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Submission + - Hunt for the Dangerous Defecator—company demands DNA swabs, employees sue (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by THE_WELL_HUNG_OYSTER
THE_WELL_HUNG_OYSTER writes: Who left offensive fecal matter throughout an Atlanta warehouse that stored and delivered products for grocery stores?

Two employees, who were forced to give a buccal cheek swab to determine if their DNA matched the poop, are suing in what could be the first damages trial resulting from the 2008 civil rights legislation Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA), which generally bars employers from using individuals' genetic information when making hiring, firing, job placement, or promotion decision.

Although there was no DNA match, the two were offered a combined $200,000 settlement. The plaintiffs rejected it and "said the offer was a load of doo doo".

Submission + - USA Freedom Act passes unamended, limiting NSA surveillance (betanews.com) 1

Submitted by Mark Wilson
Mark Wilson writes: Today the US Senate passed the USA Freedom Act without amendments, signalling the start of the significant surveillance reform that has been called for since Edward Snowden blew the whistle on the agency's activities. It had already been determined that the bulk collection of phone metadata was illegal, and the expiry of Section 215 of the Patriot Act at the end of May brought this data collection to an end anyway.

The USA Freedom Act sets in concrete the end of the phone data collection program and is seen as a major victory for privacy advocates. It will come as good news to Snowden himself who will undoubtedly feel a sense of relief that his risk-taking paid off. The bill is still to be signed into law by President Obama, but this is now little more than a formality.

Submission + - How Dinosaurs Shrank and Became Birds (quantamagazine.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Discoveries have shown that bird-specific features like feathers began to emerge long before the evolution of birds, indicating that birds simply adapted a number of pre-existing features to a new use. And recent research suggests that a few simple changes — among them the adoption of a more babylike skull shape into adulthood — likely played essential roles in the final push to bird-hood. Not only are birds much smaller than their dinosaur ancestors, they closely resemble dinosaur embryos. Adaptations such as these may have paved the way for modern birds’ distinguishing features, namely their ability to fly and their remarkably agile beaks. The work demonstrates how huge evolutionary changes can result from a series of small evolutionary steps.

Comment Re:Commodore Hack (Score 1) 258

by countSudoku() (#49825445) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Your Most Unusual Hardware Hack?

HAHA! Nice! Well, my h/w hack was to build a "walking ring counter" out of a 555 timer, a binary counter, and a one of ten decoder. Plopped it into a project box and hooked up modular phone plugs, and LEDs to it and viola; Automated Modular Wiring Test Box. More of a project proper than a hack, but there we are. Saved me all sorts of time verifying a wall-jack or a set of connections on M-150s. Yes, I have an M-150 to RJ adaptor! Nerds.

I love these high school software hacks mucho! Way back in the stone ages we had a DEC PDP-11/34 and an /04 for our BASIC computing class. My s/w hack was building a realistic looking login program for the newbies to "log into" and get frustrated. Oh, GW-BASIC on a PDP-11, those were the days! I won the programming class with my self-modifying BASIC code to graph algebra equations onto a shitty video terminal. Who knew?

We also broke into the system and had admin access via the crafting of random access data files (which didn't zero their contents!) and viewing the un-zeroed content. Eventually the system password files were discovered and read. Afterwards our instructor got wise and renamed the files, but posted daily file listings for the whole system, so just check it for four small, new files, and then copy them to 8-inch (holy crap 8-INCH!) floppy when you boot the frame, and you're in, bros.

Submission + - Tim Cook: "Weakening encryption or taking it away harms good people" (dailydot.com)

Submitted by Patrick O'Neill
Patrick O'Neill writes: Over the last year, Apple CEO Tim Cook has repeatedly made headlines as a spearpoint in the new crypto wars. As FBI director James Comey pushes for legally mandated backdoors on encryption, Cook has added default strong encryption to Apple devices and vocally resisted Comey's campaign. Echoing warnings from technical experts across the world, Cook said that adding encryption backdoors for law enforcement would weaken the security of all devices and "is incredibly dangerous," he said last night at the Electronic Privacy Information Center awards dinner. "So let me be crystal clear: Weakening encryption or taking it away harms good people who are using it for the right reason."

Submission + - Mystery company blazes a trail in fusion energy (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: Of the handful of startup companies trying to achieve fusion energy via nontraditional methods, Tri Alpha Energy Inc. has always been the enigma. Publishing little and with no website, but apparently sitting on a cash pile in the hundreds of millions, the Foothill Ranch, California-based company has been the subject of intense curiosity and speculation. But last month Tri Alpha lifted the veil slightly with two papers revealing that its device, dubbed the colliding beam fusion reactor, has shown a 10-fold improvement in its ability to contain the hot particles needed for fusion over earlier devices at U.S. universities and national labs. “They’ve improved things greatly and are moving in a direction that is quite promising,” says plasma physicist John Santarius of the Fusion Technology Institute at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

Submission + - Perl 5.22 Released (perlnews.org)

Submitted by kthreadd
kthreadd writes: Version 5.22 of the Perl programming language has just been released. A major new feature in this release is the double diamond operator; like the regular diamond operator it allows you to quickly read through files specified on the command line but does this in a much safer way by not evaluating special characters in the file names. Other new features include hexadecimal floating point numbers, improved variable aliasing and a nicer syntax for repetition in list assignment. Also, historical Perl modules CGI.pm and Module::Build are removed from the core distribution.

Submission + - Fabs Now Manufacturing Carbon Nanotube Memory, Which Could Replace NAND and DRAM (computerworld.com)

Submitted by Lucas123
Lucas123 writes: Nantero, the company that invented carbon nanotube-based non-volatile memory in 2001 and has been developing it since, has announced that seven chip fabrication plants are now manufacturing its Nano-RAM (NRAM) wafers and test chips. The company also announced aerospace giant Lockheed Martin and Schlumberger Ltd., the world's largest gas and oil exploration and drilling company, as customers seeking to use its chip technology. The memory, which can withstand 300 degrees Celsius temperatures for years without losing data, is natively thousands of times faster than NAND flash and has virtually infinite read/write resilience. Nantero plans on creating gum sticks SSDs using DDR4 interfaces. NRAM has the potential to create memory that is vastly more dense that NAND flash, as its transistors can shrink to below 5 nanometers in size, three times more dense than today's densest NAND flash. At the same time, NRAM is up against a robust field of new memory technologies that are expected to challenge NAND flash in speed, endurance and capacity, such as Phase-Change Memory and Ferroelectric RAM (FRAM).

Comment Re:It's very real (Score 2, Interesting) 276

by countSudoku() (#49824013) Attached to: Professional Russian Trolling Exposed

Just block the fuckers and stop worrying about stupid shit already. The have a button for that. Unless you WANT to gather these trolls as active followers, then you're all set! Here's a tip; make websites, don't live on them. When you have more important things to do, then Twatter and Farcebook look like what they really are; huge motherfucking wastes of time to people who are creative.

Comment Re:America next? (Score 1) 276

by countSudoku() (#49823967) Attached to: Professional Russian Trolling Exposed

Or, at the very least, certify and otherwise make them professionals. I would also want them to carry some sort of signage with them or have another person standing near them, at every hour of their day, to shout out "INTERNET TROLL! PROFESSIONAL INTERNET TROLL IS IN THE VICINITY!" Sort of like what we should do with rapists. (stolen from Mr. Show)

Submission + - Move-in day for the DRC Finals - imagine packing up your entire lab! (robohub.org)

Submitted by Hallie Siegel
Hallie Siegel writes: Imagine having to pack up your entire robotics laboratory and ship it across the country, or even the ocean. The 25 teams participating in the DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC) had to do just that, and they are right now arriving at the competition grounds in Ponoma California to unpack and set up for this premiere international robotics, which runs June 5-6 and which will demonstrate the state of the art in disaster response humanoid robotics. The logistics of moving that much equipment and staff is enormous. And just think of the paper work at US customs! I hope DARPA debriefed the local border agents ...

Submission + - Apple loses trademark case in the Philippines

Submitted by ianalis
ianalis writes: Apple's overzealous IP protection hit a snag in the Philippines when the country's Intellectual Property Office threw out their case against local company Solid Broadband for their brand MyPhone. Part of the May 19 decision reads "“This is a case of a giant trying to claim more territory than what it is entitled to, to the great prejudice of a local ‘Pinoy Phone’ merchant who has managed to obtain a significant foothold in the mobile phone market through the marketing and sale of innovative products under a very distinctive trademark.” The first MyPhone was launched a few months after the release of the first IPhone.

Submission + - Amazon: Build Us a Better Warehouse Robot (dice.com)

Submitted by Nerval's Lobster
Nerval's Lobster writes: Amazon relies quite a bit on human labor, most notably in its warehouses. The company wants to change that via machine learning and robotics, which is why earlier this year it invited 30 teams to a “Picking Contest.” In order to win the contest, a team needed to build a robot that can outpace other robots in detecting and identifying an object on a shelf, gripping said object without breaking it, and delivering it into a waiting receptacle. According to Engadget, Team RBO, composed of researchers from the Technical University of Berlin, won last month’s competition by a healthy margin. Their winning design combined a WAM arm (complete with a suction cup for lifting objects) and an XR4000 mobile base into a single unit capable of picking up 12 objects in 20 minutes—not exactly blinding speed, but enough to demonstrate significant promise. If Amazon’s contest demonstrated anything, it’s that it could be quite a long time before robots are capable of identifying and sorting through objects at speeds even remotely approaching human (and thus taking over those jobs). Chances seem good that Amazon will ask future teams to build machines that are even smarter and faster.

Submission + - NASA tries to solve the problem of bug guts sticking to aircraft wings (geek.com)

Submitted by mthwgk
mthwgk writes: While NASA may regularly carry out groundbreaking research, not all of it is something you’d want to go home and boast about. This week a team of engineers from NASA’s Environmentally Responsible Aviation (ERA) Project are working on just such a project, specifically: how to stop the guts of thousands of bugs building up on the leading edge of wings?

Submission + - GameStop swoops in to buy ThinkGeek for $140 million (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Lirodon
Lirodon writes: Remember a few days ago, when our former parent company was the subject of a $122 million takeover bid by Hot Topic? Slashdot remembers. Well, another geeky retailer entered the fray in the battle for ThinkGeek, and won. GameStop will be acquiring Geeknet for $140 million. The video game retailer has promised synergies, such as in-store pickup and integration with its rewards program.

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