Submission + - 1 million robots to replace 1 million humans at Foxconn (singularityhub.com)
Submission + - Ask Slashdot: How to catch Photoshop plagiarism 4
The problem, of course, is that some students just grab the final-result file and rename it and turn it in. Some are a little less brazen and they rename a few layers, maybe alter the colors on a few images, etc. So, it becomes time-consuming for her to open each file alongside the final-result file to see if it's "too perfect".
When I first discovered that she was doing this, my first reaction was that there's got to be some automated way of catching the cheaters. Of course, my first idea of just doing MD5 hashes of each file won't work, since most kids alter the file a little bit.
A second idea I had was to alter the final-result file in a way that isn't obvious, like removing someone's shoelace, mis-spelling a word in the background, or removing/adding some dust-specks. (I know map publishers and music transcribers use this trick to catch copiers). But this still requires that she look for the alteration in each file. I'd think that Photoshop, after all these years, would have some kind of scripting language which also supports some digital watermarking, but I've just never dabbled in that realm.
And, of course, I guess another solution would be for her to not provide the end-result file in Photoshop format, but to export it as a flat image. But I'm still intrigued by the notion of being able to "fuzzily" compare two photoshop files or images to find the ones which are too similar in certain aspects (color histograms, where the edges are, level of noise, whatever).
Anybody else have any clever ideas for this?
Submission + - Mind-Controlled Robot Avatars Inch Towards Reality (gizmag.com)
Submission + - Acer C7 Chromebooks Expand Chrome OS Market (slashdot.org)
If the new Chromebook has a weakness, it’s the advertised 3.5 hours of battery life. That’s less than the MacBook Air (which features anywhere from 5-7 hours’ battery life, depending on specs) and many of the Windows-backed Ultrabooks, some of which claim up to 11 hours of battery life depending on usage. It’s also far less than the posted battery life for tablets such as Apple’s iPad and Google’s Nexus 7, which are widely viewed as the most prominent competition to laptops in the extra-portable category."
Submission + - Here come the humanoids. There go U.S. jobs (cnet.com) 1
Baxter is a step forward in robotics with mass potential. It has a face and sensors to tell it when people are near. It's about as close to a humanoid robot as we can get, and Brooks said it's just the beginning.
"Within 10 years, we're going to see humanoid robots," said Brooks, who was a co-founder of iRobot, maker of iRoomba, the vacuum cleaner robot."
Submission + - Mark Cuban: Facebook Is Driving Away Brands - Starting With Mine (readwrite.com)
Two weeks ago Cuban tweeted out a screen grab of an offer he'd received from Facebook. The social network wanted to charge him $3,000 to reach 1 million people. Along with the screen grab, Cuban wrote, "FB is blowing it? This is the first step. The Mavs are considering moving to Tumblr or to new MySpace as primary site.""
Submission + - Why dissonant music sounds 'wrong' (nature.com) 1
There has long been thought to be a physiological reason why at least some kinds of dissonance sound jarring. Two tones close in frequency interfere to produce 'beating': what we hear is just a single tone rising and falling in loudness. If the difference in frequency is within a certain range, rapid beats create a rattling sound called roughness. An aversion to roughness has seemed consistent with the common dislike of intervals such as minor seconds.
Yet when cognitive neuroscientist Marion Cousineau of the University of Montreal in Quebec and her colleagues asked amusic subjects (who cannot distinguish between different musical tones). to rate the pleasantness of a whole series of intervals, they showed no distinctions between any of the intervals but disliked beating as much as people with normal hearing.
Instead the researchers propose that harmonicity is the key. Notes contain many overtones — frequencies that are whole-number multiples of the basic frequency in the note. For consonant 'pleasant sounding' intervals the overtones of the two notes tend to coincide as whole-number multiples, whereas for dissonant intervals this is no longer the case.
The work suggests that harmonicity is more important than beating for dissonance aversion in normal hearers (abstract)."
Submission + - Oracle makes Red Hat kernel changes available as broken-out patches (oracle.com)
This comes in response to a policy change Red Hat had operated in early 2011 with the goal of undercutting Oracle and other vendor's strategy of poaching RedHat's customers. The Ksplice team says they've doing the work they're now making available since the policy was implemented; they claim to be now making it public because they "feel everyone in the Linux community can benefit from the work".
For Ksplice, we build individual updates for each change and rely on source patches that are broken-out, not a giant tarball. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be able to take the right patches to create individual updates for each fix, and to skip over the noise — like a change that speeds up bootup — which is unnecessary for an already-running system. We’ve been taking the monolithic Red Hat patch tarball and breaking it into smaller commits internally ever since they introduced this change.
At Oracle, we feel everyone in the Linux community can benefit from the work we already do to get our jobs done, so now we’re sharing these broken-out patches publicly.
Submission + - Flash Player Update Forces Installation of Google Toolbar (adobe.com) 4
Submission + - 15 year jail sentence for pirating movies. (torrentfreak.com) 1
Submission + - In Mississippi: 15 Year Jail Sentence For Movie and Music Copyright Infringement (torrentfreak.com)
Says the RIAA: "[This] highlights the fact that the individuals engaging in these activities are frequently serial criminals for whom IP theft is simply the most convenient and profitable way they could steal from others."
Frequently serial criminals? 15 years? I wonder how much of his sentence can be attributed to his priors rather than to other factors...
Submission + - Africa makers get energy from pee (makerfaireafrica.com)
A group of African students built a small generator where with
1 Liter of urine gives you 6 hours of electricity.
It's not 100% clear how much energy you can get out of that liter (you insensitive Imperial clod) though.
It's also not 100% clear whether the main aim of the setup is to purify water or to generate energy thanks to electrolysis.
In any case either aim would be a great thing in a continent like Africa. And the whole world as well.
Submission + - Cyber Weapon Friendly Fire: Chevron Hit by Stuxnet (informationweek.com)
"'Escaped' continues to be a puzzling term when applied to a virus that relied on numerous Microsoft zero-day vulnerabilities and propagation vectors," said Sean McBride, the director of analysis for Critical Intelligence, in a SANS newsletter. "On the other hand, if your system was not the single underground facility in Iran that Stuxnet was intended to disrupt, the infection was benign. Such collateral damage is part of the price industry gets to pay for — what was then — two more years of Iran [being] without a nuclear weapon.""