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Science

Stone Tool 1.83M Years Old Discovered In Malaysia 200

Posted by kdawson from the chipping-away-at-it dept.
goran72 writes with news out of Malaysia that archaeologists have announced the discovery of stone tools more than 1.8 million years old — the earliest evidence of human ancestors in South-east Asia. Researchers believe the tools were made by members of the early human ancestor species Homo erectus. The tools actually date as slightly older than the earliest H. erectus fossils, which came from Georgia and China. No bones of that antiquity have so far been found in Malaysia. "The stone hand-axes were discovered last year in the historical site of Lenggong in northern Perak state, embedded in a type of rock formed by meteorites which was sent to a Japanese lab to be dated."
Announcements

The MST3K Crew Reunites For Live Webcast 60

Posted by timothy from the no-one-has-detonated-a-nuclear-bomb-tonight dept.
csn writes "On Wednesday, January 28th at 6:00 PM PST and 9:00 PM EST, the stars of the cult television hit 'Mystery Science Theater 3000' will reunite to do what they do best — heckle bad movies. Join Mike Nelson, Kevin 'Tom Servo' Murphy and Bill 'Crow T. Robot' Corbett as they make fun of the 1950 short film, 'Overcoming Fear,' live over the internet.
Space

Reaction Engines To Fly Reusable Spaceplane 156

Posted by timothy from the let's-just-start-here-on-the-ground dept.
RobGoldsmith writes "Reaction Engines have designed a 'reusable spaceplane' to provide inexpensive and reliable access to space. The Star Wars-looking 'Skylon' reusable spaceplane has already been designed and the team are well into engine testing. They have taken some time out from building spaceships to talk about their background, their goals, and their recent engine tests. This article shows new images of their STERN Engine, an experimental rocket motor which explores the flow in Expansion Deflection (ED) nozzles. They also discuss their Sabre air-breathing engine technology. View the Skylon Spaceplane concept, the STERN Engine and much more in this in-depth interview with the team."
Sci-Fi

Actor Matt Smith Will Be 11th Doctor Who 330

Posted by kdawson from the inheritor-of-the-scarf dept.
Jerry Smith was among a large number of readers letting us know that the 11th Doctor Who has been named. It's Matt Smith, 26, who will be the youngest actor to play the time-traveling Doctor. The head of drama at BBC Wales said this about Smith's audition: "It was abundantly clear that he had that 'Doctor-ness' about him. You are either the Doctor or you are not."
The Media

BBC's iPlayer Chief Pushes Tiered Charging For ISPs 172

Posted by timothy from the if-isp-bills-looked-like-phone-bills dept.
rs232 writes with a link to a story at The Register which begins: "The executive in charge of the BBC iPlayer has suggested that internet users could be charged £10 per month extra on their broadband bill for higher quality streaming." The article suggests (perhaps optimistically) that "after years of selling consumers pipes, not what they carry, [tiered, site-specific pricing] would be tough to pull off."
Cellphones

What Carriers Don't Want You To Know About Texting 570

Posted by timothy from the what-the-market-will-bear dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Randall Stross has just published a sobering article in The New York Times about how the four major US wireless carriers don't want anyone to know the actual cost structure of text message services to avoid public outrage over the doubling of a-la-carte per-message fees over the last three years. The truth is that text messages are 'stowaways' inside the control channel — bandwidth that is there whether it is used for texting or not — and 160 bytes per message is a tiny amount of data to store-and-forward over tower-to-tower landlines. In essence it costs carriers practically nothing to transmit even trillions of text messages. When text usage goes up, the carriers don't even have to install new infrastructure as long as it is proportional to voice usage. This makes me dream of the day when there is real competition in the wireless industry, not this gang-of-four oligopoly."

Comment You reap what you sow... (Score 4, Insightful) 85

by An Ominous Cow Erred (#26108359) Attached to: Huge iPhone Cut-and-Paste Tool Security Flaw

...well you *ARE* trusting a small, third party entity with your data on the internet. Can you really expect things that are not on storage you monitor yourself to be secure? Furthermore, why can't it just store your clipboard through local storage? Does it really have to put it up online? Do Apple's apps have no way to store and retrieve local data?

Apple really should have this feature built in, but you shouldn't be surprised when your workaround that involves dumping your unencrypted data on a server somewhere has security issues.
The Almighty Buck

Used Game Market Affecting Price, Quality of New Titles 384

Posted by Soulskill from the either-that-or-it-doesn't dept.
Gamasutra is running a feature discussing the used game market with various developers and analysts. The point has been raised by many members of the industry that used game sales are hurting developers and publishers even more lately, when they're already beleaguered by rising piracy rates and a struggling economy. Atari executives recently commented that used game sales are "extremely painful," while GameStop's CEO unsurprisingly came out in support of resales. We've recently discussed a few of the ways game designers are considering to limit used game sales. David Braben, chairman of UK-based developer Frontier Development had this to say: "Five years ago, a great game would have sold for a longer period of time than for a bad game — which was essentially our incentive to make great games. But no longer. Now publishers and developers just see revenue the initial few weeks regardless of the game's quality and then gamers start buying used copies which generates money that goes into GameStop's pocket, nobody else's."

Comment Re:fairness (Score 1) 872

by An Ominous Cow Erred (#25952811) Attached to: Bittorrent To Cause Internet Meltdown

Still, they could get around this by defining the "bittorrent chunk" size to be 1.5k (UDP payload size). Everything else would probably work fine.

This is a really dumb idea, considering that the torrent file carries a 160-bit hash for all the chunks. You'd wind up with your torrent file being over 1/10th of the size of the file you're trying to get in the first place.

Then you'd need a torrent for your torrent.

(Although, this itself isn't that bad an idea now that I think about it for an advanced version of the protocol... Have peers share hashing/parity information as well as the file. You'd be protected against bad hashes by the overall torrent file having hashes of the hashes. =D)
Portables (Apple)

Apple's New MacBooks Have Built-In Copy Protection 821

Posted by timothy from the presumption-from-on-high dept.
raque writes "Appleinsider is reporting that the new MacBooks/MacBookPros have built-in copy protection. Quote: 'Apple's new MacBook lines include a form of digital copy protection that will prevent protected media, such as DRM-infused iTunes movies, from playing back on devices that aren't compliant with the new priority protection measures.' Ars Technica is also reporting on the issue. Is this the deal they had to make to get NBC back? Is this a deal breaker for Apple or will fans just ignore it to get their hands on the pretty new machines? Is this a new opportunity for Linux? And what happened to Jobs not liking DRM?"
Networking

NASA Tests Deep-Space Network Modeled On the Internet 109

Posted by kdawson from the here-hold-this dept.
hcg50a writes "NASA has successfully tested the first deep space communications network modeled on the Internet. Working as part of a NASA-wide team, engineers from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, CA, used software called Disruption-Tolerant Networking, or DTN, to transmit dozens of space images to and from a NASA science spacecraft located about 20 million miles from Earth. The store-and-forward protocol was designed by NASA in consultation with Vint Cerf. Here's a discussion from last July before the test began."
Earth

As Seas Rise, Maldives Seek To Buy a New Homeland 521

Posted by kdawson from the gladly-pay-you-tuesday dept.
Peace Corps Online writes "The Maldives will begin to divert a portion of the country's billion-dollar annual tourist revenue to buy a new homeland as insurance against climate change. Rising sea levels threaten to turn the 300,000 islanders into environmental refugees as the chain of 1,200 island and coral atolls dotted 500 miles from the tip of India is likely to disappear under the waves if the current pace of climate change continues to raise sea levels. The UN forecasts that the seas are likely to rise by up to 59 cm by the year 2100. Most parts of the Maldives are just 150 cm above water so even a 'small rise' in sea levels would inundate large parts of the archipelago. 'We can do nothing to stop climate change on our own and so we have to buy land elsewhere. It's an insurance policy for the worst possible outcome,' says the Muslim country's first democratically elected president, Mohamed Nasheed, adding that he has already broached the subject with a number of countries and found them to be 'receptive.' India and Sri Lanka are targets because they have similar cultures and climates; Australia is worth looking at because of the immense amount of unoccupied land in that country. 'We do not want to leave the Maldives, but we also do not want to be climate refugees living in tents for decades.'"

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