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Submission + - The Soviet Union built a Doomsday Machine. Here's (wired.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Wired Magazine has a new story posted about the Doomsday Machine built by the Soviet Union in the 1980s---and that remains active today. It explains why the device was built, and why the Soviets considered it to be something that kept the peace, event though they never told the U.S. about it.
Censorship

Submission + - Amazon bans public domain from Kindle (sacred-texts.com) 6

Submitted by
John B. Hare
John B. Hare writes: "John B. Hare writes "Many publishers of public domain content on the Kindle are being turned away for reasons which Amazon declines to clarify. In the past two weeks any publisher posting a public domain book (or a book which appears to be a public domain book) have received the message "Your book is currently under review by the Kindle Operations team as we are trying to improve the Kindle customer experience. Please check back in 5 business days to see if your book was published to the store."

Amazon claims that this is a quality control issue, that readers can't figure out on their own that a five page Kindle book for $9.99 is a rip-off or yet another Kindle edition of 'Pride and Prejudice' is pointless. This was supposed to be the point of user feedback and the Kindle return policy: the user can quickly decide what the best choice is, and if they don't like it, back out without any harm done.

I own and run one of the primary contributors of new public domain etexts on the web: sacred-texts.com. When the ban went into effect, I was just back from an intense round of chemo. I was disappointed to get this message. I am (was?) in the process of converting all of the 2000+ ebooks at sacred-texts into Kindle editions. I use a homebrew preflight Kindle filter to construct the Kindle binary from my master files, which we have invested nearly a million dollars into creating. We spend thousands a month in-house doing legal clearance, scanning, OCRing, and proofing, often by domain experts. So we are hardly a fly-by-night operation. In fact, many of the PD texts floating around on the Internet and on the Kindle were originally done at sacred-texts at great investment of labor and time. Our Kindle return rate is close to zero.

This morning I received an email stating:

Dear Publisher,

We're working on a policy and procedure change to fix a customer experience problem caused by multiple copies of public domain titles being uploaded by a multitude of publishers. For an example of this problem, do a search on "Pride and Prejudice" in the Kindle Store. The current situation is very confusing for customers as it makes it difficult to decide which 'Pride and Prejudice' to choose. As a result, at this time we are not accepting additional public domain titles through DTP, including the following: The Unknown Life of Jesus Christ
The Aquarian Gospel of Jesus the Christ
Traces of a Hidden Tradition in Masonry and Medieval Mysticism
The History of the Knights Templar by Nicolas Notovitch...


If you believe that we have wrongly identified this title as a public domain title, and you are the copyright holder or are authorized to sell it by the copyright holder, then please reply to title-submission@amazon.com with appropriate documentation of your e-book rights.

Thank you, Amazon.com

As can be seen, this brings an entirely new issue into play: apparently, if I owned the rights to a public domain book and can prove it, they will reconsider. However, nobody can own a public domain book. Amazon is telling us that in order to post our books we need to prove a contradiction!

One key point is that Amazon has applied this ban completely non-selectively. Established publishers such as myself and others who have never had any quality control issues whatsoever, and give good value for the price, have all been tarred with the broad brush of 'Public Domain Publisher--do not post'.

By banning new public domain books from the Kindle, they are making an implicit decision as to which books people should read. You can argue that 'you can get these texts anywhere' but by excluding high quality Kindle books of them from the nascent Kindle marketplace, Amazon is implicitly trying to decide what is a valid part of our culture and what isn't. This trend does not bode well for the future of ebooks.

"

Submission + - Rome was built in a day (washington.edu)

Submitted by spmallick
spmallick writes: Researchers at the University of Washington, in collaboration with Microsoft, have recreated the city of Rome in 3D using images obtained from Flickr [ Press Release . The data set consists of 150,000 images from Flickr.com associated with the tags "Rome" or "Roma", and it took 21 hours on 496 compute cores to create a 3D digital model. Unlike Photosynth / Photo Tourism, the goal was to reconstruct an entire city and not just individual landmarks. Previous versions of the Photo Tourism software matched each photo to every other photo in the set. But as the number of photos increases the number of matches explodes, increasing with the square of the number of photos. A set of 250,000 images would take at least a year for 500 computers to process... A million photos would take more than a decade! The newly developed code works more than a hundred times faster than the previous version. It first establishes likely matches and then concentrates on those parts.

The project website is at http://grail.cs.washington.edu/rome/

DISCLAIMER: The primary author of the work Dr. Sameer Agarwal is a co-author and a close friend.

Submission + - SPAM: On-body circuits create new sense organ

Submitted by destinyland
destinyland writes: In "My New Sense Organ," a science writer tests "a new sense" — the ability to always know true north — by strapping a circuit board to her ankle. It's connected to an electronic compass and an ankle band with eight skin buzzers. The result? "I had wrong assumptions I didn't know about," and it also detects "the specific places where infrastructure interferes with the earth's magnetic fields!" (This article appears in the upcoming issue of Humanity-Plus magazine, but the digital edition is already available online!)
Link to Original Source

Submission + - Motorola unveils Open Source Android phone and Soc (ostatic.com)

Submitted by
ruphus13
ruphus13 writes: "Motorola announced their Android handsets today, along with a 'socially aware' application layer called MotoBlur. The Motorola Cliq is expected in a few weeks. From the post, "Dr. Sanjay K. Jha, Co-CEO of Motorola and CEO of the company's Mobile Devices division, unveiled Motorola's Android platform play. Motorola is going to be placing large bets on the open source operating system over the coming years, but is coming out of the gate with just two Android phones...It will arrive before the holidays. Key to both of the phones, and key to Motorola's overall Android strategy is a new interface and application layer called MotoBlur. It's focused on "a single stream" for social networking features, software updates, messages, syncing, e-mails, videos, photos, and more...The Cliq phone has a 5-megapixel camera, slide-out keyboard, 24 frame-per-second video capabilities, GPS, a headphone jack, an advanced browser from Google, integrated Exchange service, and Google roaming services including Google voice search, access to maps, Google calendar, and more. It also provides one-click access to Android Market and the thousands of Android applications there."
Transportation

Submission + - First Algae Car Attempts to Cross US on 25 Gallons (inhabitat.com)

Submitted by
Mike
Mike writes: "San Francisco recently saw the unveiling of the world's first algae fuel-powered vehicle, dubbed the Algaeus. The plug-in hybrid car, which is a Prius tricked out with a nickel metal hydride battery and a plug, runs on green crude from Sapphire Energy — no modifications to the gasoline engine necessary. The set-up is so effective, according to FUEL producer Rebecca Harrell, that the Algaeus can cross the US on approximately 25 gallons — a figure which is currently being tested on a coast-to-coast road trip."
Privacy

Submission + - Would you trust an insurance company's "drive- (teensafedriver.com)

Submitted by ramen99
ramen99 writes: Our new car insurance company offered us discounts for our teenage driver if we agree to install a "drive-cam" that records driving habits and wirelessly transmits video footage to a "neutral driving coach" for evaluation and comment. While this might be great to monitor a new teen driver, it will also monitor other adult drivers. The insurance company claims that they would NEVER use any information obtained to consider changes in insurance rates, but that really sounds unbelievable. Would you give up your privacy to save some dough? Installation is free, and the camera mounts just under the rear-view mirror, but something seems fishy about this...
Announcements

Submission + - TomTom anounces an open source GPS technology 1

Submitted by TuringTest
TuringTest writes: (Found via OStatic). European company TomTom (which recently settled a patent agreement with Microsoft) has announced a new open source format OpenLR for sharing routing data (relevant points, traffic information...) in digital maps of different vendors, to be used in GPS devices. The LR stands for Location Referencing. They aim is to push it as an open standard to build a cooperative information base, presumably in a similar way than its current TomTom Map Share technology in which end users provide map corrections on the fly. The technology to support the format will be released as GPLv2. Does it make OpenLR a GPL GPS?
Government

Submission + - China Considering Cuts on Rare-Earth Metal Exports

Submitted by SillySnake
SillySnake writes: A draft report by China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has called for a total ban on foreign shipments of terbium, dysprosium, yttrium, thulium, and lutetium. Other metals such as neodymium, europium, cerium, and lanthanum will be restricted to a combined export quota of 35,000 tonnes a year, far below global needs.

Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/ambroseevans_pritchard/6082464/World-faces-hi-tech-crunch-as-China-eyes-ban-on-rare-metal-exports.html
Idle

Submission + - Trapped girls call for help on Facebook (abc.net.au)

Submitted by definate
definate writes: Two teenage girls (aged 10 and 12) found themselves trapped/lost in a stormwater drain in Adelaide, South Australia. The interesting point of this article that makes it Slashdot worthy, is that although the teenage girls had mobile phones, instead of calling for help using 000 (Australia's 911 number), they decided to notify people through Facebook. My guess is it was something along the lines of "Jane Doe is like totally trapped in a stormwater drain, really need help, OMG!". Luckily a young friend of the girls was online at the time and was able to call the proper authorities.
NASA

Submission + - Sending Astronauts on a One-Way Trip to Mars

Submitted by
The Narrative Fallacy
The Narrative Fallacy writes: "Cosmologist Lawrence M. Krauss, director of the Origins Initiative at Arizona State University, writes in the NY Times that with the investment needed to return to the moon likely to run in excess of $150 billion and the cost of a round trip to Mars easily two to four times that, there is a way to reduce the cost and technical requirements of a manned mission to Mars: send the astronauts on a one way trip. "While the idea of sending astronauts aloft never to return is jarring upon first hearing, the rationale for one-way trips into space has both historical and practical roots," writes Krauss. "Colonists and pilgrims seldom set off for the New World with the expectation of a return trip." There are more immediate and pragmatic reasons to consider one-way human space exploration missions including money. "If the fuel for the return is carried on the ship, this greatly increases the mass of the ship, which in turn requires even more fuel." But would anyone volunteer to go on such a trip? Krauss says that informal surveys show that many scientists would be willing to go on a one-way mission into space and that we might want to restrict the voyage to older astronauts, whose longevity is limited in any case. The largest stumbling block is probably political as NASA and Congress are unlikely to do something that could be perceived as signing the death warrants of astronauts. "Nevertheless, human space travel is so expensive and so dangerous that we are going to need novel, even extreme solutions if we really want to expand the range of human civilization beyond our own planet" writes Krauss. "To boldly go where no one has gone before does not require coming home again.""
Robotics

Submission + - High-Speed Robot Hand Shows Dexterity and Speed (hizook.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A few blogs are passing around videos of the Ishikawa Komuro Lab's high-speed robot hand performing impressive acts of dexterity and skillful manipulation. However, the video being passed around is slight on details. Meanwhile, their video presentation at ICRA 2009 (which took place in May in Kobe, Japan) has an informative narration and demonstrates additional capabilities. I have included this video below, which shows the manipulator dribbling a ping-pong ball, spinning a pen, throwing a ball, tying knots, grasping a grain of rice with tweezers, and tossing / re-grasping a cellphone!
Programming

Submission + - Patching/Extending existing open source software?

Submitted by
zerointeger
zerointeger writes: "I am still fairly new to programming in C but was asked to extend an Open source authentication module by my employer. The project is complete, testing has been done and it works as designed. The original code was created and is currently maintained by another. The extended/patch I have created is fairly robust as it includes optional configuration options, additional help files, and several additional files. The problem is I have attempted to contact the original developer/current maintainer without success of having this feature added. I think the only reason why I would like to see this included is to prevent any patching of later revisions. Myself as well as a few others I have spoken with agree that the patch/extension would benefit administrators attempting to push linux onto the desktop as we have done at the University I am currently employed by. Has anyone else submitted patches/extensions to what seems to be a black hole?"
AMD

Submission + - AMD's OpenCL Allows GPU Code to Run on x86 CPUs (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by eldavojohn
eldavojohn writes: Two blog posts from AMD are causing a stir in the GPU community. AMD has created and released the industry's first OpenCL which allows developers to code against AMD's graphics API (normally only used for their GPUs) and run it on any x86 CPU. Now, as a developer, you can divide the workload between the two as you see fit instead of having to commit to either GPU or CPU. Ars has more details.
Power

Submission + - Electricity From Salty Water (physicscentral.com) 1

Submitted by
BuzzSkyline
BuzzSkyline writes: "It's possible to produce energy by simply mixing fresh and salty water. Although chemists and physicists have long known about the untapped energy available where fresh water rivers pour into salty oceans, the technology for exploiting the effect has been lacking. An Italian physicist seems to have solved the problem with the experimental demonstration of a "salination cell" that creates power given nothing more than input sources of salty and fresh water. Apparently the renewable, environmentally friendly energy source is comparable to "each river in the world ending at its mouth in a waterfall 225 meters [739 feet] high." A paper describing the technology is due to be published in an upcoming issue of the journal Physical Review Letters."

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