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the only downside is that you have to launch it before it can run... :)

Hmm.. but how would you make it such that it can stand up? Maybe launch it somehow forward?

I can imagine a system with 2 retractable support legs to stand it up and raise it a bit above the floor. Then make it run and retract the legs abruptly.

"What if running the 26.2 miles of a marathon only felt like running 24.9 miles, or if you could improve your average running pace from 9:14 minutes/mile to 8:49 minutes/mile without weeks of training?"

I thought the point of running a marathon was to make the effort :)

Joggobot turns a quadrocopter into a running companion Researchers from RMIT in Melbourne, Australia have developed a flying running companion called Joggobot. The system uses the built-in camera on a commercially-available Parrot AR Drone quadrocopter to track the position of a jogger, and fly a few feet out in front.

strange that even if optical fibre this would not compromise the submarines location ...

advantages: p-bits run on room temperature and are easier to connect than q-bit.

Speed is blinding. Just ask the tiger beetle: This predatory insect has excellent sight, but when it chases prey, it runs so fast it can no longer see where it's going.

The good news for Microsoft is that all the PCs powering the Olympics are running Windows. The bad news: it's the older Windows XP operating system.

Now I start to understand why the Swiss win so many medals. That's most probably a bug!!!

Physicists at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) are analysing the results of their first attempt at colliding protons and lead ions. Further attempts at proton-lead collisions are expected over the next few weeks. If these trials are successful, a full-blown experimental programme could run in 2012.

the ArduSat (Arduino - satellite) will be the first open platform allowing the general public to design and run their own space-based applications, games and experiments, steer the onboard cameras to take pictures on-demand, and even broadcast personalized messages back to Earth.

Few news events can unleash more schadenfreude within the security community than watching a notorious firm of hackers-for-hire become a hack target themselves. In the case of the freshly disemboweled Italian surveillance firm Hacking Team, the company may also serve as a dark example of a global surveillance industry that often sells to any government willing to pay, with little regard for that regime's human rights record. Scroll down for the commercial. :)) Funny that when I keep complaining about privacy and monitoring, people still point and laugh.

And the direct link to the whole stash: https://ht.transparencytoolkit.org/ Their admin kept a plain text file with passwords on his desktop. Maybe they should have hired someone to do an audit :) More importantly, from the files it follows that this company found and exploited yet another vulnerability in Flash. So the current round of plugin/browser updates is thanks to this hack :)

The vulnerability only seemed to affect some of the more recent versions. Maybe from time to time we should downgrade flash to avoid them :))

the most impressive thing about this blog, TechXav is that it is run by 14-15 year olds..... And it's not only TechXav what they are doing, wow

following up on the lunchtime discussion. An older link is available here: http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/01/14/0219246

no Higgs boson before 2013... and a replacement of 10,000 superconducting magnet connections ! Reminds me of the the gravitational detectors... no detection before an upgrade in 2013...! There are the big announcements to make the cash flow... and reality !

Higgs is almost 81, so he should better invest in his health if he wants the Nobel prize... But who cares, it's another 5 years window where high-energy theorists can produce nonsense with no experimental evidence. They should be happy!

One of the authors of the STL (C++'s Standard Template Library) explains generic programming and slams Java.

"I'd rather not even *think* about developing a web application/webservice/web-whatever in standard C++... is it actually possible?? Perhaps with some weird Microsoft solutions... I bet your bank online services are written in Java. Certainly not in PHP+MySQL :)" Doing in C++ would be awesomely crazy, I agree :) But as I see it there are lots of huge websites that operate on PHP, see for instance Facebook. For the banks and the enterprise market, as a general rule I tend to take with a grain of salt whatever spin comes out from them; in the end behind every corporate IT decision there is a little smurf just trying to survive and have the back covered :) As they used to say in the old times, "No one ever got fired for buying IBM". "Industry has chosen Java not because of industrial-corporate marketing bullshit, but because of economics... it enables you develop robustly, reliably, error-prone, modular, well integrated etc... software. And the costs? Well, using java technologies you can set-up enterprise-quality web application servers, get a fully featured development environment (which is better than ANY C/C++/whatever development environment I've EVER seen) at the cost of exactly 0 (zero!) USD/GBP/EUR... Since many years now, the central issue in software development is not implementing algorithms, it's building applications. And that's where Java outperforms many other technologies." Apart from the IDE considerations (on which I cannot comment, since I'm not a IDE user myself), I do not see how Java beats the competition in this regard (again, Python and the huge software ecosystem surrounding it). My impression is that Java's success is mostly due to Sun pushing it like there is no tomorrow and bundling it with their hardware business.

OK, I think there is a bit of everything, wrong and right, but you have to acknowledge that Python is not always the simplest. For info, Facebook uses Java (if you upload picture for instance), and PHP is very limited. So definitely, in company, engineers like you and me select the language, it is not a marketing or political thing. And in the case of fb, they come up with the conclusion that PHP, and Java don't do everything but complement each other. As you say Python as many things around, but it might be too much for simple applications. Otherwise, I would seriously be interested by a study of how to implement a Python-like system on-board spacecrafts and what are the advantages over mixing C, Ada and Java.

"They found that while the robot can leap to a height of 1.5 metres, such leaps put stresses on the robot's legs that make it more likely to fall over. Leaping to 0.8 metres improved stability but reduced the robot's maximum running speed. Future simulations will determine the precise trade-off between speed and stability."

According to the company's wikipedia page, the computer costs $ 10 million. Can we then declare Quantum Computing has officially arrived?! quotes from elsewhere in the site: "first commercial quantum computing system on the market"; "our current superconducting 128-qubit processor chip is housed inside a cryogenics system within a 10 square meter shielded room" Link to the company's scientific publications. Interestingly, this company seems to have been running a BOINC project, AQUA@home, to "predict the performance of superconducting adiabatic quantum computers on a variety of hard problems arising in fields ranging from materials science to machine learning. AQUA@home uses Internet-connected computers to help design and analyze quantum computing algorithms, using Quantum Monte Carlo techniques". List of papers coming out of it.

Cool tool to plan your next runs!

It may not show up on MapQuest, but NASA scientists are betting that the best route to Jupiter and its ice-crusted moon Europa runs through an underwater cavern in Mexico.

A database with biological models that can be downloaded or run in the web-browser!