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Submission + - China confirms of new generation of ICBM (telegraph.co.uk)

Submitted by Taco Cowboy
Taco Cowboy writes: China's ownership of a new intercontinental ballistic missile said to be capable of carrying multiple nuclear warheads as far as the United States is confirmed by state-run media

The DF-41 is designed to have a range of 12,000 kilometres (7,500 miles), according to a report by Jane's Strategic Weapon Systems, putting it among the world's longest-range missiles

It is "possibly capable of carrying multiple independently targetable re-entry vehicles", the US Defence Department said in a report in June, referring to a payload of several nuclear warheads. It also quoted a Chinese military analyst as saying: "As the US continues to strengthen its missile defence system, developing third generation nuclear weapons capable of carrying multiple warheads is the trend"

China's previous longest range missile was the DF-5A, which can carry a single warhead as far as 12,000 km, according to Jane's. The DF-5A had its first test flight in 1971, and has to be fuelled for around two hours prior to firing, limiting its effectiveness as a weapon, according to analysts

Submission + - New frontier of Arm Race - Hypersonic Vehicles (freebeacon.com)

Submitted by Taco Cowboy
Taco Cowboy writes: A new arm race has commenced.

The United States was first to develop near-space strike vehicles. Under the Prompt Global Strike program back when Bush was still the POTUS, the X-51, a scramjet powered hypersonic vehicle by Boeing, the HTV-2, a glide strike vehicle, and the X-37 space plane launched atop a rocket were developed

Now the Russian and the Chinese are getting into the act and are betting heavily on their own hypersonic weapons in an attempt to close the gap, and even trying to surpass what US has achieved so far

Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin said July 3 that Russian missile manufacturers must master the technology for both precision-guided and hypersonic weapons. Moscow has set a goal of 2020 to build its first hypersonic missile prototype

The Chinese military is working on a jet-powered hypersonic cruise missile in addition to an advanced high-speed glide warhead that was tested earlier this year

Large numbers of Chinese military writings in recent years have focused on hypersonic flight. The Chinese report outlines in technical detail how a scramjet-powered cruise vehicle operates at speeds greater than Mach 5 and discusses how to integrate airframe design with scramjet propulsion

The scramjet cruise vehicle was described in a technical military journal called Command Control & Simulation. The article was published by the 716 Research Institute of the state-run China Shipbuilding Industry Corp., China’s largest maker of warships, submarines, and torpedoes. China’s hypersonic weapons are among the most secret programs within the Chinese military, along with anti-satellite weapons and cyber warfare tools

Larry Wortzel, a former China-based military intelligence officer, said Chinese hypersonic arms are what Beijing calls “assassins’ mace” weapons that will give China a strategic edge in any future conflict with the United States. “China is continuing with a number of programs to develop what Beijing considers to be ‘assassins’ mace’ weapons that defeat conventional defenses, including these hypersonic strike vehicles,”

Submission + - NSA was the sole editor of ISO crypto-PRNG standard

Submitted by Sara Chan
Sara Chan writes: A Congressman, Alan Grayson, has sent a letter to the Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper. The letter asks several questions, in particular, this one: "How did the NSA become the sole editor of the ISO 18031 specification?" ISO 18031 specifies a model for a pseudorandom number generator that is suitable for cryptography. Thus, according to the letter, the NSA was the sole editor of an ISO cryptographic standard. The letter will probably not do much, though, given Clapper's prior perjury.

Submission + - NASA Confirms New EM Thruster Violates Laws Of Conservation

Submitted by Crudely_Indecent
Crudely_Indecent writes: Mentioned here in a previous story ( http://slashdot.org/story/06/0... ), the EM thruster that generates thrust using no fuel, only electricity has been tested by NASA and confirmed to work!

Is this the Star Trek future tech we've been waiting for?

The NASA report titled "Anomalous Thrust Production from an RF Test Device Measured on a Low-Thrust Torsion Pendulum" was published 3 days ago and can be found here: http://ntrs.nasa.gov/search.js... From the abstract:

This paper describes the eight-day August 2013 test campaign designed to investigate and demonstrate viability of using classical magnetoplasmadynamics to obtain a propulsive momentum transfer via the quantum vacuum virtual plasma.

Submission + - The CIA Does Las Vegas (belowgotham.com)

Submitted by Nicola Hahn
Nicola Hahn writes: Despite the long line of covert operations that Ed Snowden’s documents have exposed public outcry hasn’t come anywhere near the level of social unrest that characterized the 1960s. Journalists like Conor Friedersdorf have suggested that one explanation for this is that the public is “informed by a press that treats officials who get caught lying and misleading (e.g., James Clapper and Keith Alexander) as if they're credible.”

Certainly there are a number of well-known popular venues which offer a stage for spies to broadcast their messages from while simultaneously claiming to “cultivate conversations among all members of the security community, both public and private.” This year, for instance, Black Hat USA will host Dan Greer (the CISO of In-Q-Tel) as a keynote speaker.

But after all of the lies and subterfuge is it even constructive to give voice to the talking points of intelligence officials? Or are they just muddying the water? As one observer put it, “high-profile members of the intelligence community like Cofer Black, Shawn Henry, Keith Alexander, and Dan Greer are positioned front and center in keynote slots, as if they were glamorous Hollywood celebrities. While those who value their civil liberties might opine that they should more aptly be treated like pariahs”

Submission + - Was America's #1 Rocketeer a Communist Spy? The FBI thought so.

Submitted by IMissAlexChilton
IMissAlexChilton writes: Frank Malina masterfully led the World War II effort to build U.S. rockets for jet-assisted takeoff and guided missiles. As described in IEEE Spectrum, Malina’s motley crew of engineers and enthusiasts (including occultist Jack Parsons) founded the Jet Propulsion Lab and made critical breakthroughs in solid fuels, hypergolics, and high-altitude sounding rockets, laying the groundwork for NASA’s future successes. And yet, under suspicion by the Feds at the war’s end, Malina gave up his research career, and his team’s efforts sank into obscurity. Taking his place: the former Nazi Wernher von Braun. Read “Frank Malina: America’s Forgotten Rocketeer”. Includes cool vintage footage of early JPL rocket tests. Disclosure: I am a staff editor with IEEE Spectrum.

Submission + - Researchers Create Virtual Reality 'Parties' to Treat Drug Addiction

Submitted by Jason Koebler
Jason Koebler writes: To help people overcome drug addiction, researchers at the University of Houston’s Graduate School of Social Work are building hyper-realistic virtual worlds to recreate situations that trigger cravings for nicotine, alcohol, weed, and now, hard drugs like heroin.
Traditional relapse therapy usually involves roleplaying: Therapists often pretend to be a friend or some other familiar person and offer the patient their drug of choice in order to teach them avoidance strategies. By strapping patients into a virtual reality headset and running them through a familiar scenario where they commonly use the drug, like a party, the treatment can be much more realistic and effective, researchers say.

Submission + - HP gives OpenVMS new life and path to x86 port (computerworld.com)

Submitted by dcblogs
dcblogs writes: Hewlett-Packard has changed its direction on OpenVMS. Instead of pushing its users off the system, it has licensed OpenVMS to a new firm that plans to develop ports to the latest Itanium chips and is promising eventual support for x86 processors. Last year, HP put OpenVMS on the path to extinction. It said it would not validate the operating system to its latest hardware or produce new versions of it. The move to license the OpenVMS source code to a new entity, VMS Software Inc. (VSI), amounts to a reversal of that earlier decision. VSI plans to validate the operating system on Intel's Itanium eight-core Poulson chips by early 2015, as well as support for HP hardware running the upcoming "Kittson" chip. It will also develop an x86 port, although it isn't specifying a timeframe. And it plans to develop new versions of OpenVMS

Submission + - French provider Free could buy US branch of T-Mobile

Submitted by Guybrush_T
Guybrush_T writes: Iliad, the parent company of Free, confirmed today having made an offer to buy 56% of the US branch of T-Mobile. This could be very good news for the US, since the provider reduced significantly the average price of mobile plans in France since they entered the mobile market two years ago. Their disruptive strategy, featuring an all-inclusive €20/month plan and a €2/month plan gathered 11% of the French market in only two years and lowered the price of plans by a 5 to 10 factor.

Submission + - Why TiVo's founders crashed and burned with Qplay (digitaltrends.com)

Submitted by Velcroman1
Velcroman1 writes: Michael Ramsay and Jim Barton created a revolution with TiVo, a device that challenged the notion that we had to watch TV shows when they aired. And they hoped to do it again with Qplay, a device that challenged the notion that short-form videos had to be consumed one at a time, like snacks instead of meals. Qplay streamed curated queues of short-form Internet video to your TV using a small, simple box controlled by an iPad app. So what went wrong? Unlike TiVo, the Qplay box was difficult to justify owning, and thevalue of the service itself is questionable. And as of last week, Qplay is closed.

Submission + - Passport database outage leaves thousands stranded. 1

Submitted by linuxwrangler
linuxwrangler writes: Job interviews missed, work and wedding plans disrupted, children unable to fly home with their adoptive parents. All this disruption is due to a outage involving the passport and visa processing database at the U.S. State Department. The problems have been ongoing since July 19 and the best estimate for repair is "soon."

Submission + - Winners of Raspberry Pi Photography Award Contest 2014 (adafruit.com)

Submitted by coop0030
coop0030 writes: Adafruit held a 2014 Raspberry Pi Photography contest that has completed with the winners selected. You can see the winning photographs as well as all of the entries. Andrew Mulholland, using a Raspberry Pi powered LEGO panobot, is the winning photographer. He's also provided a video of how his winning photographs were put together.

Submission + - NASA's JPL develops multi-metal 3D printing process (design-engineering.com)

Submitted by yyzmcleod
yyzmcleod writes: The technology to 3D print a single part from multiple materials has been around for years, but only for polymer-based additive manufacturing processes. For metals, jobs are typically confined to a single powdered base metal or alloy per object. However, researchers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory say they have developed a 3D printing technique that allows for print jobs to transition from one metal to another in a single object.

Comment Re:StarCitizen? (Score 1) 121

by Zocalo (#47574003) Attached to: Crytek USA Collapses, Sells Game IP To Other Developers
Chris Roberts and other CIG developers clarified this when the rumours about Crytek first started getting discussed on the forums. They have a full license to the CryTek engine source code, so even if Crytek were to completely collapse they still have everything they need to get the game finished. At this point they have already customised the engine so far that it's now pretty much a dedicated SC-specific engine anyway, so the worst case is that they will lose any future development into new core engine features that might have come out of Crytek and have to do all the future development in house. That's almost certainly time and money they didn't expect to need, but at least they are not likely to have too many problems getting hold of ex-Crytek employeess looking for work who can work on it.

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