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Comment Re:Too cool (Score 3, Informative) 220

by Sean Riordan (#40905785) Attached to: NASA Releases HiRISE Images of Curiosity's Descent
Ugh ....
Maryland - Goddard Space Flight Center
New Mexico - AF Research Lab - Space Vehicles, Sandia Labs, Los Alamos Labs
Colorado - Ball, Raytheon, etc
California - JPL, Livermore Labs and way too many others to list
Virginia - Navy Research Lab, Wallops Island
Texas - UT Dallas, Texas A&M, Johnson Space Center, many more
Arizona - Orbital Sciences Corp., GD, etc
Tennessee - Oakridge
Alabama - U.S. Space and Rocket Center
Utah -Space Dynamics Laboratory, L3
Florida - Kennedy, ATK and many more
Alaska - Kodiak Island

The space industry is spread out over the entire country. This list could go on and on. Saying it is only Florida and Texas that benefit is mildly absurd. I agree with the idea, but it isn't nearly as narrow as that.

Submission + - In America, 46% of people hold a creationist view of human origins (gallup.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The latest Gallup poll is out and it finds that 46% of Americans hold the view that God created humans in their present form within the last 10 000 years. According to Gallup the percentage who hold this view has remained unchanged since 1982, when they first started asking the question.

Roughly 33% of Americans believe in divinely guided evolution, and 15% believe that humans evolved without any supernatural help.
Science

Submission + - When Continental Drift was considered Pseudoscience (smithsonianmag.com)

Submitted by Lasrick
Lasrick writes: Love this article in Smithsonian by Richard Conniff. One of my geology professors was in grad school when the theories for plate tectonics, seafloor spreading, etc., were introduced; he remembered how most of his professors denounced them as ridiculous. This article chronicles the introduction of continental drift theory, starting a century ago with Alfred Wegener.
A nice read.
Security

Submission + - The Cost of Crappy Security in Software Infrastructure (oreilly.com)

Submitted by blackbearnh
blackbearnh writes: Everyone these days knows that you have to double and triple check your code for security vulnerabilities, and make sure that your servers are locked down as tight as you can. But why? Because our underlying operating systems, languages, and platforms do such a crappy job protecting us from ourselves. A new article suggests that the inevitable result of clamoring for new features, rather than demanding rock-solid infrastructure, is that the developer community wastes huge amounts of time protecting their applications from exploits that should never be possible in the first place. TFA: The next time you hear about a site that gets pwned by a buffer overrun exploit, don't think "stupid developers!", think "stupid industry!"
Crime

Submission + - Venezuela bans the commercial sale of firearms and ammunition (bbc.co.uk) 2

Submitted by
Bob the Super Hamste
Bob the Super Hamste writes: "The BBC is reporting on a new law in Venezuela that effectively bans the commercial sale of firearms and ammunition to private citizens. Previously anyone with a permit could purchase a firearm from any commercial vendor but now only the police, military, and security firms will be able to purchase firearms or ammunition from only state owned manufactures or importers. Hugo Chavez's government states that the goal is to eventually disarm the citizenry. The law which went into effect today was passed on February 29th and up to this point the government has been running an amnesty program allowing citizens to turn in their illegal firearms. Since the law was first passed 805,000 rounds of ammunition have been recovered from gun dealers. The measure is intended to curb violent crime in Venezuela where 78% of homicides are linked to firearms."

Submission + - Obama Order Sped Up Wave of Cyberattacks Against Iran (nytimes.com)

Submitted by diewlasing
diewlasing writes: WASHINGTON — From his first months in office, President Obama secretly ordered increasingly sophisticated attacks on the computer systems that run Iran’s main nuclear enrichment facilities, significantly expanding America’s first sustained use of cyberweapons, according to participants in the program.

Mr. Obama decided to accelerate the attacks — begun in the Bush administration and code-named Olympic Games — even after an element of the program accidentally became public in the summer of 2010 because of a programming error that allowed it to escape Iran’s Natanz plant and sent it around the world on the Internet. Computer security experts who began studying the worm, which had been developed by the United States and Israel, gave it a name: Stuxnet.
Education

Submission + - The most epic scavenger hunt returns

Submitted by gotfork
gotfork writes: The world's largest scavenger hunt, covered in previous years on Slashdot, is now taking place at the University of Chicago. The competition is fierce: in 1999 one team build a working breeder reactor in the quad, but only won second place. Items on this year's list include your appendix in a jar (210), a disappearing spoon made of metal (105), a chromatic typewriter (216), an xyloexplosive (33) and a weaponized Xerox machine (83). Check out the full list here (PDF). Not bad for the school where "where fun comes to die".
Mars

Submission + - BOLD plan to find Mars life for cheap (tech-stew.com)

Submitted by
techfun89
techfun89 writes: "There is a BOLD new plan for detecting signs of microbial life on Mars. The nickname is BOLD, which stands for Biological Oxidant and Life Detection Initiative, would be a follow-up to the 1976 Mars Viking life-detection experiments.

"We have much better technology that we could use," says BOLD lead scientist Dirk Schulze-Makuch, with Washington State University. He elaborates, "Our idea is to make a relatively cheap mission and go more directly to characterize and solve the big question about the soil properties on Mars and life detection."

To help figure out the life-detection mystery, Schulze-Makuch and his colleagues would fly a set of six pyramid-shaped probes that would crash land, pointy end down, so they embed themselves four to eight inches into the soil. One of the instruments includes a sensor that can detect a single molecule of DNA or other nucleotide."
Government

Submission + - CISPA Bill Obliterates Privacy Laws with Blank Check of Privacy Invasion (hothardware.com)

Submitted by
MojoKid
MojoKid writes: "At present, the government's ability to share data on its citizens is fairly restricted, insomuch as the various agencies must demonstrate cause and need. This has created a somewhat byzantine network of guidelines and laws that must be followed — a morass of red tape that CISPA is intended to cut through. One of the bill's key passages is a provision that gives private companies the right to share cybersecurity data with each other and with the government "notwithstanding any other provision of law." The problem with this sort of blank check clause is that, even if the people who write the law have only good intentions, it provides substantial legal cover to others who might not. Further, the core problem with most of the proposed amendments to the bill thus far isn't that they don't provide necessary protections, it's that they seek to bind the length of time the government can keep the data it gathers, or the sorts of people it can't collect data on, rather than protecting citizens as a whole. One proposed amendment, for example, would make it illegal to monitor protestors — but not other groups. It's not hard to see how those seeking to abuse the law could find a workaround — a "protestor" is just a quick arrest away from being considered a "possible criminal risk.""
Ubuntu

Submission + - Codename, Theming Update Announced for Ubuntu 12.10 (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by
benfrog
benfrog writes: "In a blog post, Mark Shuttleworth announced some changes for Ubuntu 12.10 (due in October), including the code name (Quantal Quetzal--no, really) and a theme update. Some other more meaningful announcements include a focus on the cloud in the server version and the lack of a transition from Upstart to systemd."
GUI

IDEs With VIM Text Editing Capability? 193

Posted by timothy from the one-keybinding-to-rule-them-all dept.
An anonymous reader writes "I am currently looking to move from text editing with vim to a full fledged IDE with gdb integration, integrated command line, etc. Extending VIM with these capabilities is a mortal sin, so I am looking for a linux based GUI IDE. I do not want to give up the efficient text editing capabilities of VIM though. How do I have my cake and eat it too?"
The Military

Nuclear Subs 'Collide In Ocean' 622

Posted by CmdrTaco from the that's-gonna-look-bad-on-the-resume dept.
Jantastic noted a BBC report saying "A Royal Navy nuclear submarine was involved in a collision with a French nuclear sub in the middle of the Atlantic. It is understood HMS Vanguard and Le Triomphant were badly damaged in the crash earlier this month. Despite being equipped with sonar, it seems neither vessel spotted the other, the BBC's Caroline Wyatt said."
Medicine

Sea Sponge Extract Conquers Resistant Bacteria 132

Posted by kdawson from the soaking-it-in dept.
Science News has an article on research into a compound found in a particular kind of sea sponge that seems to have the ability to restore antibiotics' effectiveness against resistant bacteria. The hope is that, since the compound is not itself deadly or even harmful to bacteria, it may skew the antibiotic-bacteria arms race in our favor. "Chemical analyses of the sponge's chemical defense factory pointed to a compound called algeferin. Biofilms, communities of bacteria notoriously resistant to antibiotics, dissolved when treated with fragments of the algeferin molecule. And new biofilms did not form. So far, the algeferin offshoot has, in the lab, successfully treated bacteria that cause whooping cough, ear infections, septicemia and food poisoning. The compound also works on... [MRSA] infections, which wreak havoc in hospitals. 'We have yet to find one that doesn't work,' says [one of the researchers]."

Comment Re:Textpad! (Score 5, Informative) 1131

by Sean Riordan (#26685637) Attached to: Favorite text editor?
Agreed. Textpad has the perfect balance of feature set and configurability while remaining unobtrusive and doesn't get in the way.

As an alternative, Notepad++ I like nearly as well and has the advantage of being available for the PortableApps suite. Kate workswell for my needs as well and there is always Vi for CLI enviroments.

While there are issues of feature set and capability, for the most part I think text editor choice is all about personal preference. Much more so if you leave CLI usage out of the debate. For example the three primary applications I list above have very little to differenciate between them. They are all perfectly capable and do the job. I use Textpad mostly because I already have a plugin for it that supports syntax for an obscure language I use regularly, I am familiar with it, and I like the default color schemes for syntax highlighting. Though the defualt color scheme when run under wine is horrid, not sure why that is.
Graphics

The Presidential Portrait Goes Digital 295

Posted by CmdrTaco from the oh-oh-obamania dept.
alphadogg writes "Barack Obama's election to US president has already brought a string of firsts, and on Wednesday there came another. The official presidential portrait was shot on a digital camera for the first time. The picture was taken by the White House's new official photographer, Pete Souza, and issued by The Office of the President Elect through its Web site. It was taken on Tuesday evening at 5:38 p.m. using a Canon EOS 5D Mark II, according to the metadata embedded in the image file."

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