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Submission + - Judge orders professor removed from no-fly list (seattletimes.com) 1

Submitted by Okian Warrior
Okian Warrior writes: In a followup to Slashdot's previous article, a federal judge has ordered Rahinah Ibrahim removed from the U.S. government's no-fly list.

Rahinah Ibrahim eventually won the no-fly list ruling after her daughter, a US citizen, was prevented from returning to the country to testify at the trial.

Here's hoping this is the first of many successful challenges to the no-fly list.

Submission + - Bumblebees Capable of Flying Higher Than Mount Everest (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: The last thing you’d expect to see out your airplane window is a bumblebee cruising by. But a new study suggests that the insects might be capable of such high-altitude jaunts. Researchers trapped six male bumblebees living at an altitude of 3250 meters in Sichuan, China, and placed them, one at a time, in a plexiglass flight chamber. Then they slowly pumped air out of the box, simulating the atmospheric conditions at higher and higher altitudes. Impressively, only one bee failed to fly above 8000 meters, and two even remained airborne above 9000 meters—more than 100 meters higher than the peak of Mount Everest.

Submission + - No Beer for You, Courtesy of the FAA (avweb.com)

Submitted by Bucc5062
Bucc5062 writes:

A Minnesota brewery's airborne solution to the preventable yet apparently prevalent problem of running out of beer while ice fishing has been shot down by the FAA.

It seems the FAA frowns on beer runs by drowns for lake fishermen in Minnesota. While there were some minor logistical issues, the FAA threw cold water on the project. They frowned on the notion of a beer distributor using autonomous flying objects (AFO's) from performing the deliveries. It seems the activity

runs afoul of the agency's current ban on the commercial use of unmanned aircraft and it didn't take long for the operation to be grounded.

Ice fishermen got a little frosty when they discovered that, instead of having a case of Lakemaid brew dropped down next to the shack, thus saving a trip, they now had to miss some prime fishing time and go get some cold ones from the shore store. This is the marketing video that got them into trouble.

Submission + - Ask SlashDot: What if they give you a broken project? 1

Submitted by X10
X10 writes: Suppose you're assigned to a project that someone else has created. It's an app, you'll work on it alone. You think "how hard can it be", you don't check out the source code before you accept the assignment. But then, it turns out the code is not robust. You create a small new feature, and the app breaks down in unexpected ways. You fix a bug, and new bugs pop up all over the place. The person who worked on the project before you is well respected in the company, and you are "just a contractor", hired a few months ago.

The easy way out is to just quit, as there's plenty of jobs you can take. But that doesn't feel right. But, what else can you do?

Submission + - David Cameron says fictional crime proves why Snooper's Charter is necessary (techdirt.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: You may recall the stories from the past couple years about the so-called "snooper's charter" in the UK — a system to further legalize the government's ability to spy on pretty much all communications. It was setting up basically a total surveillance system, even beyond what we've since learned is already being done today. Thankfully, that plan was killed off by Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg.

However, Prime Minister David Cameron is back to pushing for the snooper's charter — and his reasoning is as stupid as it is unbelievable. Apparently, he thinks it's necessary because the fictional crime dramas he watches on TV show why it's necessary.

Submission + - Flying Snake Mysteries Revealed

Submitted by Rambo Tribble
Rambo Tribble writes: Researchers from Virginia Tech are reporting they have uncovered the secrets behind the genus Chrysopelea's aerodynamic feats. These ophidians are capable of gliding some distance while appearing to slither through the air. The BBC's article on the revelations hosts a short video of the phenomenon. At the heart of Chrysopelea's feat is a remarkable ability of the snakes to alter their body's cross-section. Finally, snakes that don't need to be on no stinking plane.

Submission + - Gone are the days when somebody could learn to be a sys admin at home! 3

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: After looking at many job boards it seems that most of the jobs require knowledge of "professional" VMs and cloud based services. The man/woman sitting at home does not usually "play" with VMs like how a real company would use VMs. The man/woman sitting at home usually does not have access to cloud services and would usually have to pay a considerable sum to "get cloud services" to learn about them. No more sys admin at home! In the "old" days you could learn about SCSI and IDE and networking and learn to program in say Perl or PHP — these would get you in the door at many companies. Not anymore!

Is this just my opinion? What does /. think?

Submission + - Hackers Steal Law Enforcement Documents from Microsoft (securityweek.com)

Submitted by wiredmikey
wiredmikey writes: Microsoft on Friday said that attackers breached the email accounts of a “select number” of employees, and obtained access to documents associated with law enforcement inquiries. According to the company, a number of Microsoft employees were targeted with attacks aiming to compromise both email and social media accounts

“..We have learned that there was unauthorized access to certain employee email accounts, and information contained in those accounts could be disclosed,” said Adrienne Hall, General Manager at Microsoft's Trustworthy Computing Group. “It appears that documents associated with law enforcement inquiries were stolen,” Hall said.

Targeted attacks like this are not uncommon, especially for an organization like Microsoft. What’s interesting about this is that the incident was significant enough to disclose, indicating that a fair number of documents could have been exposed, or that the company fears some documents will make their way to the public if released by the attackers—which may be the case if this was a “hacktivist” attack.

Submission + - Terraform Mars with Present Technology? It's Far into Realms of Magical Thought (mozilla.org) 2

Submitted by Robert Walker
Robert Walker writes: Mars One, Elon Musk with Space X, and the US Government all want to colonize Mars eventually, and the idea is of course also a favourite for many of the news stories about Mars. Most of us realize that Mars is a hostile planet for human life, where an unprotected human would die instantly, and the deserts of earth are far more hospitable. Yet, we have the hope that Mars can be terraformed to be more hospitable.

The problem is, terraforming is not likely to be the easy process described in science fiction stories. It would take thousands of years, if it worked, there are many ways it could go wrong, and it involves technology which would also make it possible to solve the energy crisis on Earth, and make it trivial to roll back from global warming. That puts it far into the realms of magical thinking, the idea that if you imagine something vividly enough, it means you can make it come true.

Should our space policies and so many decisions and plans be based on this idea, which has so little grounding in present day technology? Is it at all feasible to commit to a technological project that will take many centuries, and most likely tens of thousands of years to reach fruition? Is this perhaps a case of magical thinking, a human tendency which has lead to many other doomed projects in the past?

This article puts forward the view that Terraforming is an extreme form of magical thinking, and that though it is useful to think about terraforming, and we can learn much from the thought experiment, that to guide our space policy and decisions based on the idea that some day we are sure to terraform Mar is foolish, and means we may miss out on other projects that would give us much better return for less expense. For instance, to explore Mars eventually from orbit using telerobotics — which also takes human explorers to Mars, but for far less cost, greater safety, and without the increased risk of contaminating Mars.

We can leave terraforming to the future, to some time when we have the ability to do things which to us at present seem magical.

See:

(I'm the author of the articles and am interested in slashdot feedback, perhaps it might lead to a lively discussion).

Submission + - Lightning Breaks Off Fingers Of Christ The Redeemer (gizmodo.com) 1

Submitted by jones_supa
jones_supa writes: Christ the Redeemer in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil is the largest art deco statue in the world. It was constructed during years 1922 to 1931. This week, a lightning bolt struck the 30-meter tall statue and broke off a few fingers on the statue's right hand. According to the National Institute of Space Research, more than 40,000 lightning flashes hit the area during the three hour storm. When you put a giant statue on top of a hill, it is an attractive target for lightning bolts. On average, Christ the Redeemer usually gets struck with lightning 3 to 5 times per year.

Submission + - Request for Funding OpenBSD HQ's Electricity

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The OpenBSD Project started a Request for Funding our Electricity. As Undeadly.org writes:

OpenBSD supports a wide range of hardware architectures, and for practical and logistical reasons there are few places in the world that have them all in one place except OpenBSD headquarters [...] But keeping all this hardware running involves a considerable electricity bill, and Theo de Raadt (deraadt@) is asking for help, preferably in the form of a company willing to specifically sponsor the project's electricity bill.

Donations are greatly appreciated and bigger donations can go to the OpenBSD Foundation which will help with details and can provide receipts.

Submission + - Here be Aussie dragon

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Aussie National Science Agency, CSIRO, has pulled a sweet publicity stunt. A little girl wrote a letter asking if the agency could supply her a pet dragon. The scientists issued a tongue in cheek article about accelerating dragon R&D program. The story gets even better, as the staff used 3D printing to craft a titanium dragon for the kid. Eh mates, obviously the girl is really happy, as her mom tells: "All her friends are now saying they want to be a scientist and Sophie says she now wants to work in the CSIRO. She’s saying Australian scientists can do anything". Kudos for scientists with sense of humor!

Submission + - Schoolboy reports vulnerability affecting 600,000+, police called. (theage.com.au)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The database includes full names, addresses, home and mobile phone numbers, email addresses, dates of birth, seniors card ID numbers, and nine-digit extracts of credit card numbers.
[...]
More than a week after Joshua made contact with PTV, it still had not responded, but this week it referred the matter to Victoria Police and Privacy Victoria following inquiries by Fairfax Media.

Submission + - Corning unveils bacteria-resistant Gorilla Glass (pcpro.co.uk)

Submitted by nk497
nk497 writes: Good news for everyone who carries their smartphone into the washroom with them: Corning has unveiled germ-resistant Gorilla Glass for smartphones and tablets. At CES 2014, the company revealed its latest version of the strengthened glass will feature antimicrobial properties, thanks to the inclusion of ionic silver. The ionic silver is embedded in the glass, but doesn't affect the clarity of the glass or with touchscreen operations, Corning said.

"Corning’s antimicrobial Gorilla Glass inhibits the growth of algae, mold, mildew, fungi, and bacteria because of its built-in antimicrobial property, which is intrinsic to the glass and effective for the lifetime of a device," said James R Steiner, senior vice president and general manager for Corning Specialty Materials.

Submission + - I fought my ISP's bad behavior and won (github.io)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Eric Helgeson documents his experience with an unscrupulous ISP that was injecting affiliate IDs into the URLs for online retailers. 'It appears that the method they were using was to poison the A record of retailers and do a 301 redirect back to the www cname. This is due to the way apex, or ‘naked’ domain names work.' Upon contacting the ISP, they offered him access to two DNS servers that don't perform the injection, but they showed no indication that they would stop, or opt-out any other subscribers. (It was also the only wireless provider in his area, so he couldn't just switch to a competitor.) Helgeson then sent the data he gathered to the affiliate programs of major retailers on the assumption that they'd be upset by this as well. He was right, and they put a stop to it. He says, 'ISP’s ask you to not do crummy things on their networks, so how about they don’t do the same to their customers?'

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