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PhD Candidate Talks About the Physics of Space Battles Screenshot-sm 361

Posted by samzenpus from the load-photon-torpedoes dept.
darthvader100 writes "Gizmodo has run an article with some predictions on what future space battles will be like. The author brings up several theories on propulsion (and orbits), weapons (explosives, kinetic and laser), and design. Sounds like the ideal shape for spaceships will be spherical, like the one in the Hitchhiker's Guide movie."

Submission + - Man Controls Cybernetic Hand with Thoughts (unicampus.it)

Submitted by MaryBethP
MaryBethP writes: Scientists in Italy announced Wednesday that Pierpaolo Petruzziello, a 26-year-old Italian who had lost his left forearm in a car accident, was successfully linked to an artificial limb that was neural planted in the median and ulnar nerves. He has learned to control the artificial limb with his mind. According to cnet, Petruzziello says he could feel sensations in it, as if the lost arm had grown back again.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-10408139-1.html
Security

Submission + - The top ten security heroes (pcpro.co.uk)

Submitted by Barence
Barence writes: The media love to stick it to the IT security bad guys: the notorious hackers or the bumbling civil servants who put nothing more than a first-class stamp on a disc containing millions of personal files. But what about the little-known heroes of the security world? PC Pro's Top Ten Security Heroes are the people who have made the internet a (relatively) safe place to work, shop and communicate; the people who work behind the scenes to make sure our PCs aren’t stuffed full of malware. In short, the good guys.

Submission + - Offset bad code with Bad Code Offsets

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Two weeks ago, The Daily WTF's Alex Papadimoulis announced Bad Code Offsets, a join venture between many big names in the software development community (including StackOverflow's Jeff Atwood and Jon Skeet and SourceGear's Eric Sink). The premise is that you can offset bad code by purchasing Bad Code Offsets (much in the same way a carbon-footprint is offset). The profit's are donated to Free Software projects which work eliminate bad code, such as the Apache Foundation and FreeBSD. The first cheques were sent out earlier today.
Patents

Submission + - Federal Appeals Court Tosses Spam Patent (patentlyo.com)

Submitted by Zordak
Zordak writes: Dennis Crouch's Patently-O is running a news item about U.S. patent 6,631,400, which has claims drawn to a method of making sure enough people get your spam. A federal district court had overturned the patent as anticipated, obvious, and not drawn to patentable subject matter. The Federal Circuit, the appeals court which hears patent matters, upheld the finding of obviousness, thus invalidating the patent.
Earth

Swarm of Giant Jellyfish Capsize 10-Ton Trawler 227

Posted by Soulskill from the we're-gonna-need-a-bigger-boat dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "The Telegraph reports that the Japanese trawler Diasan Shinsho-maru has capsized off the coast of China, as its three-man crew dragged their net through a swarm of giant jellyfish (which can grow up to six feet in diameter and travel in packs) and tried to haul up a net that was too heavy. The crew was thrown into the sea when the vessel capsized, but the three men were rescued by another trawler. Relatively little is known about Nomura's jellyfish, such as why some years see thousands of the creatures floating across the Sea of Japan on the Tsushima Current, but last year there were virtually no sightings. In 2007, there were 15,500 reports of damage to fishing equipment caused by the creatures. Experts believe that one contributing factor to the jellyfish becoming more frequent visitors to Japanese waters may be a decline in the number of predators, which include sea turtles and certain species of fish. 'Jellies have likely swum and swarmed in our seas for over 600 million years,' says scientist Monty Graham of the Dauphin Island Sea Lab in Alabama. 'When conditions are right, jelly swarms can form quickly. They appear to do this for sexual reproduction.'"

Comment Re:Welcome to the new economy (Score 1) 194

by heikkile (#25556437) Attached to: TWiki.net Kicks Out All TWiki Contributors
I hate to sound like a troll, but it looks like we may see the end of a marriage between what we believe an open source projects should look like and the venture capitalists that fund them.

Not all Open Source projects are funded by venture capital! I work for a small company that has several Open Source projects out there, and has never had outside capital. We've had our bad times, but at the moment we are expanding slowly, and the future does not look too bad.

(And yes, we use Twiki internally, and I got the "relaunch" mail. Sounded like they wanted "strong branding" that was "not compatible with Debian". Pity, but if that is the way it goes, I will need to find another Wiki system for us, and probably convert all our data - won't let any single application dictate what distro I should use. )
Businesses

Should You Break TOS Because Work Asks You? 680

Posted by CmdrTaco from the just-don't-crawl-this-domain-please dept.
An anonymous reader writes "My boss recently assigned me a project that was all his idea, with two basic flaws that would require me to break multiple web sites' Terms of Service (TOS). Part requires scraping most of the site, parsing the data and presenting it as our own without human intervention. While we're safe on copyright issues, clearly scraping like this is normally not allowed. At times it might also put a load on those sites. The other is, for lack of better words, a 'load balancing' part that requires using multiple free accounts instead of purchasing space and CPU time for less than $2,000 USD per month. The boss sees it as 'distributed' computing when in reality it's 'parasitic.' My question is: am I wrong about the ethics? If I do need to walk, how best can I handle it without damaging my reputation and future employment opportunities?"
The Internet

Free Online Scientific Repository Hits Milestone 111

Posted by CmdrTaco from the a-whole-lotta-smart-stuff dept.
ocean_soul writes "Last week the free and open access repository for scientific (mainly physics but also math, computer sciences...) papers arXiv got past 500,000 different papers, not counting older versions of the same article. Especially for physicists, it is the number-one resource for the latest scientific results. Most researchers publish their papers on arXiv before they are published in a 'normal' journal. A famous example is Grisha Perelman, who published his award-winning paper exclusively on arXiv."
Privacy

New Bill To Rein In DHS Laptop Seizures 311

Posted by kdawson from the give-it-back-now dept.
twigles writes with news of a new proposed bill that seeks to curtail DHS's power to search and seize laptops at the border without suspicion of wrongdoing. Here is Sen. Feingold's press release on the bill. The new bill has more privacy-protecting safeguards than the previous one, which we discussed last month. "The Travelers Privacy Protection Act, a bill written by US Senators Russ Feingold, D-Wis., and Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., and Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash., would allow border agents to search electronic devices only if they had reasonable suspicions of wrongdoing. In addition, the legislation would limit the length of time that a device could be out of its owner's possession to 24 hours, after which the search becomes a seizure, requiring probable cause."
Security

New Denial-of-Service Attack Is a Killer 341

Posted by kdawson from the fighting-a-resource-war-with-an-unfair-advantage dept.
ancientribe writes "Hacker RSnake blogs about a newly discovered and deadly denial-of-service attack that could well be the next big threat to the Internet as a whole. It goes after a broadband Internet connection and KOs machines on the other end such that they stay offline even after the attack is over. It spans various systems, too: the pair of Swedish researchers who found it have already contacted firewall, operating system, and Web-enabled device vendors whose products are vulnerable to this attack." Listen to the interview (MP3) — English starts a few minutes in — and you might find yourself convinced that we have a problem. The researchers claim that they have been able to take down every system with a TCP/IP stack that they have attempted; and they know of no fix or workaround.
Earth

Removing CO2 From the Air Efficiently 487

Posted by kdawson from the install-anywhere dept.
Canadian scientists have created a device that efficiently removes CO2 from the atmosphere. "The proposed air capture system differs from existing carbon capture and storage technology ... while CCS involves installing equipment at, say, a coal-fired power plant to capture CO2 produced during the coal-burning process, ... air capture machines will be able to literally remove the CO2 present in ambient air everywhere. [The team used] ... a custom-built tower to capture CO2 directly from the air while requiring less than 100 kilowatt-hours of electricity per tonne of carbon dioxide."
Biotech

New Type of Atomic Microscope On the Way 50

Posted by kdawson from the mirror-mirror dept.
Iddo Genuth writes "Researchers at the Surface Science Laboratory at Universidad Autonoma de Madrid have created an ultrasmooth mirror that could be used to create a revolutionary new atomic microscope within the next several years. The new atomic microscope — using helium atoms for imaging — has the potential to provide the same resolution as existing electron microscopes but without many of the problems which have plagued them for years."
Security

Council Sells Security Hole On Ebay 147

Posted by CmdrTaco from the only-as-good-as-your-weakest-link dept.
Barence writes "A security expert was stunned to discover a VPN device he'd bought on Ebay automatically connected to a local council's confidential servers. Bought for just 99p for use at work, when plugged in it automatically connected with the login details which had been carelessly left on the device. 'The whole selling point of the device was that it was extremely easy to configure. It's pretty horrific really,' says the intrusion-detection professional. The council says it is 'deeply concerned' by the news, but is confident that 'multiple layers of security have prevented access to systems and data.'"

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