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Radiosonde, weather balloon, near-space exploration package... call it what you will, but today's interviewee, Jamel Tayeb, is hanging instrument packages and cameras below balloons and sending them up to 97,000 feet (his highest so far), then recovering them 50 or 60 miles away from their liftoff points with help from a locator beacon -- and not just any locator beacon, mind you, but a special one from a company called High Altitude Science with "unlocked" firmware that allows it to work with GPS satellites from altitudes greater than 60,000 feet, which typical, off-the-shelf GPS units can't do.

Here's a balloon launch video from Instructure, a company that helps create open source education systems. The point of their balloon work (and Jamel's) is not that they get to boast about what they're doing, but so you and people like you say, "I can make a functioning high altitude weather balloon system with instrumentation and a decent camera for only $1000?" This is a lot of money for an individual, but for a high school science program it's not an impossible amount. And who knows? You might break the current high-altitude balloon record of 173,900 feet. Another, perhaps more attainable record is PARIS (Paper Aircraft Released Into Space) which is currently 96,563 feet. Beyond that? Perhaps you'll want to take a crack at beating Felix Baumgartner's high altitude skydiving and free fall records. And once you are comfortable working with near space launches, perhaps you'll move on to outer space work, where you'll join Elon Musk and other space transportation entrepreneurs. (Alternate Video Link)

Radiosonde, weather balloon, near-space exploration package... call it what you will, but today's interviewee, Jamel Tayeb, is hanging instrument packages and cameras below balloons and sending them up to 97,000 feet (his highest so far), then recovering them 50 or 60 miles away from their liftoff points with help from a locator beacon -- and not just any locator beacon, mind you, but a special one from a company called High Altitude Science with "unlocked" firmware that allows it to work with GPS satellites from altitudes greater than 60,000 feet, which typical, off-the-shelf GPS units can't do.

Here's a balloon launch video from Instructure, a company that helps create open source education systems. The point of their balloon work (and Jamel's) is not that they get to boast about what they're doing, but so you and people like you say, "I can make a functioning high altitude weather balloon system with instrumentation and a decent camera for only $1000?" This is a lot of money for an individual, but for a high school science program it's not an impossible amount. And who knows? You might break the current high-altitude balloon record of 173,900 feet. Another, perhaps more attainable record is PARIS (Paper Aircraft Released Into Space) which is currently 96,563 feet. Beyond that? Perhaps you'll want to take a crack at beating Felix Baumgartner's high altitude skydiving and free fall records. And once you are comfortable working with near space launches, perhaps you'll move on to outer space work, where you'll join Elon Musk and other space transportation entrepreneurs. (Alternate Video Link)

Radiosonde, weather balloon, near-space exploration package... call it what you will, but today's interviewee, Jamel Tayeb, is hanging instrument packages and cameras below balloons and sending them up to 97,000 feet (his highest so far), then recovering them 50 or 60 miles away from their liftoff points with help from a locator beacon -- and not just any locator beacon, mind you, but a special one from a company called High Altitude Science with "unlocked" firmware that allows it to work with GPS satellites from altitudes greater than 60,000 feet, which typical, off-the-shelf GPS units can't do.

Here's a balloon launch video from Instructure, a company that helps create open source education systems. The point of their balloon work (and Jamel's) is not that they get to boast about what they're doing, but so you and people like you say, "I can make a functioning high altitude weather balloon system with instrumentation and a decent camera for only $1000?" This is a lot of money for an individual, but for a high school science program it's not an impossible amount. And who knows? You might break the current high-altitude balloon record of 173,900 feet. Another, perhaps more attainable record is PARIS (Paper Aircraft Released Into Space) which is currently 96,563 feet. Beyond that? Perhaps you'll want to take a crack at beating Felix Baumgartner's high altitude skydiving and free fall records. And once you are comfortable working with near space launches, perhaps you'll move on to outer space work, where you'll join Elon Musk and other space transportation entrepreneurs. (Alternate Video Link)

Radiosonde, weather balloon, near-space exploration package... call it what you will, but today's interviewee, Jamel Tayeb, is hanging instrument packages and cameras below balloons and sending them up to 97,000 feet (his highest so far), then recovering them 50 or 60 miles away from their liftoff points with help from a locator beacon -- and not just any locator beacon, mind you, but a special one from a company called High Altitude Science with "unlocked" firmware that allows it to work with GPS satellites from altitudes greater than 60,000 feet, which typical, off-the-shelf GPS units can't do.

Here's a balloon launch video from Instructure, a company that helps create open source education systems. The point of their balloon work (and Jamel's) is not that they get to boast about what they're doing, but so you and people like you say, "I can make a functioning high altitude weather balloon system with instrumentation and a decent camera for only $1000?" This is a lot of money for an individual, but for a high school science program it's not an impossible amount. And who knows? You might break the current high-altitude balloon record of 173,900 feet. Another, perhaps more attainable record is PARIS (Paper Aircraft Released Into Space) which is currently 96,563 feet. Beyond that? Perhaps you'll want to take a crack at beating Felix Baumgartner's high altitude skydiving and free fall records. And once you are comfortable working with near space launches, perhaps you'll move on to outer space work, where you'll join Elon Musk and other space transportation entrepreneurs. (Alternate Video Link)

Radiosonde, weather balloon, near-space exploration package... call it what you will, but today's interviewee, Jamel Tayeb, is hanging instrument packages and cameras below balloons and sending them up to 97,000 feet (his highest so far), then recovering them 50 or 60 miles away from their liftoff points with help from a locator beacon -- and not just any locator beacon, mind you, but a special one from a company called High Altitude Science with "unlocked" firmware that allows it to work with GPS satellites from altitudes greater than 60,000 feet, which typical, off-the-shelf GPS units can't do.

Here's a balloon launch video from Instructure, a company that helps create open source education systems. The point of their balloon work (and Jamel's) is not that they get to boast about what they're doing, but so you and people like you say, "I can make a functioning high altitude weather balloon system with instrumentation and a decent camera for only $1000?" This is a lot of money for an individual, but for a high school science program it's not an impossible amount. And who knows? You might break the current high-altitude balloon record of 173,900 feet. Another, perhaps more attainable record is PARIS (Paper Aircraft Released Into Space) which is currently 96,563 feet. Beyond that? Perhaps you'll want to take a crack at beating Felix Baumgartner's high altitude skydiving and free fall records. And once you are comfortable working with near space launches, perhaps you'll move on to outer space work, where you'll join Elon Musk and other space transportation entrepreneurs. (Alternate Video Link)

grouchomarxist writes with word that "The 2014 Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to Isamu Akasaki, Hiroshi Amano and Shuji Nakamura, the inventors of the blue LED." From the organization's press release: When Isamu Akasaki, Hiroshi Amano and Shuji Nakamura produced bright blue light beams from their semi-conductors in the early 1990s, they triggered a fundamental transformation of lighting technology. Red and green diodes had been around for a long time but without blue light, white lamps could not be created. Despite considerable efforts, both in the scientific community and in industry, the blue LED had remained a challenge for three decades. They succeeded where everyone else had failed. Akasaki worked together with Amano at the University of Nagoya, while Nakamura was employed at Nichia Chemicals, a small company in Tokushima. Their inventions were revolutionary. Incandescent light bulbs lit the 20th century; the 21st century will be lit by LED lamps. White LED lamps emit a bright white light, are long-lasting and energy-efficient. They are constantly improved, getting more efficient with higher luminous flux (measured in lumen) per unit electrical input power (measured in watt). The most recent record is just over 300 lm/W, which can be compared to 16 for regular light bulbs and close to 70 for fluorescent lamps. As about one fourth of world electricity consumption is used for lighting purposes, the LEDs contribute to saving the Earth's resources. Materials consumption is also diminished as LEDs last up to 100,000 hours, compared to 1,000 for incandescent bulbs and 10,000 hours for fluorescent lights. The LED lamp holds great promise for increasing the quality of life for over 1.5 billion people around the world who lack access to electricity grids: due to low power requirements it can be powered by cheap local solar power.

grouchomarxist writes with word that "The 2014 Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to Isamu Akasaki, Hiroshi Amano and Shuji Nakamura, the inventors of the blue LED." From the organization's press release: When Isamu Akasaki, Hiroshi Amano and Shuji Nakamura produced bright blue light beams from their semi-conductors in the early 1990s, they triggered a fundamental transformation of lighting technology. Red and green diodes had been around for a long time but without blue light, white lamps could not be created. Despite considerable efforts, both in the scientific community and in industry, the blue LED had remained a challenge for three decades. They succeeded where everyone else had failed. Akasaki worked together with Amano at the University of Nagoya, while Nakamura was employed at Nichia Chemicals, a small company in Tokushima. Their inventions were revolutionary. Incandescent light bulbs lit the 20th century; the 21st century will be lit by LED lamps. White LED lamps emit a bright white light, are long-lasting and energy-efficient. They are constantly improved, getting more efficient with higher luminous flux (measured in lumen) per unit electrical input power (measured in watt). The most recent record is just over 300 lm/W, which can be compared to 16 for regular light bulbs and close to 70 for fluorescent lamps. As about one fourth of world electricity consumption is used for lighting purposes, the LEDs contribute to saving the Earth's resources. Materials consumption is also diminished as LEDs last up to 100,000 hours, compared to 1,000 for incandescent bulbs and 10,000 hours for fluorescent lights. The LED lamp holds great promise for increasing the quality of life for over 1.5 billion people around the world who lack access to electricity grids: due to low power requirements it can be powered by cheap local solar power.

grouchomarxist writes with word that "The 2014 Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to Isamu Akasaki, Hiroshi Amano and Shuji Nakamura, the inventors of the blue LED." From the organization's press release: When Isamu Akasaki, Hiroshi Amano and Shuji Nakamura produced bright blue light beams from their semi-conductors in the early 1990s, they triggered a fundamental transformation of lighting technology. Red and green diodes had been around for a long time but without blue light, white lamps could not be created. Despite considerable efforts, both in the scientific community and in industry, the blue LED had remained a challenge for three decades. They succeeded where everyone else had failed. Akasaki worked together with Amano at the University of Nagoya, while Nakamura was employed at Nichia Chemicals, a small company in Tokushima. Their inventions were revolutionary. Incandescent light bulbs lit the 20th century; the 21st century will be lit by LED lamps. White LED lamps emit a bright white light, are long-lasting and energy-efficient. They are constantly improved, getting more efficient with higher luminous flux (measured in lumen) per unit electrical input power (measured in watt). The most recent record is just over 300 lm/W, which can be compared to 16 for regular light bulbs and close to 70 for fluorescent lamps. As about one fourth of world electricity consumption is used for lighting purposes, the LEDs contribute to saving the Earth's resources. Materials consumption is also diminished as LEDs last up to 100,000 hours, compared to 1,000 for incandescent bulbs and 10,000 hours for fluorescent lights. The LED lamp holds great promise for increasing the quality of life for over 1.5 billion people around the world who lack access to electricity grids: due to low power requirements it can be powered by cheap local solar power.

HughPickens.com writes "Jeremy Hsu reports that the U.S. Navy has been testing a large-scale swarm of autonomous boats designed to overwhelm enemies. In the test, a large ship that the Navy sometimes calls a high-value unit, HVU, is making its way down the river's thalweg, escorted by 13 small guard boats. Between them, they carry a variety of payloads, loud speakers and flashing lights, a .50-caliber machine gun and a microwave direct energy weapon or heat ray. Detecting the enemy vessel with radar and infrared sensors, they perform a series of maneuvers to encircle the craft, coming close enough to the boat to engage it and near enough to one another to seal off any potential escape or access to the ship they are guarding. They blast warnings via loudspeaker and flash their lights. The HVU is now free to safely move away.

Rear Adm. Matthew Klunder, chief of the Office of Naval Research, points out that a maneuver that required 40 people had just dropped down to just one. "Think about it as replicating the functions that a human boat pilot would do. We've taken that capability and extended it to multiple [unmanned surface vehicles] operating together within that, we've designed team behaviors," says Robert Brizzolara. The timing of the briefing happens to coincide with the 14-year anniversary of the bombing of the USS Cole off the coast of Yemen that killed 17 sailors. It's an anniversary that Klunder observes with a unique sense of responsibility. "If we had this capability there on that day. We could have saved that ship. I never want to see the USS Cole happen again."

An anonymous reader writes The BBC and RT report that 16 men named after the Star Wars character "Darth Vader" are running for parliamentary elections in Ukraine later this month. In addition, a Chewbacca, Palpatin, Padme Amidala and Grand Jedi Master Yoda will stand in the snap October 26 polls. All of them have been nominated for parliament by the Internet Party of Ukraine. "This is not the first time Darth Vader has stood for election in Ukraine. In April, a man going by that name tried running for presidency, but his application was rejected by the Central Electoral Commission. One official suggested that his campaign could be an attempt to make a mockery of elections in Ukraine - possibly by Russia."

FrnkMit writes: Challenging a previous Code.org story on tech diversity, a Forbes.com writer interviewed 716 women who left the technology field. Her conclusion: corporate culture, and the larger social structure, is the primary cause for these women leaving the industry and never looking back. Specific issues include a lack of maternity policies in small companies, low pay which barely covers day care, "jokes" from male coworkers, and always feeling like the "odd duck." In reality, there are probably many intertwined causes: peer pressure at the high-school and college level, female-unfriendly geek culture, low pay, a lack of accommodations for pregnant/nursing mothers, the myth of "having it all," stereotype threat, and repeated assertions that women aren't biologically suited to writing software and therefore there's no problem at all.

The Wall Street Journal reports in a paywalled article that a team under Pixel Qi founder and OLPC co-founder Mary Lou Jepsen at Google's skunkwork labs Google X is working on modular video displays that could be expanded by snapping them together "like Lego." Ars Technica, TechSpot, The Verge, and several others summarize the claims made by "three people familiar with the project"; here's a snippet from TechSpot's version: Even in the home and office, the use of multiple displays isn’t uncommon but just like with larger implementations often used for advertising purposes, screen bezels are always a problem. Bezels are less visible from a distance but up close, they pretty much ruin the experience. The scope and target audience for the project is unclear at this hour as we are told the project is currently in an early stage. One of the biggest challenges is figuring out how to stitch images together across screens, both electronically and through software.

HughPickens.com writes: Mo Costandi reports at The Guardian that a new study shows losing one's sense of smell strongly predicts death within five years, suggesting that smell may serve as a bellwether for the overall state of the body, or as a marker for exposure to environmental toxins. "Olfactory dysfunction was an independent risk factor for death, stronger than several common causes of death, such as heart failure, lung disease and cancer," the researchers concluded, "indicating that this evolutionarily ancient special sense may signal a key mechanism that affects human longevity." In the study, researchers tested a group of volunteers for their ability to correctly identify various scents. Five years later, they retested as many of the volunteers as they could find.

During the five-year gap between the two tests, 430 of the original participants (or 12.5% of the total number) had died. Of these, 39% who had failed the first smell test died before the second test, compared to 19% of those who had moderate smell loss on the first test, and just 10% of those with a healthy sense of smell. Despite taking issues such as age, nutrition, smoking habits, poverty and overall health into account, researchers found those with the poorest sense of smell were still at greatest risk. The tip of the olfactory nerve, which contains the smell receptors, is the only part of the human nervous system that is continuously regenerated by stem cells. The production of new smell cells declines with age, and this is associated with a gradual reduction in our ability to detect and discriminate odors. Loss of smell may indicate that the body is entering a state of disrepair, and is no longer capable of repairing itself.

maynard writes: Investigative Journalist James Bamford knows a thing or two more than most about the National Security Agency. Across his more than three-decade long career digging muck out of exactly those places U.S. government intelligence agencies preferred he wouldn't tread, he's published five books and over eighty press reports. At times, this made for some tense confrontations with intelligence officials from an organization once so secret even few members of Congress knew of its existence.

For the last several years public focus on the NSA has been on Bush and Obama era reports of illicit domestic spying. From allegations of warrantless wiretapping reported by James Risen in 2005 to secret documents released to journalists at The Guardian by Edward Snowden a year ago. And smack in the middle, Bamford's 2012 revelation of the existence of a huge, exabyte-capable data storage facility then under construction in Bluffdale, Utah.

Given all this attention on recent events, it might come as a surprise to some that almost forty years ago Senator Frank Church convened a congressional committee to investigate reports of unlawful activities by U.S. intelligence agencies, including illegal domestic wiretapping by the NSA. At the time, Church brought an oversight magnifying glass over what was then half-jokingly referred to as "No Such Agency." And then, like today, James Bamford was in the thick of it, with a Snowden-like cloak-and-dagger game of spy-vs-journalist. It all began by giving testimony before the Church Committee. Writing yesterday in The Intercept, Bamford tells his firsthand historical account of what led him to testify as a direct witness to NSA's wiretapping of domestic communications decades ago and then details the events that led to the publication of his first book The Puzzle Palace back in 1982. Read on for more. Bamford writes:

...during the summer of 1975, as reports began leaking out from the Church Committee, I was surprised to learn that the NSA was claiming that it had shut down all of its questionable operations a year and a half earlier. Surprised because I knew the eavesdropping on Americans had continued at least into the prior fall, and may have still been going on. After thinking for a day or so about the potential consequences of blowing the whistle on the NSA—I was still in the Naval Reserve, still attending drills one weekend a month, and still sworn to secrecy with an active NSA clearance—I nevertheless decided to call the Church Committee.

But he didn't stop at the witness stand. Afterward, he continued researching the matter for a book. And the further he dug, the more waves he made. Until someone slipped him a then recently declassified copy of a 1976 Justice Department memo [PDF] detailing a criminal investigation into illicit domestic spying by the NSA. But when agency officials discovered he had that document they took extraordinary measures attempting to get it back. They threatened to prosecute under the 1917 Espionage Act and retroactively reclassified the memo to squelch its contents.

Fearing someone might break into his home and steal the manuscript, Bamford arranged to transport and secure a copy outside of U.S. jurisdiction with a colleague at the Sunday Times of London. It was only upon the 1982 publication of Puzzle Palace that the agency dropped their pursuit of Bamford and his document as a lost cause. That's at least one stark difference between then and today when it comes to whistleblowers — back then, they merely threatened espionage charges.

Yogi Berra famously once said, "It's like Deja Vu all over again." And though the Yankees' star wasn't speaking of illicit domestic wiretaps by the national security state, given a comparison of recent revelations to those detailed by Bamford decades earlier the quote certainly fits. In telling his story of how he published details about the last NSA Merry-Go-Round with warrantless wiretapping, Bamford shows us that our recent troubles of lawless surveillance aren't so unique. It's deja-vu all over again. But if deja vu is like a waking dream, this seems more a recurring nightmare for a body-politic lured to snoring slumber by a siren-song of political passivity.

That old Justice Department memo isn't likely to wake the public from their slumber. But within its pages is a stark warning we all should have heeded. As Bamford notes in that Intercept story, the report's conclusion that NSA lawlessness stems straight from the birth of the agency suggests a constitutional conflict systemic and intentional.

...the NSA's top-secret "charter" issued by the Executive Branch, exempts the agency from legal restraints placed on the rest of the government. "Orders, directives, policies, or recommendations of any authority of the Executive branch relating to the collection ... of intelligence," the charter reads, "shall not be applicable to Communications Intelligence activities, unless specifically so stated." This so-called "birth certificate," the Justice Department report concluded, meant the NSA did not have to follow any restrictions placed on electronic surveillance "unless it was expressly directed to do so." In short, the report asked, how can you prosecute an agency that is above the law?

Here's the "Prosecutive Summary" (PDF).

Charliemopps writes: "For the first time Princeton University scientists have observed a Majorana fermion, a long-predicted but never observed exotic particle that acts as both matter and anti-matter (abstract). "The setup they created starts with an ultrapure crystal of lead, whose atoms naturally line up in alternating rows that leave atomically thin ridges on the crystal's surface. The researchers then deposited pure iron into one of these ridges to create a wire that is just one atom wide and about three atoms thick. ...[Next, they] placed the lead and the embedded iron wire under the scanning-tunneling microscope and cooled the system to -272 degrees Celsius, just a degree above absolute zero. After about two years of painstaking work, they confirmed that superconductivity in the iron wire matched the conditions required for Majorana fermion to be created in their material." The particle is surprisingly stable. Being in both states at once seems to make it interact very weakly with its surrounding material. This could also be a major step towards quantum computing.

jones_supa writes: As part of the Windows 10 Technical Preview, Internet Explorer will introduce HTTP/2 support, along with performance improvements to the Chakra JavaScript engine, and a top-level domains parsing algorithm based on publicsuffix.org. HTTP/2 is a new standard by the Internet Engineering Task Force. Unlike HTTP/1.1, the new standard communicates metadata in binary format to significantly reduce parsing complexity. While binary is usually more efficient than text, the real performance gains are expected to come from multiplexing. This is where multiple requests can be share the same TCP connection. With this, one stalled request won't block other requests from being honored. Header compression is another important performance concern for HTTP.

Contributor Bennett Haselton writes with a interesting take on the recent release of racy celebrity photos: "Lawyers for Olympic gymnast McKayla Maroney succeeded in getting porn sites to take down her stolen nude photos, on the grounds that she was under 18 in the pictures, which meant they constituted child pornography. If true, that means that under current laws, Maroney could in theory be prosecuted for taking the original pictures. Maybe the laws should be changed?" Read on for the rest.

Online warnings about the dangers of teen sexting, from sources ranging from the FBI to MTV, frequently warn that even a minor who takes a sexually explicit picture of themselves can be prosecuted for violating child pornography laws.

And these prosecutions really do happen. One Pennsylvania district attorney threatened child pornography charges against two teen girls who posed for a photo in their bras making peace signs, and tried to force them to write a report on why their actions were wrong and "what it means to be a girl in today's society." (With the ACLU's help, the girls' parents sued to stop the D.A. from following through.) A study from the American Academy of Pediatrics found that in teen "sexting" incidents reported to the police, even in cases where the sexting was between two minors and there were no "aggravating" circumstances (abuse or lack of clear consent), police made arrests in 18% of those cases. (The arrest rate was higher in cases involving "aggravating" circumstances or where an adult was involved in the sexting.)

Meanwhile, hundreds of articles have been written about Porn.com being forced to take down the nude pictures of McKayla Maroney, after receiving word from her lawyers that she was underage when the pictures were taken. As far as I can tell, none of the articles about the incident mentioned that, if her lawyers are correct, then Maroney could be theoretically prosecuted for creating, possessing, and distributing child pornography. Of course nobody wants to see that happen, but the elephant in the living room is that before Maroney's photo leak scandal, many teens were arrested for doing essentially the same thing, and more of them will continue to be arrested after the celebrity nude hacking scandal is old news.

That's not to say that Maroney's photos necessarily did constitute child pornography. Nude or topless photos of minors are not necessarily illegal, if they're not sexually explicit; Thora Birch was under 18 for her topless scene in American Beauty. I haven't seen the Maroney photos (honest -- although I'd like to think that whatever she was doing, she was making her not impressed face). Maybe they really were explicit enough to qualify as child pornography. Maybe they weren't, and Maroney's lawyers misunderstood the law and thought that any of her underage nude or topless selfies were automatically child porn. Or maybe her lawyers knew the pictures were not really child porn, but they were bluffing when they demanded that Porn.com take the pictures down. Whatever the case, Maroney's lawyers claimed the pictures were child pornography, and if they're right, the lawyers just criminally implicated their client as well.

If the pictures really were explicit and she sent them to any of her same-age friends, she could also be charged with disseminating obscene material to a minor. Iowa teenager Jorge Canal was convicted on this charge, and his conviction upheld by the Iowa Supreme Court, after his 14-year-old female friend asked him to send him a picture of his erect penis, and he obliged. (Although since he was 18 at the time of sending the picture, there was no child porn charge.) If his defense attorneys tried a defense along the lines of, "My clients actions harmed absolutely no one, and it's the prosecutors who have ruined the lives of not only my client but also his supposed 'victim', by putting them both through a trauma that will hang over them for the rest of their lives," it didn't work.

Many states have attempted to pass laws specifically addressing sexting by and/or to teenagers by reducing the penalty from a felony child pornography charge to something less severe. What all of these laws still have in common, though, is that they retain the option to impose some criminal penalties on teens for sexting even among themselves. The ACLU has opposed such a bill in Pennsylvania on the grounds that even a misdemeanor charge for teen sexting would be too draconian of a punishment.

"The Need for Sexting Law Reform: Appropriate Punishments for Teenage Behaviors", written by Alexandra Kushner, a legal associate at Winston & Strawn LLP, and published in the University of Pennsylvania Journal of Law and Social Change, argues for de-criminalizing consensual sexting among teens. (The paper argues for retaining the option to prosecute cases involving abuse or malicious forwarding of a sexted picture.) Much of the paper is refreshing for the plain language not often found in legal argumentation; discussing the case of a 16-year-old and 17-year-old who faced child pornography charges for taking sexy pictures of each other, Kushner writes, "They should not have been charged at all because they were not harming each other or anyone else by taking and keeping these pictures." This is exactly the right way to frame the issue, but to most legal scholars, sentences like these are considered simply adorable.

For the other side, you can read "A Legal Response Is Necessary for Self-Produced Child Pornography", by law professor Susan Hanley Duncan. I found it less than convincing because much of the paper stresses that sexting can have serious unforeseen consequences for teens, including public humiliation if the pictures are forwarded to their friends. Well, we know that. But that just raises the obvious question: Isn't that punishment enough, and why do we need criminal charges on top of that? Even buying into the stereotype that teens are focused only on the present -- if a teen is not deterred by the humiliating prospect of having her photo forwarded around the entire school, then why would they be deterred by the threat of prosecution, which is less likely, further out in the future, and a potential risk that they might not even be aware of?

(Note that this logic does not apply to students who forwarded sexted images to harass the person appearing in them -- the person forwarding the image usually does not face the short-term threat of public humiliation, which means a legal penalty might be the only deterrent they would care about. That's one argument for retaining the option to prosecute people who forward sexted pictures maliciously.)

Even the FBI, in their "Advice for Young People" regarding sexting, betrays a certain embarrassment over the hypocritical nature of the laws. To a person forwarding an image of someone else, they warn: "You could face child pornography charges, go to jail, and have to register as a sex offender;" but to the person taking the original picture, they say only vaguely that you could "even get in trouble with the law" -- while leaving out the fact that all of the draconian penalties in their list, also apply to the person who takes the picture, under the laws that the FBI enforces.

But unless or until sexting laws are changed, Maroney probably did violate them according to the statements from her own lawyers, which might lead cynics to think that she escaped being charged because of her celebrity status. I think that's unlikely. Recall that "only" 18% of teens who sexted each other were arrested in cases where the incidents were reported to police, so if she had been a non-celebrity, she probably would have gotten off scot-free as well. Whether a teen gets arrested or charged for "sexting," probably depends less on what they actually did, than the luck of the draw as far as which police officer hears the report of the incident, and which prosecutor ultimately has the discretion to decide whether to file charges. (Of course that makes me a cynic too, but I'm the kind who thinks that people see patterns and non-existent reasons for outcomes that are far more random than we'd like to believe.)

Public reaction is another matter. When District Attorney George Skumanick prosecuted those two girls for posing in their bras making peace signs, he may not have had all of the public on his side, but there would have been an absolute tsunami of outrage if he had tried the same thing against a celebrity like Maroney, trying to get her to write an essay about "what it means to be a girl in today's society." I'm sure she would have been not impressed.

Contributor Bennett Haselton writes with a interesting take on the recent release of racy celebrity photos: "Lawyers for Olympic gymnast McKayla Maroney succeeded in getting porn sites to take down her stolen nude photos, on the grounds that she was under 18 in the pictures, which meant they constituted child pornography. If true, that means that under current laws, Maroney could in theory be prosecuted for taking the original pictures. Maybe the laws should be changed?" Read on for the rest.

Online warnings about the dangers of teen sexting, from sources ranging from the FBI to MTV, frequently warn that even a minor who takes a sexually explicit picture of themselves can be prosecuted for violating child pornography laws.

And these prosecutions really do happen. One Pennsylvania district attorney threatened child pornography charges against two teen girls who posed for a photo in their bras making peace signs, and tried to force them to write a report on why their actions were wrong and "what it means to be a girl in today's society." (With the ACLU's help, the girls' parents sued to stop the D.A. from following through.) A study from the American Academy of Pediatrics found that in teen "sexting" incidents reported to the police, even in cases where the sexting was between two minors and there were no "aggravating" circumstances (abuse or lack of clear consent), police made arrests in 18% of those cases. (The arrest rate was higher in cases involving "aggravating" circumstances or where an adult was involved in the sexting.)

Meanwhile, hundreds of articles have been written about Porn.com being forced to take down the nude pictures of McKayla Maroney, after receiving word from her lawyers that she was underage when the pictures were taken. As far as I can tell, none of the articles about the incident mentioned that, if her lawyers are correct, then Maroney could be theoretically prosecuted for creating, possessing, and distributing child pornography. Of course nobody wants to see that happen, but the elephant in the living room is that before Maroney's photo leak scandal, many teens were arrested for doing essentially the same thing, and more of them will continue to be arrested after the celebrity nude hacking scandal is old news.

That's not to say that Maroney's photos necessarily did constitute child pornography. Nude or topless photos of minors are not necessarily illegal, if they're not sexually explicit; Thora Birch was under 18 for her topless scene in American Beauty. I haven't seen the Maroney photos (honest -- although I'd like to think that whatever she was doing, she was making her not impressed face). Maybe they really were explicit enough to qualify as child pornography. Maybe they weren't, and Maroney's lawyers misunderstood the law and thought that any of her underage nude or topless selfies were automatically child porn. Or maybe her lawyers knew the pictures were not really child porn, but they were bluffing when they demanded that Porn.com take the pictures down. Whatever the case, Maroney's lawyers claimed the pictures were child pornography, and if they're right, the lawyers just criminally implicated their client as well.

If the pictures really were explicit and she sent them to any of her same-age friends, she could also be charged with disseminating obscene material to a minor. Iowa teenager Jorge Canal was convicted on this charge, and his conviction upheld by the Iowa Supreme Court, after his 14-year-old female friend asked him to send him a picture of his erect penis, and he obliged. (Although since he was 18 at the time of sending the picture, there was no child porn charge.) If his defense attorneys tried a defense along the lines of, "My clients actions harmed absolutely no one, and it's the prosecutors who have ruined the lives of not only my client but also his supposed 'victim', by putting them both through a trauma that will hang over them for the rest of their lives," it didn't work.

Many states have attempted to pass laws specifically addressing sexting by and/or to teenagers by reducing the penalty from a felony child pornography charge to something less severe. What all of these laws still have in common, though, is that they retain the option to impose some criminal penalties on teens for sexting even among themselves. The ACLU has opposed such a bill in Pennsylvania on the grounds that even a misdemeanor charge for teen sexting would be too draconian of a punishment.

"The Need for Sexting Law Reform: Appropriate Punishments for Teenage Behaviors", written by Alexandra Kushner, a legal associate at Winston & Strawn LLP, and published in the University of Pennsylvania Journal of Law and Social Change, argues for de-criminalizing consensual sexting among teens. (The paper argues for retaining the option to prosecute cases involving abuse or malicious forwarding of a sexted picture.) Much of the paper is refreshing for the plain language not often found in legal argumentation; discussing the case of a 16-year-old and 17-year-old who faced child pornography charges for taking sexy pictures of each other, Kushner writes, "They should not have been charged at all because they were not harming each other or anyone else by taking and keeping these pictures." This is exactly the right way to frame the issue, but to most legal scholars, sentences like these are considered simply adorable.

For the other side, you can read "A Legal Response Is Necessary for Self-Produced Child Pornography", by law professor Susan Hanley Duncan. I found it less than convincing because much of the paper stresses that sexting can have serious unforeseen consequences for teens, including public humiliation if the pictures are forwarded to their friends. Well, we know that. But that just raises the obvious question: Isn't that punishment enough, and why do we need criminal charges on top of that? Even buying into the stereotype that teens are focused only on the present -- if a teen is not deterred by the humiliating prospect of having her photo forwarded around the entire school, then why would they be deterred by the threat of prosecution, which is less likely, further out in the future, and a potential risk that they might not even be aware of?

(Note that this logic does not apply to students who forwarded sexted images to harass the person appearing in them -- the person forwarding the image usually does not face the short-term threat of public humiliation, which means a legal penalty might be the only deterrent they would care about. That's one argument for retaining the option to prosecute people who forward sexted pictures maliciously.)

Even the FBI, in their "Advice for Young People" regarding sexting, betrays a certain embarrassment over the hypocritical nature of the laws. To a person forwarding an image of someone else, they warn: "You could face child pornography charges, go to jail, and have to register as a sex offender;" but to the person taking the original picture, they say only vaguely that you could "even get in trouble with the law" -- while leaving out the fact that all of the draconian penalties in their list, also apply to the person who takes the picture, under the laws that the FBI enforces.

But unless or until sexting laws are changed, Maroney probably did violate them according to the statements from her own lawyers, which might lead cynics to think that she escaped being charged because of her celebrity status. I think that's unlikely. Recall that "only" 18% of teens who sexted each other were arrested in cases where the incidents were reported to police, so if she had been a non-celebrity, she probably would have gotten off scot-free as well. Whether a teen gets arrested or charged for "sexting," probably depends less on what they actually did, than the luck of the draw as far as which police officer hears the report of the incident, and which prosecutor ultimately has the discretion to decide whether to file charges. (Of course that makes me a cynic too, but I'm the kind who thinks that people see patterns and non-existent reasons for outcomes that are far more random than we'd like to believe.)

Public reaction is another matter. When District Attorney George Skumanick prosecuted those two girls for posing in their bras making peace signs, he may not have had all of the public on his side, but there would have been an absolute tsunami of outrage if he had tried the same thing against a celebrity like Maroney, trying to get her to write an essay about "what it means to be a girl in today's society." I'm sure she would have been not impressed.

Contributor Bennett Haselton writes with a interesting take on the recent release of racy celebrity photos: "Lawyers for Olympic gymnast McKayla Maroney succeeded in getting porn sites to take down her stolen nude photos, on the grounds that she was under 18 in the pictures, which meant they constituted child pornography. If true, that means that under current laws, Maroney could in theory be prosecuted for taking the original pictures. Maybe the laws should be changed?" Read on for the rest.

Online warnings about the dangers of teen sexting, from sources ranging from the FBI to MTV, frequently warn that even a minor who takes a sexually explicit picture of themselves can be prosecuted for violating child pornography laws.

And these prosecutions really do happen. One Pennsylvania district attorney threatened child pornography charges against two teen girls who posed for a photo in their bras making peace signs, and tried to force them to write a report on why their actions were wrong and "what it means to be a girl in today's society." (With the ACLU's help, the girls' parents sued to stop the D.A. from following through.) A study from the American Academy of Pediatrics found that in teen "sexting" incidents reported to the police, even in cases where the sexting was between two minors and there were no "aggravating" circumstances (abuse or lack of clear consent), police made arrests in 18% of those cases. (The arrest rate was higher in cases involving "aggravating" circumstances or where an adult was involved in the sexting.)

Meanwhile, hundreds of articles have been written about Porn.com being forced to take down the nude pictures of McKayla Maroney, after receiving word from her lawyers that she was underage when the pictures were taken. As far as I can tell, none of the articles about the incident mentioned that, if her lawyers are correct, then Maroney could be theoretically prosecuted for creating, possessing, and distributing child pornography. Of course nobody wants to see that happen, but the elephant in the living room is that before Maroney's photo leak scandal, many teens were arrested for doing essentially the same thing, and more of them will continue to be arrested after the celebrity nude hacking scandal is old news.

That's not to say that Maroney's photos necessarily did constitute child pornography. Nude or topless photos of minors are not necessarily illegal, if they're not sexually explicit; Thora Birch was under 18 for her topless scene in American Beauty. I haven't seen the Maroney photos (honest -- although I'd like to think that whatever she was doing, she was making her not impressed face). Maybe they really were explicit enough to qualify as child pornography. Maybe they weren't, and Maroney's lawyers misunderstood the law and thought that any of her underage nude or topless selfies were automatically child porn. Or maybe her lawyers knew the pictures were not really child porn, but they were bluffing when they demanded that Porn.com take the pictures down. Whatever the case, Maroney's lawyers claimed the pictures were child pornography, and if they're right, the lawyers just criminally implicated their client as well.

If the pictures really were explicit and she sent them to any of her same-age friends, she could also be charged with disseminating obscene material to a minor. Iowa teenager Jorge Canal was convicted on this charge, and his conviction upheld by the Iowa Supreme Court, after his 14-year-old female friend asked him to send him a picture of his erect penis, and he obliged. (Although since he was 18 at the time of sending the picture, there was no child porn charge.) If his defense attorneys tried a defense along the lines of, "My clients actions harmed absolutely no one, and it's the prosecutors who have ruined the lives of not only my client but also his supposed 'victim', by putting them both through a trauma that will hang over them for the rest of their lives," it didn't work.

Many states have attempted to pass laws specifically addressing sexting by and/or to teenagers by reducing the penalty from a felony child pornography charge to something less severe. What all of these laws still have in common, though, is that they retain the option to impose some criminal penalties on teens for sexting even among themselves. The ACLU has opposed such a bill in Pennsylvania on the grounds that even a misdemeanor charge for teen sexting would be too draconian of a punishment.

"The Need for Sexting Law Reform: Appropriate Punishments for Teenage Behaviors", written by Alexandra Kushner, a legal associate at Winston & Strawn LLP, and published in the University of Pennsylvania Journal of Law and Social Change, argues for de-criminalizing consensual sexting among teens. (The paper argues for retaining the option to prosecute cases involving abuse or malicious forwarding of a sexted picture.) Much of the paper is refreshing for the plain language not often found in legal argumentation; discussing the case of a 16-year-old and 17-year-old who faced child pornography charges for taking sexy pictures of each other, Kushner writes, "They should not have been charged at all because they were not harming each other or anyone else by taking and keeping these pictures." This is exactly the right way to frame the issue, but to most legal scholars, sentences like these are considered simply adorable.

For the other side, you can read "A Legal Response Is Necessary for Self-Produced Child Pornography", by law professor Susan Hanley Duncan. I found it less than convincing because much of the paper stresses that sexting can have serious unforeseen consequences for teens, including public humiliation if the pictures are forwarded to their friends. Well, we know that. But that just raises the obvious question: Isn't that punishment enough, and why do we need criminal charges on top of that? Even buying into the stereotype that teens are focused only on the present -- if a teen is not deterred by the humiliating prospect of having her photo forwarded around the entire school, then why would they be deterred by the threat of prosecution, which is less likely, further out in the future, and a potential risk that they might not even be aware of?

(Note that this logic does not apply to students who forwarded sexted images to harass the person appearing in them -- the person forwarding the image usually does not face the short-term threat of public humiliation, which means a legal penalty might be the only deterrent they would care about. That's one argument for retaining the option to prosecute people who forward sexted pictures maliciously.)

Even the FBI, in their "Advice for Young People" regarding sexting, betrays a certain embarrassment over the hypocritical nature of the laws. To a person forwarding an image of someone else, they warn: "You could face child pornography charges, go to jail, and have to register as a sex offender;" but to the person taking the original picture, they say only vaguely that you could "even get in trouble with the law" -- while leaving out the fact that all of the draconian penalties in their list, also apply to the person who takes the picture, under the laws that the FBI enforces.

But unless or until sexting laws are changed, Maroney probably did violate them according to the statements from her own lawyers, which might lead cynics to think that she escaped being charged because of her celebrity status. I think that's unlikely. Recall that "only" 18% of teens who sexted each other were arrested in cases where the incidents were reported to police, so if she had been a non-celebrity, she probably would have gotten off scot-free as well. Whether a teen gets arrested or charged for "sexting," probably depends less on what they actually did, than the luck of the draw as far as which police officer hears the report of the incident, and which prosecutor ultimately has the discretion to decide whether to file charges. (Of course that makes me a cynic too, but I'm the kind who thinks that people see patterns and non-existent reasons for outcomes that are far more random than we'd like to believe.)

Public reaction is another matter. When District Attorney George Skumanick prosecuted those two girls for posing in their bras making peace signs, he may not have had all of the public on his side, but there would have been an absolute tsunami of outrage if he had tried the same thing against a celebrity like Maroney, trying to get her to write an essay about "what it means to be a girl in today's society." I'm sure she would have been not impressed.

AmiMoJo writes Japan's Shinkansen bullet-train has marked its 50th anniversary. The first Shinkansen between Tokyo and Osaka debuted on October 1st, 1964, ahead of the Tokyo Summer Olympics. Since then, the Shinkansen has run about 2 billion kilometers, or the equivalent of 50,000 times around the earth. It has carried about 5.6 billion passengers. The latest series to enter operation, the E5, operates at 320km/h.

SchrodingerZ writes: Threshold Entertainment has announced that it will be producing a live action film based on the Russian stacking game Tetris. Designed in 1984 by Alexey Pajitnov, Tetris has sold over 35 million copies worldwide. Threshold CEO Larry Kasanoff promises "a very big, epic sci-fi movie," explaining, "this isn't a movie with a bunch of lines running around the page. We're not giving feet to the geometric shapes." Kasanoff is known for his work with the video game films Mortal Kombat, and Mortal Kombat: Annihilation, collectively grossing $105 million in revenue. The studio is planning "a story behind Tetris which makes it a much more imaginative thing," though no directors nor cast have been connected to the film. Threshold Entertainment teased the idea, saying "What you [will] see in Tetris is the teeny tip of an iceberg that has intergalactic significance."

wabrandsma sends this article from New Scientist: Hong Kong's mass protest is networked. Activists are relying on a free app that can send messages without any cellphone connection. Since the pro-democracy protests turned ugly over the weekend, many worry that the Chinese government would block local phone networks. In response, activists have turned to the FireChat app to send supportive messages and share the latest news. On Sunday alone, the app was downloaded more than 100,000 times in Hong Kong, its developers said. FireChat relies on "mesh networking," a technique that allows data to zip directly from one phone to another via Wi-Fi or Bluetooth. Ordinarily, if two people want to communicate this way, they need to be fairly close together. But as more people join in, the network grows and messages can travel further. Mesh networks can be useful for people who are caught in natural disasters or, like those in Hong Kong, protesting under tricky conditions. FireChat came in handy for protesters in Taiwan and Iraq this year."

Z80xxc! writes: CloudFlare, a cloud service that sits between websites and the internet to provide a CDN, DDOS and other attack prevention, speed optimization, and other services announced today that SSL will now be supported for all customers, including free customers. This will add SSL support to approximately 2 million previously unprotected websites. Previously SSL was only available to customers paying at least $20/month for a "Pro" plan or higher.

Browsers connect to CloudFlare's servers and receive a certificate provided by CloudFlare. CloudFlare then connects to the website's server to retrieve the content, serving as a sort of reverse proxy. Different security levels allow CloudFlare to connect to the website host using no encryption, a self-signed certificate, or a verified certificate, depending on the administrator's preferences. CloudFlare's servers will use SNI for free accounts, which is unsupported for IE on Windows XP and older, and Android Browser on Android 2.2 and older.

An anonymous reader writes: Incremental improvements have been slowly but surely pushing solar power toward mainstream viability for a few decades now. It's getting to the point where the established utilities are worried about the financial hit they're likely to take — and they're working to prevent it. "These solar households are now buying less and less electricity, but the utilities still have to manage the costs of connecting them to the grid. Indeed, a new study from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory argues that this trend could put utilities in dire financial straits. If rooftop solar were to grab 10 percent of the market over the next decade, utility earnings could decline as much as 41 percent." The utilities are throwing their weight behind political groups seeking to end subsidies for solar and make "net metering" policies go away. Studies suggest that if solar adoption continues growing at its current rate, incumbents will be forced to raise their prices, which will only persuade more people to switch to solar (PDF).

blottsie writes: Several major tech firms are in talks with Tor to include the software in products that can potentially reach over 500 million Internet users around the world. One particular firm wants to include Tor as a "private browsing mode" in a mainstream Web browser, allowing users to easily toggle connectivity to the Tor anonymity network on and off. "They very much like Tor Browser and would like to ship it to their customer base," Tor executive director Andrew Lewman wrote, explaining the discussions but declining to name the specific company. "Their product is 10-20 percent of the global market, this is of roughly 2.8 billion global Internet users." The product that best fits Lewman's description, by our estimation, is Mozilla Firefox, the third-most popular Web browser online today and home to, you guessed it, 10 to 20 percent of global Internet users.

An anonymous reader writes "The Z-80 microprocessor has been around since 1976, and it was used in many computers at the beginning of the PC revolution. (For example, the TRS-80, Commodore 128, and ZX Spectrum.) Ken Shirriff has been working on reverse engineering the Z-80, and one of the things he noticed is that the data pins coming out of the chip are in seemingly random order: 4, 3, 5, 6, 2, 7, 0, 1. (And a +5V pin is stuck in the middle.) After careful study, he's come up with an explanation for this seemingly odd design. "The motivation behind splitting the data bus is to allow the chip to perform activities in parallel. For instance an instruction can be read from the data pins into the instruction logic at the same time that data is being copied between the ALU and registers.

[B]ecause the Z-80 splits the data bus into multiple segments, only four data lines run to the lower right corner of the chip. And because the Z-80 was very tight for space, running additional lines would be undesirable. Next, the BIT instructions use instruction bits 3, 4, and 5 to select a particular bit. This was motivated by the instruction structure the Z-80 inherited from the 8080. Finally, the Z-80's ALU requires direct access to instruction bits 3, 4, and 5 to select the particular data bit. Putting these factors together, data pins 3, 4, and 5 are constrained to be in the lower right corner of the chip next to the ALU. This forces the data pins to be out of sequence, and that's why the Z-80 has out-of-order data pins."

KentuckyFC writes: Back in the 1970s, the astronauts from Apollos 12, 14, 15, and 16 set up an array of seismometers on the lunar surface to listen for moonquakes. This array sent back data until 1977, when NASA switched it off. Now astrophysicists are using this lunar seismic data in the hunt for gravitational waves. The idea is that gravitational waves must squeeze and stretch the Moon as they pass by and that at certain resonant frequencies, this could trigger the kind of seismic groans that the array ought to have picked up. However, the data shows no evidence of activity at the relevant frequencies.

That's important because it has allowed astronomers to put the strongest limits yet on the strength of gravitational waves in this part of the universe. Earlier this year, the same team used a similar approach with terrestrial seismic data to strengthen the existing limits by 9 orders of magnitude. The lunar data betters this by yet another order of magnitude because there is no noise from sources such as oceans, the atmosphere and plate tectonics. The work shows that good science on gravitational waves can be done without spending the hundreds of millions of dollars for bespoke gravitational wave detectors, such as LIGO, which have yet to find any evidence of the waves either.

SchrodingerZ writes: In November of this year, the 42nd Expedition to the International Space Station will launch, and the crew has decided to embrace their infamous number. NASA has released an image of the crew mimicking the movie poster for The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, a film released in 2005, based on a book with the same name by Douglas Adams. Commander Butch Wilmore stands in the center as protagonist Arthur Dent, flight engineer Elena Serova as hitchhiker Ford Prefect, flight engineer Alexander Samokutyayev as antagonist Humma Kavula, astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti as Trillian, and flight engineers Terry Virts and Anton Shkaplerov as two-headed galactic president Zaphod Beeblebrox. The robotic "Robonaut 2" also stands in the picture as Marvin the depressed android. Cristoforetti, ecstatic to be part of this mission stated, "Enjoy, don't panic and always know where your towel is!" Wilmore, Serova and Samokutyayev blasted off September 25th for Expedition 41, the rest of Expedition 42 will launch November 23rd.

SchrodingerZ writes: In November of this year, the 42nd Expedition to the International Space Station will launch, and the crew has decided to embrace their infamous number. NASA has released an image of the crew mimicking the movie poster for The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, a film released in 2005, based on a book with the same name by Douglas Adams. Commander Butch Wilmore stands in the center as protagonist Arthur Dent, flight engineer Elena Serova as hitchhiker Ford Prefect, flight engineer Alexander Samokutyayev as antagonist Humma Kavula, astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti as Trillian, and flight engineers Terry Virts and Anton Shkaplerov as two-headed galactic president Zaphod Beeblebrox. The robotic "Robonaut 2" also stands in the picture as Marvin the depressed android. Cristoforetti, ecstatic to be part of this mission stated, "Enjoy, don't panic and always know where your towel is!" Wilmore, Serova and Samokutyayev blasted off September 25th for Expedition 41, the rest of Expedition 42 will launch November 23rd.

An anonymous reader writes: Japan's second highest volcano, Mount Ontake, erupted on Saturday, sending thick clouds of ash into the air. More than 250 hikers were in the area, and the ash and rocks left seven unconscious, eight injured, and all of them stranded. In video footage from the mountain, you can see the thick clouds overtaking hikers, blocking out the sun and coating them with ash. There have been no reports of lava flows, but flights in the area were forced to divert their routes. (Another video shows the ash clouds from the sky.)

HughPickens.com writes: Markus Krajewski reports that today, with many countries phasing out incandescent lighting in favor of more-efficient and pricier LEDs, it's worth revisiting the history of the Phoebus cartel — not simply as a quirky anecdote from the annals of technology, but as a cautionary tale about the strange and unexpected pitfalls that can arise when a new technology vanquishes an old one. Prior to the Phoebus cartel's formation in 1924, household light bulbs typically burned for a total of 1,500 to 2,500 hours; cartel members agreed to shorten that life span to a standard 1,000 hours.

Each factory regularly sent lightbulb samples to the cartel's central laboratory in Switzerland for verification. If any factory submitted bulbs lasting longer or shorter than the regulated life span for its type, the factory was obliged to pay a fine. Though long gone, the Phoebus cartel still casts a shadow today because it reduced competition in the light bulb industry for almost twenty years, and has been accused of preventing technological advances that would have produced longer-lasting light bulbs. Will history repeat itself as the lighting industry is now going through its most tumultuous period of technological change since the invention of the incandescent bulb?

"Consumers are expected to pay more money for bulbs that are up to 10 times as efficient and that are touted to last a fantastically long time—up to 50,000 hours in the case of LED lights. In normal usage, these lamps will last so long that their owners will probably sell the house they're in before having to change the bulbs," writes Krajewski. "Whether or not these pricier bulbs will actually last that long is still an open question, and not one that the average consumer is likely to investigate." There are already reports of CFLs and LED lamps burning out long before their rated lifetimes are reached. "Such incidents may well have resulted from nothing more sinister than careless manufacturing. But there is no denying that these far more technologically sophisticated products offer tempting opportunities for the inclusion of purposefully engineered life-shortening defects.""

HughPickens.com writes Jana Kasperkevic writes at The Guardian that it's not every day that you get to buy an iPhone from an ex-NSA officer. Yet Thomas Drake, former senior executive at National Security Agency, is well known in the national security circles for leaking information about the NSA's Trailblazer project to Baltimore Sun. In 2010, the government dropped all 10 felony charges against him and he pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge for unauthorized use of a computer and lost his livelihood. "You have to mortgage your house, you have to empty your bank account. I went from making well over $150,000 a year to a quarter of that," says Drake. "The cost alone, financially — never mind the personal cost — is approaching million dollars in terms of lost income, expenses and other costs I incurred."

John Kiriakou became the first former government official to confirm the use of waterboarding against al-Qaida suspects in 2009. "I have applied for every job I can think of – everything from grocery stores to Toys R Us to Starbucks. You name it, I've applied there. Haven't gotten even an email or a call back," says Kiriakou. According to Kasperkevic, this is what most whistleblowers can expect. The potential threat of prosecution, the mounting legal bills and the lack of future job opportunities all contribute to a hesitation among many to rock the boat. "Obama and his attorney general, Eric Holder, declared a war on whistleblowers virtually as soon as they assumed office," says Kiriakou. "Washington has always needed an "ism" to fight against, an idea against which it could rally its citizens like lemmings. First, it was anarchism, then socialism, then communism. Now, it's terrorism. Any whistleblower who goes public in the name of protecting human rights or civil liberties is accused of helping the terrorists."

HughPickens.com writes Jana Kasperkevic writes at The Guardian that it's not every day that you get to buy an iPhone from an ex-NSA officer. Yet Thomas Drake, former senior executive at National Security Agency, is well known in the national security circles for leaking information about the NSA's Trailblazer project to Baltimore Sun. In 2010, the government dropped all 10 felony charges against him and he pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge for unauthorized use of a computer and lost his livelihood. "You have to mortgage your house, you have to empty your bank account. I went from making well over $150,000 a year to a quarter of that," says Drake. "The cost alone, financially — never mind the personal cost — is approaching million dollars in terms of lost income, expenses and other costs I incurred."

John Kiriakou became the first former government official to confirm the use of waterboarding against al-Qaida suspects in 2009. "I have applied for every job I can think of – everything from grocery stores to Toys R Us to Starbucks. You name it, I've applied there. Haven't gotten even an email or a call back," says Kiriakou. According to Kasperkevic, this is what most whistleblowers can expect. The potential threat of prosecution, the mounting legal bills and the lack of future job opportunities all contribute to a hesitation among many to rock the boat. "Obama and his attorney general, Eric Holder, declared a war on whistleblowers virtually as soon as they assumed office," says Kiriakou. "Washington has always needed an "ism" to fight against, an idea against which it could rally its citizens like lemmings. First, it was anarchism, then socialism, then communism. Now, it's terrorism. Any whistleblower who goes public in the name of protecting human rights or civil liberties is accused of helping the terrorists."

New submitter ildon writes: Recently, the rights holder of former game publisher Softdisk's game library put the rights to some of their old titles up for sale, including Commander Keen: Keen Dreams, one of the few games in the series not to be published by Apogee. A group of fans created an Indiegogo campaign to purchase those rights. We are just now seeing the fruits of that effort with the full source code of the game being published to GitHub. About a year ago, Tom Hall found the sources to episodes 4-6, but it's not clear what, if any, progress has been made on getting Bethesda to allow that code to be released.

derekmead writes: After 40 years, astronomers have likely found a rather strange celestial body known as a Thorne–Zytkow object (TZO), in which a neutron star is absorbed by a red supergiant. Originally predicted in the 1970s, the first non-theoretical TZO was found earlier this year, based on calculations presented in a paper forthcoming in MNRAS.

TZOs were predicted by astronomer Kip Thorne and Anna Zytkow, who wasthen postdoctoral fellow at CalTech. The pair imagined what might happen if a neutron star in a binary system merged with its partner red supergiant. This wouldn't be like two average stars merging. Neutron stars are the ancient remnants of stars that grew too big and exploded. Their cores remain small — about 12.5 miles across — as they shed material out into space. Red supergiants are the largest stars in the galaxy, with radii up to 800 times that of our sun, but they aren't dense.

HughPickens.com writes: Reuters reports that plans for a major rewriting of international tax rules have been unveiled by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) that could eliminate structures that have allowed companies like Google and Amazon to shave billions of dollars off their tax bills. For more than 50 years, the OECD's work on international taxation has been focused on ensuring companies are not taxed twice on the same profits (and thereby hampering trade and limit global growth). But companies have been using such treaties to ensure profits are not taxed anywhere. A Reuters investigation last year found that three quarters of the 50 biggest U.S. technology companies channeled revenues from European sales into low tax jurisdictions like Ireland and Switzerland, rather than reporting them nationally.

For example, search giant Google takes advantage of tax treaties to channel more than $8 billion in untaxed profits out of Europe and Asia each year and into a subsidiary that is tax resident in Bermuda, which has no income tax. "We are putting an end to double non-taxation," says OECD head of tax Pascal Saint-Amans.For the recommendations to actually become binding, countries will have to encode them in their domestic laws or amend their bilateral tax treaties. Even if they do pass, these changes are likely 5-10 years away from going into effect. Speaking of international corporate business: U.K. mainframe company Micro Focus announced it will buy Attachmate, which includes Novell and SUSE.

wabrandsma sends this article from New Scientist: In an experiment, Alan Winfield and his colleagues programmed a robot to prevent other automatons – acting as proxies for humans – from falling into a hole. This is a simplified version of Isaac Asimov's fictional First Law of Robotics – a robot must not allow a human being to come to harm. At first, the robot was successful in its task. As a human proxy moved towards the hole, the robot rushed in to push it out of the path of danger. But when the team added a second human proxy rolling toward the hole at the same time, the robot was forced to choose. Sometimes, it managed to save one human while letting the other perish; a few times it even managed to save both. But in 14 out of 33 trials, the robot wasted so much time fretting over its decision that both humans fell into the hole. Winfield describes his robot as an "ethical zombie" that has no choice but to behave as it does. Though it may save others according to a programmed code of conduct, it doesn't understand the reasoning behind its actions.

Rambo Tribble (1273454) writes "Programmers at Fast Company are developing the Cosmos browser to allow text browsing from Android phones when networks are buckling under the load of local disasters. A common phenomenon when disaster strikes is the overloading of cell and data networks by massively increased traffic. The Cosmos browser is intended to facilitate using SMS text messages, which often still get through in such circumstances. To quote one developer, "We want this to be a way for people to get information when they're in dire need of it." Sort of a Lynx comes to Android affair. The Smithsonian contemplates the possibilities, here."

An anonymous reader writes "The Paris Review has an article about SF author Stanislaw Lem, explaining Lem's outlook on the future and his expectations for technological advancement. Lem tended toward a view that technology would infect and eventually supplant biological evolution. But he also suggested an interesting explanation for why we haven't detected alien civilizations: "Perhaps ... they are so taken up with perfecting their own organisms that they've abandoned space exploration entirely. According to a similar hypothesis, such beings are invisible because technological ease has resulted in a 'Second Stone Age' of 'universal illiteracy and idleness.' When everyone's needs are perfectly met, it 'would be hard, indeed, to find one individual who would choose as his life's work the signaling, on a cosmic scale, of how he was getting along.' Rather than constructing Dyson Spheres, Lem suggests, advanced civilizations are more likely to spend their time getting high.""

New submitter gaelfx writes: Researchers at Glasglow University have an interesting method for separating the hydrogen out of water: Liquid Sponges. Most methods of extracting the hydrogen involve some form electrolysis, but these generally require some pretty expensive materials. The researchers claim that they can accomplish this using less electricity, cheaper materials and 30 times faster to boot. With both Honda and Toyota promising hydrogen fuel cell cars in Japan within the next few years (other manufacturers must be considering it as well, if not as publicly), does this spell a new future for transportation technology?

Jon Aldama is the Product Marketing Manager for Enea A.B., but he prides himself on being a developer first and a marketer second -- a point he stresses early in today's video. Enea is behind Operating System Embedded, whose Wikipedia page, some say, "appears to be written like an advertisement," which an unkind person could also say about the Enea A.B. Wikipedia page. In any case, Enea works with the Linux Foundation's Yocto Project workgroup, whose main webpage says, "It's not an embedded Linux distribution – it creates a custom one for you." This is all open source, which Jon says is a big corporate principle at Enea -- and he should know, since his previous job was as an Open Source Compliance Officer and Software Analyst at Ericsson. (Alternate Video Link)

Jon Aldama is the Product Marketing Manager for Enea A.B., but he prides himself on being a developer first and a marketer second -- a point he stresses early in today's video. Enea is behind Operating System Embedded, whose Wikipedia page, some say, "appears to be written like an advertisement," which an unkind person could also say about the Enea A.B. Wikipedia page. In any case, Enea works with the Linux Foundation's Yocto Project workgroup, whose main webpage says, "It's not an embedded Linux distribution – it creates a custom one for you." This is all open source, which Jon says is a big corporate principle at Enea -- and he should know, since his previous job was as an Open Source Compliance Officer and Software Analyst at Ericsson. (Alternate Video Link)

Jon Aldama is the Product Marketing Manager for Enea A.B., but he prides himself on being a developer first and a marketer second -- a point he stresses early in today's video. Enea is behind Operating System Embedded, whose Wikipedia page, some say, "appears to be written like an advertisement," which an unkind person could also say about the Enea A.B. Wikipedia page. In any case, Enea works with the Linux Foundation's Yocto Project workgroup, whose main webpage says, "It's not an embedded Linux distribution – it creates a custom one for you." This is all open source, which Jon says is a big corporate principle at Enea -- and he should know, since his previous job was as an Open Source Compliance Officer and Software Analyst at Ericsson. (Alternate Video Link)

Kittenman writes: The BBC (and several other sources) are carrying the news that the Canadian government has found the sunken remains of one of Sir John Franklin's ships (either the Erebus, or the Terror), that went missing in the 1840s, causing sensation in Victorian London. Sir John and his entire crew were never seen alive again. The search for traces of the expedition went for over ten years in the 19th century, partly led by Sir John's widow. The discovery has been called the biggest archaeological event since the discovery of Tutankhamen's tomb.

KentuckyFC writes One of the great mysteries in astrophysics surrounds the origin of ultra-high energy cosmic rays, which can have energies of 10^20 electron volts and beyond. To put that in context, that's a single proton with the same energy as a baseball flying at 100 kilometers per hour. Nobody knows where ultra-high energy cosmic rays come from or how they get their enormous energies. That's largely because they are so rare--physicists detect them on Earth at a rate of less than one particle per square kilometer per century. So astronomers have come up with a plan to see vastly more ultra high energy cosmic rays by using the Moon as a giant cosmic ray detector. When these particles hit the lunar surface, they generate brief bursts of radio waves that a highly sensitive radio telescope can pick up. No radio telescope on Earth is currently capable of this but astronomers are about to start work on a new one that will be able to pick up these signals for the first time. That should help them finally tease apart the origins of these most energetic particles in the Universe .

StartsWithABang writes Hydroelectric dams are one of the best and oldest sources of green, renewable energy, but — as the Three Gorges Dam in China exemplifies — they often cause a host of environmental and ecological problems and challenges. One of the more interesting ones is how to coax fish upstream in the face of these herculean walls that can often span more than 500 feet in height. While fish ladders might be a solution for some of the smaller dams, they're limited in application and success. Could Whooshh Innovations' Salmon Cannon, a pneumatic tube capable of launching fish up-and-over these dams, finally restore the Columbia River salmon to their original habitats?

An anonymous reader writes Could someone recommend a service to convert old VHS home movies to a lossless archival format such as FFV1? The file format needs to be lossless so I can edit and convert the files with less generation loss, it needs 4:1:1 or better chroma subsampling in order to get the full color resolution from the source tapes, and preferably it should have more than 8 bits per channel of color in order to avoid banding while correcting things like color, brightness, and contrast.

So far, the best VHS archival services I've found use either the DV codec or QuickTime Pro-Res, both of which are lossy.

An anonymous reader writes Could someone recommend a service to convert old VHS home movies to a lossless archival format such as FFV1? The file format needs to be lossless so I can edit and convert the files with less generation loss, it needs 4:1:1 or better chroma subsampling in order to get the full color resolution from the source tapes, and preferably it should have more than 8 bits per channel of color in order to avoid banding while correcting things like color, brightness, and contrast.

So far, the best VHS archival services I've found use either the DV codec or QuickTime Pro-Res, both of which are lossy.

It surely won't be the last theory offered, but a century and a quarter after the notorious crimes of Jack the Ripper, an "armchair detective" has employed DNA analysis on the blood-soaked shawl of one of the Ripper's victims, and has declared it in a new book an unambiguous match with Jewish immigrant Aaron Kosminski, long considered a suspect. Kosminski died in 1919 in an insane asylum. The landmark discovery was made after businessman Russell Edwards, 48, bought the shawl at auction and enlisted the help of Dr Jari Louhelainen, a world-renowned expert in analysing genetic evidence from historical crime scenes. Using cutting-edge techniques, Dr Louhelainen was able to extract 126-year-old DNA from the material and compare it to DNA from descendants of [Ripper victim Catherine] Eddowes and the suspect, with both proving a perfect match. (Also at The Independent.) It's not the first time DNA evidence has been used to try to pin down the identity of Jack the Ripper, but the claimed results in this case are far less ambiguous than another purported mitochondrial DNA connection promoted by crime novelist Patricia Cornwell in favor of artist Walter Sickert as the killer in a 2002 book. Update: 09/07 16:03 GMT by T : Corrected Sickert's first name, originally misstated as "William."

speedplane (552872) writes Tim Wu, the popular Columbia Law Professor, author of The Master Switch, and the guy who coined the term Net Neutrality, is running for Lieutenant Governor of the great state of New York. He "has waged a shoestring anti-establishment campaign," that is well underway, and has even begun receiving attacks from the incumbent: "It has not always been smooth for Mr. Wu .... Surrogates for Mr. Cuomo have pounced on his admitted lack of 'message discipline' for comments he made comparing net neutrality to the suffragist movement (which he says were taken out of context) and sympathizing with Airbnb (which he says is 'fair game' because he has a 'wait-and-see approach' to regulating start-ups)."