Slashdot is powered by your submissions, so send in your scoop

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×

Submission + - NASA's $349 Million Empty Tower (washingtonpost.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: In a scathing indictment of the NASA bureaucracy, the Washington Post documents a $349 million project to construct a laboratory tower that was closed as soon as it was finished. "[The tower was] designed to test a new rocket engine in a chamber that mimicked the vacuum of space. ... As soon as the work was done, it shut the tower down. The project was officially 'mothballed' — closed up and left empty — without ever being used. ... The reason for the shutdown: The new tower — called the A-3 test stand — was useless. Just as expected. The rocket program it was designed for had been canceled in 2010. ... The result was that NASA spent four more years building something it didn’t need. Now, the agency will spend about $700,000 a year to maintain it in disuse. ... Jerked from one mission to another, NASA lost its sense that any mission was truly urgent. It began to absorb the vices of less-glamorous bureaucracies: Officials tended to let projects run over time and budget. Its congressional overseers tended to view NASA first as a means to deliver pork back home, and second as a means to deliver Americans into space. In Mississippi, NASA built a monument to its own institutional drift."

Comment Re:Interesting, but ... (Score 0, Troll) 150

As the study pointed out, English is, far and above all others, a global language.

It's a shame that it will likely be centuries before mankind figures out how to be more informationally efficient and come up with some sort of "basic" language.

It's a universal language - even the aliens on TV speak English. As for a "basic" language, it's been available since 1954.

Submission + - The three greatest advances in the Universe since 1980's Cosmos

Submitted by StartsWithABang
StartsWithABang writes: 34 years ago, Carl Sagan became the first person to present — in a format accessible to the entire world — a synthesized story of all the most important scientific points and facts that we had learned about the cosmic story common to us all. No longer did we live in a Universe the size of our galaxy, dominated by Newtonian gravity, but in a Universe billions of years old, with more than 100 billion galaxies in it, that all started with a bang. But since 1980, we’ve learned so much more, and some of the best ideas that Carl knew — about the beginning, middle, and end of the Universe — have actually been improved upon, and the story as it was told in 1980 has been superseded by a more accurate one.
User Journal

Journal Journal: CloudFlare Anti-DDoS is Hijacking Browsers 1

Journal by Khyber

While trying to debug a site today (thanks to CloudFlare's Anti-DDoS blocking my customers from using anonymous/private mode browsing,) I discovered that CloudFlare's anti-DDoS measures will actively kill any instance of Firebug running in your browser. As a web developer, I find this pretty annoying. As a site administrator, I find their lack of respect for my customer's privacy appalling. But what I find even worse, is that CloudFlare is actively modifying my computer programs and how they

Submission + - Godot Engine Reaches 1.0, Releases First Stable (godotengine.org)

Submitted by goruka
goruka writes: Godot, the most advanced open source (MIT licensed) game engine, that was open-sourced back in February, has reached 1.0 (stable).
It sports an impressive amount of features, and it's the only game engine with visual tools (code editor, scripting, debugger, 3D engine, 2D engine, physics, multi-platform deploy, etc) on a scale comparable to commercial offerings. As a plus, the user interface runs natively on Linux. Godot has amassed a healthy user community (through forum, Facebook and IRC) since it went public, and was used to publish commercial games in the Latin American and European markets such as "Ultimo Carnaval" with publisher Square Enix, or "The Mystery Team" by Sony Computer Entertainment Europe.

Comment Re:Unless it has support for Bitcoin... (Score 1) 156

by BarbaraHudson (#48605679) Attached to: Small Bank In Kansas Creates the Bank Account of the Future

Why does my signature bother you so much that you feel the need to comment negatively on it? :-)

Three quick and easy alternatives, if it's that much of a concern for you:
1. Turn of signatures in your preferences.
2. Don't log in to read (signatures don't show up for non-logged-in users).
3. Ignore it.

Comment Re:Don't worry guys... (Score 2) 880

by BarbaraHudson (#48605621) Attached to: Apparent Islamic Terrorism Strikes Sydney

How about only condemning the offending group in this case - Muslims? Since we don't currently have Christian or Taoist terrorists on the loose, without going back to the Crusades.

Really? Since the crusades, we haven't had Christians killing abortion doctors or bombing abortion clinics. Waco never happened? Every Sunday some pulpit somewhere preaching about how wrong it is to be LGBT, and that the Bible teaches that these people deserve to die, but that's not preaching hate?

People who want to limit the subject to just Muslim extremists don't want the inconvenient truth - that their belief system is equally flawed, and continues to produce extremists. The KKK is a good case in point - they use the Bible to justify their hate.

A list of just some of the contemporary incidents of non-muslim violence in the USA from 1984 to 2012, mostly committed by christians and/or white supremists:

Frank Silva Roque. Four days after 9/11, murdered Balbir Singh Sodhi, a Sikh immigrant from India who owned a gas station in Mesa, Arizona. Roque, a racist, mistook him for a Muslim.

On Aug. 5, 2012, white supremacist Wade Michael Page used a semiautomatic weapon to murder six people during an attack on a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin. Page’s connection to the white supremacist movement was well-documented (do you consider white supremists who kill as "non-terrorists")

On May 31, 2009, Dr. George Tiller, who was shot and killed by anti-abortion terrorist Scott Roeder , was a victim of Christian Right terrorism.

On July 27, 2008, Christian Right sympathizer Jim David Adkisson walked into the Knoxville Unitarian Universalist Church in Knoxville, Tennessee during a children’s play and began shooting people at random. Two were killed, while seven others were injured but survived. Adkisson said he was motivated by a hatred of liberals, Democrats and gays.

July 29, 1994. The murder of Dr. John Britton. One Christian Right terrorist with ties to the Army of God was Paul Jennings Hill, who was executed by lethal injection on Sept. 3, 2003 for the murders of abortion doctor John Britton and his bodyguard James Barrett. Hill shot both of them in cold blood and expressed no remorse whatsoever; he insisted he was doing’s God’s work and has been exalted as a martyr by the Army of God.

Eric Rudolph, who is serving life without parole for a long list of terrorist attacks committed in the name of Christianity. Rudolph is best known for carrying out the Olympic Park bombing in Atlanta during the 1996 Summer Olympics—a blast that killed spectator Alice Hawthorne and wounded 111 others. His bombing of an abortion clinic in Birmingham, Alabama in 1998 caused the death of Robert Sanderson (a Birmingham police officer and part-time security guard) and caused nurse Emily Lyons to lose an eye, and bombing the Otherwise Lounge (a lesbian bar in Atlanta) in 1997 and an abortion clinic in an Atlanta suburb in 1997.

Oct. 23, 1998 Charles Kopp fired a single shot into the Amherst, NY home of Barnett Slepian (a doctor who performed abortions), mortally wounding him. Slepian died an hour later.

1994, John C. Salvi attacked a Planned Parenthood clinic in Brookline, Massachusetts, shooting and killing receptionists Shannon Lowney and Lee Ann Nichols and wounding several others.

Feb. 18, 2010,Joseph Stack flew a plane into the Echelon office complex (where an IRS office was located), killing IRS employee Vernon Hunter.

June 18, 1984, Alan Berg killed with an automatic, Berg, a liberal Denver-based talk show host, was a critic of white supremacists. Members The Order (a white supremist group) members David Lane (a former Ku Klux Klan member who had also been active in the Aryan Nations) and Bruce Pierce were both convicted in federal court on charges of racketeering, conspiracy and violating Berg’s civil rights and given what amounted to life sentences.

April 19, 1995. Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City bombing, killing 168 people and injuring more than 600. When McVeigh drove a truck filled with explosives into the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. Until 9/11, this was the most deadly terrorist attack in US history.

So, we've had plenty of non-muslim home-grown terrorists much more recently than the Crusades. So the real question is, why do you and others insist on only spotlighting muslims, instead of, as I wrote, condemning violent extremists without regard as to whether they are muslim or christian or political?

Submission + - Webcast Funerals Growing More Popular

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: Lex Berko writes in The Atlantic that although webcasting has been around since the mid-1990s, livestreamed funerals have only begun to go mainstream in the last few years and the National Funeral Directors Association (NFDA) has only this year introduced a new funeral webcasting license that permits funeral homes to legally webcast funerals that include copyrighted music. The webcast service’s growing appeal is, by all accounts, a result of the increasing mobility of modern society. Remote participation is often the only option for those who live far away or have other barriers—financial, temporal, health-related—barring them from attending a funeral. “It’s not designed to replace folks attending funerals,” says Walker Posey. “A lot of folks just don’t live where their family grew up and it’s difficult to get back and forth.” But some funeral directors question if online funerals are helpful to the grieving process and eschew streaming funerals live because they do not want to replace a communal human experience with a solitary digital one. What happens if there’s a technical problem with the webcast—will we grieve even more knowing we missed the service in person and online? Does webcasting bode well for the future of death acceptance or does it only promote of our further alienation from that inevitable moment? “The physical dead body is proof of death, tangible evidence that the person we love is gone, and that we will someday be gone as well,” says Caitlin Doughty, a death theorist and mortician. “To have death and mourning transferred online takes away that tangible proof. What is there to show us that death is real?”

Submission + - Touring A Carnival Cruise Simulator: 210 Degrees Of GeForce-Powered Projection (hothardware.com) 2

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: Recently, Carnival cruise lines gave tours of their CSMART facility in Almere, the Netherlands. This facility is one of a handful in the world that can provide both extensive training and certification on cruise ships as well as a comprehensive simulation of what it's like to command one. Simulating the operation of a Carnival cruise ship is anything but simple. Let's start with a ship that's at least passingly familiar to most people — the RMS Titanic. At roughly 46,000 tons and 882 feet long, she was, briefly, the largest vessel afloat. Compared to a modern cruise ship, however, Titanic was a pipsqueak. As the size and complexity of the ships has grown, the need for complete simulators has grown as well. The C-SMART facility currently sports two full bridge simulators, several partial bridges, and multiple engineering rooms. When the Costa Concordia wrecked off the coast of Italy several years ago, the C-SMART facility was used to simulate the wreck based on the black boxes from the ship itself. When C-SMART moves to its new facilities, it'll pick up an enormous improvement in processing power. The next-gen visual system is going to be powered by104 GeForce Grid systems running banks of GTX 980 GPUs. C-SMART executives claim it will actually substantially reduce their total power consumption thanks to the improved Maxwell GPU. Which solution is currently in place was unclear, but the total number of installed systems is dropping from just over 500 to 100 rackmounted units.

Submission + - At $1.2B, Uber lands largest tech VC investment of the year (networkworld.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The venture capital market has returned to pre-recession levels. Through the first nine months of 2014 there had already been more money poured into startups ($33B) than was invested in all of 2013. This year Uber landed the largest VC payday, with Android/iOS video messaging app Tango ($280M) and Lyft ($250M) rounding out the top three. Palantir, Cloudera, DataStax, Nutnaix, Box and Lookout were among the year's other most lucrative VC deals.

Submission + - Denmark claims North Pole via Greenland ridge link (yahoo.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Scientific data shows Greenland's continental shelf is connected to a ridge beneath the Arctic Ocean, giving Danes a claim to the North Pole and any potential energy resources beneath it, Denmark's foreign minister said.

Foreign Minister Martin Lidegaard said Denmark will deliver a claim on Monday to a United Nations panel in New York that will eventually decide control of the area, which Russia and Canada are also coveting.

Submission + - Mysterious martian gouges carved by sand-surfing dry ice (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: After the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter began beaming back close-up images of the Red Planet, researchers spotted peculiar features along the slopes of dunes: long, sharply defined grooves that seem to appear and disappear seasonally. They look like trails left behind by tumbling boulders, but rocks never appear in the sunken pits at the trail ends. Researchers initially took these gullies as signs of flowing liquid water, but a new model suggests they’re the result of sand-surfing dry ice that breaks off from the crests of dunes and skids down slopes. This is no ordinary tumble—according to the model, the bases of the chunks are continually sublimating, resulting in a hovercraftlike motion that gouges the dune while propelling the ice down slopes.

Submission + - Orbiter spots solar particles penetrating deep into atmosphere of Mars (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: A stream of hot protons from the sun is penetrating deep into the thin atmosphere of Mars, researchers have found. The stream, known as the solar wind, is typically deflected by the ionosphere, a layer of ions and electrons forming a shield around Mars. But the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN (MAVEN) mission—a NASA spacecraft orbiting Mars—has found that some protons re-emerge within the ionosphere below altitudes of 200 kilometers. The effect could be used to monitor the strength of the solar wind even at altitudes where mission scientists had not expected to have any handle on it. MAVEN, which arrived in Mars’s orbit in September, needs to catalog the ways energy is deposited in the upper atmosphere in order to achieve one of its main mission goals: explaining how Mars lost much of its atmosphere. Billions of years ago, when Mars was warmer and wetter, the planet is presumed to have had a much thicker atmosphere—one that has been eroded steadily by the solar wind, and also during more catastrophic solar storm events, into the dry, cold landscape seen today.

Submission + - Study: Your all-electric car may not be so green (ap.org)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: People who own all-electric cars where coal generates the power may think they are helping the environment. But a new study finds their vehicles actually make the air dirtier, worsening global warming.

"It's kind of hard to beat gasoline" for public and environmental health, said study co-author Julian Marshall, an engineering professor at the University of Minnesota. "A lot of the technologies that we think of as being clean ... are not better than gasoline."

Hybrids and diesel engines are cleaner than gas, causing fewer air pollution deaths and spewing less heat-trapping gas. Ethanol isn't so green, either.

Slashdot Top Deals

Remember to say hello to your bank teller.

Close