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Comment Headline grabber (Score 1) 1

by Lurching (#38903177) Attached to: MIT creates solar cell from grass clippings

Nothing to see here -- keep moving.

Seriously, the costs of the "specially treated glass" will probably exceed the costs of most of the alternatives. And what kind of a usable life can we hope to get from this? Will we have to clean it and recoat it every month?

An interesting academic exercise, but not much more. Let's try news on something practical.
Medicine

Submission + - Vaccine developed against Ebola (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by Lurching
Lurching writes: Scientists have developed a vaccine that protects mice against a deadly form of the Ebola virus.

First identified in 1976, Ebola fever kills more than 90% of the people it infects.

The researchers say that this is the first Ebola vaccine to remain viable long-term and can therefore be successfully stockpiled.

The results are reported in the journal Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences.
Cellphones

Submission + - Verizon blocks Google Wallet on Galaxy Nexus

Submitted by adeelarshad82
adeelarshad82 writes: With nobody willing to settle on a standard for mobile wallets, Google's NFC technology seems to be suffering the consequences. In the latest development, Verizon has blocked the Samsung Galaxy Nexus from running Google Wallet presumably because Verizon backs a competing standard called Isis. Mobile Analyst Sascha Segan points out that there's just too much money and too many customers at stake for any of the big players to give up control to any of the others. The solution, as he points out, is to have devices support multiple standards.
United States

Submission + - Reverse Robocall Turns Tables On Politicians (itworld.com) 2

Submitted by
jfruhlinger
jfruhlinger writes: "One of the great banes of election season is that any politician can shell out a few pennies per voter and phone-spam thousands of people who'd rather not hear a recorded pitch. But turnabout's fair play, and now a service called reverse robocall will deliver your recorded message to elected officials as often as you'd like for a nominal fee. If you got someone who you'd like to call repeatedly, check them out."
Biotech

Submission + - These shoes were made for generating electricity (extremetech.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A team of engineers from the University of Wisconsin have used a process called electrowetting to create about 10 watts of power from simply walking along. Electrowetting is where a liquid, usually hydrophobic, and a mixture of oil and water in this case is forced to move by applying an electric current. These shoes reverse the process and force the mixture over some electrodes, creating a current which is stored in a battery.
Power

Submission + - Gas Powered Fuel Cell To Fix Electric-Car Range An (greencarreports.com)

Submitted by thecarchik
thecarchik writes: While electric-car advocates may avoid the issue, some buyers simply won't choose a plug-in car that can't travel unlimited distances. That's where the Chevy Volt-style range extender comes in, though the Volt adds unlimited range by burning gasoline in a conventional engine to generate electric power.

Now a new type of fuel cell offers the potential for a different kind of range extender, one that removes the enormous practical problem facing hydrogen fuel cells: the lack of a distribution infrastructure to fuel vehicles that require pure hydrogen to feed their fuel cells.
Researchers at the University of Maryland have managed to shrink the size and lower the operating temperature of a solid-oxide fuel cell by a factor of 10, meaning it could conceivably produce as much power as a car engine but occupy less space.

The advances come from new materials for the solid electrolyte, as well as design changes, and the researchers feel they have further avenues for improvement left to explore.
Red Hat Software

Submission + - Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.2 Now Shipping (securityweek.com)

Submitted by wiredmikey
wiredmikey writes: Red Hat today announced the availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.2, the latest version of its enterprise operating system that brings significant improvements in resource management, high availability, and new features aimed at storage and file system performance and identity management.

On the performance front, enterprises can take advantage of the latest multi-core processor technology to boost and maximize performance. The latest version also brings more features and improvements in terms of operating in virtual environments and improved network performance.
Science

Submission + - Graphene spun into metre-long fibres (nature.com)

Submitted by ananyo
ananyo writes: Nano-sized flakes of graphene oxide can be spun into graphene fibres several metres long, researchers in China have shown. The strong, flexible fibres, which can be tied in knots or woven into conductive mats, could be the key to deploying graphene in real-world devices such as flexible batteries.
NASA

Submission + - Solar flares tear off tons of moon, Mars surface (networkworld.com)

Submitted by
coondoggie
coondoggie writes: "NASA scientists said today that massive solar storms like the ones being thrown off by the Sun of late shave off significant portions of the moon and can sandblast other magnetically unprotected planets like Mars.

Some 100 to 200 tons of lunar material — the equivalent of 10 dump truck loads — could be stripped off the lunar surface during the typical 2-day passage of one of the Sun's intense Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs)..."

Comment Missing info (Score 1) 3

by Lurching (#37895164) Attached to: Federal Contractors are $600 Toilet Seats

Some critical data is missing from this "report".

Salaries stated for Government workers do NOT include their retirement, medical, etc. costs. What a contractor charges does include those costs for their people. Including those costs will make the comparison more equitable, if not tip it the other way.

Doing business with the Federal Government is expensive for a company just because of the amount of paperwork and tracking that is required. Those costs are not part of the internal Federal IT costs.

A very small percentage of federal contractors work in Government facilities. Those that do get charged for at a considerably lower rate than those that work in contractor facilities. All of the facility, training, retirement, etc. costs cited are overhead - added as a percentage of the direct contract costs. Federal contractors go through incredible machinations to cut those overhead costs. They are a major component of a competitive bid, and you can easily lose a bid if they are higher than your competitor.

Government IT can often be cheaper than contractor, but not always, and Government personnel regulations and processes can make hiring new IT personnel a year-long (or more) nightmare. Personnel limits imposed by Congress, whether designed to cut Federal numbers or to benefit contractors, can also make an agency or department go outside for IT support.

The full reasons and costs are NOT easy to tease out, and a simple analysis does NOT get you the real reasons/problems, nor does it provide for valid fixes.
Piracy

Submission + - Graduated Response targets English Countries

Submitted by bs0d3
bs0d3 writes: Of all the countries where graduated response measures for copyright infringement are used, there seems to be a bias for english speaking countries. Ireland, New Zealand, the United States, France and the UK are the only countries where you should be concerned with receiving regular copyright warning letters. Not to be confused with "notice of litigation letters" sent to large scale pirates who are being sued, copyright warning letters have for the most part been nothing more than scare messages that began in 2003. Out of the 5 countries where these letters may lead to some consequence, 4 of them speak english as a first language. One has to wonder if Australia and Canada are next.
Space

Does Famous Exoplanet 'Fomalhaut b' Really Exist? 40

Posted by Soulskill from the to-b-or-not-to-b dept.
astroengine writes "The first exoplanet ever to be directly imaged by the Hubble space telescope may not exist. In 2008, the world was in awe of the famous 'Eye of Sauron' image of the star Fomalhaut's dusty ring — plus a slowly moving object that was identified as Fomalhaut b, a gas giant world approximately three times the mass of Jupiter. However, due to a strange orbital misstep detected between 2008 and 2009 photographs, the validity of Fomalhaut b's detection is being questioned, generating some controversy in the exoplanet community."
Bug

SCADA Problems Too Big To Call 'Bugs,' Says DHS 92

Posted by Soulskill from the just-a-remote-unauthorized-access-feature dept.
chicksdaddy writes "With the one year anniversary of Stuxnet upon us, a senior cybersecurity official at the Department of Homeland Security says the agency is reevaluating whether it makes sense to warn the public about all of the security failings of industrial control system (ICS) and SCADA software used to control the U.S.'s critical infrastructure. DHS says it is rethinking the conditions under which it will use security advisories from ICS-CERT to warn the public about security issues in ICS products. The changes could recast certain kinds of vulnerabilities as 'design issues' rather than a security holes. No surprise: independent ICS experts like Ralph Langner worry that DHS is ducking responsibility for forcing changes that will secure the software used to run the nation's critical infrastructure. 'This radically cuts the amount of vulnerabilities in the ICS space by roughly 90%, since the vast majority of security "issues" we have are not bugs, but design flaws,' Langner writes on his blog. 'So today everybody has gotten much more secure because so many vulnerabilities just disappeared.'"

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