Slashdot Mirror

phaedrus5001 sends this quote from a story at Wired: "A data-logging software company is seeking to squash an Android developer's critical research into its software that is secretly installed on millions of phones, but Trevor Eckhart is refusing to publicly apologize for his research and remove the company's training manuals from his website. Though the software is installed on millions of Android, Blackberry and Nokia phones, Carrier IQ was virtually unknown until the 25-year-old Eckhart analyzed its workings, recently revealing that the software secretly chronicles a user's phone experience, from its apps, battery life and texts. Some carriers prevent users who actually find the software from controlling what information is sent." The EFF is hosting PDFs of CarrierIQ's C&D letter, as well as their response on Eckhart's behalf.

New submitter abesottedphoenix writes "The rural library responsible for the first open source library catalogue is under attack from defence contractor PTFS. More than a decade after rolling out Koha (which we've discussed in the past), they now find themselves in a battle to keep a generic Maori term within the public domain. The story is also covered at Radio NZ. "

alteveer writes "Just like Quake 3 before it, the Doom 3 source code has been released to the public (minus rendering of stencil shadows via the 'depth fail' method, a functionality commonly known as 'Carmack's Reverse')."

jfruhlinger writes "AT&T's plan to merge with T-Mobile just hit a pretty big snag. The FCC declared the merger would be anti-competitive and not in the public interest." According to the NY Times, the FCC seeks to hold a hearing before an administrative law judge in which the burden would be upon AT&T to prove the deal isn't anti-competitive.

New submitter kenboldt writes "Someone going by the alias 'foia' has dropped a link to a zip file containing thousands more emails similar to those released in 2009. There are apparently many more which are locked behind a password, presumably waiting to be released at some time in the future." The University of East Anglia has released a brief statement indicating that the emails were probably obtained during the 2009 breach and held back until now as "a carefully-timed attempt to reignite controversy."

In 2009, an autonomous ocean glider bobbed and dipped its way across the Atlantic; now, reader cylonlover writes with word that "Four small autonomous aquatic robots have embarked on a 60,000-kilometer (37,000-mile) journey across the Pacific ocean. The Wave Gliders, built by California-based Liquid Robotics, left San Francisco last Thursday." Two of the robot craft are to head to Australia, the other two to Japan. According to the IEEE description, "Waves will power their propulsion systems and the sun will power the sensors that will be measuring things like water salinity, temperature, clarity, and oxygen content; collecting weather data, and gathering information on wave features and currents."

New submitter RobinEggs writes "Some reviews of Bulldozer's server performance have arrived. Ars Technica has the breakdown, and the results are pretty ugly. Apparently Bulldozer fares just as poorly with servers as with desktops. From the article: 'One reason for the underwhelming performance on the desktop is that the Bulldozer architecture emphasizes multithreaded performance over single-threaded performance. For desktop applications, where single-threaded performance is still king, this is a problem. Server workloads, in contrast, typically have to handle multiple users, network connections, and virtual machines concurrently. This makes them a much better fit for processors that support lots of concurrent threads. ... It looks as though the decisions that hurt Bulldozer on the desktop continue to hurt it in the server room. Although the server benchmarks don't show the same regressions as were found on the desktop, they do little to justify the design of the new architecture.' It's probably much too early to start editorializing about the end of AMD, or even to say with certainty that Bulldozer has failed, but my untrained eye can't yet see any possible silver lining in these new processors."

First time accepted submitter boley1 writes "According to Cnet — S3 Graphics's case collapsed in their ITC suit, with the ITC ruling that Apple does not infringe on any of S3's patents. A big blow to HTC according to the report." So much for HTC buying a warchest; according to the ruling it looks like AMD/ATI actually owned the patents in question.

An anonymous reader writes "Remember how a shadowy group arose a few months back with the promise of suing thousands of Australians for allegedly pirating movies? ... Well, it looks like the effort has bit the dust as quickly as it was kicked off, with the organization's vice president of sales and marketing leaving and its website shut down. Sounds like that bright future of mega-lawsuits for Internet piracy wasn't so bright after all."

itwbennett writes "In a court filing, Oracle accused HP of secretly contracting with Intel to keep making Itanium processors so that it can continue to make money from its locked-in Itanium customers and take business away from Oracle's Sun servers. Oracle says that Intel would have long ago killed off Itanium if not for these payments from HP. For its part, HP called the filing a 'desperate delay tactic' in the lawsuit HP filed against Oracle over its decision to stop developing for Itanium."

An anonymous reader sends in this excerpt from the Fox-IT blog: "During recent weeks we have observed several interesting publications which have a direct relation to an investigation we worked on recently. On one hand there was a Certificate Authority being revoked by Mozilla, Microsoft and Google (Chrome), on the other hand there was the disclosure of a malware attack by Mikko Hypponen (FSecure) using a government issued certificate signed by the same Certificate Authority. That case, however, is not self-contained, and a whole range of malicious software had been signed with valid certificates. The malicious software involved was used in targeted attacks focused on governments, political organizations and the defense industry. The big question is, of course, what happened, and how did the attackers obtain access to these certificates? We will explain here in detail how the attackers have used known techniques to bypass the Microsoft Windows code signing security model."

jfruhlinger writes "Microsoft has quietly announced that it's planning on baking anti-virus protection right into the Windows 8 OS. Users have been criticizing Windows' insecurity for years — but of course this move is raising howls of protest from anti-virus vendors, who have built a nice business out of Windows' security holes. Is this a good move by Microsoft, or a leveraging of their monopoly as bad as bundling Internet Explorer?"

TheNextCorner writes "NASA is getting set to launch its next Mars rover this week. The car-size Curiosity rover is the centerpiece of NASA's $2.5 billion Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) mission, slated to blast off Saturday (Nov. 26) from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. The rover will employ 10 different science instruments to help it answer questions once it touches down on the Red Planet in August 2012."

First time accepted submitter Micah_Altman writes "As the next redistricting battle shapes up in New York, members of the public have an opportunity to create viable alternatives. Unlike the previously reported crowdsourced redistricting of Los Angeles, the public mapping of New York is based on open source software — anyone can use this to set up their own public web-based redistricting effort."

gbrumfiel writes "For forty years, the Higgs boson has remained a theoretical construct, but by Christmas, scientists may have a pretty good idea of whether it's real or not. Nature News reports that a new analysis has further narrowed the Higgs range, and data gathered this autumn at the LHC should be enough to show a faint signal from a Higgs, if it's there. (Already one signal has disappeared earlier in the year.) Physicists hope to finish their analysis of the autumn data by the year's end, but even if they come up empty-handed it won't be the end of the story. The Higgs is commonly referred to as the particle that endows others with mass, but its real appeal is the ability to unify the weak nuclear force with electromagnetism. If there is no Higgs, some other mechanism for creating a unified 'electroweak' force should be found inside the LHC."

SharkLaser writes "Two of the largest porn companies on the internet, Manwin and Digital Playground, yesterday sued both ICANN and ICM Registry, which runs the .xxx TLD, over extorting defensive registrations with ICANN's blessing. 'The complaint focuses on ICM's recently concluded "sunrise" period, during which porn companies, for about $200, could apply to own a .xxx address matching their trademark or .com domain.' Schools also felt the same way, and had to reserve domains under their name so that no porn content could be put up on them. The .xxx TLD has also previously been subject to criticism by both religious groups and adult industry, but for different reasons. Religious groups believe the .xxx TLD legitimizes pornography, while the adult industry believes it could lead to censorship."

itwbennett writes "As Slashdot readers will recall, Barnes & Noble is being particularly noisy about the patents Microsoft is leveraging against the Nook. Now the bookseller has filed a supplemental notice of prior art that contains a 43-page list of examples it believes counters Microsoft's claim that Nook violates five of Microsoft's patents. 'The list of prior art for the five patents that Microsoft claims the Nook infringes is very much a walk down memory lane,' says Brian Proffitt. 'The first group of prior art evidence presented by Barnes & Noble for U.S. Patent No. 5,778,372 alone lists 172 pieces of prior art' and 'made reference to a lot of technology and people from the early days of the public Internet... like Mosaic, the NCSA, and (I kid you not) the Arena web browser. The list was like old home week for the early World Wide Web.'"

angry tapir writes "The Chinese government is using Internet censorship as a trade weapon against U.S. tech companies trying to do business there. China's ongoing censorship of the Internet is applied unevenly, with foreign companies often facing stricter rules than their Chinese counterparts, said Ed Black, president and CEO of the Computer and Communications Industry Association, to the U.S. Congressional-Executive Commission on China. (Of course, a lot of countries aren't thrilled by U.S. net censorship efforts.)"

gbrumfiel writes "Earlier this year, the OPERA experiment made the extraordinary claim that they had seen neutrinos traveling faster than the speed of light. The experiment, located at Gran Sasso in Italy, saw neutrinos arrive 60 nanoseconds earlier than expected from their starting point at CERN in Switzerland. Others have doubted OPERA's claim, but in a new paper, the group reaffirms its commitment to the measurement. 'It's slightly better than the previous result,' OPERA's physics coordinator Dario Autiero told Nature News. Most members of the collaboration who didn't sign the original paper out of skepticism have now come on board. But scientists outside the group still aren't sure. 'Independent checks are the way to go,' says Rob Plunkett, co-spokesman of a rival experiment called MINOS."

itwbennett writes "Slashdot readers will recall that the SOPA hearings earlier this week 'excluded any witnesses who advocate for civil rights. Google's Katherine Oyama was the only witness to object to the bill in a meaningful way.' So to get the attention of lawmakers, new media giants Google, Facebook, and Zynga turned to the only place they knew that politicians gather daily. They took out a full page ad in the New York Times. The irony of taking out a newspaper ad to protect the Web is certainly lost on no one."

Velcroman1 writes "Slashdotters read Monday about strange symbols in the Gobi Desert recently imaged and indexed by Google Maps. Alien landing zones? Some military thingy? Bizarre art project? Nope. The grids of zigzagging white lines seen in two of the images — the strangest of the various desert structures — are spy satellite calibration targets, according to one NASA scientist."

snydeq writes "Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister discusses why code analysis and similar metrics provide little insight into what really makes an effective software development team, in the wake of a new scorecard system employed at IBM. 'Code metrics are fine if all you care about is raw code production. But what happens to all that code once it's written? Do you just ship it and move on? Hardly — in fact, many developers spend far more of their time maintaining code than adding to it. Do your metrics take into account time spent refactoring or documenting existing code? Is it even possible to devise metrics for these activities?' McAllister writes. 'Are developers who take time to train and mentor other teams about the latest code changes considered less productive than ones who stay heads-down at their desks and never reach out to their peers? How about teams that take time at the beginning of a project to coordinate with other teams for code reuse, versus those who charge ahead blindly? Can any automated tool measure these kinds of best practices?'"

mcgrew writes "CNN is reporting another Occupy movement — Occupy Flash. Their aim: get rid of Flash completely. They explain: 'Why does it matter when HTML5 has clearly won the fight for the future of our web browsing? Well, as we've seen with other outdated web technologies (most notably the much-lamented Internet Explorer 6), as long as software is installed on machines, there will be a contingent of decision makers who mandate its use, and there will be a requirement of continued support, the plugin will live on, and folks will continue to develop for it.' In response, a group of Flash developers have started Occupy HTML in Flash's defense. Popcorn, anyone?"

MojoKid writes "At the supercomputing conference SC2011 yesterday, Intel announced its new Xeon E5 processors and demoed their new Knights Corner many integrated core (MIC) solution. The new Xeons won't be broadly available until the first half of 2012, but Intel has been shipping the new chips to a small number of cloud and HPC customers since September. The new E5 family is based on the same core as the Core i7-3960X Intel launched Monday. The E5, while important to Intel's overall server lineup, isn't as interesting as the public debut of Knights Corner. Recall that Intel's canceled GPU (codenamed Larrabee) found new life as the prototype device for future HPC accelerators and complementary products. According to Intel, Knights Corner packs 50 x86 processor cores into a single die built on 22nm technology. The chip is capable of delivering up to 1TFlop of sustained performance in double-precision floating point code and operates at 1 — 1.2GHz. NVIDIA's current high-end M2090 Tesla GPU, in contrast, is capable of just 665 DP GFlops."

MojoKid writes "At the supercomputing conference SC2011 yesterday, Intel announced its new Xeon E5 processors and demoed their new Knights Corner many integrated core (MIC) solution. The new Xeons won't be broadly available until the first half of 2012, but Intel has been shipping the new chips to a small number of cloud and HPC customers since September. The new E5 family is based on the same core as the Core i7-3960X Intel launched Monday. The E5, while important to Intel's overall server lineup, isn't as interesting as the public debut of Knights Corner. Recall that Intel's canceled GPU (codenamed Larrabee) found new life as the prototype device for future HPC accelerators and complementary products. According to Intel, Knights Corner packs 50 x86 processor cores into a single die built on 22nm technology. The chip is capable of delivering up to 1TFlop of sustained performance in double-precision floating point code and operates at 1 — 1.2GHz. NVIDIA's current high-end M2090 Tesla GPU, in contrast, is capable of just 665 DP GFlops."

An anonymous reader writes "id Software is still planning to release the Doom 3 source this year, but it's been delayed by a patent issue that's causing John Carmack to personally rewrite some of the code. The patent issue in Doom 3 concerns the Carmack's Reverse algorithm and has led Carmack to rewrite it in the open-source Doom 3."

An anonymous reader writes with a new twist in the recently resolved Canadian music label infringement lawsuit. From the article: "Earlier this year, the four primary members of the Canadian Recording Industry Association (now Music Canada) — Warner Music Canada, Sony BMG Music Canada, EMI Music Canada, and Universal Music Canada — settled the largest copyright class action lawsuit in Canadian history by agreeing to pay over $50 million to compensate for hundreds of thousands of infringing uses of sound recordings. While the record labels did not admit liability, the massive settlement spoke for itself. While the Canadian case has now settled, Universal Music has filed its own lawsuit, this time against its insurer, who it expects to pay the costs of the settlement."

An anonymous reader writes with a new twist in the recently resolved Canadian music label infringement lawsuit. From the article: "Earlier this year, the four primary members of the Canadian Recording Industry Association (now Music Canada) — Warner Music Canada, Sony BMG Music Canada, EMI Music Canada, and Universal Music Canada — settled the largest copyright class action lawsuit in Canadian history by agreeing to pay over $50 million to compensate for hundreds of thousands of infringing uses of sound recordings. While the record labels did not admit liability, the massive settlement spoke for itself. While the Canadian case has now settled, Universal Music has filed its own lawsuit, this time against its insurer, who it expects to pay the costs of the settlement."

itwbennett writes "Facebook has reduced the amount of personal data it releases to users as required by European Union law. Due to the volume of requests since Europe v. Facebook began its campaign, Facebook is no longer sending CDs to people. Facebook said in a statement that the CD mailout 'contains a level of detail that is less useful for the average user — it is a much rawer collection of data.' Instead, users are now directed to a page where they can download their personal 'archive,' which according to Facebook is a copy of 'all of the personal information you've shared on Facebook.' But rather than the 57 categories of data early data requesters received, the new tool downloads just 22 categories."

In his first submission, kierny writes "A W3C working group is crafting two standards, due out by summer 2012, to enable consumers to opt out of online tracking. Numerous big players are involved, including Google, Facebook, IBM, Mozilla, Microsoft, plus the Center for Democracy and Technology, Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Federal Trade Commission. The first standard is Tracking Preference Expression, 'to define a standard for a how a browser can tell a website that a user wants more privacy,' says W3C working group co-chairman Dr. Matthias Schunter of IBM Research. 'So you send a signal, and you get a response from the website which tells you that the request has been honored.' The second standard, meanwhile, is the Tracking Compliance and Scope Specification, which details how websites should comply with Do Not Track preferences. But, don't expect Do Not Track to be active by default."

iONiUM writes "In a somewhat surprising end to the ongoing fight between large ISPs (a duopoly in Canada), and independent ISPs, the CRTC has ruled in favor of the small ISPs. This means that independent ISPs can continue to have unlimited plans offered to customers. From the article: 'Under the CRTC’s new capacity-based approach, large telephone and cable companies will sell wholesale bandwidth to independent ISPs on a monthly basis. Independent ISPs will have to determine in advance the amount they need to serve their retail customers and then manage network capacity until they are able to purchase more. Alternatively, large companies can continue to charge independent ISPs a flat monthly fee for wholesale access, regardless of how much bandwidth their customers use. Both billing options give independent ISPs the ability to design service plans and charge their own customers as they see fit.' Score one for the citizens."

New submitter ProbablyJoe writes "InfoQ reports that Adobe is to donate its web application SDK, Flex, to an 'an established open source foundation' — suspected to either be the Open Spoon Foundation (who have been working on an open source fork of Flex), or the more established Apache Foundation. Adobe has stated on its blog that they consider HTML5 to be a better technology for the future than its own Flex platform, causing frustration among developers who have used the platform for enterprise applications. Is this a generous contribution to the open source community, or just Adobe offloading another failing technology?"

Hugh Pickens writes writes "Oklahoma is typically seismically stable, with about 50 small quakes a year — but in 2009, that number jumped up to more than 1,000 and on November 5 a 5.6-magnitude tremor rattled Oklahoma — one of the strongest to ever hit the state — leading scientists to wonder if the increasingly common use of fracking, the controversial practice of blasting underground rock formations with high-pressure water, sand, and chemicals to extract natural gas, may have put stress on fault lines. Human intervention has caused earthquakes before with one 'textbook case' occurring in 1967 in India, says Peter Fairley at IEEE Spectrum, when the reservoir behind the hydroelectric Koyna Dam was filled up. The added water 'unleashed a magnitude 6.3 quake' by placing stress 'on a previously unknown fault, killing 180 people and leaving thousands homeless.' Last week's earthquakes and aftershocks are centered in rural Lincoln County, in an area about 30 miles east of Oklahoma City and there are 181 injection wells In Lincoln County. But a recent study by Austin Holland, a seismologist with the Oklahoma Geological Survey, says that it's possible that hydraulic fracking caused a series of small earthquakes, peaking at 2.8, in an area south of Oklahoma City but doesn't believe fracking caused the big Nov. 5, 6 and 8 earthquakes comparing a man-made earthquake to a mosquito bite. 'It's really quite inconsequential,' says Holland."

You asked Phil Plait, aka The Bad Astronomer, questions on topics ranging from debunking superstition to extraterrestrial life to funding space exploration; read on below for his answers. Thanks for taking part, Phil! My galaxy is bigger than yours?
fuego451

In January of '09, The BBC ran a story on research done by scientists at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Using the VLBA they found what they felt was very good evidence that our galaxy is about the same size as Andromeda (150k ly). However, very few of their fellow astronomers, including you, are touting this new size. Why? Was the study flawed?

From reading the story, the study looks legit; it's using techniques that have been around a long time and are well-understood. The reason I didn't write about it is because I didn't know about it! Well that's one reason. I get a bazillion press releases, and I can't write about all of them; I physically can't — that pesky only 24 hours in a day thing — and I've found that if I write too many in-depth astronomy posts every day, my traffic actually drops. Weird, isn't it? But true, so I pick which ones interest me the most and write about those.

In this case, too, I see a story every few months claiming we're bigger than M31, then another saying M31 is bigger than us. Even if each study is done perfectly, and turns out to be right, I can't write about them every time. It's overload on the reader, and it becomes an issue of everyone saying, "Wait, which way was it last time?" Incremental stories are very tough to write, especially in a series. It's like when astronomers find the lowest mass planet yet, and really it's just barely lower mass (within the error bars) of the last one. It's interesting, but unless it really blasts through the last record and brings us into new territory, it's ultimately just a footnote. Cool, and important, but if I wrote about every one I wouldn't have nearly enough time to watch TV and moon over River Song.

Extra Solar Planetary Imaging
mklopez

I just had an interesting argument with a coworker. The point: while he can accept that space-based telescopes would be able to do direct imaging of extra solar planets — assuming that they can directly capture the photons traveling across all the involved light-years without interference — he just doesn't believe that is possible to image those planets from the Earth surface, given atmospheric interference. He says that the images from Hawaii and other Earth observatories are just software interpolations that try to "guess" and "process" (his words) the anomalies in the images as planets... in other words, they are unintentionally "photoshopped" (again, his word). The basic question would be, then: how can a telescope inside our atmosphere be able to "take pictures" of something as faint as extrasolar planets?

Well, to be clear, your friend is wrong. :) The images taken using Keck, Gemini, the VLT and others are just as legit as the ones from Hubble (I have a gallery of them here.) The Earth's air does mess up images pretty well, since it's turbulent and fuzzes out light coming down. But there are several techniques that are used that are physically and actually compensating for that motion, including adaptive optics and laser guide stars. This isn't some sort of interpolation or picking out blips, it's literally measuring how much the atmosphere is distorting things and compensating for it. In some cases, over small areas of the sky, these techniques allow for higher resolution imagery than Hubble can produce!

Seeing faint planets near stars is really hard; if it were easy, we would've been doing it a century ago. But this new tech is pretty good at what it does. It's not magic, it's science.

Space junk
dcsmith

How serious is the amount of 'space junk' orbiting Earth? Will it have a substantial impact on the future of space flight, manned or otherwise? What are some of the best (or at least most innovative) ideas you've heard about for deorbiting big junk or cleaning up smaller bits of debris?

Well, NASA sure takes it seriously. The space station has had to boost itself to different orbits several times to make sure it got out of the way of some bit of debris or another. NASA has an entire office devoted to looking at debris and tracking it (http://orbitaldebris.jsc.nasa.gov/) and the National Reconnaissance Office does as well. Everything bigger than the size of a tennis ball in orbit is tracked, and there are thousands of them. At orbital speeds, a fleck of paint can put a hole in a spacesuit — it can have the same energy of impact as a bullet!

Big stuff is trackable, so while it's dangerous at least you can do the math and get some advance notice of a potential impact. The tiny stuff is far more dangerous, because you don't know where it all is — and also because there's lots more smaller stuff than bigger stuff (take a hammer, smash a rock, and them look at how many big pieces you get versus tiny ones).

One idea I thought was cool to get rid of debris is to hit it with a laser, heating it up and boiling off material. That acts like a wee rocket, pushing the debris into orbits which allow them to decay faster. Pretty cool, and possible though difficult in a practical sense. There's a *lot* of stuff up there. One thing is for sure; we need several different strategies to get rid of this stuff. There's no one panacea for it.

Naked eye astronomy
rickett81

I enjoy gazing at the heavens sometimes but by no means would call myself an astronomer. Short of purchasing a telescope and driving out of the city, do you have any suggestions for 'naked eye' astronomy in an area of moderate light pollution?

Yeah! There are approximate a bajillion sites that can predict satellite passes for a given location; I always use Heavens Above. Random satellite passes are fun, but seeing something like the space station or Hubble is very cool. Iridium flares — bright flashes off of reflective surfaces on Iridium commsats — are really nifty to see. And many get bright enough to spot even from places where light pollution is a problem.

There's also meteor showers, of course. But my best recommendation to everyone is to get a pair of inexpensive but solid binoculars. You can see Jupiter's moons, craters on our own Moon, Saturn's rings, and more. And they're always good to have around if you hike or just see a bird or something in the distance. I always have a pair handy. Always.

Where to start helping?
modi123

Way back when I was a freshman in college I was considering a carrier in astronomy and physics, but I opted for the more flashy and showy job of application development. Is there room for hobby astronomers to contribute in a meaningful way to the global community, or should I stick with the crowd-sourcing projects on zooniverse.org?

Well first, those citizen science projects are freaking fantastic. They're producing all kinds of interesting science. Zooniverse is a good place to start.

It used to be that comets and asteroids were all discovered by amateurs, but robotic telescopes rule the night now. Still, "amateur" observations play a big role; that big storm on Saturn last year was discovered by an amateur, as were several asteroid/comet impacts on Jupiter. Those are rare events, of course, and discovered because there are lots of amateurs looking at the sky. Realistically, any specific person's odds of contributing that way are small, but overall the combined probability approaches 1. :)

But those online citizen science projects are only getting bigger, and more are on the way. It's a fun way to do real science, and make a difference.

And we do need more and better astronomy app, so maybe you chose the right career after all.

Viewing the Transit of Venus Next June
nani popoki

Next June, I plan to travel from Boston to Hawaii (probably Kauai) to view the transit of Venus. I can take a small (90mm mak cas) telescope and a solar filter, but trying to cope with airline carry-on luggage restrictions and get a 4" diameter, 10" long aluminum cylinder through airport security is going to be a pain. Can viewing the transit be done using a camera obscura technique like one might use for viewing a partial solar eclipse?

For those wondering, a transit of Venus is when the planet passes directly in front of the Sun as seen from Earth; the next one is in June 2012, and there won't be another until 2117 (weirdly, due to orbital math, they come in pairs each separated by 8 years, but then the next pair coming over a century later). So this is your chance. TransitofVenus.org has tons of info. I saw the last one in 2004, and it was awesome. All I used were special glasses that blocked sunlight; Venus was visible as a tiny dot on the Sun's face.

Getting a telescope through security is risky; they could damage it, or it could be stolen, or they could decide it's a weapon, and then parts of *you* might get transited that you would prefer remain unocculted. You could ship the 'scope through the mail in advance, which is probably safe enough. You could also just use binoculars to project the Sun's image on a piece of paper; this is great for viewing, but difficult to photograph. Still, probably better than a pinhole camera or camera obscura.

Threats from Space?
north.coaster

We're always hearing about threats to our planet from outer space. Asteroid impacts Gamma Ray bursts. Invaders from Mars. The list goes on. What do you think is our biggest threat from space, and why?

We're all gonna DIEEEE AIIIIEEEE!!!

OK, with that out of the way... it depends. You have to weigh severity with chance. So, a GRB can sterilize the Earth in ten seconds flat, but the odds of one happening in your lifetime are millions to one against (and we don't have any good GRB candidates close enough to do the trick anyway). The Sun will expand into a red giant and fry the planet for real and for sure... but not for 5 billion years. So lots of big disasters aren't much to fret over.

My two biggest concerns are asteroid/comet impacts, and solar storms. A blast from the Sun can't really hurt us directly, but it can really mess up satellites, and a lot of our navigation and economy depends on them. Also, they can cause big blackouts over large areas (like Quebec had in March 1989), and that's pretty serious. We can take measures to prevent this (hardening our satellites against storms, and adding more power capacity to the grid to handle overloads) but that's expensive, difficult, and hard to convince company CEOs of the threat. With the solar peak coming in 2013/2014, we'll just have to see what happens.

Asteroids and comets are probably the biggest threat. We *know* no dinosaur killer is on its way here for at least a century or three, so that's cool. But the Tunguska event in 1908 (a 20 megaton explosion) and the Meteor Crater impact (in Arizona, also about 15 — 20 MT) were caused by rocks only about 50 meters across at most, and we wouldn't see one of those coming in until it was practically in our atmosphere. Literally.

But there are people taking this seriously (like the B612 Foundation). We're looking for killer rocks, and there are ideas of ways to push them away from us. I gave a TEDxBoulder talk on this, with details: It's only 12 minutes, and should scare you and then mollify you.

A couple of questions on NEOs
hairyfeet

I'm strictly a layman sky gazer so apologies if I don't use the right terminology. 1. What would you say our risk level for NEOs is? I know we make fun of the Naburu or whatever that crazy rogue planet thing is called but last I heard we had only mapped about 2% of the sky and with all that space it does make me wonder if we would actually see a NEO that was a danger before it was too late to do anything, and as a follow up 2. If we were to spot a NEO that was a danger do you believe we could divert it with our current technology, if so how so? Gravity tractor, using nukes as shockwaves to divert, maybe solar sails? How far away would the NEO have to be detected at for these to work?

I already talked about dangers from NEOs in the answer above, so there you go. The mapping question is a good one, but you have to be careful. For example, we know there is no Nibiru because if there were its gravity would have affected the orbits of other planets. Also, a planet as big or bigger than Jupiter would be naked eye visible for decades (centuries, really) before getting here. So in that case we don't need to map the whole sky.

Same thing, kinda, with asteroids. We have mapped so many now that the odds of one as big as the dinosaur killer coming in the next few centuries is really small. Smaller ones really are hard to find though. The good news is we're getting better at it, and more telescopes are coming that will map the sky more and more.

If we do see one, the best course of action depends on how big it is, and how much time we have. If time is short before impact (like
Fermi question
JoshuaZ

What do you think is the answer to Fermi's question? That is, why do you think we see no signs of intelligent life other than humans?

I don't know what the answer is. I mean, duh, no one does. The idea that we're first is not so slanderous to me, but the problem with it is the timescale. Planets like Earth could have easily formed a billion years earlier than Earth, and that's a helluva long time. Even with slower-than-light ships you can colonize the entire galaxy in just a few million years, a fraction of a billion years. So that bugs me.

We know there are lots of Sun-like stars out there (billions of 'em) and Earth-like planets are looking like they're pretty common too, given what we're learning. So it may boil down to how easy it is for life to arise (which I think is pretty easy)... but also on alien psychology. Of all the factors in the Drake equation, I suspect that's the one that we'll never know until we meet aliens. Maybe they won't care about exploration and contact. Maybe they are so weird we can't even guess what's going on.

So, short answer: beats me. We should keep looking.

Light pollution
Frenzied Apathy

There are a large number of light pollution articles to be found on the Sky and Telescope website. We amateur astronomers are keenly aware that light pollution isn't just about being able to see more stars from our backyard. Yet, when I mention the subject to friends, family, co-workers, etc, I often get a blank stare. "What's 'light pollution'?" What do you think can/should be done to improve widespread public awareness of light pollution and its effects?

That's a tough one. I've written about it a few times, but it doesn't reach the right people. Public advocacy works; I know some towns have changed lighting to reduce light pollution. That's still small scale though. The best way is to drag people out to dark sites; my wife and I were recently in the mountains at night and she was shocked at how many stars she could see. That may not be a practical way to change lots of minds, though! So honestly, I don't know. I wish I did. Usually, switching to more efficient lights that are also not polluting the sky save money, too, but that does seem to be a hard sell. If someone has a solution, let me know!

Pie in the Sky
Colonel Korn

If you could give Apollo-level funding to a single NASA program, what would it be? Would you direct that money internally or involve private space companies?

I don't think that's the right way to ask that question. NASA does a LOT of stuff, a lot of it very cool. Some of it could be better directed, I think. I'm not so sure I see the need for a heavy lift rocket from NASA, for example, when private companies are well on their way to making those. I prefer NASA innovate, rather than do stuff others can do.

So what I'd like to see is to have their budget doubled. Boom! Just like that. That, plus heavy lift capability from private industry, and there's no more worrying over scraping a gram or two off a Mars probe; you make it as big as you want, and if something doesn't fit, you build another one and launch it later. It's not that the money isn't there — we spend 10+ million bucks *an hour* in Iraq and Afghanistan — it's that we don't choose to do it.

Finally, what do you think of lunar-based observatories from a cost vs. performance standpoint?

I like the idea of a radio telescope on the far side, blocked from Earth's interference. But I'm not sold on optical lunar scopes. Putting them in orbit around Earth is way cheaper, and you don't have to worry about lunar dust, or gravity warping your optics, and a hundred other issues.

If, someday, we have a lunar colony, then yeah! There are plenty of native materials that can be used to build 'scopes. Until then though, space-based is the way.

Mars, Europa, Enceladus or Titan?
wisebabo

Is this like MFK?

If you had to choose a major (Discovery?) class probe to look for life beyond earth which celestial body would you send it to?

• Mars (methane outgassing?)
• Europa (subsurface ocean?)
• Enceladus (water "fountains"?)
• Titan (liquid water, ammonium, hydrocarbon ocean?

Oh. Well, as a scientist, Mars, which has so much cool stuff going on — it's a freaking *planet* — that there're endless things to learn. As a human and scifi fan, Europa. The scientific payoff is arguably less than Mars, but the idea of exploring an undersurface ocean is awfully tempting. And it's a lot closer than Saturn. I think it and Enceladus are tied for interest, but Europa is a lot easier to get to. I'd like to see a dedicated Titan probe eventually, but since we don't have unlimited funds, I think it's smarter to go with a safer bet. We don't *know* life can arise in lakes of liquid methane, but we do know it can in water. So overall: Europa.

Are you familiar with Peter Ward's book "Life but not as we know it" in which he makes a strong case for Titan? Do you agree?

I haven't read it. But life on Titan, but in the end, is still speculation, no matter how solidly it's based in known science. That's true for Europa too, of course but the speculation is less extended, since we know there's liquid water there. So I think I'd rather see a probe go to someplace where we know the circumstances for life are good.

Funding for small, interdisciplinary projects?
LeDopore

I've noticed a disturbing trend that as funding levels drop, agencies are receding more to their core areas of study and leaving interdisciplinary scientists high and dry. Furthermore, it seems that there's an inverse relationship between the fund-ability of a project and its efficiency: if a (say) particle physics project is so inefficient it requires 1000 scientists 10 years to get 1 bit of data (like the Top quark discovery) then they're guaranteed to have well-coordinated funding and lobbying effort, whereas projects that deliver results on only a shoestring budget might not have enough people working on them to get any funding at all.

I'm working at the interface between neuroscience and algorithm theory, and I've already made some very interesting discoveries using borrowed time/funding, but I have trouble shopping my ideas to either pure neuroscience/medical funding agencies (who don't understand the math) or to computer science funding agencies (who don't appreciate the biology). Both sides seem generally excited and encouraging, but neither is willing to fund my future research, since (despite a promising track record) I'm out of the expertise of anyone out there.

My question is, are we doomed to a future dominated by big science projects working in entrenched specialties on the least-efficient, longest-term, too-big-to-fail science investigations out there? If not, how do we promote efficient, small-scale, interdisciplinary project funding?

I'm no expert in this, but I have to wonder if the 'net is changing that. The example is TV shows. It used to take a vast budget, a huge staff, and all kinds of expertise to make a show, and it still might be crap. :) Now, people can do it for not much money at all, and lots of stuff on the web is pretty damn good! And it's egalitarian in many cases, with the best stuff rising up.

Science may be the same way. Small projects can get funded through microdonations — Kelly Weinersmith is doing this, and raising funds for her research into parasites, for example (http://www.weinersmith.com/?p=483). Citizen science projects are popping up all over the place. It's a funny time right now, with things in transition, but I suspect it'll solidify in the next few years.

Funding for the JWST?
wisebabo

Do you support finishing the JWST, which is now substantially behind schedule and over budget? (I realize that many of the problems were caused by Congress but unfortunately that's where we are today). What about if a substantial amount of the money needed to complete it is taken out of other astronomy related programs?

I'm torn about this. I supported JWST up until recent revelations that it would cost more than even NASA's overestimates. Cost overruns may have to come out of other NASA missions, and that's *NOT* acceptable. The House wants to kill it, but the Senate wants to fund it, but they still haven't said where the money will come from! It's a mess.

Canceling it outright would be a mistake, I think, since it's the only big astrophysics project NASA has going right now, and it'll keep a lot of astronomers employed for a long time. :) But of course it will revolutionize science the way Hubble did — which was also hugely over budget, behind schedule, and a political nightmare, BTW. Yet that's not how people think of Hubble now at all.

So I honestly don't know what to do. maybe we'll get a better idea once the Senate and House hammer out their two different budgets. But given the atmosphere in Congress, I wouldn't make bets either way.

Dangerous Bad Astronomy
BeardedChimp

In science a simple misconception can lead to thousands and millions of people being skeptical and disbelieving. For example the large number of people who think that humans evolved from chimpanzees rather than sharing a common ancestor. In astronomy, what misconception would you class as most dangerous to the general public's understanding?

I don't think there's any one misconception that's most dangerous, but I might say that the idea that there are mysterious things out here poised to kill us that the government is covering up might be most pernicious. Lots of people — kids mostly, but not all — are terrified over 2012, and think some giant planet or solar flare will kill us all. That makes me so angry I want to kick puppies [Note: that's a metaphor. Puppies do not make up fake doomsday scenarios in order to bilk people out of money and scare them half to death.]. Not that people are wrong in this belief — ignorance is curable — but that so many people spread this idea to sell books. 2012 is 100% unadulterated pure crap, with absolutely no basis at all. None. Yet I get emails from people who are scared out of their minds over it.

At the risk of oversimplifying, it comes from a lack of scientific thinking, lack of skeptical training, and the atmosphere of governmental mistrust. If we as a people had a better grasp of science and the process behind it, a lot of this garbage would evaporate. But this is the price we pay for not supporting science education more.

Trends in misconceptions?
vlm

Do you see long term trends in various misconceptions? It seems subjectively to me that the "vernal equinox egg" deal was way more popular in the '80s. Its a random variable on the timescale of a couple years.

The only trend I see is overall permanence. :) Things come and go, but there are always *things*.

The egg myth does seem to be dying, and I'm more than happy to take full credit for that. :) But other stuff comes in and fills the vacuum.

Other misconceptions, like "the far side of the moon is always dark" or "the moon always rises at sunset and sets at sunrise" have a relatively constant rate of mis-belief over time. Another type of misconception is the flash in the pan like the "face on Mars" which gets intense media attention for awhile and then fades (permanently?) into obscurity. Do you see any general trends in the distribution of the three types of misconceptions over time, like one getting more or less popular or ... maybe due to social media or something?

Some of these idea stick around because of inertia or a lack of proper debunking (like the Moon being bigger on the horizon; that one has a hatfull of bad explanations). Others because they seem plausible, are exciting, have a veneer of scientific language, and spread faster than a solid debunking can — like a pole shift causing superstorms or that Betelgeuse will explode in 2012. These specific claims come and go, but stuff like them will always be around.

I don't see much trending going on, but I haven't done the statistics. :) But as long as we have instantaneous communication (like Twitter) and a population that isn't familiar with the science, we'll always have this problem. Heck, *astrology* trends on Twitter all the time (probably once a month; I should check that!). Sheesh.

Cold Fusion
afabbro

Ever since I read Gary Taubes' "Bad Science," I've been unshakably convinced that cold fusion is an example of pathological science, and Pons/Fleischman's "room temperature fusion" was utter nonsense.

However, CF believers seems to soldier on year after year. As recently as 2009, the U.S. Navy Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center reported finding neutron bursts when using heavy water electrolysis, though their claims were not accepted by the mainstream scientific community.

Has anything emerged since the debunking of Pons/Fleischmann that gives any credence to cold fusion?

Anything real? Nope.

That was easy. :)

Seriously, there will always be perpetual motion believers, no matter what the science — and overwhelming evidence — shows. There may yet be a real version of cold fusion, but it's clear that Pons, Fleischmann, and companies like Steorn are wrong. But when has being completely and utterly wrong ever stopped people?



Anthroporelevence
EdZ

You've made your position fairly clear on whether the current recent warming trend in global temperature is anthropogenic. My question is: do you think a mere reduction in (or cessation of) anthropic CO2 emissions will significantly reduce this trend, and whether larger scale geoengineering is an inevitable requirement to maintain the abnormally long stable warm period that humanity has thrived in for the last few millennia?

I'll be honest: I have no idea. That's something you'd have to ask the experts about. It's entirely possible it's too late to do much, or maybe we still have some time. But it's going to be impossible to get *anything* done until the global warming deniers in government are tossed out, or at least made less powerful. When the head of the House Energy and Commerce Committee says humans don't cause climate change (and so many sitting members of that committee are out-and-out climate change deniers), getting substantive change implemented is impossible.

Mad Scientist
Restil

Any chance of ever bringing back your Mad Scientist section, where you do a Q&A sort of like the Straight Dope, only with generally more Astronomy related topics? That's the particular feature that caused me to discover your site in the first place.

First, thanks! It was fun to do that, but incredibly time consuming. However, I have plans...stay tuned. :)

Star Trek or Star Wars?
jellomizer

Which do you find more annoying: Star Trek which can spend a good portion of the show trying to explain how and why they break the laws of physics? Or Star Wars, which breaks the laws of physics but doesn't care to explain itself?

Trek. Done and done.

Star Wars was space opera, and never depended on the science. Trek was more science fiction, but the writers really blew it many times with the saving of the ship at the last second with technobabble; that's not science fiction, it's a plot device. Still, Trek did have lots of good science in it, and the point I like to make is how many people it inspired to become scientists, me included. And more shows these days are using science advisors, though of course if the plot demands twisting the science, oh well. I live with it, because I like a good story, too!

Uranus
TheDawgLives

How do you pronounce the name of the seventh planet from the Sun? I'm in favor of Futurama's solution: rename it to Urrectum.

I claim that's the only funny joke that's been made about the planet. Leave it to Futurama!

I personally pronounce it "YOOR-in-us", but it probably should be "oo-RAN-us". There's a lot of confusion over this, references to butts notwithstanding.

Doing this for some time
by 0racle

You've been doing The Bad Astronomer thing for a while. How come you haven't become a better astronomer by now?

They say the sky's the limit, and to me that's really true, because I'm bad, I'm bad, come on, you know it.

Just to tell you once again, who's bad?

angry tapir writes "Wrapped in the code the Duqu worm uses to infect computers is the message: 'Copyright (c) 2003 Showtime Inc. All rights reserved. DexterRegularDexter.' An analysis of the worm has also revealed that Duqu, which is similar to Stuxnet and may even have been written by the same developers, may be four years old and that it generally tries to steal information on Wednesdays."

MarkWhittington writes "Andrew Chaikin, the author of A Man on the Moon: The Voyages of the Apollo Astronauts, believes that the spirit of Apollo no longer resides at NASA, but rather in the nascent commercial space companies such as SpaceX. This assessment is disputed by many, who see in the Obama administration program of government subsidies for commercial space the spirit of Solyndra."

JabrTheHut writes "The Guardian has a story of how Icelandic MP Birgitta Jonsdottir, a former WikiLeaks volunteer, is challenging the U.S.'s acquisition of Twitter account information, IP addresses, mailing addresses and even bank information. The U.S. says it wanted these details to help with its investigation into WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. Jonsdottir said, 'This is a huge blow for everybody that uses social media. We have to have the same civil rights online as we have offline. Imagine if the U.S. authorities wanted to do a house search at my home, go through my private papers. There would be a hell of a fight. It's absolutely unacceptable.'"

An anonymous reader tips news that, right on schedule after Tuesday's Firefox 8.0 launch, Mozilla has rolled out the beta of Firefox 9.0. This update brings a significant boost to JavaScript performance, UI improvements for the OS X Lion version, and Do Not Track opt-out detection for developers. 9.0 beta also "supports chunking for XHR requests so websites can receive data that’s part of a large XHR download in progress. This helps developers make websites and Web apps faster, especially those that download large sets of data or via AJAX."

An anonymous reader writes "The Linux kernel power bug that caused high power usage for many Intel Linux systems has finally been addressed. Matthew Garrett of Red Hat has devised a solution for the ASPM Linux power problem by mimicking Microsoft Windows' power behavior in the Linux kernel. A patch is on LKML for this solution to finally restore the battery life under Linux."

New submitter benfrog writes "Despite repeated attempts over the past few days, Russia is unable to make contact with Phobos-Grunt, the probe that was supposed to make it to Mars and never left Earth's atmosphere. Estimates now vary widely on the time left to contact the probe, but it is descending toward Earth and will likely turn into scrap before it can be reached." Official information is still hard to come by, but the Planetary Society Weblog has been keeping up with the story.

tearmeapart writes "It may be time again for another discussion/flamewar on the reasons why a lot of us are (still) using Microsoft. The last big discussion on Slashdot was close to 10 years ago, and a lot has changed since then: Windows XP and 7 have proven to be stable (and memories of Windows ME are mostly gone.) There are many more distributions for Linux, especially commercial options. Distributions like Ubuntu and CentOS have made GNU/Linux more friendly. Options for word processing, spreadsheets, etc. have grown. Apple and their products have changed considerably, though their philosophy hasn't. Microsoft Silverlight came and is on the way out. Wine and solutions like Transgaming have matured. So... why are a lot of us still using Windows? What would it take for us to switch?"

An anonymous reader writes "Johannes Caspar, data protection commissioner for the German state of Hamburg, today declared he will soon fine Facebook over its use of biometric facial recognition technology. He said 'further negotiations are pointless' because the company had ignored a deadline he set for it to remove the feature. German authorities could fine Facebook up to €300,000 ($420,000)."

Wired reports that "The Justice Department is entitled to records of the Twitter accounts used by three current and former WikiLeaks associates, a federal judge ruled Thursday, dealing a victory to prosecutors in a routine records demand that turned into a fierce court battle over online privacy and free speech. ... The Justice Department has been seeking the Twitter records under 18 USC 2703(d), a 1994 amendment to the Stored Communications Act that allows law enforcement access to non-content internet records, such as transaction information, without demonstrating the 'probable cause' needed for a full-blown search warrant." Jacob Appelbaum, one of the three, was also detained on his re-entry to the U.S. last August (as well as on numerous other occasions) and had his email records seized as well. The others are Birgitta Jonsdottir (a member of Iceland's parliament) and Dutch businessman Rop Gonggrijp.

Wired reports that "The Justice Department is entitled to records of the Twitter accounts used by three current and former WikiLeaks associates, a federal judge ruled Thursday, dealing a victory to prosecutors in a routine records demand that turned into a fierce court battle over online privacy and free speech. ... The Justice Department has been seeking the Twitter records under 18 USC 2703(d), a 1994 amendment to the Stored Communications Act that allows law enforcement access to non-content internet records, such as transaction information, without demonstrating the 'probable cause' needed for a full-blown search warrant." Jacob Appelbaum, one of the three, was also detained on his re-entry to the U.S. last August (as well as on numerous other occasions) and had his email records seized as well. The others are Birgitta Jonsdottir (a member of Iceland's parliament) and Dutch businessman Rop Gonggrijp.

jfruhlinger writes "Edward Naughton has been insisting for months that Android violates the GPL because Google created a new set of Linux kernel headers that it hasn't released the source code for, despite the fact that it incorporates open source code. While numerous commentators, including those who helped write the kernel headers, claimed this code isn't copyrightable, Naughton in persisting in his crusade, saying that the questions need to be resolved in court for the good of the open source movement."

iONiUM writes "As a follow up to the previous slashdot story, there has been a new release by the International Energy Agency indicating that within 5 years we will have irreversible climate change. According to the IEA, 'There are few signs that the urgently needed change in direction in global energy trends is under way. Although the recovery in the world economy since 2009 has been uneven, and future economic prospects remain uncertain, global primary energy demand rebounded by a remarkable 5% in 2010, pushing CO2 emissions to a new high. Subsidies that encourage wasteful consumption of fossil fuels jumped to over $400bn (£250.7bn).'"

MrSeb writes "Just a couple of months after nanoengineers at Tufts University developed an 18-atom single-molecule electric motor, researchers from the University of Twente in the Netherlands have gone one better: They've made a car using just a single molecule. To create the vehicle, Tibor Kudernac and colleagues crafted a molecule with a long body and four 'paddle' (wheel) features attached at each corner. The molecule was created with a bottom-up process, where each part of the molecule is gently slotted together. By applying tiny amounts of electricity with a scanning tunneling microscope (STM) to the finished vehicle, the wheels are forced to make a quarter turn. The wheels naturally take another quarter turn to restore equilibrium — and then the STM starts the process all over again. The end result is very slow forward movement — six nanometers per 10 electric pulses."

itwbennett writes "Following Tuesday's report that HP is looking to sell WebOS, CEO Meg Whitman and HP employees gathered for a late-afternoon meeting. According to The Verge, Whitman told those gathered at the meeting 'It's really important to me to make the right decision, not the fast decision,' adding that a decision would come in the next three to four weeks."

SharkLaser writes "Silverlight 5 might be last version released by Microsoft. Several industry insiders and partners for the last few weeks have heard from their own Microsoft sources that there won't be new versions released after Silverlight 5. Status on service packs and support for Silverlight is unclear, as Microsoft haven't yet released lifecycle support end date even for the previous Silverlight 4. By their support page they will give full year head-up before ending support. With Adobe ending development of Flash for mobile browsers and Microsoft ending development of Silverlight, HTML5 video looks a lot more promising. But will content providers be able to give out their material without DRM and how does HTML5 perform with non-video side of Flash and Silverlight?"

MojoKid writes with an article in Hot Hardware about the fancy new Asus tablet/laptop hybrid. Quoting the article: "Asus and nVidia have collectively taken the wraps off the next-generation version of Asus's well-received Transformer tablet line. The new system aims to carve out a slice of the premium tablet market that Apple's iPad has dominated for so long. On paper and in pictures, the Prime impresses. The Transformer Prime incorporates NVIDIA's new Kal-El (Tegra 3) processor and is one of NVIDIA Tegra 3's upper-end launch systems. The new ARM-based CPU contains a fifth 'companion core' to reduce and manage idle power consumption and contains 12 GPU cores, up from the eight GPUs in Tegra 2. NVIDIA claims that Tegra 3's GPU is up to 3x faster than Tegra 2, thanks to additional architectural enhancements. Asus is also rolling out a new LCD they're calling 'Super IPS+.' The display's normal brightness tops out at ~500 nits, but the Prime offers an alternate Super IPS mode that pushes display brightness up to 600 nits for use in bright outdoor environments."