Comment Re:It's an old scam (Score 1) 349
Welcome to Slashdot!
Boeing Teams To Offer Spaceflight Trips 59
coondoggie writes "Aerospace giant Boeing and outer space tourism proprietors Space Adventures teamed up today to offer low Earth orbit (LEO) flight services onboard Boeing's future commercial crew spacecraft. Under this agreement, Space Adventures will market passenger seats on commercial flights aboard the Boeing Crew Space Transportation-100 (CST-100) spacecraft. Boeing's CST-100, which is under development, can hold seven and is bigger than NASA's Apollo orbiter but smaller than NASA's Orion."
Comment Re:Bad Slashdot summary (Score 1) 555
"Bedfordshire police, who then visited Luke, said the e-mail was full of abusive and threatening language." In the 3rd paragraph of the tiny article.
Equatorial Mounts For Budget Astrophotography? 85
Timoris writes "With the Perseids approaching rapidly, I am looking for a good beginner's motorized equatorial mount for astrophotography. I have seen a few for $150 to $200, but apparently the motor vibrations make for poor photographs. Orion makes good mounts, but are out of my price range ($350) and the motor is sold separately, adding to the price half over again. Does anyone have any good experience with any low- or mid-priced mounts?"
Citizen Scientists Help Explore the Moon 60
Pickens writes "NPR reports that NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter is doing such a good job photographing every bit of the moon's surface that scientists can't keep up, so Oxford astrophysicist Chris Lintott is asking amateur astronomers to help review, measure, and classify tens of thousands of moon photos streaming to Earth using the website Moon Zoo, where anyone can log on, get trained, and become a space explorer. 'We ask people to count the craters that they can see ... and that tells us all sorts of things about the history and the age of that bit of surface,' says Lintott. Volunteers are also asked to identify boulders, measure the craters, and generally classify what is found in the images. If one person does the classification — even if they're an expert — then anything odd or interesting can be blamed on them. But with multiple independent classifications, the team can statistically calculate the confidence in the classification. That's a large part of the power of Moon Zoo. Lintott adds the British and American scientists heading up the LRO project have been randomly checking the amateur research being sent in and find it as good as you would get from an expert. 'There are a whole host of scientists ... who are waiting for these results, who've already committed to using them in their own research.'"
Comment Re:Get a book to see the Mona Lisa (Score 1) 246
We went on a Sunday morning in Winter. There was just us, a guard, and a guy cleaning the floors in the room.
Comment Cyber Stalking - Really an issue? (Score 4, Insightful) 318
Situation: I am being "cyber-stalked".
Solution: Log off WOW.
Solution 2 (If you really need your MMORPG fix): Switch to a different character.
Why would a person knowing where you are in a fictional landscape ever be a problem anyway? Surely there's some kind of ignore button in WOW (correct me if I'm wrong, I only played the free trial before getting bored), so even if they knew where you were, they could... what?
Comment Re:Don't be a girlie man, flip the switch (Score 1) 139
Not sure what holds companies back from making the change. I've heard the arguments, they don't hold up to reality. Google doesn't spy on our email and if it's something really sensitive we can add a password to the document or encrypt the content. I've done that exactly once in the last year.
"Hmm, wonder which one of his emails holds the Top Secret Data...".
"Maybe the one that's encypted?"
"Nah, it's probably one of the others!"
Seriously though, if you need to rarely send sensitive data, isn't it far more secure if you encrypt everything you send, and for very little extra effort?
Comment Re:Apps (Score 1) 139
Anyway, wouldn't the camera breaking be more of a hardware problem?
Sorry, to clarify I meant that the phone froze while trying to take the photo, possibly because the lighting was bad. It also takes a bloody age to autofocus and then take the picture. Maybe the combination of my horrible nerd face and the rictus grin you get after 5 seconds of waiting for a photo to be taken was too much for the poor software? I'd still probably buy one though, as for everything else (apart from the wifi connection problem) it's top notch so far.
Comment Re:Apps (Score 2, Interesting) 139
Playing with my girlfriend's new Android we managed to freeze it utterly within a minute of playing with the piss-poor camera*, and after connecting to my wifi once successfully it won't do it anymore, for no reason we can see.
The rest of the phone is shaping up to be awesome (especially when available on such cheap contracts and with google apps fully intergrated), but it needs some improvement to get the non-geek majority away from thier shiney iPhones.
*(The camera broke when trying to take a photo of my face, so it might not be an issue with the phone...)
Comment Thank you! (Score 1) 1
Thanks, didn't know most of these!
Communication Lost With Indian Moon Satellite 186
stoolpigeon writes "All communication links with the only Indian satellite orbiting the Moon have been lost, India's space agency says. Radio contact with the Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft was lost abruptly early on Saturday, said India's Bangalore-based Space Research Organization (ISRO)."
Comment Re:Divorce? (Score 1) 633
Don't toss the TV and don't toss the internet, unless you're willing to toss booze, drugs and gambling too. She doesn't have marriage troubles, she has addiction troubles!
People who sit in front of the TV or internet for hours don't need the TV or internet *taken away*, they just need willpower or help to fix the underlying problems.
Comment Switched to GamesTM (Score 2, Interesting) 65
I used to read PC Gamer until I got sick of it getting thinner and thinner, while the price went up and up and the amount of crap on the coverdisc multiplied. Now I read GamesTM (UK mag) and it's pretty good- it feels like it's written for adults, which is bloody refreshing in a games mag.
(No, I don't work for them, just pointing out that it's not all as bad as PC Gamer!)
Comment Re:Moonquakes (Score 2, Interesting) 151
Check out Moonlite, a (hopefully) upcoming British mission to do just that.
Good for science, good for the comedy value of saying "penetrator" and giggling a lot.
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