Category: Techie

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From Discover Magazine: US manned spaceflight infographic | Bad Astronomy

I’m a fan of simple infographics: illustrations that make a point clearly and cleanly. The folks at mgmt. design have made one for US manned spaceflight that does just that.

Click that to enboosternate it; I’ve put just a portion of it here. I like it because you can see a few things instantly, for example how short the Apollo program was compared to the total amount of time we’ve been space traveling.

Even more obvious are the gaps in flights. The biggest is post-Apollo and pre-Shuttle, when the Saturn V was essentially decommissioned before the Shuttle was anywhere near being ready. That might be something to keep in mind during the current gap in the US capability to put humans in space.

Also obvious are the pauses after Challenger and Columbia, when the safety of the Shuttle was reassessed. Now, of course, we’re in the second long gap.

I wonder how long it will last? And perhaps more importantly, just how it will end?

 

from Discover Magazine

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From Ars Technica: Judge orders failed copyright troll to forfeit “all” copyrights


Righthaven, a copyright-troll law firm that failed in its attempt to make money for newspapers by suing readers for sharing stories online, was dealt a death blow on Tuesday by a federal judge who ordered the Las Vegas company to forfeit “all of” its intellectual property and other “intangible property” to settle its debts.

The order is an ironic twist to a copyright trolling saga that began in 2010, when Righthaven was formed with the idea of suing blogs and websites that re-post newspaper articles or snippets of them without permission.

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from Ars Technica

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From Ars Technica: Yahoo IP lawsuit: We patented “Facebook’s entire social network model”


By now you’ve heard that Yahoo has sued Facebook, alleging patent infringement. But just which pieces of intellectual property is Yahoo claiming Facebook ripped off?

Surely, you’d say, Yahoo doesn’t claim that it invented the entire social networking model Facebook is based upon—except it turns out that is almost exactly what Yahoo is claiming.

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from Ars Technica

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From Ars Technica: New 3D printer could create nano-devices in minutes


Researchers at the Vienna University of Technology (TU Vienna) have developed a 3D printing technology that can quickly print detailed objects in nanoscale using a process called two-photon lithography. It’s fast, too: the precision required to print objects with features measured in hundreds of nanometers in width meant the speed of previous attempts at printing nanoscale objects were measured in millimeters per second. In contrast, the TU Vienna team’s 3D printer is capable of printing lines of resin at a rate of five meters per second. In a demonstration shown in the video below, the team was able to print a nanoscale model of a 300-micrometer long Formula 1 racecar—made from 100 layers of resin, each consisting of approximately 200 individual lines—in four minutes.

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from Ars Technica

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From Ars Technica: NASA admin returns to Congress to fight for commercial space


It’s possible that no NASA Administrator has enjoyed appearing in front of Congress since the 1960’s. Charlie Bolden’s testimony in front of both the Senate and House oversight committees for his agency last Wednesday was likely to continue that trend.

Although there was some argument over the 20 percent cuts to the Mars exploration program and NASA’s commitments to the ESA, the key issue in both the Senate and House hearings was a philosophical difference over how to get humans into orbit. The legislators favored NASA’s Space Launch System, known among its detractors as the “Senate Launch System,” over CCDev, the Commercial Crew Development program. The two shouldn’t conflict, given that they are meant for completely different purposes, but in these highly-politicized times, they do.

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from Ars Technica

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From Gizmodo: Owners of Capsized Italian Cruise Ship Want to Save It With Something They Saw on MythBusters [Ships]

It’s been a month since the fatal sinking of the Costa Concordia off the coast of Italy. And, now that the half million gallons of on-board fuel are being safely siphoned off, the ship’s owner must decide—raise it from the seabed with hundreds of thousands of ping-pong balls or call in the Jawas and have it dismantled for scrap. More »




from Gizmodo