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Comment Re:Why not above? (Score 1) 127

by progmanj (#29774065) Attached to: New Kind of Orbit Could Ease Mars Communications

There are other stable points in the Solar System, that require only enough fuel as it takes to get there, and that is asteroids. You land on one, no more fuel needed. Just find one or two in the right orbit and a good resonance with Earth and Mars, and you have a free ride. The only hard part is that asteroids tend to tumble through space, changing their orientation constantly. Tethers could be used to slow that rotation, making a consistant orientation.
Toys

Submission + - Instant sunglassess--and data storage! (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: "Researchers have developed a material that almost instantaneously changes from clear to dark blue when exposed to ultraviolet (UV) light, and it just as quickly reverts to clear when the light is turned off. The new material, one of a class called photochromics, could be useful in optical data storage as well as in super-fancy sunglasses."
Movies

Submission + - Studios Ask Judge To Bar RealNetworks DVD Burner

Submitted by
Frosty Piss
Frosty Piss writes: "On Friday, lawyers urged a federal judge to bar RealNetworks from selling software that allows consumers to copy their DVDs to computer hard drives, arguing that the Seattle-based company's product is an illegal pirating tool. RealNetworks' lawyers countered later in the morning that its RealDVD product is equipped with piracy protections that limits a DVD owner to making a single copy and a legitimate way to back up copies of movies legally purchased. The same judge who shut down is presiding over the three-day trial."
Businesses

Submission + - AT&T sends mixed message on behavioral adverti (thestandard.com)

Submitted by
Ian Lamont
Ian Lamont writes: "An advertising company that runs a "targeting marketplace" and partner AT&T are playing down the telecommunications giant's use of its services, after AT&T's chief privacy officer told a House subcommittee yesterday that the company does not engage in behavioral advertising. The AT&T executive testified to the House of Representatives Subcommittee on Communications, Technology and the Internet that AT&T would not use behavioral advertising methods without informed customer consent. However, AudienceScience, a company that records "billions of behavioral events daily" has apparently worked for AT&T since 2005. After the hearing, AudienceScience removed a client testimonial relating to AT&T from its website, so "all the appropriate parties [have] consistent messaging," its CEO said. An AT&T spokesman also said that the testimony was talking about AT&T's role as an ISP, not an advertiser."
The Internet

Submission + - The Wrong Cloud (maya.com) 1

Submitted by
Red Leader.
Red Leader. writes: "MAYA Design just released an excerpt from one of their forthcoming books as a white paper. The paper offers a different perspective on cloud computing. Their view is that cloud computing, as currently described, is not that far off from the sort of thinking that drove the economic downturn. In effect, both situations allowed radical experiments to be performed by gigantic, non-redundant entities. This is dangerous and the paper argues that we should insist on decentralized, massively-parallel venues until we understand a domain very, very well. In the information economy, this means net equality, information liquidity, and radically distributed services (and that's pretty much the opposite of "cloud computing" as described today). While there is still hope for computing in the clouds, its hard not to wonder if short-term profits, a lack of architectural thinking about security and resilience, and long-term myopia aren't leading us to the wrong ones."
Biotech

Submission + - Drug Company Drew Up Doctor "Hit List" (news.com.au)

Submitted by
Philip K Dickhead
Philip K Dickhead writes: "An international drug company made a hit list of doctors who had to be "neutralised" or discredited because they criticised the anti-arthritis drug the pharmaceutical giant produced. According to the report in The Australian, saff at US company Merck &Co emailed each other about the list of doctors — mainly researchers and academics — who had been negative about the drug Vioxx or Merck and a recommended course of action. The email, which came out in the Federal Court in Melbourne yesterday as part of a class action against the drug company, included the words "neutralise", "neutralised" or "discredit" against some of the doctors' names. It is also alleged the company used intimidation tactics against critical researchers, including dropping hints it would stop funding to institutions and claims it interfered with academic appointments. "We may need to seek them out and destroy them where they live," a Merck employee wrote, according to an email excerpt read to the court by Julian Burnside QC, acting for the plaintiff."
Security

Submission + - A vision for a world free of CAPTCHAs (slate.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Slate argues that we're going about verifying humans on the Web all wrong: "As Alan Turing laid out in the 1950 paper that postulated his test, the goal is to determine whether a computer can behave like a human, not perform tasks that a human can. The reason CAPTCHAs have a term limit is that they measure ability, not behavior. ... the random, circuitous way that people interact with Web pages--the scrolling and highlighting and typing and retyping--would be very difficult for a bot to mimic. A system that could capture the way humans interact with forms algorithmically could eventually relieve humans of the need to prove anything altogether." Seems smart if an algorithm could actually do that.

Comment Re:Thermodynamics (Score 1) 492

by progmanj (#26179679) Attached to: Scientist Patents New Method To Fight Global Warming

Correct me if I'm wrong....the Earth is a closed loop system, mostly.

There is some escape to space, but mostly what we produce comes from what we consume.

So, any water we release to the atmosphere had to already come from the atmosphere. We already have evaporation that produces water vapor in the air, so how can we cool the planet more that it already would have if we had done nothing?
Space

Submission + - Boeing Dreamliner Concerns are Specious (wired.com)

Submitted by SoyChemist
SoyChemist writes: On the most recent edition of his new show, Dan Rather reported that the new 787 Dreamliner aircraft may be unsafe. Since then, dozens of news agencies have jumped on the bandwagon. Most of them are reporting that the carbon fiber frame may not be as sturdy as aluminum. Few have bothered to question Rather's claims that the composite materials are brittle, more likely to shatter on impact, and prone to emit poisonous chemicals when ignited. While there is a lot of weight behind the argument that composite materials are not as well-studied as aircraft aluminum, the reasoning behind the flurry of recent articles may be faulty. The very title of Rather's story, Plastic Planes, indicates a lack of grounding in science. Perhaps the greatest concern should be how well the plane will hold up to water. Because they are vulnerable to slow and steady degradation by moisture, the new materials may not last as long as aluminum. Testing them for wear and tear will be more difficult too.
The Internet

Submission + - Americans giving up friends and sex for Web life

Submitted by Stony Stevenson
Stony Stevenson writes: A survey into how the Web affects American adults has found that surfing the net has become an obsession for many, with the majority of U.S. adults feeling they cannot go for a week without going online and one in three giving up friends and sex for the Web.

The survey asked 1,011 American adults how long they would feel OK without going on the Web and found that 15 percent said just a day or less, 21 percent said a couple of days and another 19 percent said a few days. It also found that 20 percent said they spend less time having sex because they are online.
Software

OpenOffice 2.3 Released 293

Posted by Zonk from the yay-free-software dept.
ClickOnThis writes "Surely I'm not the only one who noticed that OpenOffice.org has announced the release of version 2.3! From the website: 'Available for download now, OpenOffice.org 2.3 incorporates an extensive array of new features and enhancements to all its core components, and protects users from newly discovered security vulnerabilities. It is a major release and all users should download it. Plus: It is only with 2.3 that users can make full use of our growing extensions library.' You can download it but be kind and use a P2P client instead, such as bittorrent."
Data Storage

Submission + - USB 3 optical connection in 2008-10 times as fast

Submitted by psychicsword
psychicsword writes:
"Intel and others plan to release a new version of the ubiquitous Universal Serial Bus technology in the first half of 2008, a revamp the chipmaker said will make data transfer rates more than 10 times as fast by adding fiber-optic links alongside the traditional copper wires."
"The current USB 2.0 version has a top data-transfer rate of 480 megabits per second, so a tenfold increase would be 4.8 gigabits per second."
This should make USB hard drives easier and faster to use. The article can be seen here http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9780794-7.html

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