.'"Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/25326 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/b_3npd4783w/article.pl Tue, 07 Oct 2008 10:05:01 EDT Science News reports on a paper to be published in Physical Review Letters in which an international team of researchers describes their computer simulation of the most violent collision imaginable: two black holes colliding head-on at nearly light-speed. Even in this extreme scenario, Roger Penrose's weak cosmic censorship hypothesis seems to hold — the resulting black hole (after the gravitational waves have died down) retains its event horizon. "Mathematically, 'naked' singularities, or those without event horizons, can exist, but physicists wouldn't know what to make of them. All known mechanisms for the formation of singularities also create an event horizon, and Penrose conjectured that there must be some physical principle — a 'cosmic censor' — that forbids singularity nakedness..."Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/25303 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/xMOF_uPQt-I/article.pl Mon, 06 Oct 2008 01:05:02 EDT Facebook announced it has chosen tax-haven Dublin for its international HQ, but not all are buying COO Sheryl Sandberg's line about local world-class talent being the motivation behind the move. The Irish Times recently reported that Irish subsidiaries owned by US multinationals are opting to convert to unlimited liability status, concealing the financial performance of their Irish operations from public view. They include Microsoft's incredibly profitable Irish subsidiaries Round Island One and Flat Island Company, Google Ireland Holdings, and a subsidiary of Apple Computer. The conversions have occurred as US tax authorities have increased their scrutiny of international mechanisms used by American multinationals to reduce their taxes at home."Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/25243 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/bSF31fb_4JA/article.pl Fri, 03 Oct 2008 12:05:05 EDT For the past few years, the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology has been sponsoring nanosoccer — a new team sport for universities with programs in micro-electro-mechanical systems. The soccer nanobots, operated by human players via remote-controlled magnetic fields and electrical signals, slide tiny discs around on a 30mm x 30mm playing field. Two demonstration competitions have already been held, and a third one is slated to take place next summer in Austria at RoboCup 2009."Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/24983 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/vRStDih-CaI/article.pl Tue, 23 Sep 2008 08:05:01 EDT When you file your taxes online, you want to be sure that the Web site you visit — www.irs.gov — is operated by the Internal Revenue Service and not a scam artist. By the end of next year, you can be confident that every U.S. government Web page is being served up by the appropriate agency. That's because the feds have launched the largest-ever rollout of a new authentication mechanism for the Internet's DNS. All federal agencies are deploying DNS Security Extensions (DNSSEC) on the .gov top-level domain, and some expect that once that rollout is complete, banks and other businesses might be encouraged to follow suit for their sites. DNSSEC prevents hackers from hijacking Web traffic and redirecting it to bogus sites. The Internet standard prevents spoofing attacks by allowing Web sites to verify their domain names and corresponding IP addresses using digital signatures and public-key encryption."Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/24963 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/veMfiy-wQRs/article.pl Mon, 22 Sep 2008 10:05:01 EDT Steven Hawking unveiled an unsettling clock in Cambridge on Friday. Designed by John Tayor--a British horologist and inventor whose thermostatic switch is incorporated in millions of electric appliance worldwide--the clock was conceived as a tribute to another British inventor, John Harrison. Harrison invented the grasshopper escapement in the early 18th Century, which resulted in extremely accurate mechanical time keeping and was instrumental in solving the 'Longitude Problem.' Tayor's clock, which in entirely mechanical in operation but has no hands, uses a fearsome-looking "demon grasshopper' as its escapement. 'I [...] wanted to depict that time is a destroyer — once a minute is gone you can't get it back' Taylor said. 'That's why my grasshopper is not a Disney character. He is a ferocious beast that over the seconds has his tongue lolling out, his jaws opening, then on the 59th second he gulps down time.' It also (purposely) only tells correct time once every five minutes. An excellent video of the clock in action, with an explanation of its workings by its inventor, is available on YouTube."Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/24927 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/P4W3UtkfrRg/article.pl Sat, 20 Sep 2008 19:05:10 EDT chromoZ writes with word that because of the serial blasts in Indian cities (and terrorist outfits claiming responsibility via email, often sent via Cyber Cafes and open Wi-Fi spots), sharing unsecured wireless access may get much tougher in India: "The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) after studying open Wifi networks is coming up with a set of guidelines and recommendations to secure them. 'All ISPs may be instructed to ensure that their subscribers using wireless devices must use effective authentication mechanisms and permit access to internet to only authorised persons using wireless devices.' An open Wi-Fi could be as much as illegal in India after this."Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/24857 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/5EKR6JKC9eU/article.pl Wed, 17 Sep 2008 11:05:01 EDT An anonymous reader writes to tell us that a new RFID chip from Verayo claims to be unclonable through the use of the new Physical Unclonable Functions (PUF), sort of an electronic DNA for silicon chips. "Basic passive RFID chips can be easily cloned by copying the data residing on one chip to another. Verayo's PUF-based RFID chips cannot be cloned, and provide a very strong and robust authentication mechanism. No other chip or device can be disguised as the original chip, even if the data is copied from one Verayo RFID chip to another."Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/24640 http://rss.slashdot.org:80/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/9EUNiDOAMXE/article.pl Mon, 08 Sep 2008 21:05:35 EDT Intel is entering the storage market with an ambitious X25-M solid-state drive capable of 250MB/s sustained reads and 70MB/s writes. The drive is so fast that it employs Native Command Queuing (originally designed to hide mechanical hard drive latency) to compensate for latency the SSD encounters in host systems. But how fast is the drive in the real world? The Tech Report has an in-depth review comparing the X25-M's performance and power consumption with that of the fastest desktop, mobile, and solid-state drives on the market."Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/24639 http://rss.slashdot.org:80/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/N0Xvbmxl7uE/article.pl Mon, 08 Sep 2008 21:05:31 EDT An anonymous reader writes to tell us that a new RFID chip from Verayo claims to be unclonable through the use of the new Physical Unclonable Functions (PUF), sort of an electronic DNA for silicon chips. "Basic passive RFID chips can be easily cloned by copying the data residing on one chip to another. Verayo's PUF-based RFID chips cannot be cloned, and provide a very strong and robust authentication mechanism. No other chip or device can be disguised as the original chip, even if the data is copied from one Verayo RFID chip to another."Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/24628 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/9EUNiDOAMXE/article.pl Mon, 08 Sep 2008 17:05:32 EDT Intel is entering the storage market with an ambitious X25-M solid-state drive capable of 250MB/s sustained reads and 70MB/s writes. The drive is so fast that it employs Native Command Queuing (originally designed to hide mechanical hard drive latency) to compensate for latency the SSD encounters in host systems. But how fast is the drive in the real world? The Tech Report has an in-depth review comparing the X25-M's performance and power consumption with that of the fastest desktop, mobile, and solid-state drives on the market."Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/24627 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/N0Xvbmxl7uE/article.pl Mon, 08 Sep 2008 17:05:18 EDT Raindeer writes to share his article about peering and transit between networks, which begins: "In 2005, AT&T CEO Ed Whitacre famously told BusinessWeek, 'What they [Google, Vonage, and others] would like to do is to use my pipes free. But I ain't going to let them do that...Why should they be allowed to use my pipes?' The story of how the Internet is structured economically is not so much a story about net neutrality, but rather it's a story about how ISPs actually do use AT&T's pipes for free, and about why AT&T actually wants them to do so. These inter-ISP sharing arrangements are known as 'peering' or 'transit,' and they are the two mechanisms that underlie the interconnection of networks that form the Internet. In this article, I'll take a look at the economics of peering and transit in order to give you a better sense of how traffic flows from point A to point B on the Internet, and how it does so mostly without problems, despite the fact that the Internet is a patchwork quilt of networks run by companies, schools, and governments."Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/24609 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/VgN9KN9_Zzg/article.pl Sun, 07 Sep 2008 14:05:01 EDT Solid State Drive technology is set to turn the storage industry on its ear — eventually. It's just a matter of time. When you consider the intrinsic benefits of anything built on solid-state technology versus anything mechanical, it doesn't take a degree in physics to understand the obvious advantages. However, as with any new technology, things take time to mature and the current batch of SSDs on the market do have some caveats and shortcomings, especially when it comes to write performance. This full performance review and showcase of four different Solid State Disks, two MLC-based and two SLC-based, gives a good perspective of where SSDs currently are strong and where they're not. OCZ, Mtron and Super Talent drives are tested here but Intel's much anticipated offering hasn't arrived to market just yet."Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/24570 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/KSKcTSR_1yE/article.pl Fri, 05 Sep 2008 11:05:01 EDT Gamasutra is running a story deconstructing the mechanics of Portal's teleportation programming. They present a snippet of Portal's code and a downloadable demo. They ran another article in this series earlier this year with sample code from Mario Galaxy's unique take on physics. We've discussed the development of Portal in the past. "Teleport mechanics in video games are nothing new. Puzzles from the original Gauntlet were memorable -- and more than likely, that wasn't the first game to use teleportation as a gameplay mechanic. The difference between Portal and all those that came before it is that Portal's teleportation acts as a frictionless tube between point A and point B. Physics are still hard at work inside the frictionless tube. Instead of simply repositioning an object from point A to point B, the player enters point A with full velocity and exits point B with the same speed, but moving in a new direction."Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/24372 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/375466346/article.pl Tue, 26 Aug 2008 16:05:02 EDT Zonk did an interesting interview with Ed Stark and Dave Williams, employees for an MMO developer named Red 5 (and experienced tabletop game designers). They talk about their ideas and plans to bring about the next step in MMO gaming: increased persistence in online worlds, where an objective, once completed, stays completed. Williams said, "Right now for most of these games, when the player saves the princess and he starts walking away from the tower — if he looks back he's going to see the princess at the top of the tower again." Regarding their current work, he continues: "If you save the village, it stays saved — you saved it! But maybe now that village becomes an objective for another player; maybe something has to be done now because that village wasn't destroyed. And so on, and so on, and so on. Building those mechanisms to make it a world that reacts to a player's actions instead of existing in a static state. That's the world we're talking about."Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/24318 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/372777706/article.pl Sat, 23 Aug 2008 13:05:02 EDT In the ongoing battle to let us eat dinner in peace without being interrupted by amazingly annoying telemarketer blather, and in this case the even more infuriating recorded telemarketing drivel, the Federal Trade Commission today basically outlawed recorded telemarketing calls. Specifically, the FTC changed its venerable Telemarketing Sales Rule (TSR) to prohibit, as of Sept. 2009, telemarketing calls that deliver prerecorded messages, unless a consumer has agreed to accept such calls from a given caller/seller. Between now and 2009, telemarketers must provide an obvious, easy and quick way for consumers to opt-out of any call, the FTC said. Such an opt-out mechanism needs to be in place by December 1, 2008."Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/24252 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/369710745/article.pl Wed, 20 Aug 2008 03:05:01 EDT