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Philatelists Push Petition For Pluto Probe Postage

Slashdot - 1 hour 49 min ago


Hugh Pickens writes "Space.com reports that an online petition directed at the USPS and its Citizen Stamp Advisory Committee (CSAC) hopes to collect 100,000 signatures or more by March 13, the 82nd anniversary of the announcement of Pluto's discovery as the New Horizons robotic spacecraft gets closer to flyby Pluto and its moons in 2015. 'This is a chance for us all to celebrate what American space exploration can achieve though hard work, technical excellence, the spirit of scientific inquiry, and the uniquely human drive to explore,' reads the petition. Whether or not the New Horizons team is successful in getting the USPS to honor their spacecraft's mission, the probe will have delivered a stamp to Pluto. New Horizons includes nine stowaways including one of the 1991 'Not Yet Explored' Pluto stamps together with other mementos including a Florida quarter, a small container with an ounce of the ashes of Clyde Tombaugh, discoverer of Pluto, and a small segment of 2004 Ansari X Prize winner SpaceShipOne, the first privately-funded crewed spacecraft. 'Why nine mementos? I bet you can guess,' says Dr. Alan Stern, New Horizons' Principal Investigator adding why he wanted to send one of the Pluto stamps on the mission. 'Pluto may not have been explored when that stamp set came out, but we were going to conquer that,' says Stern. 'I wanted to fly it as a sort of 'in your face' thing.'"

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SB12-030: Vulnerability Summary for the Week of January 23, 2012

US-Cert.Gov - 2 hours 3 min ago
Vulnerability Summary for the Week of January 23, 2012

TA12-024A: "Anonymous" DDoS Activity

US-Cert.Gov - 2 hours 3 min ago
"Anonymous" DDoS Activity

SB12-023: Vulnerability Summary for the Week of January 16, 2012

US-Cert.Gov - 2 hours 3 min ago
Vulnerability Summary for the Week of January 16, 2012

SB12-016: Vulnerability Summary for the Week of January 9, 2012

US-Cert.Gov - 2 hours 3 min ago
Vulnerability Summary for the Week of January 9, 2012

SA12-010A: Microsoft Updates for Multiple Vulnerabilities

US-Cert.Gov - 2 hours 3 min ago
Microsoft Updates for Multiple Vulnerabilities

TA12-010A: Microsoft Updates for Multiple Vulnerabilities

US-Cert.Gov - 2 hours 3 min ago
Microsoft Updates for Multiple Vulnerabilities

SB12-009: Vulnerability Summary for the Week of January 2, 2012

US-Cert.Gov - 2 hours 3 min ago
Vulnerability Summary for the Week of January 2, 2012

TA12-006A: Wi-Fi Protected Setup (WPS) Vulnerable to Brute-Force Attack

US-Cert.Gov - 2 hours 3 min ago
Wi-Fi Protected Setup (WPS) Vulnerable to Brute-Force Attack

SA12-006A: Wi-Fi Protected Setup (WPS) Vulnerable to Brute-Force Attack

US-Cert.Gov - 2 hours 3 min ago
Wi-Fi Protected Setup (WPS) Vulnerable to Brute-Force Attack

SB12-002: Vulnerability Summary for the Week of December 26, 2011

US-Cert.Gov - 2 hours 3 min ago
Vulnerability Summary for the Week of December 26, 2011

iPad, Kindle Fire are not post-PC, says IDC analyst

CNET NEWS - 2 hours 28 min ago
Sorry Steve, it's not post-PC, it's PC-plus, says IDC analyst Bob O'Donnell.

Aliens crave Earth wives in Chevy Volt Super Bowl ad

CNET NEWS - 2 hours 50 min ago
In an attempt to suggest that Chevy Volt's technology is more sophisticated than anything in the galaxy, Chevy's Super Bowl ad features aliens who don't just admire the Volt's advanced design.

Remembering Sealab

Slashdot - 3 hours 13 min ago


An anonymous reader writes "'Some people remember Sealab as being a classified program, but it was trying not to be,' says Ben Hellwarth, author of the new book Sealab: America's Forgotten Quest to Live and Work on the Ocean Floor, which aims to 'bring some long overdue attention to the marine version of the space program.' In the 1960s, the media largely ignored the efforts of America's aquanauts, who revolutionized deep-sea diving and paved the way for the underwater construction work being done today on offshore oil platforms. It didn't help that the public didn't understand the challenges of saturation diving; in a comical exchange a telephone operator initially refuses to connect a call between President Johnson and Aquanaut Scott Carpenter, (who sounded like a cartoon character, thanks to the helium atmosphere in his pressurized living quarters). But in spite of being remembered as a failure, the final incarnation of Sealab did provide cover for a very successful Cold War spy program."

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Microsoft publishes fancy-pants heterogeneous parallel GPGPU C++ AMP specification

Arstechnica - 3 hours 47 min ago

Microsoft has published the specification for C++ AMP (Accelerated Massive Parallelism), its new system for heterogeneous parallel processing in C++. When Microsoft first announced C++ AMP in June last year, it said that it wanted to make the AMP specification open to all.

AMP has been developed by Microsoft with input from AMD and NVIDIA. Microsoft's implementation allows AMP programs to use both the main CPU and Direct3D video cards (via the company's DirectCompute API), though the specification should also permit OpenGL/OpenCL-based implementations.

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Google In Battle With Its Own Lawyers

Slashdot - 4 hours 33 min ago


An anonymous reader writes "Google is at daggers end with a law firm it's been using since 2008, after discovering that lawyers in the law firm, named Pepper Hamilton LLP, were representing a patent licensing business that sued Google's Android partners last month. Google has claimed that Pepper Hamilton LLP never provided notice that it was hired by Digitude Innovations LLC, the firm that filed patent infringement complaints against Google's business allies."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Women to Facebook: Stop banning our breast-feeding pics

CNET NEWS - 5 hours 18 min ago
Women around the world, fed up with Facebook's policy of not allowing breast-feeding pictures, are staging protests at Facebook offices and using Facebook to coordinate those efforts.

Kia offers 5 hours of Adriana Lima for Super Bowl

CNET NEWS - 5 hours 35 min ago
How many people will prefer watching 5 hours of model Adriana Lima on YouTube moving very, very slowly to the New York Giants defense moving very, very quickly? Or might people do both?

Weekend Time Waster: Solitaire Blitz brings excitement to lonely card clicking

Arstechnica - 5 hours 48 min ago

Digital forms of Solitaire have been included with Windows since it reached version 3.0, and they may well represent the most widely played video game series this side of Angry Birds, enjoyed by bored cubicle workers and bored, procrastinating students alike. While most serious gamers probably wouldn't put these games top ten picks of all time, you'd be hard-pressed to find a single PC owner that hasn't put in at least a few hours on a machine that has nothing else available.

Plants vs. Zombies and Peggle maker Popcap is targeting this familiar genre with its latest Facebook time-waster, Solitaire Blitz, a supremely addictive and well-crafted offering that adds just the right amount of tension to the zen autonomy of mindlessly clicking cards.

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Coke's polar bears ready to talk Super Bowl live online

CNET NEWS - 5 hours 48 min ago
No, they won't, like Tom Brady, be viewing an illegal streaming site. Instead, Coke is using social media and the Web in order to have its polar bears react to the game as it's in progress.