An anonymous reader sends word that the 2014 wireless spectrum license auction has surpassed $34 billion. “A government auction of airwaves for use in mobile broadband has blown through presale estimates, becoming the biggest auction in the Federal Communications Commission’s history and signaling that wireless companies expect demand for Internet access by smartphones to continue to soar. And it’s not over yet. Companies bid more than $34 billion as of Friday afternoon for six blocks of airwaves, totaling 65 megahertz of the electromagnetic spectrum, being sold by the F.C.C. That total is more than three times the $10.5 billion reserve price that the commission put on the sale, the first offering of previously unavailable airwaves in six years.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Bidding In Government Auction of Airwaves Reaches $34 Billion
After seven years and $40 million of development, the US Navy has finally sent its prototype laser weapon, one capable of blowing holes clean through UAVs , on patrol throughout the disputed Persian Gulf . Read more… 
It’s been a while since we heard anything new about Nest’s flagship product, the quiet elder brother to the attention-hogging Protect . But today the company is pushing a new software update to all existing devices this week, and it’s using a clever new bit of software to make them far more efficient. Read more… 
Stanford’s Linear Accelerator Laboratory operates the longest particle accelerator of its kind—it’s produced groundbreaking work in particle physics over the decades, as well as several Nobel prizes. But surprisingly, it also played a major role in the early web: By hosting the first web site in the US . It wasn’t much to look at, but that’s not important. Read more… 
There are a few key things that keep PC gamers tethered to their desks, one of them being the awesomeness of having the “click clack” of a quality mechanical keyboard punctuate their gameplay. Impressive as they may be, laptops haven’t been able to replicate that experience…yet. MSI to the rescue! Read more… 
Presto Vivace writes H-1B records that are critical to research and take up a small amount of storage are set for deletion. “In a notice posted last week, the U.S. Department of Labor said that records used for labor certification, whether in paper or electronic, ‘are temporary records and subject to destruction’ after five years, under a new policy. There was no explanation for the change, and it is perplexing to researchers. The records under threat are called Labor Condition Applications (LCA), which identify the H-1B employer, worksite, the prevailing wage, and the wage paid to the worker. The cost of storage can’t be an issue for the government’s $80 billion IT budget: A full year’s worth of LCA data is less than 1GB.” Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
In 1937, Amelia Earhart’s plane, the aluminum-clad Electra, disappeared somewhere over the Pacific during the course of her global circumnavigation attempt. Now 77 years later, historians and aviation experts are confident they have found a part of her downed aircraft . Read more…