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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.'"
Google

Google Researcher Issues How-To On Attacking XP 348

Posted by timothy from the now-get-to-the-next-phone-booth dept.
theodp writes "A Google engineer Thursday published attack code that exploits a zero-day vulnerability in Windows XP, giving hackers a new way to hijack and infect systems with malware. But other security experts objected to the way the Google engineer disclosed the bug — just five days after it was reported to Microsoft — and said the move is more evidence of the ongoing, and increasingly public, war between the two giants."
Communications

Pope Urges Priests To Go Forth and Blog 284

Posted by kdawson from the heavy-content-filtering-at-the-seminary dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "Pope Benedict XV, whose own presence on the Web has grown in recent years, is urging priests to use all multimedia tools at their disposal to preach the Gospel and to engage in dialogue with people of other religions and cultures. 'The spread of multimedia communications and its rich "menu of options" might make us think it sufficient simply to be present on the Web,' but priests are 'challenged to proclaim the Gospel by employing the latest generation of audiovisual resources,' says the Pope. The message from the Pope, prepared for the World Day of Communications, suggests such possibilities as images, videos, animated features, blogs, and Web sites and adds that young priests should become familiar with new media while still in seminary, though the Pope stresses that the use of new technologies must reflect theological and spiritual principles. Many priests and top prelates already interact with the faithful online, and one of Benedict's advisers has his own Facebook profile. So does the archbishop of Los Angeles. The Pope adds, 'I renew the invitation to make astute use of the unique possibilities offered by modern communications. May the Lord make all of you enthusiastic heralds of the Gospel in the new "agorà" which the current media are opening up.'"
Security

Test of 16 Anti-Virus Products Says None Rates "Very Good" 344

Posted by timothy from the keeps-the-av-people-in-business-though dept.
An anonymous reader writes "AV-Comparative recently released the results of a malware removal test in which they evaluated 16 anti-virus software solutions. The test focused only on the malware removal/cleaning capabilities, therefore all the samples used were ones that the tested anti-virus products were able to detect. The main question was if the products were able to successfully remove malware from an already infected/compromised system. None of the products performed at a level of 'very good' in malware removal or removal of leftovers, based on those 10 samples."

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!
Perl

Perl 5.11.0 Released 235

Posted by Soulskill from the and-so-soon dept.
jamie points out that Perl 5.11.0 was released yesterday, as well as a schedule for future 5.11.x releases, planned for the 20th of every month. Jesse Vincent encouraged testing of the new (development) version, saying, "If you write software in Perl, it is particularly important that you test your software against development releases. While we strive to maintain source compatibility with prior releases wherever possible, it is always possible that a well-intentioned change can have unexpected consequences. If you spot a change in a development release which breaks your code, it's much more likely that we will be able to fix it before the next stable release. If you only test your code against stable releases of Perl, it may not be possible to undo a backwards-incompatible change which breaks your code."
Input Devices

Software To Flatten a Photographed Book? 172

Posted by kdawson from the shadows-in-the-gutter dept.
davidy writes "I have photographed some pages of a book for reading on my PDA. This is much faster than scanning and I don't have to carry the heavy books. However, the photographed books are not as nice: curved, skewed, and shadowed, as opposed to the much flatter, cleaner scanned books. I have searched for software that can flatten the pages for better reading on the PDA. So far I have come across Unpaper and Scan Tailor. Unpaper doesn't seem to have a windows GUI, and Scan Tailor doesn't unskew well. I remember reading about Google's technique of converting books to e-books with a camera and a laser overlay. Is there any home user software that can do a similar job without the need for a laser overlay or other sophisticated (and patented) technology?"
Google

Microsoft Says Google Chrome Frame Makes IE Less Secure 459

Posted by CmdrTaco from the less-secure-than-what-exactly dept.
Mark writes "The release of Google Chrome Frame, a new open source plugin that injects Chrome's renderer and JavaScript engine into Microsoft's browser, earlier this week had many web developers happily dancing long through the night. Finally, someone had found a way to get Internet Explorer users up to speed on the Web. Microsoft, on the other hand, is warning IE users that it does not recommend installing the plugin. What does the company have against the plugin? It makes Internet Explorer less secure. 'With Internet Explorer 8, we made significant advancements and updates to make the browser safer for our customers,' a Microsoft spokesperson told Ars. 'Given the security issues with plugins in general and Google Chrome in particular, Google Chrome Frame running as a plugin has doubled the attack area for malware and malicious scripts. This is not a risk we would recommend our friends and families take.'"

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