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Submission + - 2.1 Million of the Oldest Internet Posts Are Now Online for Anyone to Read (vice.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Decades before Twitter threads, Reddit forums, or Facebook groups, there was Usenet: an early-internet, pre-Web discussion system where one could start and join conversations much like today's message boards. Launched in 1980, Usenet is the creation of two Duke University students who wanted to communicate between decentralized, local servers—and it's still active today. On Usenet, people talk about everything, from nanotech science to soap operas, wine, and UFOs. Jozef Jarosciak, a systems architect based in Ontario, had his first encounter with Usenet in 2000, when he found a full-time job in Canada thanks to a job posting there.

This week, Jarosciak uploaded some of the oldest Usenet posts available to the internet. Around 2.1 million posts from between February 1981 and June 1991 from Henry Spencer's UTZOO NetNews Archive are archived at the Usenet Archive for anyone to browse. This latest archive-dump is part of an even larger project by Jarosciak. He launched the Usenet Archive site last month, as a way to host groups in a way that'd be independent of Google Groups, which also holds archives of newsgroups like Usenet. It's currently archiving 317 million posts in 10,000 unique Usenet newsgroups, according to the site—and Jarosciak estimates it'll eventually hold close to 1 billion posts.
Games

Submission + - How Broken is Game Journalism? (vgchartz.com)

Submitted by SSDNINJA
SSDNINJA writes: Joseph Jackmovich of gamrFeed analyzes 161 articles from Kotaku, Joystiq, and Destructoid to discover how well they report gaming news. He looks to find out if the stereotypes of game journalism being poorly sourced and sexist are anecdotal or based in fact.
Space

Submission + - 'Wet' Asteroids Could Supply Space Gas Stations (space.com)

Submitted by FleaPlus
FleaPlus writes: Water ice was recently discovered on the large asteriod 24 Themis, and Space.com discusses proposals for producing fuel from asteroid ice. NASA and the President recently announced plans for robotic precursor missions to asteroids (and a human mission by 2025), as well as a funding boost for R&D to develop techniques like in-situ resource utilization. Since most mass of a beyond-Earth mission is fuel, refueling in orbit would be a huge mass- and cost-saver for space exploration (especially if fuel can be produced in space), but a large unknown is how to effectively extract water in an environment lacking gravity.
Robotics

Submission + - NASA Outlines Plan for Next-Gen Space Robots (computerworld.com)

Submitted by
CWmike
CWmike writes: "Imagine a team of robots — some rolling on wheels, some walking on two legs — working alongside astronauts on the surface of Mars, scouting previously unseen locations, measuring the parameters of a new base or constructing a building. Now picture astronauts driving across the Martian surface in a vehicle. When the astronauts get out and begin their work, they can flip a switch to turn the vehicle into an autonomous robot that goes off to undertake projects on the planet. Whatever work the next generation of NASA-developed space robots does, it will be done in conjunction with their human counterparts. Terry Fong, director of NASA's intelligent robotics group, said that's the image that a lot of the U.S. space agency's engineers have in mind as they work on the new robotic rovers. In comparison, the Mars rovers on the Red Planet have been working alone for years. 'We're working on a new use of these robots — robots to support human exploration,' Fong told Computerworld. 'NASA is now thinking, 'How do you go about sending humans to the moon or Mars or elsewhere? How can you use the combination of humans and robots to do exploration better?' I think it's a really, really fundamentally different approach.' Fong said he's hopeful that the the next-generation robotic rovers will arrive on the moon or on an asteroid within five to 10 years."
NASA

Submission + - NASA solar satellite flashes first Sun images (networkworld.com)

Submitted by coondoggie
coondoggie writes: NASA today showed off the amazing first pictures of the Sun taken from its 6,800lb Solar Dynamics Observatory flying at an orbit 22,300 miles above Earth. The first images show a variety of activity NASA says provide never-before-seen detail of material streaming outward and away from sunspots. Others show extreme close-ups of activity on the sun’s surface. The spacecraft also has made the first high-resolution measurements of solar flares in a broad range of extreme ultraviolet wavelengths.

Submission + - Palm WebOS Hacked Via SMS Messages

Submitted by gondaba
gondaba writes: Security researchers at the Intrepidus Group have hacked into Palm's new WebOS platform, using nothing more than text messages to exploit a slew of dangerous web app vulnerabilities. The white hat hackers found that the WebOS SMS client did not properly validate input/output validation on any SMS messages sent to the handset, leading to a rudimentary HTML injection bug. Coupled with the fact that HTML injection leads directly to injecting code into a WebOS application, the attacks made possible were quite dangerous (especially considering they could all be delivered over a SMS message).
Science

Submission + - Study Suggests Brain Can Manage Only 2 Tasks at On (livescience.com) 1

Submitted by suraj.sun
suraj.sun writes: Study Suggests Brain Can Manage Only 2 Tasks at Once :

For those who find it tough to juggle more than a couple things at once, don't despair. The brain is set up to manage two tasks, but not more, a new study suggests.

That's because, when faced with two tasks, a part of the brain known as the medial prefrontal cortex (MFC) divides so that half of the region focuses on one task and the other half on the other task. This division of labor allows a person to keep track of two tasks pretty readily, but if you throw in a third, things get a bit muddled.

"What really the results show is that we can readily divide tasking. We can cook, and at the same time talk on the phone, and switch back and forth between these two activities," said study researcher Etienne Koechlin of the Université Pierre et Marie Curie in Paris, France. "However, we cannot multitask with more than two tasks."

Live Science: http://www.livescience.com/health/brain-multitasking-limit-100415.html
Medicine

Submission + - DNA cancer codes cracked by international effort (news.com.au) 1

Submitted by Enigma23
Enigma23 writes: As reported on news.com.au, scientists from the International Cancer Genome Consortium of 12 institutes around the world will today release the first DNA profiles of some of the most prevalent types of tumours. While the story asserts that "A new era of cancer treatment has dawned" I'm a bit more sceptical, given that gene therapy and immunotherapy are still very much in their infancy at the current time.
Science

Submission + - MIT Researchers Harness Viruses to Split Water (inhabitat.com) 2

Submitted by ByronScott
ByronScott writes: A team of researchers at MIT has just announced that they have successfully modified a virus to split apart molecules of water, paving the way for an efficient and non-energy intensive method of producing hydrogen fuel. The team engineered a common, harmless bacterial virus to assemble the components needed to crack apart a molecule of water, yielding a fourfold boost in efficiency over similar processes.
Google

Submission + - Ex-Googler Obama Appointee Gets Buzz'ed

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: Hillicon Valley reports that Rep. Darrell Issa of the House Oversight Committee is pressing White House Deputy CTO Andrew McLaughlin to explain his relationship with Google, where McLaughlin was employed as Google's chief lobbyist. 'The American people have a right to expect that White House employees are working to advance the public interest and not the interests of the lobby shops who formerly employed them,' Issa noted in the letter. 'The use of a Gmail account to communicate with lobbyists and evade transparency laws is at odds with President Obama's promises to limit the influence of lobbyists.' Concerns emerged after screenshots of McLaughlin's Google Buzz account emerged showing that a number of the search giant's top employees subscribed to the deputy Web chief's updates.
Games

Submission + - Game Development Extends to the Heart of Africa 1

Submitted by
Peace Corps Online
Peace Corps Online writes: "The Internet has been credited with "flattening" the world economy, giving anyone, anywhere with the requisite skills the opportunity to build a game or create an app on Facebook. Now the Mercury News reports on a new game for the iPhone called iWarrior, founded by two 26-year old developers in Africa, Eyram Tawiah, a Ghanan, and Wesley Kirinya, a Kenyan, who created every element of their game — the mechanics, the graphics, the music — overcoming considerable obstacles to develop their first product. The game is "a feed 'em up game, not a shoot 'em up" says Tawiah where you "defend your village by feeding and driving away the animals before they crash it and feed on your livestock and garden!" with threats including "thundering elephants," "mighty rhinos," "swift cheetahs" and "crafty hyenas." Leti, which means star in the Ewe language, was nurtured by the philanthropic arm of San Francisco-based Meltwater Group, an Internet business services company, which in 2008 founded the Meltwater Entrepreneurial School of Technology (MEST) in Accra, Ghana. "We believe talent is everywhere," says Meltwater founder and CEO Jorn Lysegger."
Businesses

Submission + - Regulators Investigating Unpaid Internships

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: With job openings scarce for young people, the number of unpaid internships has climbed in recent years, leading federal and state regulators to worry that more employers are illegally using such internships for free labor. Convinced that many unpaid internships violate minimum wage laws, officials in Oregon, California and other states have begun investigations and fined employers. 'If you're a for-profit employer or you want to pursue an internship with a for-profit employer, there aren't going to be many circumstances where you can have an internship and not be paid and still be in compliance with the law,' said Nancy J. Leppink, the acting director of the U.S. Dept. of Labor's wage and hour division. So does this mean we're going to have to pay kids to make coffee, clean the bathrooms, and wipe the door handles each day to minimize the spread of swine flu, Nancy?
Linux

Submission + - Songbird Drops Linux Support (digitizor.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The Songbird developers have announced that they will no longer support Songbird in Linux. This is really a socking announcement as Songbird has its root in open source. Songbird will however continue to be available for Windows and Mac.

Submission + - SETI founder outlines ambitious future plans (wired.co.uk)

Submitted by Lanxon
Lanxon writes: "In the universe there is intelligent life, I'm confident about that," SETI founder Dr Frank Drake (of the Drake Equation) affirmed earlier today during a talk at the Royal Society in London, 50 years after SETI was founded, reports Wired. And one of his visions to prove this, and to show that the last five decades were not a waste of time, is to station a radio observatory not in near-Earth orbit, but on the far side of the moon. And maybe later, he suggests another craft could be stationed 500 times further away from the Sun than the Earth, using the Sun itself as a giant magnifying lens to resolve alien worlds. We could even see continents and oceans, he suggests.
Programming

Submission + - SPAM: Is Programming a Lucrative Profession? 4

Submitted by itwbennett
itwbennett writes: A pamphlet distributed by blogger Cameron Laird's local high school proclaimed that 'Computer Science BS graduates can expect an annual salary from $54,000-$74,000. Starting salaries for MS and PhD graduates can be to up to $100,000' and 'employment of computer scientists is expected to grow by 24 percent from 2010 to 2018.' The pamphlet lists The US Federal Bureau of Labor Statistics as a reference so how wrong can it be? 'This is so wrong, I don't know where to start,' says Laird. 'There are a lot of ways to look at the figures, but only the most skewed ones come up with starting salaries approaching $60,000 annually, and I see plenty of programmers in the US working for less,' says Laird. At issue, though, isn't so much inaccurate salary information as what is happening to programming as a career: 'Professionalization of programmers nowadays strikes chords more like those familiar to auto mechanics or nurses than the knowledge workers we once thought we were,' writes Laird, 'we're expected to pay for our own tools, we're increasingly bound by legal entanglements, H1B accumulates degrading tales, and hyperspecialization dominates hiring decisions.'
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