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NASA

Submission + - NASA Asteroid Capture Mission to Be Proposed in 2014 Budget (yahoo.com)

Submitted by
MarkWhittington
MarkWhittington writes: "Included in President Obama's 2014 budget request will be a $100 million line item for NASA for a mission to capture and bring an asteroid to a high orbit around the moon where it will be explored by asteroinauts. Whether the $2.6 billion mission is a replacement or a supplement to the president's planned human mission to an asteroid is unclear. The proposal was first developed by the Keck Institite in April, 2012 and has achieved new impetus due to the meteor incident over Russia and new fears of killer asteroids."
The Almighty Buck

Submission + - Obama signs 'Monsanto Protection Act' Into Law (rt.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Despite over 250,000 people's names on a petition asking for a veto of the the spending bill, Obama on Thursday signed into law HR 933 which includes a rider referred to as the "Monsanto Protection Act." This provision "effectively bars federal courts from being able to halt the sale or planting of GMO or GE crops and seeds, no matter what health consequences from the consumption of these products may come to light in the future... With HR 933 now a law, however, the court system no longer has the right to step in and protect the consumer."
News

Submission + - United States begins stealth bombing runs over South Korea. (nytimes.com)

Submitted by skade88
skade88 writes: The New York Times is reporting that the United States of America has started flying B-2 Stealth Bomber runs over South Korea as a show of force to North Korea during raised tensions in the region. The bombers flew 6,500 miles to bomb a South Korean island with mock explosives. Earlier this month the US Military ran mock B-52 bombing runs over the same South Korean island. The US Military says it shows that it can execute precision bombing runs at will with little notice needed. The US also reaffirmed their commitment to protecting it's allies in the region.

The North Koreans have been making threats to turn South Korea into a sea of fire. North Korea has also made threats claiming they will nuke the United States' main land.
Google

Submission + - Google pledges not to sue open source software, unless first attacked (muktware.com)

Submitted by sfcrazy
sfcrazy writes: Google has announced the Open Patent Non-Assertion (OPN) Pledge. In it's pledge Google says that they will not sue any user, distributor or developer of open-source software on specified patents, unless first attacked. Under this pledge, Google is starting off with 10 patents relating to MapReduce, a computing model for processing large data sets first developed at Google. Google says that over time they intend to expand the set of Google’s patents covered by the pledge to other technologies.
Patents

Submission + - Texas judge tosses out patent claim against Linux (networkworld.com)

Submitted by
netbuzz
netbuzz writes: "A federal judge in Texas, presiding over a district notorious for favoring patent trolls, has summarily dismissed all claims relating to a case brought by Uniloc USA against Rackspace for allegedly infringing upon Linux patents. Red Hat defended Rackspace in the matter and issued a press release saying: “In dismissing the case, Chief Judge Leonard Davis found that Uniloc’s claim was unpatentable under Supreme Court case law that prohibits the patenting of mathematical algorithms. This is the first reported instance in which the Eastern District of Texas has granted an early motion to dismiss finding a patent invalid because it claimed unpatentable subject matter.”"
AI

Submission + - A German Parking Garage Parks Your Car for You (technologyreview.com)

Submitted by moon_unit2
moon_unit2 writes: Tech Review has a story about a garage in Ingolstadt, Germany, where the cars park themselves. The garage is an experiment set up by Audi to explore ways that autonomous technology might practically be introduced; most of the sensor technology is built into the garage and relayed to the cars rather than inside the cars themselves. It seems that carmakers see the technology progressing in a slightly different way to Google, with its fleet of self-driving Prius. From the piece: “It’s actually going to take a while before you get a really, fully autonomous car,” says Annie Lien, a senior engineer at the Electronics Research Lab, a shared facility for Audi, Volkswagen, and other Volkswagen Group brands in Belmont, California, near Silicon Valley. “People are surprised when I tell them that you’re not going to get a car that drives you from A to B, or door to door, in the next 10 years.”

Submission + - Creationist Bets $10k Against Challengers To Literal Interpretation of Genesis (yahoo.com)

Submitted by HungWeiLo
HungWeiLo writes: A California man who believes the literal interpretation of the Bible is real is offering $10,000 to anyone who can successfully debunk claims made in the book of Genesis in front of a judge.

Joseph Mastropaolo, the man behind this challenge, is to put $10,000 of his own money into an escrow account. His debate opponent would be asked to do the same. They would then jointly agree on a judge based on a list of possible candidates. Mastropaolo said that any evidence presented in the trial must be “scientific, objective, valid, reliable and calibrated."

For his part, Mastropaolo has a Ph.D. in kinesiology and writes for the Creation Hall of Fame website, which is helping to organize the minitrial. It’s also not the first such trial he’s tried to arrange. A previous effort, known as the “Life Science Prize,” proposed a similar scenario. Mastropaolo includes a list of possible circuit court judges to oversee the trial and a list of those he challenged to take part on the evolutionary side of the debate.

Anyone up for winning $20,000?
Java

Submission + - Everything About Java 8 (techempower.com)

Submitted by reygahnci
reygahnci writes: I found a comprehensive summary of the developer-facing changes coming in Java 8 including: improvements to interfaces, functional interfaces, lambdas, functions, streams, parallels, date/time improvements, and more. The article includes example code with realistic examples of use as well as explaining the reasoning behind some of the choices made by the developers who are working on Java 8.
Cellphones

Submission + - North Korea Halts Internet Access After One Month (ibtimes.com)

Submitted by
redletterdave
redletterdave writes: "After just one month online, North Korea has pulled the plug on its only 3G data network, which was previously made available for tourists to access the Internet starting on Feb. 22. The North Korean government did not explain why its 3G network has been shut off, but given the raised level of international interest in the country’s activities (the country is facing UN sanctions after its third nuclear test last month) and how it severed its final communication line with South Korea on Wednesday, the government likely had a change of heart about its loosening communication restrictions. That said, as with most things in North Korea, we may never know the real answer."
GNOME

Submission + - GTK+ 3.8 Released with support for Wayland (gmane.org)

Submitted by kthreadd
kthreadd writes: Version 3.8 of the GTK+ GUI framework has been released in version 3.8. A new feature in GTK+ 3.8 is support for Wayland 1.0, the display server that will replace X on free desktops. Among the other new featurs are improved support for themeing, fixes to the geometry management and improved accessibility. There is also better support for touch, as part of a long going effort in making GTK+ touch-aware.
Medicine

Submission + - New Brain Implant Transmits Wirelessly to Computer (singularityhub.com)

Submitted by
kkleiner
kkleiner writes: "Scientists at Brown University have made a brain implant that can record and transmit brain signals to a computer wirelessly. Free from onerous connections and wires, the technology could foster the development of a new generation of more flexible robotics to help amputees, spinal cord injury victims, or people with crippling neurological disorders. Referred to the researchers affectionately as the “can,” the titanium-enclosed device measures 2.2 inches (56 mm) long, 1.65 inches (42 mm) wide, and 0.35 inches (9 mm) thick. That’s pretty small considering it contains an array of 100 electrodes, a lithium ion battery, and custom-designed ultralow-power integrated circuits, radio and infrared wireless transmitters, and a copper coil for recharging."
Businesses

Submission + - Square Enix President Yoichi Wada stepping down, Extraordinary loss predicted. (forbes.com)

Submitted by skade88
skade88 writes: Square Enix president Yoichi Wada will not have his one year contract renewed in June on news of a huge loss for the company.

From the Article: 'The revised guidance for the year ending 31 March 2013 makes for grim reading. The predicted 13.5 billion yen drop (around $143.2 million) in operating income turns a 7.5 billion yen operating income into a 6 billion yen outflow – a 16.7 billion yen drop from the 2012 financial year operating income of 10.7 billion yen. Net income is similarly affected, dropping from a previous guidance of 3.5 billion yen to a 13 billion yen loss, down 19.1 billion yen on the prior year.'

Submission + - Another Way Carriers Screw Customers: Premium SMS "Errors" (techcrunch.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: No one likes their carrier. And with behaviour like this it's not surprising. TechCrunch catches T-Mobile taking money from a new pay-as-you-go customer after signing her up to its own premium horoscope text message service — and taking money before she's even put the SIM in the phone.
Google

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: Are We in a Tech Bubble? (slashdot.org)

Submitted by
Nerval's Lobster
Nerval's Lobster writes: "When a major IT company pays a reported $30 million—roughly 90 percent of it in cash—for an iOS app with no monetization strategy and a million downloads since launch, is that a sign that the tech industry as a whole is riding a massive, overinflated bubble? That’s the amount of filthy lucre that Yahoo paid for 17-year-old Nick D’Aloisio’s Summly app, according to AllThingsD. The app offers “algorithmically generated summaries” (in its Website’s words) from hundreds of news sources across the Web, presented in an easy-to-read format; users can cherry-pick their topics and news sources of choice, save summaries for offline viewing, and share content with others. Yahoo isn't alone, by a long shot: over the past couple years, a few apps have been snatched up for enormous sums—think Facebook’s $1 billion acquisition of Instagram in 2012, or Google buying Sparrow for a reported $25 million. Nor has the money train stopped there: in a pattern that recalls the late-90s market frothiness for anyone over the age of 28, a handful of tech companies have either launched much-hyped IPOs or witnessed their share price skyrocket into the stratosphere. But does all this IPO activity and app-acquiring actually mean "bubble"?"

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