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Submission Summary: 0 pending, 88 declined, 23 accepted (111 total, 20.72% accepted)

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Submission + - Applied Oceanic Geoengineer Spurs Mass Hysteria Among Political Class (io9.com)

Submitted by
Baldrson
Baldrson writes: "The UK Guardian via io9 reports that "A massive and illegal geoengineering project has been detected off Canada’s west coast." An Amerindian tribe in the Pacific NW that depends on salmon contracted to have 100 tonnes of iron sulphate spread across a huge area in order to spur plankton growth. The entrepreneur, Russ George, hopes to cash in on the carbon credits and the Amerindian tribe on an increased salmon harvest. This is inducing mass hysteria among the poltical class."

Submission + - H-1bs Drive Out Skilled But Not Unskilled (eurekalert.org)

Submitted by
Baldrson
Baldrson writes: "From a Notre Dame press release: "In the first study to measure the temporary impact of highly skilled immigrants on native populations, University of Notre Dame EconomistAbigail Wozniak and Fairfield University's Thomas J. Murray — a former Notre Dame graduate student — found that when highly skilled immigrants move to a city or town, the U.S. natives in that area who are also highly skilled tend to move away. However, the study found that the same immigrant group's presence decreases the chances that low-skilled natives would leave." This, of course, contrasts with pundits such as Tim O'Reilly who claim that US skilled workers enjoy greater economic security from skilled immigrants."

Submission + - Quadrotor Construction Swarm (youtube.com)

Submitted by Baldrson
Baldrson writes: In this video teams of quadrotors autonomously build cubic structures from modular parts. Imagine these little guys flying to battery recharge stations, dropping off their discharged batteries and picking up freshly charged batteries. That would take only about 10% off their production time. The battery recharge stations themselves could be autonomously and continuously redistributed to the construction frontier. Autonomous crawlers could weld the positioned joints.
Space

Submission + - Falcon 9 Orbits! (businessweek.com)

Submitted by Baldrson
Baldrson writes: Business Week reports that: "SpaceX’s Falcon 9 took off on its first test flight at about 2:45 p.m. local time from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. It reached the Earth’s orbit about nine minutes later." This is a victory not only for Elon Musk's team, but for advocates of commercial space transportation.
Space

Submission + - A Space Solar Power Satellite A Day... (seedmagazine.com) 2

Submitted by
Baldrson
Baldrson writes: "I've been following space solar power satellite technology since O'Neill's Stewart Brand days (longer than half of you have been alive) and this is the first time it appears likely to happen in the near future: PowerSat Corporation has filed 2 important patents. One uses the solar array to propel itself from low earth orbit to geostationary orbit. The other one turns a cloud of small geostationary solar power satellites into a huge phased array. The propulsion patent plausibly reduces launch costs by 67%. The satellite cloud microwave phasing patent, however, has a huge hidden benefit that I doubt even Powersat has fully taken into account: industrial learning curve of small launchers. A similar argument has been made before by Autodesk founder, John Walker in "A Rocket A Day keeps the High Costs Away. Basically, if you are going to deploy a system with a large number of repetitions, the total (integral) cost is given by the formula: firstunit*(units^(1-rate))/(1-rate). To replace all fossil fuel baseload generation capacity in the US (250GW) would require 20,000 Falcon 9 HL launches (78Mdollars/15000kg or $5200/kg to geostationary transfer orbit) each of 3 BrightStars (PowerSat's satellite) at nearly 5000kg each. Walk that down down an industrial learning curve at 10% per doubling, the total launch cost of a 250GW cloud would be (1-.67)*1-.67)*5200*3*5000*((200*100)^(1-.1))/(1-.1) = 212G$ or less than a dollar per installed watt of baseload electric generation capacity. Assuming 10% energy loss in transmission to the ground array, each satellite would need to generate around 250GW/(3*5000*200*100)kg/(1-.1) or less than 1kW/kg or 5MW/satellite. At 35% solar conversion efficiency and 1kW/m^2 solar flux most of that would be in a weightless mirror that would have to be about 70m in diameter at 350g/m^2 (5000kg/(5MW/(.35*1kW/m^2))). Weightless mirrors can be very low mass and inexpensive. Looks doable. To pay for the satellite itself let's more than triple the installed cost to $3/W. To understand how big of a deal this is: The other near-term scalable baseload electrical sources are "clean coal" and nuclear power — both of which are, optimistically, at similar capital costs per installed watt."
First Person Shooters (Games)

Submission + - Spasim: World's First 3D MOG (majorityrights.com) 1

Submitted by
Baldrson
Baldrson writes: "The first 3D Multiplayer Online Game was published in — 1994? No. 1984? Sorry, Mac. It was 1974 on the same system that Ray Ozzie, Microsoft's current Chief Architect got his start: PLATO IV. It was for up to 32 world-wide users all shooting it up in a space simulation called "Spasim". Watch the video of a recent demonstration running on a CDC Cyber emulated by an AMD64 system."
Space

Submission + - Armadillo Aerospace Wins First Lunar Lander Prize (xprize.org)

Submitted by
Baldrson
Baldrson writes: "By flying a rocket for 90 seconds to a soft landing on another pad, and then relaunching for a similar 90 second flight, John Carmack's rocket company, Armadillo Aerospace has won the first, and smaller, of two prizes in the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge. The first flight was completed this morning but the second flight was delayed until this afternoon due to air traffic conflicts. Carmack and crew have been at this for a number of years with some near misses in prior competitions. This winning flight is welcome good news at a time when many have concerns about a down-turn in commercial space and the likely next President of the United States has recently said of such prizes, "When John F. Kennedy decided that we were going to put a man on the moon, he didn't put a bounty out for some rocket scientist to win — he put the full resources of the United States government behind the project...""
Programming

Submission + - Fear and Loathing in AIG's IT Department (vdare.com)

Submitted by
Baldrson
Baldrson writes: "John Miano of The Programmer's Guild writes: "In the late 1990s the world of computer consulting took me to AIG. Only superlatives can describe what I saw while working at AIG's computer operation. It was the most mismanaged company of any type that I have ever seen...So why are you and I bailing out this company? In a free market, the penalty for mismanagement is going out of business. America owes AIG nothing. AIG has no loyalty to America or the American people. They were willing to replace Americans with foreign workers in a futile attempt to save a few dollars.""
Data Storage

Submission + - $1M In Compression Prizes Announced by Ocarina (ocarinatech.com)

Submitted by
Baldrson
Baldrson writes: "Ocarina, a storage compression company, is offering $1 million in prize increments of $10,000 for each 3% advance in compression on what Ocarina's Chief Scientist, Matt Mahoney, describes as "extremely challenging data". Matt should know, since, in addition to originating a leading class of compression algorithms and maintaining a benchmark list of top compressors, he is on the board of directors of The Hutter Prize for Lossless Compression of Human Knowledge, which stimulated a number of 3% incremental improvements in compressing Wikipedia."
The Almighty Buck

Submission + - Machine Super Intelligence Thesis Wins $10k Prize (singinst.org)

Submitted by
Baldrson
Baldrson writes: "The Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence has announced Dr. Shane Legg the winner of its $(CDN)10,000 prize for academic achievement in 2008 for his theoretic work relating to "machine super intelligence". In his own words: "My thesis is written and submitted and I will be having my thesis defence in June. The title is 'Machine Super Intelligence' in which I describe Marcus Hutter's AIXI model and study some of its implications, extensions etc." His post-doctoral work is going to be in finance."
The Almighty Buck

Submission + - H-1b Visas Not Going to "Best and Brightest (majorityrights.com)

Submitted by
Baldrson
Baldrson writes: "Norm Matloff has published a continuation of an earlier study investigating the degree to which H-1b visas have been awarded to talent unavailable in the United States — "the best and the brightest" — as is required by law. Using a market-based analysis derived from salary figures, Matloff concludes: '...the data show dramatically that most foreign workers, the vast majority of whom are from Asia, are in fact not "the best and the brightest."' Moreover, he further concludes that 'Most foreign workers work at or near entry level, described by the Department of Labor in terms akin to apprenticeship. This counters the industry's claim that they hire the workers as key innovators, and again we will see a stark difference between the Asians and Europeans.'"
United States

Submission + - Chertoff Recommends Cyber "Manhattan Project&# (news.com)

Submitted by
Baldrson
Baldrson writes: "News.com reports that: "Risks from cyberattacks are increasing and the consequences are so great that the country needs a "Manhattan Project" for network security, Michael Chertoff, secretary of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, said in a keynote on Tuesday at RSA 2008... The government needs the "best and brightest" from Silicon Valley and elsewhere in the private sector to work on creating an advanced warning system to prevent such cyberattacks." I'm sure all reasonable readers of /. are now asking themselves, "Why don't they just bring in a bunch of Indians, Chinese, and Israelis on H-1B visas?""
Censorship

Submission + - Free Speech Redefined by Canadian Court (majorityrights.com)

Submitted by
Baldrson
Baldrson writes: "Saying, essentially, that "If it were free speech then it wouldn't be prohibited!" an Ontario Superior Court has ruled that a dissident must pay damages for calling a lawyer for the Canadian Human Rights Commission "an enemy of free speech". The London Free Press reports that: "Richard Warman, a lawyer who worked as an investigator for the Canadian Human Rights Commission, often filed complaints against "hate speech" sites — complaints that were generally upheld under Canadian speech restrictions. Fromm, a defender of various Holocaust deniers and anti-Semites, has been publicly condemning Warman for, among other things, being "an enemy of free speech." Warman sued, claiming that these condemnations are defamatory... Friday, the Ontario Superior Court held for Warman — chiefly on the grounds that because Warman's claims were accepted by the legal system, they couldn't accurately be called an attack on free speech." Additional details of the ruling indicate this centers on the use of internet communication."
The Matrix

Submission + - Surfer's Theory of Everything Stuns Physicists (arxiv.org)

Submitted by
Baldrson
Baldrson writes: "The UK Telegraph reports that: A surfer dude named Garrett Lisi has come up with a new theory of everything which physicists are calling "fabulous", "incredibly beautiful", "profound" and "most compelling". Lisi's peer-reviewed paper titled "An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything" is being published with the New Scientist. The Telegraph article continues: "Lisi is now calculating the masses that the 20 new particles should have, in the hope that they may be spotted when the Large Hadron Collider starts up.""

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