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Submission + - FAA Bans Delivering Packages With Drones (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: he Federal Aviation Administration has said that online shopping powerhouse Amazon may not employ drones to deliver packages, at least not anytime soon. The revelation was buried in an FAA document (PDF) unveiled Monday seeking public comment on its policy on drones, or what the agency calls "model aircraft." The FAA has maintained since at least 2007 that the commercial operation of drones is illegal. A federal judge ruled in March, however, that the FAA enacted the regulations illegally because it did not take public input before adopting the rules, which is a violation of federal law. Flight regulators have appealed the decision, maintaining that commercial applications are still barred. ... In Monday's announcement, published in the Federal Register, the FAA named Amazon's December proposal as an example of what is barred under regulations that allow the use of drones for hobby and recreational purposes. The agency did not mention Amazon Prime Air by name, but it didn't have to. Under a graphic that says what is barred, the FAA mentioned the "Delivering of packages to people for a fee." A footnote added, "If an individual offers free shipping in association with a purchase or other offer, FAA would construe the shipping to be in furtherance of a business purpose, and thus, the operation would not fall within the statutory requirement of recreation or hobby purpose."

Submission + - Microsoft Suffers Another Cloud Outage With Exchange Online (crn.com)

Submitted by cgriffin21
cgriffin21 writes: A day after Microsoft’s Lync instant messaging service suffered a global outage, its Exchange Online customers are now having problems with the cloud email service. Customers began experiencing problems with Exchange Online a little after 8 a.m. ET Tuesday, according to posts on Microsoft's Office 365 community forum. Some customers reported being unable to send or receive emails from Exchange Online. Many customers reported experiencing long hold times when trying to contact Microsoft customer service representatives.

Submission + - Swift can be easily twiddled if necessary (brockerhoff.net)

Submitted by Kensai7
Kensai7 writes: ...Swift. It really appears to be a very pragmatic language. If you look at the generated library header (in Xcode, command-doubleclick on any Swift type to see it), nearly all operators and types are defined there, in often surprising detail. In other words, few language features are hard-wired into the parser/compiler – the Swift library/runtime and the pre-LLVM optimizer are, instead, responsible for the language and its implementation details, and therefore more easily twiddled if necessary.

Submission + - Gambling on Edward Snowden's next move (dailydot.com)

Submitted by blottsie
blottsie writes: With Edward Snowden's temporary asylum in Russia set to expire in approximately one month, the Daily Dot teamed up with U.K. bookmaker William Hill to set the odds on which country the NSA whistleblower could land in next. The smart money puts him ending up in the U.S.

Submission + - A Laser Message from Space (nasa.gov)

Submitted by stephendavion
stephendavion writes: Anyone who remembers dialup internet can sympathize with the plight of NASA mission controllers. Waiting for images to arrive from deep space, slowly downloading line by line, can be a little like the World Wide Web of the 1990s. Patience is required.

A laser on the International Space Station (ISS) could change all that. On June 5th, 2014, the ISS passed over the Table Mountain Observatory in Wrightwood, California, and beamed an HD video to researchers waiting below. Unlike normal data transmissions, which are encoded in radio waves, this one came to Earth on a beam of light.

"It was incredible to see this magnificent beam of light arriving from our tiny payload on the space station," says Matt Abrahamson, who manages the Optical Payload for Lasercomm Science at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Submission + - A Supreme Court win for Aereo would take the fight out of broadcasters (networkworld.com)

Submitted by smaxp
smaxp writes: Broadcasters can't stop Aereo without hurting themselves, Broadcasters have threatened to stop over-the-air OTA broadcasting. if Aereo prevails before the Supreme Court. Its all bark and no bite because the broadcasters will lose advertising dollars by cutting off OTA viewers.

Aereo and Netflix provides "good enough television" that will convince aspiring cord-cutters to finally cut the cord. Why pay $70 per month for cable when $18 provides Netflix, ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox and PBS — news, prime-time TV, some sports and reality TV.

Broadcasters will lose retransmission fees, but for the bulk of their advertising revenues will follow the the cord cutters from cable and satellite to Aereo. Aereo may be able to deliver better analytics than the cable and satellite providers and Nielsen, and that will help broadcasters in their negotiations with sponsors to increase adverting revenues.

Submission + - NOAA implicated in global temperature data fabrication (telegraph.co.uk)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Christopher Booker writes in The Telegraph

Uncovered by Steven Goddard, and published in his blog Real Science. Mr. Goddard demonstrates how shamelessly manipulated one of the world’s most influential climate records has been, the graph of US surface temperature records published by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

Goddard shows how, in recent years, NOAA’s US Historical Climatology Network (USHCN) has been “adjusting” its record by replacing real temperatures with data “fabricated” by computer models. The effect of this has been to downgrade earlier temperatures and to exaggerate those from recent decades, to give the impression that the Earth has been warming up much more than is justified by the actual data.

Submission + - Citing "Terrorism," Illinois spent $250k on Stingray to fight regular crime

Submitted by v3rgEz
v3rgEz writes: New documents released on MuckRock show the Illinois State Police crying "Terrorist" in order to get funding and approval for a $250,000 Stingray cell snooping system, even though, as Mike Masnick at Techdirt notes, the technology is being used to fight regular crime. The ToS on the device actually prevent officers from seeking a warrant to use it, because doing so would disclose the device's use to the courts. MuckRock currently has a crowdfunding campaign to fund similar requests across the country.

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