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Robotics

Submission + - Water-Prospecting Polaris Lunar Rover Prototype Built (gizmag.com)

Submitted by Zothecula
Zothecula writes: Astrobotic Technology Inc., a spin-off company of Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), has debuted its full-size flight prototype of its Polaris lunar water-prospecting robot. Polaris is specially designed to work in the permanently shadowed craters at the Moon’s poles. Scheduled to be sent to the Moon using a SpaceX Falcon 9 launch vehicle, the solar-powered rover is a contender in the US$20 million Google Lunar X Prize and is tasked with seeking ice deposits that could be used by future colonists.
Handhelds

Submission + - Snes/Nes & Megadrive Perfect Gaming On a Handheld

Submitted by YokimaSun
YokimaSun writes: DCEmu have an article about a Handheld thats been released that will play original Nes, Snes and Megadrive(genesis) Carts. Instead of emulating on consoles such as the PSP or Nintendo Wii, you can play the games on original hardware but whilst on the go. The Handheld comes with 2 joypads and even connects to the TV. It has a decent 8 hours of battery usage and if your lucky enough to own a flash cart for either the Snes or Megadrive this could very much be the ultimate system for you.
Hardware

Submission + - How to add 5.5 petabytes and get banned from Costco during a hard drive crisis (gigaom.com)

Submitted by
concealment
concealment writes: "“We buy lots and lots of hard drives . . . . [They] are the single biggest cost in the entire company.”

Those are the words of Backblaze Founder and CEO Gleb Budman, whose company offers unlimited cloud backup for just $5 a month, and fills 50TB worth of new storage a day in its custom-built, open source pod architecture. So one might imagine the cloud storage startup was pretty upset when flooding in Thailand caused a global shortage on internal hard drives last year.

Backblaze details much the process in a Tuesday-morning blog post, including the hijinks that followed as the company got creative trying to figure out ways around the new hard drive limits. Maps were drawn, employees were cut off from purchasing hard drives at Costco — both in-person throughout Silicon Valley and online (despite some great efforts to avoid detection, such as paying for hard drives online using gift cards) — and friends and family across the country were conscripted into a hard-drive-buying army."
Hardware

Submission + - 10 reasons why the desktop PC will live forever (pcworld.com)

Submitted by
concealment
concealment writes: "It's an intruiguing proposition, but don't count on mobile devices killing off your desktop PC any time soon. While mobile gear is certainly convenient when you're trying to conduct business on the go, it's nowhere near as convenient as a desktop when you're trying to complete serious work in an office environment.

Sure, your phone, tablet or even laptop might conveniently fit in your pocket or backpack, but all these devices are fraught with compromises, whether it's computing power, screen size, or, well, a really expensive price tag."
Android

Submission + - Developer Switches Paid Android App to Free Citing Rampant Piracy (paritynews.com)

Submitted by hypnosec
hypnosec writes: Android based devices are being activated at the rate of million a day and users are downloading apps and games at a rate never seen before. Despite these promising stats, developers of Android based games and apps are not really keen on porting games and apps that have been successful on iOS to Android. Why? Rampant piracy on Android! Madfinger Games has joined the long list of developers who have recently turned their paid Android based game, Dead Trigger, to a free one. Originally priced at $0.99 on Play Store, the first person shooter game is now available for free. The iOS version of the game still costs $0.99 and hasn’t been made free. The reason developer cites for this move is the amount of piracy on Android platform. On its Facebook page, Madfinger Games said, “The main reason: piracy rate on Android devices, that was unbelievably high.”
Your Rights Online

Submission + - Why the GPL licensing cops are the good guys (infoworld.com)

Submitted by rtfa-troll
rtfa-troll writes: 'GPL enforcement by Software Freedom Conservancy puts electronics makers on notice, leaves business users untouched', says Infoworld, going on to explain 'You are several orders of magnitude more likely to be raided by your proprietary suppliers, in the form of the Business Software Alliance, than to ever hear from SFC, let alone face any action. License compliance is a major and costly issue for proprietary software, but the case concerns an end-user license agreement (EULA), not a source license.' the expertly written article gives a good summary of why having GPL licenses enforced helps everybody except for 'hardware manufacturers — typically those creating low-cost consumer and business electronics' who need to verify that they pass on the same rights to others as they received with the original code.
Censorship

Submission + - New Restrictions Create Uncertainty For Chinese Social-Media Users

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Sina Weibo, the popular Chinese social-media network and innovative microblogging service, has been running on new rules to restrict unlawful and disruptive discourse since May 28.

Sina Weibo users each will now receive 80 points to begin with, and this can be boosted to a full 100 points by those who provide their official government-issued identification numbers (like Social Security numbers in the U.S.) and link to a cellphone account.

Spreading falsehoods will lead to deductions in points, among other penalties. Spreading an untruth to 100 other users will result in a deduction of two points. Spreading it to 100-1,000 other users will result in a deduction of five points, as well as a week's suspension of the account. Spreading it to more than 1,000 other users will result in a deduction of 10 points, as well as a 15-day suspension of the account.

Comment Thanks (Score 5, Funny) 82

by MCROnline (#38464734) Attached to: USTR Publishes Rogue Sites List
Thanks for naming all the popular sites I never knew about, keep up the good work, I tip my hat to the USTR :D By the way, if you close these sites, any chance you could do another report so I don't have to go to the fuss of looking for infringing content?

Submission + - Wind and wave energies are not renewable after all

Submitted by
lee1
lee1 writes: "Physicist Axel Kleidon of the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry
in Jena, Germany has shown that it is a mistake to consider the wind and
waves to be truly renewable energy sources. Build enough wind farms to
replace fossil fuels, he says, and we would reduce the energy available
in the atmosphere and actually accelerate climate change. We know from
thermodynamics that only a modest fraction of the solar energy reaching
Earth is available as 'free energy' we can use, taking the form of
winds, ocean currents, and lifting of evaporated water. The rest becomes
heat, which is not available to do work. Some of the free energy
harnessed by wind and wave generators will be lost as heat, since they
can not be perfectly efficient. So by building wind and wave farms, we
will be converting part of the sun's useful energy into thermal energy.
The effects of this would probably show up first in wind farms
themselves, where the gains expected will be less than predicted as the
energy of the Earth system is depleted. Kleidon’s calculations show
that the amount of energy which we can harness from the wind is reduced
by a factor of 100 if you take into account the depletion of free energy
by wind farms. In addition, sucking that much energy out of the
atmosphere will change precipitation, turbulence and the amount of solar
radiation reaching the Earth's surface. The magnitude of the changes
will be comparable to the changes to the climate caused by doubling
atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide. Even current photovoltaic
solar cell designs will contribute to global warming, because they
convert only a small fraction of the light that hits them, and absorb
most of the rest, converting it to heat that warms the environment."
Iphone

Submission + - iPhone 5 Will Get Mobile Payments (ibtimes.com)

Submitted by RedEaredSlider
RedEaredSlider writes: Shortly after rumors surfaced that the upcoming iPhone 5 would not be equipped with Near Field Communication technology, entrepreneurs and manufacturers are speculating that the next iPhone will see the technology after all.

Speaking with a developer working on a NFC-related project, Forbes reports that there is a good chance that the iPhone 5 will support technology enabling features like mobile payment and ticketing. NFC reader manufacturers, too, are convinced of Apple's interest, and are preparing for the eventual influx in orders.
Google

Submission + - Google makes web pages faster with a simple tweak (i-programmer.info)

Submitted by mikejuk
mikejuk writes: Google has manged to speed up the way that it serves AdSense content to over 2 million web sites by a simple change to the JavaScript that does the loading. The ungrateful among us might be asking — why has it taken so long to fix?
News

Submission + - Shock Wave Disk Engine Can Triple Fuel Efficiency (inhabitat.com) 1

Submitted by formaggio
formaggio writes: Straight from the engineers at Michigan State University, this new ‘wave disk engine’ is 3.5 times more fuel efficient than a conventional combustion engine, can be run on almost any fuel and emits 95% less carbon dioxide.
The Military

Submission + - Tweaked, Air Force to blast second hypersonic jet (networkworld.com)

Submitted by
coondoggie
coondoggie writes: "Air Force researchers said they a prepped for a second test run of its X-51A Waverider hypersonic jet which they ultimately expect to hit speeds upwards of Mach 6. The X-51 test will be the second of flight of the four scramjets built for the Air Force tests by Boeing and Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne"

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