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Transportation

Submission + - SPAM: Europe to mix unmanned and commercial aircraft

Submitted by
coondoggie
coondoggie writes: "The European Defense Agency is projecting unmanned aircraft vehicles (UAVs) will be able to operate with civilian air traffic within eight years and it has signed a an $8.9 million with a consortium of aerospace companies to develop a detailed roadmap for integrating UAVs into European airspace. The EDA conducted a 16 month study on the feasibility of integrating UAV operations with existing technology and found that no new systems would need to be developed to supplement mid-air collision avoidance systems (MIDICAS) to handle UAV operations, though complementary developments and engineering are required to provide a UAV-specific system. Meanwhile, There are rumblings that the US will be doing more to safely integrate UAVs into the commercial airspace system but the Federal Aviation Administration has kept a tight reign on the situation. [spam URL stripped]"
Link to Original Source
United States

Submission + - Lifesaving hospital hygiene checklist banned (nytimes.com) 2

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: From the article:
Johns Hopkins University published a simple five-step checklist designed to prevent certain hospital infections. It reminds doctors to make sure, for example, that before putting large intravenous lines into patients, they actually wash their hands and don a sterile gown and gloves.

The results were stunning. Within three months, the rate of bloodstream infections from these I.V. lines fell by two-thirds. The average I.C.U. cut its infection rate from 4 percent to zero. Over 18 months, the program saved more than 1,500 lives and nearly $200 million.

Yet this past month, the Office for Human Research Protections shut the program down.
Data Storage

Submission + - USB 3 optical connection in 2008-10 times as fast

Submitted by psychicsword
psychicsword writes:
"Intel and others plan to release a new version of the ubiquitous Universal Serial Bus technology in the first half of 2008, a revamp the chipmaker said will make data transfer rates more than 10 times as fast by adding fiber-optic links alongside the traditional copper wires."
"The current USB 2.0 version has a top data-transfer rate of 480 megabits per second, so a tenfold increase would be 4.8 gigabits per second."
This should make USB hard drives easier and faster to use. The article can be seen here http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9780794-7.html
It's funny. Laugh.

Submission + - Airline sacrificing goats to fix a Boeing 757? (reuters.com)

Submitted by Flower Skunk
Flower Skunk writes: There's a news story on Reuter's about a airline company in Nepal that sacrificed 2 goats to an Hindu god in order to fix two Boeing 757's with 'technical problems'. So..can someone recommend a god to sacrifice to in order to get an old, broken powerbook to work again?
Biotech

Submission + - Beeborne Virus Possible Cause of Colony Collaspe (iht.com)

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: The project involved an unusual partnership between entomologists and scientists working at the leading edge of human genetic research. It employed the same technology being used to decode Neanderthal DNA and the personal genome of James Watson, the co-discoverer of DNA.

Turns out it's entirely possible a VIRUS previously unnoticed until recent sequencing technology might be the cause of bee colony collapses...imagine that, it might not be the evil cell-phone radiation after all.
Security

Submission + - Hackers Hold Monster.com Users' Files Hostage 1

Submitted by Hypercoyote
Hypercoyote writes: Hundreds of thousands of people, mostly in the U.S., have been exposed to the risk of file ransom after the Web site of the world's largest online recruiter was hacked. Personal details stored on Monster.com, a Web site that lists job seekers and job opportunities, were taken after a raid by hackers who posed as employers to gain access to the site. Read more about it here
Biotech

Submission + - The Whys of Mating: 237 Reasons and Counting (nytimes.com)

Submitted by
gollum123
gollum123 writes: "Scholars in antiquity began counting the ways that humans have sex, but they weren't so diligent in cataloging the reasons humans wanted to get into all those positions ( http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/31/science/31tier.h tml?em&ex=1186113600&en=193f3472d7a6827b&ei=5087%0 A ). Perhaps you thought that the motivations for sex were pretty obvious. Or maybe you never really wanted to know what was going on inside other people's minds, in which case you should stop reading immediately. For now, thanks to psychologists at the University of Texas at Austin, we can at last count the whys. After asking nearly 2,000 people why they'd had sex, the researchers have assembled and categorized a total of 237 reasons — everything from "I wanted to feel closer to God" to "I was drunk." They even found a few people who claimed to have been motivated by the desire to have a child. some respondents said they did it to "help me fall asleep," "make my partner feel powerful," "burn calories," "return a favor," "keep warm," "hurt an enemy" or "change the topic of conversation." The lamest may have been, "It seemed like good exercise," although there is also this: "Someone dared me." The researchers collected the data by first asking more than 400 people to list their reasons for having sex, and then asking more than 1,500 others to rate how important each reason was to them. Although it was a fairly homogenous sample of students at the University of Texas, nearly every one of the 237 reasons was rated by at least some people as their most important motive for having sex."
Space

Submission + - Blast at Virgin Galactic desert spaceport kills 2 (cnn.com)

Submitted by yourdog
yourdog writes: An explosion killed two people Thursday at the airport HQ of a company building the first private manned rocket for Virgin Galactic, Richard Branson's space tourism venture. Aerial video showed a wrecked flatbed trailer with a large silver tank next to it, and large pieces of debris appeared to be strewn for hundreds of yards.
Space

Submission + - 2 killed in SpaceShipTwo motor test explosion (cnn.com)

Submitted by RZG
RZG writes: Two people were killed and 4 were injured during a "cold fire test" of the motor for SpaceShipTwo. This obviously is a setback for Virgin Galactic and the non-government space community in general. "Aerial video of the blast aftermath showed a charred and twisted flatbed trailer attached to a truck cab with a large silver tank next to it. Large pieces of debris appeared to be strewn for hundreds of yards from the center."
Space

Submission + - Virgin Galactic Explosion

Submitted by the_Bionic_lemming
the_Bionic_lemming writes: An explosion at an airport home to Scaled Composites — the builder of the first private manned rocket to reach space — killed two people and left four seriously hurt Thursday, a Kern County Fire Department official says. It happened at the Mojave Air and Space Port during a test of a new rocket motor for SpaceShipTwo — a spaceship being built for Virgin Galactic, Richard Branson's space tourism company, a source said. The motor uses nitrous oxide, the source said.
Space

Submission + - Scaled Composites Kill 2

Submitted by
WED Fan
WED Fan writes: "An explosion in Mojave, CA, home of SpaceShip One, has killed 2 people. Early reports indicated fuel processing was involved."
Patents

Submission + - GPL3 Drives Wedge Between Novell and Microsoft (com.com)

Submitted by
Bruce Perens
Bruce Perens writes: "In this news.com story, Microsoft declares that its "Novell Support Coupons" will not apply to GPL3 software, in an effort to escape from language in GPL3 that would extend Microsoft's patent protection from Novell customers only — to all users of the software. Novell declares that they're going to include GPL3 software in their distribution. Eben Moglen, Richard Stallman and the GPL3 committees and contributors deserve a (free) beer, for having successfully emasculated Microsoft's attempt to divide the community. Instead, the wedge has now been driven between Microsoft and Novell."
Programming

Submission + - Are 80 columns enough? 1

Submitted by ThinkGeek
ThinkGeek writes: Dating back to the venerable DEC VT100, the 80 column terminal has served us well for over 25 years. Even now, many open source projects and common conventions require lines of code and documentation to fit on that terminal. I am not alone, judging by code I've seen in and out of the open source world, in finding that number insufficient for coding, much less more verbose writing. Given that modern graphical displays (and all popular editors) are capable of far more, is it time we came up with a new standard-sized terminal? If so, what should the new standard be?
Republicans

Submission + - Congressman Orrin Hatch caught pirating software

Submitted by
Rocketship Underpant
Rocketship Underpant writes: "Orrin Hatch, the Congressman viewed by many as a shill for corporate copyright interests, recently stated that people who download copyrighted materials should have their computers destroyed as punishment. However, as Wired.com reports, Hatch's own website uses copyrighted software without permission — a Javascript menu system developed by a British company. Is Mr. Hatch accepting volunteers to go through his home and office destroying all his computers, or were his comments to Congress just a bunch of hypocritical hot air?"

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