Boeing Patents an Engine Run By Laser-Generated Fusion Explosions

MarkWhittington writes: Boeing has had a patent approved for an aircraft engine that uses laser-generated nuclear fusion as a power source, according to a story in Business Insider. The idea is already generating a great deal of controversy, according to the website Counter Punch. The patent has generated fears of what might happen if an aircraft containing radioactive material as fuel were to crash, spreading such fuel across the crash site. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Boeing Patents an Engine Run By Laser-Generated Fusion Explosions

SpaceX Rocket Failure Cost NASA $110 Million

An anonymous reader writes: On June 28th, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket exploded just over two minutes into its attempt to reach the International Space Station. It was a contracted mission from NASA to resupply the astronauts living there. Today, NASA associate administrator William Gerstenmaier said the price tag to taxpayers for that failed launch is $110 million. SpaceX is leading the investigation into the cause of the failure, and NASA officials faced tough questions about whether private companies should be allowed to direct investigations into their own failed launches. A similar inquiry is underway at Orbital ATK. NASA inspector general Paul Martin said his office is looking into the matter. Gerstenmaier added that NASA is thinking about making these companies take out insurance policies that would cover the cost to taxpayers in the event of another failure. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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SpaceX Rocket Failure Cost NASA $110 Million

Adblock Plus Reduces University’s Network Traffic By 25 Percent

Mickeycaskill writes: Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada claims it cut 25% of its network traffic (40% of video traffic) by deploying Adblock Plus across its internal network. The study tested the ability of the Adblock Plus browser extension (PDF) in reducing IP traffic when installed in a large enterprise network environment, and found that huge amounts of data transfer were saved by blocking web-based advertisements and video trailers. The experiment was carried out over a period of six weeks. Disclaimer: the study was funded by Adblock Plus. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Adblock Plus Reduces University’s Network Traffic By 25 Percent

Samsung Releases First 2TB Consumer SSD For Laptops

Lucas123 writes: Samsung has released what it is calling the world’s first 2.5-in consumer-grade, multi-terabyte SSD, and it’s issuing the new drive a 10-year warranty. With up to 2TB of capacity, the new 850 Pro and 850 EVO SSDs double the maximum capacity of their predecessors. As with the previous 840 Pro and EVO models, Samsung used its 3D V-NAND technology, which stacks 32 layers of NAND atop one another in a microscopic skyscraper. Additionally, the drives take advantage of multi-level cell (MLC) and triple-level cell (TLC) (2- and 3-bit per cell) technology for even greater density. The 850 Pro, Samsung said, can manage up to 550MBps sequential read and 520MBps sequential write rates and up to 100, 000 random I/Os per second (IOPS). The 850 EVO SSD has slightly lower performance with 540MBps and 520MBps sequential read/write rates and up to 90, 000 random IOPS. The SSDs will range in capacity from 120GB to 2TB and in price from $99 to $999. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Samsung Releases First 2TB Consumer SSD For Laptops

Tetris Blocks Flashbacks of Traumatic Events Lodged in the Brain

As computer games go, Tetris is one of the most mesmeric. Now, a team of researchers has found that the visual processing required to play the game can help sufferers of post-traumatic stress disorder overcome flashbacks—even after the memory of an event is lodged within their brain. Read more…

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Tetris Blocks Flashbacks of Traumatic Events Lodged in the Brain

Firefox 39 Released, Bringing Security Improvements and Social Sharing

An anonymous reader writes: Today Mozilla announced the release of Firefox 39.0, which brings an number of minor improvements to the open source browser. (Full release notes.) They’ve integrated Firefox Share with Firefox Hello, which means that users will be able to open video calls through links sent over social media. Internally, the browser dropped support for the insecure SSLv3 and disabled use of RC4 except where explicitly whitelisted. The SafeBrowsing malware detection now works for downloads on OS X and Linux. (Full list of security changes.) The Mac OS X version of Firefox is now running Project Silk, which makes animations and scrolling noticeably smoother. Developers now have access to the powerful Fetch API, which should provide a better interface for grabbing things over a network. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Firefox 39 Released, Bringing Security Improvements and Social Sharing

How to Move a PC Game to Another Hard Drive (Without Re-Downloading It)

So you’re running out of hard drive space (maybe on that fast-but-tiny SSD of yours), and you need to move a few of your PC games to another hard drive. Don’t uninstall and re-download them! You can actually move your games to a new drive without having to wait hours to reinstall each one. Read more…

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How to Move a PC Game to Another Hard Drive (Without Re-Downloading It)

U.S. Builds First Giant Robo-Suit, Immediately Challenges Japan To Fight

Finally, after millennia of bullshit agriculture and metallurgy and revolutions industrial, political, cultural, whatever, shit’s finally getting good. That’s because there are now two giant, functional, manned robotic mecha-Gundam-Pacific Rim-giant-robot-whatever suits, and it looks like they’re gonna fight. Who will win? Everyone. Read more…

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U.S. Builds First Giant Robo-Suit, Immediately Challenges Japan To Fight

Where Facebook Stores 900 Million New Photos Per Day

1sockchuck writes: Facebook faces unique storage challenges. Its users upload 900 million new images daily, most of which are only viewed for a couple of days. The social network has built specialized cold storage facilities to manage these rarely-accessed photos. Data Center Frontier goes inside this facility, providing a closer look at Facebook’s newest strategy: Using thousands of Blu-Ray disks to store images, complete with a robotic retrieval system (see video demo). Others are interested as well. Sony recently acquired a Blu-Ray storage startup founded by Open Compute chairman Frank Frankovsky, which hopes to drive enterprise adoption of optical data storage. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Where Facebook Stores 900 Million New Photos Per Day