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Submission + - Two Cities Ask the FCC to Preempt State Laws Banning Municipal Fiber Internet 2

Submitted by Jason Koebler
Jason Koebler writes: Two cities—Chattanooga, Tennessee, and Wilson, North Carolina—have officially asked the federal government to help them bypass state laws banning them from expanding their community owned, gigabit fiber internet connections.
In states throughout the country, major cable and telecom companies have battled attempts to create community broadband networks, which they claim put them at a competitive disadvantage. The FCC will decide if its able to circumvent state laws that have been put in place restricting the practice.

Submission + - U.S. reveals secret plans for '60s moon base (cnn.com) 2

Submitted by mpicpp
mpicpp writes: The U.S. military races to the moon to build a base — to beat the Russians to the punch. Maybe test a nuclear weapon on the surface. Consider a lunar-based bombing system to target earthbound foes.

That was the plan in the 1960s, according to declassified national security documents released this week — some of them stamped as "SECRET."
Today those schemes may sound as outlandish and dusty as a relic black-and-white episode of "Space Patrol."

The U.S. Army brainchild "Project Horizon" was born.
Its proposal to leap beyond the Soviets opened with the line: "There is a requirement for a manned military outpost on the moon."

The paper argued that it was imperative for the United States to develop and protect its potential interest on the Earth's natural satellite — and to do so quickly to protect the American way of life.

"To be second to the Soviet Union in establishing an outpost on the moon would be disastrous to our nation's prestige and in turn to our democratic philosophy," the paper surmised.

It should have the kind of priority and authority given to the Manhattan Project, which developed the atomic bomb, the Army said.
"Once established, the lunar base will be operated under the control of a unified space command." The space around the Earth and moon would be considered a military theater.

Submission + - Precisely what makes a comment valuable to the FCC? 2

Submitted by Presto Vivace
Presto Vivace writes: 1 Million Net Neutrality Comments Filed, But Will They Matter?

A record-setting number of Americans weighed in with their thoughts on this matter. But there's one problem, according to George Washington University law professor Richard Pierce.

"The vast majority of the comments are utterly worthless," Pierce says.

Oh really? and precisely what makes a comment valuable?

The folks who do comment with the detail, data and analysis that can change minds? Deep-pocketed industries.

"Those comments that have some potential to influence are the very lengthy, very well-tailored comments that include a lot of discussion of legal issues, a lot of discussion of policy issues, lots of data, lots of analysis," Pierce says. "Those are submitted exclusively by firms that have a large amount of money at stake in the rule-making and the lawyers and trade associations that are represented by those firms."

The FCC's Gigi Sohn also cautions against using the high number of comments in this matter as a tea leaf, because of the unknown content in the comments.

"A lot of these comments are one paragraph, two paragraphs, they don't have much substance beyond, 'we want strong net neutrality, ' " she says.

It would appear that Gigi Sohn and GW law professor Richard Pierce are unclear as to who the FCC works for. The FCC works for the American people, if we want something, that should be sufficient reason to rule in our favor.

Submission + - I'm so sick of sexism in tech, it needs to be a more accessible environment (dailydot.com)

Submitted by Kaneda2112
Kaneda2112 writes: Note to IBM executives: If you're going to openly discuss why you think young women make bad hires in the tech industry, you might want to make sure you're not having lunch next to a young mom who's also a coder. As a father of a daughter, I'd like to think that companies look for skill and innovation from wherever they can find it and not basing decisions on someone'sm age or reproductive profile....this just p****ed me off. Is this another sign of IBM's continued decline...?

Submission + - Black Holes Not Black After All, Say Theoretical Physicists

Submitted by KentuckyFC
KentuckyFC writes: Black holes are singularities in spacetime formed by stars that have collapsed at the end of their lives. But while black holes are one of the best known ideas in cosmology, physicists have never been entirely comfortable with the idea that regions of the universe can become infinitely density. Indeed, they only accept this because they can't think of any reason why it shouldn't happen. But in the last few months, just such a reason has emerged as a result of intense debate about one of cosmology's greatest problems--the information paradox. This is the fundamental tenet in quantum mechanics that all the information about a system is encoded in its wave function and this always evolves in a way that conserves information. The paradox arises when this system falls into a black hole causing the information to devolve into a single state. So information must be lost. Earlier this year, Stephen Hawking proposed a solution. His idea is that gravitational collapse can never continue beyond the so-called event horizon of a black hole beyond which information is lost. Gravitational collapse would approach the boundary but never go beyond it. That solves the information paradox but raises another question instead: if not a black hole, then what? Now one physicist has worked out the answer. His conclusion is that the collapsed star should end up about twice the radius of a conventional black hole but would not be dense enough to trap light forever and therefore would not be black. Indeed, to all intents and purposes, it would look like a large neutron star.

Submission + - MS squeezing SQL Server customers on licensing (crn.com)

Submitted by yuhong
yuhong writes: "Microsoft's SQL Server business has hit the $5 billion mark in terms of annual revenue and is growing like gangbusters, according to CEO Satya Nadella. " What Satya did not mention is where this revenue comes from. According to an article from CRN, "Licensing experts believe this stunning figure is primarily due to the company raising prices last summer for many of its enterprise products [such as SQL Server]."

Comment Re:Advanced? (Score 1) 95

by UnknownSoldier (#47518645) Attached to: Finding Life In Space By Looking For Extraterrestrial Pollution

Exactly. This human myopic assumptions are purely asinine at times. (Just like Scientists assume the Laws of Physics are constant for the universe based purely on visual data which has huge margins of error.)

Other stupid assumptions: Assuming life favors a single-star system when in reality it favors a twin-star system.

Earth is the anomaly here; NOT the norm.

Submission + - Microsoft to Finally Pull the Plug on Windows RT

Submitted by Deathspawner
Deathspawner writes: A lot of people have never been able to understand the logic behind Microsoft's Windows RT, with many urging the company to kill it off so that it can focus on more important products, like the mainline Windows. Well, this is probably not going to come as a huge surprise, especially in light of mass layoffs announced last week, but Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has said that his company will be working to combine all Windows versions into a unified release by next year.

Submission + - 'Just Let Me Code!' (drdobbs.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Andrew Binstock has an article about the ever-increasing complexity required to write code. He says, "I got into programming because I like creating stuff. Not just any stuff, but stuff other people find useful. I like the constant problem solving, the use of abstractions that exist for long periods nowhere but in my imagination, and I like seeing the transformation into a living presence. ... The simple programs of a few hundred lines of C++ long ago disappeared from my experience. What was the experience of riding a bicycle has become the equivalent of traveling by jumbo jet; replete with the delays, inspections, limitations on personal choices, and sudden, unexplained cancellations — all at a significantly higher cost. ... Project overhead, even for simple projects, is so heavy that it's a wonder anyone can find the time to code, much less derive joy from it. Software development has become a mostly operational activity, rather than a creative one. The fundamental problem here is not the complexity of apps, but the complexity of tools. Tools have gone rather haywire during the last decade chasing shibboleths of scalability, comprehensiveness, performance. Everything except simplicity."

Submission + - Finding life in space by looking for extraterrestrial pollution (networkworld.com)

Submitted by coondoggie
coondoggie writes: If what we know as advanced life exists anywhere other than Earth, then perhaps they are dirtying their atmosphere as much as we have and that we could use such pollution components to perhaps more easily spot such planets in the universe. That’s the basics of new research put for this week by researchers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics that stated if we could spot the fingerprints of certain pollutants under ideal conditions, it would offer a new approach in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

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