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Space

Submission + - Scientists await the explosion of Eta Carinae (harvard.edu) 1

Submitted by Urbanator
Urbanator writes: According to the Chandra X-Ray observatory, Eta Carinae, a star about 7,500 light years away and 100 to 150 times the mass of the sun is set to explode. If this occurs the star may be light enough to rival a full moon for a short period of time. New composite images of the star are shown, displaying the results of an earlier explosion from the 1840's which caused material about 10 times the mass of the sun to eject from the star and form a nebula around it. Of course for all we know, this explosion may have already happened sometime in the last 7,500 years.
Supercomputing

Submission + - Sun to build 62,976 core Opteron SuperComputer (wired.com)

Submitted by
mytrip
mytrip writes: "Sun Microsystems announced today that its hardware will power the largest supercomputer ever built, weighing in with 62,976 CPU cores, 125 terabytes of memory, 1.7 terabytes of disk space, and 504 teraflops of performance.

The computer, which has been dubbed "Ranger," will be hosted at the Texas Advanced Computing Center at the University of Texas, Austin. It is due to go online on January 1, 2008.

Ranger costs $30 million in hardware alone, and an additional $29 million for staffing and maintenance — and is being entirely funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation.

Under the hood, Ranger's brain will be built from 16,744 quad-core AMD Opteron processors. The machine's production timeline is dependent on how fast AMD can crank out the as-yet-unreleased chips, Bechtolsheim said."
Security

Submission + - CIA Declassifies the "Family Jewels"

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: The CIA has recently declassified some records relating to illegal spying, assassination attempts, and other goodies for afternoon reading. These are available from the CIA's FOIA portal
From the article:
Last week, CIA chief Michael Hayden announced the decision to declassify the records, saying the documents were "unflattering but part of CIA history".
The documents detail assassination plots, domestic spying, wiretapping, and kidnapping.
The incidents include:
* the confinement of a Soviet KGB defector, Yuriy Ivanovich Nosenko, in the mid-1960s
* attempts to use a suspected Mafia mobster, Johnny Roselli, in a plot to assassinate Cuba's Fidel Castro
* the wiretapping and surveillance of journalists, including in 1972 columnist Jack Anderson who broke a string of scandals
Intel

Submission + - Intel Patches Flaws in Processors 4

Submitted by Nom du Keyboard
Nom du Keyboard writes: According to this article in The Inquirer and this Microsoft Knowledge Base article, a fix for some significant problems in many of Intel's most recent processors, including Core 2 Duo E4000/E6000, Core 2 Quad Q6600, Core 2 Xtreme X6800, XC6700 and XC6800 has been quietly released. Details on just what has been fixed are scanty (it's called a "reliability update"), however, it's probably more important than either Intel, or Microsoft, is openly admitting. Does this give the feeling of a cover-up?
First Person Shooters (Games)

Submission + - EA's Battlefield 2 Stats Blowup

Submitted by Llamakiller-4
Llamakiller-4 writes: It hasn't had the press of a "World of Warcraft" or "Everquest" breakdown, but one of EA's online jewels, the "Battlefield 2" series is experiencing some severe problems with the managing of their precious Statistics system. A breakdown which has lasted over a week is infuriating players by the thousands and casting skepticism on EA's marketing model for the game. Details are sparse from EA and this is fueling player discontent. Server operators are paying for "ranked" servers licensed thru EA, which allows players to accumulate points for play that are then used to achieve promotions, weapon unlocks etc. Battlefield 2 is a very closeknit community involving large amounts of "clan players" who pay the server operators to help subsidize the cost of their server. EA recently admitted that it's possible that all points accumulated during the Stat Server meltdown period may be lost once the servers are restored. The EA "Battlefield 2" forums are abuzz with complaints and some topics are being locked as a result. This is highlighting the need for gaming companies, which are attempting to create new revenue streams, to maintain those networks and staff against the risk of bad "PR" and having demanding gamers take their money to competitors games.
Republicans

Submission + - Bush vetoes stem cell bill (cnn.com)

Submitted by
starbuckr0x
starbuckr0x writes: "Pushing back against the Democratic-led Congress, President Bush vetoed a bill Wednesday that would have eased restraints on federally funded embryonic stem cell research."
Privacy

Submission + - Warrant Now Required For Email Searches By Feds

Submitted by nnkx00
nnkx00 writes: Courtesy of the EFF: "The government must have a search warrant before it can secretly seize and search emails stored by email service providers, according to a landmark ruling Monday in the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The court found that email users have the same reasonable expectation of privacy in their stored email as they do in their telephone calls...the government has routinely used the federal Stored Communications Act (SCA) to secretly obtain stored email from email service providers without a warrant." Full Ruling here.
Handhelds

Submission + - Baby monitor picks up video from NASA (yahoo.com)

Submitted by WrongSizeGlass
WrongSizeGlass writes: Yahoo is reporting a mother of two outside of Chicago is receiving NASA's space mission updates on her baby monitor. I could be wrong, but I see the potential for either MAFIAA style lawsuit, Homeland Security violations or a guest spot on 'The View' here.
Businesses

Submission + - Do private companies have to keep their email?

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: So I'm an IT intern at a medium-sized manufacturing business. In short, my superiors have asked me to research if privately-held corporations have to archive all of their email.

Have any laws pertaining to archiving/backing up emails been recently passed or proposed in light of any headline corporate scandals?

Or, more simply put, is it legally ok for employees and administrators at private companies to permanently delete their emails?
Power

40% Efficiency Solar Cells Developed 357

Posted by Zonk from the that-makes-me-28-percent-happy dept.
gtada writes "A story published at Physorg.com discusses recently published research into the fabrication of solar cells that surpass the 40% efficiency milestone. Such devices would be the high water-mark to date, and hint at the possibility of even more effective technology. 'In the design, multijunction cells divide the broad solar spectrum into three smaller sections by using three subcell band gaps. Each of the subcells can capture a different wavelength range of light, enabling each subcell to efficiently convert that light into electricity. With their conversion efficiency measured at 40.7%, the metamorphic multijunction concentrator cells surpass the theoretical limit of 37% of single-junction cells at 1000 suns, due to their multijunction structure.'"
Privacy

Submission + - Photo Tagging: A Privacy Problem? (harvardlawreview.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The Harvard Law Review, a journal for legal scholarship, recently published a short piece on the privacy implications of online photo-tagging. The anonymously penned piece dourly concludes that 'privacy law, in its current form, is of no help to those unwillingly tagged.' Focusing on the privacy threat from newly emergent automatic facial recognition search engines', like Polar Rose but not Flickr or Facebook, the article states that 'for several reasons, existing privacy law is simply ill-suited for this new invasion. First, traditional tort law does not recognize invasions of privacy that occur in public, such as the taking of a photo in any public location. Second, the few public invasions that do constitute torts involve celebrities or other individuals who have commercial interests in their likenesses. Third, courts have severely limited privacy protections in order to ensure that privacy claims do not limit the free flow of ideas.' The article suggests that Congress create a photo-tagging opt-out system, similar to what they did with telemarketing calls and the Do-Not-Call Registry.
Media

Copying HD DVD, Blu-ray Discs May Become Legal 188

Posted by kdawson from the but-it-could-cost-ya dept.
Consumers could soon be able to make several legal copies of movies bought on HD DVD or Blu-ray Disc under a new licensing agreement now being negotiated. Rights holders might charge more for discs that can be copied for backup or for use on a media server, however.

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