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Space

SpaceX Falcon 9 and Dragon Make It To Orbit 200

jnaujok writes "This morning the Falcon 9 rocket carrying the Dragon capsule lifted off from Cape Canaveral at 10:43 Eastern time, after an earlier launch had been scrubbed because of a bad telemetry feed. A little over 9 minutes later, the Dragon capsule separated from the second stage into its intended orbit. Part of the COTS (Commercial access To Space) program, this is the first test of the Dragon capsule by SpaceX to prove it can be used to ferry supplies to the ISS. The Dragon capsule will make two or three orbits before returning to Earth about four hours after launch."
Security

MasterCard Hit By WikiLeaks Payback Attacks 715

An anonymous reader writes "MasterCard's website has been hit by a distributed denial of service attack. Netcraft describes how the attack uses a voluntary botnet of LOIC (low orbit ion cannon) users to swamp sites with traffic. PostFinance, the PayPal blog and Swedish prosecutors have been targeted previously."
Biotech

Fly Eyes Used For Solar Cells 73

disco_tracy writes "Researchers took corneas from blow flies, fixed them on a glass substrate, added a polymer to protect the shape and then coated nine-eye arrays in nickel within a vacuum chamber. The result was a master template that retained those useful nanoscale features and can be used to make solar cells."

Comment Re:Sure, that sends the right message (Score 1) 334

No, however they may have to consider the actual cost (in actual dollars) of implementing their idiotic plan. What do you think the actual cost of one day of these shenanigans is to the government? Also, while I do not like to feed the b/east they were rather effective at humiliating the government by making them appear completely ineffectual.

Comment Re:Photonical engineering (Score 3, Interesting) 92

I took a biophotonics course at university. The reason they don't teach this much: its dense, and extremely difficult. While the equations might look pretty in Transmission / Waves class, when you actually get down to the scale of molecules and the like, with all of the complications that entails, it is virtually impossible to make meaningful sense of the mathematical results. The best you can do is a computer simulation, which is occasionally useful, and of course test in the lab.

Comment Re:RIAA is right on this one. (Score 4, Interesting) 138

âoeI certainly donâ(TM)t agree that I am violating any law.â

And his justification:

âoeThat is so outrageously unconstitutional that I would prefer myself to honor the United States Constitution and take my chances that recording a conversation with a judge in a federal case and opposing lawyers is somehow in violation of a Massachusetts statute that makes me a felon,â Nesson said.

While I can certainly see how perhaps there are cases where this sort of behavior would indeed be very bad, in this particular case I think Nesson is right.

Comment Re:Cap & Trade = Energy Rationing (Score 0) 874

I, like you, see our destruction of the environment as a debt to future generations and actions must be taken to protect the world for the future, however, please consider the fact that our children won't have a future if we've spent out economy into oblivion. If you are ok with the United States going up to 25% unemployment again, people by the tens-of-millions living on the streets on in shelters, and your children having little to no education (or an advantage really) to speak of all for the protection of the environment, then I guess such considerations need not be made.

I believe this to be a false choice. You seem to imply that the current implementation proposed would cause a complete economic disaster. I do not see this as the case. Other countries have done what we are proposing, in fact the rest of the developed world with the exception of China have done it.

Comment Re:it's really bad (Score 1) 677

This is "teaching to the test" at its worst. Proofs are on the exams to get money. Improved curriculum doesn't do anything if the standardized exams don't change too. I had plenty of good teachers, who wanted to teach - and ended up basically prepping students to perform well on standardized exams just so funding wouldn't get slashed.
While we are on the subject - the whole public school system is no longer really teaching kids anything of value. Its basically an expensive babysitting service. What exactly is a high school graduate qualified for anymore?

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