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Moon

Europe's Space Agency Wants To Do What NASA Can't 136

coondoggie writes "The European Space Agency is moving forward with a plan to land an autonomous spacecraft on the moon by 2017, with the idea a manned vehicle could land there sometime in the future. It's a mission NASA had on its roadmap before the current budget debate, but such plans seem doomed now. The ESA is now seeking proposals for a lunar lander that would land on the south polar region of the Moon, which possible deposits of water ice, heavily cratered terrain, and long periods of sunlight make promising for explorers and scientists, the agency stated."
Image

Microsoft RickRolls Wi-Fi Network Leechers Screenshot-sm 165

An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft has revealed that it RickRolled users that were killing its TechEd conference Wi-Fi network last year by torrenting large files. Network administrators at the event quickly built a list of all of the top torrent trackers around and got the nod to add them all to the local DNS resolver and point them at a local Web server containing some Rick Roll scripts. According to the admin: 'It killed me that I didn't see anyone getting done by this first hand, but there were hundreds of impressions in the server logs containing the Rick Roll scripts so I did get a fair amount of satisfaction at least. It was the most evil of evil Rick Roll scripts too — worse than any that anyone has used to get me in the past.' Fun and games aside, it looks like the leechers will force quotas and traffic shaping for the first time in the event's history."
Communications

White House Press Secretary's Tweets Archived 63

RedTeflon writes "The White House spokesman, who has just started using Twitter, told reporters this afternoon that he met with government lawyers yesterday to determine whether his tweets would be archived along with emails and just about everything else produced at the White House. After deliberation, White House lawyers have decided that any and all tweets will be archived in keeping with the Presidential Records Act of 1978."
Displays

No Glasses Needed For TI's New 3D Display 165

adeelarshad82 writes "At the MWC, TI showed off a tablet-sized device with a 3D display that doesn't require glasses, running on an existing TI OMAP3 chipset. The 3D demo showed images and video in 3D by using a standard 120-Hz LCD with a special overlay film from 3M that can direct images either towards your left or right eye. By flickering two images very quickly, running at 60 frames per second rather than the usual 30, the display transmits a different picture to each eye, creating a simulated 3D image. The 3D picture can be created using a handheld with dual 3-megapixel cameras and an 800-MHz TI OMAP 3630 chipset."
Social Networks

Facebook Now Supports Jabber/XMPP 174

supersloshy writes "Facebook Chat has so far only been meant to be used in a web browser, and instant messaging applications have had a hard time implementing its undocumented protocol. Today, Facebook is making this job much easier by enabling support for XMPP to access its chat service. AOL's AIM and the Empathy Instant Messenger are also including pre-set Facebook options, due to already supporting XMPP." Here are instructions for setting up XMPP Facebook chat with popular instant messaging clients, including Pidgin and Adium.
Social Networks

Submission + - Using social network sites for business promotion

Toam writes: So my girlfriend was planning to present a proposal to her employers outlining several ways for them to better promote their business. Apparently someone there had heard of these 'facebook' and 'twitter' things and they now want her to incorporate promotion via social networking websites into her presentation which currently consists of some more traditional methods of promoting the business. Are any slashdotters employed by companies which use social networking websites to advertise, or otherwise communicate with the public? Have any of you been involved in implementing a similar type of thing? Have you had much success? Are there any pitfalls to be wary of when using social networking sites to promote your business?
Space

Scotty's Final Mission 221

Jane Q. Public writes "According to Ars Technica, the ashes of James Doohan, who played "Scotty" in the original 'Star Trek' series and several movies, were aboard the SpaceX III launch and were lost when the launch vehicle failed." Which totally wouldn't have happened if Scotty was the engineer.

Update: 08/05 00:09 GMT by KD : BoingBoing has a tribute to Doohan from his son.

Firefox Breaks 8 Million, Gets Into Guinness 199

Punkster812 writes "Mozilla has gotten the results back from the Guinness World Records and the official number that will be set as the record is 8,002,530 downloads. The day started out a little rough for them, with server troubles during the initial launch, but once they got everything going, they were able to transfer 62,419,734 MB in 24 hours. You can get more information, including a breakdown of how many downloads each country did from around the world, by visiting spreadfirefox.com. Congratulations, Mozilla, on the new record."
Programming

Best Color Scheme For Coding, Easiest On the Eyes? 763

Marzubus writes "I tend to do a lot of code editing in vim and sometimes get the 'burning eyes' or headaches. I have been trying to find a background / foreground combination for my terminal sessions which is easiest on the eyes but cannot seem to find any real data on this subject. Does anyone know of a study / data on this topic?"
The Internet

YouTube Must Give All User Histories To Viacom 778

psyopper writes "Google will have to turn over every record of every video watched by YouTube users, including users' names and IP addresses, to Viacom, which is suing Google for allowing clips of its copyright videos to appear on YouTube, a judge ruled Wednesday. Although Google argued that turning over the data would invade its users' privacy, the judge's ruling (.pdf) described that argument as 'speculative' and ordered Google to turn over the logs on a set of four terabyte hard drives." Update: 07/03 18:05 GMT by T : Brian Aker, now of MySQL but long ago Slashdot's "database thug," writes a journal entry on how companies could intelligently treat such potentially sensitive user data.
Software

Submission + - RMS lashes out at Microsoft (bbc.co.uk)

DatabaseMuffin writes: While the topic may hardly be news, Stallman's latest round of harsh words towards Redmond are more public than usual, appearing in a short article he wrote for the BBC. The content is run-of-the-mill evangelical rambling, perhaps a little too much for an audience where the majority won't have a strong opinion on the subject.
Power

Submission + - University building uses glass panels for power (rmit.edu.au)

fyc writes: "RMIT University in Australia has recently announced that one of its new buildings will use glass panels as a means of cooling and powering the building. The Design Hub will have a translucent "smart skin" of over 16,000 sandblasted glass cells — some of which will be able to capture sunlight as a power source — that can shield the building from the Sun and turn transparent when it comes in contact with water (so you can see out on those rainy days)."

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