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Power

UK Joins Laser Nuclear Fusion Project 199

Posted by Soulskill from the if-it's-worth-doing-it's-worth-doing-with-lasers dept.
arisvega writes with this quote from the BBC: "The UK company AWE and the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory have now joined with [the National Ignition Facility in the U.S.] to help make laser fusion a viable commercial energy source. ... Part of the problem has been that the technical ability to reach 'breakeven' — the point at which more energy is produced than is consumed — has always seemed distant. Detractors of the idea have asserted that 'fusion energy is 50 years away, no matter what year you ask,' said David Willetts, the UK's science minister. 'I think that what's going on both in the UK and in the US shows that we are now making significant progress on this technology,' he said. 'It can't any longer be dismissed as something on the far distant horizon.'"

Comment Re:implications (Score 1) 207

by lemonfresh33 (#35757122) Attached to: Involuntary Geolocation To Within One Kilometer
if I add in a random amount of time delay, but you average them out, you don't find out the time to my system, but the average amount of delay I have added PLUS the time to find my system. I'll end up looking further away than you think whatever happens. The only time when averaging out would sum to zero is if I sometimes add a negative delay, and sometimes a positive delay.
Space

Submission + - Brooklyn Father, Son Launch Homemade Spacecraft (wpix.com)

Submitted by Adair
Adair writes: A father and son team from Brooklyn successfully launched a homemade spacecraft nearly 19 miles (around 100,000 feet) above the Earth's surface. The craft was a 19-inch helium-filled weather balloon attached to a Styrofoam capsule that housed an HD video camera and an iPhone. The camera recorded video of its ascent into the stratosphere, its apogee where the balloon reached its breaking point, and its descent back to earth. They rigged a parachute to the capsule to aid in its return to Earth, and the iPhone broadcast its GPS coordinates so they could track it down. The craft landed a mere 30 miles from its launch point in Newburgh, NY, due to a quick ascent and two differing wind patterns. The pair spent 8 months researching and test-flying the craft before launching it in August. Columbia University Professor of Astronomy Marcel Aguera said, "They were very good but also very lucky."
Iphone

Submission + - Plane Finder iPhone app - aid to terrorist ? (ndtv.com) 1

Submitted by ProgramErgoSum
ProgramErgoSum writes: The Plane Finder AR application, developed by a British firm for the Apple iPhone and Google's Android, allows users to point their phone at the sky and see the position, height and speed of nearby aircraft. It also shows the airline, flight number, departure point, destination and even the likely course-the features which could be used to target an aircraft with a surface-to-air missile, or to direct another plane on to a collision course, the 'Daily Mail' reported. The programme, sold for just 1.79 pounds in the online Apple store, has now been labelled an 'aid to terrorists' by security experts and the US Department of Homeland Security is also examining how to protect airliners.

The new application works by intercepting the so-called Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcasts (ADS-B) transmitted by most passenger aircraft to a new satellite tracking system that supplements or, in some countries, replaces radar.
IT

Submission + - STEC Unveils Industrial-Strength SSD (eweekeurope.co.uk)

Submitted by geek4
geek4 writes: The ZeusRAM SSD is aimed at enterprises deploying heavy-duty workloads that need ultra-low latency

Solid-state storage drive maker STEC on 20 September introduced a new industrial-strength SSD aimed at enterprises deploying fast and/or continuous read/write workloads that include metadata logging, journaling, and database indexing applications.

The announcement was made at Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco at the Moscone Centre.
STEC’s ZeusRAM, which is currently being tested by several high-performance OEMs, will be launched later this fall in a 3.5-inch standard form factor using a native 6Gb SAS interface, said chairman and chief executive Manouch Moshayedi.
Piracy

Submission + - Mass Mailer Worm Brings Email Misery Back (eweekeurope.co.uk)

Submitted by geek4
geek4 writes: A mass mailer worm that links to a UK website is a throwback to the days of old, security researchers said

A mass-mailer worm flooded inboxes at a number of high-profile organisations today. It struck havoc in the US yesterday and may be lurking in UK inboxes when the workforce logs-in today.

The worm, dubbed ‘Here you have’ because of its email subject line, contains what appears to be a link to an Adobe PDF file. In fact, the link takes the victim to a screensaver (.scr) file on a web page hosted on the members.multimania.co.uk domain. Users who agree to install the file are then infected by the worm which mails itself to the users’ email contacts.
Earth

Yellowstone Hot Spot Shreds Ancient Pacific Ocean 69

Posted by Soulskill from the tectonic-violence dept.
jamie passes along this excerpt from DiscoveryNews: "If you thought the geysers and overblown threat of a supervolcanic eruption in Yellowstone National Park were dramatic, you ain't seen nothing: deep beneath Earth's surface, the hot spot that feeds the park has torn an entire tectonic plate in half. The revelation comes from a new study (abstract) in the journal Geophysical Research Letters that peered into the mantle beneath the Pacific Northwest to see what happens when ancient ocean crust from the Pacific Ocean runs headlong into a churning plume of ultra-hot mantle material."
The Internet

Six Reasons Why Flash Isn't Going Away 483

Posted by CmdrTaco from the flash-in-the-pan dept.
CWmike writes "While Steve Jobs is betting his mobile platform on it, predicting Flash's demise is short-sighted, say industry analysts. 'There are many people who despise Flash, but I'm not sure they'd love the alternative right out of the gate. The open-source world has not blown everyone out of the water with their video work thus far,' Michael Cote, an analyst at RedMon, told Howard Wen. 'Adobe has spent a lot of time optimizing Flash, and I'd wager it'd take some time to get HTML 5 video as awesome.' Here are six factors that give Flash a strong position over HTML 5 and other alternative Web media technologies in the foreseeable future. For starters, While Android has made Flash a wedge issue, Flash is just beginning to show up on multiple mobile device platforms, Wen writes. Ross Rubin, an analyst at NPD Group, reminds us how Flash ushered in video on Web pages, but Craig Barberich, vice president of marketing and business development at Coincident TV, highlights the pervasiveness of Flash on the Web as we know it: 'Everybody is talking about video, but what doesn't necessarily get talked about is a lot of the interactive elements.'"
Businesses

Apple, RIM, Google All Bid On Palm 117

Posted by timothy from the face-palm-apple dept.
imamac writes "It seems HP was only one of many bidders for the struggling Palm. The others included Apple, RIM and even Google. You may now commence speculation on why the various companies wanted Palm."
Operating Systems

OpenSUSE 11.3 Is Here 156

Posted by timothy from the lovely-little-lizard dept.
lukehashj writes "The openSUSE Project is pleased to announce the release of the latest incarnation of openSUSE, with support for 32-bit and 64-bit systems. OpenSUSE 11.3 is packed with new features and updates including SpiderOak to sync your files across the Internet for free, Rosegarden for free editing of your audio files, improved indexing with Tracker, and updates to Mozilla Firefox, and Thunderbird."
Government

After a Decade, Digital Radio Still an Also-Ran In UK 200

Posted by timothy from the played-out-in-advance dept.
beschra writes "Digital Audio Broadcast (DAB) was developed as early as 1981. After launching in the UK 10 years ago, only 24% of listeners listen on DAB. The article credits a good part of the delay to the fact that the technology was largely developed under the Europe-wide Eureka 147 research project. How does government vs. commercial development help or hinder acceptance of new technology? From the article: '"If Nokia develops something, they'll be bringing out the handsets before you know it," [analyst Grant Goddard says]. "Because DAB was a pan-European development, you had to have agreement from all sides before you could do anything. That meant progress was extremely slow." But this alone did not account for the hold-up. The sheer complexity of introducing and regulating the system was also a major factor, Mr. Goddard adds."'

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