Meshugga - Slashdot User

Submission + - Swedish Hackerspace raided by the police (forskningsavd.se) 4

Submitted by intedinmamma on Sunday November 29, 2009 @07:18PM

intedinmamma writes: At 20.45 on Saturday the 28th of November the police raided the social centre Utkanten in Malmö, where the hackerspace Forskningsavdelningen is housed. Twenty officers in full riot gear and ski masks broke into the space, using crowbars. The official reason for the raid was to do a “pub check” because of the suspicion that there was illegal selling of alcohol going on at a punk concert. After the raid the cops confiscated a lot of stuff, being indiscriminate as to whose effects were removed. A lot of equipment from Forskningsavdelningen were taken, and also some personal belongings, even though the hackerspace was unaffiliated with the group arranging the concert downstairs.

Low-Power Home Linux Server? 697

Posted by Soulskill on Sunday October 25, 2009 @01:11PM from the how-long-can-a-car-battery-power-it dept.

mpol writes "For years I've been using a home server with Linux, but recently I've been having doubts about the electric bill. I'm not touched by the recession yet, but I would like to cut costs, and going from a 100-Watt system to a 30-Watt system would save me 70 bucks a year. The system doesn't need to do much, just apache, imap, ssh and some nfs, but I do prefer to have a full-fledged system, where I can choose what to install on it. I also don't really care if it's a low-power Via or an ARM processor as long as it's cheap. I'm aiming for $300 or less for a full system, which I could then earn back in about four years through power savings. I've been reading about the Western Digital Mybook World Edition, which has an ARM processor but isn't that easy to install Debian on. A Mac Mini draws about 85 Watts, so that isn't an option either. Something a bit more than turn-key would be fine, but preferably not a complete hack-job. Adding a temporary CR-ROM or DVD-ROM, or a USB disk with an iso to install from would be nice. Any Slashdotters run nice and cheap low-power Linux systems? What can you recommend?"

VASIMR Ion Engine Could Cut Mars Trip To 39 Days 356

Posted by CmdrTaco on Monday October 19, 2009 @10:12AM from the i'll-believe-when-i-ride-it dept.

An anonymous reader writes "It would take about 39 days to reach Mars, compared to six months by conventional rocket power. 'This engine is in fact going to be tested on the International Space Station, launched about 2013,' astronaut Chris Hadfield said. The Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket (VASIMR®) system encompasses three linked magnetic cells. The 'Plasma Source' cell involves the main injection of neutral gas (typically hydrogen, or other light gases) to be turned into plasma and the ionization subsystem. The 'RF Booster' cell acts as an amplifier to further energize the plasma to the desired temperature using electromagnetic waves. The 'Magnetic Nozzle' cell converts the energy of the plasma into directed motion and ultimately useful thrust."

Comment Re:Thank god I'm from Austria (Europe) (Score 1) 1259

by Meshugga on Monday October 19, 2009 @07:55AM (#29792243) Attached to: Student Loan Interest Rankles College Grads

This, and you get up to 760 EUR (~1100 USD) non-refundable subsidy each month if you stay below a certain time threshold (~4-6 years, depending on major, 1.5 years for the PhD) with progressing in your studies. You only get this if you "need" it, but with a typical low to average income family, you do most certainly get it.
You also get the same amounts if you start studying after you already worked four or more years long.
And with those monthly subsidies in effect, you can still work up to a yearly gross (but not taxed) income of 8000EUR.
Student health insurance with accidents and dental (the standard austrian public insurance covering) is included, of course. (We really don't usually worry about insurance coverage in any kind of employment or unemployment, since it's always compulsory* and automatically deducted or paid for you)

In Austria currently people argue very very emotionally about bi-yearly (!!) tuition fees in the amounts of 360.- EUR each which would be waived anyway if the student can't afford it (i.e. is on subsidy already).

Makes me wonder.

* compulsory also means its very cheap, ~180 EUR is the maximum rate (depends on your income) you pay if you are employed. Freelancers pay more.

Gigantic Air Gun To Blast Cargo Into Orbit 384

Posted by timothy on Sunday October 11, 2009 @05:36PM from the phwipt-phwipt dept.

Hugh Pickens writes: "The New Scientist reports that with a hat tip to Jules Verne's From the Earth to the Moon , physicist John Hunter has outlined the design of a gigantic gun that could slash the cost of putting cargo into orbit. At the Space Investment Summit in Boston last week, Hunter described the design for a 1.1-kilometer-long gun that he says could launch 450-kilogram payloads at 6 kilometers per second. A small rocket engine would then boost the projectile into low-Earth orbit. The gun would cost $500 million to build, says Hunter, but individual launch costs would be lower than current methods. 'We think it's at least a factor of 10 cheaper than anything else,' Hunter says. The gun is based on the SHARP (Super High Altitude Research Project) light gas gun Hunter helped to build in the 1990s while at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in California. With a barrel 47 meters long, it used compressed hydrogen gas to fire projectiles weighing a few kilograms at speeds of up to 3 kilometers per second."

Software To Diagnose Faulty PC Hardware? 274

Posted by timothy on Saturday October 10, 2009 @03:47PM from the diagnostics-are-underrated dept.

Etylowy writes "Over the years I have repaired my own PC and those belonging to family and friends many, many times. While in most cases it turned out to be restoring a system after malware/the user/Windows made a mess, or simple cases of 'follow the smell of smoke and molten plastic,' there were some nasty ones where the computer mostly works. By 'mostly,' I mean: you can boot it up, it might even work for a while, but will crash way too often to blame it all on Microsoft — what do you do then? Once you strip it of any extra hardware (which, with today's motherboards that have pretty much everything integrated, might not be an option) you are left with the CPU, motherboard, graphics card, RAM and HDD. You can test the HDD, you can run memtest86+ to check the RAM, but how do you go about testing the CPU, motherboard and graphics card trio to find which is to blame? Replacing them one by one isn't really an option. Do you know of any software that would help the way memtest helps with RAM?"

Microsoft Files "Emergency Motion" To Ship Word 221

Posted by kdawson on Monday August 17, 2009 @07:43PM from the my-word dept.

adeelarshad82 writes "Several days after a judge ordered Microsoft to halt sales of Word and handed down $290M in fines, the software giant has moved to stop the ban. On Friday Microsoft filed an emergency motion to stop the judgment and waive the bond requirement, according to court filings. The actual document was filed under seal, so the full contents of the request have not yet been made public."

EFF Says Burning Man Usurps Digital Rights 439

Posted by CmdrTaco on Thursday August 13, 2009 @08:43AM from the free-spirit-for-a-price dept.

Hugh Pickens writes "In a few weeks, tens of thousands of creative people will make their yearly pilgrimage to Nevada's Black Rock desert for Burning Man, an annual art event and temporary community celebrating radical self expression, self-reliance, creativity and freedom, but EFF reports that the event's Terms and Conditions include 'a remarkable bit of legal sleight-of-hand.' As soon as 'any third party displays or disseminates' your photos or videos in a manner that the Burning Man Organization (BMO) doesn't like, those photos or videos become the property of the BMO. BMO's Terms and Conditions also limits your own rights to use your own photos and videos on any public websites obliging you to take down any photos to which BMO objects, for any reason; and forbidding you from allowing anyone else to reuse your photos. This 'we automatically own all your stuff' magic appears to be creative lawyering intended to allow the BMO to use the streamlined 'notice and takedown' process enshrined in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to quickly remove photos from the Internet giving BMO the power of fast and easy online censorship. 'Burning Man strives to celebrate our individuality, creativity and free spirit,' writes Corynne McSherry. 'Unfortunately, the fine print on the tickets doesn't live up to that aspiration.'"

New DoS Vulnerability In All Versions of BIND 9 197

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday July 28, 2009 @10:02PM from the binding-with-briars-my-joys-and-desires dept.

Icemaann writes "ISC is reporting that a new, remotely exploitable vulnerability has been found in all versions of BIND 9. A specially crafted dynamic update packet will make BIND die with an assertion error. There is an exploit in the wild and there are no access control workarounds. Red Hat claims that the exploit does not affect BIND servers that do not allow dynamic updates, but the ISC post refutes that. This is a high-priority vulnerability and DNS operators will want to upgrade BIND to the latest patch level."

Which Game Series Would You Reboot? 1120

Posted by Soulskill on Tuesday July 28, 2009 @09:56AM from the star-control-please dept.

Franchise reboots are all the rage these days in Hollywood, and the trend is starting to creep into the games industry as well. The Guardian's games blog is running a story discussing a few examples and pondering likely candidates for future reboots. Quoting: "If anything, the concept of the reboot makes more sense in the videogame sector than it does in movies. For a start, games are complex entities, with each new iteration in a familiar series adding many, many hours of fresh narrative content. Entering, say, the Zelda, Resident Evil, Half-Life, Dragon Quest or Metal Gear worlds at this stage must be massively intimidating — even if the developers go to great lengths to make each entry work as a singular, self-contained entity within the canon. Also, videogames are going through a paradigm shift in terms of popular appeal at the moment. The faithful audience of young males has been joined by new demographics brought in by the Wii, PC casual games, and now the iPhone. Many of these people may be vaguely aware of long-running game brands, but won't have a clue about the key characters, sign post events and basic gameplay mechanisms." So, which series (or individual title) would you like to see rebooted?

Security Certificate Warnings Don't Work 432

Posted by timothy on Sunday July 26, 2009 @11:03PM from the for-the-same-reason-most-people-ignore-etruscan dept.

angry tapir writes "In a laboratory experiment, researchers found that between 55 percent and 100 percent of participants ignored certificate security warnings, depending on which browser they were using (different browsers use different language to warn their users). The researchers first conducted an online survey of more than 400 Web surfers, to learn what they thought about certificate warnings. They then brought 100 people into a lab and studied how they surf the Web. They found that people often had a mixed-up understanding of certificate warnings. For example, many thought they could ignore the messages when visiting a site they trust, but that they should be more wary at less-trustworthy sites."

Stallman Says Pirate Party Hurts Free Software 546

Posted by kdawson on Friday July 24, 2009 @03:15PM from the arrr-not-so-fast dept.

bonch writes "Richard Stallman has written an article on the GNU Web site describing the effect the Swedish Pirate Party's platform would have on the free software movement. While he supports general changes to copyright law, he makes a point that many anti-copyright proponents don't realize — the GPL itself is a copyright license that relies on copyright law to protect access to source code. According to Stallman, the Pirate Party's proposal of a five-year limit on copyright would remove the freedom users have to gain access to source code by eventually allowing its inclusion in proprietary products. Stallman suggests requiring proprietary software to also release its code within five years to even the balance of power."

Armadillo Aerospace Flight Paves Way For Science Payloads 63

Posted by timothy on Thursday July 23, 2009 @02:05PM from the how-much-for-a-spacemail-stamp dept.

Matt_dk writes "Armadillo Aerospace conducted two groundbreaking atmospheric test flights this weekend with their 'Mod' vertical-takeoff-vertical-landing rocket, a vehicle familiar to anyone who has followed NASA's Lunar Lander Challenge competitions. Flying from their test facility in Caddo Mills, Texas, Armadillo Aerospace first completed a milestone flight under a NASA contract, using methane fuel and liquid oxygen as propellant. Later that same afternoon, a second successful low-altitude flight was performed using a 'boosted hop' trajectory of the same type that will be used for suborbital flights to space."

Microsoft Releases Linux Device Drivers As GPL 362

Posted by timothy on Monday July 20, 2009 @01:10PM from the could-easily-be-world's-largest-open-source-distributor dept.

mjasay writes "Microsoft used to call the GPL 'anti-American.' Now, as Microsoft releases Hyper-V Linux Integration Components (LinuxIC) under the GPL (version 2), apparently Microsoft calls the GPL 'ally.' Of course, there was little chance the device drivers would be accepted into the Linux kernel base unless open source, but the news suggests a shift for Microsoft. It also reflects Microsoft's continued interest in undermining its virtualization competition through low prices, and may suggests concern that it must open up if it wants to fend off insurgent virtualization strategies from Red Hat (KVM), Novell (XEN), and others in the open-source camp. Microsoft said the move demonstrates its interest in using open source in three key areas: 1) Make its software development processes more efficient, 2) product evangelism, and 3) using open source to reduce marketing and sales costs or to try out new features that highlight parts of the platform customers haven't seen before."

Main Toilet On ISS Craps Out 219

Posted by kdawson on Monday July 20, 2009 @01:44AM from the series-of-tubes dept.

The Narrative Fallacy writes "NASA has spent years getting ready for a crowd in space — adding additional sleeping quarters, learning how to recycle liquid waste into drinking water, and installing a second bathroom last year. But now the main toilet has broken down on the International Space Station while a record 13 astronauts are on board. For now Mission Control has advised the astronauts to hang an 'out of service' sign on the toilet as it may take days to repair. In the meantime, Endeavour's seven astronauts will be restricted to the shuttle bathroom. Last year a Russian cosmonaut complained that he was no longer allowed to use the US toilet because of billing and cost issues. Now the six space ISS residents will have to get in line to use the back-up toilet in the Russian part of the station. The pump separator on the malfunctioning toilet has apparently flooded, and ESA astronaut Frank De Winne is the guy tasked with putting his plumbing skills to work on short notice. 'We don't yet know the extent of the problem,' says flight director Brian Smith, adding that the toilet troubles were 'not going to be an issue' for now."

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