Slashdot Mirror

cylonlover writes "Following on from a successful maiden flight under battery power in 2010, AeroVironment's high altitude, long endurance (HALE) Global Observer unmanned aircraft has now taken to the skies using hydrogen-fueled propulsion. The aircraft reached an altitude of 5,000 feet during the four hour flight on January 11 at Edwards Air Force Base (EAFB) in California. Both the endurance and the altitude of the system will be expanded in further test flights in order to achieve the planned operational altitude of 55,000 to 65,000 feet."

vbraga writes "This week, during the visit of Chinese president Hu Jintao to the United States, GE plans to sign a joint-venture agreement in commercial aviation that shows the tricky risk-and-reward calculations American corporations must increasingly make in their pursuit of lucrative markets in China. GE, in partnership with a state-owned Chinese company, will be sharing its most sophisticated airplane electronics (NYT reg. required, reg.-free alternative here), including some of the same technology used in Boeing's new state-of-the-art 787 Dreamliner."

MarkWhittington writes "With the discovery of vast amounts of water on the Moon, some frozen in the shadows of craters at the Lunar poles and some chemically bonded with the regolith, interest in lunar mining has arisen among commercial space entrepreneurs. Paul Spudis, a lunar geologist, has suggested a plan to return to the Moon, which features, among other things, robotic resource extraction and the deployment of space-based fuel depots using lunar water even before the first human explorers return to the lunar surface. But Mike Wall, writing in Space.com, suggests that there are a number of legal as well as technical issues involved in setting up lunar mining operations."

GMGruman writes "Hewlett-Packard is planning to unveil its Palm WebOS strategy in a few weeks, while RIM is allegedly working up a new version of its popular Curve that uses the new BlackBerry OS 6 and its touch interface. WebOS has largely faded from view since HP bought it nine months ago, and RIM's been largely silent since its summer release of the BlackBerry Torch, its first successful modern BlackBerry, and the fall announcement of its PlayBook tablet. Meanwhile, it's been an Apple iOS and Google Android show at CES 2011, in the popular press, and in customers' hands. (Microsoft and Nokia essentially ceased to matter by Christmas 2010.) Is it too late for WebOS and BlackBerry? They're running out of time, and the public signs of their plans are not so positive. Still, the two 'also-ran' mobile OSes have a couple opportunities to resurrect themselves."

schliz writes "Online dating company Gotham Dating Partners has announced plans to create profiles for non-registered individuals based on publicly available information from social networking sites, e-mail registries, mailing lists, marketing surveys, government census records, real estate listings and business websites. Although the Australian Privacy Commissioner has warned that the automatic creation of identifiable profiles of individuals without their knowledge is 'not good privacy practice,' Gotham Dating Partners does not expect to face any privacy issues from the move, which is expected to boost its membership from 6.5 million to 340 million worldwide."

Techmeology writes "Professor Akira Iritani of Kyoto University plans to use recent developments in cloning technology to give life to the currently extinct woolly mammoth. Although earlier efforts in the 1990s were unsuccessful due to damage caused by extreme cold, Professor Iritani believes he can use a technique pioneered by Dr Wakayama (who successfully cloned a frozen mouse) to overcome this obstacle. This technique will enable Professor Iritani to identify viable cell nuclei, and transfer them to egg cells of an African elephant which will carry the mammoth for a 600 day pregnancy."

theodp writes "In its just-published patent application for Adapting Parasites to Combat Disease, Microsoft lays out plans to unleash 'altered parasitic organisms' on humans, including mosquitoes, fleas, ticks, bed bugs, leeches, pinworms, tapeworms, hookworms, heart worms, roundworms, lice (head, body, and pubic), and the like. 'Irradiated mosquitoes can be used to deliver damaged Plasmodium to individuals,' explains Microsoft. 'Instead of contracting malaria, an individual receiving the damaged Plasmodium develops an immune response that renders the individual resistant to contracting malaria.' Don't worry about runaway breeding, advises Microsoft — 'a termination feature [that] can include programmed death' makes this impossible. As David Spade might say, I liked this movie the first time I saw it — when it was called Jurassic Park."

surveyork writes with this "new chapter in the browser wars: 'Google in a defense of its decision to pull H.264 from Chrome's HTML5 revealed that it will put out WebM plugins for Internet Explorer 9 and Safari. Expecting no official support from Apple or Microsoft, Google plans to develop extensions that would load its self-owned video codec. No timetable was given.' So Google gets started with their plan for world-wide WebM domination. They'll provide WebM plugins for the browsers of the H.264-only league, so in practice, all major browsers will have WebM support — one way or the other. Machiavellian move?"

Pickens writes "The Arizona Republic reports that the federal government has officially cancelled its multibillion-dollar plan to build a virtual fence along the border with Mexico as Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano disclosed in a congressional briefing that the program known as SBInet was costing too much and achieving too little. 'SBInet cannot meet its original objective of providing a single, integrated border-security technology solution,' says Napolitano. Boeing was hired in 2006 to develop the system under a three-year federal contract with cost projections for full build-out as high as $8 billion but efforts were plagued by delays, glitches, budget increases and congressional criticism. Napolitano has ordered Customs and Border Protection to launch a more modest and geographically tailored effort using SBInet funds and existing technology such as mobile-surveillance systems, unmanned aircraft, thermal-imaging devices and remote-video surveillance with proven elements of SBInet including stationary radar and infrared-sensor towers. SBInet cost nearly $1 billion for development along 53 miles of Arizona border."

BJ_Covert_Action writes "NASA engineers have finally discovered the root cause of the cracks that have been found on space shuttle Discovery's main external tank. The main tank, one of the 'Super Lightweight Tank' models developed by Lockheed-Martin, employs an aluminum-lithium alloy developed by Lockheed-Martin specifically for this application. The new alloy is used in various structural stringers throughout the SLWT design. Unfortunately, the batch of this alloy used in the tank that is currently mated with the Discovery shuttle appears to be of low quality. The alloy used in the stringers has a 'mottled' appearance, compared to the nominal appearance typically used in the main tank stringers (see picture in article). This appearance is indicative of a fracture threshold that is significantly lower than typical. NASA has determined, through testing, that this low grade alloy has only 65% of the fracture strength of the nominal alloy typically used. NASA engineers have devised a potential fix to the problem that they are currently testing to ensure the repair will cause no unintended consequences. NASA plans to have the Discovery shuttle ready to launch again by February 24th, 2011."

Barence writes "Intel boss Paul Otellini says his company plans to offer Windows 8 on smartphones — putting the chipmaker on a collision course with Microsoft. Speaking during Intel's earnings call, Otellini said Microsoft's decision to port Windows to system-on-a-chip platforms had advantages for his company. 'We have the ability to put our lowest-power Intel processors running Windows 8 – or "next-generation Windows" – into phones, because it's the same OS stack.' That would appear to run contrary to Microsoft's plans for its OSes. Speaking at CES last week, Windows chief Steven Sinofsky said Windows Phone 7 was 'uniquely focused on small form factor' while Windows was designed for tablets and above."

Capcom's recent release of action platformer Maxsplosion for the iPhone caused indie developer Twisted Pixel to call Capcom out for copying the concept from their successful Xbox Live game 'Splosion Man. Twisted Pixel said they had no plans for legal action, since they were "too small to take on a company like Capcom." The indie studio had even pitched the game to Capcom for publishing at one point, but were declined. Now, Capcom has released a statement denying that Maxsplosion's development team had any knowledge of the meetings and saying, "MaXplosion was developed independently by Capcom Mobile. Nonetheless, we are saddened by this situation and hope to rebuild the trust of our fans and friends in the gaming community."

Daevad writes "Virgin Mobile sent an e-mail today informing me of their plans to start throttling the Broadband2Go Plan. The web site doesn't seem to reflect the change yet, but here is the message they sent to me: 'Here at Virgin Mobile, our mission is to deliver an outstanding customer experience. Sometimes that means making difficult choices in order to provide the best possible service to the greatest number of customers. To make sure we can keep offering our $40 Unlimited Broadband2Go Plan at such a great price, we're putting a speed limit in place for anyone on that plan who uses over 5GB in a month. How will it work? Starting February 15, 2011, if you go over 5GB in a month on the $40 Unlimited Plan: Your data speeds will be limited for the remainder of the monthly plan cycle. During this time, you may experience slower page loads and file downloads and lags in streaming media. Your data speeds will return to normal as soon as you buy a new Broadband2Go Plan. This change will only affect plans bought on or after 2/15/2011. How will it affect me? Keep in mind, 5GB is A LOT of data. To give you an idea, it's about 250 hours of web browsing or over 500,000(!) emails. So this change shouldn't affect you unless you're a heavy downloader/streamer/etc.'" Just when I was getting comfortable recommending it to people, too. I do prefer a slowdown to an absolute cap, but this sours me a bit on the (locked-to-Sprint) MiFi I bought to use the Virgin service.

Neil writes "Damon Sicore, Senior Director of Platform Engineering at Mozilla, has announced that the company is almost ready to ship Firefox 4. On its mailing list, Mozilla has revealed it has around 160 hard blockers to fix, before proceeding to Release Candidate stage. Both the RC and the final version would arrive in February, according to Sicore. Mozilla was originally planning on having Firefox 4 out by the end of last year, but it had to delay the release till 2011. Last month, Firefox 4 Beta 8 was released for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux 32-bit/64-bit, with support for 57 languages. Mozilla's roadmap says it still wants to release a Beta 9, a Beta 10, and at least one Release Candidate build before the final version."

Jason writes "Sony is reportedly pitching the PSP2 as a high-end portable equivalent to its PS3. The gaming content on the platform will clearly differentiate the handheld from Apple's and Google's mobile products as well as the games found on the App Store and the Android Market. The company will reveal the first concrete details regarding the handheld in Tokyo on January 27. This is a month before Nintendo's 3DS platform goes on sale in Japan. Sony is already planning to reveal more at GDC and E3 after the initial announcement this month."

An anonymous reader writes "Steve Jobs is notoriously frugal when it comes to buttons so the latest rumor emanating out of Cupertino might not come as a huge surprise. Apple is reportedly planning to do away with the home button on the next-gen iPad and iPhone and replace its functionality with multitouch gestures. And as luck would have it, the newly seeded iOS 4.3 includes support for new multitouch gestures, one of which is the ability to use a four or five finger pinch to go back to the homescreen" The attached video demonstrates the new gestures for switching applications and demonstrates how you could function without the home button.

Alex writes "In the first update to Windows Phone 7, Microsoft is planning to block ChevronWP7, which allowed users to unlock any retail Windows Phone 7 device for application side-loading without having to pay $99 per year for a WP7 marketplace account. The update, which is slated for release this month, will also introduce copy and paste functionality, among other improvements. ChevronWP7 was discontinued less than a week after its release about two months ago. ChevronWP7's three developers, Long Zheng, Rafael Rivera, and Chris Walsh were approached by Brandon Watson, Director of Developer Experience for Windows Phone 7, and decided to kill their app."

BJ_Covert_Action writes "Well, Congress demanded, last year, that NASA develop a budget plan and proposal for a new heavy lift vehicle in light of the Ares V cancellation. Recently, NASA gave Congress just what they wanted. On January 11th, Douglas Cooke pitched an interim report to Congressional members detailing the basic design concepts that would go into a new heavy lift vehicle. Congress required that the new heavy lift vehicle maximize the reuse of space shuttle components as part of its budget battle with President Obama last year. As a result, NASA basically copy-pasted the Ares V design into a new report and pitched it to Congress on the 11th. The proposed vehicle will require the five segment SRB's that were proposed for the Ares V rocket. It will utilize the SSME's for it's main liquid stage. It will reuse the shuttle external tank as the primary core for the liquid booster (the same tank design that is currently giving the Discovery shuttle launch so many problems). And it will utilize the new J-2X engine that NASA has been developing for the Ares V project as an upper stage. In other words, NASA proposed to Congress exactly what Congress asked for."

Hugh Pickens writes "The Sacramento Bee reports that California Governor Jerry Brown, in his first executive order since taking office, has ordered the collection and return of 48,000 state government-paid cell phones — half of those now in use — by June 1. 'It is difficult for me to believe that 40 percent of all state employees must be equipped with taxpayer-funded cell phones,' says Brown in a written statement. 'Some state employees, including department and agency executives who are required to be in touch 24 hours a day and seven days a week, may need cell phones, but the current number of phones out there is astounding.' Brown's cell phone order directs state agency and department heads to retrieve the cell phones and the governor says he plans to continue reducing cell phone usage in months ahead. 'In the face of a multi-billion dollar budget deficit, a cell phone may not seem like a big expense,' adds Brown. 'But spending $20 million, and perhaps far more than that, on cell phones can't be justified.'"

Mark.JUK writes "The European Internet Services Providers Association has today warned the European Union that plans aimed at tackling online child sexual abuse content, which propose to force ISPs into adopting mandatory website blocking (censorship) technology, will not work because such methods are easy to circumvent; an ISP might cover your eyes but anybody can still take the blindfold off. Instead the EuroISPA has called for members of Parliament to consider permanently removing Internet-based child sexual abuse content at source, although this also runs into problems when the servers are based outside of your jurisdiction."