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Submission + - Amatuers spy on US spy plane (wired.com)

arshadk writes: "The X-37B has generated intense interest, long before it ever left the ground. Boeing originally developed the 29-foot unmanned craft — a kind of miniature Space Shuttle — for NASA. Then, the military took over in 2004, and the space plane went black. Its payloads were classified, its missions hush-hush."
"You can even see the space plane for yourself: The X-37B is traveling in a slightly elliptical orbit more than 200 miles up, swooping from 43 degrees north latitude to 43 degrees south."

Submission + - WikiLeaks cash-for-votes exposé rocks Indian (bbc.co.uk) 1

mage7 writes: While the world's attention seems to be focused on the events unfolding in Japan and the Middle-east, Indian headlines are being dominated by the latest WikiLeaks' revelations.
The newly leaked cable (dated 17 July 2008) suggests that India's ruling Congress party bribed MPs, in order to secure their votes for a controversial nuclear deal between India and the US. Among other details, It describes how a senior Congress aide showed a US embassy official "chests of cash" allegedly containing about $25 million to pay off MPs ahead of the vote. Another Congress insider told a US official about how the Minister of Commerce and Industry formerly "could only offer small planes as bribes.....now he can pay for votes with jets."

Government

Submission + - Utah to Teach USA is a Republic, not a Democracy (sltrib.com) 1

0ryan0 writes: The Salt Lake Tribune reports here that Utah lawmakers passed a bill today to force public school teachers to teach that the USA is a republic, not a democracy.

. . . because a Democracy would have Democrats in it.

Media

Submission + - Virgin Media UK Begins Throttling P2P Traffic (unitethecows.com)

Anonymous Coward writes: "UK Internet Service Provider (ISP) Virgin Media has announced that it will begin throttling both P2P and Newsgroup traffic at "Peak" times it has emerged.

The ISP which advertises itself as "The fastest in the UK" and offers speeds of up to 100mb has said it needs to throttle file sharing traffic to prevent slowness in other areas such as online multiplayer gaming.

Trialing of the new traffic managment plans commenced on March 2 and will only apply to Upstream traffic, therefore download speeds will be unaffected. The clamp down will apply on top of the existing traffic shaping Virgin Media has in place and will affect all packages, including the previously unmanaged 100mb deal.

A message on the Virgin Media site read

"After the successful out of hours trial of our combined upstream and downstream file sharing traffic management policy we will be trialling this new policy between 17:00 and 00:00 for one week starting on Wednesday 2nd of March.

Between these times P2P and Newsgroup upstream traffic will be managed in a similar way to our current downstream traffic management. If the trial is successful we'll launch the new policy immediately.

We're interested if you could tell us how this affects your gaming experience over the next few days and if you see any general improvement in latency and ping at peak times."

The move comes as a surprise to many as Virgin already manage traffic between 4pm and 8pm. Virgin Medias website details their file sharing traffic management policy and says;

"We moderate the total volume of file sharing traffic on our network between 5pm and midnight on weekdays and midday and midnight on weekends. This policy, which applies to all broadband packages, is restricted to Peer to Peer ("P2P") applications and Newsgroups (which are commonly used to distribute large amounts of data). This policy does not impact any applications other than Peer to Peer and Newsgroups, so things like watching iPlayer, online gaming, making calls via Skype, downloading music tracks from iTunes or streaming them from Spotify and sending an email or normal browsing are unaffected."

So there you have it, Virgin Media ARE the UK's fasstest Broadband Provider, but only because they decided what you can do and when you can do it.

Source: UniteTheCows"

Hardware

Submission + - Researcher create computer that fits on pen tip (computerworld.com)

CWmike writes: Researchers at the University of Michigan announced Wednesday that they have created the first prototype for a millimeter-scale computing system that can hold up to a week's worth of data when implanted in something as small as a human eye. The computer, called the Phoenix chip, is just over one cubic millimeter in size and was designed to monitor eye pressure in glaucoma patients. 'This is the first true millimeter-scale complete computing system,' said Dennis Sylvester, a professor at the school and one of the researchers on the project. Within the computer is an ultra low-power microprocessor, a pressure sensor, memory, a thin-film battery, a solar cell and a wireless radio with an antenna that can transmit data to an external reader device held near the eye.
News

Submission + - Wikileaks Nominated for 2011 Nobel Peace Prize 3

mvar writes: Whistle-blower site WikiLeaks has been nominated for the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize by a Norwegian politician who cited its role in freedom of speech, news agency NTB reported Wednesday. "WikiLeaks is one of this century's most important contributors to freedom of speech and transparency," parliamentarian Snorre Valen said in his nomination. Valen cited WikiLeaks role in disclosing the assests of Tunisia's former president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali and his nearest family, contributing to the protests that forced them into exile.
GNOME

Submission + - Oracle drops Sun's commitment to accessibility :( (grain-of-salt.com)

An anonymous reader writes: What I feared became true: after buying Sun, Oracle had a look at its accessibility group and made big cuts in it by firing the most important contributors to the Linux accessibility tools. This is a very sad day for disabled people, as it means we do not really have full-time developers any more.
Businesses

Submission + - Tritium Leak Grows (washingtonpost.com)

mdsolar writes: The tritium leak into ground water at Vermont Yankee http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/01/11/2054237/Another-Crumbling-Reactor-Springs-a-Tritium-Leak has now tested at 775,000 picocuries per liter, 37 times higher than the Federal drinking water standard. At what level should the NRC shut down the troubled http://www.businessweek.com/ap/financialnews/D9DLEQ200.htm plant?
Idle

Submission + - Saving Dave (heraldsun.com.au)

An anonymous reader writes: Following worldwide attention after being caught seeing pictures of Miranda Kerr at work while a coleague was being interviewed on TV, a petition to save David Kiely's job has started. Stated motives: He seems like a nice bloke, the pics weren't hardcore, he has suffered enough, and, maybe more important, there's just too much political correctness in this world anyway. Showing class and sense of humor, miss Kerr said she will sign the petition.

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