Dev.SN

Papas Fritas writes:

Ars Technica reports that the government built facilities for the Minuteman missiles in the 1960s and 1970s and although the missiles have been upgraded numerous times to make them safer and more reliable, the bases themselves haven't changed much and there isn't a lot of incentive to upgrade them. ICBM forces commander Maj. Gen. Jack Weinstein told Leslie Stahl from "60 Minutes" that the bases have extremely tight IT and cyber security, because they're not Internet-connected and they use such old hardware and software. "A few years ago we did a complete analysis of our entire network," says Weinstein. "Cyber engineers found out that the system is extremely safe and extremely secure in the way it's developed." While on the base, missileers showed Stahl the 8-inch floppy disks, marked "Top Secret," which are used with the computer that handles what was once called the Strategic Air Command Digital Network (SACDIN), a communication system that delivers launch commands to US missile forces. Later, in an interview with Weinstein, Stahl described the disk she was shown as "gigantic," and said she had never seen one that big. Weinstein explained, "Those older systems provide us some, I will say, huge safety, when it comes to some cyber issues that we currently have in the world."

Would upgrading the systems make them more safe and reliable, or a liability?

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crutchy writes:

The Debian Installer team is pleased to announce the first alpha release of the installer for Debian 8 "Jessie".

Debian now comes with Xfce as the default window manager (it's still possible to select an alternative desktop to install at the boot prompt). Some of the other changes are:

The Linux kernel has been updated from 3.2 to 3.13
ia64 architecture has been removed
75 languages are supported (full translation for 12)

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Angry Jesus writes:

The Verge has a fascinating article on the implications of a recently published study indicating that lab mice have a stress response to the scent of male researchers but not female researchers.

"People have not paid attention to this in the entire history of scientific research of animals," says Jeffrey Mogil, a pain researcher at McGill University and lead author of the study. "I think that it may have confounded, to whatever degree, some very large subset of existing research."

Interestingly, the stress response isn't only dependent on the sex of an intruder, but also on the circumstances of his or her approach. "If you put a male-worn T-shirt and a female-worn T-shirt in the same room, the female T-shirt counteracts the effect of a male T-shirt." This, Mogil says, indicates that solitary males represent the real threat. "A lone male is up to no good — either hunting or defending his territory."

What do you think are the implications of this study?

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Angry Jesus writes:

Looking for a new guilty pleasure tv show? If Tosh.0, Jackass and Mythbusters had a three-way baby, it would be National Geographic UK's new show, The Science of Stupid. Each episode centers around a couple of stunts, like doing backflips, roundhouse kicks, bike jumps or skateboard grinds. Each segment starts with a handful of videos demonstrating people failing at doing the stunts often with hilarious results, and then progresses to a discussion of the physics of the stunt, why the stunt failed and the correct way to do it. The show lets you laugh at stupid youtube videos and is at least somewhat educational at the same time. Throw in a snarky british commentator and the result is more watchable than it has any right to be.

You can see videos on youtube and also there is a version in Spanish

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Papas Fritas writes:

The NYT writes in an editorial that for the last few months, the Koch brothers and their conservative allies in state government have been spending heavily to fight incentives for renewable energy by pushing legislatures to impose a surtax on this increasingly popular practice, hoping to make installing solar panels on houses less attractive. "The coal producers' motivation is clear: They see solar and wind energy as a long-term threat to their businesses. That might seem distant at the moment, when nearly 40 percent of the nation's electricity is still generated by coal, and when less than 1 percent of power customers have solar arrays. But given new regulations on power-plant emissions of mercury and other pollutants, and the urgent need to reduce global warming emissions, the future clearly lies with renewable energy."

For example, the Arizona Public Service Company, the state's largest utility, funneled large sums through a Koch operative to a nonprofit group that ran an ad claiming net metering would hurt older people on fixed incomes by raising electric rates. The ad tried to link the requirement to President Obama. Another Koch ad likens the renewable-energy requirement to health care reform, the ultimate insult in that world. "Like Obamacare, it's another government mandate we can't afford," the narrator says. "That line might appeal to Tea Partiers, but it's deliberately misleading," concludes the editorial. "This campaign is really about the profits of Koch Carbon and the utilities, which to its organizers is much more important than clean air and the consequences of climate change."

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lhsi writes:

From sunlight to jet fuel: EU project makes first "solar" kerosene

An EU-funded research project called SOLAR-JET has produced the world's first "solar" jet fuel from water and carbon dioxide (CO2). Researchers have for the first time successfully demonstrated the entire production chain for renewable kerosene, using concentrated light as a high-temperature energy source. The project is still at the experimental stage, with a glassful of jet fuel produced in laboratory conditions, using simulated sunlight. However, the results give hope that in future any liquid hydrocarbon fuels could be produced from sunlight, CO2 and water.

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"x" writes:

"What’s the smallest fire I could start to be noticed, but not so big that I risk burning down the building?” is one of the stranger thoughts to have entered my head, in many years of working in IT. No, I'm not a closet pyromaniac, so why was I entertaining such thoughts?
I had found myself stuck in a data centre on a Sunday afternoon and by that point, I'd been in there for over two hours with no sign of rescue. That shouldn't have been the case, of course, but a series of unfortunate events had led me down that road.

I completed the work I needed to, then packed up my bag to leave. When I got to the exit however, my access card wouldn't unlock the door. After a few frustrated swipes I tried the emergency door release button, also to no avail. Following some rather pitiful shoulder bunts against the door, to see if the release was working but the door itself was physically stuck - it wasn't, it hurt - I conceded that the contractors must have fouled up the access control system somehow."

Would you just wait it out and deal with a chilly sleepover, or would you put together an escape plan?

-- submitted from IRC

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AnonTechie writes:

Putnisite is a recently discovered (2007) mineral that occurs as tiny crystals on volcanic rock. Discovered at Polar Bear peninsula, a remote location about 40 km north-east of Norseman, and surrounded by the usually dry Lake Cowan salt-pan, Western Australia.

The new purple-pink mineral that has a chemical composition and crystalline structure unlike any of the known 4,000 minerals has been discovered at a mining site researchers report.

http://www.mindat.org/loc-240988.html

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AnonTechie writes:

Siemens is bringing electricity to the surface from the world's deepest arch-dam turbines. The dam of the Jinping-1 Hydropower Station in China's Sichuan province is 305 meters tall; the turbines are located 230 meters deep. The facility will have a total power output of 3.6GW. In order to transport this huge amount of energy up out of the mountain, Yalong Hydro is using gas-insulated transmission lines (GIL) from Siemens. This technology is especially well suited for the transmission of large amounts of electricity in restricted spaces.

Gas-insulated tubular lines can transmit up to 5kA at up to 550 kilovolts (kV). Every line consists of two concentric aluminum tubes. The space between the inner conductor and the earthed outer tube is filled with insulating gas. GIL systems not only transmit huge amounts of electricity in very restricted spaces, they are also fireproof; unlike standard power cables. As a result, GILs are a safe and easy-to-install solution for the transmission of electricity out of underground power stations or tunnels. The Jinping-I transmission line consists of a total of three parallel GIL systems, each of which has three mono-polar tubular lines that lead vertically up at the dam.

Original Submission

Blackmoore writes:

When security researcher Scott Erven was given free rein to roam through all of the medical equipment used at a large chain of health care facilities, he knew he would find security problems; but he wasn't prepared for just how bad it would be. From article by Kim Zetter at Wired

Erven and his team discovered that hospitals are full of fundamentally insecure devices. The insecurities are not the result of obscure bugs buried deep in their code base, but rather they were incredibly stupid, incredibly easy to discover mistakes, such as hard coded easy default passwords.

Can you really trust the personnel in the hospital to keep you alive when the equipment can be so quickly abused?

Original Submission

me writes:

"To sum it up for everyone, I took part in what I (and many others) would consider theft of money from the publishers by Google, and from direct orders of management. There were many AdSense employees involved, and it spanned many years, and I hear it still is happening today except on a much wider scale. No one on the outside knows it, if they did, the FBI and possibly IRS would immediately launch an investigation, because what they are doing is so inherently illegal and they are flying completely under the radar.

They kept saying how we "needed to tighten the belts" and they didn’t want it to come from Google employees pockets.

What happened afterwards became much worse. Their "quality control" came into full effect. Managers pushed for wide scale account bans, and the first big batch of bans happened in March of 2009. The main reason, the publishers made too much money. But something quite devious happened. We were told to begin banning accounts that were close to their payout period (which is why account bans never occur immediately after a payout). The purpose was to get that money owed to publishers back to Google AdSense, while having already served up the ads to the public."

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AnonTechie writes:

If you throw a gecko at Teflon, will he stick? University of Akron researchers found the answer

That little lizard that has become so effective selling car insurance - the gecko - can climb across glass windows and across the ceiling. You knew that, right? The science of that ability has intrigued researchers at the University of Akron for several years because it has so much potential for application in such areas as construction materials and medicine.

They're so intrigued, they're asking tougher questions of the 50 little lizards kept in two labs at the Auburn Science Center. "OK, buddy, how about this one: Can you walk on Teflon?"

The answer: not very well. The popular DuPont nonstick product not only resists cheese omelets, but it also presented a significant challenge to the hairy toes of the gecko.

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AnonTechie writes:

Birds in the exclusion zone around Chernobyl are adapting to — and may even be benefiting from — long-term exposure to radiation, ecologists have found. The study, published in the British Ecological Society's journal Functional Ecology, is the first evidence that wild animals adapt to ionising radiation, and the first to show that birds which produce most pheomelanin, a pigment in feathers, have the greatest problems coping with radiation exposure.

According to lead author Dr Ismael Galvan of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC):
"Previous studies of wildlife at Chernobyl showed that chronic radiation exposure depleted antioxidants and increased oxidative damage. We found the opposite — that antioxidant levels increased and oxidative stress decreased with increasing background radiation."

Here is a related link

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