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Submission + - Thousands of Veterans Want to Learn to Code—But Can't (backchannel.com) 1

Submitted by mirandakatz
mirandakatz writes: David Molina was finishing up his 12-year time in the army when he started teaching himself to code, and started to think that he might like to pursue it professionally once his service was done. But with a wife and family, he couldn't dedicate the four years he'd need to get an undergraduate degree in computer science—and the GI Bill, he learned, won't cover accelerated programs like code schools. So he started an organization dedicated to changing that. Operation Code is lobbying politicians to allow vets to attend code schools through the GI Bill and prepare themselves for the sorts of stable, middle-class jobs that have come to be called "blue-collar coding." At Backchannel, Andrew Zaleski profiles Molina and Operation Code, who see it as a serious failing that the GI Bill will cover myriad vocational programs, but not those that can prepare veterans for one of the fastest-growing industries in existence.

Submission + - Richard Hatch Dies at 71 (tmz.com)

Submitted by computerman413
computerman413 writes: TMZ reports that Richard Hatch has passed away at 71 from pancreatic cancer. Hatch played Apollo on the original Battlestar Galactica, and had a recurring role as terrorist Tom Zarek on the reimagined Battlestar Galactica.

Submission + - CmdrTaco Launches Trove, a Curated News Startup (theverge.com)

Submitted by jigamo
jigamo writes: The Verge reports:

A long list of startups have put forth a Herculean effort to find the best way to suggest new things for people to read, and former Slashdot editor-in-chief Rob Malda, also known as CmdrTaco, just unveiled his: Trove, a people-powered app initially available on the web and for iPhone and iPad.

Trove basically lets users opt in to feeds of stories that align with their interests. Users are encouraged to curate "troves," collections of stories that relate to a particular theme. You could create a trove for "Ukrainian Politics," "Dog Heroes," or "Best of The Verge," for example, to which other Trove users can subscribe.

"The core of the product is that people have many interests and rather than just giving them information through pure algorithms and picking particular publications, we want to connect them with people who share those interests, who can pick the best content in those topical areas," says Vijay Ravindran, CEO of Trove.

Submission + - Supercomputer smashes simulation speed record 1

Submitted by Lank
Lank writes: A team of computer scientists from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have managed to coordinate nearly 2 million cores to achieve a blistering 504 billion events per second, over 40 times faster than the previous record. This result was achieved on Sequoia, a 120-rack IBM Blue Gene/Q normally used to run classified nuclear simulations. Note: I am a co-author of the coming paper to appear in PADS 2013.
Google

Google Pledges Not To Sue Any Open Source Projects Using Their Patents 153

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the now-and-forever dept.
sfcrazy writes "Google has announced the Open Patent Non-Assertion (OPN) Pledge. In the pledge Google says that they will not sue any user, distributor, or developer of Open Source software on specified patents, unless first attacked. Under this pledge, Google is starting off with 10 patents relating to MapReduce, a computing model for processing large data sets first developed at Google. Google says that over time they intend to expand the set of Google's patents covered by the pledge to other technologies." This is in addition to the Open Invention Network, and their general work toward reforming the patent system. The patents covered in the OPN will be free to use in Free/Open Source software for the life of the patent, even if Google should transfer ownership to another party. Read the text of the pledge. It appears that interaction with non-copyleft licenses (MIT/BSD/Apache) is a bit weird: if you create a non-free fork it appears you are no longer covered under the pledge.
NASA

Low Quality Alloy Cause of Shuttle Main Tank Issue 118

Posted by Soulskill from the heisenberg-compensators-were-acting-up dept.
BJ_Covert_Action writes "NASA engineers have finally discovered the root cause of the cracks that have been found on space shuttle Discovery's main external tank. The main tank, one of the 'Super Lightweight Tank' models developed by Lockheed-Martin, employs an aluminum-lithium alloy developed by Lockheed-Martin specifically for this application. The new alloy is used in various structural stringers throughout the SLWT design. Unfortunately, the batch of this alloy used in the tank that is currently mated with the Discovery shuttle appears to be of low quality. The alloy used in the stringers has a 'mottled' appearance, compared to the nominal appearance typically used in the main tank stringers (see picture in article). This appearance is indicative of a fracture threshold that is significantly lower than typical. NASA has determined, through testing, that this low grade alloy has only 65% of the fracture strength of the nominal alloy typically used. NASA engineers have devised a potential fix to the problem that they are currently testing to ensure the repair will cause no unintended consequences. NASA plans to have the Discovery shuttle ready to launch again by February 24th, 2011."

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