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Space

Submission + - Can We Travel to That Exciting New Exoplanet? (discovermagazine.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The news last week that exoplanet Gliese 581g may be in the "goldilocks zone" and could therefore hold liquid water and alien life got everyone all excited, with good reason. A potentially habitable planet--and only 20 light years away! But to put things in perspective, here are a couple of estimates on what it would take to travel to Gliese 581g. One scientist puts the travel time at 180,000 years based on current space flight technology, while another explains that it could be quite quick if we build a matter-antimatter drive, and can figure out how to bring along 530 times as much mass in fuel as is contained in the ship and cargo itself.

Submission + - Solar power coming to the White House (skunkpost.com)

Submitted by crimeandpunishment
crimeandpunishment writes: The White House is going greener. Solar panels will be installed by next spring, and will heat water for the first family and provide some electricity. President Obama, who has been a big supporter of renewable energy, has been under pressure to lead by example. It's still unclear how much the project will cost and how much fossil fuel-based electricity it will replace.

Submission + - Ig Nobel prize winner wins real Nobel Prize (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by Leemeng
Leemeng writes: Andrei Geim and Konstantin Novoselov, both at Manchester University, UK, took this year's Nobel Prize for Physics for their research on graphene. Geim was one of the recipients of 2000 Ig Nobel Prize in physics, which he earned for magnetically levitating frogs. This makes Geim the first person to have won both the Ig Nobel and the Nobel Prizes.
Government

Secret Service Runs At "Six Sixes" Availability 248

Posted by timothy from the only-need-half-as-many dept.
PCM2 writes "ABC News is reporting that the US Secret Service is in dire need of server upgrades. 'Currently, 42 mission-oriented applications run on a 1980s IBM mainframe with a 68 percent performance reliability rating,' says one leaked memo. That finding was the result of an NSA study commissioned by the Secret Service to evaluate the severity of their computer problems. Curiously, upgrades to the Service's computers are being championed by Senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, who says he's had 'concern for a while' about the issue."
Games

The Murky Origins of Zork's Name 70

Posted by Soulskill from the murky-enough-for-a-grue dept.
mjn writes "Computational media researcher Nick Montfort traces the murky origins of Zork's name. It's well known that the word was used in MIT hacker jargon around that time, but how did it get there? Candidates are the term 'zorch' from late 1950s DIY electronics slang, the use of the term as a placeholder in some early 1970s textbooks, the typo a QWERTY user would get if he typed 'work' on an AZERTY keyboard, and several uses in obscure sci-fi. No solid answers so far, though, as there are problems with many of the possible explanations that would have made MIT hackers unlikely to have run across them at the right time."

Comment Crashplan (Score 1) 611

by Ron Harwood (#28757401) Attached to: Best Home Backup Strategy Now?

I use crashplan - it's free as in beer... cross platform and does "to disk" backups - either to a local disk or a disk on a remote system. It does data de-duplication, compression, encryption and only backs up thing that have changed.

www.crashplan.com
Security

Submission + - SPAM: FBI turns on national crime info sharing system

Submitted by
coondoggie
coondoggie writes: "The FBI this month activated the first part of and an all-encompassing national information-sharing system that will let law enforcement gather, share and correlate criminal investigation clues, interview information and a host of other data designed to more quickly solve crimes and spot nefarious trends. The agency's Law Enforcement National Data Exchange, or N-DEx system has the lofty goal of tying together more than 200,00- investigators who work in 18,000 local, state, tribal, and federal law enforcement agencies across disparate systems and jurisdiction boundaries. Privacy groups have expressed concerns about systems such as N-DEx in the past and the FBI says this system includes appropriate safeguards to protect privacy and civil liberties. Access to information in N-DEx will be strictly controlled by the law enforcement agency who "owns" the info — each agency decides what data to share, with whom, and under what circumstances. [spam URL stripped]"
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