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Space

X-37B Robotic Space Plane Returns To Earth 55

Posted by Soulskill from the down-to-earth dept.
Kozar_The_Malignant writes "The secretive X-37B robotic space plane has returned to Earth after a seven-month mission. This was the vehicle's first flight. Looking like a cross between a Predator Drone and the Space Shuttle, it landed at Vandenberg AFB in California, which was to have been the military's shuttle launch facility. Speculation is that the X-37B is an orbital spy platform."

Comment Re:I agree, it does ignore today's reality (Score 0) 763

by krypticmind (#34155624) Attached to: Obama Says Offshoring Fears Are Unwarranted
Manufacturing in a modern economy such as the US is something doomed. Not because we cant make it well, but because workers cost so damn much! Yep, would you still be all "our jobs" if your cost 2x as much? Yep, that also means less money for other things. Let me leave you with something: Would you be sorry for the Whale Oilers if this was 1890-1910 and essentially every one of them lost their jobs? There is no more whale oil, the whole industry had become obsolete because of the energy-denser crude, and killing whales to power anything sounds like a shitty deal to me. Yet, them losing their jobs had a negligible impact on the 100 years of extremely rapid development as a result of that industry tech switch. Industries die, jobs become obsolete, and thats just the nature of technologic advance. The sooner it sinks into the populous, the sooner we can start looking into more important things than the Tea Party and actually make some headway.

Comment Re:yeah right (Score 2, Insightful) 763

by krypticmind (#34155544) Attached to: Obama Says Offshoring Fears Are Unwarranted
Commodity jobs are being exported, the kind that you rather have someone else do anyway, as the profit margin of doing it at home is very low and you end up with subsidized industries for that exact reason (/me waves at the corn/christian belt and General Motors) The fact that alot of uneducated electorate seems to neglect is that economics in the most developed and rich country on the planet is something way beyond what their American Idol brains can fathom. The only source of information for the above mentioned "middle" class is Murdoch's Newscorp, but thats a different story. Back to the point, if we were losing so many jobs, why is it that at economic peaks we always end up with the same 4% unemployment rate, despite the last ten years being the golden age of outsource? The reality is that today's economy is far more dynamic and outsourcing something that produces little profit is the best way to keep an economy competitive (again, look at the US car industry and, say, Japanese/German cars) http://www.google.com/publicdata?ds=usunemployment&met=unemployment_rate&tdim=true&dl=en&hl=en&q=unemployment+percentage
The Internet

Europe Proposes International Internet Treaty 116

Posted by Soulskill from the it-will-all-be-accessible-by-train dept.
Stoobalou writes "Europe has proposed an Internet Treaty to protect the Internet from the political interference which threatens to break it up. The draft international law has been compared to the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which sought to prevent space exploration being pursued for anything less than the benefit of all human kind. The Internet Treaty would similarly seek to preserve the Internet as a global system of free communication that transcends national borders."
Space

Pope's Astronomer Would Love To Baptize an Alien 308

Posted by samzenpus from the where-do-you-keep-the-head-on-this-thing? dept.
Ponca City, We Love You writes "The Guardian reports that Guy Consolmagno, curator of the pope's meteorite collection and a trained astronomer and planetary scientist, says he would be 'delighted' if intelligent life was found among the stars. 'But the odds of us finding it, of it being intelligent and us being able to communicate with it — when you add them up it's probably not a practical question.' Consolmagno adds that the traditional definition of a soul was to have intelligence, free will, freedom to love and freedom to make decisions. 'Any entity — no matter how many tentacles it has — has a soul.' Would he baptize an alien? 'Only if they asked.' Consolmagno dismisses the ideas of intelligent design as a pseudo-scientific version of creationism. 'The word has been hijacked by a narrow group of creationist fundamentalists in America to mean something it didn't originally mean at all. It's another form of the God of the gaps. It's bad theology in that it turns God once again into the pagan god of thunder and lightning.'"

Comment What about 3rd party modules? (Score 0, Troll) 235

by krypticmind (#29628799) Attached to: Perl 5.11.0 Released
Ladies, ladies, before you start talking about things you obviously lack the brains to comprehend, lets just remind everyone how one should measure an active development community. Lets examine the amount of modules in the default distribution for each of the top interpreted languages today: CPAN: 73018, PyPI: 7740, Pear: 132. A year ago, there were 58878 modules on CPAN (http://web.archive.org/web/20080730121430/http://search.cpan.org/). Draw your own conclusions whether the language is dead. Meanwhile, the Python (ex PHP retards) core team is still trying to figure out, 20 years deep in the development of the project, how to support UNICODE correctly. Good times!
Intel

Intel Threatens To Revoke AMD's x86 License 476

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the toddlers-fighting-over-a-toy dept.
theraindog writes "AMD's former manufacturing division opened for business last week as GlobalFoundries, but the spin-off may run afoul of AMD's 2001 cross-licensing agreement with Intel. Indeed, Intel has formally accused AMD of violating the agreement, and threatened to terminate the company's licenses in 60 days if a resolution is not found. Intel contends that GlobalFoundries is not a subsidiary of AMD, and thus is not covered by the licensing agreement. AMD has fired back, insisting that it has done nothing wrong, and that Intel's threat constitutes a violation of the deal. At stake is not only AMD's ability to build processors that use Intel's x86 technology, but also Intel's ability to use AMD's x86-64 tech in its CPUs."
Hardware

What Does a $16,000+ PC Look Like, Anyway? 495

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the half-the-cost-was-windows-server-liceses dept.
justechn writes "Tom's Hardware has an article about custom PC maker Puget Systems, who had just finished a custom $16,000 PC for one of their clients. So what exactly goes into a $16,000 system? How about: Four quad-core Opteron processors, 32 GB of memory, Windows Server 2008, Asus Xonar DX PCI Express sound card, 3Ware 9550SX-8LP SATA 3 Gb/s RAID controller, Two Western Digital 300 GB VelociRaptor hard drives in RAID 1, Two 1 TB Samsung SpinPoint F1s also in RAID 1, and Four 1 TB Samsung SpinPoint F1s in RAID 5. Puget went with MagiCool's Xtreme Nova 1080 radiator, Nine 120 mm fans, Four Koolance CPU blocks, Koolance combined pump and reservoir unit, and Cooler Master Stacker 810 case. In addition to all that hardware, it also runs very quiet and very cool. The temperature of the CPUs is 36 C at idle, 45 C at load."
Privacy

The CDA Is Dead, But States Are Trying To Revive It 205

Posted by kdawson from the free-speech-vs.-anonymity dept.
oliphaunt writes "This week at The Legality, Tracy Frazier has an article discussing the damage that can be done by anonymous online comments. While regulars here are familiar with infamous bits of Net censorship like the Fishman Affidavit fiasco, and everyone has been an anonymous coward at least once or twice, some of you may not know about the conflict between Heide Iravani and AutoAdmit.com. Heide eventually filed a lawsuit because the first result for a Google search on her name brought up anonymous comments on AutoAdmit that accused her of carrying an STD and sleeping her way to the top of her class. The Communications Decency Act was supposed to prevent this kind of thing, but an injunction prevented it from ever being enforced and eventually the Supreme Court killed it. Should the law be changed?" The article links to a proposal from last summer in the New Jersey legislature that would institute a DMCA-like takedown regime for allegedly defamatory content posted on a Web site, and would allow aggrieved parties to demand the identity of anonymous posters without a subpoena. No indication of how that proposal fared. Also linked is a recent North Carolina proposal that would criminalize the act of defaming someone using an electronic medium. This proposal shields Web sites from liability and explicitly does not apply to anonymous speech.
The Courts

Wife of Harried Pirate Bay Witness Gets Buried in Internet Love 470

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the thanks-for-lending-us-your-hubby dept.
treqie writes "During the trial of pirate bay yesterday, a professor (Roger Wallis) took the witness stand. He told the court things that the prosecutors did not want to hear. The prosecutors then tried to discredit both him and his team's work in the area, as well as his title, it was a real spectacle. In the end, the judge asked if he wanted compensation for being there — he replied that he did not want anything, but they could send flowers to his wife. Many listening online heard, and began sending her flowers, from all over the world. As of this submission, the sum is over 40,000 SEK worth of flowers. There's even a Facebook group for it."
Patents

How To Hijack an EU Open Source Strategy Paper 112

Posted by kdawson from the lobbyists-at-the-policy-table dept.
Glyn Moody writes "Thanks to the indispensable Wikileaks, we have the opportunity to see how an organization close to Microsoft is attempting to re-write — and hijack — an important European Union open source strategy paper, currently being drawn up. Analyzing before and after versions visible in the document demonstrates how the Association for Competitive Technology, a lobbying group partially funded by Microsoft, is trying to widen the scope of open source to include 'mixed solutions blending open and proprietary code.'" And reader Elektroschock adds some detail on EU processes: "The European Commission lets ACT and CompTIA participate in all working groups of the European Open Source Strategy, which defines Europe's future open source approach. A blue editor questions the objectives: 'Regarding the "Europe Digital Independence" our [working] group thinks it is, in general, not an issue.' 'European digital independence' is a phrase coined by EU Commissioner V. Reding, that is what her European Software Strategy was supposed to be about. She didn't reveal that lobbyists or vendors with vested interests would write the strategy for the Commission."
Hardware Hacking

Bunnie Huang on China's "Shanzai" Mash-Up Design Shops 181

Posted by timothy from the gibsonstephensonesque dept.
saccade.com writes "Bunnie (of XBox hacking and Chumby fame) has written an insightful post about how a new phenomena emerging out of China called 'Shanzai' has impacted the electronics business there. A new class of innovators, they're going beyond merely copying western designs to producing electronic "mash-ups" to create new products. Bootstrapped on small amounts of capital, they range from shops of just a few people to a few hundred. They rapidly create new products, and use an "open source" style design community where design ideas and component lists are shared."

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