Actually practically all IceCube servers at the Pole, running the data acquisistion, processing & filtering are running linux. So those penguins would not have much to do, except join the party. :-)

(And a nitpick: IceCube is actually at the geographic South Pole, too far away from the Antarctic coast for any penguin to reach it.)

All comments so far are about economic/IP aspects. What about the political/cultural aspect of mapping? China could use this policy to enforce its preferred representation of the Tibet area. Like: replace all traditional Tibet names with new Chinese ones.

I agree that the background reduction due to lack of atmosphere is very convenient, but as zero.kalvin points out, you still need a 'refracting medium', that is, a really large volume of transparent material such as water or ice (in which you can catch the Cherenkov light whenever a neutrino is kind enough to interact and produce fast charged particles). The large volume is not needed to suppress background, but to beat the very small cross section; in order to detect neutrinos you need them to interact with your detector, and the only way to achieve that is to make it as big as possible.

There is ice on the Moon, but to harvest that and turn into a detector poses some interesting challenges. To use it in frozen form is hard, because you need it with a clarity and purity similar to the exceptionally clear deep Antarctic ice that IceCube uses and which is even clearer and purer than laboratory ice. To use it in liquid form requires keeping it heated, which is probably easier (you need a solar panel farm to power the heating system, but for the ice option you would also need those panels, to power the elaborate purification system + clear ice machinery). Either way: probably science fiction.

Another "green" issue is that while a puffin may consume less power than a propellor plane powered by a combustion engine, flight is still less energy-efficient than transport by wheels (train, car, bike). As far as I know currently only a tiny fraction of electric power worldwide is generated with environmentally friendly techniques. So I'd like to see the kWh scores compared between a puffin and an electric car.

Gravity was refuted years ago by evangelical scientists.

(I'm surprised that I seem to be the first to link to this Onion gem...)

I am surprised by how serious people take this light-hearted article. It clearly states:

So, let's take a 100 per cent objective* look at the plugs and plug sockets of the world,...

where the footnote clarifies: "*Objectivity in this sentence has a one-off, government-approved change in definition. Its meaning here, and only here, is the exact opposite of what it usually means." Do /. readers really recognize a tongue-in-cheek story only when the summary got the humor icon stuck on it?

When you have toy like this or somesuch, then you do not need a regular screen. A screenless laptop plus wearable display seems to me a nice solution for mobile computing. Of course the laptop should have a battery life of 8h then. Which should actually be easy, because I would expect those display goggles to use less power than a regular screen.

As a side note: for tall people like me this would be kind of ideal for computing in an airplane. Unless I'm in an exit row or bulk head seat there is no way I can see my regular laptop screen. With display goggles that problem is completely solved.

Different ending:

[...]
You: The full decrypt was "1337Crypt" but if it is corrupt were both screwed

(An assistant, who is listening in from the other room, has a few bitwise clones of your harddrive, and tries the "1337Crypt" password on a clone.)

Officer: Yep still says corrupt. Cannot decrypt information. Well were both screwed I guess.

(The assistant successfully decrypts the cloned partition with the "1337Crypt" and switches on the airco of the interrogation room, as a covert signal to the officer inside that the decryption of the clone was successful. The officer continues the interrogation while pretending to believe that the harddrive is lost. In your triumphant mood you make some remarks which by themselves would not mean much but combined with the data from the decrypted drive they are sufficient to prove whatever the officer wants to prove.)

I agree with that, but I also wonder if the work times that he quotes are really the ones specified in his contract. 60 hours per week, really, for a support job? Could it be that he is just adding some extra hours before and/or after, every day, out of some social habit, to make a good impression maybe? If that is the case then he should break that habit. Having physical exercise during those salvaged hours will make his regular working hours also way more productive and effective, so his employer and colleagues should be happy with this more health behavior as well.

Plus: would it be negotiable to telecommute one of the working days? That saves travel time, which can be spent on exercise.

So what if the article is published in a magazine with a bad reputation, I find the resulting discussion quite informative and entertaining. And thinking about this topic might inspire some immobile nerds to get a workout, with or without shoes.

Besides, as a previous poster already pointed out, the text is actually not written by a DM journalist; about halfway the page you can find the confession that the whole story is extracted from a book that will go on sale soon.

Instead of reflecting light it is absorbing light, so as a sail this is about half as efficient as a fully reflective solar sail, but nonetheless I was wondering whether this contraption would not be "blown" out of orbit by all that light it is capturing? I have no time to read the full wikipedia article about solar sails but some sections mention that a solar sail can even travel towards the Sun by aiming its "thrust" against its orbital direction. This trick and similar tricks make the sail capable of manoeuving. I wonder if this capability remains if the surface is 99% absorbing instead of 99% reflective.

I was very confused when I read the summary. The first half and second half seem to deal with totally different topics.

Life, stories and stories of lives are only interesting if they have good content. Content, content, content. Meet interesting people, visit interesting places, do interesting things.

If technology helps you improving your life/story content: nice. We could have an interesting discussion about how that could come about.

The second half of the story is about this dude's work at Amazon and boring technical details. When I glanced through TFA I saw that it is mostly about that, and the dude doing his best to distinguish his product from all those other web 2.0 products. This has nada nothing zero to do with an interesting life story.

Of course the blame is on the story submitter. The title fitting TFA should be something onionesque like 'area man stares at navel and creates his own special unique superior web2.0 niche'.

(And bad summaries are getting sort of the standard here on /., I should know better not be fooled by them anymore, maybe I am getting too old for this place.)