When most people hear the word “drone, ” they probably picture a cockpit-free plane zipping over the Iraqi desert. But there’s more to it than that. The Army is in the process of adopting a whole new generation of unmanned vehicles that will assist soldiers on the battlefield—and they’re by far the scariest remote-controlled cars you’ll ever see. Read more…
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These Next Generation Drones Carry Gear and Machine Guns into Battle
Everybody hates wires, but if you want crazy speed, they’re the way to go. But maybe not anymore. A team of German scientists have developed record-setting Wi-Fi that cooks right along at 100 Gigabits per second . You know, like Google Fiber but times 100. Read more…
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The World’s Fastest Wi-Fi Makes Google Fiber Look Like Dial-Up
“Todd, ” the digitally rendered man pictured at far left, is a physiologically average American male, his paunchy proportions based on averages from CDC anthropometric data . Beside him stand average men from Japan, the Netherlands and France. How do you stack up? Read more…
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The bodies of average men from around the world
Taco Cowboy writes “Back in 1999, it was postulated that diamonds may rain from the sky in the atmospheres of our solar system’s gas giants. Now, research has shown that diamond rains on Saturn are more than probable. ‘”We don’t want to give people the impression that we have a Titanic-sized diamondberg floating around, ” said researcher Mona Delitsky, of California Specialty Engineering, “We’re thinking they’re more like something you can hold in your hand.” Recent data compiled by planetary scientists … has been combined with newly published pressure temperature diagrams of Jupiter and Saturn. These diagrams, known as adiabats, allow researchers to decipher at what interior level that diamond would become stable. They also allow for calculations at lower levels – regions where both temperature and pressure are so concentrated that diamond becomes a liquid. Imagine diamond rain or rivulets of pure gemstone.’ ‘At even greater depths, the scientists say the diamond will eventually melt to form liquid diamond, which may then form a stable ocean layer.’ Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Diamond Rain In Saturn
A team of astrophysicists have made an exciting however complex discovery a mere 170 light years away. In their own words , it’s “the first evidence of a water-rich rocky planetary body” outside of our own solar system to have evidence of water. It’s the “rocky” bit that makes it Earth-like. Read more…
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Scientists Found the Remains of a Water-Covered Earth-Like Planet
mattydread23 writes “Most gamification efforts fail. But when DirecTV wanted to encourage its IT staff to be more open about sharing failures, it created a massive internal game called F12. Less than a year later, it’s got 97% participation and nearly everybody in the IT group actually likes competing. So what did DirecTV do right? The most important thing was to devote a full-time staffer to the game, and to keep updating it constantly.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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How DirecTV Overhauled Its 800-Person IT Group With a Game
We’ve long suspected that the NSA, the world’s premiere spy agency, was pretty good at breaking into computers. But now, thanks to an article by security expert Bruce Schneier—who is working with the Guardian to go through the Snowden documents—we have a much more detailed view of how the NSA uses exploits in order to infect the computers of targeted users. The template for attacking people with malware used by the NSA is in widespread use by criminals and fraudsters, as well as foreign intelligence agencies, so it’s important to understand and defend against this threat to avoid being a victim to the plethora of attackers out there. Read more…
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How The NSA Deploys Malware
An anonymous reader writes “NVIDIA was caught removing features from their Linux driver and days later Linux developers have caught and confirmed AMD imposing artificial limitations on their graphics cards in the DVI-to-HDMI adapters that their driver will support. Over years AMD has quietly been adding an extra EEPROM chip to their DVI-to-HDMI adapters that are bundled with Radeon HD graphics cards. Only when these identified adapters are detected via checks in their Windows and Linux Catalyst driver is HDMI audio enabled. If using a third-party DVI-to-HDMI adapter, HDMI audio support is disabled by the Catalyst driver. Open-source Linux developers have found this to be a self-imposed limitation and that the open-source AMD Linux driver will work fine with any DVI-to-HDMI adapter.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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AMD Intentionally Added Artificial Limitations To Their HDMI Adapters
MajikJon writes “The BBC junking policies of the ’60s and ’70s resulted in the loss of hundreds of episodes of the classic series in its earliest years. Through the work of ardent fans over the succeeding decades, dozens of these lost episodes have been painstaking recovered and added back into the BBC archives. Now, it seems, the searchers have struck the mother lode. According to the Wikipedia, there are currently 106 missing episodes of the serial. If reports are correct, we may finally get to see all the episodes.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
It was one thing when Google’s Chrome apps managed to break out of the browser and become real, offline apps, but clearly that is not Google’s real long-term play. A recent update to the developer version of Google Chrome basically runs Chrome OS inside of Windows 8 . Read more…
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Google Is Sneaking Chrome OS Into Windows 8’s "Metro" Mode