Slashdot Mirror

Researcher Patrick Lin says that with the development of a wide range of technologies including: drugs, special nutrition, gene therapy and robotic implants, the military needs to plan for a future where soldiers have "mutant powers.” From the article: "If we don’t, we could find ourselves in big trouble down the road. Among the nightmare scenarios: Botched enhancements could harm the very soldiers they’re meant to help and spawn pricey lawsuits. Tweaked troopers could run afoul of international law, potentially sparking a diplomatic crisis every time the U.S. deploys troops overseas. And poorly planned enhancements could provoke disproportionate responses by America’s enemies, resulting in a potentially devastating arms race (PDF)."

Change writes "The CalPoly Cubesat group's launch yesterday has been a failure. It seems the first stage did not separate from the Dnepr rocket properly, and the vehicle crashed about 25km south of the launch site. More will be known when the debris is recovered and analyzed. A second launch is still in the works, but the loss of the 14 satellites from this launch is an unfortunate end to quite a lot of hard work of many engineering students."

Change writes "The CalPoly Cubesat group's launch yesterday has been a failure. It seems the first stage did not separate from the Dnepr rocket properly, and the vehicle crashed about 25km south of the launch site. More will be known when the debris is recovered and analyzed. A second launch is still in the works, but the loss of the 14 satellites from this launch is an unfortunate end to quite a lot of hard work of many engineering students."

Change writes "The CalPoly Cubesat group's launch yesterday has been a failure. It seems the first stage did not separate from the Dnepr rocket properly, and the vehicle crashed about 25km south of the launch site. More will be known when the debris is recovered and analyzed. A second launch is still in the works, but the loss of the 14 satellites from this launch is an unfortunate end to quite a lot of hard work of many engineering students."

leighklotz writes "The CalPoly CubeSat Program announced a launch date for its 13 amateur satellites: June 28, 2006 at 19:39:11Z, from the Kazakstan Baikonur Cosmodrome aboard a Russian DNEPR-1LV rocket. The satellites are made from a kit, and are 10cm cubes." Read on for more info, including links to many of the individual satellite projects.

leighklotz continues: "There are also pictures of 14 satellites and info about some of them:

• ION, University of Illinois
• RINCON, University of Arizona
• ICE Cube 1, Cornell University
• KUTESat [also] University of Kansas
• nCube nCube Norweigian University of Science and Technology
• HAUSAT-1 Hankuk Aviation University
• SEEDS Nihon University
• CP1 and CP2 Cal Poly
• AeroCube 1 The Aerospace Corporation
• Voyager University of Hawaii
• ICE Cube 2 Cornell University

These folks have a list of ongoing CubeSat projects. And as always AMSAT is a good organization to join if you have any interest in using or building your own satellites."

leighklotz writes "The CalPoly CubeSat Program announced a launch date for its 13 amateur satellites: June 28, 2006 at 19:39:11Z, from the Kazakstan Baikonur Cosmodrome aboard a Russian DNEPR-1LV rocket. The satellites are made from a kit, and are 10cm cubes." Read on for more info, including links to many of the individual satellite projects.

leighklotz continues: "There are also pictures of 14 satellites and info about some of them:

• ION, University of Illinois
• RINCON, University of Arizona
• ICE Cube 1, Cornell University
• KUTESat [also] University of Kansas
• nCube nCube Norweigian University of Science and Technology
• HAUSAT-1 Hankuk Aviation University
• SEEDS Nihon University
• CP1 and CP2 Cal Poly
• AeroCube 1 The Aerospace Corporation
• Voyager University of Hawaii
• ICE Cube 2 Cornell University

These folks have a list of ongoing CubeSat projects. And as always AMSAT is a good organization to join if you have any interest in using or building your own satellites."

leighklotz writes "The CalPoly CubeSat Program announced a launch date for its 13 amateur satellites: June 28, 2006 at 19:39:11Z, from the Kazakstan Baikonur Cosmodrome aboard a Russian DNEPR-1LV rocket. The satellites are made from a kit, and are 10cm cubes." Read on for more info, including links to many of the individual satellite projects.

leighklotz continues: "There are also pictures of 14 satellites and info about some of them:

• ION, University of Illinois
• RINCON, University of Arizona
• ICE Cube 1, Cornell University
• KUTESat [also] University of Kansas
• nCube nCube Norweigian University of Science and Technology
• HAUSAT-1 Hankuk Aviation University
• SEEDS Nihon University
• CP1 and CP2 Cal Poly
• AeroCube 1 The Aerospace Corporation
• Voyager University of Hawaii
• ICE Cube 2 Cornell University

These folks have a list of ongoing CubeSat projects. And as always AMSAT is a good organization to join if you have any interest in using or building your own satellites."

leighklotz writes "The CalPoly CubeSat Program announced a launch date for its 13 amateur satellites: June 28, 2006 at 19:39:11Z, from the Kazakstan Baikonur Cosmodrome aboard a Russian DNEPR-1LV rocket. The satellites are made from a kit, and are 10cm cubes." Read on for more info, including links to many of the individual satellite projects.

leighklotz continues: "There are also pictures of 14 satellites and info about some of them:

• ION, University of Illinois
• RINCON, University of Arizona
• ICE Cube 1, Cornell University
• KUTESat [also] University of Kansas
• nCube nCube Norweigian University of Science and Technology
• HAUSAT-1 Hankuk Aviation University
• SEEDS Nihon University
• CP1 and CP2 Cal Poly
• AeroCube 1 The Aerospace Corporation
• Voyager University of Hawaii
• ICE Cube 2 Cornell University

These folks have a list of ongoing CubeSat projects. And as always AMSAT is a good organization to join if you have any interest in using or building your own satellites."

seanldunn asks: "Currently I am looking at digital video recorder solution to help flesh out my home theater, I've taken a look at the two consumer boxes that I know of, RealplayTV and TiVo"> link however their stance on not being able to upgrade their hardware without taking it into the shop doesn't float my boat. After all, why should I pay them $300 for a 30gig IDE hard drive, when I can buy one off the shelf for $180, and I can get a 60gig for about $200 in a year? Currently I'm am thinking about adding a few components to my personal web/file server running Linux... I'm looking at grabbing a video capture card supported by bttvgrab and some sort of mpeg decoder card with TV out, maybe a Creative Labs Dxr2. Quite frankly a software decoder with a TV out converter doesn't sound good for playing on a P-133... Anyone know if there are any better/cheaper solutions then this?" Interesting thought. If such a solution were put together, how would it compare in quality with the comsumer solutions?

Bill Brooks writes "Sun and IBM announced that they are bailing out of working together on JavaOS for Business. If you've never heard of it, JavaOS for Business was a project that Sun and IBM agreed to work on together to produce a new version of an operating system that would run Java software on so-called 'thin clients.' The operating itself has only been around, in an embryonic form, since May of 1995, and the Sun/IBM joint venture started in 1997, shipping its first release in August of last year. A commercial operating system axed a year into its first release. Is M$ the only software company that can give a commercial OS time to find its market?"

IBM will release DB2 for Linux Beta on December 7th. However it will still lack database extenders and data replication. It may or may not include Java stored procedures and Java user-defined functions (time to clamor ;-)). The article also says IBM will announce on December 1st that it is enabling its enterprise file systems sofware for Linux. Anyone know what that might mean? Another filesystem? IBM does appear to understand the role that Linux could play on attacking the desktop. Remains to be seen about HP and Sun. Update! tpepper wrote in to say he believes the big Dec. 1 announcement will be that IBM's ADSM client is becoming available for Linux. An unsupported version has just become available and ADSM is described on this page "

Jon Abbott writes "I know, this isn't the most *exciting* thing in the world, but hey it's cool. over at wombat.doc.ic.ac.uk, where they have the "Free On-line Dictionary of Computing", I've convinced them to add "slashdot effect" to the dictionary! They even bash IIS! :^) The definition can be found at: link " In humour of a somewhat different kind go here to see Microsoft's response to the Halloween documents ("The existence of these documents demonstrates the vigorous competition that exists in the OS industry.") and a gob-shot of that omnipresent Ed Muth. Thanks to Javier Alvarado for the link.

Dave Kusters writes in with our first non linux-centric question in a bit. He asks "Top level country domains are assigned by the ISO 3166 Maintainance Agency. When a country's name changes, this organization changes the country's top level domain. For example, when Zaire changed to the Democratic Republic of Congo, the top level domain changed from za to cd. My question is, what happens when a large portion of the world does not recognize the new government. For example, when China became the People's Republic of China, the United States and several other countries refused to recognize the PRC. If another non-recognition situation arises, how will the ISO 3166 Maintainance Agency resolve the top level domain? In a related question, when a top level country domain changes, how long does the old domain remain in tact? za was switched over to cd just over a year ago and I can't seem to find any DNS entry in the za domain."