SoylentNews

Hugh Pickens writes:

The Pentland Firth is a raw, stormy sound between the Scottish mainland and the Orkney Islands, known for some of the world’s fastest flowing marine waters. Daily tides here reach 11 miles per hour, and can go as high as 18 – a breakneck current that’s the reason people are describing Scotland as the Saudi Arabia of tidal power. Now Megan Garber reports in The Atlantic that a new tidal power plant, to be installed off the Scottish coast aims to make Scotland a world leader for turning sea flow into electricity. Underwater windmills, the BBC notes, have the benefit of invisibility—a common objection to wind turbines being how unsightly they are to human eyes. Undersea turbines also benefit from the fact that tides are predictable in ways that winds are not: You know how much power you're generating, basically, on any given day. The tidal currents are also completely carbon-free and since sea water is 832 times denser than air, a 5 knot ocean current has more kinetic energy than a 350 km/h wind.

MeyGen will face a challenge in that work: The turbines are incredibly difficult to install. The Pentland Firth is a harsh environment to begin with; complicating matters is the fact that the turbines can be installed only at the deepest of ocean depths so as not to disrupt the paths of ships on the surface. They also need to be installed in bays or headlands, where tidal flows are at their most intense. It is an unbelievably harsh environment in which to build anything, let alone manage a vast fleet of tidal machines beneath the waves. If each Hammerfest machine delivers its advertised 1MW of power, then you need 1,000 of them to hope to match the output of a typical gas or coal-fired power station. "The real aim," says Keith Anderson, "is to establish the predictability which you get with tidal power, and to feed that into the energy mix which includes the less predictable sources like wind or wave. The whole point of this device is to test that it can produce power, and we believe it can, and to show it's robust and can be maintained."

Prowler writes:

There are other atrocities happening in the world, especially right next door. We should focus media attention on cartels as well. It's all about media propaganda at the end of the day and what they want you to focus your attention on. For instance Mao killed more people then any known dictator in history, but Hitler is more infamous, why? Vested international interest in propaganda. The same thing Is happening all over the world, there are major things happening and yet our media is focused in on one thing. Vested interest. It's time we ask, in what?

And yes the war on drugs is what spurned these cartels to pop up, which is another debate this country still is iffy about talking about. Thank you Nancy Reagan. You can read more here.

VLM writes:

Any software plans for blocking political spam on Tuesday election day?

Last presidential election I got more than one political text message spam per hour, which was getting incredibly annoying and distruptive. Also I got about one legacy landline phone call every 90 minutes. ALL DAY LONG.

My plan for this election is I have Mr Number on my phone and I'm hoping the spam sources will be blacklisted fast enough that I won't get spammed to death. I have no plan for the legacy landline, turn off the ringer and delete 10 voicemails on Wednesday, I guess.

I'd be interested to hear if anyone has some good technological ideas for spam blocking given whats likely to happen starting in less than 24 hours.

gewg_ writes:

AlterNet reports:

Two-thirds of American college students graduate with college debt, and that debt now tops $1.2 trillion. By every indication, college is now more expensive than it has ever been, out of reach of not only poor Americans, but even middle class ones.

[...]there are many places abroad where [...] Americans can study for free or at very low cost--and in English!
Brazil
Germany
Finland
France
Norway
Slovenia
Sweden

tonyPick writes:

Over at Mental Floss is an article on the physics of R'lyeh, as described in H.P. Lovecraft's The Call Of Cthulhu.

This is based on a paper by Physicist Benjamin Tippet where:

The paper is available at arXiv .

tt1059786 writes:

The FBI is attempting to persuade an obscure regulatory body in Washington to change its rules of engagement in order to seize significant new powers to hack into and carry out surveillance of computers throughout the US and around the world.

“This is a giant step forward for the FBI’s operational capabilities, without any consideration of the policy implications. To be seeking these powers at a time of heightened international concern about US surveillance is an especially brazen and potentially dangerous move,” said Ahmed Ghappour, an expert in computer law at University of California, Hastings college of the law.

gewg_ writes:

The Inquirer reports

The Red State, which earlier this year denounced Microsoft Windows 8 as a spyware tool on the lunchtime news, has been developing its own flavour of Linux, based in part on an earlier attempt based on Ubuntu, called Kylin.

'NeoKylin', as the OS is understood to be called, is already due to appear on a range of Dell machines manufactured for the Chinese market.

It has now been confirmed that Professor Ni Guangnan of the Chinese Academy of Engineering has designed a rollout programme that has been passed by the government and will see [the operating system on] all government servers, mainframes, and individual machines being replaced.

The plan is to replace Windows-powered machines at a rate of 15 percent per year, give or take 10 percent, over five years.

"We call this a de-Windowsifying movement," Ni told Chinese site Ecns.cn[1] [Google cache]

[1] That page is a 500 for me.

Related:
Chinese OS Expected to Debut in October
China Bans Windows 8 From Government PCs?

Magic Oddball writes:

SpaceShip Two had a unique feature called "feathering" that was designed to ease its descent into the atmosphere: tail section rotated 90 degrees upward to slow down naturally using wind resistance, which is shown in this YouTube video of an earlier flight and explained by NTSB chairman Christopher Hart in the video at the top of NBC News’ coverage.

The design was supposed to require the pilots to first move a lever to unlock the mechanism and instruct it to perform the rotation. Unfortunately, SpaceFlight Now reported from the NTSB press conference, things didn't go remotely as planned:

On the upside, “because it was a test flight, it was heavily documented, in ways that we don't usually see with normal accidents,” including three cameras watching from WhiteKnight Two plus SpaceShip Two’s own six video cameras & six data recorders. It has already been discovered that the rocket motor & propellant tanks landed intact with no signs of burn-through or breaching, indicating they were most likely not involved in the failure.

Space.com reports that doctors have advised the NTSB against talking to surviving pilot Michael Alsbury for now, and in the meantime, the NTSB can’t yet rule out pilot error as a major cause:

gewg_ writes:

El Reg reports

The Sandworm vulnerability is being actively abused to attack Swiss banking customers, Danish security consultancy CSIS has warned. CSIS reports that the attacks are pushing the latest version of the Dyre banking trojan.

Attacks arrive as spam emails under the guise of information about unpaid invoices. In reality, the PowerPoint attachment to these messages is booby-trapped to exploit the Sandworm vulnerability and infect [unpatched] Windows PCs.

[...] Microsoft patched this (CVE-2014-4114) vulnerability as part of its regular Patch Tuesday update on 14 October.

Robert Pogson notes

Secunia estimates 12.6 per cent of UK users are running unpatched operating systems, up from 9.7 per cent the previous quarter. In addition, one in 10 third-party programs on the average PC are exposed due to failures in installing the latest security updates."

Of course, this damage could have been mitigated by promptly patching when M$ releases their "Patch Tuesday" updates or sooner in an emergency. That's the point. Consumers are not IT-people. They don't know about this stuff. They just know about the speed and convenience of PCs on the web. That other OS is supposed to be "easy to use" but that's just PR in the ads. It's also easy to lose all security, have the system slow to a halt or crash. Sometimes, M$ gets it wrong and the patches don't work.

So Soylentils, have you found MICROS~1's "fixes" to be less aggravating than the exploits?
Are your Windoze-using clients applying patches religiously?

juggs writes:

This is not a news piece, I suppose it could be considered an RFC. (Request For Comment)

Who am I? IRC co-team lead for SN.....
http://wiki.soylentnews.org/wiki/WhosWho#IRC

Recently I've seen questions raised on IRC and here on our www site about what happened to the .onion link for the website. I can't answer that particular question as it's really none of my business. I run around on IRC not fettling the other gubbins that my erstwhile colleagues are far more knowledgeable about - in short, I'd just break things if let loose. The .onion issue is on their radar, I leave it in their capable hands.

However, this got me thinking - it's all well and good putting the www site into an onion bisque.. but what about our IRC server?

It's certainly do-able, and I'm happy to do the leg work to make it so.

But before I go running off down mystical rabbit holes of paranoia and metallic head wear - is there any call for a .onion SN IRC? Would you use it?

Hmm.. having typed this, the irony of asking this question while simultaneously having the www .onion unavailable so those most likely to have replied will not do so strikes me.

Thoughts?

AnonTechie writes:

A rocket science safety expert on Sunday said Virgin Galactic "ignored" safety warnings in the years leading up to the deadly crash of its spacecraft in California, as investigators hunted for clues to accident's cause.

Carolynne Campbell, a rocket propulsion expert with the Netherlands-based International Association for the Advancement of Space Safety, said she could not speculate on the cause of Friday's crash without "all the data." However, she said multiple warnings had been issued to Virgin since 2007, when three engineers died testing a rocket on the ground.

http://news.yahoo.com/probe-virgin-spaceship-crash-may-085338983.html

tonyPick writes:

There's an article over at Aeon on Quantum Biology, the interaction between Quantum Mechanics and Biological processes.

The article is written by Johnjoe McFadden, professor of molecular genetics at the University of Surrey. He's written on the same subject last week in a related article at The Guardian, and over at YouTube there's a video of a keynote presentation from back in July.

tonyPick writes:

Over at Drew Ex Machina is an article on the low quality of media reporting on space related issues, such as SETI and Extrasolar planet detection.

It also refers to Dwayne Day's Space Review article from September on the problems in Newsweek's reporting of the history of the Space Race.

(These issues are not restricted to mainstream media sources; the Day article also refers to an earlier piece on some problems in online journalism).

tonyPick writes:

Over at the Scientific American Physics Week in Review is a link to a video on the Derek Muller's explanation on the physics behind Kelvin's Thunderstorm.

The setup, also known as a Kelvin water dropper is a system where two streams of falling water use electrostatic induction to generate high voltages across a spark gap.

It's explained further, along with hints and tips on how to build your own, in this article by Bill Beaty, and in this Makezine Article.

Spotted at Scientific American Physics Week in Review. Derek Muller's Veritasium Youtube channel is also worth a more general look if you haven't seen it before.

(No this is not news, but it is cool).

jbernardo writes:

The BBC decided to shut down the RSS feeds for the iplayer without any kind of warning on Thursday. The excuse is the end of a larger hosting contract for those legacy sites, and the users are promised some day in the future an API, called Nitro, to access the same kind of info. However, the head of platform API, Jon Billings, makes it clear that the reason was to break third party players: In particular, the BBC does not sanction XBMC, get_iplayer or similar clients, and the iPlayer RSS feeds were never designed or intended to support them. Nitro will almost certainly not support their ways of working.

The Nitro API portal seems to be only for BBC corporate partners only, according to the comments on that blog post, so it will indeed be worthless to third parties like kodi or get-iplayer developers.