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Submission + - Vt. Yankee discovers flood seals are missing (recorder.com)

Submitted by mdsolar
mdsolar writes: "For the third time in 18 months, inspectors have uncovered missing flood seals at the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant, a problem which could compromise the plant’s ability to operate electrical safety systems.

Inspecting for flood seals has been a Nuclear Regulatory Commission priority since the nuclear disaster in Fukushima, when flood water from a tsunami inundated several nuclear plants similar in design to Vermont Yankee.

The most recent problem was discovered Wednesday during an annual inspection of the manholes at the Vernon plant, according to NRC spokesman Neil Sheehan.

In last Wednesday’s instance, Entergy Nuclear failed to correct missing and faulty flood seals that were discovered last spring in underground pipes, Sheehan said."

Submission + - Tea Party's Green Faction Fights for Solar in Red States (bloomberg.com)

Submitted by mdsolar
mdsolar writes: "Here’s a riddle to vex the Washington political class: When do Tea Party Republicans stand together with Sierra Club environmentalists?

The answer is on their support for solar energy against the monopoly power of traditional utilities in some of the most conservative U.S. states.

A Georgia splinter group known as the Green Tea Coalition, which is part of the broader anti-big-government movement, is reviving the Republican link with the Sierra Club that dates back more than a century to President Theodore Roosevelt’s work to protect the environment. Its influence is being felt in other states, from Arizona in the West to North Carolina on the East Coast.

“Some people have called this an unholy alliance,” said Debbie Dooley, founder of the coalition and a co-founder of the Atlanta Tea Party Patriots. She’s working with the Sierra Club to fight for solar and against nuclear power in Georgia. “We agree on the need to develop clean energy, but not much else.”

The alliance is a danger for utilities such as Southern Co.’s Georgia Power unit and Pinnacle West Capital Corp.’s Arizona Public Service, which are resisting the spread of solar energy as a threat to their business model. It may help solar developers such as SolarCity Corp. and panel manufacturers including SunPower Corp. of San Jose, California.

What’s uniting the environmental and Republican groups is the view that plunging prices for solar panels may mean consumers don’t need to buy all their electricity from utilities and their giant centralized generation plants."

Submission + - Pentagon Readies Contingency Plans Due To BlackBerry's Uncertain Future (nextgov.com)

Submitted by cold fjord
cold fjord writes: Nextgov reports, "The Defense Department, owner of 470,000 BlackBerrys, is distancing itself from the struggling vendor while moving ahead with construction of a departmentwide app store and a system for securing all mobile devices, including the latest iPhones, iPads, and Samsung smartphones and tablets. Just two months ago, when BlackBerry announced the company would radically curtail commercial sales, Pentagon officials said their business partnership remained unaffected. ... A 2012 strategy to transition personnel from PCs to smartphones and tablets did not favor any one device maker ... "This multi-vendor, device-agnostic approach minimizes the impact of [a] single vendor to our current operations," Pentagon spokesman Lt. Col. Damien Pickart said. Implementation of the strategy centers on a "mobile device management" system to track handhelds that touch military networks so that they do not compromise military information or corrupt Defense systems. "DoD's mobility strategy and commercial mobile device implementation plan includes reliance on multiple vendors to support its mobile communications needs," Pickart said. ... The Pentagon anticipates connecting 300,000 approved government-issued consumer devices by 2016."

Submission + - No, Space Station Is Not Infected With Stuxnet Worm (discovery.com)

Submitted by astroengine
astroengine writes: After antivirus expert Eugene Kaspersky gave a talk last week about the threat of cyber espionage and malicious software infecting critical networks, citing the International Space Station as one such vulnerable isolated network, some news outlets ran with the story that the Stuxnet worm — a virus responsible for causing chaos in Iranian nuclear refineries and now, potentially, a Russian nuclear power station — had been uploaded to the orbiting outpost. This, however, is not the case. In fact, it's not clear if there are any current malware or virus threats on the space station; Kaspersky was just using the ISS as an example. That's not to say that the space station hasn't been infected in the past, however. “I was talking to Russian space guys and they said ‘yes, from time to time there are virus epidemics in the space station,’” said Kaspersky vaguely, possibly referring to the 2008 W32.Gammima.AG infection that was likely delivered to the space station via a flash drive.

Submission + - CyanogenMod Installer exits beta, now available in Google Play Store (muktware.com)

Submitted by sfcrazy
sfcrazy writes: CyanogenMod Installer is exiting beta stage and is now available for general purpose from the Google Play Store. CM supports quite a lot of devices and there is a very comprehensive list of supported device which is available here. With this release the team is also giving the Download Portal some design makeover to make it easier for user to find the builds for their devices.

Submission + - Does Your Salad Know What Time It Is?

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Does your salad know what time it is? It may be healthier for you if it does, according to new research from Rice University and the University of California at Davis.

"Vegetables and fruits don't die the moment they are harvested," said Rice biologist Janet Braam, the lead researcher on a new study this week in Current Biology. "They respond to their environment for days, and we found we could use light to coax them to make more cancer-fighting antioxidants at certain times of day." Braam is professor and chair of Rice's Department of Biochemistry and Cell Biology.

Submission + - Killing Your Sexual Desires for Academic and Intellectual Pursuits? 3

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: In the past few months, I have been applying to a multitude of graduate schools. Recently, I was accepted into a Ph.D. in computer science program at a fairly prestigious and demanding institution. Like most Slashdot readers, I have always been an exceptional student throughout high school and my undergraduate studies. However, as a heterosexual male individual, there has always been a persistent desire to associate myself with females in an effort to find love, have sex, and to be in a relationship. I have learned the hard way that this is often a colossal distraction from one's schooling and I would like to train myself to become more apathetic to such desires in preparation for the difficult but intellectually awarding years of graduate school that lay ahead. So, fellow Slashdot users, I ask you a rather odd but serious question: How do you kill your sexual desires to enable you to focus more on academic and intellectual goals?

Submission + - Meet the 23-ton X-Wing, the world's largest Lego model (wordpress.com) 1

Submitted by awaissoft
awaissoft writes: There’s big, then there’s really big, and then there’s colossal, which might be a good word to use when describing a near 46,000-pound Lego X-Wing that made a triumphant debut Thursday in New York’s Times Square.

The full-size replica, about 42 times the size of the Lego “Star Wars” X-Wing (#9493) set available on store shelves, celebrates the debut of Cartoon Network’s “The Yoda Chronicles,” which premieres on May 29 at 8 p.m.

It took a small army of 32 Lego master builders, housed in a facility in the Czech Republic, to build the 45,980-pound, or 23-ton, Lego ship. It stands 11 feet high and 43 feet long, and contains more than 5 million Lego pieces...

Submission + - Cockroaches Evolving to Avoid Roach Motels (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: Only a few years after roach motels were introduced in the 1980s, they lost their allure for an increasing number of German cockroaches. Researchers soon realized that some roaches had developed an aversion to glucose—the sugary bait disguising the poison—and that the insects were passing that trait on to their young. Now, scientists have figured out how this behavior evolved.

Submission + - Ron Paul found guilty of Reverse Domain Name Hijacking in domain dispute (domainnamewire.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Ron Paul lost his two cybersquatting complaints against RonPaul.com and RonPaul.org.

In the case of RonPaul.org, Paul was been found guilty of "reverse domain name hijacking".

A reverse domain name hijacking finding means that the arbitration panel believes the case was filed in bad faith, resulting in the abuse of the administrative process.

The panel ruled this way since Paul filed the case after the owner of RonPaul.org had already offered to give him the domain for free.

The panel also ruled against Paul for the RonPaul.com domain name.

Submission + - Scientists growing new crystals to make LED lights useful for office, home (networkworld.com)

Submitted by coondoggie
coondoggie writes: When to comes to offering warm yet visually efficient lighting, LEDs have a long way to go. But scientists with the University of Georgia and Oak Ridge and Argonne national laboratories are looking at new family of crystals they say glow different colors and hold the key for letting white LED light shine in homes and offices as well as natural sunlight.

Submission + - Refuses to Decrypt -- Claims Fifth Amendment (jsonline.com)

Submitted by jsrjsr
jsrjsr writes: A West Allis, WI computer scientist is refusing to decrypt hard drives that the FBI claims contain child pornography. He has consistently refused to admit anything in the case, which a judge says has the effect of strengthening his claim of fifth amendment protection against incriminating himself.

Comment Re:Meanwhile... (Score 1) 185

by ChrisSlicks (#43459973) Attached to: U.S. Offshore Wind Farm Receives $2 Billion From Japanese Banks

In Massachusetts we do get a choice of the electric production company (but not the service provider), so unless they have cancelled this option for the particular Boston home owner above, I believe he still has a choice.

New England states have historically had a high price for electricity overall, but a large percentage of the cost is the supply charge which covers maintenance of the fragile "last mile" power lines.
Google

Google Pledges Not To Sue Any Open Source Projects Using Their Patents 153

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the now-and-forever dept.
sfcrazy writes "Google has announced the Open Patent Non-Assertion (OPN) Pledge. In the 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." This is in addition to the Open Invention Network, and their general work toward reforming the patent system. The patents covered in the OPN will be free to use in Free/Open Source software for the life of the patent, even if Google should transfer ownership to another party. Read the text of the pledge. It appears that interaction with non-copyleft licenses (MIT/BSD/Apache) is a bit weird: if you create a non-free fork it appears you are no longer covered under the pledge.
Programming

Submission + - SpaceX: Lessons Learned Developing Software for Space Vehicles (lwn.net)

Submitted by
jrepin
jrepin writes: "On day two of the 2013 Embedded Linux Conference, Robert Rose of SpaceX spoke about the "Lessons Learned Developing Software for Space Vehicles". In his talk, he discussed how SpaceX develops its Linux-based software for a wide variety of tasks needed to put spacecraft into orbit—and eventually beyond. Linux runs everywhere at SpaceX, he said, on everything from desktops to spacecraft."

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