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Comment Serious Efforts Elsewhere (Score 1) 206

by violettheconqueror (#28302099) Attached to: DIY 18-ft.-High Robotic Exoskeleton
Just to mention a serious effort is underway to build a 20+ft high mecha. They actually have funding and trained engineers, as well as the computer systems to back it up, not just a bunch of hydraulics and prayer. Theirs may not be fully built, but at least when it is it will walk and not fall over like this guys. They are called MPS (Mechanized Propulsion Systems) and they have buisness plans for it. Check out their website they have a ton of information www.MechaPs.com
Government

Submission + - Pentagon Lost Billions, Pennies at a Time 1

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens
Hugh Pickens writes: "MSNBC reports that in 1969 Walter T. Davey, an aeronautical engineer at North American Rockwell discovered he was being overpaid by roughly 2 cents an hour, or one-third of 1 percent of his pay. Davey submitted the discovery to his superiors and suggested a simple fix. "It was so simple to correct," said Davey, a 79-year-old retired Air Force colonel. "just change a few digits in the coding software." The Project on Government Oversight, which reviewed Davey's findings last year, estimated the change could save taxpayers $270 million a year. Multiply by 40 years — the length of time since Davey made his discovery — and the figure grows to an astounding $10.8 billion. Legislators ignored Davey's letters, federal auditors deferred to Congress, and lobbyists "descended on it and tore it into a piece of Swiss cheese" but legislators aren't eager to challenge the powerful defense lobby about a figure that's a relative pittance in the overall defense budget — even if it exceeds $100 million annually. "A lot of people have taken advantage of the system to reap as much in taxpayer dollars as possible," says Scott Amey, general counsel for the Project on Government Oversight. "But when you're going up against the contractor lobby — whether you're an individual across the country or a public interest group or a government employee — it's a tough road.""
Movies

Submission + - Netflix Throttling Instant Video Streaming (breakitdownblog.com) 1

Submitted by
rsk
rsk writes: "For the last few weeks I've been experiencing terrible streaming video performance from Netflix on both my Xbox 360 and PC. While my Xbox 360 would at least stream at a lower resolution, my PC cannot seem to avoid 2hr buffering times before playback even started. I smelled shenanigans and started digging. With some help finding the debug menu for the streaming video player, I set out to figure out why playback was so slow. It seems that Netflix is significantly throttling Watch Instantly users (on the PC) down to an unusable cap on a per-connection basis."
Bug

Submission + - New Laser System Targets Mosquitoes (wsj.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: In the Cold War the so-called "Star Wars defense system" proposed using lasers to destroy incoming Soviet missiles. In a 2007 brainstorming session aimed at combating malaria, Dr. Lowell Wood, the architect of that system, proposed modifying his original idea to kill mosquitoes. The cover of today's Wall Street Journal contains an article that highlights this initiative as well as a few others, like using a giant flashlight to disrupt mosquitoes' vision and using the insects to vaccinate, in the war against malaria. The system is intelligent enough to avoid noncombatants like humans and butterflies and can even tell the difference between females, the blood-drinkers, and males. My favorite quote: "We'd be delighted if we destabilize the human-mosquito balance of power."
Operating Systems

Submission + - French Police Save Millions Switching to Ubuntu (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Ynot_82
Ynot_82 writes: The French national police force, the Gendarmerie Nationale, has spoken about their migration away from the Windows platform to Linux.

Estimated to have already saved the force 50 Million Euros, the migration is due to be completed on all 90,000 workstations by 2015.

Of the move, Lt. Col. Guimard had this comment

Moving from Microsoft XP to Vista would not have brought us many advantages and Microsoft said it would require training of users," said Lt. Col. Guimard. "Moving from XP to Ubuntu, however, proved very easy. The two biggest differences are the icons and the games. Games are not our priority.
Media

Submission + - An Interview With The Developers Of FFmpeg (phoronix.com)

Submitted by An anonymous reader
An anonymous reader writes: Following the long-awaited release of FFmpeg 0.5, Phoronix has conducted an interview with three FFmpeg developers (Diego Biurrun, Baptiste Coudurier, and Robert Swain) about this project's recent release. In this interview they talk about moving to a 3/6-month release cycle, the criteria for version 1.0, Blu-Ray support on Linux, OpenCL and GPGPU acceleration, multi-threading FFmpeg, video APIs, their own video codecs, and legal challenges they have run into.
Education

Submission + - National Ignition Facility fires 192-beam pulse (llnl.gov)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: In what's looking to be a banner year for particle physics (hopefully with the LHC and Fermilab firing on all cylinders), the construction and test firing of the National Ignition Facility has also completed. NIF is tasked with being the first facility to ever achieve self-sustaining nuclear fusion, and in particular, reach the point of ignition in which more energy is generated from the reaction than went into creating it. While the recent 192-beam pulse only produced 80 kilojoules worth of energy, all signs currently point to NIF being able to reach an order of magnitude higher than that in the coming year. [pdf]
Wine

Submission + - SPAM: DirectX 10 coming to Linux and Mac

Submitted by
twickline
twickline writes: "Jeremy White posted the 2009 roadmap for Crossover and wrote, We've just shipped a lot of those 'under the hood' improvements for games out in CrossOver Games 7.2. We're really pushing Direct X 9 support pretty far along, and getting ready to move on Direct X 10.

In the next few months, we'll be shipping CrossOver Linux 8.0"
Link to Original Source
Space

Submission + - China's new military space stations coming soon (space.com)

Submitted by WindBourne
WindBourne writes: China will be launching 2 news space stations this next year. One is for their civil program as ran by the military, while the second is openly for the military. It appears that their will be multiples of the military version to be launched in 2010. It appears that they are developing the same U.S. Air Force Manned Orbiting Laboratory (MOL) that was canceled in 1969. In addition, it appears that China is accelerating their timelines on a number of the earlier space announcements.
The Military

US Forgets How To Make Trident Missiles 922

Posted by CmdrTaco from the i-forget-how-to-spell-feal dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "The US and the UK are trying to refurbish the aging W76 warheads that tip Trident missiles to prolong their life and ensure they are safe and reliable but plans have been put on hold because US scientists have forgotten how to manufacture a mysterious but very hazardous component of the warhead codenamed Fogbank. 'NNSA had lost knowledge of how to manufacture the material because it had kept few records of the process when the material was made in the 1980s, and almost all staff with expertise on production had retired or left the agency,' says the report by a US congressional committee. Fogbank is thought by some weapons experts to be a foam used between the fission and fusion stages of the thermonuclear bomb on the Trident Missile and US officials say that manufacturing Fogbank requires a solvent cleaning agent which is 'extremely flammable' and 'explosive,' and that the process involves dealing with 'toxic materials' hazardous to workers. 'This is like James Bond destroying his instructions as soon as he has read them,' says John Ainslie, the co-ordinator of the Scottish Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, adding that 'perhaps the plans for making Fogbank were so secret that no copies were kept.' Thomas D'Agostino, administrator or the US National Nuclear Security Administration, told a congressional committee that the administration was spending 'a lot of money' trying to make 'Fogbank' at Y-12, but 'we're not out of the woods yet.'"
Classic Games (Games)

Submission + - Dealing with Fairness and Balance in Video Games

Submitted by
MarkN
MarkN writes: "Video games are subject to a number of balance issues traditional games have largely stayed free from. It can be hard finding players of comparable skill-level to create even matchups, diverse gameplay options can quickly become irrelevant if someone finds a broken feature of gameplay that beats everything else, and some online games make your ability to play competitively a question of how much time and money you've invested in a game rather than the skill you possess. In this article, I talk about some of the issues relating to fairness and balance in games, in terms of the factors and strategies under the player's control, the game's role in potentially handicapping players, and the role a community of gamers plays in setting standards for how games are to be played. I'd be very interested in hearing the community's thoughts on managing a 'fair and balanced' gaming experience."

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