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The Military

Submission + - Navy tests Mach 8 Electromagnetic Railgun (wired.com)

Submitted by hargrand
hargrand writes: Wired magazine has a story and publicly released video of the Navy test firing of a 32 megajoule electromagnetic railgun.

Reporters were invited to watch the test at the Dalghren Naval Surface Warfare Center. A tangle of two-inch thick coaxial cables hooked up to stacks of refrigerator-sized capacitors took five minutes to power juice into a gun the size of a schoolbus built in a warehouse. With a 1.5-million-ampere spark of light and a boom audible in a room 50 feet away, the bullet left the gun at a speed of Mach 8.

Comment Re:Unlimited Calling (Score 1) 106

by laxpeter (#28705327) Attached to: Google Voice Apps Arrive For Android and Blackberry
So that all inbound calls count as being in your Fav5 plan too. Is that really how TMobile tracks it, though? Just on caller ID? If so, I could certainly imagine the caller id info being passed on the data network from Google to your phone so that it could display the 'real' caller ID, while still qualifying for the free call from TMobile.
Biotech

Old Materials Resurface For "Prebiotic Soup" 263

Posted by kdawson from the do-not-clean-out-the-fridge dept.
AliasMarlowe writes "Stanley Miller performed the famous experiments in the 1950s showing that amino acids and other building blocks for biomolecules could be produced by passing lightning through a mix of simple hydrocarbons, water vapor, and ammonia (thought at the time to approximate the Earth's early atmosphere). Other experiments approximated the environment around volcanic eruptions, but those results were not published. Following his death last year, a former student discovered the materials from those experiments, in labelled vials. Analysis of this material indicates that the conditions around volcanic eruptions (still thought to be representative of such events in the early Earth) resulted in a higher yield of amino acids than the simple lightning experiments, and resulted in a greater variety of amino acids." Pharyngula has a discussion of the Science paper, including a graph of the amino acids produced.
Social Networks

Submission + - Facebook caves to privacy protests over Beacon (computerworld.com)

Submitted by jcatcw
jcatcw writes: After weeks of privacy protests over its advertising system, Facebook CEO announced that users now can turn the system off completely. CEO Zuckerberg said "We simply did a bad job with this release." Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, called the announcement from Zuckerberg "a step in the right direction."
Businesses

Submission + - eBay Auctions Canceled for Charging Too Little

Submitted by jcgam69
jcgam69 writes: Although interference with eBay sales is nothing new, companies in two recently filed federal cases explicitly invoke Leegin as a justification for terminating the eBay auctions of competitors that charge lower prices online. These cases not only show Leegin's likely effect on Internet sales, but are also, unfortunately, fairly typical examples of the sort of anticompetitive actions companies take to fight lower-priced competition online.
Television

Submission + - Easy TV Data to pick up where Zap2it leaves off (easytvdata.org)

Submitted by Nedward
Nedward writes: Wondering what will happen to your myth-box when zap2it goes offline? From the mythTV wiki: ``A group of developers from various open source and free-as-in-beer projects have formed a new company called Easy TV Data, which will replace Zap2it Labs to become the official provider of US and Canadian TV Listings for MythTV (and other projects). Please see http://easytvdata.org/ for more information."
Software

Submission + - Pidgin is the new GAIM

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: http://www.pidgin.im/ "Getting a settlement with AOL has taken FAR FAR longer than we would have ever guessed. On legal advice, we have refrained from any non-beta release during this process as a show of good faith, and to keep AOL from giving up on it. Again, on legal advice, we have also kept this information closely controlled. At long last, I am pleased to announce that we have a signed settlement and can release our new version. There is one catch however: we have had to change the project's name. After a long, and unfortunately secret debate (as we could not say why we were looking at a name change, we ended up just doing this ourselves), we settled on the name "Pidgin" for gaim itself, "libpurple" for libgaim (which, as of 2.0.0 beta6, exists), and "Finch" for gaim-text. Yes, the spelling of "Pidgin" is intentional, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pidgin."
The Internet

Submission + - The Unintended Consequences of NoFollow

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The nofollow attribute tells search engines to ignore a link when calculating the link destination's pagerank. Nofollow was promoted by Google to combat comment spam, but it didn't work — there's more spam on blogs than ever. A Wordpress founder conceded that nofollow has failed. But sites like Wikipedia are now using nofollow to suck up tons of link energy.

http://www.dailydomainer.com/200781-to-follow-or-n ofollow.html

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