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Transportation

Is a US High-Speed Railway Economically Feasible? 1139

Posted by samzenpus from the price-of-admission dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The federal government has committed at least $8-billion (and counting) for the development of a nationwide high-speed intercity passenger railway system in almost three-dozen states. Rail advocates have long dreamed of an extensive railway grid that will provide clean, speedy, energy-efficient travel. The high-speed rail program is also expected to create thousands of desperately needed jobs, while reducing the nation's dependence on foreign oil and easing gridlocked highways and congested air-space. However, this noble, ambitious, multi-year plan faces a multitude of obstacles — including costs that will no doubt escalate as the years pass by; and an American public that may be reluctant to relinquish the independence and convenience of their beloved automobiles for a train."
Space

SpaceX Successfully Launches Falcon 9 Rocket 190

Posted by Soulskill from the how-much-for-a-ride dept.
leetrout writes "SpaceX has successfully launched a two-stage rocket, the Falcon 9, into Earth orbit from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. 'Liftoff came after hours of delay, sparked initially by launchpad telemetry problems, then by a sailboat that strayed into a restricted area of the launch range. The day's first countdown was aborted at virtually the last second, due to a problem with the engine parameters, but the launch software was adjusted and a second countdown went all the way to the end.'" Update: 06/04 20:16 GMT by S : Reader mrcaseyj points out Spaceflight Now's coverage, which includes a number of pictures from the launch.
Image

Oil Leak Could Be Stopped With a Nuke 799

Posted by samzenpus from the lesser-of-two-disasters dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico could be stopped with an underground nuclear blast, a Russian newspaper reports. Komsomoloskaya Pravda, the best-selling Russian daily, reports that in Soviet times such leaks were plugged with controlled nuclear blasts underground. The idea is simple, KP writes: 'The underground explosion moves the rock, presses on it, and, in essence, squeezes the well's channel.' It's so simple, in fact, that the Soviet Union used this method five times to deal with petrocalamities, and it only didn't work once."
The Courts

Hollywood Nervous About Kagan's Fair Use Views 239

Posted by kdawson from the fair's-fair dept.
Of the many commentaries and analyses springing up about Obama's Supreme Court nominee, this community might be most interested in one from the Hollywood Reporter. Reader Hugh Pickens notes that Hollywood may have reason to be nervous about the nomination of Elena Kagan to be the next US Supreme Court justice. "As dean of Harvard Law School from 2003 to 2009, Kagan was instrumental in beefing up the school's Berkman Center for Internet & Society by recruiting Lawrence Lessig and others who take a strongly liberal position on fair use in copyright disputes. And Kagan got an opportunity to showcase her feelings on intellectual property when the US Supreme Court asked her, as US Solicitor General, to weigh in on the big Cablevision case. 'After Cablevision announced in 2006 that it would allow subscribers to store TV programs on the cable operator's computer servers instead of on a hard-top box, Hollywood studios went nuts, predicting that the days of licensing on-demand content would be over,' writes Gardner. Kagan's brief compared remote-storage DVRs to VCRs (PDF), brought up the Sony/Betamax case, and lightly slapped Cablevision on the wrist for not making fair use a bigger issue. 'It sounds to us like Kagan would love the Court to determine when customers have a fair-use right to copy, which should cheer those on the copy-left at the EFF, and worry many in the entertainment industry.' On the minus side, Kagan has surrounded herself with entertainment industry advocates in the Justice Department."
Google

The Need For Search Neutrality 203

Posted by samzenpus from the fair-and-balanced dept.
wilsone8 writes "The New York Times includes an op-ed today arguing for Search Neutrality: 'Today, search engines like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft's new Bing have become the Internet's gatekeepers, and the crucial role they play in directing users to Web sites means they are now as essential a component of its infrastructure as the physical network itself. The F.C.C. needs to look beyond network neutrality and include search neutrality: the principle that search engines should have no editorial policies other than that their results be comprehensive, impartial and based solely on relevance.'"
Businesses

Best Open Source Business Tools? 164

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the getting-the-details-right dept.
An anonymous reader writes "My wife and I started an S Corp in 2009 mainly to provide small scale consulting services for friends with small businesses of their own (we build them websites and do odd technical jobs). Now that the year is closing I'm giving thought to our corporate tax filings which will be due March 15th. I've scoured the web for free/open source legal templates for hiring contractors, issuing W-2s, keeping shareholder minute meetings, etc, but haven't been able to find any decent sources. It seems like this should be a priority of the open source community since reducing the cost of entry into small business could drive open source development. What are the best sources of open source legal templates, tax filing software, corporate compliance templates, etc?" What experiences have others had with open sources businesses and the best way to consolidate the necessary corporate mojo into a workable model?
Television

"Loud Commercial" Legislation Proposed In US Congress 636

Posted by Soulskill from the you-have-my-grandmother's-vote dept.
Hackajar writes "Have you ever caught yourself running for the volume control when a TV commercial comes on? Congresswoman Anna Eshoo (D-CA) has, and is submitting legislation that would require TV commercials in the US to stay at volume levels similar to the programming they are associated with. From the article: 'Right now, the government doesn't have much say in the volume of TV ads. It's been getting complaints ever since televisions began proliferating in the 1950s. But the FCC concluded in 1984 there was no fair way to write regulations controlling the "apparent loudness" of commercials.'"
Education

Submission + - Linux to be installed in every Russian school (cnews.ru) 2

Submitted by J_Omega
J_Omega writes: According to the Russian IT site CNews, Linux is slated to be installed in every Russian school by 2009. The article makes it appear that it will be going by the (unimaginative and nationalist) name "Russian OS." As stated in the article: "The main aim of the given work is to reduce dependence on foreign commercial software and provide education institutions with the possibility to choose whether to pay for commercial items or to use the software, provided by the government." Initial testing installations are supposed to begin next year in select districts. Is 2008/09 the year of Linux on the (Russian) desktop?
The Courts

Submission + - Fighting child porn vs. ruining innocent lives

Submitted by
netbuzz
netbuzz writes: "ABC News has the story of a horrifying example of how legitimate societal concerns about child pornography are leading to overzealous prosecutions that can upturn if not ruin the lives of innocents. In this case, the innocents are a teenage boy and his parents, who have been so traumatized by the injustice that they've taken the drastic though understandable step of disconnecting their PC from the Internet. What can other parents do to lessen the chances of this nightmare happening to their families? And what can technologists contribute to the cause of sorting true child porn traffickers from those who are merely unwitting hosts? http://www.networkworld.com/community/?q=node/1046 0"
Perl

Submission + - Minimal Perl for Unix and Linux People

Submitted by
Ravi
Ravi writes: "Perl (Practical Extraction and Report Language) — the language which was created by Larry Wall is arguably one of the greatest programming languages. But it has a reputation for taking an excessive cryptic nature which gives it an image especially among Perl novices as a language which is complex and hard to master.

The book titled "Minimal Perl — for Unix and Linux people", authored by Tim Maher and published by Manning Publications addresses these obstacles presented by Perl's complexity. This book which is divided into two parts comprising of a total of 12 chapters takes a unique methodology to explain the Perl syntax and its use. The author emphasizes on Perl's grep, awk and sed like features and relys on concepts such as inputs, filters and arguments to allow Unix users to directly apply their existing knowledge to the task of learning Perl.

What I found while reading this book is that the "Minimal Perl" is a specially crafted subset of Perl language designed to be easily grasped by people who have a Unix background and who wish to use Perl to write their scripts. Its main aim is to filter out the complex way of writing programs using Perl and stick to simple ways and where ever possible accomplish complex tasks using just one or two lines of Perl code. So in the first part of the book comprising of 6 chapters, the author explains how Perl can be used to do the same tasks as accomplished by common Unix tools such as grep, awk, sed and find. He goes one step further by explaining how one can accomplish much more and in a much simpler way by using the Perl techniques than can be achieved by using these tools.

Through out the book, the author consciously makes sure that the learning curve in acquiring Perl skills remain gentle. As Perl is a language whose syntax has a multitude of options, this book is peppered with numerous tables which provide excellent information at a glance. For example, in the third chapter titled "Perl as a (Better) grep command", the author lists and compares the fundamental capabilities of Perl and the different grep commands such as grep, egrep and fgrep which clearly shows the advantages that Perl has over grep. In another table, you get a birds eye view of the essential syntax of Perl's regular expressions and their meaning. This chapter alone has around 12 tables. This is a really nice feature of this book because it doubles this book as a ready reference for Perl where you can flip to the respective page and get the information you need.

The main strength and drawback of a language such as Perl is its dependence on regular expressions for accomplishing complex tasks. Once you master the regular expressions, the sky is the limit for ordering and segregating data using this language. And in Perl, there are more than one ways of doing the same thing. What is unique about this book is that the author specializes in explaining the easiest way of doing a particular task as is hinted by the title of the book.

In many places, the author demonstrates accomplishing complex tasks using just a few lines of Perl code. And many of the examples covered in this book are practical examples which give an idea of how the commands relate to the final outcome. For instance, while elaborating on the one line grep like commands in Perl, the author illustrates a web oriented application of pattern matching where he shows how to extract and list, the outline of slashdot.org site's front page. And the surprising thing is this is accomplished using just a single line of Perl code. This book has lots of such one liner examples which teaches how to use Perl intelligently using minimal effort.

If part I of this book focuses on ways in which simple Perl programs can provide superior alternatives to standard Unix commands, the second part comprising of another six chapters throws light on the other aspects of Perl concentrating on the syntax of the language and various built-in functions and modules available which does away with a lot of re-invention of the wheel — so to speak, and helps churn out code which is portable across OSes.

Chapter 7 titled "Built-in functions" introduces an eclectic mix of functions available in Perl. So you have functions which are used to extract a list of fields from a string, functions to access the current date and time, generating random numbers, sorting lists, transforming lists, managing files with functions and so on. These functions are broadly classified into those which generate and process scalars and those that process lists.

In chapter 8 of this book, the author involves the reader on the numerous scripting techniques that can be used to write better Perl programs.

It was quite surprising that the author has chosen to discuss the variables — more specifically the list variables comprising of arrays and hashes as well as the looping constructs only in the 9th and 10th chapters respectively when they should be some where up front. But on hind sight, I feel it is a good decision as once, you execute the one liner Perl programs in the initial chapters, by the time you reach the 9th chapter, you will be fairly confident in using Perl.

The last two chapters deal with creating sub-routines and modules. Over the years various Perl programmers have created modules which are used for diverse purposes. And with an aim to share these modules, they are collected and stored at one central place known as CPAN, which is an acronym for Comprehensive Perl Archive Network. The final chapter, apart from teaching how to create modules in Perl and manage them, also introduces the CPAN and ways in which one can find the right module by searching on CPAN.

The special variables cheat-sheet and the guidelines for parenthesizing code provided in the two appendices are really useful as a quick reference while writing Perl programs.

This is not a comprehensive book on Perl, rather the author specializes on a slice of Perl which when mastered can do over 95% of the jobs which require Perl. So for instance, you won't find object oriented concepts of Perl being mentioned in this book. But in many ways, the author has moved beyond explaining a subset of Perl by providing a section titled "Directions for further study" at the end of each chapter, where the author lists further material which can be used to learn more about the topic that is covered.

I really enjoyed going through this book on Perl, especially because it stresses on the practical side of using Perl and takes a minimal approach which does away with some of the seemingly complex nature of this language.

Ravi Kumar maintains a blog titled "All about Linux" where he shares his thoughts and experiences in using Linux, Open Source and Free software."
AMD/OSTG

Journal Journal: Alienware Media Centre With Built In 100Watt Amplifier

Journal by OSTG Marketing
If you're at this year's CES show in Las Vegas you might see the new Alienware Media Centre . "The all-in-one system combines an AMD-based digital media platform with PC functionality and an AVR internal audio amplifier. At the heart of the DHS A Series amplifier lays an advanced D2Audio Digital Audio EngineT (DAE-1) Class-D PWM controller with an integrated DSP.D2Audio is the first d
The Internet

Journal Journal: Video Broadcast Sites Newest Threat to Our Children 3

Journal by anaesthetica

The New York Times is breathlessly reporting on the rising danger facing our nation's children: video broadcast sites. Unlike video-upload sites, like the previous banes-of-our-children YouTube and Google Video, these new websites offer live video broadcasts and chats between their users. The kicker: these websites promise no monitoring by their staff for conduct or misbehavior. Will Stickam and PalTalk become the

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