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The Military

DARPA's AlphaDog begins real world testing->

Submitted by
MrSeb
MrSeb writes "DARPA has released the first video of its robot Legged Squad Support System (LS3) walking untethered and in the wild. Watch in awe as a robotic quadruped scales a rocky, forested hill while carrying a heavy load on its back. The last time we saw LS3 (aka AlphaDog), back in September, it was tethered to external hydraulics. This made it impressively quiet, but obviously it couldn’t go outside. In the last few months, those hydraulics have been squeezed onto AlphaDog’s chassis, and an on-board petrol-driven motor powers the whole thing. What now follows is an 18-month testing period where AlphaDog's performance will be verified, culminating in an actual field exercise with some US Marines."
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Science

Little Ice Age: it Was Not the Sun-> 1

Submitted by
vikingpower
vikingpower writes "The Little Ice Age, at the end of the Middle Age and down into the 17th century, may very likely have been caused by the combined effects of four major volcano eruptions and increased sunlight reflection by increaing sea ice, the so-called Albedo effect. Science daily also runs an article on what is probably a discovery, and so does the blog of the prestigious 'Nature'. The University of Boulder, Colorado has a press release with pretty good maps and photographs. Bette Otto-Bliesner, one of the scientists behind the "volcano + sea ice" thesis, fields an earnest warningagainst drawing conclusions too quickly from this research: "‘I think people might look at the Little Ice Age and think that all we need to save us from rising temperatures are some volcanic eruptions or the geo-engineering equivalent [...] But when you see what happened when global temperatures dropped by just one degree and you look at current predictions of six or seven degree increases for the future, you realize how precarious things are for life as we know it.’""
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Data Storage

Intel Releases Cherryville SSD - 80,000 IOPS->

Submitted by Lucas123
Lucas123 writes "Intel today began shipping its fastest SSD to date and the first one to a SandForce controller — the SF2281. The spec sheet for the Cherryville 520 Series 2.5-in SSD shows sequential read/write speeds of 500MB+ per second and random read rates exceeding 80,000 IOPS. Actual testing on a MacBook Pro showed significantly lower performance, but it's still a drive that can offer 15-second system boots and application loads that seem instantaneous. Intel has also for the first time added a 5-year warranty on its SSD."
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The engineer who stopped airplanes from flying into mountains ->

Submitted by gmrobbins
gmrobbins writes "The Seattle Times profiles avionics engineer Don Bateman, whose Honeywell lab in Redmond, Washington has for decades pioneered ground proximity warning systems. Bateman's innovations have have nearly eliminated controlled flight into terrain by commercial aircraft, the most common cause of fatal airplane accidents."
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Books

Remembering Sealab-> 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "“Some people remember Sealab as being a classified program, but it was trying not to be,” says Ben Hellwarth, author of the new book Sealab: America’s Forgotten Quest to Live and Work on the Ocean Floor, which aims to “bring some long overdue attention to the marine version of the space program.” In the 1960s, the media largely ignored the efforts of America’s aquanauts, who revolutionized deep-sea diving and paved the way for the underwater construction work being done today on offshore oil platforms. It didn’t help that the public didn’t understand the challenges of saturation diving; in this comical exchange a telephone operator initially refuses to connect a call between President Johnson and Aquanaut Scott Carpenter, (who sounded like a cartoon character, thanks to the helium atmosphere in his pressurized living quarters). But in spite of being remembered as a failure, the final incarnation of Sealab did provide cover for a very successful Cold War spy program."
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Government

Former DHS official: no "property interest" in data-> 1

Submitted by grahamsaa
grahamsaa writes "Stewart A. Baker, a former assistant secretary at the Department of Homeland Security is quoted in the New York Times today as saying “You can’t really have a property interest in data,” he argued. “It’s going to get cheaper to reproduce it. It’s going to get reproduced and stored. It’s going to get copied.”

Of course, he was talking about your personal data — in his opinion, personal data can be stored, aggregated, copied and used to track your activities online. But this raises an interesting point — if one can't have a property interest in data, why are people getting sued, fined and arrested for copyright infringement? It seems that you can't have it both ways. If data is going to get copied, and if there's no enforceable property interest, what's the problem with online piracy?"
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Science

Radio Contact Lost With Vostok Station 2

Submitted by K. S. Kyosuke
K. S. Kyosuke writes "Russian scientists at the Antarctic Vostok Station, who have been trying to dig into the liquid heart of Lake Vostok, have suddenly gone silent.

The conditions in the lake are presumed to be similar to those of Europa and Enceladus and there is a hope that previously unknown forms of life could have found a niche in this unusual environment. Despite having been warned that their drilling technology (using freon and kerosene to lubricate the bore hole) may not be up to the task of reaching the lake without harmful enviromental side-effects, the Russians have decided to go on with the drilling. They haven't been heard from for the past five days."

Comment: Re:I'm not sure I understand (Score 1) 432

by MBCook (#38908935) Attached to: How Far Should GPL Enforcement Go?

They don't have to look at BusyBox, it's just a collection of standard utilities. Since they know what the utilities are supposed to do, they can make their own versions without having to look at the BusyBox code.

The real issue is what this look like. "We keep being accused of GPL infringement, and people are using this BusyBox thing as leverage, so if we replace it, they won't have leverage and can keep infringing without worry."

Now it's entirely possible Sony isn't doing this to let them get away with other infringement, but to make it so they don't have to worry about accidental infringement. But if you're the kind who likes the idea of using GPLed software to force other bits of the system open that are normally closed source, this looks like a sinister development.

Data Storage

SSD capacity a big factor in performance, value->

Submitted by crookedvulture
crookedvulture writes "More than two years ago, Slashdot covered a story exploring how SSD capacity can affect drive performance. What about today? This article tackles the subject with the latest drives, more capacity points, and a handful of budget RAID configurations. The highest capacities offer the best overall performance within each SSD family, and surprisingly, they're also the best values from a cost-per-gigabyte perspective. Budget drives actually look much worse from that angle, and they're quite a bit slower."
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Android

Linux 3.3 Will Let You Boot Into Android: Greg-KH->

Submitted by sfcrazy
sfcrazy writes "In an exclusive interview, Greg KH told the site that "The code is almost all there already. The 3.3 kernel release will let you boot an Android userspace with no modifications, but not very good power management. The 3.4 kernel release will hopefully have the power management hooks that Android needs in it, along with a few other minor missing infrastructure pieces that didn't make it into the 3.3 kernel release.""
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"Never give in. Never give in. Never. Never. Never." -- Winston Churchill