Bob the Super Hamste writes "CNN is reporting that the page recovery.gov is not as transparent as it claims to be. The examples pointed out are: 1. The user is greeted by a large pie chart that show the breakdown of money spent by 2 categories, state government distributions and local government distributions. 2. Finding projects involves a complicated search, information on projects is not actually hosted on recovery.gov 3. The format of the information available is of poor quality (the article specifically mentions a PDF document that was created from a scanned sideways copy of roadwork projects from New York state). Given that this site was meant to make the spending of the new stimulus money more transparent to the citizens of the Unites States of America it seems oddly opaque. CNN does seem to praise the ability for government agencies to be able to exchange HTML based information between systems, which for government I would call a massive accomplishment. I tried to find information for my state and searched for Minnesota. I got 4 matches, 2 of which were generic ones: one was the Minnesota state certification that is required for a state to receive funds and one that lays out public transportation spending for all states of which Minnesota gets $94,093,115."

krou writes "The BBC is reporting on the first Maker Faire in the UK, in Newcastle. The event saw an incredible gathering of tech DIY enthusiasts showing off their robotic wares. Maker Faire is firmly established in the US; the 4th annual running in the Bay Area begins on May 30. The BBC video shows the fire-breathing horse, Rusty, and Titan, an eight-foot tall fully-animated robot that likes scaring kids. Elsewhere, the Faire also had Ian Sharp's physical realization of the Lunar Lander computer game, low-cost multi-touch displays, and one of the oldest-ever case mods, made by veteran computer enthusiast John Honnibal, who also showed off his old over-clocked kit computer. Pictures from the Faire are also on Flickr, and videos on YouTube."

KingofGnG writes "Conficker/Downup/Downadup/Kido malware, that according to Symantec 'is, to date, one of the most complex worms in the history of malicious code,' has been updated and this time for real. The new variant, dubbed W32.Downadup.C, adds new features to malware code and makes the threat even more dangerous and worrisome than before."

secmartin writes "Researchers at Delft University warn that large parts of the BitTorrent network might collapse if The Pirate Bay is forced to shut down. A large part of the available torrents use The Pirate Bay as tracker, and other available trackers will probably be overloaded if all traffic is shifted there. TPB is currently using eight servers for their trackers. According to the researchers, even trackerless torrents using the DHT protocol will face problems: 'One bug in a DHT sorting routine ensures that it can only "stumble upon success", meaning torrent downloads will not start in seconds or minutes if Pirate Bay goes down in flames.'"

Smivs writes "The BBC are reporting that a German team has confirmed the existence of a Black Hole at the center of the Milky Way. Astronomers tracked the movement of 28 stars circling the center of the Milky Way, using the 3.5m New Technology Telescope and the 8.2m Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile. Both are operated by the European Southern Observatory (Eso). The black hole is four million times heavier than our Sun, according to the paper in The Astrophysical Journal. According to Dr Robert Massey, of the Royal Astronomical Society (RAS), the results suggest that galaxies form around giant black holes in the way that a pearl forms around grit."

binary.bang writes "Google has announced an unlocked version of T-Mobile's G1 for sale at the same unlocked price of $399. The Android Dev Phone 1 is the G1, except being truly open: no SIM-lock, no hardware lock. Feel free to flash your customized Android build — the bootloader won't be checking for signatures. Don't be misled by the word 'Dev,' looks like all you need to qualify is an Android Market account. This looks like the Open Handset Alliance delivering the promised Open Handset: yes root, yes flash-your-build, no contract, no strings attached. Anyone else relieved & thrilled?"

This installment of Disagree Mail highlights a man's concern about illegal cloning in the Hollywood community, a guy who is sick of US imperialism and his low karma, and an example of the kind of people you don't want as roommates in college. Read below to find out just how crazy, angry and irresponsible it gets.

theodp writes "With control of 63% of the world's Internet searches, as well as ownership of YouTube, the NY Times reports that Google is the most powerful and protean of the Internet gatekeepers, exerting enormous influence over who can find an audience on the Web around the world. Deciding what controversial material does and doesn't appear on the local search engines Google maintains in many countries — as well as on Google.com, YouTube, Blogger, Picasa, and Orkut — falls on the shoulders of Nicole Wong and her colleagues, who have arguably been given more influence over online expression than anyone else on the planet. Some find Google's gatekeeper role worrisome: 'If your whole game is to increase market share,' says Lawrence Lessig, 'it's hard to do good, and to gather data in ways that don't raise privacy concerns or that might help repressive governments to block controversial content.'"

kev009 writes to recommend his editorial overview of the past, present and future of Linux file systems: ext2, ext3, ReiserFS, XFS, JFS, Reiser4, ext4, Btrfs, and Tux3. "In hindsight it seems somewhat tragic that JFS or even XFS didn't gain the traction that ext3 did to pull us through the 'classic' era, but ext3 has proven very reliable and has received consistent care and feeding to keep it performing decently. ... With ext4 coming out in kernel 2.6.28, we should have a nice holdover until Btrfs or Tux3 begin to stabilize. The Btrfs developers have been working on a development sprint and it is likely that the code will be merged into Linus's kernel within the next cycle or two."

SheeEttin writes "If you've been longing to play games from Steam on your Linux machine, you may not have to wait much longer — the Left 4 Dead demo includes some Linux libraries, in particular, one named 'steamclient_linux.so.' While the game's full release does not include these libraries, their apparently accidental inclusion in the demo suggests that Steam games will have native Linux clients in the near future. (A job listing at Valve looking for someone whose responsibilities would include 'Port[ing] Windows-based games to the Linux platform' would seem to support this.) The libraries also include several strings nonessential to a pure server, including references to forgotten passwords. Hopefully, this indicates that at least some Valve-affiliated games will have native Linux clients."

HanzoSpam sends us this story from Space News, which begins: "US President-elect Barack Obama's NASA transition team is asking US space agency officials to quantify how much money could be saved by canceling the Ares 1 rocket and scaling back the Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle next year. ... The questionnaire, 'NASA Presidential Transition Team Requests for Information,' asks agency officials to provide the latest information on Ares 1, Orion and the planned Ares 5 heavy-lift cargo launcher, and to calculate the near-term close-out costs and longer-term savings associated with canceling those programs. The questionnaire also contemplates a scenario where Ares 1 would be canceled but development of the Ares 5 would continue. While the questionnaire, a copy of which was obtained by Space News, also asks NASA to provide a cost estimate for accelerating the first operational flight of Ares 1 and Orion from the current target date of March 2015 to as soon as 2013, NASA was not asked to study the cost implications of canceling any of its other programs, including the significantly overbudget 2009 Mars Science Laboratory or the James Webb Space Telescope."

bowman9991 writes "Two big budget Isaac Asimov novel adaptations are on the way. New Line founders Bob Shaye and Michael Lynne are developing Asimov's 1951 novel Foundation, the first in Asimov's classic space opera saga, which has the potential to be as epic as Lord of the Rings. At the same time, New Regency has recently announced they were adapting Asimov's time travel novel The End of Eternity. Despite having edited or written more than 500 books, it's surprising how little of Isaac Asimov's work has made it to the big screen. '"Isaac Asimov had writer's block once," fellow science fiction writer Harlan Ellison said, referring to Asimov's impressive output. "It was the worst ten minutes of his life."' Previous adaptations include the misguided Will Smith feature I, Robot, the lame Bicentennial Man with Robin Williams, and two B-grade adaptations of Nightfall." This reader also notes that a remake of The Day of the Triffids is coming.