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Space

Simulations May Explain Loss of Beagle 2 Mars Probe 98

Posted by timothy from the gremlins-are-everywhere dept.
chrb writes "Researchers at Queensland University have used computer simulations to calculate that the loss of the US$80 million British Beagle 2 Mars probe was due to a bad choice of spin rate during atmospheric entry, resulting in the craft burning up within seconds. The chosen spin rate was calculated by using a bridging function to estimate the transitional forces between the upper and lower atmosphere, while the new research relies on simulation models. Beagle 2 team leader Professor Colin Pillinger has responded saying that the figures are far from conclusive, while another chief Beagle engineer has said 'We still think we got it right.'"

Comment Re:Not very good blocking software (Score 1) 184

by stry_cat (#25660823) Attached to: Australian Censorship Bypassed Before Live Trials

While it is "painfully obvious you're [the parent poster] a highschooler trying to get around some stupid proxy," I think they have a point.

After this censorship thing is implemented lets say you're in Australia just an average bloke (is that what they call a Joe there?). You can't look up proxy lists. Even if you did the proxies listed will probably be blocked by their updating stuff.

So being unable to look up one or use any that are advertised in any public way, you have to set one up. But how are you going to do that? You've got to get on a network outside of the censorship thing. That meas you've got to leave the country and set one up or at least make contact with a foreigner and make arrangements for this. Not only is this unlikely to happen, but it will probably get you on some terrorist watch list or worse.

So you can't get a foreign proxy set up. So now what do you do?

Eh you probably won't have time to even spend on your censored Internet since you'll be working all the time to pay your taxes for this stupid thing.
Earth

2008 Is the Coldest Year of the 21st Century 1039

Posted by timothy from the problem-with-complexity-is-all-the-complexity dept.
dtjohnson writes "Data from the United Kingdom Meteorological Office suggests that 2008 will be an unusually cold year due to the La Nina effect in the western Pacific ocean. Not to worry, though, as the La Nina effect has faded recently so its effect on next year's temperatures will be reduced. However, another natural cycle, the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, is predicted to hold global temperatures steady for the next decade before global warming takes our planet into new warmth. If these predictions are correct, there must be a lot of planetary heat being stored away somewhere ... unless the heat output from the sun is decreasing rather than increasing or the heat being absorbed by the earth is decreasing due to changes in the earth's albedo."
Role Playing (Games)

Submission + - Where to find VC?

Submitted by
PHPNerd
PHPNerd writes: "Some friends and I have been working on an online video game for the last few years in our spare time and have now decided to take it up to the next level. We have a game currently released that is our "demo" and we have been hard at work on the next (and "real") version of the game. In our small amount of publicity, we've managed to get something around 20,000 user accounts and a small but active community. The only problem is that it's all done in our spare time and that makes development slow. There's clear market potential for this game and money to be made, but I fear that without serious venture we won't ever get there in a reasonable amount of time. Furthermore, when you're in grad school, young and broke, you don't know anyone with money, or how to get in touch with anyone with money. There was an Ask Slashdot recently that asked about how to pitch a game idea, and the most common response was to do it yourself and seek VC, but no one mentioned where or how. Can anyone at Slashdot please point me in the right direction for finding venture capital?"
PHP

Submission + - WAMP / LAMP for local developement...which one??? 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: I am looking for a solid WAMP and/or LAMP development environment for Joomla and/or Drupal. Which of the many different LAMP/WAMP, Drupal/Joomla option would you recommend? I'm a web designer that dabbles with programming...so which environment is the more suitable option for developing my own little space on the web(forum, blog, access control for files). I will be using a budget shared hosting environment and plan on building my own 'theme' for it.
Security

How Phishers Think, Act, and Make a Profit 133

Posted by timothy from the good-laugh-at-your-expense dept.
whitehartstag writes with a write up of "the excellent session at Black Hat that detailed 'how phishers create sites, share info and code, and basically are lazy.' They store their stolen data 'on websites that they have hacked into, or on [publically available] sites like guestbooks. And even worse, they are not protecting their stolen data ... which means that all one needs to do to find this info is to reverse engineer a real phisher's website, look at their PHP script, and find out where they are storing the data.'"
AMD

Submission + - Your Server Is Wasting Your CPU (infoworld.com)

Submitted by
snydeq
snydeq writes: "While using an AMD Barcelona server to create a portable benchmarking kit, InfoWorld's Tom Yager discovered something unexpected: 'I could incur variances in some benchmark tests ranging from 10 to 60 percent through combined manipulation of the server's BIOS settings, BIOS version, compiler flags, and OS release.' Yager put this matter to AMD's performance engineers and was told he was seeing an effect widely known among CPU engineers, but seldom communicated to IT — that the performance envelope of a CPU is cast in silicon, but is sculpted in software. 'Long before you lay hands on a server,' Yager writes, 'BIOS and OS engineers have reshaped its finely tuned logic in code, sometimes with the real intent of making it faster or more efficient in some way that AMD hadn't considered, sometimes to compensate for overall server design flaws, and sometimes to homogenize the server to flatten its performance relative to Intel's.' One of the chief culprits is Microsoft, which, starting with Vista, has been writing the processor drivers exclusively. And there is no way for IT or end-users to know what they are missing."
User Journal

Submission + - Flickr Boots Users For Making Simple Mistakes (laist.com)

Submitted by
Andy Sternberg
Andy Sternberg writes: "Recently a rather popular Flickr member was involved in a ridiculous flame war against some angry trolls. As an intended joke, she posted a GIF of some bouncing (covered) breasts in the comments thread, which appeared to most Flickr users (including myself) to be rather silly, a joke amongst friends. The GIF was rather small and, unbeknownst to the poster, contained an explicit image in the upper corner. The owner of the photostream did not complain. But someone else did. In a rather impulsive act of nepotism, Flickr went ahead and started deleting every comment ever made by this person, or as they said chillingly "we're scrubbing your comments from the Flickrverse." Over 10,000 of them.

(WTF is a Flickrverse and when did they get so damned important that they are not just Flickrland or even Flickrworld but a whole Flickrverse?)

Flickr stated that putting dirty animated GIFs in the comments is a way of circumventing their safety filters and a means of spreading porn to the public. Sure, maybe it is, and that behavior should be flagged if it happens, let's say, repeatedly. But once? As a joke? Coming from a user whose photostream is comprised of stuffed animals and flowers and a few dead leaves, one would think a more appropriate response would be deleting that comment, erasing all of her comments with embedded GIFs, or giving her a warning and saying "what the hell were you thinking?" Instead they took their big giant Flickrverse sterilizer and went through and sanitized everything she'd laid her dirty little paws on and bleached it out, saving the souls of Flickr users everywhere. Even those of us who really wanted needed her comments there to boost the entertainment value of their otherwise mundane and dull photostreams, yes, we've been saved as well.

Maybe what is comes down to is that Flickr should stop calling itself a community and reiterate that it is not nearly as friendly or democratic as it would like to sound. Its users are not entitled to specific rights and privileges. Mistakes are not allowed. Cruel and unusual punishments are not beyond the reach of the powers that be. There is no writ of habeas corpus. And there are many rules prohibiting the exercise of free speech which are not clearly delineated but can be enforced at any time to the fullest extent of the law."
Government

Submission + - First-ever national identity card system (yahoo.com)

Submitted by lo5
lo5 writes: The Homeland Security Department has spent years crafting the final regulations for the REAL ID Act, a law designed to make it harder for terrorists, illegal immigrants and con artists to get government-issued identification. The effort once envisioned to take effect in 2008 has been pushed back in the hopes of winning over skeptical state officials

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All your files have been destroyed (sorry). Paul.

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