Forgot your password?

Close
typodupeerror

Russian asteroid-nuking project is 15 years old->

Submitted by jamax
jamax writes "According to this article here (russian only, google's translation is here) Russias' State Rocket Center (http://makeyev.ru/rocspace/ — english version available) has finished drawing up plans for anti-asteroid nuclear missle comlpex to either convert incoming asteroids into rubble by a nuclear explosion on its surface or pushing them off-course by exploding nuke near it.
The system consists of two vehicles — recon module "Caissa" and payload module "Kapkan" (snare in russian) and is to be launched on top of either Soyuz-2 or Rus-M carriers.
They claim the projected system to be able to take care of asteroids with diameter up to 300 meters.
The SRC presentation stressed the fact that the two space vehicles were developed by SRC alongside two other institutions for the past 15 years, so threre is an actual chance that it is not more vapourware we get so much of from Russian space agency in the last 5-10 years.."
Link to Original Source
Firefox

Firefox 5 Fixes Security and Improves Browsing->

Submitted by Orome1
Orome1 writes "Mozilla released Firefox 5.0 that fixes several security issues, stability issues and introduces new features. Privacy-aware users will be happy to learn that the Do-Not-Track header preference has been moved to increase discoverability. The developers tuned HTTP idle connection logic for increased performance and also improved standards support for HTML5, XHR, MathML, SMIL, and canvas. Linux users can expect improved desktop environment integration and WebGL content can no longer load cross-domain textures."
Link to Original Source
Science

Is there life inside black holes?->

Submitted by jamax
jamax writes "From TFA: "Inside the rotating or charged black holes there are bound periodic planetary orbits, which not coming out nor terminated at the central singularity. The advanced civilizations of the third kind (according to Kardashev classification) may inhabit the interiors of supermassive black holes, being invisible from the outside and basking in the light of the central singularity and the orbital photons. "

That's a preprint from arxiv.org, of an article by Vyacheslav Dokuchaev, a russian physisist, working at Institute for Nuclear Research at Russian Academy of Sciences..

While no actual proof (even theoretical) is provided for the existence of life, author argues that under certain circumstance, some black holes may indeed harbour stable planetary systems, even if planetary orbits are a far cry from ellipse-shaped orbits we see everywhere else."
Link to Original Source
Hardware Hacking

Chinese Magical Hard-Drive->

Submitted by jamax
jamax writes "From TFA: "A Russian friend .... works at a hard-drive repair center in a Russian town, located near the Chinese border. A couple of days ago a customer has brought a broken 500Gb USB-drive that he had bought in a Chinese store across the river, for an insanely low price. But the drive was not working: if you, say, save a movie onto the drive, playing the saved movie back resulted in replaying just the last 5 minutes of the film."
    Apparently the contents of the external HDD box included: two nuts, glued to the inner surface of the box with a 128MB flash drive wedged between them (image)..
  And it was a clever hack too — if ever an attempt was made of writing a file that's too large it got sort of cycled — rewriting itself over and over from the beginning, while leaving the existing files intact. And it reported everything correctly — file sizes and all!"
Link to Original Source

A couple more shots of whiskey, women 'round here start looking good. [something about a 10 being a 4 after a six-pack? Ed.]