rlazarus - Slashdot User

Submission + - NASA can't pay for killer asteroid hunt

Submitted by

CGISecurity.com

on Tuesday March 06, 2007 @12:37AM

CGISecurity.com writes: "NASA officials say the space agency is capable of finding nearly all the asteroids that might pose a devastating hit to Earth, but there isn't enough money to pay for the task so it won't get done. "We know what to do, we just don't have the money," said Simon "Pete" Worden, director of NASA's Ames Research Center.""

Submission + - Windows Vista keygen is a hoax

Submitted by on Saturday March 03, 2007 @01:32AM

An anonymous reader writes: The author of the Windows Vista keygen that was reported yesterday on Slashdot has admitted that the program does not actually work. Here is the initial announcement of the original release of the keygen, and here is the followup post in which the same author acknowledges that the program is fake. Apparently, the keygen program does legitimately attack Windows Vista keys via brute force, but the chances of success are too low for this to be a practical method. Quote from the author: "everyone who said they got a key a probably lying or mistaken!"

Submission + - DoJ Mulls Tracking Picture Uploads

Submitted by

Dominus Suus

on Friday March 02, 2007 @09:37PM

Dominus Suus writes: "C&Ped from C|Net: "The Bush administration has accelerated its Internet surveillance push by proposing that Web sites must keep records of who uploads photographs or videos in case police determine the content is illegal and choose to investigate." Rest of story: http://news.com.com/2100-1028_3-6163679.html"

Submission + - Analog TV cards banned by FCC as of yesterday

Submitted by

Anonymous Coward

on Friday March 02, 2007 @08:05PM

Anonymous Coward writes: "Beginning yesterday, the FCC requirement went in to effect that 'All TV receiving devices sold must possess the capability of supporting digital television signals.' NVidia has already discontinued their fairly new and very popular DualTV MCE (http://www.nvidia.com/page/dualtvmce.html) card, and soon all Non-ATSC cards will be gone from shelves and available only on Ebay."

Submission + - Your Papers Please!

Submitted by skelator2821 on Friday March 02, 2007 @07:42PM

skelator2821 writes: Department of Homeland Security requires internal passport for all US Citizens The paranoia-inducing 27B Stroke 6 blog reports that the Department of Homeland Security has issued its requirements for standardizing state identification cards. http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2007/03/national_ id_car.html

The Wii's MEMS Inventor on Future Technology 118

Posted by Zonk on Friday March 02, 2007 @07:16PM from the wii-wii-wii-all-the-way-to-the-bank dept.

eldavojohn writes "IEEE Spectrum is running an article on the inventor of the motion sensor that the Wii uses. The microelectromechanical system (MEMS) gives Wii its core ability to sense motion in the controller. What's really interesting is where Benedetto Vigna wants to take this technology. He has plans to make the sensor smaller and tougher, and hope to place it inside of things like shoes, textiles, and medical devices to aid in data collection. He continues, 'Then I want to make a three-dimensional gyroscope, to measure rotation around three different axes. Today, such products are quite big, a cube 10 centimeters on a side. We want to do this in less than a 30-millimeter cube, to serve as an image stabilizer in cameras and to track a person's position in the intervals when he can't get a GPS signal.'"

Submission + - Total Lunar Eclipse This Weekend

Submitted by SeaDour on Friday March 02, 2007 @06:44PM

SeaDour writes: This Saturday night, March 3rd, a total lunar eclipse will be visible from nearly all inhabited parts of the world. A great shadow will stretch across the surface of the moon, eventually casting it in an eerie red glow as sunlight filters through our atmosphere onto the lunar surface. Viewers in Europe and Africa will have the best vantage point, able to watch the entire eclipse in action, while observers in most of the western hemisphere can see it eclipsed as it rises just after sunset.

Submission + - Best Buy Confirms 'secret' Website

Submitted by Iberian on Friday March 02, 2007 @05:10PM

Iberian writes: Courant.com confirms Best Buy does indeed maintain a second website for what one could only assume is for fraudulent purposes.

State Attorney General Richard Blumenthal ordered the investigation into Best Buy's practices on Feb. 9 after my column disclosed the website and showed how employees at two Connecticut stores used it to deny customers a $150 discount on a computer advertised on BestBuy.com.

Submission + - Scientist: Sun is Warming Both Earth and Mars

Submitted by

MCraigW

on Friday March 02, 2007 @05:05PM

MCraigW writes: "Simultaneous warming on Earth and Mars suggests that our planet's recent climate changes have a natural — and not a human-induced — cause. Earth is currently experiencing warming, which climate scientists say is due to humans pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

Mars, too, appears to be enjoying more mild and balmy temperatures.

In 2005 data from NASA's Mars Global Surveyor and Odyssey missions revealed that the carbon dioxide "ice caps" near Mars's south pole had been diminishing for three summers in a row.

Habibullo Abdussamatov, head of the St. Petersburg's Pulkovo Astronomical Observatory in Russia, says the Mars data is evidence that the current global warming on Earth is being caused by changes in the sun."

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