colinneagle writes "A blog post contending that Microsoft's decision to match Apple's iPad pricing on its Surface tablet will hurt its chances in the market has brought out some negative comments from readers who seem to like the Surface tablet. I was kind of surprised by this, as I and other bloggers seem to agree that making the fully keyboard-equipped Surface tablet roughly $120 more expensive than the iPad kind of negates the purpose — to build steam by appealing to those in the market for a cheaper tablet. Also, I've yet to see an argument that justifies pricing the Surface competitively with the iPad, so I figured I would bring the question to Slashdot: Is Microsoft's pricing for the Surface tablet justified?"
derekmead writes "New evidence that the giant impact hypothesis is correct: A paper published today in Nature shares findings of a chemical analysis of Moon rocks that shows fractional differences between the makeup of the Earth and Moon that most likely were caused by the collision between Earth and a Mars-sized planet around 4.5 billion years ago. Although the two are quite similar, it's been previously shown that Moon rocks lack volatile elements, which suggests they may have evaporated during the incredibly intense heat and pressure created during an impact event. But if the hypothesis that light elements actually evaporated from Moon rocks during their formation is correct, you'd expect to find evidence of elements being layered by mass — heavier elements would condense first, and so on. That process is known as isotopic fractionation — a concept central to carbon dating — and the Washington University team's results suggest they found exactly that (abstract). They compared the blend of zinc isotopes in Moon rocks and Earth samples, and found that the Moon rocks held slightly higher proportions of heavier zinc isotopes. If the Moon was indeed once part of Earth — which has been shown by extensive modeling (PDF) — the difference in the balance of zinc profiles would most likely be explained by lighter zinc isotopes evaporating away following a collision."
beaverdownunder writes "A former police officer in the Australian state of Victoria has called on law enforcement to prosecute creators of hate pages on social media following Facebook's decision to close down a page mocking Jill Meagher, the 29-year-old Melbourne woman abducted and killed last month. Susan McLean, who spent 27 years with Victoria Police before launching her cyber safety consultancy three years ago, said police have the ability to prosecute the creators of pages that are in breach of Australian laws but appear to be unwilling to use it. 'There have been many cases in the UK where these people have been hunted down and charged and jailed. We need to do that in Australia.' Under section 474.17 of the Commonwealth Crimes Act, it is an offense to use 'a carriage service to menace, harass or cause offense,' punishable by three years in jail."
Frequent contributor Bennett Haselton writes: After I sent 10 new proxy sites to my (confirmed-opt-in) mailing list, two of them ended up on one of Spamhaus's blacklists, and as a result, all 10 domains were disabled by the domain registrar, so the sites disappeared from the Web. Did you even know this could happen?"
As they did with the first debate, Democracy Now has published the debate questions answered by third party candidates. Jill Stein (Green), Virgil Goode (Constitution), and Rocky Anderson (Justice) were present. There's a (long) video with the answers spliced in, and (thankfully) a transcript of all their answers. Gary Johnson was not present, but you can catch him debating Jill Stein Thursday October 18th at 7 p.m. EDT.
concealment writes with news that Amazon's Jeff Bezos has called for new legislation from governments to end abuse of the patent system. He said, 'Patents are supposed to encourage innovation and we're starting to be in a world where they might start to stifle innovation. Governments may need to look at the patent system and see if those laws need to be modified because I don't think some of these battles are healthy for society.' His comments are from an interview with the UK's Metro. Bezos was also optimistic about the future of the private space industry: "If private companies can start to generate profits from this kind of activity then you’ll start to see the flywheel spin more rapidly and we’ll make more progress, because I really do think we want to live in a civilization where millions of people are living and working in space"
Hugh Pickens writes "The Christian Science Monitor reports that scientists are planning a new route for NASA's New Horizons space probe as it approaches a potentially perilous path toward Pluto through a possible set of rings that may create dangerous debris zones for the NASA spacecraft. New Horizons is currently about 1,000 days away and 730 million miles from closest approach to Pluto but given that New Horizons is currently zooming away from the sun at more than 33,500 mph, 'a collision with a single pebble, or even a millimeter-sized grain, could cripple or destroy New Horizons,' says project scientist Hal Weaver. 'We need to steer clear of any debris zones around Pluto.' Researchers are making plans to avoid these hazards if New Horizons needs to. 'We are now exploring nine other options, "bail-out trajectories,"' says principal investigator Alan Stern. New Horizon's current plan would take it about halfway between Pluto and the orbit of its largest moon, Charon. Four of the bail-out trajectories would still take the spacecraft between Pluto and Charon's orbit. The other alternatives would take New Horizons much further away from Pluto, past the orbits of its known moons. 'If you fly twice as far away, your camera does half as well; if it's 10 times as far, it does one-tenth as well,' says Stern. 'Still, half a loaf is better than no loaf. Sending New Horizons on a suicide mission does no one any good. We're very much of the mind to accomplish as much as we can, and not losing it all recklessly. Better to turn an A+ to an A- than get an F by overreaching.'"
I recently sat down with Chris DiBona to talk about the 15th anniversary of Slashdot. In addition to discussing the joys of heading an email campaign against spamming politicians, and the perils of throwing a co-worker's phone into a bucket, even if you think that bucket is empty, we talked about the growth of Google Summer of Code. Below you'll find his story of how a conversation about trying to get kids to be more active with computers in the summer has led to the release of 55 million lines of code.
Via the H comes news of a possible remote attack vector using the protocol handler installed by Valve's Steam platform: "During installation, it registers the steam:// URL protocol which is capable of connecting to game servers and launching games ... In the simplest case, an attacker can use this to interfere with the parameters that are submitted to the program. For example, the Source engine's command line allows users to select a specific log file and add items to it. The ReVuln researchers say that they successfully used this attack vector to infect a system (PDF) via a batch file that they had created in the autostart folder. ... In the even more popular Unreal engine, the researchers also found a way to inject and execute arbitrary code. Potential attackers would, of course, first have to establish which games are installed on the target computer. "
Zothecula writes "Video game developers are always looking for new ways to give players a more immersive experience. But with several motion-controlled systems widely available and a viable virtual reality headset in the works, what else could be done to make games seem more realistic? Sony may have an unexpected answer with a recent patent that describes a controller that changes temperature between hot and cold to match in-game actions. With the controller giving 'temperature feedback,' the idea is that players would be able to more closely feel what their character feels, from getting hit with a fireball to traveling through a blizzard."
For anyone curious about how Google's data centers look on the insidie, NMajik writes with word that Google published a photo tour of their secretive data centers. They look like the future, with a soft blue glow and color-coordinated cooling pipes.
An anonymous reader writes "Boxee has announced the game-changing Boxee TV, offering live streaming TV via two on-board tuners and an industry-first 'No Limit' DVR service that allows users to record as much TV content as they want, and access it from virtually anywhere. The problem is that the unit, which records directly to the cloud, does not allow recording to a local drive, meaning users are stuck with Boxee for as long as they want to access their stored content — potentially hundreds or thousands of hours – to the tune of $14.99 per month until Boxee ups the ante. CEPro.com suggests, 'I suspect Boxee is offering unlimited storage to make users especially beholden to them. The more content you have, the less likely you are to drop the service.'"
Oracle boss Larry Ellison wanted to make the America?s Cup more like Nascar. He?s succeeded. His team, the defending champions, capsized one of its AC72 catamarans in San Francisco Bay -- then had to scramble to keep the wreckage from drifting out to sea.
The internet goes wild following Mitt Romney's unfortunate comment during Tuesday's presidential debate. Here are the best of the best.
Small business love Facebook, but are not opening their wallets.
If PayPal was the most widespread payment system of the '00s, then Braintree might just become the PayPal of this decade. The payment processing company is used by big names like Uber, OpenTable, and Airbnb, and just raised $35 million.
It's a tablet, it's a PC, it's a... skateboard? Microsoft's upcoming Surface tablet is apparently made for more than computing. Steven Sinofsky, President of the Windows group, got on the Surface and took it for a ride. Literally.
Musician Paul Buckley wants to stand on his head in front of an atomic clock on 11/11/11?at 11:11:11. His road trip turns into a deep dive into the world?of atomic clocks, timekeeping and the nature of time itself.
It won't have all the speed and OS integration found in the Windows 8 version, but a version of Internet Explorer 10 for Windows 7, complete with support for a host of new web standards, will be here soon.
Microsoft?s touch-focused Windows 8 operating system is pushing a new form factor for devices: the tablet-notebook hybrid -- or, as Gadget Lab likes to refer to it, the "laplet." The question is whether these devices address a real need in the marketplace and will catch on with consumers.
Fly through both space and time with this amazing new time-lapse video, showing beautiful star trails and city lights streaking over the Earth's surface as seen from space.
GoPro just announced the latest version of its portable, mountable, waterproof camera line: the 4K-shooting GoPro Hero 3.
The and how Han Solo inspired Hit Girl's story line.
A 2009 pirate standoff that could have ended in military disaster was instead resolved bloodlessly for the U.S., thanks in large part to a small team of far-flying, night-parachuting, tireless, sharpshooting Navy commandos. Their exploits would remain relatively obscure, if not for a retired admiral's revealing new book.
If you or your client has ever made a bad SEO decision -- paid for some spammy inbound links or joined a shady link exchange -- Google is giving you a reprieve. The company has released a new tool you can use to disavow any inbound links you can't get rid of, helping to clear your site's name in the search giant's eyes.
As individuals, students and workers, we cannot afford for broad data collection to become the norm for cloud services. Google, give us our digital lives back and let us opt out from your data mining machine, argues Doug Miller.
Just in time for a presidential election in which both candidates compete to be besties with Israel, the U.S. and Israeli militaries are holding a big, high-profile exercise to practice shooting Iranian missiles out of the sky. Only neither country wants to say the exercise is about either Iran or presidential politics.
A species of harvestman, known colloquially as a daddy longlegs, with a leg-span of over 12 inches has been discovered living in the caves of Laos.
Blue Origin, the quiet and often secretive rocket company started by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, fired up the thrust chamber for its engine at NASA's Stennis Space Center in Mississippi.
You can't risk a click on the internet without triggering some kind of marketing deluge, but that hasn't soured investors' taste for more. The latest startup to get some cash for selling your company's image is LocalVox.
Following Felix Baumgartner's free-fall from the edge of space, a look at the physics of the speed of sound.
If you're looking for the beating heart of the digital age--a physical location where the scope, grandeur, and geekiness of the kingdom of bits become manifest--you could do a lot worse than Lenoir, North Carolina. This rural city of 18,000 was once rife with furniture factories. Now it's the home of a Google data center.
Credit card companies make money by taking a cut every time you swipe your plastic at the checkout counter. Now MasterCard has found a way to make those swipes pay over and over again.
The comic book writer and artist talks about wrangling with studios, writing supernatural stories and not giving half a crap about Batman in this episode of podcast.
Fronted by a wall of dials, switches, and neon lights -- and often plugged into spinning tape drives stretching from floor to ceiling -- the IBM AN/FSQ-7 looked like one of those massive computing systems that turned up in Hollywood movies and prime time TV during the 60s and the 70s. This is mainly because it is one those massive computing systems that turned up in Hollywood movies and TV during the 60s and 70s -- over and over and over again.
It won't be long now before the "doctor" treating you for that nagging cold is a machine doing a doctor's bidding remotely, perhaps through an iPad. It's already happening in 650 hospitals worldwide.
Isn't technology wonderful? There was a time when printing text meant painstakingly assembling words letter by letter. Type foundries were so named because they literally forged fonts in steel, and for print shops, offering a new font meant incurring a major capital expense.Thanks to advances in printing technology, artists and designers have the flexibility to ...
Spanish company One Moment producing slipper-shoes made from soft and durable bioplastics that are not only eco-friendly in construction, they're 100 percent biodegradable.
The signature insurgent weapon of Iraq and Afghanistan is proving more durable than either war. Every month, outside either the U.S. former warzone or its remaining active one, militia groups construct approximately 600 cheap, homemade bombs to hide in ditches, roadsides, culverts and vehicles -- nearly twice as many as they did two years ago.
Baseball fans were treated to a new way of viewing the game Monday night when FOX Sports rolled out a modified camera that shot parts of the National League Championship Series game in San Francisco at up to 5,000 frames per second.
After 16 years of development, Gibbs Sports Amphibians has revealed their land-and-sea ATV. The Quadski converts from four wheels on land to a pseudo-jetski, all for the bargain basement price of around $40,000 when it goes on sale next month.
Jason Edmiston's haunting painting will be part of a Universal Horror-themed art show at Mondo Gallery in Austin, Texas. See how Edmiston captured the crazy in this image gallery, which shows the artwork's progression.