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Submission + - Texas makes clean power breakthrough as solar output overtakes coal (reuters.com)

Submitted by AmiMoJo
AmiMoJo writes: For the first time, Texas' main power system looks set to generate more power from solar farms than coal plants during a calendar year in 2025, marking a key new energy transition milestone for the largest power network in the U.S.
The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) generated 2.64 million megawatt hours (MWh) of power from solar assets, compared with 2.44 million MWh of power from coal plants for the January-to-November period, according to data compiled by LSEG.

Submission + - Tunguska Meteor that blasted millions of trees only 'grazed' Earth (space.com) 3

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: A new explanation for a massive blast over a remote Siberian forest in 1908 is even stranger than the mysterious incident itself.

Known as the Tunguska event, the blast flattened more than 80 million trees in seconds, over an area spanning nearly 800 square miles (2,000 square kilometers) — but left no crater. A meteor that exploded before hitting the ground was thought by many to be the culprit. However, a comet or asteroid would likely have left behind rocky fragments after blowing up, and no "smoking gun" remnants of a cosmic visitor have ever been found.

Now, a team of researchers has proposed a solution to this long-standing puzzle: A large iron meteor hurtled toward Earth and came just close enough to generate a tremendous shock wave. But the meteor then curved away from our planet without breaking up, its mass and momentum carrying it onward in its journey through space.

Submission + - Project Gutenberg blocks German users after outrageous court ruling (teleread.org)

Submitted by David Rothman
David Rothman writes: The oldest public domain publisher in the world, Project Gutenberg, has blocked German users after an outrageous legal ruling saying this American nonprofit must obey German copyright law.

Gutenberg is fighting the latest threat to the global Internet, but meanwhile, out of prudence, it is understandably fencing out German book-lovers. This, of course, is not an acceptable permanent solution. Nor is an effort at book-by-book blocking. Imagine the technical issues for fragile, cash-strapped public domain organizations--worrying not only about updated databases covering all the world's countries, but also applying the results to distribution. TeleRead carries two views on the German case involving a Holtzbrinck subsidiary. Senior TeleRead Writer Chris Meadows is more sympathetic to the German court than I am. My pro-Gutenberg views, as TeleRead's editor-publisher-founder, are in the comments section.

Significantly, older books provide just a tiny fraction of the revenue of megaconglomerates like Holtzbrinck but are essential to students of literature and indeed to students in general. What's more, as illustrated by the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act in the U.S., copyright law in most countries tends to reflect the wishes and power of lobbyists more than it does the commonweal. Ideally the travails of Project Gutenberg will encourage tech companies, students, teachers, librarians and others to step up their efforts against oppressive copyright laws.

While writers and publishers deserve fair compensation, let's focus more on the needs of living creators and less on the estates of authors dead for many decades. The three authors involved in the German case are Heinrich Mann (died in 1950), Thomas Mann (1955) and Alfred Döblin (1957).

One solution in the U.S. and elsewhere for modern creators would be national library endowments. The money for a $20-billion U.S. library endowment in five years is, in fact, there. Just ten American billionaires are together worth more than half a billion. Harvard's endowment alone is a whopping $35+ billion, while all the library endowments in America total only several billion or so. A little social justice, please.

Meanwhile, it would be very fitting for Google and other deep-pocketed corporations with an interest in a global Internet and more balanced copyright to help Gutenberg finance its battle. Law schools, other academics, educators and librarians should also offer assistance.

Submission + - Astrophysicists Increasingly Accepting of Electricity Through Space 3

Submitted by Chris Reeve
Chris Reeve writes: An October 2017 paper titled Electric Currents along Astrophysical Jets reports that "Several researchers have reported direct evidence for large scale electric currents along astrophysical jets." A review of the citations at the end of that paper and others (here and here, for instance) would seem to suggest that one of the great Internet science debates has finally been settled: Electricity does indeed travel through space over vast cosmic distances. What has been interesting to watch about this unexpected development is that science journalists have so far not explicitly reported this as a shift in theory, and commenters on sites like phys.org appear to deny that any change has even occurred: "The jets have been shown not to be electric currents, the energy and the physics involved are certainly not electromagnetic." This comment completely rejecting these new findings was highly rated by other phys.org readers, suggesting that the failure to explicitly report this as a change in theory has left this controversial topic in a highly confused state.

Submission + - Robots hit the streets -- and the streets hit back (cnn.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: As robots begin to appear on sidewalks and streets, they're being hazed and bullied. Last week, a drunken man allegedly tipped over a 300-pound security robot in Mountain View, California... Knightscope, which makes the robot that was targeted in Mountain View, said it's had three bullying incidents since launching its first prototype robot three years ago. In 2014, a person attempted to tackle a Knightscope robot. Last year in Los Angeles, people attempted to spray paint a Knightscope robot. The robot sensed the paint and sounded an alarm, alerting local security and the company's engineers... the robot's cameras filmed the pranksters' license plate, making it easy to track them down.

Comment Re:One just arrived, I kid you not (Score 2) 194

by DorkLensman (#43552577) Attached to: Microsoft Ad Campaign Puts a Hotspot Inside a Magazine
There's a lot of stuff in that little device. Try browsing to 192.168.100.1 ... admin/admin ... there's an HTTP server there (naturally) ... with a lot of settings (FTP, VPN, and on and on). I don't know what actually works. The server says it is "RALink 4.0.0.0" And ... while stumbling through the menus, I found the System Command option. And did an 'ls'. Some sort of tiny unix/linux in there. Have fun, everyone.

Comment One just arrived, I kid you not (Score 5, Informative) 194

by DorkLensman (#43548415) Attached to: Microsoft Ad Campaign Puts a Hotspot Inside a Magazine
I just had a "matrix" moment. I read the summary ... and within 10 minutes, a priority mail package arrived. "What's this?" ... opened the envelope and out popped a suspiciously thick copy of Forbes, containing one of the hotspots. Surreal. Hopefully, I will have time tonight to do some testing.

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