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Submission + - An orbital solar death ray idea from WWII (google.com.au)

Submitted by ceview
ceview writes: So from an old forgotten article in Life Magazine that as reported in news.com.au " US Army technical experts came up with the astonishing fact that German scientists had seriously planned to build a “sun gun".
A giant orbital mirror that would focus light on targets below and burn or boil away whatever was in the way.

Submission + - Let Them Eat Teslas

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: If you're a bright kid who wants to prepare for the 21st century workforce (pdf) by studying engineering at Purdue, the government will help your parents pay the $100,000 or so tuition tab with a 7.9% interest loan (plus 4% fees) that's likely to be non-dischargeable in bankruptcy and paid back with after-tax money. If, on the other hand, you want to buy a tricked-out $100,000 Model S, Tesla has teamed up with the government, Wells Fargo, and U.S. Bank on what it calls a 'Revolutionary New Finance Product' that enables those who play the game right to avoid paying sales tax, get the government to pick up the first $15,000 (no down payment needed!), and also receive a 2.95% bankruptcy-dischargeable loan for the balance, the payments for which could be tax-deductible. Yep, 'Revolutionary' may be about right!

Submission + - Bitcoin breaks $100 USD per coin (examiner.com)

Submitted by bobwrit
bobwrit writes: "Yesterday, while a number of banks were closed, bitcoin decided to break another major psychological barrier, and is now trading at above $100 USD per coin. At the moment, Bitcoin is trading at $118 USD/BTC. There is very little resistance to further price increases, so expect the price of bitcoin to rise very rapidly over the next few weeks. These are also record highs for the currency."
Security

Submission + - Did the Spamhaus DDos really slow down global Internet access? (informationweek.com)

Submitted by
CowboyRobot
CowboyRobot writes: "Despite the headlines, the big denial of service attack may not have slowed the Internet after all. The argument against the original claim include the fact that reports of Internet users seeing slowdowns came not from service providers, but the DDoS mitigation service CloudFlare, which signed up Spamhaus as a customer last week. Also, multiple service providers and Internet watchers have now publicly stated that while the DDoS attacks against Spamhaus could theoretically have led to slowdowns, they've seen no evidence that this occurred for general Internet users. And while some users may have noticed a slowdown, the undersea cable cuts discovered by Egyptian sailors had more of an impact than the DDoS."
Bitcoin

Submission + - Bitcoin crosses 1 billion USD market value threshold (examiner.com)

Submitted by jeremy85mai
jeremy85mai writes: From the article:
"Today, Bitcoin crossed an important milestone for the decentralized currency, in that the net worth of all bitcoins currently minted now exceeds 1 billion US dollars. At the moment, bitcoin is trading around $94, which makes the current net market value 1.03 billion USD. This is a significant milestone, since many consider this to be the point at which bitcoin should be taken as a serious currency."
Networking

Submission + - Open DNS Resolvers Center Stage in Massive DDoS Attacks (threatpost.com)

Submitted by msm1267
msm1267 writes: While the big traffic numbers and the spat between Spamhaus and illicit webhost Cyberbunker are grabbing big headlines, the underlying and percolating issue at play here has to do with the open DNS resolvers being used to DDoS the spam-fighters from Switzerland. Open resolvers do not authenticate a packet-sender’s IP address before a DNS reply is sent back. Therefore, an attacker that is able to spoof a victim’s IP address can have a DNS request bombard the victim with a 100-to-1 ratio of traffic coming back to them versus what was requested. DNS amplification attacks such as these have been used lately by hacktivists, extortionists and blacklisted webhosts to great success.

Submission + - Solar Impulse Airplane to Launch First Sun-Powered Flight Across America (inhabitat.com)

Submitted by
markboyer
markboyer writes: "The Solar Impulse just landed at Moffett Field in Mountain View, California to announce a journey that will take it from San Francisco to New York without using a single drop of fuel. The "Across America" tour will kick off this May when founders Bertrand Piccard and André Borschberg take off from San Francisco. From there the plane will visit four cities across the states before landing in New York."
Google

Submission + - Google pledges not to sue open source software, unless first attacked (muktware.com)

Submitted by sfcrazy
sfcrazy writes: Google has announced the Open Patent Non-Assertion (OPN) Pledge. In it's pledge Google says that they will not sue any user, distributor or developer of open-source software on specified patents, unless first attacked. Under this pledge, Google is starting off with 10 patents relating to MapReduce, a computing model for processing large data sets first developed at Google. Google says that over time they intend to expand the set of Google’s patents covered by the pledge to other technologies.
Ubuntu

Submission + - Is Bing biased against Ubuntu? (distrorank.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: As many of you know, part of my popularity analysis of GNU/Linux distributions includes search engine results. One thing I immediately noticed when I started analyzing the data was how fewer results Bing has compared to Google specifically for the term "Ubuntu Linux". At first, I thought that perhaps Bing simply hasn't indexed as much as Google and it will catch up. But over several ranking periods now, Bing is still, in my opinion, unusually low in "Ubuntu Linux" results. So I did a quick and dirty experiment:
Patents

Submission + - Texas judge tosses out patent claim against Linux (networkworld.com)

Submitted by
netbuzz
netbuzz writes: "A federal judge in Texas, presiding over a district notorious for favoring patent trolls, has summarily dismissed all claims relating to a case brought by Uniloc USA against Rackspace for allegedly infringing upon Linux patents. Red Hat defended Rackspace in the matter and issued a press release saying: “In dismissing the case, Chief Judge Leonard Davis found that Uniloc’s claim was unpatentable under Supreme Court case law that prohibits the patenting of mathematical algorithms. This is the first reported instance in which the Eastern District of Texas has granted an early motion to dismiss finding a patent invalid because it claimed unpatentable subject matter.”"
IT

Submission + - Gender gap in tech salaries is all gone, Dice reports (infoworld.com)

Submitted by bobwrit
bobwrit writes: "The field of IT is notorious for being persistently male-dominated, but that doesn't mean women still suffer from a gender gap when it comes to pay.

In fact, the compensation gender gap has disappeared for tech workers, according to the latest salary survey from IT careers site Dice. Specifically, ever since 2009, average salaries have been equivalent for male and female tech professionals, the company reported on Tuesday — as long as you're comparing equal levels of experience and education and parallel job titles."
Google

Submission + - What an anti-Google antitrust case by the FTC may look like (cnet.com)

Submitted by
hessian
hessian writes: "It's not certain that Google will face a federal antitrust lawsuit by year's end. But if that happens, it seems likely to follow an outline sketched by Thomas Barnett, a Washington, D.C., lawyer on the payroll of Google's competitors.

Barnett laid out his arguments during a presentation here last night: Google is unfairly prioritizing its own services such as flight search over those offered by rivals such as Expedia, and it's unfairly incorporating reviews from Yelp without asking for permission.

"They systematically reinforce their dominance in search and search advertising," Barnett said during a debate on search engines and antitrust organized by the Federalist Society. "Google's case ought to have been brought a year or two ago.""

Submission + - Worlds first 9.6 imch 4K screen produced (examiner.com)

Submitted by jeremy85mai
jeremy85mai writes: Ortustech unveiled today that it had build a 9.6 inch display with a resolution of 3840x2160. This gives the display a resolution of 458.94 ppi. This is the smallest any manufacturer has been able to produce any 4K screens. While this is not the highest density display out there(Toshiba has displays that are around 500 PPI), it is still incredibly dense. The main advantage of screens this dense is either for a much smoother visual experience(reducing the need for Anti-Aliasing), as well as making the image displayed much more crisp and sharp.

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