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Space

Submission + - Russian Meteor Likely An Apollo Asteroid Chunk (discovery.com)

Submitted by
astroengine
astroengine writes: "Helped by the extensive coverage of eyewitness cameras, CCTV footage and a fortuitous observation made by the Meteosat-9 weather satellite, Jorge Zuluaga and Ignacio Ferrin of the University of Antioquia in Medellin, Colombia, have been able to reconstruct the most likely orbit of the meteoroid that slammed into the atmosphere over the Russian Urals region on Feb. 15. What’s more, they know what type of space rock it was — the Chelyabinsk-bound meteoroid originated from an Apollo-class asteroid. Apollo asteroids are well-known near-Earth asteroids that cross the orbit of Earth. Around 5,200 Apollo asteroids are currently known, the largest being 1866 Sisyphus — a 10 kilometer-wide monster that was discovered in 1972."

Submission + - Supreme Court Disallows FISA Challenges (newser.com) 1

Submitted by ThatsNotPudding
ThatsNotPudding writes: In a not too suprising example of judicial abdication in favor of the surveillance state, the US Supreme court rejected pleas to allow any challenges to the wiretapping law *unless* someone can prove they've been tapped by the Federales.
Microsoft

Submission + - When did you learn how to code? (networkworld.com) 3

Submitted by
coondoggie
coondoggie writes: ""I think everybody in this country should learn how to program a computer — because it teaches you how to think." --Steve Jobs

That's the introduction to a new video and a new organization, Code.org which describes itself as being a is a non-profit organization "devoted to the vision that every student in every school should have the opportunity to learn how to code. We believe computer programming should be part of the core curriculum in education, alongside other science and math courses such as biology, chemistry and algebra.""
Education

Submission + - IT Leaders explains the need for teaching "Coding" in Schools. (rtoz.org)

Submitted by
rtoz
rtoz writes: "Code.org has released video and infographics to explain the need for teaching "Coding" in Schools.

Facebook Founder Mark Zuckerberg has said that “Everyone should have the chance to learn to code in school” as part of this efforts to support code.org.

And he says,

        “Our policy at Facebook is literally to hire as many talented engineers as we can find. There just aren’t enough people who are trained and have these skills today.“

At a time when people are saying “I want a good job – I got out of college and I couldnt find one,” every single year in America there is a standing demand for 120,000 people who are training in computer science.“ says Former U.S President Bill Clinton.

Bill Gates, Chairman of Microsoft says,
“Learning to write programs stretches your mind, and helps you think better, creates a way of thinking about things that I think is helpful in all domains.“

Eric Schmidt, Executive Chairman of Google says,

        “For most people on Earth, the digital revolution hasn’t even started yet. Within the next 10 years, all that will change. Let’s get the whole world coding!“"
Businesses

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: Time for Optional Pay Business Models? 1

Submitted by eegad
eegad writes: I've been thinking a lot about how much information I give to technology companies like Google and Facebook and how I'm not super comfortable with what I even dimly know about how they're handling and selling it. Is it time for major companies like this that offer arguably utility-like services for free in exchange for info to start giving customers a choice about how to "pay" for their service? I'd much rather pony up a monthly fee to access all the Google services I use, for example, and be assured that no tracking or selling of my information is going on. I'm not aware of how much money these companies might make from selling data about a particular individual, but could it possibly be more than the $20 or $30 a month I'd happily fork over to know that my privacy is a little more secure? Is this a pipe dream or are there other people who would happily pay for their private use of these services? What kinds of costs or problems could be involved with companies implementing this type of dual business model?
Businesses

Submission + - Amazon's Merchandising of Its Search Results Doesn't Violate Trademark Law (forbes.com)

Submitted by
concealment
concealment writes: "Many of us have had the experience of going to Amazon to buy one thing but checking out with a huge shopping cart of items that we didn’t initially seek—or even know were available. Amazon’s merchandising often benefits Amazon’s customers, but trademark owners who lose sales to their competition due to it aren’t as thrilled. Fortunately for Amazon, a California federal court recently upheld Amazon’s merchandising practices in its internal search results."
Earth

Submission + - Global Warming Will Make the World Too Hot to Get Any Work Done (vice.com)

Submitted by
pigrabbitbear
pigrabbitbear writes: "It’s a good thing that robots are stealing our jobs, because in about thirty-five years, nobody in their right mind is going to want to do them.

Scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration just published a report in Nature Climate Change that details how a warming climate impacts the way we work, and the results are pretty clear—we do less of it. NOAA discovered that over the last 60 years, the hotter, wetter climate has decreased human labor capacity by 10%. And it projects that by 2050, that number will double."
Microsoft

Submission + - Microsoft releases Internet Explorer 10 for Windows 7 (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Internet Explorer 10 for Windows 7 is out. Windows 8 may suck but now you can at least enjoy (most of) that version's Internet Explorer. IE10 for Win7, originally not planned, has seen the light of day after all â" four months after it debuted in Windows 8. It is available via Windows Update as an optional update, however if you've already installed a pre-release version, it will be updated automatically as an 'important' update. IE7 on Win7 requires a platform update to bring some Windows 8 APIs to the more mature Windows, and it will not feature embedded Adobe Flash as the Windows 8 version does (use the plug-in version from Adobe, as usual, instead).
GUI

Submission + - Minority Report's Legacy Of Terrible Interfaces (theawl.com)

Submitted by
jfruh
jfruh writes: "More than a decade ago, the special effects artists working the Steven Speilberg film "Minority Report" synthesized experimental thinking about GUIs to produce a floating interface that Tom Cruise manipulated with his hands in one of the film's "wow" moments. In 2013, surrounded by iOS and Android and Windows 8 devices, we use stripped down versions of this interface every day — and commercial artist Christian Brown thinks that's a bad thing. Such devices may look cinematic, he argues, but they completely ignore the kinds of haptic and textured feedback that have defined how we interact with devices for centuries."

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: Projects for a heap of junk? 2

Submitted by yenrabbit
yenrabbit writes: A friend has just told me that he has 80 CRT TVs, a stach of DVD players and hundereds of VCR machines, all broken and all mine free of charge. I can already think of a few awesome components i can extract (flyback transformers for high voltage contraptions and so on) and have a few ideas such as DVD lasers etc that i can build, but what else can be made from such a treasure-trove of components, and how would one go about processing such a large volume of stuff with the least amount of effort? Also, i don't have access to online shopping so i'd also like a pain free way of salvaging many simpler parts such as resistors as well.

Submission + - Trekkies detect Spock's Vulcan homeworld ORBITING PLUTO (theregister.co.uk)

Submitted by
iComp
iComp writes: "Trekkies have seized a poll in which the public voted on names for two of Pluto's moons — ensuring a winning moniker is Vulcan.

With William Shatner on the case, it was perhaps a foregone conclusion that Vulcan would be the clear winner in the contest, with 174,062 votes. Runner-up mythical hound Cerberus (aka Fluffy in Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone), which got 99,432 nods, will be the name of the second moon.

Captain Kirk was pleased with the results, which he orchestrated by suggesting Vulcan and Romulus as possible names to his 1.3 million Twitter followers"
Media

Submission + - Xiph Episode 2: Digital Show & Tell (xiph.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Continuing a firehose tradition of maximum information density, Xiph.Org's second video on digital media explores multiple facets of digital audio signals and how they really behave in the real world. Demonstrations of sampling, quantization, bit-depth, and dither explore digital audio behavior on real audio equipment using both modern digital analysis and vintage analog bench equipment... just in case we can't trust those newfangled digital gizmos. You can also download the source code for each demo and try it all for yourself!
Science

Submission + - For Sale - Nobel Prize for Discovery of DNA

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "UPI reports that for the first time in the history of Nobel Prize, one of the Nobel Prize medals along with the diploma presented by the Nobel committee is on auction with an opening bid of $250,000. Awarded to Francis Crick, who along with James Watson and Maurice Wilkins won the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1962 "for their discoveries concerning the molecular structure of nucleic acids and its significance for information transfer in living material," the medal will be auctioned off in New York City, by Heritage Auctions. The medal has been kept in a safe deposit box in California since Crick's widow passed away in 2007 and a portion of the proceeds will go to the Francis Crick Institute of disease research scheduled to open in London in 2015. ""By auctioning his Nobel it will finally be made available for public display and be well looked after. Our hope is that, by having it available for display, it can be an inspiration to the next generation of scientists," says Crick's granddaughter, Kindra Check. ""My granddad was honored to have received the Nobel Prize, but he was not the type to display his awards; his office walls contained a large chalkboard, artwork and a portrait of Charles Darwin.""
Hardware

Submission + - MYO Armband Delivers One-Armed Gesture Control (gizmag.com)

Submitted by Zothecula
Zothecula writes: Over the last five years, the touchscreen has supplanted the mouse and keyboard as the primary way that many of us interact with computers. But will multitouch enjoy a 30-year reign like its predecessor? Or will a newcomer swoop in and steal its crown? One up-and-comer, Thalmic Labs, hopes that the next ruler will be 3D gesture control. Like Microsoft Kinect and the upcoming Leap Motion, MYO lets you control a computer with Minority Report-like gestures. But unlike those devices, which rely on optical sensors, MYO employs a combination of motion sensing and muscular activity.

Submission + - Future fighter planes won't have ejection seats (nationalgeographic.com) 1

Submitted by
Dr. Tom
Dr. Tom writes: "The U.S. has deployed more than 11,000 military drones, up from fewer than 200 in 2002. They carry out a wide variety of missions while saving money and American lives. Within a generation they could replace most manned military aircraft, says John Pike, a defense expert at the think tank GlobalSecurity.org. Pike suspects that the F-35 Lightning II, now under development by Lockheed Martin, might be “the last fighter with an ejector seat, and might get converted into a drone itself.”

The weakest link is the pilot. A jet could pull 15 g's, out-turning any conventional aircraft, except it would kill the pilot. Is it time to stop spending billions on obsolete aircraft?"

Submission + - Identity Under Attack 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: It appears that two weeks ago my email address got into the wrong database. Since that time there have been continuing attempts to access my accounts and create new accounts in my name. I have received emails asking me to click the link below to confirm I want to create an account with twitter, facebook, apple games center, facebook mobile account, and numerous pornographic sites. I have not attempted to create accounts on any of these services. I have also received 16 notices from Apple about how to reset my Apple Id. I am guessing these notices are being automatically generated in response to too many failed login attempts. At this point I have no reason to believe any of my accounts have been compromised but I see no good response. Thanks for your throughts!
The Internet

Submission + - Pirate Bay quits Sweden to relieve pressure on bandwidth provider (itworld.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The Pirate Bay has opened two new gateways to its internal network in order to shield its current Internet provider, the Swedish Pirate Party, which had been threatened with legal action if it did not stop providing Internet access to the torrent search site by Tuesday.

The Swedish Pirate Party had provided bandwidth to The Pirate Bay for about three years because it was hard for the site to find anyone else who would do so. But last Tuesday the Rights Alliance, an organization that represents the film industry, gave it an ultimatum: The Pirate Party had to cut off Internet access to the torrent search site or face legal action.

The Pirate Bay's administrators said in a post on Facebook that, because of the legal threat and the potential cost of fighting it, "We've taken the decision to move on to Norway and Spain."

Submission + - Terminator Sparrows? (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by AstroPhilosopher
AstroPhilosopher writes: In a move not far removed from the model T-101, US researchers have succeeded in re-animating a dead sparrow. Duke scientists were studying male behavior aggression amongst sparrows. So they cleverly decided to insert miniaturized robotics into an empty sparrow carcass and operate it like a puppet. It worked; they noticed wing movements were a primary sign of aggression. Fortunately the living won out this time. The experiment stopped after the real sparrows tore off the robosparrow's head. But there's always a newer model on the assembly-line. Good luck sparrows.
Science

Submission + - Blood Test To Determine Whether People Are Suicidal (popsci.com)

Submitted by
rtoz
rtoz writes: "Scientists Are Developing A Blood Test To Determine Whether People Are Suicidal.

Last year, researchers in Sweden published a study linking suicide attempts to higher-than-usual levels of quinolinic acid, a neurotransmitter associated with inflammation.

Now, a team of scientists in Australia is using that finding to develop a blood test to measure levels of quinolinic acid in the blood.

The test would function as a diagnostic tool to help doctors gauge a depressed person's mental state--the higher the levels of the chemical, the more likely a patient is to attempt suicide."

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