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Space

"Pathfinders" Take Shape For Galileo, Europe's GPS 105

Posted by kdawson from the dodging-the-space-junk dept.
oliderid sends along a BBC report on progress toward Europe's home-grown GPS system. The Galileo concept will get an initial test via four "pathfinder" satellites that will be the first in the Galileo constellation. Galileo is intended to be complementary with the US GPS system — when all 30 Galileo birds are flying, a receiver with both GS and Galileo capability should enjoy 1-meter positional accuracy, vs. the several meters available through GPS alone, according to the article. There's a video tour of the facility where the pathfinders are being built. "After all the wrangling, the delays, and the furor over cost, Europe's version of GPS is finally starting to take shape. Due for launch in pairs in late 2010 and early 2011, the 'pathfinders' will form a mini-constellation in the sky. They will transmit the navigation signals that demonstrate the European system can become a reality."
Businesses

Are You a Blue-Collar Or White-Collar Developer? 836

Posted by Soulskill from the what-about-three-moon-wolf-collar dept.
jammag writes "Some developers have gone to four-year universities, where they've also studied subjects like history and sociology, while other coders go to vocational schools and focus purely on writing great software. So why, asks a longtime developer, is there a stigma attached to not having a four-year degree, when 'blue collar' coders might be better trained? Why does the software industry keep emphasizing this difference — and generally giving better pay to four-year grads? Isn't being a developer about real skill level, not the piece of paper on the wall?"
Security

The "Hail Mary Cloud" Is Growing 102

Posted by Soulskill from the like-a-zombie-chia-pet dept.
badger.foo writes "The Australian rickrolling of jailbroken iPhones only goes to prove that bad passwords are bad for you, Peter Hansteen points out, as he reports on the further exploits of the password-guessing Hail Mary Cloud (which we've discussed in the past). The article contains log data that could indicate that the cloud of distributed, password-guessing hosts is growing. 'With 1767 hosts in the current sample it is likely that we have a cloud of at least several thousand, and most likely no single guessing host in the cloud ever gets around to contacting every host in the target list. The busier your SSH deamon is with normal traffic, the harder it will be to detect the footprint of Hail Mary activity, and likely a lot of this goes undetected.'"
Space

The Space Garbage Scow, ala Cringely 221

Posted by Soulskill from the dream-big dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Robert X. Cringely once again educates and amuses with his take on how we could clean up the garbage that's in orbit around Earth. I cannot vouch for his math, but it makes sense to me. Quoting: 'We’d start in a high orbit, above the space junk, because we could trade that altitude for speed as needed, simply by flying lower, trading potential energy for kinetic. Dragging the net behind a little unmanned spacecraft, my idea would be to go past each piece of junk in such a way that it not only lodges permanently in the net, but that doing so adds kinetic energy (hitting at shallow angles to essentially tack like a sailboat off the debris). But wait, there’s more! You not only have to try to get energy from each encounter, it helps if — like in a game of billiards or pool — each encounter results in an effective ricochet sending the net in the proper trajectory for its next encounter. Rinse and repeat 18,000 times.'"
Power

NIF Aims For the Ultimate Green Energy Source 234

Posted by Soulskill from the crazy-eddie's-discount-power dept.
theodp writes "Edward Moses and his team of 500 scientists and engineers at Lawrence Livermore's National Ignition Facility are betting $3.5B in taxpayer money on a tiny pellet they hope could produce an endless supply of safe, clean energy. By the fall of 2010, the team aims to start blasting capsules containing deuterium-tritium fuel with 1.4 megajoules of laser power, a first step towards the holy grail of controlled nuclear fusion. Not all are convinced that Moses will lead us to the promised land. 'They're snake-oil salesmen,' says Thomas Cochran, a scientist with the Natural Resources Defense Council. Moses, for his part, seems unfazed by the skepticism, saying he's confident that his team will succeed."
Communications

Why Email Has Become Dangerous 255

Posted by CmdrTaco from the run-away-run-away dept.
mikkl666 writes "The Sydney Morning Herald runs an interesting story dealing with a study about email user behavior, explaining how and why email can be a terrible distraction: 'It takes an average of 64 seconds to recover your train of thought after interruption by email. So people who check their email every five minutes waste 8 1/2 hours a week figuring out what they were doing moments before.' Email is also compared to slot machines in the way it works psychologically: 'So with email, usually when I check it there is nothing interesting, but every so often there's something wonderful — an invite out or maybe some juicy gossip — and I get a reward.' There are also some hints offered on how to keep control of the inbox, for those of us already addicted."
Google

Google Updates Chrome's Terms of Service 318

Posted by timothy from the credit-where-due dept.
centuren writes "In response to the reaction to Chrome's terms of service, Google has truncated the offending Section 11, apologizing for the oversight. The new Section 11 contains only the first sentence included in their Universal Terms of Service, now stating: 'You retain copyright and any other rights you already hold in Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services.'"
The Internet

Comcast To Cap Data Transfers At 250 GB In October 939

Posted by timothy from the crimp-in-your-style dept.
JagsLive writes with this story from PC Magazine: "Comcast has confirmed that all residential customers will be subject to a 250 gigabyte per month data limit starting October 1. 'This is the same system we have in place today,' Comcast wrote in an amendment to its acceptable use policy. 'The only difference is that we will now provide a limit by which a customer may be contacted.' The cable provider insisted that 250 GB is "an extremely large amount of data, much more than a typical residential customer uses on a monthly basis. ... As part of our pre-existing policy, we will continue to contact the top users of our high-speed Internet service and ask them to curb their usage,' Comcast said Thursday. 'If a customer uses more than 250 GB and is one of the top users of our service, he or she may be contacted by Comcast to notify them of excessive use,' according to the AUP."
Censorship

Submission + - US Hosting Company Shelves Anti-Islam Film

Submitted by
h4rm0ny
h4rm0ny writes: "The BBC is covering the story of how US hosting company Network Solutions has suspended the account of a Dutch politician who wished to distribute a short film he had produced on the subject of Islam saying the film may have contravened its guidelines on hate speech. The film is critical of Islam (though the maker says not of muslims themselves).The guidelines of Network Solutions forbid both "Hate Propaganda" and "Profane" material. This raises disturbing questions of what is considered 'propaganda' and that something being "profane" should be considered a legitimate reason to suppress material is very disturbing. As well as whether companies have the right to censor material. Note that I haven't seen the film as the site now contains only a short message from the hosting company. However, a brief search of the torrents reveals several hits for the movie (called "Fitna" from an arabic word for religious strife) so it looks like it's out there and available to any that want to see it whether people want to stop it or not."
Math

Submission + - Has the Higgs boson been hiding in plain sight? (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: From Science: "Thousands of particle physicists are spending billions to try to spot the elusive Higgs boson, which is key to explaining the origins of mass. But evidence of the Higgs boson — or at least a Higgs boson — may already be lying unnoticed in data from previous experiments..."
Movies

Submission + - MPAA Botched Study on College Downloading (google.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Yes, even the MPAA can be wrong. The Associated Press reports that in a 2005 study it conducted through an outfit called LEK everyone's favorite movie trade association vastly overestimated how much college students engage in illegal movie downloading; instead of '44 percent of the industry's domestic losses' owing to their piracy, it's 15 percent — and one expert's quoted as saying even that number's way too high. Dan 'Sammy' Glickman's gang admitted to the mishap, blaming 'human error', and promised 'immediate action to both investigate the root cause of this problem as well as substantiate the accuracy of the latest report,' which one hopes doesn't involve the FBI. Or maybe it should.

Feed Engadget: Bug Labs store open for business, BUGbundle unveiled for $549 (engadget.com)

From feed by engfeed

Filed under: Misc. Gadgets

We knew today was the day, and now Bug Labs has opened its doors and cautiously invited shoppers inside. Cautious because Bug doesn't really want non-developers snapping up the kit right now, since the hardware itself is pretty much useless to the proletariat at this point without any mature software, and there isn't a bunch of it go around. To kick things off, Bug Labs is also announcing the BUGbundle, which packages a BUGbase (the WiFi-free Hiro P edition), GPS, LCD, accelerometer and 2 megapixel camera for $549. Orders are limited to one per customer at this time, and educational promotions will be coming in March.

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Feed Engadget: Handpresso gets unboxed: how did we ever get by without? (engadget.com)

From feed by engfeed

Filed under: Household

Actually, that headline is a bit misleading, since we'd never actually subscribe to a method of coffee production that required any sort of effort before the coffee is actually in our body -- clearly defeating the purpose -- but this Handpresso thing is still quite the little gizmo in its own right. It works pretty much exactly like you'd expect: pump the handle to the right pressure level, add an espresso pod and hot water, flip the switch and blammo, you've got a few waking hours in a cup. Apparently the box is all fancy too, which is always nice.

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