58093683
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Daniel_Stuckey writes:
After a furious bidding war in Vienna on Saturday, a Japanese camera collector has bought a Hasselblad camera for $910,000 in a record-setting auction of what's been widely called the "only camera to come back from the moon."
But contrary to claims repeated across the Internet on Monday, this isn't the only camera to come back from the moon. In fact, some think it may have never landed on the moon at all. And because of rules surrounding most NASA property, its sale may actually violate US law.
One thing we know for sure, maybe: the 70mm Hasselblad 500 is one of fourteen cutting-edge cameras that astronauts used in orbit around the moon and on the lunar surface during the Apollo program. All of the images we have from those moon missions were taken by these machines, which were either mounted inside the command module that circled the moon or were attached to space suits at the chest.
This particular camera was, reports the Verge, among many other sources, "used on the moon during the Apollo 15 mission in 1971," and "is special in the fact that it's returned to Earth." That's because astronauts were often instructed to jettison their cameras on the lunar surface in order to save precious kilograms during the return trip.
58066187
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Daniel_Stuckey writes:
I guess it isn’t surprising that Americans—contentious and swift to judge as we are—are prone to conspiracy theories, especially when it comes to medicine. A new survey from researchers at the University of Chicago found that half of Americans believe in one medical conspiracy theory or another: one-third of us believe that the FDA is holding back a natural cure for cancer at the behest of drug companies; a fifth of us believe that health officials are holding back evidence that cell phones cause cancer at the behest of large corporations; another fifth believe that vaccines do cause autism and other psychological disorders, but the government and doctors are vaccinating anyway. It doesn’t say why the government and doctors want to endanger your health, but just taking a stab in the dark, I’m going to say that some corporation is probably behind it.
But maybe that’s not that exciting, and what’s interesting is who held these beliefs. Medical conspiracy theorists aren’t limited to one side of the political spectrum—35 percent of those who agreed with a conspiracy theory identified themselves as liberals, 41 percent said they were conservatives. But aside from believing conspiracy theories, this group did share other tendencies: they didn’t wear sunscreen as often. They took herbal supplements more often. And what I found really surprising, the more conspiracy theories they believed in, the more likely they were to buy organic or farm-stand food.
58058039
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Daniel_Stuckey writes:
Last week saw the UK’s annual budget announced, and beyond the misguided PR campaigns to pander to voters (lower tax on beer and bingo!) was a potentially less pocket-friendly nugget for anyone who pays for digital downloads like music, films, and apps. Namely: They’re probably going to cost more soon.
The Guardian picked out a largely overlooked clause in the budget documents that sets out rules for charging value-added tax (VAT) on digital companies. The paper reads:
As announced at Budget 2013, the government will legislate to change the rules for the taxation of intra-EU business to consumer supplies of telecommunications, broadcasting and e-services. From 1 January 2015 these services will be taxed in the Member State in which the consumer is located, ensuring these are taxed fairly and helping to protect revenue.
58057977
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Daniel_Stuckey writes:
Additive manufacturing has made huge strides in high-resolution and multi-material printing, but this is still pretty amazing: a functional tape measure that was printed fully-assembled. Made by an aeromechanical engineer who goes by the name Angry Monk, the tape measure has a total of 114 individual parts.
As you can see in the video, the tape measure is fully functional, with a tape made of half-inch articulating segments that are graduated down to 1/8 inch. The entire thing is about the same size as a traditional tape measure, but as you might expect, you can fit a lot more thin metal tape into a traditional design—Angry Monk's design fits just over 52 inches of tape, versus 25 feet in the regular model he compares it to.
57881045
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Daniel_Stuckey writes:
Last March, weev, the notorious internet troll who seems to be equally celebrated and reviled, was convicted of accessing a computer without authorization and identity fraud, and sentenced to serve 41 months in prison.
"He had to decrypt and decode, and do all of these things I don't even understand," Assistant US Attorney Glenn Moramarco argued. Here, on a Wednesday morning in Philadelphia, before a packed courtroom, the federal prosecution argued that a hacker should spend three and a half years in prison for committing a crime it couldn't fully comprehend.
Previously, Orin Kerr, a law professor at George Washington University and weev's defense attorney, had argued first and foremost that there was no criminal hacking to speak of. According to Kerr, what weev and Daniel Spitler (who pleaded guilty to avoid jail time) had done while working as an outfit called Goatse Security was entirely legal, even though it embarrassed public officials and some of the country's biggest corporations.
57880975
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Daniel_Stuckey writes:
So, after hours and hours of discussion and research into about how we at Motherboard and VICE Canada could investigate PTSD treatment, we landed on Skip Rizzo and his team at the Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT) at University of Southern California, who are using virtual reality therapy to treat PTSD.
Because of his experience, Jody's reactions and comments on Skip’s equipment were highly valuable. It’s stunning that someone like Jody, who as a sniper witnessed all kinds of carnage, and who lost both of his feet to a landmine, can still manage to avoid the syndrome. This of course adds to the mystery of the condition, and is what largely fuels his own personal curiosity.
We also spoke to Sgt. John Warren, who the LA Times eloquently spilled ink over in a feature story that ran late last year. Sgt. Warren, an American, fought in Iraq and fell victim to a horrific roadside bomb incident that left him with PTSD. As Christopher Goffard wrote in the Times, “Warren woke to find himself in a furnace. He heard the shrill screaming of someone in terror. He realized it was himself. Fire ate at his neck and face.”
57844103
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Daniel_Stuckey writes:
Today, Dogecoin is 100 days old. If the altcoin is truly headed for the moon, then it's already made some pretty decent progress. The alternative cryptocurrency, and the community around it have funded the Jamaican bobsled team's journey to Sochi’s winter games, and have also raised $50,000 to provide clean drinking water to Kenyans. Its adopters have launched initiatives like Doge4Kids, SaveDogemas, and have reached out to actual Shiba Inu owners and rescuers to help pay their vet bills. Through non-sequitur phrases scribed out in rainbow-colored Comic Sans, I've stood witness as the altcoin has brought virtual currency enthusiasts together with the unwitting owners of cute dogs.
Chronicling the first 100 days of Dogecoin's success, the above video, like many other videos pertaining to doge, can hardly contain its caffeinated excitement. One might compare the Shiba Inu-embossed currency's first 100 days to Bitcoin's first 1,000. That’s coarsely, if you were to compare the growth of the currencies’ market capitalizations. By Bitcoin's 1,000th day, or September 30, 2011, the original cryptocurrency sat at a market cap of roughly $36.5 million, after having spiked as at $190 million in July that year (the first Bitcoin bubble). Today, Dogecoin's market cap is at about $47 million, after having risen to over $87 million in less than two months.
57840067
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Daniel_Stuckey writes:
Would you rather have a Swiss Army knife or a tire iron? Context is, of course, everything, so imagine that your car has been getting flats like crazy, and the Swiss Army knife costs three times as much as the tire iron. Facing a round of deep budget cuts, the Department of Defense is opting for the Swiss Army knife, which is why its planning to ground the A-10 Thunderbolt II—called the "Air Force's most effective weapon"—in favor of long-delayed, over budget, under performing F-35, known as "the stealth fighter...designed for no one."
Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel released a budget proposal to shrink the size of the armed forces to their smallest size in decades. Under the budget as proposed, the Air Force's entire fleet of 350 A-10s would be retired in order to save $3.5 billion over five years, and its former combat roles will be handed over to the newer F-35joint strike fighterand the growing drone fleet.
"The A-10 is a 40-year-old single-purpose airplane originally designed to kill enemy tanks on a Cold War battlefield," Hagel said. "It cannot survive or operate effectively where there are more advanced aircraft or air defenses."
57839919
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Daniel_Stuckey writes:
Google Glass could play a role in determining the next president of the United States. It may sound nuts, but it’s not too far-fetched. Already some political strategists in Washington are studying how to use augmented reality to help win elections, and if not as soon as this November, we could expect to see some Glassholes vying for our vote come 2016.
On Sunday, NPR's Don Gonyea wrote that he's started to spot the controversial eyewear at political events, and raised an interesting question of how Glass and other wearables could be used on the campaign trail.
The first question is whether candidates themselves will don the computerized frames. At this point, probably not—the device is still too nerdy and niche for a politician trying to seem folksy and relatable to risk traipsing around town looking like a cyborg.
57806675
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Daniel_Stuckey writes:
The Australian Attorney General is pushing a new law that would force suspects of computer crimes to disclose the passwords and keys necessary to decrypt their internet communications.
Part of a proposal to revise the country's Telecommunications Interception Act, the law would expand an existing law, section 3LA of the Crimes Act 1914, which already allows Australian authorities to gain access to physically seized computers and hard drives by way of forcing suspects to disclose their decryption passwords.
The proposal would give intelligence agencies even more elbow room, by allowing them to also "issue 'intelligibility assistance notices' requiring a person to provide information or assistance to place previously lawfully accessed communications into an intelligible form," as IT News reported today.
57708491
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Daniel_Stuckey writes:
The goal is to build a self-contained block of toilets, similar to Coca-Cola's community blocks, that can also provide clean water and power for phone charging—to essentially turn toilets into a community center.
"I think it's hard to make sanitation as sexy as a cell phone, but by integrating into the community and making it a hub, it can be something more popular," Linden said.
The toilet itself, called the Sol-Char, is a fascinating bit of engineering. In order to sanitize waste without the help of massive treatment facilities, Linden's team instead designed the toilet to scorch waste in a chamber heated by fiber optic cables that pipe in heat from solar collectors on the toilet's roof.
"A solar concentrator has all this light focused in on one centimeter. It'd be fine if we could bring everyone's fecal waste up to that one point, like burning it with a magnifying glass," Linden said. "But that's not practical, so we were thinking of other ways to concentrate that light."
57674659
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Daniel_Stuckey writes:
It’s been four and a half months since a federal judge ordered the FBI to release thousands of documents on the agency’s use of drones. At 800 pages released so far, the Bureau has done its damnedest to scrub out particulars about its unmanned inventory, past and present.
But even FBI redaction artists slip up and accidentally divulge some hard figures once in awhile.
After months of anticipation, we finally know approximately how many drones the FBI had. In 2010.
In a December 2010 submission to the Federal Aviation Administration, the FBI asserted that its three drones [“UAS,” or unmanned aerial system, in the above] were safe to fly in domestic skies. In an otherwise heavily redacted document, this one number escaped the censors’ gaze.
57669783
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Daniel_Stuckey writes:
On paper, the technology is as elegant as it is promising. Bitcoin's big innovation is that it offers a system of verification that relies on math, not middlemen, to broker trust. That's a big deal, but it's also a little bewildering.
Among other things, Bitcoin undoes the internet's logic of copying and pasting: it proves that transactions have happened through math alone, which can, among other things, obviate the need for central financial institutions. It may not turn out to be a very good currency, but it's already looking like an interesting way to change the way we handle and send money.
Some regulators and banks are now taking it very seriously. A report out today from Goldman Sachs says Bitcoin isn't a very good store of value, but its payment technology could force "existing players to adapt or coopt it." In a December report, Bank of America Merrill Lynch predicted that Bitcoin could “become a major means of payment for e-commerce and may emerge as a serious competitor to traditional money transfer providers.” Other industry stalwarts remain puzzled: “Wow... It’s totally surreal," was how James P. Gorman, the head of Morgan Stanley, put it the other day. And yet, for all of its futuristic mystery, the technology rests on self-evidence and hard logic. It aims to replace messy human trust with rigid mathematical proof.
57632351
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Daniel_Stuckey writes:
The very first pages that formed the earliest World Wide Web are probably lost forever. When Tim Berners-Lee launched a network of linked hypertext documents from his NeXT computer in 1989, he wasn't thinking much about posterity. He was mostly thinking about the boon the system could prove for his particle physicist colleagues at CERN, who desperately needed a better system for sharing and storing the data from their experiments.
The fact that the first website got deleted somewhere along the way is both remarkable and unsurprising. The web was never intended to be a permanent archive, and an average website in the 90s survived only 100 days. Still, given the historical import of the digital document, and the fact that there are some 48 copies of the Gutenberg Bible still out there, it feels strange, if somehow typical of the ever-ephemeral nature of wired progress.
57563337
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Daniel_Stuckey writes:
Over the weekend, Ma 28-year-old man was arrested on suspicion of using a small quadcopter drone to smuggle an unknown quantity of illegal drugs into a prison in Melbourne, Australia.
While it's certainly not the first time small-fry UAV technology has been used by a mid-level mule to airmail drugs into the clink, it does suggest a growing trend in the highest-tech of prison highs. Here, then, is a brief history of drone-assisted prison drug smuggling.
In November 2013, guards at Hull jail in Gatineau, Canada, spotted a small drone flying over the prison's walls. An exhaustive search of both Hull's grounds and the immediate vicinity turned up nothing by way of whatever contraband the drone might have been toting around. Nevertheless, it didn't appear to be one-off incident
"This sort of thing happens often in prisons all across Quebec," Stephane Lemaire, president of Quebec's correctional officers' union, told the Ottawa Sun. "Usually the drones are carrying small packages of drugs or other illicit substances." The problem, Lemaire added, is that "the drone can be controlled from more than a kilometre away, and the [Hull] prison is surrounded by forest."
