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Comment Re:They don't really look like that, do they? (Score 2, Interesting) 102

by Almonday (#38391204) Attached to: Hubble Captures the Violent Birth of a Star
To continue the christmas tree analogy, what Hubble does for our eyes is a little like what some enterprising pixel-slinger might do for a person with some form of color blindness; sure, the viewer might not be able to distinguish between red and green (or blue and yellow) lights on the tree, but they can still be rendered using the available spectrum into something which conveys the beauty and complexity of the overall display.
NASA

Submission + - Voyager 1 Exits Our Solar System (telegraph.co.uk)

Submitted by eldavojohn
eldavojohn writes: The first man-made craft to do so is now entering a 'cosmic purgatory' between solar systems and entering an interstellar space of the Milky Way Galaxy. With much anticipation, Voyager 1 is now 'in a stagnation region in the outermost layer of the bubble around our solar system. Voyager is showing that what is outside is pushing back.' After three decades the spacecraft is still operating and apparently has enough power and fuel to continue to do so until 2020. The first big piece of news? "We've been using the flow of energetic charged particles at Voyager 1 as a kind of wind sock to estimate the solar wind velocity. We've found that the wind speeds are low in this region and gust erratically. For the first time, the wind even blows back at us. We are evidently traveling in completely new territory. Scientists had suggested previously that there might be a stagnation layer, but we weren't sure it existed until now." This process could take months to years to completely leave the outer shell but already scientists are receiving valuable information.
Security

Submission + - Two-thirds of Lost USB Drives Carry Malware (itworld.com) 1

Submitted by
itwbennett
itwbennett writes: "Antivirus firm Sophos acquired a passel of USB sticks lost by commuters on trains in the Greater Sydney metro area at an auction organized by the Rail Corporation New South Wales. The company analyzed 50 USB sticks and found that not a single one was encrypted and 33 of them were infected with at least one type of malware."

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: Open vs. closed-source for a start-u (lp-research.com) 1

Submitted by
atamagabakkaomae
atamagabakkaomae writes: "Together with a friend I am starting up a company in Japan that develops sensors used in motion capture. For these sensors we develop hardware and software. Part of the software development is an open-source toolkit called openMAT. We have some special purpose algorithms that we developed ourselves and that are better than our competitor's technology. I first wanted to publish everything open-source to spark interest in our company and to do development in collaboration with the community. My company partner disagreed and said that we will lose our technological advantage if we open-source our best IP. So I eventually published only a part of the toolkit open-source and closed the most interesting code. How do you guys think that open-sourcing your code-base affects a company's business? Is it wrong for a small company to give away precious IP like that or will it on the contrary help the development of the company?"
Power

Submission + - MPG of a human (ucsd.edu)

Submitted by
InterGuru
InterGuru writes: "Tom Murphy, blogging from UCSD in his Do the Math blog asks
' I am curious to know how potent human fuel can be. How many miles per gallon do we get as our own engines of transportation? '

He finds, after accounting for the energy intensity of American agriculture, which uses ten units of energy to get one unit of food energy, walking consumes 18-34 MPG of oil equivalent, and biking comes in at 70-130 MPG.
Maybe if we switched to a more vegetarian diet, we could improve on this."
Google

Submission + - Google Acquires Motorola: What Next? (walyou.com)

Submitted by shpoople
shpoople writes: While we were just getting used to the idea of Google working towards being a social media giant apart from being the search giant, they have just now announced about the Motorola Mobility acquisition
Crime

Submission + - Facebook helps trace laptop looter (bbc.co.uk) 1

Submitted by DaveAtWorkAnnoyingly
DaveAtWorkAnnoyingly writes: A former NASA and FBI employee had had his laptop stolen during the recent looting and rioting in Britain. However, being an IT security professional, he had installed a tracking device into it so he sat, patiently waiting for his computer to phone home. "After two hours of watching him surf religious revelation videos, shopping for Mercedes A class on Autotrader he finally popped onto Facebook!". He said the information included the man's name, school, address in west London and information about his wireless internet. After he handed the details over to police, they raided the man's flat and recovered the laptop.
Programming

Submission + - 11 Hard Truths About HTML5 (infoworld.com)

Submitted by
snydeq
snydeq writes: "InfoWorld's Peter Wayner discusses the 11 hard truths Web developers must accept in making the most of HTML5 — especially those who are looking to leverage HTML5 in hopes of unseating native apps. 'The truth is, despite its powerful capabilities, HTML5 isn't the solution for every problem. Its additional features are compelling and will help make Web apps formidable competitors for native apps, but security issues, limitations of local data storage, synchonization challenges, and politics should have us all scaling back our expectations for the spec.'"
Crime

Mobile Users More Vulnerable To Phishing Attacks 92

Posted by CmdrTaco from the it's-the-tiny-fonts dept.
Orome1 writes "Trusteer recently gained access to the log files of several web servers that were hosting phishing websites. Analyzing these log files provided visibility into how many users accessed the websites, when they visited them, whether they submitted their login information, and what devices they used to access the website. As soon as a phishing website is broadcast through fraudulent email messages the first systems to visit it are typically mobile devices. Most fraudulent emails call for immediate action. For example, they usually claim that suspicious activity has been detected in the user's account and that immediate action is required. Most victims who fall for this ploy will visit the phishing site quickly."
Movies

NASA Names Best & Worst Sci-Fi Movies of All Time 610

Posted by samzenpus from the I-want-a-recount dept.
mvar writes "Working through the year-end best/worst movie lists can be a feat of Olympic proportions, but there's one list which is so damn cool you'll definitely want to give it a whirl. NASA and the Science and Entertainment Exchange have compiled a list of the 'least plausible science fiction movies ever made,' and they ranked the disastrous (in more ways than one) 2012 as the most 'absurd' sci-fi flick of all time."

Comment Re:Did you actually read the article? (Score 1) 840

by Almonday (#31991864) Attached to: Pope Rails Against the Internet and Transparency
"The times in which we living knows a huge widening of the frontiers of communication," he said (according to our Italian fixer/producer) and the new media of this new age points to a more "egalitarian and pluralistic" forum. But, he went on to say, it also opens a new hole, the "digital divide" between haves and have-nots. Even more ominous, he said, it exacerbates tensions between nations and within nations themselves. And it increases the "dangers of ... intellectual and moral..."

Comment Misleading Headline and Summary.... (Score 1) 840

by Almonday (#31991716) Attached to: Pope Rails Against the Internet and Transparency
The full quote from TFA:

"The times in which we living knows a huge widening of the frontiers of communication," he said (according to our Italian fixer/producer) and the new media of this new age points to a more "egalitarian and pluralistic" forum. But, he went on to say, it also opens a new hole, the "digital divide" between haves and have-nots. Even more ominous, he said, it exacerbates tensions between nations and within nations themselves. And it increases the "dangers of ... intellectual and moral relativism," which can lead to "multiple forms of degradation and humiliation" of the essence of a person, and to the "pollution of the spirit." All in all, it seemed a pretty grim view of the wide open communication parameters being demanded by the Internet age.

It seems to me that His Popeliness is simply pointing out that the explosive growth of information technology over the past few decades is not automatically an unmitigated good, but that it has conferred both beneficial and deleterious effects on the lives of human beings. I personally doubt that he and I agree on precisely which effects fall into which column, but c'mon folks, this is hardly an example of the dude "Rail[ing] against the Internet and Transparency."
Networking

Alcatel-Lucent Boosts Broadband Over Copper To 300Mbps 160

Posted by samzenpus from the greased-lightning dept.
alphadogg writes "Alcatel-Lucent has come up with a way to move data at 300Mbps over copper lines. So far the results have only been reproduced in a lab environment — real products and services won't be available for at least a year. From the article: 'Researchers at the company's Bell Labs demonstrated the 300Mbps technology over a distance of 400 meters using VDSL2 (Very high bitrate Digital Subscriber Line), according to Stefaan Vanhastel, director of product marketing at Alcatel-Lucent Wireline Networks. The test showed that it can also do 100Mbps over a distance of 1,000 meters, he said. Currently, copper is the most common broadband medium. About 65 percent of subscribers have a broadband connection that's based on DSL, compared to 20 percent for cable and 12 percent for fiber, according to market research company Point Topic. Today, the average advertised DSL speeds for residential users vary between 9.2 Mbps and 1.9Mbps in various parts of the world, Point Topic said.'"

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