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Comment ATTENTION (Score 2, Funny) 392

by feder (#30403836) Attached to: How To Build a Quantum Propulsion Machine

THIS SOUNDS LIKE A REACTIONLESS DRIVE. NOW THAT I HAVE PROPERLY CATEGORIZED IT FOR YOU, YOU CAN JUST GO STRAIGHT ON TO BEING SKEPTICAL, SINCE EVERYONE KNOWS REACTIONLESS DRIVES ARE BALONY. THIS HAS BEEN A SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT FROM THE SOCIETY FOR THE PROTECTION OF THE STATUS QUO IN ENGINEERING. THANK YOU.

(We had to bribe Slashdot editors to let us write the above in all caps. They are total suckers for lower-case letters. It's a fetish of theirs, probably. Poor little letters. Cut to CmdrTaco doing a lower-case 'a' in the butt. Oh, ffs, will this filter ever let me through? rthwerg erg qergqegqerg qerg qegqegqreghqer gqer gq erg qer gqe gqergqergeqrgerg)

Comment Re:It'll never happen (Score 1) 554

by feder (#28677081) Attached to: NASA Plans To De-Orbit ISS In 2016

Hey, wait a minute - aren't they installing a new ion drive on the thing (VASIMR)? Just set it at full speed ahead, and leave it to some alien civilization to find it... (yeah, yeah, I know, escape velocity and all - they can do gravity assist or something)
Data Storage

How Does Flash Media Fail? 357

Posted by kdawson from the in-the-pan dept.
bhodge writes "Aside from the obvious 'it stops working' answer, how does flash media — such as USB, SD, and CF — fail? Unlike with traditional hard drive, where anyone who's worked with computers for a while knows what a drive failure looks like, I don't know anyone who has experienced such a failure with flash. I've haven't been able to find more than scant evidence of what such failures look like at the OS level. The one account I have found detailed using a small USB drive for /var/log storage; it failed very quickly, and then utterly (0 byte unformatted device), after five years of service in the role. This runs contrary to other anecdotal claims that you should still be able to read the media after you can no longer write to it. So my question is: what have you seen of the nature of flash media failure, if anything?"
Media

Boxee Launches New API 69

Posted by Soulskill from the take-that-hulu dept.
A recent post on the boxee blog announces the release of a new, fully documented API that will allow developers to create and share new apps and plugins. "The new boxee API enables developers to build sophisticated applications (such as the Pandora and RadioTime apps) using a set of API calls in Python and writing the GUI using XML. ... Users can install new applications via the boxee App Box, the beginnings of our app store. Unlike other app stores, boxee does not want to be a gate keeper (or bottleneck) in deciding which applications are published so anyone can become a publisher." A complete description is available at their developers page. I'm sure this will help in their ongoing battle with Hulu.
Security

Cybercrime-As-a-Service Takes Off 113

Posted by timothy from the no-need-for-subtlety dept.
pnorth writes "Malware writers that sell toolkits online for as little as $400 will now configure and host the attacks as a service for another $50, according to email offers cited by security experts. A technical account manager at authentication firm Vasco said that cyber crime is becoming so business-like that online offerings of malicious code often include support and maintenance services. He said 'it was inevitable that services would be sold to people who bought the malware toolkits but didn't know how to configure them. Not only can you buy configuration as a service now, you can have the malware operated for you, too.'"
Announcements

Fermilab Not Dead Yet, Discovers Rare Single Top Quark 194

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the emphasis-on-the-operating dept.
Several sources are reporting that in spite of LHC hype, Fermilab's Tevatron has produced another feat for scientific discovery. Currently the world's most powerful operating particle accelerator, the Tevatron has allowed researchers to observe a rare single Top Quark. "Previously, top quarks had only been observed when produced by the strong nuclear force. That interaction leads to the production of pairs of top quarks. The production of single top quarks, which involves the weak nuclear force and is harder to identify experimentally, has now been observed, almost 14 years to the day of the top quark discovery in 1995."
Space

Submission + - Open source camera races to the moon (linuxdevices.com)

Submitted by nerdyH
nerdyH writes: The all-volunteer FREDNET science project vying for Google's Lunar X PRIZE competition will use a Linux camera from Elphel, the same company that supplied Google with imaging gear for its StreetView and Book Library projects. All of Elphel's cameras are completely open source, a good fit for collaborative scientific research projects like Team FREDNET, a FREDNET volunteer writes, because there's no chance for patent NDAs to obstruct innovation. The question is, will the Man in the Moon express privacy concerns, when his cat appears in Google MoonView?
NASA

Submission + - Underground Water on Saturn's Moon? (thefutureofthings.com)

Submitted by
Iddo Genuth
Iddo Genuth writes: "Researchers working on NASA's Cassini mission to Saturn are theorizing that Saturn's moon Enceladus has pockets of liquid water located just underneath its surface. Several recent flybys of this moon (including one on October 9, 2008 that passed a mere 16 miles from its surface) focused on studying water vapor plumes and jets of icy particles shooting out of the moon. This phenomenon was discovered by Cassini in 2005, but the new closer photographs and spectral analysis of captured particles allowed researchers to compare their behavior to mathematical models. The observed behavior matches that which was predicted for situations when underground water is present."

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