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Google

Submission + - Google Releases Street View Images From Fukushima Ghost Town (businessweek.com)

Submitted by
mdsolar
mdsolar writes: "Google Inc. (GOOG) today released images taken by its Street View service from the town of Namie, Japan, inside the zone that was evacuated after the Fukushima nuclear disaster in March 2011.

Google, operator of the world’s biggest Web search engine, entered Namie this month at the invitation of the town’s mayor, Tamotsu Baba, and produced the 360-degree imagery for the Google Maps and Google Earth services, it said in an e-mailed statement.

All of Namie’s 21,000 residents were forced to flee after the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami crippled the Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear plant, about 8 kilometers (5 miles) from the town, causing the world’s worst nuclear accident after Chernobyl. Baba asked Mountain View, California-based Google to map the town to create a permanent record of its state two years after the evacuation, he said in a Google blog post."

Comment Re:I Don't Understand This Legacy (Score 1) 375

by Cap'n.Brownbeard (#35199184) Attached to: FBI Releases File On the Anarchist Cookbook

It simply blew my mind that someone could be arrested for possession of this book because after all the notoriety it's really not that useful.

I think you know why the gov't wants to lend the book notoriety

This book exhibits somewhat of an active imagination in causing trouble ... oftentimes this trouble is easily traced back to you no matter how well the book tries to convince the reader you're being super careful and are virtually untraceable.

Dumb criminals are dumb. And easy to catch.
Idle

Growing A House From Meat 133

Posted by samzenpus from the delicious-future dept.
baosol writes "From the boundary-pushing team of archi-visionaries who brought us the fabulous Fab Tree Hab comes a new (and somewhat disgusting) way to grow a structure — using animal flesh! The In Vitro Meat Habitat is a futuristic concept home composed of meat cells grown in a lab. The creator of the concept, Mitchell Joachim, is a futurist with a twist– he says he is actually developing the concept in a lab."
Image

Dad Delivers Baby Using Wiki 249

Posted by samzenpus from the 9cm-edited dept.
sonamchauhan writes "A Londoner helped his wife deliver their baby by Googling 'how to deliver a baby' on his mobile phone. From the article: 'Today proud Mr Smith said: "The midwife had checked Emma earlier in the day but contractions started up again at about 8pm so we called the midwife to come back. But then everything happened so quickly I realized Emma was going to give birth. I wasn't sure what I was going to do so I just looked up the instructions on the internet using my BlackBerry."'"

Comment Re:Also why are they doing it? (Score 1) 520

by Cap'n.Brownbeard (#29604417) Attached to: Wii Update 4.2 Tries (and Fails) To Block Homebrew

It's also a "problem" that PC games or even Nintendo DS games never had to deal with. There's no region locking on either platform.

Back when Quake II was released I had a copy that clearly stated on the disc "For sale ONLY in Australia". I literally had to change my timezone to install it. Please check your facts.
Politics

Siemens, Nokia Helped Provide Iran's Censoring Tech 280

Posted by CmdrTaco from the well-that's-not-very-nice dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The Wall Street Journal has an article about Nokia and Siemens selling the censoring technology to Iran's government. Do you believe that the public relations damage to these companies can persuade them from selling this kind of technology to other dictatorial regimes?" I don't believe there will *be* any PR Damage, and that makes me a little sad.
Security

Do the SSL Watchmen Watch Themselves? 171

Posted by Soulskill from the barbers-with-a-good-haircut dept.
StrongestLink writes "In an intriguing twist on the recent Comodo CA vulnerability discussed here last week, security researcher Mike Zusman today revealed that three days prior to StartCom's disclosure of a flaw in a Comodo reseller's registration process, he discovered and disclosed an authentication bypass flaw to StartCom in their own registration process that allowed an attacker to submit an authorized request for any domain. During a month which was marked by the continuing paradigm shift to SSL-verified holiday shopping, the Chain of Trust continues to run off the gears, and Bruce Schneier is even commenting publicly that SSL's site validation mission isn't even relevant. What lies ahead for the billion-dollar CA industry?"

Comment Re:It is doomed (Score 3, Funny) 149

by Malevolent Tester (#25736181) Attached to: Richard Garriott Quits NCSoft
My biggest complaint about Tabula Rasa was that it was so generic. When I got into the beta, from all the material and previews I'd read, I was expecting something like WW2 Online (but good) against an intelligent, dynamic AI army.

Instead I played WoW with crappy pseudo-FPS controls. About the only innovative feature was the cloning, and even the appeal of that was diminished by the near-Korean levels of grinding the game required.

Comment The Spirit rover is dying (Score 0) 222

by Malevolent Tester (#25736081) Attached to: Mars Rover "Spirit" In Danger
It is official; NASA now confirms: The Spirit rover is dying

One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered Mars exploration community when NASA confirmed that the rover's power level has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent. Coming close on the heels of the recent Phoenix Lander failure, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. The Spirit is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by a story on Slashdot regarding its power failures.

You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict the Spirit rover's future. The hand writing is on the wall: the Spirit rover faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for the Spirit rover because the Spirit rover is dying. Things are looking very bad for the Spirit rover. As many of us are already aware, the Spirit rover continues to lose power. Machine oil flows like a river of blood.

Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.

NASA states that there are 89 watt hours of energy. How much energy is required each day? Let's see. There are heaters including one that protects a science instrument, the miniature thermal emission spectrometer, as well as communications equipment. Now NASA has had to switch all these off.

Due to the troubles of metric/imperial conversion and so on, the Beagle Probe crashed and attention was taken over by the Phoenix Lander. Now the Phoenix Lander is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another rusting hulk.

All major surveys show that the Spirit rover has steadily declined in power. the Spirit rover is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. The Spirit rover continues to decay. Nothing short of a Martians with batteries could save the Spirit rover from its fate at this point in time. For all practical purposes, the Spirit rover is dead.

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