Author: kenmay

Dish used “small business” discount to save $3 billion at taxpayer expense

Dish took advantage of discounts intended for small businesses to save $3.3 billion in an auction of public airwaves, making a “mockery” of the small business program, according to a member of the Federal Communications Commission. Dish used companies it owns in order to place $13.3 billion worth of winning bids in an auction of wireless airwaves that can be used for cellular networks. Results of the auction were announced last week . But Dish only has to pay $10 billion because it didn’t place the bids directly. FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai called upon FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler “to immediately launch an investigation into these multi-billion dollar subsidies.” “[T]wo companies in which Dish Network has an 85 percent ownership stake claimed over $3 billion in taxpayer-funded discounts when purchasing spectrum in the AWS-3 auction,” Pai said in his call for an investigation today . “Those discounts came through the FCC’s designed entity (DE) program, which is intended to make it easier for small businesses to purchase spectrum and compete with large corporations. Dish, however, has annual revenues of almost $14 billion, a market capitalization of over $32 billion, and over 14 million customers. Its participation makes a mockery of the DE program.” Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Dish used “small business” discount to save $3 billion at taxpayer expense

Lucasfilm heads to court to unmask Star Wars: The Force Awakens image leaker

Lucasfilm is demanding that popular photo-sharing site ImageShack cough up the identity of one of its users the studio says uploaded an infringing photograph connected to its upcoming Star Wars movie. ImageShack has already deleted the picture  from user “Darth-Simi” whose account was used to post a picture that was described as a villain from the upcoming Star Wars: The Force Awakens movie. The image included a glimpse of a red crossguard lightsaber like the one showed in a teaser trailer officially released in November. Lucasfilm’s parent company, Disney, is seeking a San Francisco federal court to order California-based ImageShack to turn over Darth-Simi’s personal information. The studio is making the demand  [PDF] to remove the picture “Star Wars Episode VII Costume Design and Photograph” under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Lucasfilm heads to court to unmask Star Wars: The Force Awakens image leaker

The Hells Angels Are Old Pros at Encryption 

The Silk Road trial is back on, and we still don’t know if Ross Ulbricht is going to go down for the crimes of the Dread Pirate Roberts. Today, the trial focused on DPR’s interactions with the Hells Angels, who he allegedly hired to kill a rogue drug vendor. Read more…

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The Hells Angels Are Old Pros at Encryption 

A Brief History Of Star Wars Canon, Old And New

When a franchise is around for four decades, it can get impossibly unwieldy to try and grasp its lore — and Star Wars canon is no exception. Here’s a guide to the origins of Star Wars Canon, the rise and fall of one of the most prominent Expanded Universes in fiction , and where the saga stands with Disney today. Read more…

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A Brief History Of Star Wars Canon, Old And New

Report: Uber Is Building a Robotics Factory for Self-Driving Cars

Uber, which is notorious for more or less ignoring its drivers’ needs already , is apparently looking to one-day cut out the middleman entirely. According to a report from TechCrunch, the on-demand car service is building a robotics research lab to ” kickstart autonomous taxi fleet development .” Because at least robots won’t get all uppity about sketchy loans and unfair wages . Read more…

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Report: Uber Is Building a Robotics Factory for Self-Driving Cars

Raspberry Pi 2 appears two years early with substantial hardware upgrades

While Raspberry Pi fans were told to expect a brand new board somewhere around 2017 , it turns out that wasn’t quite true. This is the Raspberry Pi 2 Model B: a substantial upgrade from the Model B+ that will reportedly go on sale later today from the Raspberry Pi foundation for $35. The new board has some fundamental upgrades that could well warrant the upgrade for existing Raspberry Pi dabblers — that is, if smaller wasn’t better . Raspberry Pi Foundation lead Eben Upton told The Register that the new Model B “is a usable PC now.” “You could use a Raspberry Pi 1 as a PC but you had to say ‘this is a great PC in so far as it cost me 35 bucks’. We’ve removed the caveat that you had to be a bit forgiving with it. Now it’s just good.” How much better? Well, the team’s upgraded the processor on-board to a 900MHz quad-core chip and have loaded in 1GB of RAM, which the foundation reckons will offer at least six times the performance of the old Model B+ . It may look the same, but the board (with that processor which has apparently been in development for years), also has a special a tweak connecting to the quad-core brains to ensure it handles the gig of RAM on board. Naturally, it’ll be up to the Raspberry Pi community and makers to show what is possible with this sequel PC — but we’re assuming the specification bump will mean “a whole lot more”. Once Raspberry Pi goes official with the news, we’ll be adding more of the important details right here, but it will be available for the same price as last year’s B+; $35. Filed under: Peripherals , Science , Internet Comments Source: The Register

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Raspberry Pi 2 appears two years early with substantial hardware upgrades

Quantum Entanglement Can Now Be Performed on a Chip

The lure of quantum entangled computing is strong, as it can provide a means of impenetrable encryption —but the hardware has always been too bulky to make it practical. Now, though, researchers have shrunk the technology down to less than the width of a human hair, small enough to squeeze onto a chip. Read more…

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Quantum Entanglement Can Now Be Performed on a Chip

Entangled photons on a chip could lead to super-fast computers

Photon entanglement is one of the odder properties of quantum physics, but it promises a lot for computing — if one photon can instantly affect another no matter how far away it is, you could make super-speedy computers and communications that aren’t easily limited by physical distances. It hasn’t been easy to get entanglement tech down to a manageable size, however, and that’s where Italy’s Università degli Studi di Pavia might just come to the rescue. Its researchers have developed a tiny emitter that could pump out entangled photons as part of an otherwise ordinary silicon chip. The device, which uses a ring shape to both rope in and emit light, measures just 20 microns across. That’s hundreds of times smaller than existing devices, which are comparatively gigantic at a few millimeters wide. You probably won’t see whole processors built around this technique, at least not for a while. Chip makers usually work on the nanometer scale — Intel’s new 14nm processors are far more intricate than this ring. Moreover, there’s some refinement left to make sure this part produces a reliable stream of tangled photons. If everything falls into place, however, you could see entanglement rings boosting performance in certain tasks. You might also see an entanglement-based component that handles jobs which aren’t otherwise possible, like spy-proof quantum cryptography . This breakthrough isn’t going to change semiconductors overnight, but it could make quantum computing more of a practical reality. Filed under: Science Comments Via: EurekAlert , SpaceDaily Source: OpticsInfoBase

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Entangled photons on a chip could lead to super-fast computers