Group items tagged

A $30 million Google-backed competition to land a spacecraft on the moon may be about to be scooped. China’s Chang’e 3 probe successfully put itself into lunar orbit on Friday in preparation for an attempted touchdown around Dec. 14.

And the attempts to tar and feather Ed Snowden continue. The latest is that famed reporter Kurt Eichenwald, who started attacking Ed Snowden months ago, has written up a long speculative article for Newsweek arguing that Ed Snowden has "escalated the cyber war" by giving China the necessary cover it needs to avoid reining in its own cyber attacks

That is, if you follow the bizarre logic here, without Snowden, Eichenwald believes that the US would have somehow convinced the Chinese to stop their cyber attack program. And, now because of Snowden, the Chinese can ignore that effort, by pointing out that the US is doing a ton of online hacking too.

Again, nearly everything about that statement is ridiculous. He didn't "leave all of the documents in Hong Kong." He provided heavily encrypted versions to a very small number of journalists, and then got rid of the files himself. Eichenwald takes that to mean he "left" them in Hong Kong, based on nothing, and all of this apparently means that Snowden is working for the Chinese (even though he left China pretty quickly).

Early Monday morning, Foxconn released a statement indicating that the riot started as a personal disagreement between factory workers in a dormitory and was eventually brought under control by police, but this clashes with reports trickling in from users of China's version of Twitter, Sina Weibo. Much like with the situations in Egypt and other Arab Spring countries earlier this year, microbloggers are painting a different picture than the one presented by official sources; numerous Weibo posts indicate that the riots were started not by a fight between workers in off-campus housing, but instead by security guards beating one or more workers nearly to death. Regardless of the cause, pictures leaking out from the scene show some destruction, including broken windows and a toppled guard post building.

Observers say the equipment failure may have disabled the electrical motors needed to close the rover's solar panels, which would have disastrous effects as the rover heads into the two-week "lunar night." If the panels cannot be closed, the rover will almost certainly freeze during the two week span.

First, it assumes that Snowden’s master file includes data from every network he ever scanned. Second, it assumes that this file is already in or will end up in the hands of America’s adversaries. If these assumptions turn out to be true, then the alarm raised in the last week will be warranted. The key word here is “if.”

three tonnes of force inside a golf ball-sized sample of material that is normally as brittle as fine china.

Superconductors are materials that carry electrical current with little or no resistance when cooled below a certain temperature. While conventional superconductors need to be cooled close to absolute zero (zero degrees on the Kelvin scale, or –273 °C) before they superconduct, high temperature superconductors do so above the boiling point of liquid nitrogen (–196 °C), which makes them relatively easy to cool and cheaper to operate.

Superconductors are currently used in scientific and medical applications, such as MRI scanners, and in the future could be used to protect the national grid and increase energy efficiency, due to the amount of electrical current they can carry without losing energy.