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Space

Sun Produces First Cycle 24 X-Class Solar Flare 131

Posted by Soulskill from the go-outside-and-look dept.
radioweather writes "For the first time since solar cycle 24 began, the sun produced a massive X-class solar flare, the strongest type of flare event. This comes from sunspot group 1158, which produced an M-class solar flare on Sunday. The EVE X-ray imager on the solar dynamics observatory shows a bright explosion on the sun, so bright it made a lens flare. The last X-class solar flare was on December 13th, 2006 and was part of solar cycle 23. Look for spectacular auroras in a couple days as the slower Coronal Mass Ejection hits earth. This will be a test of how well our newest technology handles stray energy from such solar disruptions."
The Military

North Korea Says War With South Would Go Nuclear 608

Posted by Soulskill from the cruisin'-for-a-bruisin' dept.
A reader writes "According to reports from the Uriminzokkiri, the official website of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, a war with South Korea would involve nuclear weapons, and '[will] not be limited to the Korean peninsula.' The article goes on, 'The Korean peninsula remains a region fraught with the greatest danger of war in the world. This is entirely attributable to the US pursuance of the policy of aggression against the DPRK (North Korea).'"

Comment Other way (Score 3, Informative) 321

by wraithguard01 (#34317496) Attached to: FCC To Allow Texting To 911
I'm a volunteer firefighter, and our dispatch center already sends us texts, as well as the typical page out over radio. That system proves incredibly useful for us. There is no way for us to text back through the system though, and the number is not a 911 number, it's a normal SMS short code number. Of course, going the other way is a different situation entirely, but my point is, I think that this shows that it is inevitable that texting is going to soon become a part of normal 911 operations.
Facebook

Sex Drugs and Texting 287

Posted by samzenpus from the busy-hands-are-happy-hands dept.
statesman writes "The Associated Press reports that teens who text frequently are three and a half times more likely to have sex. A survey of 4,200 public high school students in the Cleveland area found that one in five students sent more than 120 text messages a day or spent more than 3 hours a day on Facebook. Students in this group were much more likely to have sex. Alcohol and drug use also correlate with frequent texting and heavy Facebook use."
Media

Flash Can Rob 2 Hours From MacBook Air's Battery Life 509

Posted by timothy from the less-frantic-scrambling dept.
The lack of Flash in the new MacBook Air may annoy some users, but it has a big upside, too. According to Wired's report (citing Ars Technica) passed on by an anonymous reader, "Having Flash installed can cut battery runtime considerably — as much as 33 percent in our testing. With a handful of websites loaded in Safari, Flash-based ads kept the CPU running far more than seemed necessary, and the best time I recorded with Flash installed was just 4 hours. After deleting Flash, however, the MacBook Air ran for 6:02 — with the exact same set of websites reloaded in Safari, and with static ads replacing the CPU-sucking Flash versions."
United States

New York Judge Rules 6-Year-Old Can Be Sued 799

Posted by Soulskill from the court-is-more-interesting-than-kindergarten-anyway dept.
suraj.sun sends this snippet from Reuters: "A girl can be sued over accusations she ran over an elderly woman with her training bicycle when she was 4 years old, a New York Supreme Court justice has ruled. The ruling by King's County Supreme Court Justice Paul Wooten stems from an incident in April 2009 when Juliet Breitman and Jacob Kohn, both aged four, struck an 87-year-old pedestrian, Claire Menagh, with their training bikes. Menagh underwent surgery for a fractured hip and died three months later. In a ruling made public late Thursday, the judge dismissed arguments by Breitman's lawyer that the case should be dismissed because of her young age. He ruled that she is old enough to be sued and the case can proceed."
The Internet

Interop Returns 16 Million IPv4 Addresses 270

Posted by samzenpus from the share-the-wealth dept.
klapaucjusz writes "Every discussion about IPv4 address exhaustion prompts comments about whether Apple (or MIT, or UCB, or whoever) needs all of those addresses. Interop has set the example by returning 16 million IPv4 addresses to the ARIN pool, extending the IPv4 address exhaustion deadline by a whole month."
Communications

UK To Track All Browsing, Email, and Phone Calls 286

Posted by samzenpus from the that-about-covers-it dept.
Sara Chan writes "The UK government plans to introduce legislation that will allow the police to track every phone call, email, text message and website visit made by the public. The information will include who is contacting whom, when and where and which websites are visited, but not the content of the conversations or messages. Every communications provider will be required to store the information for at least a year."
Canada

Copyright License Fees Drive Pandora Out of Canada 254

Posted by timothy from the bargaining-chip dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Online streaming music services such as Pandora are abandoning plans to launch in Canada, claiming licensing fees are too high: 'These rates ... are astronomical,' Tim Westergren, founder of California-based Pandora, wrote in an email to The Canadian Press. The agency that collects music royalties in Canada on behalf of record companies and performing artists wants to charge web-based music sites that stream to mobile devices the greater of two figures: 45 per cent of the site's gross revenues in Canada or 7.5-tenths of a cent for every song streamed. Meanwhile, record labels are blaming the lack of online music services in Canada on piracy: 'Why would you spend a lot of money trying to build a service in Canada when Canadians take so much without paying for it?' said Graham Henderson, president of the Canadian Recording Industry Association, which represents major record labels."
Piracy

Pirate Bay Down; Police Raids Across Europe 325

Posted by timothy from the knock-knock-joke dept.
Stoobalou contributes a link to this story at Thinq.co.uk, from which he excerpts: "Torrent-tracking site The Pirate Bay is currently unavailable as reports come in of co-ordinated police raids against file sharers across Europe. Police in up to 14 countries carried out raids against suspected file-sharing servers this morning. According to file-sharing news site TorrentFreak, the bulk of police action seems to have taken place in Sweden. Swedish Internet service provider ISP, which hosts both The Pirate Bay and whistle-blowing site WikiLeaks, earlier denied rumours of a police raid, saying that officers had visited them to ask questions over two suspect IP addresses, and that no computers or other goods had been seized."

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