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Comment Re:Want to know why they'll NEVER be honest with y (Score 1) 481

by kraemer (#35775632) Attached to: FBI Releases Document Confirming Roswell UFO
BULLSH. Most special access programs are solely for the purpose of avoiding oversight. There is NO oversight on the money going into special access programs. Tens of thousand of people have seen the stealth blimp and the only reason to keep it secret at this point is to conceal the monies being spent on the program from public scrutiny. If people have seen it, there is a web page about it, then sure as hell our adversaries know about it. Lets end the top secret bullsh*t.
Image

Denver Rejects UFO Agency To Track Aliens 80

Posted by samzenpus from the name-and-galaxy-of-origin-please dept.
Republicans weren't the only ones to win big yesterday. Aliens in The Mile-High City can breathe easier thanks to voters rejecting a plan to officially track them. From the article: "The proposal defeated soundly Tuesday night would have established a commission to track extraterrestrials. It also would have allowed residents to post their observations on Denver's city Web page and report sightings." Let the anonymous probings begin!
Social Networks

Buried By The Brigade At Digg 624

Posted by CmdrTaco from the because-they-can dept.
Slashdot regular Bennett Haselton writes in with an essay on a subject we've dealt with internally at Slashdot for years: user abuses of social news... this time at Digg. He starts "Alternet uncovers evidence of a 'bury brigade' coordinating efforts to 'bury' left-leaning stories on Digg. Digg had previously announced that the 'bury' button will be removed from the next version of their site, to prevent these types of abuses, but that won't fix the real underlying issue — you can show mathematically that artificially promoting stories is just as harmful in the long run. Here's a simple fix that would address the real problem."

Submission + - Natural carbon crystals found--harder than diamond (msn.com)

Submitted by
HikingStick
HikingStick writes: "The science desk at MSNBC.com just published a report that a new, naturally occurring form of carbon has been found in a meteorite fragment. From the article:

"researchers were polishing a slice of the carbon-rich Havero meteorite that fell to Earth in Finland in 1971. When they then studied the polished surface they discovered carbon-loaded spots that were raised well above the rest of the surface — suggesting that these areas were harder than the diamonds used in the polishing paste...graphite layers were shocked and heated enough to create bonds between the layers — which is exactly how humans manufacture diamonds, Chen explained.

"Ferroir's team took the next step and put the diamond-resistant crystals under the scrutiny of some very rigorous mineralogical analyzing instruments to learn how its atoms are lined up. That allowed them to confirm that they had, indeed, found a new "phase" or polymorph of crystalline carbon as well as a type of diamond that had been predicted to exist decades ago, but had never been found in nature until now.""
Government

The Upside of the NASA Budget 283

Posted by Soulskill from the new-astronaut-ice-cream-flavors dept.
teeks99 writes "There are a lot of articles circulating about the new changes to the NASA budget, but this one goes into some of the details. From what I'm seeing, it looks great — cutting off the big, expensive, over-budget stuff and allowing a whole bunch of important and revolutionary programs to get going: commercial space transportation; keeping the ISS going (now that we've finally got it up and running); working on orbital propellant storage (so someday we can go off to the far flung places); automated rendezvous and docking (allowing multiple, smaller launches, which then form into one large spacecraft in orbit). Quoting: 'NASA is out of the business of putting people into low-earth orbit, and doesn't see getting back in to it. The Agency now sees its role as doing interesting things with people once they get there, hence its emphasis on in-orbit construction, heavy lift capabilities, and resource harvesting hardware. Given budgetary constraints and the real issues with the Constellation program, none of that is necessarily unreasonable.'"
Security

Gaining Root Access On Linux-Based Femtocells 102

Posted by Soulskill from the feel-free-to-listen-in dept.
viralMeme writes "According to the Register, 'Security researchers have turned their attention to femtocells, and have discovered that gaining root on the tiny mobile base stations isn't as hard as one might hope.' One of the researchers said, 'After hours of sniffing traffic, changing IP address ranges, guessing passwords and investigating hardware pinouts, we had obtained root access on these Linux-based cellular-based devices, which piqued our curiosity [about] the security implications.' Whoever designed these devices should be sent back to computer school. An authentication device that can be bypassed is a contradiction in terms. Or, as some pen-pusher would put it in a report: an unantipicated security excursion.
NASA

Dying Man Shares Unseen Challenger Video 266

Posted by Soulskill from the new-perspective-on-an-old-tragedy dept.
longacre writes "An amateur video of the 1986 Space Shuttle Challenger explosion has been made public for the first time. The Florida man who filmed it from his front yard on his new Betamax camcorder turned the tape over to an educational organization a week before he died this past December. The Space Exploration Archive has since published the video into the public domain in time for the 24th anniversary of the catastrophe. Despite being shot from about 70 miles from Cape Canaveral, the shuttle and the explosion can be seen quite clearly. It is unclear why he never shared the footage with NASA or the media. NASA officials say they were not aware of the video, but are interested in examining it now that it has been made available."

Comment history (Score 2, Interesting) 425

by kraemer (#23336234) Attached to: id Software Announces Doom 4
I followed Doom3's progress with great anticipation. Right from the first showing of the tech at a Steve Jobs keynote I was hooked. I went to E3 in 2002 with Redwood and watched the first big public showing in the "Doom3 theater". It was seriously awesome and the graphics world was rocked by its coolness. The E3 judges couldn't believe the lighting was real time 3d. Many more screen shots and cool trailers would follow until the game finally shipped. And then I was pretty underwhelmed. The graphics were cool and the ending animations were quite photo realistic, but I kept asking myself, where in the hell did most of the stuff from the E3 showing disappear to? There was a lot of story and characters that just changed or got yanked completely. What the heck? The way the player was stalked and killed by the demon knight was so cool in the e3 demo, yet so totally unexciting in the actual game... If they could make a game that captures the essence of what was shown at E3 2002. I would be interested...
First Person Shooters (Games)

id Software Announces Doom 4 425

Posted by timothy from the this-time-it's-yours dept.
spoco2 writes "The id Software site has announced that work has begun on the next sequel to their most famous game, Doom. Will they be able to resurrect the series after what many considered to be a serious misstep with Doom 3? Oh... and they're hiring for the team, so maybe you can steer them in the right direction?"
NASA

NASA Offers $5000 a Month For You to Lie in Bed 239

Posted by samzenpus from the I-know-someone-perfect-for-this dept.
tracer818 writes "In order to study a person as if they were in space without gravity, NASA scientists are paying subjects $17,000 to stay in bed for 90 straight days. The study will follow the Bed Rest Project standard model and be conducted at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, Texas. Participants will live in a special research unit for the entire study and be fed a carefully controlled diet."

Reverse Multithreading CPUs 263

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the quick-geordi-reverse-the-polarity dept.
microbee writes "The register is reporting that AMD is researching a new CPU technology called 'reverse multithreading', which essentially does the opposite of hyperthreading in that it presents multiple cores to the OS as a single-core processor." From the article: "The technology is aimed at the next architecture after K8, according to a purported company mole cited by French-language site x86 Secret. It's well known that two CPUs - whether two separate processors or two cores on the same die - don't generate, clock for clock, double the performance of a single CPU. However, by making the CPU once again appear as a single logical processor, AMD is claimed to believe it may be able to double the single-chip performance with a two-core chip or provide quadruple the performance with a quad-core processor."

Is Microsoft Silent Before a Deadly Storm? 492

Posted by Zonk from the big-companies-jump-far dept.
M$FTjack writes "Discussions about Microsoft are all over the place, esp. with its recent delays to Vista. Some consider Microsoft to be doomed, while others say Microsoft is silent before a deadly storm. According to the article on CoolTechZone, the author believes that Microsoft will unleash an abundance of next-generation applications that will take everyone by surprise. From the article: 'So why am I citing all these examples? Simply because I think Microsoft is itself poised for a big leap. Despite all the rumors about Google and how it will topple Microsoft, I don't see that happening in the near future ... people (and I don't mean technology enthusiasts) will continue to purchase Microsoft products simply because of the sheer familiarity and comfort levels (BSoD et al) that they have with Microsoft software.'"

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