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Submission + - How Do You Move a City? (gizmag.com)

Submitted by Zothecula
Zothecula writes: The town of Kiruna in Lapland, Sweden, is known for its Jukkasjårvi Ice Hotel and for hosting the recent Arctic Council summit. It also sits within the Arctic Circle, on one of the world’s richest deposits of iron ore. Now in danger of collapse due to extensive deep mining, the city center is to be relocated.

Submission + - The True Color of Ancient Sea Creatures (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: Looking a bit like a dolphin, but with a long slim snout filled with pointy teeth, one species of ichthyosaur was practically invisible in the murky depths of Jurassic seas, thanks to dark pigmentation that covered its entire body. That’s one conclusion of a new study that provides an unprecedented peek at the coloration of sea creatures alive during or soon after the dinosaur era. The approach involves bombarding fossils with charged particles and then analyzing the particles that are knocked from the surface, which reveals remnants of ancient pigments. Dark pigmentation may have helped ichthyosaurs and other predators camouflage themselves in the murky depths while they hunted prey.

Submission + - Chang'e-3 lunar rover landing tomorrow at 13:40 UTC (planetary.org)

Submitted by savuporo
savuporo writes: The Chinese Chang'e-3 probe will be landing on the moon tomorrow, 13:40 UTC. CCTV is likely to carry the event life as they did for initial launch. According to technical overview of the mission scenario and instruments the landing will be fully autonomous with active landing hazard avoidance, which is the first time this has been attempted on any planetary landing. More real-time updates can be found on Twitter with ChangE3 hash tag and NASASpaceFlight forums live event section.

Submission + - Critics Reassess 'Starship Troopers' as a Misunderstood Masterpiece 2

Submitted by Hugh Pickens DOT Com
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes: Calum Marsh writes in The Atlantic that when Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers hit theaters 16 years ago today, American critics slammed it as a “crazed, lurid spectacle” featuring “raunchiness tailor-made for teen-age boys" and “a nonstop splatterfest so devoid of taste and logic that it makes even the most brainless summer blockbuster look intelligent.” But now the reputation of the movie based on Robert Heinlein's Hugo award winning novel is beginning to improve as critics begin to recognize the film as a critique of the military-industrial complex, the jingoism of American foreign policy, and a culture that privileges reactionary violence over sensitivity and reason. "Starship Troopers is satire, a ruthlessly funny and keenly self-aware sendup of right-wing militarism," writes Marsh. "The fact that it was and continues to be taken at face value speaks to the very vapidity the movie skewers." The movie has rightfully come to be appreciated by some as an unsung masterpiece. Coming in at number 20 on Slant Magazine’s list of the 100 best films of the 1990s last year, the site’s Phil Coldiron described it as “one of the greatest of all anti-imperialist films,” a parody of Hollywood form whose superficial “badness” is central to its critique. "That concept is stiob, which I'll crudely define as a form of parody requiring such a degree of over-identification with the subject being parodied that it becomes impossible to tell where the love for that subject ends and the parody begins," writes Coldiron. "If you’re prepared for the rigor and intensity of Verhoeven’s approach—you’ll get the joke Starship Troopers is telling," says Marsh. "And you’ll laugh."

Submission + - Company to Balloon Tourists to the Edge of Space for $75,000 (discovery.com)

Submitted by astroengine
astroengine writes: If the thought of a rocket ride to space — or the $250,000 price tag to get there — leaves you feeling queasy, an Arizona firm thinks it has a gentler, less expensive alternative. World View, an offshoot of privately owned Paragon Space Development Corp., is developing a balloon-launched, near-space (30 kilometers) ride for $75,000 — less than one-third the current cost to fly on Virgin Galactic's suborbital SpaceShipTwo. “It really is very gentle. You can be up at altitude for hours, for days for research if you need to be... I think we have the opportunity to give a really, really incredible experience to people — and for a lot less than most of what’s out on the market right now,” project co-founder and Paragon president Jane Poynter told Discovery News.

Submission + - Experian sold social security numbers to ID Theft Service

Submitted by realized
realized writes: Experian — one of the three national US credit bureaus — reportedly sold SSNs through its subsidiary, Court Ventures, to the operators of SuperGet.info who then offered all of the information online for a price. The website would advertise having "99% to 100% of all USA" in their database on websites frequented by carders.

Hieu Minh Ngo, the website owner, has recently been charged with 15-count indictment filed under seal in November 2012, charging him with conspiracy to commit wire fraud, substantive wire fraud, conspiracy to commit identity fraud, substantive identity fraud, aggravated identity theft, conspiracy to commit access device fraud, and substantive access device fraud.

Submission + - Learning to Code: Are We Having Fun Yet? 1

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: Nate West has a nice essay on the importance of whimsy in learning to program. "It wasn’t until I was writing Ruby that I found learning to program to be fun," recalls West. "What’s funny is it really doesn’t take much effort to be more enjoyable than the C++ examples from earlier...just getting to write gets.chomp and puts over cout > made all the difference. Ruby examples kept me engaged just long enough that I could find Why’s Poignant Guide to Ruby." So, does the future of introductory computer programming books and MOOCs lie in professional, business-like presentations, or does a less-polished production with some genuine goofy enthusiasm help the programming medicine go down?

Submission + - World's largest OTEC power plant planned for China (gizmag.com)

Submitted by cylonlover
cylonlover writes: Lockheed Martin has been getting its feet wet in the renewable energy game for some time. In the 1970s it helped build the world’s first successful floating Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion (OTEC) system that generated net power, and in 2009 it was awarded a contract to develop an OTEC pilot plant in Hawaii. That project has apparently been canceled but the company has now shifted its OTEC sights westward by teaming up with Hong Kong-based Reignwood Group to co-develop a 10 MW pilot plant that will be built off the coast of southern China.
Science

Submission + - Forbes 2013 career list flamed by university professors (forbes.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The Forbes list of "least stressful jobs" for 2013 is headlined by... university professors. This comes at a time in which the academic community has been featured on controversies about 100-hour week work journeys, doctors live on food stamps, tenured staff is laid off large science institutions, and the National Science Foundation suffers severe budget cuts, besides the well known (and sometimes publicized) politics of publish or perish. The Forbes reporter has received abundant feedback and published a shy, foot-note "addendum"; however, their cited source, CareerCast (which does not map to any recognizable career journalist, but rather to a Sports writer), does not seem to have had the same luck. The comments of the Forbes reporter on the existence of a Summer break for graduates ("I am curious whether professors work that hard over the summer") are particularly noteworthy.
Government

Submission + - Scary Toothbrush prompts shutdown of world's busiest airport (ajc.com)

Submitted by McGruber
McGruber writes: The big buzz for travelers today is the story (http://www.ajc.com/news/news/local/atlanta-airport-closed-by-toothbrush/nTmqK/) of how a scary toothbrush prompted the closure of Hartsfield–Jackson Atlanta International Airport: "Airport officials told Channel 2 Action News that an electric toothbrush began vibrating inside a bag checked onto an AirTran flight, causing workers to alert airport officials to the strange noise." The terminal and the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority (MARTA) subway were both temporary closed "out of an abundance of caution".

ATL has been the world's busiest airport by passenger traffic since 1998, and by number of landings and take-offs since 2005.[
Games

Submission + - Dad Hires In-Game 'Assassins' To Discourage Son's Gaming Habit (huffingtonpost.com) 2

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A irritated father of a 23-year old gamer hired "In game assassins" to attempt to make his son quit playing video games and have him get a job. While he recently had a job at a software development company he quit because he decided he didn't like the work
Programming

Submission + - The Struggles of Developing StarCraft (codeofhonor.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Patrick Wyatt led production efforts for several of Blizzard Entertainment's early games, including Warcraft 1 and 2 and StarCraft. Wyatt has just published an in-depth look at the development of StarCraft, highlighting many of the problems the team encountered, and several of the hacks they came to regret later. Quoting: 'Given all the issues working against the team, you might think it was hard to identify a single large source of bugs, but based on my experiences the biggest problems in StarCraft related to the use of doubly-linked linked lists. Linked lists were used extensively in the engine to track units with shared behavior. With twice the number of units of its predecessor — StarCraft had a maximum of 1600, up from 800 in Warcraft 2 — it became essential to optimize the search for units of specific types by keeping them linked together in lists. ... All of these lists were doubly-linked to make it possible to add and remove elements from the list in constant time — O(1) — without the necessity to traverse the list looking for the element to remove — O(N). Unfortunately, each list was “hand-maintained” — there were no shared functions to link and unlink elements from these lists; programmers just manually inlined the link and unlink behavior anywhere it was required. And hand-rolled code is far more error-prone than simply using a routine that’s already been debugged. ... So the game would blow up all the time. All the time.'
Network

Submission + - Judge Rules Sniffing Open WiFi Networks Is Not Wiretapping (arstechnica.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Ars reports on a decision from a district judge in Illinois, who ruled that sniffing traffic on an unencrypted Wi-Fi network is not wiretapping. In the ruling, the judge points out an exception in the Wiretap Act which allows people to 'intercept or access an electronic communication made through an electronic communication system that is configured so that such electronic communication is readily accessible to the general public.' He concludes that 'the communications sent on an unencrypted Wi-Fi network are readily available to the general public.' Orin Kerr disagrees with the ruling, saying that the intent of the person setting up the network is important: 'No one suggests that unsecured wireless networks are set up with the goal that everyone on the network would be free to read the private communications of others.'

Submission + - Violation of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by mbone
mbone writes: A very interesting paper has just hit the streets (or, at least, Physics Review Letters) about the Heisenberg uncertainty relationship as it was originally formulated about measurements. They find that they can exceed the uncertainty limit in measurements (although the uncertainty limit in quantum states is still followed, so the foundations of quantum mechanics still appear to be sound.) This is really an attack on quantum entanglement (the correlations imposed between two related particles), and so may have immediate applications in cracking quantum cryptography systems. It may also be easier to read quantum communications without being detected than people originally thought.

Submission + - Finnish bureaucracy to kill crowdfunded textbook project? (kickstarter.com)

Submitted by
linjaaho
linjaaho writes: "Senja Larsen, a person who runs popular Facebook study group Senja teaches you Swedish, collected $14,161 in Kickstarter crowd funding service. The project caught large media attention in Finland (TV and all major newspapers), since it is the first crowdfunded book project in this country and among the first Finnish crowdfunded projects (the previous ones are Iron Sky movie, Myrskyn Sankarit role playing game and Wishbone headphone wire manager). Now, after successfully collecting the funds for the book (and after the book has been edited and printed), the National Police Board of Finland has asked Senja to submit a statement concerning using Crowdfunding to finance a project and the terminology used. It is possible that all the funding collected must be returned. The main problem is that direct translations of terminology at Kickstarter, such as "bounty" or "support" are interpreted to mean collecting money without giving anything back, and this kind of operation requires a permit which can be only given to associations, not to private persons and it takes long to apply for such permit."

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If computers take over (which seems to be their natural tendency), it will serve us right. -- Alistair Cooke

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