How the FCC Plans to Save the Internet By Destroying It

Posted on by

Previous telecommunications systems — most notably the phone system — are regulated as “common carriers”. This means you can call whoever you like; you can use whatever phone you want; and anyone in a service area can sign up at a fair rate.

This designation recognizes that communication systems are too important to be left to the vagaries of profit-be-damned executives and that the operators are in very powerful positions to do harm and extract tolls.

via How the FCC Plans to Save the Internet By Destroying It: An Explainer — Medium.

Democratizing the Datastore

Posted on by

No matter how you slice it, the database market is massive and evolving. It’s also a market that has received a disproportionate share of VC investment, with VCs plowing funding into a long list of database related market segments including: NoSQL, Hadoop, graph databases, open-source SQL, cloud-based databases, visualization, etc. But for all of that innovation, the process of setting up and running very large database remains either expensive or complicated. Expensive because large databases still often require expensive hardware and/or licenses. Complicated because setting up a massive cluster of commodity machines to run a database requires a ton of administrative work and expertise that not a lot of people have. It’s this administrative complexity that Crate is out to eliminate – and that’s the real story behind the investment: the democratization of database cluster management. Crate’s real claim to fame is that it allows developers – any developer – to easily set up a massively scalable data store on commodity hardware with sub-second query latency simply and within minutes.

via Democratizing the Datastore: Why we invested in Crate | Yankee Sabra Limey.

F.C.C., in ‘Net Neutrality’ Turnaround, Plans to Allow Fast Lane

Posted on by

The new rules, according to the people briefed on them, will allow a company like Comcast or Verizon to negotiate separately with each content company—like Netflix, Amazon, Disney or Google—and charge different companies different amounts for priority service.

via F.C.C., in ‘Net Neutrality’ Turnaround, Plans to Allow Fast Lane.

The Hackers Who Recovered NASA’s Lost Lunar Photos

Posted on by

When they learned through a Usenet group that former NASA employee Nancy Evans might have both the tapes and the super-rare Ampex FR-900 drives needed to read them, they jumped into action. They drove to Los Angeles, where the refrigerator-sized drives were being stored in a backyard shed surrounded by chickens. At the same time, they retrieved the tapes from a storage unit in nearby Moorpark, and things gradually began to take shape. Funding the project out of pocket at first, they were consumed with figuring out how to release the images trapped in the tapes.

via The Hackers Who Recovered NASA’s Lost Lunar Photos | Raw File | WIRED.

The resulting framelets had to be individually reassembled in Photoshop. After kluging through countless engineering problems (try finding a chemical substitute for whale oil to lubricate tape heads), the LOIRP team was able to single out and reproduce the famous earthrise image. This proof of concept brought the first NASA funding in 2008, and the team recently completed processing the entire tape collection.

This Time, Get Global Trade Right

Posted on by

But the administration’s rationale for secrecy seems to apply only to the public. Big corporations are playing an active role in shaping the American position because they are on industry advisory committees to the United States trade representative, Michael Froman. By contrast, public interest groups have seats on only a handful of committees that negotiators do not consult closely.

via This Time, Get Global Trade Right – NYTimes.com.

Drones On Demand

Posted on by

Supposing you can make the whole thing safe, then it might stand a chance. The app could summon a drone using its GPS for location and the internet to communicate with the drone. This means the drone has to have a good internet connection and a satellite link seems like the best option, but the technology for this isn’t easy to get right.

via Drones On Demand.

Aereo analysis: Cloud computing at a crossroads

Posted on by

“Consider any file-hosting service that allows people to store their own material, such as Dropbox. What if it can be shown they are storing copyrighted work. Do they need a license?” he asked in a telephone interview.

Mitch Stoltz, an Electronic Frontier Foundation attorney, said in a telephone interview that, “If the Supreme Court rules in favor of the broadcasters, their opinion might create liability for various types of cloud computing, especially cloud storage.”

via Aereo analysis: Cloud computing at a crossroads | Ars Technica.

‘Easter Dragon’ makes delivery to International Space Station

Posted on by

Reuters – A cargo ship owned by Space Exploration Technologies arrived at the International Space Station on Sunday, with a delivery of supplies and science experiments for the crew and a pair of legs for the experimental humanoid robot aboard that one day may be used in a spacewalk.

via ‘Easter Dragon’ makes delivery to International Space Station | Reuters.

Dragon will be reloaded with science samples and equipment no longer needed on the station and returned to Earth in about a month.

Preventing Heat From Going to Waste

Posted on by

 Thermoelectrics are slabs of semiconductor with a strange and useful property: heating them on one side generates an electric voltage that can be used to drive a current and power devices. To obtain that voltage, thermoelectrics must be good electrical conductors but poor conductors of heat, which saps the effect. Unfortunately, because a material’s electrical and heat conductivity tend to go hand in hand, it has proven difficult to create materials that have high thermoelectric efficiency—a property scientists represent with the symbol ZT.

via Preventing Heat From Going to Waste | Science/AAAS | News.

The key to the ultralow thermal conductivity, Kanatzidis says, appears to be the pleated arrangement of tin and selenium atoms in the material, which looks like an accordion. The pattern seems to help the atoms flex when hit by heat-transmitting vibrations called phonons, thus dampening SbSe’s ability to conduct heat. The researchers report the results today in Nature.