Tag: science

Microsoft Researchers Slash Skype Fraud By 68%

mask.of.sanity writes “Life could become more difficult for fraudsters on Skype thanks to new research by Microsoft boffins that promises to cut down on fake accounts across the platform. The research (PDF) combined information from diverse sources including a user’s profile, activities, and social connections into a supervised machine learning environment that could automate the presently manual tasks of fraud detection. The results show the framework boosted fraud detection rates for particular account types by 68 per cent with a 5 per cent false positive rate.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Microsoft Researchers Slash Skype Fraud By 68%

The Navy’s Newest "Pickup Truck of the Sea" Just Launched

The USNS Fall River , the fourth vessel in the US Navy’s new Spearhead -class of high-speed, shallow-draft transport catamarans launched for the first time over the weekend. This multi-function catamaran will transport up cargo and up to a battalion of troops between ports. Read more…        

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The Navy’s Newest "Pickup Truck of the Sea" Just Launched

Linux 3.13 Released

diegocg writes “Linux kernel 3.13 has been released. This release includes nftables (the successor of iptables); a revamp of the block layer designed for high-performance SSDs; a framework to cap power consumption in Intel RAPL devices; improved squashfs performance; AMD Radeon power management enabled by default and automatic AMD Radeon GPU switching; improved NUMA and hugepage performance; TCP Fast Open enabled by default; support for NFC payments; support for the High-Availability Seamless Redundancy protocol; new drivers; and many other small improvements. Here’s the full list of changes.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Linux 3.13 Released

Ball lightning has been captured on video for the first time ever

Reports of ball lightning have existed for hundreds of years, but footage of the rare phenomenon, which appears transiently in the form of a glowing sphere of electrical activity , has never been acquired outside the lab. Now, a team of Chinese researchers claims it has obtained the first recorded scientific video of ball lightning in action. Read more…        

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Ball lightning has been captured on video for the first time ever

Report: Paramount Pictures Cuts Film, Goes All-Digital in U.S.

The Los Angeles Times reports that Paramount Pictures is the first major Hollywood studio to ditch 35mm film and go all-digital for United States theater releases, with The Wolf of Wall Street being shipped to theaters in digital format only. Sorry film fans, it sounds like that’s a wrap. Read more…        

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Report: Paramount Pictures Cuts Film, Goes All-Digital in U.S.

Microsoft Quietly Fixes Windows XP Resource Hog Problem

An anonymous reader writes “Microsoft indicated this week that it has fixed a Windows XP resource-hog problem associated with the system’s SVCHOST.EXE processes. Windows XP users affected by this problem typically found that the operating system was using up system resources for 15 minutes to an hour after startup, making it difficult to use the machine during that period. The Microsoft Update team had vowed last month to spend the holiday break tackling the issue, which has plagued some users for years. The fix involved stopping the system from perpetually checking Internet Explorer updates. Microsoft indicated that the fix was rolled out on Tuesday.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Microsoft Quietly Fixes Windows XP Resource Hog Problem

Two fans broke onto Star Trek: TNG sets to film their own documentary

In 1988, two fans of Star Trek: The Next Generation broke onto the Paramount lot and wandered through the Enterprise sets, filming a homemade documentary as they went along. They also caused a little accidental mayhem along the way. Read more…        

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Two fans broke onto Star Trek: TNG sets to film their own documentary

How to power a starship with an artificial black hole

According to theory, it may be possible to create an advanced propulsion system that would harness the available energy from an evaporating black hole, a so-called Schwarzschild Kugelblitz drive. Here’s how it would work. Read more…        

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How to power a starship with an artificial black hole

There is such a thing as sexually transmitted food poisoning

Just when you think that sex ed in high school and posters at clinics have covered all the times it is necessary to use protection, the human body (and various microbes) throw yet another horrifying sex scenario at you. We now suspect that people can get sexually transmitted food poisoning. Read more…        

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There is such a thing as sexually transmitted food poisoning