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Submission + - Hacked Sony emails reveal that Sony had pirated books about hacking (dailydot.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Sony has done a lot of aggressive anti-piracy work in their time, which makes it that much funnier that pirated ebooks were found on their servers from the 2014 hacks that just went on to WikiLeaks. Better yet, the pirated books are educational books about hacking called "Inside Cyber Warfare" and "Hacking the Next Generation" from O'Reilly publishers.

Submission + - Slashdots stops sucking effective immediately!!

GrabbaTheButt writes: In a complete 180 degree turn of events, the overlords at Dice have decided to end all Slashvertisments, kill Beta and end all stories that have no place on this site.

When asked why such a radical change? Management said "we have decided to start listening to our user community and stop thinking straight out of our asses".

Submission + - Eyedrops provide Night vision to see up to 50 meters in Darkness.

rtoz writes: A group of scientists in California have successfully created eye drops that temporarily enable night vision.

They use mixture of Insulin and a chemical known as "Ce6" (Chlorin e6) as eye drop for getting the night vision. It allows the user to view the objects clearly up to 50 meters in darkness.

This chemical "Ce6" is found in some deep-sea fish and is often used to treat cancer and night blindness.

The Ce6 solution will start work in as little as one hour after getting injected into eyes using micropippette. And the Night vision effect will be lasting for “many hours” afterwards, and the test subject's eyesight will become normal the next day.

The organisation "Science for the Masses" has released a paper that detailed the experiment in their website.

Submission + - Amazon Requires Non-Compete Agreements...For Warehouse Workers

Rick Zeman writes: Amazon, perhaps historically only second to NewEgg in the IT nerdling's online shopping heart, not only has treated their warehouse workers to appalling working condtions, but they're also making them sign a non-compete agreement for the privilege. Excerpt from the agreement:
During employment and for 18 months after the Separation Date, Employee will not, directly or indirectly, whether on Employee’s own behalf or on behalf of any other entity (for example, as an employee, agent, partner, or consultant), engage in or support the development, manufacture, marketing, or sale of any product or service that competes or is intended to compete with any product or service sold, offered, or otherwise provided by Amazon (or intended to be sold, offered, or otherwise provided by Amazon in the future)....

Submission + - Bring On The Boring Robots (popsci.com)

malachiorion writes: After a successful 6-month pilot, Savioke's "butler bots" are heading to hotels around the country. These are not sexy, scary, or even technically impressive machines. But they were useful enough, over the course of their 2000 or so deliveries, to warrant a redesign, and a larger deployment starting in April. Savioke's CEO had some interesting things to say about the pilot, including the fact that some 95 percent of guests gave the robot a 5-star review, and only the drunks seemed to take issue with it. Plus, as you might expect, everyone seemed to want to take a damn selfie with it. But as small as the stakes might appear, highly specialized bots like this one, which can only do one thing (in this case, bring up to 10 pounds of stuff from the lobby to someone's door) are a better glimpse of our future than any talk of hyper-competent humanoids or similarly versatile machines. This is my post for Popular Science about why the rise of the boring robot is good news for robotics.

Submission + - Pixar Releases Free Version of RenderMan

jones_supa writes: A year ago the animation studio Pixar promised its RenderMan animation and rendering suite to eventually become free for non-commercial use. This was originally scheduled to happen in the SIGGRAPH 2014 computer graphics conference, but things got delayed. Nevertheless, today Pixar is releasing the free version into wild. Free non-commercial RenderMan can be used for research, education, evaluation, plug-in development, and any personal projects that do not generate commercial profits. This version is fully featured, without a watermark or any kind of artificial limits. Featuring Pixar's new RIS technology, RenderMan delivers extremely fast global illumination and interactive shading and lighting for artists. The software is available for Mac, Linux and Windows. In conjunction with the release, Pixar has also launched a new RenderMan Community site where users can exchange knowledge and resources, showcase their own work, share assets such as shaders and scripts, and learn about RenderMan from tutorials.

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