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Submission + - NASA Honors William Shatner With Distinguished Public Service Medal

Submitted by Hugh Pickens DOT Com
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes: Red Orbit reports that after nearly 50 years of warping across galaxies and saving the universe from a variety of alien threats and celestial disasters, Star Trek’s William Shatner was honored with NASA’s Distinguished Public Service medal, the highest award bestowed by the agency to non-government personnel. “William Shatner has been so generous with his time and energy in encouraging students to study science and math, and for inspiring generations of explorers, including many of the astronauts and engineers who are a part of NASA today, ” said David Weaver, NASA’s associate administrator for the Office of Communications at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “He’s most deserving of this prestigious award.” Past recipients of the NASA Distinguished Public Service Medal include astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, former NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory director and Voyager project scientist Edward Stone, theoretical physicist and astronomer Lyman Spitzer, and science fiction writer Robert Heinlein. The award is presented to those who “ have personally made a contribution representing substantial progress to the NASA mission. The contribution must be so extraordinary that other forms of recognition would be inadequate.”

In related news Shatner’s one-man show “Shatner’s World” was presented in nearly 700 movie theaters nationwide on April 24 providing audiences a behind-the-scenes look at Shatner’s career and life. “Everything can be termed positively and that’s what I attempt to do in this one-man show,” he said. “This one-man show is very important to me. It’s the culmination of a long career.”

Submission + - Parallella ships to Kickstart backers!

Submitted by Amigan
Amigan writes: Adapteva went the kickstarter route for funding of it's Home HPC machine. It was successfully funded 10/27/2012 w/4965 backers. Shipment was originally thought to be August 2013 — which came and passed. They have now successfully shipped to over 2000 of the kickstart funders (16 core), and are working their way through the 64 core implementation delivery.

Submission + - Space Hackers preparing to recover a 36 year old historic Spacecraft from Deep S

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A band of engineers, space hackers, has picked up the carrier signal and is now trying to do something hard and never done before — recover a 36 year old NASA spacecraft (http://makezine.com/2014/04/24/crowdfunding-the-recovery-of-a-lost-spacecraft/) from the grips of deep space and time. ISEE-3, later rechristened ICE, the International Cometary Explorer, is returning to Earth. With old NASA original documents and with Rockethub crowdfunding (http://www.rockethub.com/42228), a team led by Dennis Wingo and Keith Cowing is attempting to steer the spacecraft back into a Earth orbit and return it to scientific operations. Dennis says, "ISEE-3 can become a great teaching tool for future engineers and scientists that will design and travel to Mars". Only 40 days remain before the spacecraft will be out of range for recovery. A radio telescope is available, command and telemetry, propulsion design are in hand but things have to come together (http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/space/nasa/how-to-resurrect-a-35-year-old-spacecraft-16724874?src=spr_TWITTER&spr_id=1457_54583169) and the team is hoping for public support to provide the small amount needed to accomplish a very unique milestone in space exploration.
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Dear Slashdot. My user account is staffinfection but I have not used it for some time. I do not have the linked email to recover the password. Can you send me the password to telluric@hotmail.com or tim.reyes@yahoo.com? I am a nasa engineer (http://ti.arc.nasa.gov/profile/treyes/).

Submission + - The Hackers Who Recovered NASA's Lost Lunar Photos (wired.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project has since 2007 brought some 2,000 pictures back from 1,500 analog data tapes. They contain the first high-resolution photographs ever taken from behind the lunar horizon, including the first photo of an earthrise (first slide above). Thanks to the technical savvy and DIY engineering of the team at LOIRP, it’s being seen at a higher resolution than was ever previously possible. ... The photos were stored with remarkably high fidelity on the tapes, but at the time had to be copied from projection screens onto paper, sometimes at sizes so large that warehouses and even old churches were rented out to hang them up. The results were pretty grainy, but clear enough to identify landing sites and potential hazards. After the low-fi printing, the tapes were shoved into boxes and forgotten. ... The drives had to be rebuilt and in some cases completely re-engineered using instruction manuals or the advice of people who used to service them. The data they recovered then had to be demodulated and digitized, which added more layers of technical difficulties.

Submission + - Contacting the author of lost software?

Submitted by AAWood
AAWood writes: I used to love a freeware PalmOS game from way back... so much so that I'd like a crack at making my own version for modern systems. I don't want to go ahead without contacting the author for their blessing, which is a problem when I don't have the game, aren't sure I remember the name, and can't find any indication is ever existed online.

Are there any useful avenues for tracking down forgotten developers? Should I go ahead if I can't find them? Have you ever had a situation where you needed something you knew was out there, but could no longer find?

Submission + - Click Like? You may have given up the right to sue. (nytimes.com)

Submitted by sandbagger
sandbagger writes: The New York Times reports that General Mills, the maker of cereals like Cheerios and Chex as well as brands like Bisquick and Betty Crocker, has quietly added language to its website to alert consumers that they give up their right to sue the company if they download coupons, 'join' it in social media communities. Who'd have imagined that clicking like requires a EULA?

Submission + - Russia prepares to attack the petrodollar

Submitted by Snirt
Snirt writes: The existence of "petrodollars" is one of the pillars of America's economic might because it creates a significant external demand for American currency, allowing the US to accumulate enormous debts without defaulting. If a Japanese buyer wants to buy a barrel of Saudi oil, he has to pay in dollars even if no American oil company ever touches the said barrel. Dollar has held a dominant position in global trading for such a long time that even Gazprom's natural gas contracts for Europe are priced and paid for in US dollars. Until recently, a significant part of EU-China trade had been priced in dollars. Lately, China has led the BRICS efforts to dislodge the dollar from its position as the main global currency, but the "sanctions war" between Washington and Moscow gave an impetus to the long-awaited scheme to launch the petroruble and switch all Russian energy exports away from the US currency.

Submission + - Yahoo DMARC implementation breaks most mailing lists

Submitted by pdclarry
pdclarry writes: On April 8 Yahoo implemented a new DMARC policy that essentially bars any Yahoo user from accessing mailing lists hosted anywhere except on Yahoo and Google. While Yahoo is the initiator, it also affects Comcast, ATT, Rogers, SBGlobal and several other ISPs. Internet Engineering Council expert John R. Levine, specialing in email infrastructure and spam filtering claimed in a post “Yahoo breaks every mailing list in the world including the IETF's.” on the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) list.

DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance) is a two year old proposed standard previously discussed on Slashdot that is intended to curb email abuse, including spoofing an phishing. Unfortunately, as implemented by Yahoo, it claims most mailing list users as collateral damage. Messages posted to mailing lists (including listserv, mailman, majordomo, etc) by Yahoo subscribers are blocked when the list forwards them to other Yahoo (and other participating ISP's) subscribers. List members not using Yahoo or its partners are not affected and will receive posts from Yahoo users. And posts from non-Yahoo users are delivered to Yahoo members. So essentially those suffering the most are Yahoo's (comcast's, att's, etc) own customers. Hacker News has details about why DMARC has this affect on mailing lists. Their best proposed solution is to ban Yahoo email users from mailing lists and encourage them to switch to other ISPs. Unfortunately, it isn't just Yahoo, although they are getting the most attention.

Submission + - Theo De Raadt's Small Rant on OpenSSL (gmane.org) 1

Submitted by raides
raides writes: Theo De Raadt has been on a better roll as of late. Since his rant about FreeBSD plating catch up (here), he has something to say about OpenSSL. It is worth the 5 second read because it is how a few thousand of us feel about the whole thing and the stupidity that caused this panic. Enjoy

Submission + - Tesla Model S has hidden ethernet port, user runs Firefox on the 17" Screen (dragtimes.com) 1

Submitted by FikseGTS
FikseGTS writes: A Tesla Model S owner located a 4 pin connector on the left side of the Tesla Model S dashboard that turns out to be a disguised ethernet networking port. After crafting his owns patch cable to connect with the Tesla’s port, a networking connection was established between the Tesla Model S and a laptop computer.

The Model S is running a 100 Mbps, full duplex ethernet network and 3 devices were found with assiged IP addresses in the 192.168.90.0 subnet. Some ports and services that were open on the devices were 22 (SSH), 23 (telnet),53 (open domain), 80 (HTTP), 111 (rpcbind), 2049 (NFS), 6000 (X11). Port 80 was serving up a web page with the image or media of the current song being played. The operating system is modified version of Ubuntu using an ext3 filesystem. Using X11 it also appears that someone was able to somewhat run Firefox on both of the Model S screens.

Is a jailbroken Tesla Model S on the way?

Submission + - Life without ICANN (doc.gov) 2

Submitted by flagser
flagser writes: Without ICANN, who controls domain names and mapping? That will be a new international organization who, at least at first, will leave unchanged ICANN policies. I think that is a good thing, because I believe that changes will come, and they will be at the expense of free speech.

So what about an alternative? We (I use the term affectionately here) came up with a distributed way to share files--bitTorrent. a distributed way to exchange money--bitCoin. Why not a distributed way to handle domain names? bitNames.

Tell me you haven't thought of this. Of course you have. We would need some kind of secure client engine that runs--probably as part of a network stack--and can then talk to a browser. Best case, it replaces your current stack and thus works with any browser/internet device. This would undoubtedly require some kind of IP hardcoding (v6 please)

Does this make any sense? I have not been able to find a project like this that anyone is working on. Is it really that difficult? Tell me how we get started. You, the smart guy in the back with the beard. Tell me what the first step is?

Submission + - Go ask Alice: Supreme Court to hear arguments on software patents (insidecounsel.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Think about the state of the software industry 30 years ago. Back then, computerized devices were far more limited, and home computers were barely more than glorified calculators. Today, though, in our “there’s an app for that” society, computing power is king, and the software business is extremely profitable. Quite a bit has changed in the computing world over the last three decades, but legal view of software patents has stayed relatively the same.

But that might change based on the outcome of one crucial Supreme Court case.

On March 31, the Supreme Court of the United States will hear arguments in Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank, a case that will, at the very least, clear up case law from the federal circuit and could conceivably upend the software industry as we know it.

According to Linda Thayer, partner at global IP law firm Finnegan, the claims in Alice are “Interesting, but, as some people have pointed out, these might not be the best claims to address this issue. But, it was the most ripe and made it to court,” so it will be the test case for the patentability of software. She noted that the Supreme Court needs to step up and weigh in with a standard, and speculates that the decision won’t be about the claims in the case specifically, but more about the big picture.

The primary issue that the Court needs to clear up, says Thayer, is the application of the “101 filter,” refering to Section 101 of the Patent Act of 1952 which stands as the first threshold to deciding if an invention can be patented. Thayer believes that, based on the history of the statute, Congress’ intent was that it “not be a strict filter, just to eliminate things that are natural ideas or not made by man.” She anticipates the Court leaving 101 as a broad filter, letting anything man-made through, then looking at other statutes, like 102, 103, 112 etc. to see if something is new or novel.

One reason why this case is getting so much attention is that it closely relates to the patent troll issue. Studies show that nearly half of all troll litigation deals with software patents, so there is a strong overlap between unwanted litigation and specious patents. “A lot of troll patents were issued when the patent office was underfunded,” Thayer explains. “The examiners were not well trained and lacked tools to search as to why claims were not patentable.” She says that the solution is not to limit the 101 filter but rather to let patent claims through and crack down on how patents are examined in light of 102, 103 and 112 grounds.

Since the federal circuit cannot come to an agreement, the only avenue is the Supreme Court. The arguments occurring on March 31 won’t be settled for several months, but there is no doubt the case will reverberate for a long time, though probably not 30 more years

Related stories:

IP: Supreme Court to determine patentability of software-implemented inventions

Supreme Court to rule on software patents

The future of software patents, part 1

Submission + - The end of PostGreSQL

Submitted by jjohn_h
jjohn_h writes: Every time some issue related to mySQL comes up, quicker than light the followers and believers of the PostGreSQL church are there to mud the waters. The chant is always the same: PostGreSQL is sooo superior, why use mySQL and why talk of mySQL in the first place. The gods have spoken, it's PostGreSQL and nothing else. Bad news for you, whiners: Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Twitter have extended mySQL to WebScaleSQL. I expected from you a collective harakiri, nothing else: http://www.zdnet.com/webscales...

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Thus spake the master programmer: "After three days without programming, life becomes meaningless." -- Geoffrey James, "The Tao of Programming"

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