TechReviewAl writes "Alexey Ponomarev from the University of Augsburg in Germany and colleagues have revealed the blueprints for an electric motor built with just two atoms. The motor would have one neutral atom and one charged atom trapped in a ring-shaped optical lattice. The atoms jump from one site in the lattice to the next as they travel around the ring and placing this ring in an alternating magnetic field creates the conditions necessary to keep the charged atom moving round the the ring. A team from the University of Glasgow in the UK in fact built one of these quantum motors back in 2007, which they called an optical ferris wheel for ultracold atoms. 'The next step, say Ponomarev and co, is to attach the motor to a nanoscopic resonator, such as a spring board or nanomushroom, and make it vibrate. If you can do that, they say, you'd be powering a classical object using a quantum motor.'"

darthcamaro writes "A lot of people in the US have not seen a use case for the use of IPv6 yet, since we've got plenty of IPv4 addresses. But what happens when the entire electrical grid gets smart? The so-called Smart Grid will need a networking transport mechanism that will connect potentially hundreds of millions of people and devices. Networking giant Cisco sees IP (internet protocol) as the right transport and IPv6 as the logical choice for addressing. 'Pv6 is an interesting discussion and one that occupies a lot of bandwidth at Cisco,' Marie Hattar, Cisco's vice president of network systems and security solutions marketing said. 'Some people say that for smaller deployments, we could get away with IPv4, but the smart grid has a number of parts. The point is that if you're looking to build this [smart grid] out, why not build it out on the scalable protocol from the get-go?'"

Several sources are reporting that The Data Liberation Front, a new engineering group within Google, is trying make it easier for users to move their data in and out of Google products. They have already "liberated" about half of Google's offerings (including Blogger and Gmail) and have plans to liberate Google Sites and Google Docs in the near future. "In a blog post this morning, Data Liberation engineering manager Brian Fitzpatrick, uses a good analogy to explain why the company sees this is an important step: 'Imagine you want to move out of your apartment. When you ask your landlord about the terms of your previous lease, he says that you are free to leave at any time; however, you cannot take all of your things with you - not your photos, your keepsakes, or your clothing. If you're like most people, a restriction like this may cause you to rethink moving altogether. Not only is this a bad situation for you as the tenant, but it's also detrimental to the housing industry as a whole, which no longer has incentive to build better apartments at all. Although this may seem like a strange analogy, this pretty accurately describes the situation my team, Google's Data Liberation Front, is working hard to combat from an engineering perspective.'"

The Register writes up a Russian security researcher who has uncovered a Linux webserver botnet that is coordinating with a more conventional home-based botnet of Windows machines to distribute malware. "Each of the infected machines examined so far is a dedicated or virtual dedicated server running a legitimate website, Denis Sinegubko, an independent researcher based in Magnitogorsk, Russia, told The Register. But in addition to running an Apache webserver to dish up benign content, they've also been hacked to run a second webserver known as nginx, which serves malware [on port 8080]. 'What we see here is a long awaited botnet of zombie web servers! A group of interconnected infected web servers with [a] common control center involved in malware distribution,' Sinegubko wrote. 'To make things more complex, this botnet of web servers is connected with the botnet of infected home computer(s).'"

An anonymous reader writes "Most people use MS filesystems on Disk-On-Keys, and portable hard drives, as these are readable from most machines. But this way you lose the files' permission information, which many times is very inconvenient (you must agree that having Ubuntu asking you whether to execute or display every text file or image you open from a DOK is annoying). Using 'regular' Linux filesystems like ext keeps the permissions, but may require using the superuser when switching machines (as the UIDs are different). So do any of you have a creative solution for this problem?"

inject_hotmail.com writes "The results are in: it's faster to send your data via an airborne carrier than it is through the pipes. As discussed Tuesday, a company in South Africa called Unlimited IT, frustrated by terribly slow Internet speeds, decided to prove their point by sending an actual homing pigeon with a "data card" strapped to its leg from one of their offices to another while at the same time uploading the same amount of data to the same destination via their ISPs data lines. The media outlet reporting this triumph said that it took the pigeon just over 1 hour to make the 80km/50mile flight, whereas it took over 2 hours to transfer just 4% of that data."

Hynee writes "As tweeted, NASA has released 10 new images, all from the new WFC3 instrument and others, including the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph. Images include NGC 6302, Carina Nebula, Stephan's Quintet, Markarian 817, Abell 370, and a few others. Great looking stuff, the WFC3 has twice the resolution of the WF/PC2, on the CCD at least, if memory serves correctly. Eta Carina is a fascinating object, and there are at least two releases in this 'Early Release Observations' set." Here is a video about the new images at Hubblesite.org, and a full HubbleSite.org release page with 56 images.

yuna49 writes 'Lately I've been visiting colleges with my daughter, who is a senior in high school. Every school has proudly announced that they support both Windows and Macs, and most of these schools report having about a 50-50 split between the two. However we've been a Linux household for many years now, and my daughter routinely uses a laptop running Kubuntu 9.04. Sometimes I would ask the student tour guide if Linux was supported and was usually met with a blank stare. We're obviously not concerned about whether she can write papers using OpenOffice and Linux. Rather we've been wondering about using other computing services on campus like classroom applications, remote printing, VPNs, or Wi-Fi support (nearly all these campuses have ubiquitous Wi-Fi). Given the composition of Slashdot's readership, I thought I'd pose the question here. Does your school support Linux? Have you found it difficult or impossible to use Linux in concert with the school's computing services?'

It seems that Swedish regulators have decided to extend the requirement of not calling yourself a bank to the registration of domain names. Now anyone that tries to register a .SE domain name with the word "bank" in it will need to prove they are a legitimate bank. Hopefully there are no blood banks or anyone with the last name of "Banks" that might want a .SE domain. Here is a Google translation of the demand issued by the authorities to the .SE registry.

Precision submits "Intel Corp., the largest maker of chips in the world, has outlined plans to make chips using 4nm process technology in about thirteen years. According to Intel, integration capacity of chips will increase much higher compared to fabrication process."

murphee writes "Flight delayed again? Should have asked FlightCaster, a new site using statistical analysis to predict the delay of your flight in real-time. What's even better, the services is fully buzzword compliant: it's built with Clojure, distributed with Hadoop, served with Rails, and hosted on Heroku. This interview with one of the FlightCaster developers gives the gory details on architecture, Clojure tips, and your boss a reason to let you have all the multimethods and macros you can eat. Seems like now that O'Reilly's publishing a LISP book, the Age of Parenthesus has come..."

daria42 writes "An early review of part of the Eoin Colfer-penned sequel to Douglas Adams's Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy series has panned the book as not being very funny. If you read Hitchhiker to have a good laugh, maybe you're going to be disappointed," wrote Nicolas Botti, on his Douglas Adams fan site earlier this month."