Steel Treatment Paves the Way For Radically Lighter, Stronger, Cheaper Cars

Zothecula writes: Radically cheaper, quicker and less energy-intensive to produce than regular steel, Flash Bainite is stronger than titanium by weight, and ductile enough to be pressed into shape while cold without thinning or cracking. It’s now being tested by three of the world’s five largest car manufacturers, who are finding they can produce thinner structural car components that are between 30-50 percent lighter and cheaper than the steel they’ve been using, while maintaining the same performance is crash tests. Grain of salt: the positive claims here are mostly coming from the company responsible for the process. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Steel Treatment Paves the Way For Radically Lighter, Stronger, Cheaper Cars

MST3K Breaks Kickstarter Record

the_Bionic_lemming writes: Raising over 6.3 million dollars in just one month MST3K fans helped push the new 14 episode series past the Official Kickstarter Veronica Mars total of $5, 702, 153 by raising $5, 764, 229 On Kickstarter. $600, 000 + Was added to the total from the Add on store at MST3K.com . And what’s more, they did it with only 48, 270 backers compared to 91, 585 Veronica Mars backers. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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MST3K Breaks Kickstarter Record

Faraday Future Selects Las Vegas As Home For $1B Electric Car Factory

An anonymous reader writes: Faraday Future, the newest and most unknown player in the electric car game, has selected North Las Vegas as the home for their billion dollar factory. The 3 million square foot factory will be built on 900 acres and create 4, 500 jobs. Faraday Future will release more information on their Tesla fighter, a 100% electric car, at CES in January. Autoblog reports: “Nevada topped finalists California, Georgia and Louisiana in the race to land the 2.5 million square foot plant. It’s expected to sit on 600 acres in North Las Vegas’s Apex Industrial Park and bring 4, 500 jobs to Nevada. Mayor John Lee called the site choice ‘a transformational opportunity’ for his city of about 220, 000 residents. North Las Vegas boomed as the nation’s fastest-growing city in the early 2000s and nearly busted when the recession hit and pushed it close to insolvency.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Faraday Future Selects Las Vegas As Home For $1B Electric Car Factory

AVG, McAfee, Kaspersky Antiviruses All Had a Common Bug

An anonymous reader writes: Basic ASLR was not implemented in 3 major antivirus makers, allowing attackers to use the antivirus itself towards attacking Windows PCs. The bug, in layman terms, is: the antivirus would select the same memory address space every time it would run. If attackers found out the memory space’s address, they could tell their malicious code to execute in the same space, at the same time, and have it execute with root privileges, which most antivirus have on Windows PCs. It’s a basic requirement these days for software programmers to use ASLR (Address Space Layout Randomization) to prevent their code from executing in predictable locations. Affected products: AVG, McAfee, Kaspersky. All “quietly” issued fixes. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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AVG, McAfee, Kaspersky Antiviruses All Had a Common Bug

Microsoft Open Sources and Forks Windows Live Writer Into Open Live Writer

SmartAboutThings writes: Windows Live Writer is a blogging tool that Microsoft originally released back in 2006, and it still remains popular today, which has prompted Microsoft to promise that it will make it open source earlier this year. Now the company has officially open-sourced and forked Windows Live Writer into Open Live Writer, having put its repositories on GitHub already. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Microsoft Open Sources and Forks Windows Live Writer Into Open Live Writer

WordPress 4.4 Arrives

An anonymous reader with news of the newest release of open source WordPress, which adds a slew of new features to the blog management tool that will “make your site more connected and responsive.” You can download the new release now from WordPress.org/Download (7.3MB). WordPress is a content management system (CMS) that powers 25 percent of the Web. The latest version is dubbed “Clifford” in honor of jazz trumpeter Clifford Brown. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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WordPress 4.4 Arrives

Google Finds D-Wave Machine To Be 10^8 Times Faster Than Simulated Annealing

An anonymous reader sends this report form the Google Research blog on the effectiveness of D-Wave’s 2X quantum computer: We found that for problem instances involving nearly 1000 binary variables, quantum annealing significantly outperforms its classical counterpart, simulated annealing. It is more than 10^8 times faster than simulated annealing running on a single core. We also compared the quantum hardware to another algorithm called Quantum Monte Carlo. This is a method designed to emulate the behavior of quantum systems, but it runs on conventional processors. While the scaling with size between these two methods is comparable, they are again separated by a large factor sometimes as high as 10^8. A more detailed paper is available at the arXiv. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Google Finds D-Wave Machine To Be 10^8 Times Faster Than Simulated Annealing

French Legislation Would Block Tor and Restrict Free Wi-Fi

Several readers sent word that French newspaper Le Monde got its hands on documents showing the French government is debating two new pieces of legislation that are unfriendly to internet users. The first would ban people from sharing Wi-Fi connections during a state of emergency. “This comes from a police opinion included in the document: the reason being that it is apparently difficult to track individuals who use public Wi-Fi networks.” The second would forbid the use of Tor within France’s borders. “The main problem with such a ban on Tor is that it wouldn’t achieve a whole lot. Would-be terrorists could still access Tor from outside the country, and if they did manage to access Tor from within France I doubt they’re concerned about being arrested for illegal use of the network.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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French Legislation Would Block Tor and Restrict Free Wi-Fi

Los Angeles Flirts With Pre-Crime

An anonymous reader writes: The city of Los Angeles is considering a new plan to fight prostitution: sending letters to men who solicit prostitutes in the hopes that the letters are seen by family members. Why not just arrest them while they’re doing it? Because these letters aren’t being sent to the houses of men who were convicted, or even arrested. Instead, automated license plate readers would scan the cars driving down streets known to have a prostitution problem, and the letters would be sent to the address associated with those vehicles. An article about the plan says, “There isn’t ‘potential’ for abuse here, this is a legislated abuse of technology that is already controversial when it’s used by police for the purpose of seeking stolen vehicles, tracking down fugitives and solving specific crimes.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Los Angeles Flirts With Pre-Crime