Feed news.com: Massive solar photovoltaic plants are California-bound (cnet.com)
California utility Pacific Gas Electric is working with OptiSolar and SunPower to add 800 megawatts of photovoltaic solar farms to the grid.
Feed New York Times: Two Large Solar Plants Planned in California (nytimes.com)
FBI Seizes Library Computers Without Warrant 483
An anonymous reader writes "Two FBI agents walked into a public library in Maryland, without a warrant, and walked out with two computers. The library director agreed to release the machines to these smooth-talking feds. According to the article, the director of Frederick County Public Libraries indicated that this was the third time in his 10 years there that the FBI had requested records, but the first time they had come without a court order. The director seemed to indicate no regrets, stating 'It was a decision I made on my experience and the information given to me.' He further justified his actions, noting that the agents indicated specific computers they needed (of the several dozen in the library) and further that they 'had an awful lot of information.'" The library director speculated whether the raid may have involved the Bruce Ivins / anthrax case, musing "Obviously it coincided with the events everyone is talking about," but he said the agents hadn't mentioned it.
Pittsburgh Cancer Center Warns of Cell Phone Risks 555
RevWaldo contributes a link to an AP story carried by Google, according to which "The head of a prominent cancer research institute issued an unprecedented warning to his faculty and staff Wednesday: Limit cell phone use because of the possible risk of cancer. The warning from Dr. Ronald B. Herberman, director of the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute, is contrary to numerous studies that don't find a link between cancer and cell phone use, and a public lack of worry by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration." RevWaldo continues: "One possible solution offered? 'Use a wireless headset.' No risk of EM exposure from one of them, no sirree!"
Apollo 14 Moonwalker Claims Aliens Exist 1268
An anonymous reader writes "Former NASA astronaut and moon-walker Dr Edgar Mitchell — a veteran of the Apollo 14 mission — has stunningly claimed aliens exist. And he says extra-terrestrials have visited Earth on several occasions — but the alien contact has been repeatedly covered up by governments for six decades. Dr Mitchell, 77, said during a radio interview that sources at the space agency who had had contact with aliens described the beings as 'little people who look strange to us.'"
The Death of Nearly All Software Patents? 731
An anonymous reader writes "The Patent and Trademark Office has now made clear that its newly developed position on patentable subject matter will invalidate many and perhaps most software patents, including pioneering patent claims to such innovators as Google, Inc. In a series of cases including In re Nuijten, In re Comiskey and In re Bilski, the Patent and Trademark Office has argued in favor of imposing new restrictions on the scope of patentable subject matter set forth by Congress in article 101 of the Patent Act. In the most recent of these three — the currently pending en banc Bilski appeal — the Office takes the position that process inventions generally are unpatentable unless they 'result in a physical transformation of an article' or are 'tied to a particular machine.'"
Submission + - SPAM: Towards low-cost LED lighting
Roland Piquepaille writes: "You all know that incandescent bulbs are pretty inefficient, converting only 10% of electricity into light — and 90% into heat. Light-emitting diodes, or LEDs, could soon replace incandescent and compact fluorescent bulbs in our homes. They are more efficient and environmentally friendly. But LED lights are currently too expensive because they are using a sapphire-based technology. Now, Purdue University researchers have found a way to build low-cost and bright LEDs for home lighting. According to the researchers, the LED lights now on the market cost about $100 while LED lights based on their new technology could be commercially available within a couple of years for a cost of about $5. It would also help to cut our electricity bill by about 10%, but read more for additional references and an overview of this promising research work."
Submission + - Amazon S3 and SQS Services Down (centernetworks.com)
babooo404 writes: "Amazon's S3 and SQS cloud computing services are currently down. Multiple services are affected including Twitter, Scribd, SmugMug, etc. The service is down over one hour as of 1pm Eastern time on Sunday."
Submission + - Companies Coming Around to Piracy's Upside? (economist.com)
traycerb writes: The Economist has an article detailing how numerous companies are finding piracy's silver lining.
"Statistics about the traffic on file-sharing networks can be useful. They can reveal, for example, the countries where a new singer is most popular, even before his album has been released there. Having initially been reluctant to be seen exploiting this information, record companies are now making use of it. This month BigChampagne, the main music-data analyser, is extending its monitoring service to pirated video, too."
The kicker is Microsoft's tacit endorsement of Windows piracy in developing markets, namely China. The big man himself, Bill Gates, says it best in an interview with Fortune last year: "It's easier for our software to compete with Linux when there's piracy than when there's not."
"Statistics about the traffic on file-sharing networks can be useful. They can reveal, for example, the countries where a new singer is most popular, even before his album has been released there. Having initially been reluctant to be seen exploiting this information, record companies are now making use of it. This month BigChampagne, the main music-data analyser, is extending its monitoring service to pirated video, too."
The kicker is Microsoft's tacit endorsement of Windows piracy in developing markets, namely China. The big man himself, Bill Gates, says it best in an interview with Fortune last year: "It's easier for our software to compete with Linux when there's piracy than when there's not."
Submission + - Guide for small team programming?
dm writes: "I run a small design shop and have been doing more and more web development, including fairly involved back-end programming of what's now essentially become our own CMS. Up to now I've been doing all the programming myself. Now we are working with a second programmer for the first time. I already use version control (SVN) and an issue-tracking system, and I guess we are both decent at what we do — although self-taught — , but we both lack experience programming in a team context. Is there a useful guide for this? Most of the tutorials I have seen for Subversion are surprisingly organized from a single coder's perspective. Where else should I look?"
Submission + - The new Brazilian Internet surveillance Law
Anonymous Hero writes: Nardol is reporting that Brazil is about to approve a law that allows ISPs to peek on users traffic and report to the authorities everything that can be considered a crime.
Submission + - YouTube Under Attack
Kataire writes: A lot of small (and not so small) legal actions involving YouTube make one wonder. Is YouTube suffering from a littigation-based distributed denial of service attack?
Check out these articles,
Loic's plea to get his account back sounds like a growing problem in the corporate content sharing space... content platforms such as YouTube getting so bogged down in litigation that they cannot fairly respond to all the complaints.
Further, with articles like this on News Week [The Internet is the New Sweatshop], it seems there's even some corporate news-mongering to take it apart in public opinion.
Submission + - iPhone 3G Jailbreak Released, Open Source Coming
PainMeds writes: iPhone Atlas is reporting that the first jailbreak for the iPhone 3G has been released, and includes the popular Cydia community installer for distributing free games and applications. Since Apple's SDK was released, web sites have criticized Apple for the restrictions placed on both what developers could write and what APIs they were allowed to use. Others have noted the SDK's incompatibility with the GPL. The Cydia installer has provided a distribution channel for both open source software and software that would otherwise be impossible to build using the restricted SDK. A few applications are already out, including MobileTerminal and NES.app, a Nintendo game console emulator. In just over a week, open development is finally here for the iPhone 3G!
Submission + - Encrypted Google Calendar with Firefox Extensions (ibm.com)
mrcgran writes: "IBM's Nathan Harrington has an interesting essay on using open-source tools to ensure privacy on Google Calendar: "Today's Web applications provide many benefits for online storage, access, and collaboration. Although some applications offer encryption of user data, most do not. This article provides tools and code needed to add basic encryption support for user data in one of the most popular online calendar applications. Building on the incredible flexibility of Firefox extensions and the Gnu Privacy Guard, this article shows you how to store only encrypted event descriptions in Google's Calendar application, while displaying a plain text version to anyone with the appropriate decryption keys.""
Submission + - How do you do "experiment-based" coding?
hazard02 writes: My last two jobs have both teams of mathematicians ("quants") who need to do software development. The quants know enough coding to prototype their ideas, but not enough to implement them robustly in a production environment. Professional coders typically can't understand what the quants need to do (can you understand how to write code to solve a stochastic calculus equation?) What kind of software development environment do you put in place to support non-coders who need to write code?
The quants' main goal is extremely-rapid prototyping: Change this equation in the model, see how it fits the data; change that parameter in the controller, see how the feedback loop is affected. They never use unit tests and they only occasionally use source control. One "code and observe" cycle can last anywhere from a few minutes to a week.
What kind of software methodology do you put in place to support this kind of development? Does it make sense to write unit tests for an hour when you're going to throw the code away in a few minutes? Do you need a different source control paradigm when you have hundreds of branches because you tried out a hundred different hypotheses? What existing tools can you use differently, or do new tools need to be developed?
The quants' main goal is extremely-rapid prototyping: Change this equation in the model, see how it fits the data; change that parameter in the controller, see how the feedback loop is affected. They never use unit tests and they only occasionally use source control. One "code and observe" cycle can last anywhere from a few minutes to a week.
What kind of software methodology do you put in place to support this kind of development? Does it make sense to write unit tests for an hour when you're going to throw the code away in a few minutes? Do you need a different source control paradigm when you have hundreds of branches because you tried out a hundred different hypotheses? What existing tools can you use differently, or do new tools need to be developed?
