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Mars

Submission + - Curiositys First Weather Readings (spaceindustrynews.com) 2

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The Mars Curiosity Rovers REMS instrument (Rover Environmental Monitoring Station) has sent back the first weather data from the red planet. REMS collects data about Mars’ wind, pressure, temperature, humidity, and UV radiation.
Facebook

Submission + - India's Internet Freedom Nightmare: Could India Ban Twitter? (thediplomat.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Recently in India threatening messages containing images of mutilated bodies began appearing on Indian cell phones, Facebook pages, Twitter accounts and various other forms of social media. The images, texts and emails – which Indian Home Secretary R.K. Singh has argued originated from Pakistan – warned that Indian Muslims were planning to harm non-Muslims from India’s northeast region. The messages set off widespread panic among northeasterners working and studying in cities across south India, who feared they would be attacked and maybe killed.

India's government has made the move to hold the social media companies that hosted the threatening messages partly accountable. Recently, India’s Secretary for Telecommunications even hinted that Facebook and Twitter could face some sort of legal action for their unwillingness or inability to take down online material, or to trace the violent messages’ origins.

"Twitter, it was suggested, might even be shut down in India entirely."
Security

NIST Publishes Draft Guidelines For Server BIOS Protection 141

Posted by timothy from the why-stop-with-servers? dept.
hypnosec writes "The U.S.'s National Institute of Standards and Technology has come up with a set of proposed guidelines for security of server BIOSes— the mechanism on which most modern day computers rely during boot up. Recently quite a few instances of malware have been known to persistently infect computer systems, and cannot be removed even on OS re-installs. NIST is proposing a set of measures through which the BIOS can be made more secure and resistant to such firmware manipulating attacks. Mebromi is one such Trojan. NIST published the draft guidelines [PDF] earlier this week and has proposed four different features through which the server BIOSes can be made more secure: authenticated update mechanism; secure local update mechanism (optional); firmware integrity protections; and non-bypassability features."
Linux

Arch Linux For Newbies? Manjaro Is Here! 120

Posted by timothy from the kill-a-whatnow? dept.
Penurious Penguin writes "Well within the top ten Linux distros, Arch Linux has a strong following for sure. But with an installation process requiring a little more involvement than the average distro, not every prospective user is ready to embrace the Arch Way, and understandably so. This is where Manjaro steps in. With a 100% compatibility with Arch, uncompromising adherence to principia KISS and a pre-configured Xfce, — or alternatively available GNOME & KDE — those who've been hesitating to explore Arch now have a few less excuses. And a little side-note for those still bitter about the lack of package-signing: You'll be glad to know that Arch fully implemented package-signing in June of 2012."
Data Storage

Submission + - New Computer Memory Material Goes Easy on the Juice (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: Your computer is sucking up a lot of electricity keeping track of work you haven't yet saved to the hard drive. Americans spend $6 billion a year on electricity to keep that data stored in a computer's memory during operation. But that figure could drop sharply, scientists report this week, thanks to a new type of material than can permanently store such data—without needing a continuous trickle of electricity to do it.
Programming

Submission + - Can we make accountable research software? (bytesizebio.net) 1

Submitted by Shipud
Shipud writes: This practices of code writing for day-to-day bioinformatic lab research are completely unlike anything software engineers are taught. In fact, they are actually the opposite in many ways, and may horrify you if you come from a classic software-industry development environment. Research coding is not done with the purpose of being robust, or reusable, or long-lived in development and versioning repositories. Upgrades are not provided and the product, such as it is, is definitely not user-friendly for public consumption. It is usually the code’s writer who is the consumer, or in some cases a few others in the lab. In most cases research results are published without the code that was used to generate them. There are no resources in most labs to make that code fir for public consumption. How can this problem be solved?
HP

Submission + - HP's bad quarter could prove bad for America (computerworld.com)

Submitted by dcblogs
dcblogs writes: Hewlett-Packard’s bad quarter this week, which included an $8.9 billion loss, may be all Chinese-based Lenovo needs to take the top position in global PC sales away from HP. Both Gartner and IDC show Lenovo very close to taking over the number one spot. Gartner's report on second quarter PC shipments showed HP in the lead position by shipments with 14.9% of the world's PC market, and Lenovo with 14.7%. IDC's latest market share numbers give HP a little more breathing room. It listed HP's second quarter worldwide PC share at 15.5%, and Lenovo at 14.9%. Some Wall Street analysts are saying that a PC division spin-off may make sense for both companies. If that happened a likely buyer might be Lenovo which bought IBM’s PC division in 2005. The idea of an overseas firm taking over the PC market worries some. Robert Atkinson, who heads the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation in Washington, said, "At some point you draw a line in the sand and say no more retreat, we stand and fight here. If PCs go, what's next? Semiconductors? Other components? At some point the United States has to say what are we not willing to lose in foreign competition.”
Power

Submission + - OSU's Breakthrough Microbial Fuel Cell Turns Waste to Power (oregonstate.edu)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A team of engineers from Oregon State University has developed a breakthrough microbial fuel cell that is capable of generating 10 to 50 times more electricity from waste than other MFCs. The team hopes that their innovation will enable waste treatment plants to not only power themselves, but also sell excess electricity back to the grid. “If this technology works on a commercial-scale the way we believe it will, the treatment of wastewater could be a huge energy producer, not a huge energy cost,” said associate professor Hong Liu. “This could have an impact around the world, save a great deal of money, provide better water treatment and promote energy sustainability.”
Programming

Submission + - What Developers Can Learn From Anonymous (infoworld.com)

Submitted by
snydeq
snydeq writes: "'Regardless of where you stand on Anonymous' tactics, politics, or whatever, I think the group has something to teach developers and development organizations,' writes Andrew Oliver. 'As leader of an open source project, I can revoke committer access for anyone who misbehaves, but membership in Anonymous is a free-for-all. Sure, doing something in Anonymous' name that even a minority of "members" dislike would probably be a tactical mistake, but Anonymous has no trademark protection under the law; the organization simply has an overall vision and flavor. Its members carry out acts based on that mission. And it has enjoyed a great deal of success — in part due to the lack of central control. Compare this to the level of control in many corporate development organizations. Some of that control is necessary, but often it's taken to gratuitous lengths. If you hire great developers, set general goals for the various parts of the project, and collect metrics, you probably don't need to exercise a lot of control to meet your requirements.'"
Twitter

Submission + - Twitter to Join The Linux Foundation (paritynews.com)

Submitted by hypnosec
hypnosec writes: Twitter will be joining the Linux Foundation – the nonprofit consortium working towards growth of Linux, next week it has announced. The Linux Foundation enables companies and consumers to come together to discuss and collaborate on development of Linux. The foundation has attracted quite a few companies like IBM, Google, HP, Oracle in the past and Twitter will be joining the ranks soon. Chris Aniszczyk, Manager – Open Source at Twitter, said, “Linux and its ability to be heavily tweaked is fundamental to our technology infrastructure.” With thousands of Linux servers in its network the micro-blogging site will be joining the foundation in a bid to promote, protect and advance Linux.
Education

Iran Universities To Ban Women From 77 Fields of Study 585

Posted by Soulskill from the a-university-of-their-own dept.
New submitter jasper160 writes "An August 20th, 2012 announcement from Iran places restrictions on female university students. Iran will be cutting 77 fields of study from the female curriculum, making them male-only fields. Science and engineering are among those affected by the decree. 'The Oil Industry University, which has several campuses across the country, says it will no longer accept female students at all, citing a lack of employer demand. Isfahan University provided a similar rationale for excluding women from its mining engineering degree, claiming 98% of female graduates ended up jobless.' The announcement came soon after the release of statistics showing that women were graduating in far higher numbers than men from Iranian universities and were scoring overall better than men, especially in the sciences. Senior clerics in Iran's theocratic regime have become concerned about the social side-effects of rising educational standards among women." Iranian Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Shirin Ebadi wrote to the UN that this effort is "part of the recent policy of the Islamic Republic, which tries to return women to the private domain inside the home as it cannot tolerate their passionate presence in the public arena,"

Comment Re:Sick of wasting resources on inferior people (Score 2) 31

by marcmcn (#40978733) Attached to: EyeRing Could Help Blind People See Objects
Is your society in the jungle? If we are part of the same society, which I think we are, it seems the more we can create to assist others in our society the greater the return in: research, technology, investments, job growth. In our society we do have moral and ethical character that makes our lives have more personal value when we help others. A capitalist doesn't doesn't see "inferior people", they see opportunity, good or bad it all gets shared with society in one form or another. And yes, I get your point about living in a Darwinian way, but we do not live in a utopian society that I am aware of.
Patents

8-Year-Old Receives Patent 142

Posted by samzenpus from the young-inventor-society dept.
Knile writes "While not the youngest patent recipient ever (that would be a four year old in Texas), Bryce Gunderman has received a patent at age 8 for a space-saver that combines an outlet cover plate with a shelf. From the article: '"I thought how I was going to make a lot of money," Bryce said about what raced through his brain when he received the patent.'"

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