December 2013 – Page 13

US Light Bulb Phase-Out’s Next Step Begins Next Month

SonicSpike writes “Light bulb manufacturers will cease making traditional 40 and 60-watt light bulbs — the most popular in the country — at the start of 2014. This comes after the controversial phasing out of incandescent 75 and 100-watt light bulbs at the beginning of 2013. In their place will be halogen bulbs, compact fluorescent bulbs, LED bulbs and high efficiency incandescents — which are just regular incandescents that have the filament wrapped in gas. All are significantly more expensive than traditional light bulbs, but offer significant energy and costs savings over the long run. (Some specialty incandescents — such as three-way bulbs — will still be available.) … The rules were signed into law by President George W. Bush in 2007. They are designed to address gross inefficiencies with old light bulbs — only 10% of the energy they use is converted into light, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, which has a handy fact sheet about the changes. The rest is wasted as heat. But the rules have drawn fire from a number of circles — mainly conservatives and libertarians who are unhappy about the government telling people what light bulbs they can use. They argue that if the new ones really are so good, people will buy them on their own without being forced to do so.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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US Light Bulb Phase-Out’s Next Step Begins Next Month

Photos Stream Back From China’s Lunar Lander

After the successful soft landing of its carrier vessel on the surface of the moon, China’s Jade Rabbit lunar rover has begun beaming back photos of the lunar surface. From the BBC’s article, with links to video as well as several photos, comes this description: “Chang’e-3 is the third unmanned rover mission to touch down on the lunar surface, and the first to go there in more than 40 years. The last was an 840kg (1, 900lb) Soviet vehicle known as Lunokhod-2, which was kept warm by polonium-210. But the six-wheeled Chinese vehicle carries a more sophisticated payload, including ground-penetrating radar which will gather measurements of the lunar soil and crust. The 120kg (260lb) Jade Rabbit rover can reportedly climb slopes of up to 30 degrees and travel at 200m (660ft) per hour. … The rover and lander are powered by solar panels but some sources suggest they also carry radioisotope heating units (RHUs), containing plutonium-238 to keep them warm during the cold lunar night. According to Chinese space scientists, the mission is designed to test new technologies, gather scientific data and build intellectual expertise. It will also scout valuable mineral resources that could one day be mined.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Photos Stream Back From China’s Lunar Lander

You Can Actually Browse the Web on a 27-Year-Old Mac Plus

Jeff Keacher wanted to get his Mac Plus, now well into its third decade, online. It had been on BBSes and text-only Lynx via dial-up back in the day, but Keacher wanted to go full TCP/IP. And it worked. He even loaded Gizmodo for us! Read more…

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You Can Actually Browse the Web on a 27-Year-Old Mac Plus

Why Cloud Infrastructure Pricing Is Absurd

itwbennett writes “Two reports out this week, one a new ‘codex’ released by 451 Research and the other an updated survey into cloud IaaS pricing from Redmonk, show just how insane cloud pricing has become. If your job requires you to read these reports, good luck. For the rest of us, Redmonk’s Stephen O’Grady distilled the pricing trends down to this: ‘HP offers the best compute value and instance sizes for the dollar. Google offers the best value for memory, but to get there it appears to have sacrificed compute. AWS is king in value for disk and it appears no one else is even trying to come close. Microsoft is taking the ‘middle of the road, ‘ never offering the best or worst pricing.'” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Why Cloud Infrastructure Pricing Is Absurd

NuScale Power Awarded $226 Million To Deploy Small Nuclear Reactor Design

New submitter ghack writes “NuScale power, a small nuclear power company in Corvallis Oregon, has won a Department of Energy grant of up to $226 million dollars to enable deployment of their small modular reactor. The units would be factory built in the United States, and their small size enables a number of potential niche applications. NuScale argues that their design includes a number of unique passive safety features: ‘NuScale’s 45-megawatt reactor, which can be grouped with others to form a utility-scale plant, would sit in a 5 million-gallon pool of water underground. That means it needs no pumps to inject water to cool it in an emergency – an issue … highlighted by Japan’s crippled Fukushima plant.’ This was the second of two DOE small modular reactor grants; the first was awarded to Babcock and Wilcox, a stalwart in the nuclear industry.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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NuScale Power Awarded $226 Million To Deploy Small Nuclear Reactor Design

‘Darkness Ray’ Beams Invisibility From a Distance

KentuckyFC writes “Optical engineers generally build imaging systems with the best possible resolving power. The basic idea is that an imaging system focuses light into a pattern known as a point spreading function. This consists of a central region of high intensity surrounded by a concentric lobe of lower intensity light. The trick to improving resolution is narrowing and intensifying this central region while suppressing the outer lobe. Now optical engineers have turned this approach on its head by suppressing the central region so that the field intensity here is zero while intensifying the lobe. The result is a three-dimensional beam of darkness that hides any object inside it. The engineers say this region can be huge — up to 8 orders of magnitude bigger than the wavelength of the imaging light. What’s more, the optics required to create it are simple and cheap: a lens consisting of concentric dielectric grooves. The team has even tested a prototype capable of hiding a 40-micrometre object in visible laser light.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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‘Darkness Ray’ Beams Invisibility From a Distance

Safari Stores Previous Browsing Session Data Unencrypted

msm1267 writes “Users of Apple’s Safari browser are at risk for information loss because of a feature common to most browsers that restores previous sessions. The problem with Safari is that it stores session information including authentication credentials used in previous HTTPS sessions in a plaintext XML file called a Property list, or plist, file. The plist files, a researcher with Kaspersky Lab’s Global Research and Analysis Team said, are stored in a hidden folder, but hiding them in plain sight isn’t much of a hurdle for a determined attacker. ‘The complete authorized session on the site is saved in the plist file in full view despite the use of https, ‘ said researcher Vyacheslav Zakorzhevsky on the Securelist blog. ‘The file itself is located in a hidden folder, but is available for anyone to read.'” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Safari Stores Previous Browsing Session Data Unencrypted

North Korea attempts to purge online memory of executed leader

Kim Il Sung (left) is the founder of modern North Korea and the grandfather of current dictator Kim Jong Un. Tormod Sandtorv On Thursday, foreign policy watchers worldwide were stunned when North Korea announced the execution of Jang Song Taek , a top government official. Jang was the uncle of Kim Jong Un, North Korea’s young dictator, and also served as vice chairman of the National Defense Commission of North Korea . However, beyond the whims of North Korea’s leader, the Hermit Kingdom appears to have now also taken the unusual step of attempting to remove all references to Jang Song Taek from state-controlled Internet outlets, primarily the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA). The KCNA website , which is hosted in Japan, appears to have suffered an outage briefly on Friday , and subsequently, past articles appeared scrubbed of mentions of Jang. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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North Korea attempts to purge online memory of executed leader

Sprint wants to buy T-Mobile and leave US with just three major carriers

Masayoshi Son (left), poses with a Storm Trooper at Sprint owner SoftBank’s launch of the iPhone 3GS in 2009. Danny Choo Sprint is “working toward a possible bid for rival T-Mobile” but is first examining regulatory concerns that could prevent such a merger, the Wall Street Journal reported today . A merger would leave the US cellular market with only three major carriers, although a combined Sprint/T-Mobile would perhaps be a more formidable opponent to market leaders AT&T and Verizon Wireless. AT&T attempted to buy T-Mobile, but it dropped those plans in December 2011 after opposition from the Justice Department and Federal Communications Commission (FCC). Sprint hasn’t made a final decision on a bid, but it could happen in the first half of 2014 and be worth more than $20 billion “depending on the size of any stake in T-Mobile that Sprint tries to buy,” the Journal reported. “But it would likely face tough opposition from antitrust authorities, who worry consumers could suffer without a fourth national competitor to keep a check on prices,” the report said. AT&T’s takeover bid for T-Mobile would have been $39 billion.The Journal ‘s sources indicate that Sprint is wary of wasting time on a deal that might not come to fruition, but the company’s owner is leading the charge. “Driving the current effort is SoftBank Chief Executive Masayoshi Son, an aggressive acquirer who bought control of Sprint earlier this year and has made no secret of his desire to grow in the US via further deals,” the Journal wrote. Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

British Library sticks 1 million pics on Flickr, asks for help making them useful

In 2008, the British Library, in partnership with Microsoft, embarked on a project to digitize thousands of out-of-copyright books from the 17 th , 18 th , and 19 th centuries. Included within those books were maps, diagrams, illustrations, photographs, and more. The Library has uploaded more than a million of them onto Flickr and released them into the public domain. It’s now asking for help. Though the library knows which book each image is taken from, its knowledge largely ends there. While some images have useful titles, many do not, so the majority of the million picture collection is uncatalogued, its subject matter unknown. Next year, it plans to launch a crowdsourced application to fill the gap, to enable humans to describe the images. This information will then be used to train an automated classifier that will be run against the entire corpus. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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British Library sticks 1 million pics on Flickr, asks for help making them useful

Ken May

Month: December 2013