DynaSoar writes “Esther Dyson, known to many as a founding and consistently guiding member of ICANN, and for working with the startups of Flickr, de.icio.us, Medscape and others, is now expanding her interests upwards. She recently announced that she will be heading to Moscow to train as backup astronaut for Charles Simonyi, who plans to fly aboard Soyuz TMA-14 next year. The US$3 million price tag won’t her first cash contribution towards personal space flight. She’s already an investor in Space Adventures, the company that arranges the space tourist flights on Soyuz.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

chromakey writes “The Wall Street Journal is running an essay from Lawrence Lessig about the fair use of copyrighted material on the Internet. He makes the case that companies who go to extreme lengths to squash minor videos, such as Universal, are stifling creativity in the modern era. Lessig makes specific reference to a YouTube video that was hit by a DMCA takedown notice, in which a 13-month-old child is dancing to a nearly inaudible soundtrack of Prince’s ‘Let’s Go Crazy.’ Lawrence Lessig is a board member for the Electronic Frontier Foundation.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

snydeq writes “Fatal Exception’s Neil McAllister takes Microsoft’s recently released Touchless SDK for a test spin, controlling his Asus Eee PC 901 with a Roma tomato. The Touchless SDK is a set of .Net components that can be used to simulate the gestural interfaces of devices like the iPhone in thin air — using an ordinary USB Webcam. Although McAllister was able to draw, scroll, and play a rudimentary game with his tomato, the SDK still has some kinks to work out. ‘For starters, its marker-location algorithm is very much keyed to color,’ he writes. ‘That’s probably an efficient way to identify contrasting shapes, but color response varies by camera and is heavily influenced by ambient light conditions.’ Moreover, the detection routine soaked up 64 percent of McAllister’s 1.6GHz Atom CPU, with the video from the Webcam soon developing a few seconds’ lag that made controlling onscreen cursors challenging. Project developer Mike Wasserman offers a video demo of the technology.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

riverman writes “I have been ‘provisioned’ at the school where I work to teach a new Computer Science/Programming course. I’m supposed to be teaching everything from the very-very basics (i.e. where that myspace thing is in your computer monitor, and how it knows who your friends are) to the easy-advanced (i.e. PHP classes and Python/Google App Engine). I’m an experienced programmer, but I’m not sure where to start — I could easily assume that my students know something basic they don’t. Are there any resources on the internet that could help me find a solid curriculum? What are your suggestions?” I’m sure many of us have gone through intro-level programming courses of some sort; what are some things your teacher or professor did that worked well, and what didn’t work at all?

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Discover Magazine is running a story detailing the search for planets like Earth orbiting other stars. While we’ve been able to locate a few “super earths” so far, none of them really compare in size or the potential for habitability with our own world. Fortunately, advances in data analysis and new space-based telescopes — such as Kepler, the James Webb Space Telescope, and the already-launched CoRoT (PDF) — have some astronomers predicting we’ll find such an exoplanet by 2010, and a habitable one by 2012. Earth-based telescopes are also in the hunt, though the article notes, “even if a habitable Earth-like world is found first from the ground, it will most likely take a space observatory to search for the chemical signals that tell us what we really want to know: Is anything living out there? If the planet is one that can be observed transiting, it just might be possible to provide a hint of an answer in the next few years.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from MarketWatch: “A one-megaton nuclear bomb detonated 250 miles over Kansas could cripple many modern electronic devices and systems in the continental US and take out the power grid for a long time. … A solar storm similar to the one that occurred in 1859, which shorted out telegraph wires in the United States and Europe, could wreak havoc on electrical systems. Each of the above scenarios can create a powerful electromagnetic pulse that overloads electronic devices and systems. IAN staff and Frostburg State University physics and engineering professor Hilkat Soysal are teaming — through a $165,000 project recently approved by the Maryland Industrial Partnerships (MIPS) program — to create renewable energy-powered, electromagnetic pulse (EMP)-protected microgrids that could provide electricity for critical infrastructure facilities in the event of a disaster.” Also available are an EMP threat assessment (PDF) written for the US Congress and an estimate of economic impact (PDF).

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

r2k writes “While the Apple rumours posted yesterday highlight some of the most commonly talked-about opinions, a writer for CNet UK sat down with Mahalo’s Jason Calacanis, who told CNet he knew for a fact that Apple is developing fully networked LCD TV sets. As the writer points out, Apple dropped ‘Computer’ from its company name for a very good reason.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Master of Transhuman writes “Seems like nobody can keep their data under wraps these days. On the heels of the World Bank piece about massive penetrations of their servers, the British Ministry of Defense has lost a hard drive with the personal details of 100,000 serving personnel in the British armed forces, and perhaps another 600,000 applicants. This comes on the heels of the MoD losing 658 of its laptops over the past four years and 26 flash drives holding confidential information. Apparently the MoD outsources this stuff to EDS, which is under fire for not being able to confirm that the data was or was not encrypted.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes “Our wonderful government here in the UK has decided we’re not being surveilled enough, and agreed to spend £12 billion on a programme to monitor every Briton’s phone calls, e-mails, and internet usage. According to various sources, upwards of £1 billion has already been spent on the uber-database. Rationale? Terrorism, of course (no prizes for guessing). Needless to say, not everyone is as happy as Larry over this: Michael Parker pointed out how us Brits are being ’stalked.’ I’m just looking forward to when the data gets lost.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

bsk_cw writes “Sprint’s newly launched Xohm service is now offering America’s first WiMax network. Computerworld’s Brian Nadel went to Baltimore to try it out, and he reports that Xohm delivered data smoothly to a car moving at highway speeds, played YouTube videos flawlessly, and on average, pushed through more than 3Mbit/sec., compared with 1.3 Mbit/sec. for the AT&T network Brian used as a comparison. But right now, coverage is only planned in a few US cities; if Sprint isn’t able to ramp up its coverage quickly, it may lose its advantage.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

rsk writes “Justin Voskuhl, a Google engineer, in a 2-fold bid to fight boredom and figure out something to cover a large barren wall in his living room, one weekend developed a Java program using an annealing algorithm to figure out the best layout and colors of Lego blocks to reproduce a source image exclusively in Lego blocks inside a frame. He plans to release the source code soon. I probably would have just painted the wall …”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Zarf writes “I’d like to file a bug report on the US educational system. The New York Times reports on a recent study that shows the US fails to encourage academic talent as a culture.’”There is something about the culture in American society today which doesn’t really seem to encourage men or women in mathematics,” said Michael Sipser, the head of M.I.T.’s math department. “Sports achievement gets lots of coverage in the media. Academic achievement gets almost none.”‘ While we’ve suspected that the US might be falling behind academically, this study shows that it is actually due to cultural factors that are devaluing the success of our students. I suspect there’s a flaw in the US cultural system that prevents achievement on the academic front as valuable. Could anyone suggest a patch for this bug or is this cause for a rewrite?”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

SmarkWoW writes “The university I attend is currently looking to change the way in which is provides its students with an email service. In the past they used a legacy mail system which can no longer fit their needs. A committee has narrowed the possibilities down to three vendors: Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo. Representatives from these three vendors will be coming to our college and giving a presentation on the advantages of their systems. We’re looking at other services these companies provide such as calendaring and integration with existing software that our university runs. What questions would Slashdot readers ask during these Q&A sessions? Which of these three companies would you recommend? Why? What advantages would each have that college-level students would take advantage of? What other aspects should we consider when making our decision?”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

thefickler writes “Scientists at the University of Dayton have created a peel-on, peel-off glue which mimics the wall-climbing abilities of Spiderman. The substance, based on the feet of the Gecko lizard, is three times stickier than existing adhesives. The material is so strong that a 4×4mm pad would be enough to hold a 1.5kg object such as hardback book. However, it’s likely too expensive for consumer use: one British scientist calculates that a single Post-it note using the glue would cost around a thousand dollars.” We’ve mentioned the possibilities of synthetic gecko technology several times before, including as applied in this wall-climbing robot; commercial applications have seemed just around the corner for a while now.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.