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Submission + - 32 Cities Want to Challenge Big Telecom, Build Their Own Gigabit Networks

Submitted by Jason Koebler
Jason Koebler writes: More than two dozen cities in 19 states announced today that they're sick of big telecom skipping them over for internet infrastructure upgrades and would like to build gigabit fiber networks themselves and help other cities follow their lead.
The Next Centuries Cities coalition, which includes a couple cities that already have gigabit fiber internet for their residents, was devised to help communities who want to build their own broadband networks navigate logistical and legal challenges to doing so.

Submission + - Where will Hadoop be in 5 years? (opensource.com)

Submitted by jenwike
jenwike writes: Some experts in open source say working in the field is more about common sense than creed. Doug Cutting of Cloudera speaks from working on projects like Hadoop and Lucene. In this interview with Opensource.com, prior to his keynote at the All Things Open conference this week, he dives into open source adoption in the enterprise and where he thinks Hadoop will be in 5 years.

Submission + - Barometers in iPhones: Crowdsourcing weather forecasts 1

Submitted by cryptoz
cryptoz writes: Apple is now adding barometers to its mobile devices: both new iPhones have valuable atmospheric pressure sensors being used for HealthKit (step counting). Since many Android devices have been carrying barometers for years, scientists like Cliff Mass have been using the sensor data to improve weather forecasts. Open source data collection projects like PressureNet on Android automatically collect and send the atmospheric sensor data to researchers.

Submission + - Internet trolls to face two years in jail for online abuse (theguardian.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Internet trolls who spread “venom” on social media could be jailed for up to two years, the justice secretary Chris Grayling has said as he announced plans to quadruple the maximum prison sentence.

Grayling, who spoke of a “baying cybermob”, said the changes will allow magistrates to pass on the most serious cases to crown courts.

The changes, which will be introduced as amendments to the criminal justice and courts bill, will mean the maximum custodial sentence of six months will be increased to 24 months.

Grayling told the Mail on Sunday: “These internet trolls are cowards who are poisoning our national life. No one would permit such venom in person, so there should be no place for it on social media. That is why we are determined to quadruple the six-month sentence.

Submission + - The Largest Ship in the World is Being Built in Korea

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: Alastair Philip Wiper writes that at at 194 feet wide and 1,312 feet long, the Matz Maersk Triple E is the largest ship ever built capable of carrying 18,000 20-foot containers. Its propellers weigh 70 tons apiece and it is too big for the Panama Canal, though it can shimmy through the Suez. A U-shaped hull design allows more room below deck, providing capacity for 18,000 shipping containers arranged in 23 rows – enough space to transport 864 million bananas. The Triple-E is constructed from 425 pre-fabricated segments, making up 21 giant “megablock” cross sections. Most of the 955,250 litres of paint used on each ship is in the form of an anti- corrosive epoxy, pre-applied to each block. Finally, a polyurethane topcoat of the proprietary Maersk brand colour, “Hardtop AS-Blue 504”, is sprayed on.

Twenty Triple-E class container ships have been commissioned by Danish shipping company Maersk Lines for delivery by 2015. The ships are being built at the Daewoo Shipbuilding and Marine Engineering factory in the South Korean port of Opko. The shipyard, about an hour from Busan in the south of the country, employs about 46,000 people, and "could reasonably be described as the worlds biggest Legoland," writes Wiper. "Smiling workers cycle around the huge shipyard as massive, abstractly over proportioned chunks of ships are craned around and set into place." The Triple E is just one small part of the output of the shipyard, as around 100 other vessels including oil rigs are in various stages of completion at the any time.” The vessels will serve ports along the northern-Europe-to-Asia route, many of which have had to expand to cope with the ships’ size. “You don’t feel like you’re inside a boat, it’s more like a cathedral,” Wiper says. “Imagine this space being full of consumer goods, and think about how many there are on just one ship. Then think about how many are sailing round the world every day. It’s like trying to think about infinity.”

Submission + - 100 year old rifle being phased out by Canada's Rangers (metronews.ca)

Submitted by ControlsGeek
ControlsGeek writes: The Lee-Enfield .303 Rifle is being phased out for use by Canada's Rangers. A Northern aboriginal branch of the Armed Forces. The rifle has been in service with the Canadian military for 100 years and is still being used by the Rangers for it's unfailing reliability in Arctic conditions. If only the Hardware that we use in Computers could have such a track record.

Submission + - Comet Summer Siding's about to graze Mars' orbit. Could we use this? (cnet.com)

Submitted by tqk
tqk writes: The linked article explains that this thing started on its way here a million years ago. It's going to be going back out there. That would be one seriously celestial bird's eye view. That got me thinking.

We already have another mission about to harpoon an asteroid. Well, how about we try to harpoon Summer Siding and hitch a ride. It's handling the propulsion problem. We just have to meet it on its way through our neighbourhood. I'm imagining some sort of automated observatory.

Has this idea been considered (and shot down for a million reasons) before? If we can't use Summer Siding this way (it was only discovered in 2013), how about we gin something up for the next traveller that comes through? And the next one, and the next one, ... Pretty soon, we'd have a constellation of these things way the hell out there reporting back everything they can see.

That would be really cool, I think, not to mention pretty useful.

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