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EU

International Organization To Assess Earth Defense From Space Dangers 93

arisvega writes in with a story about an international organization that is trying to come up with options to save the planet from a large asteroid or comet collision. "NEOShield is a new international project that will assess the threat posed by Near Earth Objects (NEO) and look at the best possible solutions for dealing with a big asteroid or comet on a collision (PDF) path with our planet. The effort is being led from the German space agency's (DLR) Institute of Planetary Research in Berlin, and had its kick-off meeting this week. It will draw on expertise from across Europe, Russia and the US. It's a major EU-funded initiative that will pull together all the latest science, initiate a fair few laboratory experiments and new modelling work, and then try to come to some definitive positions. Industrial partners, which include the German, British and French divisions of the big Astrium space company, will consider the engineering architecture required to deflect one of these bodies out of our path."
Crime

NYPD Developing Portable Body Scanner For Detecting Guns 575

Zothecula writes "You have to feel sorry for the police officers who are required to frisk people for guns or knives — after all, if someone who doesn't want to be arrested is carrying a lethal weapon, the last thing most of us would want to do is get close enough to that person to touch them. That's why the New York Police Department teamed up with the United States Department of Defense three years ago, and began developing a portable scanner that can remotely detect the presence of a gun on a person's body. The NYPD announced the project this week."
Science

Physicists Devise Magnetic Shield 90

sciencehabit writes "The sneaky science of 'cloaking' just keeps getting richer. Physicists and engineers had already demonstrated rudimentary invisibility cloaks that can hide objects from light, sound, and water waves. Now, they've devised an 'antimagnet' cloak that can shield an object from a constant magnetic field without disturbing that field. If realized, such a cloak could have medical applications, researchers say."

Comment What could have been... (Score 1) 245

Mod parent up. The domain system was meant to be strictly hierarchical, with most entities registering domains at the third or even the fourth level.

The perversion of system into a quasi-flat namespace centered around second-level domains came about because the planned high-level directory service for the Internet never materialized. These days most people use search engines to do much the same thing, albeit at the cost of standardization and protocol / vendor independence.

Crime

The Bomb Squad Olympiad Starts Today 43

The bomb suit relay and the robot obstacle course are just two of the events you can enjoy at the Bomb Squad Olympiad. Over the next three days squads from across South Carolina will compete and showcase their bomb defusing capabilities for the public. I hear the deep fried dynamite is especially good.

Comment I wouldn't get my hopes up (Score 1) 432

Judging from Apple's page, all the gestures are the same as the ones used by the current MacBook Pro trackpad. Apple didn't even bother to change the preferences panel (screenshot). Apple's claim to fame is keeping things simple as possible for consumers, and adding gestures that aren't supported by any other Apple device would tend to run against that.

Seeing as Apple has never bothered to provide official Windows driver support for their peripherals, I wouldn't hold my breath on that, either. Somebody will probably rip the appropriate bits out of Boot Camp if and when they update it to support the pad, however (this has been done before for other Apple devices).

Microsoft

Passwords That Are Simple — and Safe(?) 563

TravisTR submitted a story that talks about simpler passwords. I don't think anyone disagrees that having elaborate rules with 20 char passwords requiring mixed cases and symbols and requiring them to change frequently is a pain, but I'm not sure that allowing unique but simpler passwords is a better idea.

Comment Re:Engadget's Page Refesh = Awesome (Score 1) 917

The auto refresh is there because the article is a "live blog" which received real-time updates as the press conference progressed. Now that the conference is over, Engadget appears to have forgotten to turn it off, but removing the &refresh=60 from the end of the URL string and reloading the page should fix it.

Comment Re:While I agree that anonymity is a good thing... (Score 1) 780

[...] the secret ballot is such a terrible analogy for this petition that it's incredible anyone would bring it up if they have any clue whatsoever as to how secret ballots actually work, and how much effort is made to verify that people in secret ballot situations don't vote twice, and their identity matches who they say they are, and they are actually legally allowed to vote.

For all we know the names on this petition are "Donald Duck" repeated 100,000 times, or the names of closet gays (also known as Bible Believing Christians) and their minor children.

Publishing the names serves the good and useful purpose of validating that the signers are who they say they are, and that they are adults living in the State of Washington, as opposed to shills from out of state, minors, or fictional characters.

There is absolutely nothing to prevent the same checks from being applied to the signature gathering process. If all signatories provide their address along with their name, it is trivial to verify that they are indeed eligible citizens of the jurisdiction in which the petition is being circulated.

The agency responsible for verifying the signatures could even opt to contact a random sample of the signatories and confirm their participation, if they so chose. I would point out, however, that doing so goes beyond the measures taken to ensure the integrity of actual ballots. When I request an early ballot and vote by mail, the state has no way to confirm that the person who called for the ballot, filled it out and returned it was actually me.

The only practical reason for making petition signatures public is to allow them to be verified by any interested third party. The problem with this is that, for some people, "verification" involves breaking kneecaps. Why should we hold petitions to a higher standard than the elections that follow them?

Linux

Adobe (Temporarily?) Kills 64-Bit Flash For Linux 272

An anonymous reader writes "It seems that with the release of the 10.1 security patches, Adobe has, at least temporarily, killed 64-bit Flash for Linux. The statement says: 'The Flash Player 10.1 64-bit Linux beta is closed. We remain committed to delivering 64-bit support in a future release of Flash Player. No further information is available at this time. Please feel free to continue your discussions on the Flash Player 10.1 desktop forums.' The 64-bit forum has been set to read-only."
Power

Traffic-Flow Algorithm Can Reduce Fuel Consumption 328

thecarchik writes "New projects from German automakers Audi and BMW promise to ease congestion simply by looking at traffic signals and driving style, in an effort to smooth the flow of traffic. Through a test course in Munich, vehicles were able to post phenomenal fuel efficiency gains simply by adjusting the timing of traffic lights depending on traffic volume — to whatever speed provides a so-called 'green wave' of four or more synchronized signals."

Submission + - CSIRO's 'lazy billion' Wi-Fi patent payday (smh.com.au)

An anonymous reader writes: Australia's peak science body stands to reap more than $1 billion from its lucrative Wi-Fi patent after already netting about $250 million from the world's biggest technology companies, an intellectual property lawyer says. The CSIRO has spent years battling 14 technology giants including Dell, HP, Microsoft, Intel, Nintendo and Toshiba for royalties and made a major breakthrough in April last year when the companies opted to avoid a jury hearing and settle for an estimated $250 million. Now, the organisation is bringing the fight to the top three US mobile carriers in a new suit targeting Verizon Wireless, AT&T and T-Mobile. It argues they have been selling devices that infringe its patents.
Data Storage

Submission + - Hybrid Seagate hard drive has performance issues (techreport.com)

EconolineCrush writes: The launch of Seagate's Momentus XT hard drive made news on Slashdot last week, and for good reason. While not the first hybrid hard drive on the market, the XT is the only one that sheds Windows' ReadyDrive scheme for an OS-independent approach Seagate calls Adaptive Memory. While early coverage of the XT was largely positive, more detailed analysis reveals a number of performance issues, including poor sequential read throughput and an apparent problem with command queuing. In a number of tests, the XT is actually slower than Seagate's year-old Momentus 7200.4, a drive that costs $40 less!

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