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Comment Re:net neutrality isn't protocol agnosticism (Score 1) 200

by ItsJustAPseudonym (#48321939) Attached to: Net Neutrality Alone Won't Solve ISP Throttling Abuse, Here's Why
This. Absolutely.

The article gave a bad explanation of the requirements for video, as noted by other posters here. Nevertheless, it is true that video-streaming has different requirements than two-way voice calls, which both have different requirements than a Tor relay. These can each be enhanced by appropriate optimization, as the parent describes.

The "neutrality" is about the identities of the provider and the consumer, not about the type of data.

Comment Re:What do you vote for? (Score 1) 551

by ItsJustAPseudonym (#48310855) Attached to: In this year's US mid-term elections ...

While the lower house elections has options of about 15 political parties, only about 7 have a serious chance of getting seats.

Wow. More than two viable political parities? We in the U.S. can only dream of that. The Democrats and Republicans have so rigged the national debate that it is difficult for anyone else to play. Literally, the presidential debates used to be hosted by the League of Women Voters, and involved more that two parties, and some actually interesting questions. Now the "debates" are not run by LWV, and are controlled, captured, and pre-arranged. Only the two major parties can get in.

Submission + - Scientists grow tiny human stomachs in lab dishes (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: Because the digestive systems of mice, flies, and other model organisms differ from those of humans, researchers have been hard-pressed to find a way to study the development of human gut maladies such as peptic ulcer disease. So several groups have turned to pluripotent stem cells—cells derived from human embryos or reprogrammed adult cells that can turn into any cell type in the body—to try to grow digestive organs in the lab. Last week, one group of researchers announced the creation of a lab-grown small intestine from stem cells. Today, a different team reports that they’ve perfected the recipe of molecules needed to coax both types of stem cells to grow into small spheres that, despite their size, have all the properties of a functional stomach. When the researchers exposed the ministomachs to the bacterium Helicobacter pylori, infections of which are blamed for many stomach ulcers and cancers, they saw the same molecular and cellular changes already known to occur in life-size stomachs.

Submission + - HP Unveils Industrial 3D Printer 10X Faster, 50% Cheaper Than Current Systems (computerworld.com)

Submitted by Lucas123
Lucas123 writes: HP today announced an 3D industrial printer that it said will be half the cost of current additive manufacturing systems while also 10 times faster, enabling production parts to be built. The company also announced Sprout, a new immersive computing platform that combines a 23-in touch screen monitor and horizontal capacitive touch mat with a scanner, depth sensor, hi-res camera, and projector in a single desktop device. HP's Multi Jet Fusion printer will be offered to beta customers early next year and is expected to be generally available in 2016. The machine uses a print bar with 30,000 nozzles spraying 350 million drops a second of thermoplastic or other materials onto a print platform. The Multi Jet Fusion printer uses fused deposition modeling, an additive manufacturing technology first invented in 1990. the printer works by first laying down a layer of powder material across a build area. Then a fusing agent is selectively applied with the page-wide print bar. Then the same print bar applies a detailing agent at the parts edge to give high definition. The material is then exposed to an energy source that fuses it.

Submission + - Imagining the Future History of Climate Change

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: The NYT reports that Naomi Oreskes, a historian of science at Harvard University, is attracting wide notice these days for a work of science fiction called “The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View From the Future,” that takes the point of view of a historian in 2393 explaining how “the Great Collapse of 2093” occurred. “Without spoiling the story,” Oreskes said in an interview, “I can tell you that a lot of what happens — floods, droughts, mass migrations, the end of humanity in Africa and Australia — is the result of inaction to very clear warnings” about climate change caused by humans." Dramatizing the science in ways traditional nonfiction cannot, the book reasserts the importance of scientists and the work they do and reveals the self-serving interests of the so called “carbon combustion complex” that have turned the practice of science into political fodder. Oreskes argues that scientists failed us, and in a very particular way: They failed us by being too conservative. Scientists today know full well that the "95 percent confidence limit" is merely a convention, not a law of the universe. Nonetheless, this convention, the historian suggests, leads scientists to be far too cautious, far too easily disrupted by the doubt-mongering of denialists, and far too unwilling to shout from the rooftops what they all knew was happening. "Western scientists built an intellectual culture based on the premise that it was worse to fool oneself into believing in something that did not exist than not to believe in something that did."

Why target scientists in particular in this book? Simply because a distant future historian would target scientists too, says Oreskes. "If you think about historians who write about the collapse of the Roman Empire, or the collapse of the Mayans or the Incans, it's always about trying to understand all of the factors that contributed," Oreskes says. "So we felt that we had to say something about scientists."

Submission + - CERN looking for help filling in the gaps in photo archive

Submitted by rHBa
rHBa writes: According to the BBC scientists at the European nuclear research centre CERN have uncovered an archive of images from its first 50 years and are asking for help in deciphering what is going on in them. Dr Sue Black, who was a key figure in the campaign to save Bletchley Park, said "we believe that much of this information could be crowd-sourced from the CERN community."

Submission + - Check Out The Source Code For The Xerox Alto (itworld.com)

Submitted by jfruh
jfruh writes: The Xerox Alto is a computer legend: it was never sold to the public, but its window-based OS was the inspiration for both the original Mac operating system and Windows. Now you can check out its source code, along with code for CP/M, a similarly old school (though not graphical) operating system.

Submission + - Labor Dept. to destroy H-1B records 3

Submitted by Presto Vivace
Presto Vivace writes: Records that are critical to research and take up a microscopic amount of storage are set for deletion

In a notice posted last week, the U.S. Department of Labor said that records used for labor certification, whether in paper or electronic, "are temporary records and subject to destruction" after five years, under a new policy. ... There was no explanation for the change, and it is perplexing to researchers. The records under threat are called Labor Condition Applications (LCA), which identify the H-1B employer, worksite, the prevailing wage, and the wage paid to the worker. ... ... The cost of storage can't be an issue for the government's $80 billion IT budget: A full year's worth of LCA data is less than 1GB.

Submission + - Swedish regulator orders last 'hold-out' ISP to retain customer data (thestack.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Despite the death of the EU Data Retention Directive in April, and despite the country having taken six years to even begin to obey the ruling, the Swedish government, via its telecoms regulator, has forced ISPs to continue retaining customer data for law enforcement purposes. Now the last ISP retrenching on the issue has been told that it must comply with the edict or face a fine of five million krona ($680,000).

While providers all over Europe have rejoiced in not being obliged any longer to provide infrastructure to retain six months of data per customer, Sweden and the United Kingdom alone have insisted on retaining the ruling — particularly surprising in the case of Sweden, since it took six years to begin adhering to the Data Retention Directive after it was made law in 2006. Britain's Data Retention and Investigatory Powers bill, rushed through in July, actually widens the scope of the original EU order.

Submission + - Researchers at Brown University Shattered a Quantum Wave Function

Submitted by Jason Koebler
Jason Koebler writes: A team of physicists based at Brown University has succeeded in shattering a quantum wave function. That near-mythical representation of indeterminate reality, in which an unmeasured particle is able to occupy many states simultaneously, can be dissected into many parts. This dissection, which is described this week in the Journal of Low Temperature Physics, has the potential to turn how we view the quantum world on its head.
Specifically, they found it’s possible to take a wave function and isolate it into different parts. So, if our electron has some probability of being in position (x1,y1,z1) and another probability of being in position (x2,y2,z2), those two probabilities can be isolated from each other, cordoned off like quantum crime scenes.

Submission + - HP Unveiled a 3D Printer that is 10X's Faster Than Any Other 3D Printer Today (3dprint.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: It's been known for over a year that HP (Hewlett Packard) would be jumping into the 3D printing market. However, no one knew for sure what that would encompass. Today, HP Inc. announced what could be the biggest breakthrough yet for the technology. Their new Multi-jet Fusion 3D printer is capable of printing at speeds of over 10 times that of current technology. The 3D printer will also be priced much lower than current comparable machines, and parts will be more affordable to print. Beta versions of this new printer will be available next year, with the final product releasing in 2016.

Submission + - Why Every Cardiac Patient Needs a Virtual Heart (ieee.org)

Submitted by the_newsbeagle
the_newsbeagle writes: In the latest high-tech approach to personalized medicine, cardiologists can now create a computer model of an individual patient’s heart and use that simulation to make a treatment plan. In this new field of computational medicine, doctors use a patient's MRI scans to make a model showing that patient's unique anatomy and pattern of heart disease. They can then experiment on that virtual organ in ways they simply can't with a flesh-and-blood heart. Proponents say this tech can "improve therapies, minimize the invasiveness of diagnostic procedures, and reduce health-care costs" in cardiology.

Submission + - Google Announces Project Ara Developer Conference: Mountain View on January 14

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Google today announced it will be hosting the second iteration of its Project Ara Module Developers Conference early next year. The first event will be in Mountain View on January 14, 2015, with satellite locations at Google offices in New York City, Buenos Aires, and London. The same agenda will be repeated in Singapore on January 21, 2015, with satellite locations at Google offices in Bangalore, Tokyo, Taipei, and Shanghai. During the full-day events Google plans to share the latest on the Ara platform and promises to have Project Ara team members at all event sites. Even though the speakers will be in Mountain View and Singapore, bi-directional video links will be available at the satellite locations.

Submission + - 'Ambulance drone' prototype unveiled in Holland (yahoo.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: A Dutch-based student on Tuesday unveiled a prototype of an "ambulance drone", a flying defibrillator able to reach heart attack victims within precious life-saving minutes.

"Around 800,000 people suffer a cardiac arrest in the European Union every year and only 8.0 percent survive, the main reason for this is the relatively long response time of emergency services of around 10 minutes, while brain death and fatalities occur with four to six minutes,"

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It is clear that the individual who persecutes a man, his brother, because he is not of the same opinion, is a monster. - Voltaire

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