×
Firefox

Submission + - Telefonica Shows Prototype Firefox OS Phone (techweekeurope.co.uk)

Submitted by
judgecorp
judgecorp writes: "Telefonica has added some detail to the Firefox OS picture, following the announcement of phones by two manufacturers earlier this week. The Qualcomm built handset shown by Telefonica in London ran the HTML5 OS and showed multitasking as well as a range of HTML5 applications. Firefox-maker Mozilla receives a lot of funding from Google, but Telefonica sees Firefox OS as a way to achieve independence from Google. It will be more open than Android, and will run on lower-specification hardware, according to the company's director of products."
The Military

Submission + - Nuclear Weapons: "The only peackeeping weapons the world has even known" (thediplomat.com) 3

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Famed academic Kenneth Waltz for years has argued that more nukes around the world create peace. Why? Because the more nukes are around, the more people are afraid to start a war with a nuclear armed state. Peace seems assured with a gun to the world's head.

In a recent interview, he argues that Iran gaining nuclear weapons would be a good thing. He points out that "President Obama and a number of others have advocated the abolition of nuclear weapons and many have accepted this as both a desirable and a realistic goal. Even entertaining the goal and contemplating the end seems rather strange. On one hand the world has known war since time immemorial, right through August 1945. Since then, there have been no wars among the major states of the world. War has been relegated to peripheral states (and, of course, wars within them). Nuclear weapons are the only peacekeeping weapons that the world has ever known. It would be strange for me to advocate for their abolition, as they have made wars all but impossible."
Science

Submission + - Small Molecule May Play Big Role in Alzheimer's Disease (utexas.edu)

Submitted by
aarondubrow
aarondubrow writes: "Researchers from UC Santa Barbara used the Ranger supercomputer to simulate small forms of amyloid peptides that are believed to be a primary cause of toxicity in Alzheimer's disease. They found that hairpin-shaped forms of the peptide initiated the aggregation of oligomers that ultimately led to the formation of a fibril. The simulations are leading to new diagnostic and treatment options they may stop the disease."
Social Networks

Submission + - Social Networks, Suicide and Statistics (i-programmer.info) 1

Submitted by mikejuk
mikejuk writes: The data that is available in social networks is often used to detect the opinion of the crowd — but can it reveal the state of mind of the individual. New research suggests that some simple but non-obvious characteristics of social network use are related to suicide.
Data mining is usually about determining things of economic advantage, but in this case, suicide we have a personal loss and an economic one. A new paper by a group of Japanese researchers, Naoki Masuda, Issei Kurahashi and Hiroko Onari, claims to have found ways of detecting suicidal tendencies — or at least the tendency to think about suicide, so-called "suicide ideation".
The study used the Japanese social network mixi, which has over 27 million members and allows users to join any of over 4.5 million topic groups — some focusing on the subject of suicide. This provided a study and control group to compare. The most interesting finding is that while users in the suicide group had lots of friends they didn't have as many transitive relationships i.e. where A friends B friends C friends A. This suggests that it isn't lack of friends but a lack of tight social groupings that is a factor.
The same technique could be used to investigate similar problems such as depression and alcohol abuse.
Games

Submission + - Team Hot Wheels Sets New Record (coolstacks.com)

Submitted by
thecoolstacks
thecoolstacks writes: "Team Hot Wheels did not disappoint stunt lovers during this year's X Games. First they built a six-story tall replica of their Double Dare Snare toy track for kids, and renamed it Double Loop Dare, then they sent two drivers into the loop at the same time!"

Submission + - university sues student for graduating early (thelocal.de)

Submitted by pointbeing
pointbeing writes: A private German economics and business university is suing one of its students for lost income after he finished his Bachelors and Masters degrees in about a quarter of the normal time.

Marcel Pohl completed 60 examinations in 20 months, gaining a grade of 2.3, and was officially ex-matriculated in August 2011. Such a course usually takes 11 semesters, but he only needed three.

Now the Essen-based School of Economics and Management (FOM) want the 22-year-old to pay his fees up the end of 2011 — an extra €3,000.
Government

Submission + - US Election Year, Still No Voting Reform

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A year ago, we discussed this on Slashdot: E-Voting Reform In an Out Year?. The point was that due to the hoard of problems with electronic (and mechanical) voting, it is best to approach reform in an out year, when it is not on everyone's mind yet too late to do anything about it. Well, we failed, didn't we? Another election year is upon us, and our vote is less secure, less reliable, less meaningful than ever. To reference the last article, we still have no open source voting, no end-to-end auditable voting systems and no open source governance. So don't complain when this election is stolen. You forgot to fix the system.
Technology

Submission + - Dreaming of Digital Glory at Hacker Hostels (nytimes.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The NY Times has a story about a small chain of managed residences that has sprung up in the Bay Area to provide a cheap place where programmers, designers, and scientists can live and work. These 'hacker hostels' are a place for aspiring entrepreneurs to gather, share, and refine ideas. 'Hackers ... have long crammed into odd or tiny spaces and worked together to solve problems. In the 1960s, researchers at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory slept in the attic and, while waiting for their turn on the shared mainframe computer, sweated in the basement sauna. When told about the hacker hostels, Ethan Mollick, an assistant professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania who studies entrepreneurship, said they reminded him of his days in the last decade studying at M.I.T., where graduate students would have bunk beds inside their small offices.'
Robotics

Submission + - Real-life Avatar: The first mind-controlled robot surrogate (extremetech.com)

Submitted by
MrSeb
MrSeb writes: "An Israeli student has become the first person to meld his mind and movements with a robot surrogate, or avatar. Situated inside an fMRI scanner in Israel, Tirosh Shapira has controlled a humanoid robot some 2000 kilometers (1250 miles) away, at the Béziers Technology Institute in France, using just his mind. The system must be trained so that a particular “thought” (fMRI blood flow pattern) equates to a certain command. In this case, when Shapira thinks about moving forward or backward, the robot moves forward or backward; when Shapira thinks about moving one of his hands, the robot surrogate turns in that direction. To complete the loop, the robot has a camera on its head, with the image being displayed in front of Shapira. Speaking to New Scientist, it sounds like Shapira really became one with the robot: “It was mind-blowing. I really felt like I was there, moving around,” he says. “At one point the connection failed. One of the researchers picked the robot up to see what the problem was and I was like, ‘Oi, put me down!’”"
Microsoft

Submission + - Ubuntu Can't Trust FSF: Thus Dropped Grub 2 For Secure Boot (muktware.com)

Submitted by sfcrazy
sfcrazy writes: Free Software Foundation, FSF, recently published a white paper criticizing Ubuntu's move to drop Grub 2 in order to support Microsoft's UEFI Secure Boot. FSF also recommend that Ubuntu should reconsider their decision. Ubuntu's charismatic chief, Mark Shuttleworth, has finally responded stating the reason why they won't change their stand on dropping Grub 2 from Ubuntu. Mark Shuttleworth said "The SFLC advice to us was that the FSF could require key disclosure if some OEM screwed up. As nice as it is that someone at the FSF says they would not, we have to plan for a world where leaders change and institutional priorities change. The FSF wrote a licence that would give them the rights to take specific actions, and it's hard for them to argue they never would!

So, does that FSF can't be trusted?"
Linux

Submission + - It Looks like the end for MeeGo

Submitted by
asavin
asavin writes: "Although Nokia has rolled out a software update for its MeeGo-based N9 smartphone, the head of the MeeGo team and other key members have confirmed they are leaving Nokia.

In tweet, Sotiris Makrygiannis, Nokia's director of applications for MeeGo, said, "After 12 years at #Nokia is time to say goodbye. Last day but I'm going knowing that we created a legendary phone #N9 and we tried hard."

It really does look like the death-knell for the Linux-based open source platform."
Science

Submission + - Robot Avatar Body Controlled By Thought (gizmocrazed.com)

Submitted by Diggester
Diggester writes: Recent technology has shown that it is now possible to type by just thinking, so the use of thought to control a robot seems inevitable. The video seems like a scene out of Avatar but in it's first stages of the technology. The scientists of the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology in Tsukuba, Japan have combined the teleoperating, the ability to remotely control a device, radios with an fMRI, which tracks mental activity in real time, to achieve this scientific breakthrough.
Privacy

Submission + - NY Couple on "Wanted" Poster for Filming Police

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "Ben Fractenberg and Jeff Mays write that the NYPD has created a "wanted" poster for a Harlem couple who film cops conducting stop-and-frisks and post the videos on YouTube — branding them "professional agitators" who portray cops in a bad light and listing their home address. The flyer featuring side-by-side mugshots of Matthew Swaye and Christina Gonzalez and the couple's home address was taped to a podium outside a public hearing room in the 30th Precinct house and warns officers to be on guard against them. The couple has filmed officers stopping and frisking and arresting young people of color in Harlem and around New York City, which they post on Gonzalez's YouTube account. They said their actions are legal. "There have been times when it's gotten combative. There have been times when they [police officers] have videoed Christina," says Swaye. "But if we were breaking the law they would have arrested us." Swaye was part of a group of advocates including Cornel West who were detained at the 28th Precinct in Harlem in October for protesting the stop-and-frisk policy which Mayor Bloomberg strongly defends. Gonzalez and Swaye see the flyer as an effort to "discredit" and "shame" them for protesting what they feel is a civil rights issue, while also potentially endangering them by putting their home address on the flyer. "I saw it immediately and was kind of blown away," says Swaye, "It was designed to show us as people who are not trustworthy or safe.""
Google

Submission + - Google Bans Guns from Google Shopping, Relents After Pressure

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Last week Google emailed adwords customers telling them that Google Shopping was censoring all results relating to guns. This upset many gun owners who used the search engine to compare prices. Google has silently relented and is once again including gun products in the Shopping index.
Linux

Submission + - One Man to Make 31 Operating Systems in One Month (webpath.net)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Todd Robinson, completely un-assisted, will to attempt to create, and release, a complete desktop operating system each and every day for the period of 31 days, to demonstrate the huge advantages of using open source (shared knowledge) solutions in real-world situations.
The Internet

Submission + - Ron Paul's new primary goal is "internet freedom" (buzzfeed.com)

Submitted by Charliemopps
Charliemopps writes: Ron and Rand Paul are shifting the central focus of their family's libertarian crusade to a new cause: Internet Freedom.

This seems like welcome news to me. Lets see if they can get more traction here than they did with the Fed.
Patents

Submission + - Apple Wins Patent For Head-Mounted Display Tech (ibtimes.com)

Submitted by
redletterdave
redletterdave writes: "It appears that Google is no longer alone in exploring the realm of wearable tech solutions. Apple was granted a patent on Thursday in relation to "peripheral treatment for head-mounted displays." While Google Glass places a piece of smartglass right above the user's eye, Apple's solution uses two peripheral lights to show two different images to each eye "to create an enhanced viewing experience for the user." Apple's patent also attempts to address the biggest problems with head-mounted displays (HMDs), particularly tunnel vision and motion sickness."
IT

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: Old Dogs vs New Technology? 2

Submitted by xTrashcat
xTrashcat writes: I am 22 years of age and have been working in the IT field for over a year. I try to learn as much about technology as my cranium can handle; I even earned the nickname "Google" because of the amount of time I spend attempting to pack my brain with new information. Being 22, it is, I speculate, needless to say that I am the youngest of my coworkers.

If there is a piece of software, hardware, technique, etc., I want to know everything about it. On the contrary, nearly all of my coworkers resent it and refuse to even acknowledge it, let alone learn about it.

For example, we just started buying boxes from a different vendor that are licensed for Win7. A few months later, we decide that a computer lab was going to get an XP image instead of Win7. After several days worth of attempts, none of our XP images, even our base, would work, and left everyone scratching their heads. We were on the verge of returning thousands of dollars worth of machines because they were "defective." I was not satisfied. I wanted to know WHY they weren't working instead of just simply returning them. I jumped into the project. After almost 30 seconds of fishing around in BIOS, I noticed that UEFI was enabled. Switched it to legacy, and boom. My coworkers grunted and moaned because they didn't have to do that before, and still to this day, they hate our new boxes.

So in closing, I have three questions: What is the average age of your workplace? How easily do your coworkers accept and absorb new technology? Are most IT environments like this, where people refuse to learn anything about new technology they don't like, or did I just get stuck with a batch of stubborn case-screws?

Slashdot Top Deals