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Christmas Cheer

Submission + - Santa's Naughty/Nice list compromised (sophos.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Reports from the North Pole have confirmed that Santa's Naughty/Nice list has been compromised.

The list is said to contain the name, stocking address and naughty/nice score (the child equivalent of a credit score) of every child on earth. Absent from the leaked data is the "What I want for Christmas" list which is said to be stored in a separate database.
Space

Submission + - New Molecule Could Lead To Better Rocket Fuel (chemweb.com)

Submitted by MithrandirAgain
MithrandirAgain writes: Trinitramid is the name of the new molecule that may be a component in future rocket fuel. This fuel could be 20 to 30 percent more efficient in comparison with the best rocket fuels available today, according to researchers. The discovery was made at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Sweden.

"A rule of thumb is that for every ten-percent increase in efficiency for rocket fuel, the payload of the rocket can double. What's more, the molecule consists only of nitrogen and oxygen, which would make the rocket fuel environmentally friendly. This is more than can be said of today's solid rocket fuels, which entail the emission of the equivalent of 550 tons of concentrated hydrochloric acid for each launch of the space shuttle," says Tore Brinck, professor of physical chemistry at KTH.
Earth

Submission + - What if the earth stood still

Submitted by crus0e
crus0e writes: As the german weekly newspaper DIE ZEIT reports [Google-translated link to the article], the german computer-scientist and expert for geographical information systems, Witold Fraczek, simulated how a total slowdown of the earth rotation would affect the shape and the appearance of mother earth. Though he does not claim his simulation to be perfectly correct, it seems to be a nice intellectual game to play.
Games

Submission + - Pay what you want: a sustainable business model?

Submitted by revealingheart
revealingheart writes: As the 2010 comes to a close, this could be remembered as the year that pay-what-you-want pricing reached the mainstream. Along with the two Humble Indie Bundles, YAWMA offer a game and music bundle, and Rock, Paper and Shotgun reports on the curiously named Bundle of Wrong, made to help fund a developer who contracted pneumonia.

More examples include Reddit briefly offered their users to choose what to pay when they were in financial difficulties; the Indie Music Cancer Drive launched Songs for the Cure for cancer research; and Mavaru launched an online store where users can buy albums for any amount. Can pay-what-you-want become a sustainable mainstream business model? — or destined to be a continued experiment for smaller groups?
Google

Submission + - Android phone at the edge of space (suasnews.com)

Submitted by garymortimer
garymortimer writes: It seems like the google crowd are really keen to replicate what many in the sUAS world have been playing with for the last couple of years. It really will be interesting to see the UAS apps that must be coming for the Nexus S. Certainly a market Apple are not keen in light of the 4.2 TOS update.

Submission + - How The Free Market Rocked The Grid (ieee.org)

Submitted by sean_nestor
sean_nestor writes: Most of us take for granted that the lights will work when we flip them on, without worrying too much about the staggeringly complex things needed to make that happen. Thank the engineers who designed and built the power grids for that—but don't thank them too much. Their main goal was reliability; keeping the cost of electricity down was less of a concern. That's in part why so many people in the United States complain about high electricity prices. Some armchair economists (and a quite a few real ones) have long argued that the solution is deregulation. After all, many other U.S. industries have been deregulated—take, for instance, oil, natural gas, or trucking—and greater competition in those sectors swiftly brought prices down. Why not electricity?
Science

Submission + - Scientifically, You Are Likely In The Slowest Line (hothardware.com) 1

Submitted by
MojoKid
MojoKid writes: "As you wait in the checkout line for the holidays, your observation is most likely correct. That other line IS moving faster than yours. That's what Bill Hammack (the Engineer Guy), from the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the University of Illinois — Urbana proves in this video. Ironically, the most efficient set-up is to have one line feed into several cashiers. This is because if any one line slows because of an issue, the entry queue continues to have customers reach check-out optimally. However, this is also perceived by customers as the least efficient, psychologically."

Submission + - Skype Slowly Restores Service To Users (computerworld.com)

Submitted by CWmike
CWmike writes: Skype continues to slowly recover after an outage caused by problems with its peer-to-peer interconnection system. The latest estimates say that 10 million users are now online, according to a blog post. Skype's outage began on Wednesday. Skype continues to slowly recover after an outage caused by problems with its peer-to-peer interconnection system. The latest estimates say that 10 million users are now online, according to a blog post. Skype's outage began on Wednesday.
Technology

Submission + - FCC Chair Seeks Comcast-NBC Merger Conditions (huffingtonpost.com) 1

Submitted by Anarki2004
Anarki2004 writes: From the article: The head of the Federal Communications Commission proposed regulatory conditions Thursday to ensure that cable giant Comcast Corp. cannot stifle video competition once it takes control of NBC Universal. Comcast is seeking government approval to buy a 51 percent stake in NBC Universal from General Electric Co. for $13.8 billion in cash and assets. The deal would create a media powerhouse that both produces and distributes content.
Patents

Submission + - Will Patent Make NCAA Football Playoffs Impossible

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Mark Cuban recently announced plans to create a college football playoff system, which many people (including President Obama) have been claiming has been needed for years. However, after doing so, Cuban received an odd emails, claiming that he'd better watch out, because a college football playoff system is patented and anything he did would likely infringe. The patent wasn't named, but Techdirt believes it has found the patent in question, along with another pending patent application (which has some amusing errors in it — such as an abstract that says it's about a boat fender, rather than a sports playoff system). So is it really true that some random guy in Arizona is the only person who can legally set up such a college football playoff system?
Technology

Submission + - Aerial Video Footage of New York Taken By RC Plane (singularityhub.com)

Submitted by kkleiner
kkleiner writes: Expert remote control pilot Raphael “Trappy” Pirker recently took his 54 inch Zephyr model plane on a harrowing tour of Manhattan and the surrounding area. The best part: his RC vehicle was fitted with a camera that wirelessly transmitted an amazing recording of everything it saw – Pirker was piloting his craft with this visual feed. As you can see in the video, the results were spectacular. The plane looks to be flying within a few feet of buildings and whizzing past bridges with ease. You have to check out around 2:01 when he starts to buzz right by the Statute of Liberty. Phenomenal! Could the new era of personal video recording be spreading to the sky?

Submission + - Solar dynamo still anemic, magnetism and UV lax

Submitted by radioweather
radioweather writes: While we are well along into solar cycle 24, there remains a significant gap between the predictions of where we should be, and where we actually are in the progression of solar cycle 24. Recently, the sun went spotless again, and the solar Ap geomagnetic index, an indicator of the solar magneto,hit zero. It is something you really don't expect to see this far along into the cycle. In other solar news, scientists monitoring the SORCE solar satellite have found that solar ultraviolet emissions have dropped significantly in the past few years. The Solar Irradiance Monitor (SIM) on the satellite "suggests that ultraviolet irradiance fell far more than expected between 2004 and 2007 — by ten times as much as the total irradiance did — while irradiance in certain visible and infrared wavelengths surprisingly increased, even as solar activity wound down overall."
Software

Submission + - 10 Do's and Don'ts to Make Sysadmins' Lives Easier (acm.org)

Submitted by CowboyRobot
CowboyRobot writes: Tom Limoncelli has a piece in 'Queue' summarizing the Computer-Human Interaction for Management of Information Technology's list of how to make software that is easy to install, maintain, and upgrade.
FTA: "#2. DON'T make the administrative interface a GUI. System administrators need a command-line tool for constructing repeatable processes. Procedures are best documented by providing commands that we can copy and paste from the procedure document to the command line."

Submission + - Bank of America Buying Abusive Domain Names (finextra.com)

Submitted by Nite_Hawk
Nite_Hawk writes: From the Article: Bank of America has snapped up hundreds of abusive domain names for its senior executives and board members in what is being perceived as a defensive strategy against the future publication of damaging insider info from whistleblowing Website WikiLeaks. According to Domain Name Wire, the US bank has been aggressively registering domain names including its board of Directors' and senior executives' names followed by "sucks" and "blows".

Submission + - US Dept of Homeland Security caught Blog Trollin' (infowars.com)

Submitted by McGruber
McGruber writes: The US Department of Homeland Security (http://www.dhs.gov/index.shtm), who claim to be "Preserving Our Freedoms", have been caught trolling the "We Won't Fly" blog. In the interest of keeping the blog up, here's the link to the google cache of the original blog article: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=cache%3Awewontfly.com%2Fhomeland-security-trolling-we-wont-fly-blog
Science

Submission + - The Tipping Point of Humanness (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: Robert Zemeckis, take note. Using videos that morph the face of a baby or man into a doll, researchers have figured out at what point we stop considering a face human--and start considering it artificial. The ability, the researchers say, is key to our survival, enabling us to quickly determine whether the eyes we're looking at have a mind behind them. It may also explain why so many people hated The Polar Express.

Submission + - Placebos Work -- Even Without Deception 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: For most of us, the "placebo effect" is synonymous with the power of positive thinking; it works because you believe you're taking a real drug. But a new study rattles this assumption. Researchers at Harvard Medical School's Osher Research Center and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) have found that placebos work even when administered without the seemingly requisite deception. The study published on December 22 in PLoS ONE.
Space

Submission + - Latest From Mars: Frosty Landscapes, Ancient Lakeb (universetoday.com)

Submitted by
Phoghat
Phoghat writes: "A new batch of images has been released by the HiRISE camera on the Mars Reconnaissaince Orbiter and as usual they are stunning. In the first image, there is a lot going on! Numerous dust devil tracks have left criss cross marks
The second is an image of what could have been a once habitable lake.
There are more including a possible future landing site."
The Internet

Submission + - Skype outages continue into second day (networkworld.com)

Submitted by netbuzz
netbuzz writes: And according to a statement issued this morning, the company doesn’t appear to know when service will return to normal: “Unfortunately, it’s not possible for us to predict on an individual level when you’ll be able to sign in again, and we thank you for your patience in the meantime.” In a blog post yesterday, Skype blamed the disruption on problems with “supernodes.”

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