Slashdot Mirror

crimeandpunishment writes "A planned server outage turned into an unplanned glitch for the Internal Revenue Service, and it comes at a very bad time. The IRS planned the server outage for the holiday weekend ... but today they couldn't get the system back into operation. This week is the deadline for filing 2009 tax returns for taxpayers who got extensions. So far it's not having a huge impact since the shutdown only involves the updated version of the e-filing system, and most programs used by large tax companies like H&R Block will default to the older version. There's no estimate on when the system will be back up."

eldavojohn writes "Remember those 30 new nuclear reactors the US was slated to build? Those plans have been halted. A few years ago, it seemed like a really good idea to build a bunch of nuclear reactors. The environmental impacts of other energy production methods were becoming well known and the economy was tanking. Well, natural gas is now much cheaper, and as a result it looks like building a single nuclear reactor in Maryland is such a risky venture that Constellation can't reach an agreement with the federal government for the loans it needs to build that reactor. The government wants Constellation to sign an agreement with a local energy provider to ensure they'll recoup at least some of the money on the loan, but Constellation doesn't like the terms. So, the first of those thirty reactors has officially stalled, with no resolution in sight. It looks like it'd take an economic meltdown to trigger nuclear reactor production in the US."

angry tapir writes "Development around the original Cell processor hasn't stalled, and IBM will continue to develop chips and supply hardware for future gaming consoles, a company executive said. IBM is working with gaming machine vendors including Nintendo and Sony, said Jai Menon, CTO of IBM's Systems and Technology Group, during an interview Thursday. 'We want to stay in the business, we intend to stay in the business,' he said. IBM confirmed in a statement that it continues to manufacture the Cell processor for use by Sony in its PlayStation 3. IBM also will continue to invest in Cell as part of its hybrid and multicore chip strategy, Menon said."

An anonymous reader writes "Several newspapers have reported that DRDO (the defence R&D organization of the Indian military) is planning to create an OS. The need for this arose due to the cyber security concerns facing India and that all [conventional] operating systems are made outside India. About 50 professionals in Bangalore and New Delhi are expected to start work on this operating system." At least one of the linked articles says the new OS, though home-grown, would run Windows software.

crimeandpunishment writes "If all goes according to plan, the only space sibling team will be hooking up in orbit. And not only are Scott and Mark Kelly brothers, they're identical twins. Scott took off Friday on a Russian Soyuz rocket to begin a five and a half month mission as the next commander of the International Space Station. Mark is the next commander of the space shuttle Endeavour, scheduled to lift off in February and hook up with the space station March 1st."

theodp writes "Newsweek reports on a company called True Alaska Bottling that has purchased the rights to transfer 3 billion gallons of water a year from Sitka, Alaska's bountiful reserves. If all goes according to plan, 80 million gallons of Blue Lake water will soon be siphoned into the kind of tankers normally reserved for oil and shipped to a bulk bottling facility near Mumbai. From there it will be dispersed among several drought-plagued cities throughout the Middle East. Think of it as a proof of concept for turning life's most essential molecule into a global commodity." I'm sure the residents of Saratoga Springs and Perrier (not to mention the island nation of Fiji) can think of some prior art.

eldavojohn writes "Congress and the president haven't been exactly kind to NASA recently as far as funding goes but NASA chief Charles Bolden is ruffling some feathers with his planned trip to Beijing to investigate cooperative human space flight as well as potential Chinese involvement with the International Space Station. Such news has caused Congressman Frank Wolf to warn Bolden that 'no such planning or coordination has been approved by the Congress ... In fact, several recent NASA authorization bills have explicitly sought to place strict limitations on coordination with China.' Wolf is an outspoken critic of China in space and further warned Bolden in a letter that 'It should go without saying that NASA has no business cooperating with the Chinese regime on human spaceflight. China is taking an increasingly aggressive posture globally, and their interests rarely intersect with ours.'"

uid7306m writes "The UK government is planning an austerity budget, in the wake of the financial crisis and banking bailouts. This involves a 25% overall cut in the government budget, and the indications are that it will hit UK science and university budgets strongly. In response to this, a campaign has started that has managed to get scientists out of their labs and into the streets."

itwbennett writes "Chris Nerney is blogging about Apple's $1.7 million purchase of a 1-acre lot in Maiden, N.C. where it plans to build a $1 billion, 500,000 sq. ft. data center. The couple who owned the land, and the home that sat on the land, Donnie and Kathy Fulbright (hereafter known as Apple's shrewdest investors) reportedly 'rejected two previous offers from Apple before being told to name their price,' says Nerney."

taco8982 writes "After three years of providing free directory assistance in exchange for voice samples, Google has announced plans to shut down the GOOG-411 service, in order to focus on 'speech-enabling the next generation of Google products and services across a multitude of languages.' The service will close on November 12th."

cgriffin21 writes "The United Arab Emirates will not suspend services on BlackBerry smartphones next week, following an agreement reached with BlackBerry maker Research In Motion that is said to comply with UAE policy. It'll be a relief for the roughly 500,000 BlackBerry users in the UAE, a turnaround on the planned Oct. 11 service suspension. In a brief statement, the UAE's Telecommunications Regulatory Authority said that BlackBerry services 'are now compliant with the UAE's telecommunications regulatory framework.'" The Guardian's coverage quotes an anonymous UAE university professor, who said, "The general opinion amongst the business expat community, westerners at least, has been for some time now that [the ban] wasn't going to happen. Call it a failure of imagination on their part, but no one could conceive of how the country could do something so counterproductive to the image they are trying to present primarily to the west. Was it posturing? To some extent."

Hugh Pickens writes "Ars Technica reports that with the release of the 'near-final' ACTA text (PDF), it is becoming clear that the US has caved on the most egregious provisions from earlier drafts (advocating 'three strikes' regimes, ordering ISPs to develop anti-piracy plans, promoting tough DRM anticircumvention language, setting up a 'takedown' notification system, ordering 'secondary liability' for device makers) and has largely failed in its attempts to push the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) onto the rest of the world. Apparently, a face-saving agreement is better than no agreement at all — but even the neutered ACTA could run into problems, with Mexico's Senate recently approving a nonbinding resolution asking for the country to suspend participation in ACTA, while key members of the European Parliament have also expressed skepticism about the deal."

Barence writes "The company behind the Ubuntu Linux distro says it has no plans to follow Opera's lead and file a complaint against Microsoft to the EU. Ubuntu 10.10 is the most 'consumer-friendly' version of the Linux distro to date, but it faces an uphill battle against Microsoft's marketing machine. Even high-profile supporter Dell has dropped Ubuntu machines from its website in recent months, while continuing to remind visitors that 'Dell recommends Windows 7' at the top of every PC page. 'I don't think we've ever considered [an EU complaint],' said Steve George, vice president of business development at Canonical. 'The improvements we're making to Ubunutu ... are a better route for us to reach out to users and get a bigger user base.'"

tedlistens writes "The last Space Shuttle's external tank was recently lifted into a 'checkout cell' in the Vehicle Assembly Building at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, one of the largest buildings in the world. The completion of the last tank meant the shut down of the assembly line – and the 800 remaining people who worked on it – at NASA's Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans. The tank contains the liquid hydrogen fuel and liquid oxygen that, along with the solid rocket boosters, powers the Shuttle into orbit. Though they are not typically reused — ten seconds after the engines cut off, the tank falls away to break up over the Indian Ocean, away from known shipping lanes — one new plan imagines using old shuttle parts, including pieces of the tank, to build a new moon rocket. There's a beautiful video of the lifting of the tank at Motherboard."

waderoush writes "After laying off staff and splitting the organization in two, Nicholas Negroponte and the One Laptop Per Child effort may be hitting their stride again. In an interview with Xconomy, Negroponte says he has a new model for getting XO laptops to kids in Gaza and Afghanistan — and reveals more ideas about the planned XO 3 tablet and the future of books. 'Paper books are really dead — they're gone. And they're not being killed by tablets, they're creating tablets,' he says."

It turns out the people of Oklahoma don't appreciate any educational program that refers to the founding fathers as "old dead white men." From the article: "The Oklahoma City public school district is taking a second look at a plan to teach at-risk students using rap and hip-hop after receiving complaints over one lesson referring to the Founding Fathers as 'old dead white men.' The program, known as Flocabulary, is an educational tool that uses rap and hip-hop music to help students learn and memorize basic principles of vocabulary, reading, writing, social studies, math and science. The district was authorized to spend $97,000 in federal funds on the program and has already spent $10,000, NewsOK.com reported."

Oxford University's Bodleian Library has purchased a huge £26m warehouse to give a proper home to over 6 million books and 1.2 million maps. The Library has been housing the collection in a salt mine, and plans on transferring the manuscripts over the next year. "The BSF will prove a long-awaited solution to the space problem that has long challenged the Bodleian," said its head librarian Dr Sarah Thomas. "We have been running out of space since the 1970s and the situation has become increasingly desperate in the last few years." The 153 miles of new shelf space will only be enough for the next 20 years however because of the library's historic entitlement to a copy of every volume published in the UK.

cgriffin21 writes "Verizon plans to launch its 4G LTE network in 38 major U.S. metropolitan areas by year's end, in an ambitious rollout that will also drape high-speed mobile broadband coverage over 60 airports." Not coincidentally, everyone and their brother is talking about iPhone on Verizon in 2011, and what that means to Android.

CartaNova writes "The Obama administration has announced plans to install solar panels and a solar hot water heater on the White House. The Carter administration had previously installed a 32-panel solar system at the White House — which was quietly removed during Reagan's tenure in office. Solar hot water and Photovoltaic firms had been campaigning on this issue for some time."

An anonymous reader writes "Since the atmospheric blanket of Mars is fast disappearing, NASA is planning a mission to Mars in 2013 to study the Red Planet further. The $400-million plus project named the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution Mission (MAVEN) will investigate how Mars lost most of its atmosphere. This will be critical in understanding whether there has been life there or not."