Remember when NASA visited an asteroid with $10 quintillion worth of minerals? Now the lucrative asteroid-mining industry is being pursued by “the European banking hub with a population not much bigger than Albuquerque’s,” reports Bloomberg, as low-cost reconnaissance missions are already looking “increasingly feasible.” An anonymous reader writes: Last week Luxembourg’s parliament unanimously passed an […]
Month: July 2017
schwit1 shared an article from the BBC: Using a cheap robot, a team of hackers has cracked open a leading-brand combination safe, live on stage in Las Vegas. The team from SparkFun Electronics was able to open a SentrySafe safe in around 30 minutes… After the robot discovered the combination was 51.36.93, the safe popped […]
An anonymous reader shares an article from O’Reilly Media’s VP of content strategy: It’s high time to build the internet that we wanted all along: a network designed to respect privacy, a network designed to be secure, and a network designed to impose reasonable controls on behavior. And a network with few barriers to entry […]
An anonymous reader writes: Palo Alto-based HackerRank, which offers online programmng challenges, “dug into our data of about 450,000 unique U.S. developers to uncover which states are home to the best software engineers, and which pockets of the country have the highest rate of developer growth.” Examining the 24 months from 2015 through the end […]
An anonymous reader quotes Phoronix: Finalizing Fedora’s switch from Python 2 to Python 3 by default is still going to take several more Fedora release cycles and should be done by the 2020 date when Python 2 will be killed off upstream. While much of Fedora’s Python code is now compatible with Py3, the /usr/bin/python […]
An anonymous reader quotes BleepingComputer: A petition is asking Adobe to release Flash into the hands of the open-source community. Finnish developer Juha Lindstedt started the petition a day after Adobe announced plans to end Flash support by the end of 2020. “Flash is an important piece of Internet history and killing Flash means future […]
An anonymous reader quotes a story from Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight site about “the worst internet in America”: FiveThirtyEight analyzed every county’s broadband usage using data from researchers at the University of Iowa and Arizona State University and found that Saguache, Colorado was at the bottom. Only 5.6 percent of adults were estimated to have broadband… […]
sciencehabit writes: In May 2014, a group of scientists took a field trip to a small brewery in an old warehouse in Seattle, Washington — and came away with a microbe scientists have never seen before. In so-called wild beer, the team identified a yeast belonging to the genus Pichia, which turned out to be […]
In a piece describing the paranoid vibe in Las Vegas during the DEFCON convention, CNET reported Friday that the Wet Republic web site “had two images vandalized” with digital graffiti. But their reporter now writes that “my paranoia finally got the best of me, and it turned out to be an ad campaign.” The images […]
The Guardian reports: Almost every graduate taking an unpaid internship can expect to be worse off three years later than if they had gone straight into work. That is the shock finding of the first survey of its kind of the career trajectories of tens of thousands of students over a six-year period. The study, […]