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Submission + - Why does light stretch as the Universe expands?

Submitted by StartsWithABang
StartsWithABang writes: On the one hand, galaxies are definitely redshifted, and they're redshifted more severely the farther they are; that's been indisputable since Hubble's data from the 1920s. But spacetime's expansion — the idea that photons get redshfited because expanding space stretches their wavelength — is just one possibility. Sure, it's the possibility predicted by General Relativity, but a fast-moving, receding galaxy could cause a redshift, too. How do we know what the cause is? Here's how.

Submission + - DISH Becomes World's Largest Company to Accept Bitcoin (coindesk.com)

Submitted by Raystonn
Raystonn writes: US satellite service provider DISH Network has announced that it will start accepting Bitcoin payments later this year from its more than 14 million pay-TV subscribers. This will make it the largest company to accept Bitcoin to date.

Comment Good way to brick your XP box (Score 1) 322

by Gazzonyx (#47098731) Attached to: Registry Hack Enables Continued Updates For Windows XP
Seems like MS would make a lot of dough if you were to enable these non-XP updates and then one of them bricked your box. Maybe it's a bit of a tinfoil hat idea, but I'm sure they're not going out of their way to make sure that enabling this registry key isn't going to make you a potential customer again.

Submission + - Programmers: It's OK to Grow Up

Submitted by Nemo the Magnificent
Nemo the Magnificent writes: From the Peter-Pan-need-not-apply dept.

Everybody knows software development is a young man's game, right? Here's a guy who hires and manages programmers and he says it's not about age at all, it's about skills, period. A company that actively works to offer all employees the chance to learn and to engage with modern technologies is a company that good people are going to work for, and to stay at.

Submission + - Does Common Core Suffer From What Ails Obamacare?

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: If you listen to Common Core cheerleader Bill Gates, the new academic standards promised by the initiative are the best way to fix school for our kids. But the devil is in the detail, and therein lies the problem. "My conversations with several Core proponents over the past few weeks," writes the WSJ's Peggy Noonan in The Trouble With Common Core, "leave me with the sense they fell in love with an abstraction and gave barely a thought to implementation. But implementation — how a thing is done day by day in the real world — is everything. There is a problem, for instance, with a thing called 'ObamaCare.' That law exists because the people who pushed for it fell in love with an abstract notion and gave not a thought to what the law would actually do and how it would work." With criticism of Common Core hitting new heights, Noonan suggests its advocates take a look at their ill-thought-out creation instead of summarily dismissing the "dangerous misconceptions" of those who oppose Common Core in its present incarnation. "The irony," notes Noonan, "is that Core proponents’ overall objective — to get schools teaching more necessary and important things, and to encourage intellectual coherence in what is taught — is not bad, but good."

Submission + - The Truth on OpenGL Driver Quality (blogspot.com)

Submitted by rcht148
rcht148 writes: Rich Geldreich (game/graphics programmer) has made a blog post on the quality of different OpenGL Drivers. Using anonymous titles (Vendor A: Nvidia; Vendor B: AMD; Vendor C: Intel), he plots the landscape of game development using OpenGL. Vendor A, jovially known as 'Graphics Mafia' concentrates heavily on performance but won't share it's specifications thus blocking any open source driver implementations as much as possible. Vendor B has the most flaky drivers. They have good technical know-how on OpenGL but due to an extremely small team (money woes), they have shoddy drivers. Vendor C is extremely rich. It had not taken graphics seriously until a few years ago. They support open source specifications/drivers wholeheartedly but it will be few years before their drivers come to par with market standards. He concludes that using OpenGL is extremely difficult and without the blessings of these vendors, it's near impossible to ship a major gaming title.

Submission + - Iran unveils duplicate of captured US drone (dailytimes.com.pk)

Submitted by mpicpp
mpicpp writes: Iran has produced a duplicate of a U. S. drone it captured in 2011, Press TV reported on Monday.
A copy of the RQ-170 stealth drone was unveiled on Sunday at an exhibition attended by Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the media outlet said. The event, held at the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) Aerospace Forces' Central Command, also put on display "the achievements of the IRGC Aerospace Forces in the design and development of drones, radars and defense systems, as well as anti-ship, ballistic and anti-shield missile systems," Press TV said.

The RQ-170 Sentinel was reverse-engineered by IRGC experts in about two years, it said. An RQ-170 unmanned stealth aircraft, designed and developed by Lockheed Martin, was captured by Iran on Dec. 4, 2011 while flying over the Iranian city of Kashmar.

Submission + - Blockbuster Big Bang Result May Fizzle, Rumor Suggests (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: The biggest discovery in cosmology in a decade could turn out to be an experimental artifact—at least according to an Internet rumor. A physics blogger has caused a stir by reporting rumors that the BICEP group--the team behind the huge announcement of the moments after the Big Bang a few weeks back--had subtracted the wrong Planck measurement of foreground radiation in deriving its famous evidence for gravitational waves. As a result , the calculation is invalid and the so-called evidence inconclusive. Intriguingly, the BICEP team has yet to flat-out deny this.

Submission + - How to approve the use of open source on the job

Submitted by Czech37
Czech37 writes: If you work in an organization that isn’t focused on development, where computer systems are used to support other core business functions, getting management buy-in for the use of open source can be tricky. Here's how an academic librarian negotiated with his management to get them to give open source software a try, and the four words he recommends you avoid using.

Submission + - Inflight Wi-Fi: Not just a business-class perk anymore (networkworld.com) 1

Submitted by smaxp
smaxp writes: AT&T's new class of inflight broadband is designed for the always-on mobile consumers that take 3 billion flights per year.

It looks like AT&T is trying to capture a new and much larger category of consumers who want to be constantly connected with their mobile devices, compared to the professional group that has to be connected with their notebooks. This larger group wouldn’t pay $29.95 for slow internet access, but many more will pay less to stay connected on fast broadband.

Submission + - Richard Stallman Answers Your Questions

Submitted by samzenpus
samzenpus writes: A while ago you had the chance to ask GNU and Free Software Foundation founder Richard Stallman about GNU, copyright laws, digital restrictions management, and software patents. Below you'll find his answers to those questions.

Submission + - In 1972, Scientists Discovered a 2 Billion-Year-Old Nuclear Reactor in W Africa

Submitted by KentuckyFC
KentuckyFC writes: In June 1972, nuclear scientists at the Pierrelatte uranium enrichment plant in south-east France noticed a strange deficit in the amount of uranium-235 they were processing. That’s a serious problem in a uranium enrichment plant where every gram of fissionable material has to be carefully accounted for. The ensuing investigation found that the anomaly originated in the ore from the Oklo uranium mine in Gabon, which contained only 0.600% uranium-235 compared to 0.7202% for all other ore on the planet. It turned out that this ore was depleted because it had gone critical some 2 billion years earlier, creating a self-sustaining nuclear reaction that lasted for 300,000 years and using up the missing uranium-235 in the process. Since then, scientists have studied this natural reactor to better understand how buried nuclear waste spreads through the environment and also to discover whether the laws of physics that govern nuclear reactions may have changed in the 1.5 billion years since the reactor switched off. Now a review of the science that has come out of Oklo shows how important this work has become but also reveals that there is limited potential to gather more data. After an initial flurry of interest in Oklo, mining continued and the natural reactors--surely among the most extraordinary natural phenomena on the planet-- have all been mined out.

Submission + - Is forking OSS code still a problem for the U.S. government? (opensource.com)

Submitted by Jason Hibbets
Jason Hibbets writes: Explore the current state of use of open source software by the U.S. government In this interview with David Wheeler. The interview includes challenges of the Federal acquisition system, what Wheeler's excited about as he looks ahead for open source and government, and an interesting section on how the U.S. government forking OSS projects is still a big problem.

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