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Businesses

Ikea Sends IkeaHackers Blog a C&D Order 207

Posted by samzenpus from the stop-it dept.
An anonymous reader writes Ikea has sent the IkeaHackers blog a C&D order over the usage of the Ikea name. IkeaHackers hosts articles on how to hack Ikea furniture to make it more useful in daily life. From the article: "Speaking to the BBC, an Ikea representative said: 'We feel a great responsibility to our customers and that they always can trust Ikea... many people want to know what really is connected to Ikea - and what isn't. And we think that people should have that right. When other companies use the Ikea name for economic gain, it creates confusion and rights are lost.'
Science

New Sensor To Detect Food-Borne Bacteria On Site 10

Posted by samzenpus from the just-eat-it dept.
Zothecula (1870348) writes According to the CDC, around 48 million people in the US get sick, 128,000 are hospitalized, and 3,000 die as a result of foodborne illnesses every year. One of the main culprits is listeriosis (or listeria), which is responsible for approximately 1,600 illnesses and 260 deaths. Now researchers at the University of Southampton are using a device designed to detect the most common cause of listeriosis directly on food preparation surfaces, without the need to send samples away for laboratory testing.
Wireless Networking

Comcast Converting 50,000 Houston Home Routers Into Public WiFi Hotspots 474

Posted by Soulskill from the just-what-you-never-wanted dept.
New submitter green453 writes: 'As a Houston resident with limited home broadband options, I found the following interesting: Dwight Silverman of the Houston Chronicle reports (warning: paywalled) that Comcast plans to turn 50,000 home routers into public Wi-Fi hotspots without their users providing consent. Comcast plans to eventually convert 150,000 home routers into a city-wide WiFi network. A similar post (with no paywall) by the same author on the SeattlePI Tech Blog explains the change. From the post on SeattlePI: "What's interesting about this move is that, by default, the feature is being turned on without its subscribers' prior consent. It's an opt-out system – you have to take action to not participate. Comcast spokesman Michael Bybee said on Monday that notices about the hotspot feature were mailed to customers a few weeks ago, and email notifications will go out after it's turned on. But it's a good bet that this will take many Comcast customers by surprise."' This follows similar efforts in Chicago and the Twin Cities.
United States

Did Russia Trick Snowden Into Going To Moscow? 346

Posted by samzenpus from the can-we-give-you-a-ride? dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Ex-KGB Major Boris Karpichko says that spies from Russia's SVR intelligence service, posing as diplomats in Hong Kong, convinced Snowden to fly to Moscow last June. 'It was a trick and he fell for it,' Karpichko, who reached the rank of Major as a member of the KGB's prestigious Second Directorate while specializing in counter-intelligence, told Nelson. 'Now the Russians are extracting all the intelligence he possesses.'"

Comment Wow, people are stupid. (Score 1) 432

by eyenot (#47190693) Attached to: Turing Test Passed

I cast some pretty serious doubt onto the legitimacy of the claim that this machine passes a Turing Test, so much as the Turing Testers fail to be convincingly human.

Also, the robot went down much earlier than the appearance of this slashdot article, so for everybody saying the site got "slashdotted", hate to break your bubble but the world doesn't revolve around /.

http://gabrielapetrie.wordpres...

Comment Re:Fucking Bush! (Score 1) 272

we all wanted and needed hope and change. there's no way to know if he was geniune when he started out.

Yes, there is. Apply a simple test: is he being promoted by one of the two major parties? If yes, then he is not genuine.

There has been no meaningful exception since Kennedy. The way that ended simply proved what could happen if the candidate double-crosses the monied interests (the real power) that got him into office.

Comment Re:Obama's police state? (Score 1) 272

What I wonder every time I see this: do the law enforcement officers involved ever think something like, "wow, by doing this I become one of the jack-booted thugs working hard to bring tyranny and corruption to this nation!" Are they complete myrmidons?

Anyone with an IQ above 105-110 is barred from becoming a police officer. Examples abound, in the US and elsewhere, so I'll let you find examples of this long-known fact.

I've met more than one person with a high IQ who possessed neither the emotional maturity to perform any sort of introspection nor the courage of character to think for themselves and question everything that someone else taught them to believe. People like this are shrewd and highly effective at getting what they want but have all the same unwise, shallow, and childish tendencies/priorities so common in the rest of the population.

But I'm really not surprised that the police departments find intellectual ability undesirable. I would assume that obedience is their favorite trait, followed by the belief that what is legal is always exactly the same thing as what is right.

Comment Re:Get used to it. (Score 1) 272

These kinds of shenanigans are going to continue until the American public puts a stop to it. Note, I said the public. Not the government.

The nation is full of people who cannot even control their own waistlines, let alone something with a will of its own like this.

I really hope people are waking up and deciding to stop being so passive and unwilling to take a little responsibility. I really do hope so. If that is happening, it's not the sort of thing that would get reported by the mainstream corporate media. After all, that might encourage it.

Comment Re:Hard copy? (Score 1) 272

Well, I'd just ask them to email the document. Then if some "federal agency" demand the documents, they can simply email them to that federal agency. Saves everyone time, and everyone's got what they want.

Actually, I'm surprised they didn't handle it this way from the start. That way the "private citizen" wouldn't even know that another department had "seized" their documents.

But maybe I've just been working on the Internet too long. I tend to be surprised when someone wants to deal with hard copy.

"Seized the records" probably means the same thing it means when individuals are raided for computer crimes: grab all hard copies, all hard drives, and all other electronic storage media believed to be holding said records.

Maybe the next Snowden works for one of these police departments.

Comment Re:Obama's police state? (Score 5, Interesting) 272

Orwell was just 30 years late on his predictions...

What I wonder every time I see this: do the law enforcement officers involved ever think something like, "wow, by doing this I become one of the jack-booted thugs working hard to bring tyranny and corruption to this nation!" Are they complete myrmidons? Are they "true believers" who really managed to convince themselves this is all for some kind of nebulous greater good? Are they simply sociopaths with no conscience? Are they somehow brave enough to take on an armed criminal yet too cowardly to refuse bullshit orders?

What exactly goes through their minds? That's what I wonder.
Stats

Study Finds Porn Exposure Associated With Smaller Brain Region 211

Posted by timothy from the news-for-nerds dept.
New submitter Bodhammer (559311) writes "German researchers looked at the brains of 64 men between the ages of 21 and 45 and found that one brain region (the striatum, linked to reward processing), was smaller in the brains of porn watchers, and that a specific part of the same region is also less activated when exposed to more pornography." While it's tempting to cast blame, "the study doesn't confirm whether watching porn causes the changes, or whether people with a certain brain type are inherently more apt to tune into X-rated content." The study's abstract is available; the paper itself is pay-walled.
Media

Virtual DVDs, Revisited 147

Posted by Soulskill from the still-waiting-on-virtual-laserdiscs dept.
Bennett Haselton writes: "In March I asked why Netflix doesn't offer their rental DVD service in 'virtual DVD' form -- where you can 'check out' a fixed number of 'virtual DVDs' per month, just as you would with their physical DVDs by mail, but by accessing the 'virtual DVDs' in streaming format so that you could watch them on a phone or a tablet or a laptop without a DVD drive. My argument was that this is an interesting, non-trivial question, because it seems Netflix and (by proxy) the studios are leaving cash on the table by not offering this as an option to DVD-challenged users. I thought some commenters' responses raised questions that were worth delving into further." Read on for the rest of Bennett's thoughts.

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