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Jetman Attempts Intercontinental Flight 140

Posted by samzenpus from the a-jetwing-and-a-prayer dept.
Last year we ran the story of Yves Rossy and his DIY jetwings. Yves spent $190,000 and countless hours building a set of jet-powered wings which he used to cross the English Channel. Rossy's next goal is to cross the Strait of Gibraltar, from Tangier in Morocco and Tarifa on the southwestern tip of Spain. From the article: "Using a four-cylinder jet pack and carbon fibre wings spanning over 8ft, he will jump out of a plane at 6,500 ft and cruise at 130 mph until he reaches the Spanish coast, when he will parachute to earth." Update 18:57 GMT: mytrip writes: "Yves Rossy took off from Tangiers but five minutes into an expected 15-minute flight he was obliged to ditch into the wind-swept waters."

Submission + - Why isn't Google allowing searches over HTTPS? 11

Submitted by ttsiod
ttsiod writes: I don't know why I've never thought about this before, but... why isn't Google offering its search engine over HTTPS? Try it, you'll get nothing. Google for it, 8 hits! What?!?... It's true that privacy advocates have a point when they claim that Google is in a position to store personal search queries, but it seems to me that we should be far more worried about ... "regimes" inspecting our queries while they travel from router to router, or our ISPs (who actually *know* who we are) gathering each and every search we have ever made, since it travels in plain, human-readable cleartext. Should I be worried if I live behind the Big Firewall and my browser sends a bad packet? Why don't we have an option (like we do in GMail) to use HTTPS and have only one thing to worry about, that is Google giving the records itself?
I know that HTTPS places a lot more load on CPUs and networks, but clearly this would not be much of an issue for Google's amazing armies of machines ...

What do you think?
Science

Scientists Create Compound With a Single Element 163

Posted by samzenpus from the a-bit-of-a-hermit dept.
rocketman768 writes "An international team of researchers including scientists at the Carnegie Institution has discovered a new chemical compound that consists of a single element: boron. Chemical compounds are conventionally defined as substances consist of two or more elements, but the researchers found that at high pressure and temperature pure boron can assume two distinct forms that bond together to create a novel 'compound' called boron boride."
Music

Financial Crisis Soundtrack 31

Posted by samzenpus from the what-is-the-sound-of-the-dollar-falling dept.
German musician Johannes Kreidler made a soundtrack of the global economic crisis composed by running financial graphs through SongSmith. It gets political in a few spots, but is bleakly funny.
Power

Wind Farms To Receive Future Wind Forecasts 57

Posted by timothy from the as-well-they-ought dept.
An anonymous reader writes "If the US plans to develop wind farms across the country they need a better way to predict the wind direction and the duration. NCAR (National Center for Atmospheric Research) is looking to do just that. In December, NCAR signed an agreement with Xcel Energy to develop a wind prediction system for the company's wind energy farms in Colorado, Minnesota, and Texas. Experimental forecasts may start as early as May. At present, most wind forecasts rely heavily on statistical forecasting methods, since the numerical weather forecast products available from operational centers are produced with coarse-grid, larger-scale models. The RTFDDA system, however, is designed to provide a birds-eye view of local weather for small areas of special interest, like wind farms, through a multiple level downscaling algorithm." I hope that decentralized weather-data gathering stations (like many people have feeding data to The Weather Underground) would be useful for this purpose.

Comment Re:So winning a war... (Score 1) 352

by incubuz1980 (#26459619) Attached to: The Unmanned Air Force

So winning a war will be about programming skills and not economic power.

I for one welcome our new communist overlords.

I agree, I wonder how this will change wars. Changing the economics is probably harder than just focusing on education.

Moors law will applied to war is a scary concept.
Software

Submission + - User training causes Microsoft Office lockin (translate.org.za)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Is migrating Office suite a change management issue? Is it hard to retrain people on new products? Or is it simply that people don't actually now how to use their current program, as this article seems to suggest, that makes it hard to migrate to a different product?

While tool neutrality could be achieved through proper training. The article also likens the current ODF vs OOXML debate, which aims at document format neutrality, to the next VHS vs Betamax fight. With the clear loser being the consumer while the vendors slug it out.

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