On the EFF’s Deep Links blog, Parker Higgins presents the stakes in today’s Supreme Court hearing for Kirtsaeng v. Wiley, which concerns the right of a student, Supap Kirtsaeng, to import textbooks from overseas and sell them in the USA. Wiley, a textbook publisher, argues that even though the books Kirtsaeng is selling are his property, that they have the right to dictate how and whether he may pass it on. Normally, copyright is limited by “first sale” — once a copyrighted work has been sold once, it is the new … Read More → "Act now: your right to own property is being considered at the Supreme Court today"

Space exploration once captured the world’s imagination. In the 1960s and 1970s, children dreamed of satellites, lunar rovers, and walking on the moon. Today – decades after Sputnik, Neil Armstrong, and the Apollo missions – many children may not even know what a space capsule is.

Some of those children from the Space Race years, though, grew up to work at NASA. Public indifference be damned, those engineers are still dreaming of new … Read More → "NASA heli-capsule could let astronauts land anywhere"

On-going project to collect and organize envelope security patterns from around the world. 

More here. 

via Coudal

Scientists have developed a way to manufacture a new breed of computer chips that use carbon nanotubes in the place of silicon.

Nanotubes have plenty of superior electronic properties over silicon, but until now it’s been impossible to manufacture a chip with a high enough density of nanotubes to make an effective processing unit. Now, the researchers, from IBM, have cracked it.
via … Read More → "Scientists are making computer chips of the future out of carbon nanotubes"

Just as photography was a controversial new art form in the late 19th century (critics questioned the role of the artist if the machine ultimately produced the work), it seems computer programmers have yet to be fully accepted into the art world.

This much was clear at the first Leaders in Software and Art (LISA) Conference, which took place at the GuggenheimMuseum in New York last week. The conference grew out of the LISA Salons … Read More → "Programmers are the new art world renegades"

Piloted solar flight has been a reality for some time, with even international flights now possible. Up to this point, such voyages have been a strictly solo affair, however the team originally responsible for the Sunseeker II intends to change this by manufacturing what’s billed as the world’s first two-seater solar aircraft – a motor glider named the … Read More → "Sunseeker team building a two-passenger solar-powered airplane"

As part of Google’s ongoing effort to expand the reach of their panoramic Street View service, they have developed the Trekker, a backpack panoramic camera system that can be carried by one person (video). 
via Laughing Squid

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… Read More → "Backpack camera system brings Google Street View to Grand Canyon"

Yesterday, the Department of Defense’s advanced research arm, DARPA, announced the details of its next grand challenge. Following up on its autonomous vehicle challenge, the research agency will now focus on robots that do need an operator. But these robots are meant to operate in what DARPA calls “degraded” environments—basically, disaster zones of various flavors—where bandwidth between the operator and … Read More → "DARPA’s next “grand challenge”: tool-wielding rescue robots"

Today Ortus Technology, a Japanese manufacturer of industrial flat panel displays, announced a new 9.6-inch TFT boasting a whopping resolution of 3840×2160. For those keeping score, that happens to be the newly appointed 4K UHD standard, and the same as Sony’s $25,000 84-inch behemoth.

Except that on an 84-inch TV your eyes have an actual chance of discerning all those extra pixels, … Read More → "Your eyes aren’t sharp enough to justify this 9.6-inch 4K display"

When it’s done, the concept for a ship that’ll take astronauts to deep space won’t look like much. Actually, it kind of sounds like a mess: the “Deep Space Habitat” is being cobbled together from scrap parts of the International Space Station, and even a museum mockup. Obviously, it’s not going to send anyone to deep space. But it does give us a tantalizing look at what it’ll … Read More → "NASA is building a mocked-up deep-space habitat in Texas"