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Space

Submission + - Tau Zero Takes Aim at Interstellar Propulsion (discovery.com)

Submitted by
astroengine
astroengine writes: "Could the future of interstellar space travel be in the hands of a group of volunteer scientists? According to Paul Gilster, of Centauri Dreams fame, interstellar propulsion techniques, by their design, will require an incremental approach, headed not by governments, but by private enterprise. And don't expect to reach the nearest star any time soon, that could take centuries! So you think striving toward interstellar spaceflight is a little "far out"? Not so fast. The Tau Zero Foundation is already on the case and has just completed year one of the five year Project Icarus study, just one project that will hopefully carry mankind beyond our solar system."

Submission + - It's suprisingly hard to notice when moving object (harvard.edu)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Scientists at Harvard have found that people are remarkably bad at noticing when moving objects change in brightness, color, size, or shape. In a paper published yesterday in Current Biology, the researchers present a new visual illusion that "causes objects that had once been obviously dynamic to suddenly appear static." The finding has implications for everything from video game design to the training of pilots. Several videos demonstrating this striking effect can be found at http://visionlab.harvard.edu/silencing/.
Science

Submission + - Hypersonic Radio Black-Out Problem Solved (technologyreview.com)

Submitted by KentuckyFC
KentuckyFC writes: Russian physicists have come up with a new way to communicate with hypersonic vehicles surrounded by a sheath of plasma. Ordinarily, this plasma absorbs and reflects radio waves at communications frequencies leading to a few tense minutes during the re-entry of manned vehicles such as the shuttle. However, the problem is even more acute for military vehicles such as ballistic missiles and hypersonic planes. Radio black out prevents these vehicles from accessing GPS signals for navigation and does not allow them to be re-targeted or disarmed at the last minute. But a group of Russian physicists say they can get around this problem by turning the entire plasma sheath into a radio antenna. They point out that any incoming signal is both reflected and absorbed by the plasma. The reflected signal is lost but the absorbed energy sets up a resonating electric field at a certain depth within the plasma. In effect, this layer within the plasma acts like a radio antenna, receiving the signal. However, the signal cannot travel further through the plasma to the spacecraft. Their new idea is to zap this layer with radio waves generated from within the spacecraft. These waves will be both absorbed by the plasma and reflected back inside the spacecraft. However, the key point is that the reflected waves ought to be modulated by any changes in the electric field within the plasma. In other words, the reflected waves should carry a kind of imprint of the original external radio signal. That would allow the craft to receive external signals from GPs satellites or ground control. And the same process in reverse allows the spacecraft to broadcast signals too.
Businesses

Submission + - For Mac developers, Armageddon comes tomorrow (zdnet.com)

Submitted by kdawson
kdawson writes: David Gewirtz's blog post over at ZDNet warns of an imminent price collapse for traditional Mac applications, starting tomorrow when the Mac App Store opens. The larger questions: what will Mac price plunges of 90%-95% mean for the PC software market? For the Mac's market share? Quoting: 'The Mac software market is about as old-school as you get. Developers have been creating, shipping, and selling products through traditional channels and at traditional price points for decades. ... Mac software has historically been priced on a parity with other desktop software. That means small products are about $20. Utilities run in the $50-60 range. Games in the $50 range. Productivity packages and creative tools in the hundreds, and specialty software — well, the sky's the limit. Tomorrow, the sky will fall. Tomorrow, the iOS developers move in and the traditional Mac developers better stick their heads between their legs and kiss those price points goodbye.'
Power

Submission + - Tax Credits Slashed for Boosting Energy-Efficiency

Submitted by
Ponca City
Ponca City writes: "The LA Times reports that the $858-billion federal tax bill signed into law by President Obama on December 17 slashes the popular tax credits for energy-efficient remodeling from 30% of an improvement's cost ($1,500 maximum per taxpayer) to just a 10% credit with a $500 maximum for expenditures on insulation materials, exterior windows and storm doors, skylights, and metal and asphalt roofs that resist heat gain. The net effect of all this, say home building and remodeling experts, will be to severely diminish consumers' interest in energy-efficient home improvements. The gutting of energy-efficiency credits "is a big step backward. It's bad for the environment, bad for consumers and, of course, bad for jobs in our industry," says contractor Donna Shirey. "We're heading the wrong way here, sending absolutely the wrong message." Builder Barb Friedman adds that 70% of all housing units in the country are 30 years old or older, and that most have significant energy inefficiencies caused by their age alone. "The $1,500 credit was a step in the right direction" toward providing owners financial incentives to reduce some of these inefficiencies, "but $500 is more like a drop in the bucket.""

Submission + - DDOS-in-a-box: VM swarm in a dozen lines of shell (gridcentriclabs.com)

Submitted by Laxitive
Laxitive writes: We (GridCentric) just posted a couple of interesting videos demoing a load-testing use-case on top of our freely available Xen-based virtualization platform called Copper. In both videos, we use live-cloning of VMs to instantly create a swarm of worker VMs that act as clients to a webapp. The ability to clone is exposed as an API call to the VM that wants to clone itself, meaning that in a dozen lines of shell, we can script the automatic creation and control of dozens of VMs across multiple physical computers.

Creating a clone VM in Copper is similar in function and complexity to forking a process in Unix, and carries all the same assurances: your new VMs are near exact copies of the original VM, start running within seconds of the clone command being invoked, and are "live" — meaning that all programs running on the original VM remain running on the clone VM.

The more we play with it, the more it feels like live-cloning is one of those core capabilities which is at once powerful as well as easy to leverage in designing distributed applications and services. And it seems that today, when cloud is on the top of everyone's mind, is when we should really be having a discussion on what the APIs, architecture, and features of this new class of distributed operating systems should be.

We hope this demo spurs some of that discussion...
Security

Submission + - Scientists find TSA scanners may tear apart DNA (cnn.com) 3

Submitted by Terrence Aym
Terrence Aym writes: Los Alamos scientist Boian Alexandrov and his team discovered is that the resonant effects of the terahertz (THz) waves bombarding humans unzips the double-stranded DNA molecule. This ripping apart of the twisted chain of DNA creates bubbles between the genes that can interfere with the processes of life itself: normal DNA replication and critical gene expression.

Submission + - Five Low-Cost Windows Video Editing Programs (devx.com)

Submitted by Roblimo
Roblimo writes: Every year, an increasing percentage of my income comes from video shooting and editing. I also help friends, neighbors, and various business associates learn to shoot and edit their own videos. This article describes my five favorite entry-level Windows video editing programs, with a brief run-down of each one's strengths and weaknesses. While I wrote this for people doing business-type videos, this information is also valuable if you want to edit your family's holiday videos. (Free registration required to view.)
The Internet

Submission + - Why I'm Posting Bail Money for Julian Assange (huffingtonpost.com) 3

Submitted by digitaldc
digitaldc writes: Yesterday, in the Westminster Magistrates Court in London, the lawyers for WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange presented to the judge a document from me stating that I have put up $20,000 of my own money to help bail Mr. Assange out of jail.

Furthermore, I (Michael Moore) am publicly offering the assistance of my website, my servers, my domain names and anything else I can do to keep WikiLeaks alive and thriving as it continues its work to expose the crimes that were concocted in secret and carried out in our name and with our tax dollars.
Idle

Submission + - WikiLeaks has “splintering effect” on (myce.com)

Submitted by BussyB
BussyB writes: The expanding droves of WikiLeaks supporters and differing opinions as to how attacks should be carried out is causing a “splintering effect” of what was originally Operation Payback, according to sources at Panda Security.

Since some of the members of the original Operation Payback began Operation Avenge Assange, to rally around WikiLeaks most public representative by staging DDoS attacks against the online operations of corporations who cut off the site as more US diplomatic cables were published, more initiatives have split off with specific causes of their own.
Google

Submission + - Chrome OS's core concept: don't trust users, apps (technologyreview.com)

Submitted by holy_calamity
holy_calamity writes: Google's Chrome OS chiefs explain in Technology Review how most of the web-only OS' features flow from changing one core assumption of previous operating system designs. "Operating systems today are centered on the idea that applications can be trusted to modify the system, and that users can be trusted to install applications that are trustworthy," says Google VP Sundar Pichai. Chrome doesn't trust applications, or users and neither can modify the system. Once users are banned from installing applications, or modifying the system security, usability and more are improved, the Googlers claim.

Submission + - Remote Exim exploit in the wild (exim.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Exim users are going to have a long night ahead of them. Via the exim users mailing list, a user had his exim install hacked via remote exploit that gives the user the privledge of the mailnull user, which can lead to other possible hacks on a system. http://www.exim.org/lurker/message/20101207.215955.bb32d4f2.en.html outlines it.
Censorship

Submission + - EasyDNS Falsely Accused of Unplugging WikiLeaks (easydns.org)

Submitted by kdawson
kdawson writes: EasyDNS, a DNS and hosting provider, was mistakenly identified in press accounts as the entity that knocked wikileaks.org off the Net. It wasn't them, it was EveryDNS, a completely separate outfit. EasyDNS suffered a series of online reprisals as the false attribution spread. When WikiLeaks approached them to add to the robustness of their DNS support, EasyDNS said yes.
Censorship

Submission + - Beating censorship by routing around DNS (itworld.com)

Submitted by jfruhlinger
jfruhlinger writes: Last month, the US gov't shut down a number of sites it claimed were infringing copyright. They did it by ordering VeriSign to change the sites' authoritative domain name servers. This revealed that DNS is subject to government interference — and now a number of projects have emerged to bypass DNS entirely.

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