Matt_dk sends word that NASA has chosen a new target crater into which to crash the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) mission vehicles. "The decision means that when NASA's LCROSS probe and its spent Centaur rocket stage slam into the moon on Oct. 9, they will crash into the large crater Cabeus, and not the nearby (and smaller) Cabeus A crater that was previously targeted. ... The data suggests the new target Cabeus has a concentration of hydrogen — an indication of possible water ice — that's higher than anywhere else at the lunar south pole. ... A small valley etched into the otherwise tall crater ridge of Cabeus should allow sunlight to shine on the ejecta cloud kicked up when LCROSS and its Centaur rocket stage crash into the moon in successive impacts."

There has been an ongoing legal battle over the past few years about how and when game makers can use the likenesses of football players without their permission. Former college football player Samuel Keller filed a class action suit in May against Electronic Arts for the publisher's use of NCAA players' information — including things like jersey number, height, weight, skin tone and hair style, but not names — to recreate actual teams within sports games. An earlier suit filed by NFL Hall-of-Famer Jim Brown brought up the fact that video games weren't even a consideration when contracts and licensing rights were negotiated in the '50s and '60s, yet many football players from that era (including Brown) are represented in the occasional sports game whether they like it or not. A ruling came down from a district court judge last Wednesday stating that video games are "expressive works, akin to an expressive painting that depicts celebrity athletes of past and present in a realistic sporting environment," and are thus protected under the First Amendment. Brown and fellow Hall-of-Famer Herb Adderley are now seeking to throw their support behind Keller's lawsuit.

Phurge writes "When Princeton announced its Kindle e-reader pilot program last May, administrators seemed cautiously optimistic that the e-readers would both be sustainable and serve as a valuable academic tool. But less than two weeks after 50 students received the free Kindle DX e-readers, many of them said they were dissatisfied and uncomfortable with the devices. 'I hate to sound like a Luddite, but this technology is a poor excuse of an academic tool,' said Aaron Horvath, a student in Civil Society and Public Policy. 'It's clunky, slow and a real pain to operate.' 'Much of my learning comes from a physical interaction with the text: bookmarks, highlights, page-tearing, sticky notes and other marks representing the importance of certain passages — not to mention margin notes, where most of my paper ideas come from and interaction with the material occurs,' he explained. 'All these things have been lost, and if not lost they're too slow to keep up with my thinking, and the "features" have been rendered useless.'"

An anonymous reader recommends a project carried out recently by Serge Brunier and Frédéric Tapissier. Brunier traveled to the top of a volcano in the Canary Islands and to the Chilean desert to capture 1,200 images — each one a 6-minute exposure — of the night sky. The photos were taken between August 2008 and February 2009 and required more than 30 full nights under the stars. Tapissier then processed the images together into a single zoomable, 800-megapixel, 360-degree image of the sky in which the Earth is embedded. "It is the sky that everyone can relate to that I wanted to show — it's constellations... whose names have nourished all childhoods, it's myths and stories of gods, titans, and heroes shared by all civilisations since Homo became sapiens. The image was therefore made as man sees it, with a regular digital camera." The image is the first of three portraits produced by the European Southern Observatory's GigaGalaxy Zoom project.

itwbennett writes "Blogger Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols wags his finger at Apple for indiscriminately pushing the iPhone Configuration Utility 2.1 update out to Windows users, since it is a tool for business system administrators to set up and administer corporate iPhones — the blogger himself (and practically every other iPhone user) not being of the corporate iPhone user persuasion. But more than just unnecessary, the update actually puts him and millions of other iPhone owners/Windows PC users at increased risk by installing 'not just a configuration program, but the Apache Web server as well,' says Vaughan-Nichols. 'A Web server like the one Apple [is] adding to your PC... [is] a gateway just asking to be hammered on by an attacker. Managed properly Apache is as safe a Web server as you'll ever find, but ordinary PC users shouldn't try to manage it, and even an expert can't do anything with it if they don't know it's there.'" Reader CWMike notes that Apple pulled the iPhone Configuration Utility from the update list after a few hours.

lurking_giant writes "Well, Microsoft has done it again with the YouTube Windows 7 launch party video that is turning the stomachs of even the mainstream press with its clueless and campy marketing style. A Washington Post reader was quoted as saying 'If Microsoft had been put in charge of marketing sex, the human race would have ended long ago, because no one would be caught dead doing something that uncool.'" Even the Guardian's resident die-hard Apple hater calls it "the most nauseating advert in history."

chill writes "Nature is reporting that 'South Korean manufacturer Samsung Electronics announced this week that it has begun mass production of a new kind of memory chip that stores information by melting and freezing tiny crystals. Known as phase-change memory (PCM), the idea was first proposed by physicists in the 1960s.' With transistor-equivalent cells only 20 nm wide, switching time is around 16 ns. The first target market is cell phones, but the companies behind the technology see applications in PCs, servers, and other devices as well."

TechReviewAl writes "A company called 80legs has come up with an interesting new web business model: customized, on-demand web spidering. The company sells access to its spidering system, charging $2 for every million pages crawled, plus a fee of three cents per hour of processing used. The idea is to offer Web startups a way to build their own web indexes without requiring huge server farms. 'Many startups struggle to find the funding needed to build large data centers, but that's not the approach 80legs took to construct its Web crawling infrastructure. The company instead runs its software on a distributed network of personal computers, much like the ones used for projects such as SETI@home. The distributed computing network is put together by Plura Processing, which rents it to 80legs. Plura gets computer users to supply unused processing power in exchange for access to games, donations to charities, and other rewards.'"

An anonymous reader writes "A time lens can focus a chunk of time to a point, rather like a normal lens focuses light rays. Put two time lenses together and you can create what a Cornell University team calls a 'time domain telescope' which can magnify time. They sent a 2.5 nanosecond long light pulse, encoding 24 bits of information, into their time telescope. What came out on the other side was the same 24 bit pulse, but compressed into 92 picoseconds. Squashing more information into a light pulse could help to send more information via optical fibres."

notthatwillsmith writes "Maximum PC just posted an exclusive hands on with Thermaltake's unique Level 10 case. This concept design features individual compartments for different components (each with dedicated cooling) all mounted on a black steel frame. The case looks like a prop from 2001, rendered in black steel instead of white plastic. It's absolutely unlike anything I've ever seen before."

In the latest example of how just because you can do something doesn't mean you should, one credit union has decided to offer a new feature, dubbed "tweetMyMoney," that allows members to interact with their accounts via Twitter. Can't wait for the next version, "tweetSomeoneElsesMoney." "tweetMyMoney, available exclusively to Vantage members! With tweetMyMoney, you can monitor your account balance, deposits, withdrawals, holds and cleared checks with simple commands. And, you can even transfer funds within your account. It's all available on Twitter, 24/7!"

An anonymous reader writes to wonder if the glory has gone out of IT. One blogger remembered his first impression upon entering a profession in IT that made it seem like the place to be, with a new shiny around every corner. What experiences have others had? Has a more pervasive technical culture forced our IT gurus into obsolescence?

Barence writes "An undercover investigation has revealed how Dell's online sales staff take liberties with the truth when trying to sell customers new PCs. One member of staff told an undercover reporter that he would need a PC with a good graphics card to download digital photos. Another, who was more incompetent than devious, was asked how many photos could be stored on a 250GB hard disk. 'Its[sic] on average 2 MB then 1024 MB * 2,' came the bewildering reply. Meanwhile, a sales assistant at supermarket Tesco told the reporter that netbooks got their name because 'a Japanese man on a plane fell asleep with a laptop on his thighs and was horribly burned, so the industry has dropped the name laptop.'"

In an effort to create future Centennial Challenges, NASA is asking the general public to come up with (and submit) ambitious contest ideas. For the next six weeks, the Innovative Partnerships Program will be accepting ideas for new contests, with all submissions becoming public domain information. "According to NASA, any idea can be proposed for a prize competition that addresses challenges related to the mission of NASA in aeronautics, exploration, science, or space operations. Crosscutting topics or those that also address related national or global needs are especially valuable. The challenges must require basic and applied research, technology development or prototype demonstrations."

Trailrunner7 writes "Bruce Schenier writes on Threatpost.com: 'In computer security, a lot of effort is spent on the authentication problem. Whether it is passwords, secure tokens, secret questions, image mnemonics, or something else, engineers are continually coming up with more complicated — and hopefully more secure — ways for you to prove you are who you say you are over the Internet. This is important stuff, as anyone with an online bank account or remote corporate network knows. But a lot less thought and work have gone into the other end of the problem: how do you tell the system on the other end of the line that you are no longer there? How do you un-authenticate yourself? My home computer requires me to log out or turn my computer off when I want to un-authenticate. This works for me because I know enough to do it, but lots of people just leave their computer on and running when they walk away. As a result, many office computers are left logged in when people go to lunch, or when they go home for the night. This, obviously, is a security vulnerability.'"