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Submission + - Apple legend Steve Wozniak takes up university post (afr.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Apple founder Steve Wozniak has joined the University of Technology, Sydney as adjunct professor, to work in the school's “magic lab”, more formally known at the Innovation and Enterprise Research Lab.

Submission + - Mars Orbiter Beams Back Images of Comet's Surprisingly Tiny Nucleus (discovery.com)

Submitted by astroengine
astroengine writes: The High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on board NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) has become the first instrument orbiting Mars to beam back images of comet Siding Spring’s nucleus and coma. And by default, it has also become the first ever mission to photograph a long-period comet’s pristine nucleus on its first foray into the inner solar system. Interestingly, through analysis of these first HiRISE observations, astronomers have determined that the icy nucleus at the comet’s core is much smaller than originally thought. “Telescopic observers had modeled the size of the nucleus as about half a mile, or one kilometer, wide,” writes a NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory news release. “However, the best HiRISE images show only two to three pixels across the brightest feature, probably the nucleus, suggesting a size less than half that estimate.”

Submission + - TorFi, an alternative to Anonabox, already up at Kickstarter (kickstarter.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Riding on the coattails of the desire for anonymity on the Internet displayed by Anonabox, new Kickstarter project TorFi "aims to satisfy the demand demonstrated for a simple, plug-and-play, secure access point to the Internet. With no more technical knowledge than what it takes to plug into a home ISP connection..." It appears to use OpenWRT and pre-existing hardware to accomplish this and claims it will only cost $30.

Submission + - Blackberry reported to be in talks with Lenovo

Submitted by BarbaraHudson
BarbaraHudson writes: The CBC, the Financial Post, and The Toronto Sun are all reporting a possible sale of Blackberry to Lenovo. From the Sun:

BlackBerry shares rose more than 3% on Monday after a news website said Chinese computer maker Lenovo Group might offer to buy the Canadian technology company.

Rumours of a Lenovo bid for BlackBerry have swirled many times over the last two years. Senior Lenovo executives at different times have indicated an interest in BlackBerry as a means to strengthen their own handset business.

The speculation reached a crescendo in the fall of 2013, when BlackBerry was exploring strategic alternatives.

Sources familiar with the situation however, told Reuters last year that the Canadian government had strongly hinted to BlackBerry that any sale to Lenovo would not win the necessary regulatory approvals due to security concerns.

Analysts also have said any sale to Lenovo would face regulatory obstacles, but they have suggested that a sale of just BlackBerry's handset business and not its core network infrastructure might just pass muster with regulators.
Mars

NASA's HI-SEAS Project Results Suggests a Women-Only Mars Crew 399

Posted by timothy from the couple-of-jockeys-too dept.
globaljustin writes "Alan Drysdale, a systems analyst in advanced life support and a contractor with NASA concluded, "Small women haven't been demonstrated to be appreciably dumber than big women or big men, so there's no reason to choose larger people for a flight crew when it's brain power you want," says Drysdale. "The logical thing to do is to fly small women." Kate Greene, who wrote the linked article, took part in the first HI-SEAS experiment in Martian-style living, and has some compelling reasons for an all-women crew, energy efficiency chief among them: Week in and week out, the three female crew members expended less than half the calories of the three male crew members. Less than half! We were all exercising roughly the same amount—at least 45 minutes a day for five consecutive days a week—but our metabolic furnaces were calibrated in radically different ways. During one week, the most metabolically active male burned an average of 3,450 calories per day, while the least metabolically active female expended 1,475 calories per day. It was rare for a woman on crew to burn 2,000 calories in a day and common for male crew members to exceed 3,000. ... The calorie requirements of an astronaut matter significantly when planning a mission. The more food a person needs to maintain her weight on a long space journey, the more food should launch with her. The more food launched, the heavier the payload. The heavier the payload, the more fuel required to blast it into orbit and beyond. The more fuel required, the heavier the rocket becomes, which it in turn requires more fuel to launch.
Space

The Woman Who Should Have Been the First Female Astronaut 200

Posted by timothy from the actually-my-grandmother-would-have-been-great-at-it-too dept.
StartsWithABang writes We like to think of the Mercury 7 — the very first group of NASA astronauts — as the "best of the best," having been chosen from a pool of over 500 of the top military test pilots after three rounds of intense physical and mental tests. Yet when women were allowed to take the same tests, one of them clearly distinguished herself, outperforming practically all of the men. If NASA had really believed in merit, Jerrie Cobb would have been the first female in space, even before Valentina Tereshkova, more than 50 years ago. She still deserves to go.

Submission + - Internet trolls to face two years in jail for online abuse (theguardian.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Internet trolls who spread “venom” on social media could be jailed for up to two years, the justice secretary Chris Grayling has said as he announced plans to quadruple the maximum prison sentence.

Grayling, who spoke of a “baying cybermob”, said the changes will allow magistrates to pass on the most serious cases to crown courts.

The changes, which will be introduced as amendments to the criminal justice and courts bill, will mean the maximum custodial sentence of six months will be increased to 24 months.

Grayling told the Mail on Sunday: “These internet trolls are cowards who are poisoning our national life. No one would permit such venom in person, so there should be no place for it on social media. That is why we are determined to quadruple the six-month sentence.

Submission + - Torvalds: I Made A "Metric Sh--load" Of Mistakes With The Linux Community (readwrite.com)

Submitted by electronic convict
electronic convict writes: In a Q&A at LinuxCon Europe, Linux creator Linus Torvalds — no stranger to strong language and blunt opinions — acknowledged a "metric shitload" of interpersonal mistakes that unnecessarily antagonized others within the Linux community. In response to Intel's Dirk Hohndel, who asked him which decision he regretted most over the past 23 years, Torvalds replied:

From a technical standpoint, no single decision has ever been that important... The problems tend to be around alienating users or developers and I'm pretty good at that. I use strong language. But again there's not a single instance I'd like to fix. There's a metric shitload of those.

It's probably not a coincidence that Torvalds said this just a few weeks after critics like Lennart Poettering started drawing attention to the abusive nature of some commentary within the open-source community. Poettering explicitly called out Torvalds for some of his most intemperate remarks and described open source as "quite a sick place to be in." Still, Torvalds doesn't sound like he's about to start making an apology tour. "One of the reasons we have this culture of strong language, that admittedly many people find off-putting, is that when it comes to technical people with strong opinions and with a strong drive to do something technically superior, you end up having these opinions show up as sometimes pretty strong language," he said. "On the Internet, nobody can hear you being subtle."

Submission + - University, NASA to help astronauts by sending mice into space (localnews8.com)

Submitted by notthegeneral
notthegeneral writes: Researchers are sending mice to the International Space Station to find out why returning astronauts often develop visual problems. From the article:

"As you can imagine there's a lot that goes into taking people up into space," said Dr. Shawn Bearden, associate professor of physiology at Idaho State University. "And there's an equal amount and perhaps even more risk and danger and issue associated with coming back down."

The first group of test mice will eventually die, but there are plans to make later groups return to Earth safely.

Submission + - White House wants ideas for 'bootstrapping a solar system civilization' (examiner.com)

Submitted by MarkWhittington
MarkWhittington writes: Tom Kalil, the Deputy Director for Policy for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and Senior Advisor for Science, Technology and Innovation for the National Economic Council, has an intriguing Tuesday post on the OSTP blog. Kalil is soliciting ideas for “bootstrapping a solar system civilization.” Anyone interested in offering ideas along those lines to the Obama administration can contact a special email address that has been set up for that purpose.

The ideas that Kalil muses about in his post are not new for people who have studied the question of how to settle space at length. The ideas consist of sending autonomous robots to various locations in space to create infrastructure using local resources with advanced manufacturing technology, such as 3D printing. The new aspect is that someone in the White House is publicly discussing these concepts.

Submission + - After Negative User Response, ChromeOS To Re-Introduce Support For Ext{2,3,4}

Submitted by NotInHere
NotInHere writes: Only three days after the large public has known about ChromeOS to disable ext2fs support for external drives, and linux users voiced many protests on websites like reddit, slashdot, or the issue tracker, the ChromeOS team now plans to support it again. To quote Ben Goodger's comment:"

Thanks for all of your feedback on this bug. We’ve heard you loud and clear.

We plan to re-enable ext2/3/4 support in Files.app immediately. It will come back, just like it was before, and we’re working to get it into the next stable channel release."

Submission + - Flight Attendants Want Stricter Gadget Rules Reinstated

Submitted by stephendavion
stephendavion writes: You might be super happy to toil away on your phone or tablet the entire time you're on a plane, but not everyone is pleased to see your face buried in your device during takeoff and landing. The Federal Aviation Administration's new, more relaxed rules on gadget use aren't sitting well with one group — flight attendants. According to a report from The Wall Street Journal, the nation's largest flight attendant union is now suing the FAA to have the ban on gadget use during takeoff and landing reinstated. The Association of Flight Attendants-CWA argues that the change has caused many passengers to ignore flight attendants' emergency announcements, and that the new rules violate federal regulations requiring passengers to stow all items during takeoff and landing.

Submission + - Netflix Video Speed on FiOS Doubles After Netflix-Verizon Deal 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Verizon now joins AT&T and Time Warner Cable in the list of ISPs on which Netflix streaming has significantly improved after Netflix paid for access to their networks. Ars Technica notes that "[t]he interconnection deals give Netflix a direct connection to the edge of the Internet providers' networks, bypassing congested links, but without receiving priority treatment after entering the networks." The success of these deals, however, gives the ISPs no incentive whatsoever to fix their congested links. Toll roads have, in essence, been created for the internet.

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