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Submission + - Senators: Too much focus on college degrees

Submitted by Joe_Dragon
Joe_Dragon writes: lawmakers across the political aisle are in agreement that Washington must help emphasize that jobs training can be just as valuable to young Americans as a college degree.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2013/07/ron-johnson-student-loan-college-degree-94327.html#ixzz2ZPilCwY8

The IT field needs more vocational / hands on learning and not CS for IT jobs like desktop / sysadmin jobs. That can take up to 6 years for a 4 year degrees with skill gaps.

Submission + - Help Desk Security Threats

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Help desks are most commonly asked to assist users in addressing common IT problems including password resets and application and connectivity issues. Often the performance of help desk employees is measured by how quickly they can serve callers and resolve the issue. Unfortunately, in many cases, security does not play a major role in the process and as a result, help desks have become an unintended entry point for hackers and malicious insiders attempting to gain access to sensitive enterprise resources.

Submission + - Defective Microsoft patch KB2846071 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: It would appear that a recent Microsoft patch KB2846071 is causing some javascript based errors.
It causes the value of window.event.clientX and clientY to return a negative value when it should be positive. Thus causing many websites to think the user closed the browser.

Further details:
http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/ie/forum/ie10-windows_7/hello-friends-problem-when-i-installed-the/ca4a270e-7501-47a8-80f8-585724d8735a?page=1&tm=1373994140210

Submission + - Describe any location on earth in 3 words

Submitted by jameshumphreys
jameshumphreys writes: London startup what3words has successfully launched a new website which has carved the world map into almost 57 trillion 3m x 3m squares, assigning each square a simple, unique 3 word address. For instance, the 'what3words' for the famous Peter Pan statue in London’s Hyde Park is ‘union.prop.enjoy’. This means you can easily describe even remote locations with great precision. CEO, Chris Sheldrick, says "We see our service being most useful where current methods of describing location (e.g. postcodes or ZIP codes) don’t do the job well enough or don’t do the job at all — but of course it has applications as a preferred alternative even where the existing solutions do a decent job, but perhaps less precise/customised than w3w."
An API is planned "in the coming weeks".

Submission + - DARPA Unveils ATLAS - Super Humanoid Robot Ready for the Robotics Challenge (thefutureofthings.com)

Submitted by Iddo Genuth
Iddo Genuth writes: Last week DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), unveiled ATLAS — a 330 lbs 6.1 ft humanoid robot to the 6 teams that will compete in the next DARPA Robotics Challenge this December. During the challenge each team will use its version of the ATLAS robot to try and perform a series of complex tasks similar to what might be required in a disaster response scenario.

Submission + - Break free from PRISM with the new Kolab 3.1 (kolab.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Kolab is a data hub for your personal information that puts you in control. It makes sharing things easy and supports IMAP, SMTP, ActiveSync and now also CardDAV, CalDAV and WebDAV for file storage. No need for GMail or Outlook anymore. You can host the solution yourself or at people you trust. Being completely Free Software, packages are available for the main Linux distributions.

Submission + - Arizona Republicans Propose Bill That Would Not Allow Atheists Graduate (patheos.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: the republicans in AZ are trying to force kids to swear an oath to get a diploma.

A quote from the proposed bill Arizona House Bill 2467
"Beginning in the 20132014 school year, In addition to fulfilling the course of study and assessment requirements prescribed in this chapter, before a pupil is allowed to graduate from a public high school in this state, the principal or head teacher of the school shall verify in writing that the pupil has recited the following oath:

I, _________, do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic, that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge these duties; So help me God. "

Submission + - Stallman on Snowden .. (rt.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: “I am very happy that Snowden told us what the US government and some other governments are really doing .. I had no proof – I’ve been saying for many years that if we look at the ‘Pa-Triot Act’ – I won’t call it ‘patriot’ because it’s as unpatriotic as you can get in a country based on an idea of freedom – I said, ‘look at this, I would guess that they are collecting all the data about everyone, regularly, fast enough so it doesn’t get erased between collections – but that was just a guess.”

Submission + - The Future of Linux: Evolving Everywhere

Submitted by snydeq
snydeq writes: Serdar Yegalulp offers a long view of the current evolution of Linux, one that sees the open source OS firmly entrenched as a cornerstone of IT, evolving in almost every direction at once — including most demonstrably toward the mobile and embedded markets. 'If Linux acceptance and development are peaking, where does Linux go from up? Because Linux is such a mutable phenomenon and appears in so many incarnations, there may not be any single answer to that question. More important, perhaps, is how Linux — the perennial upstart — will embrace the challenges of being a mature and, in many areas, market-leading project. Here's a look at the future of Linux: as raw material, as the product of community and corporate contributions, and as the target of any number of challenges to its ethos, technical prowess, and growth.'

Submission + - Math and Science Popular with College Students Until They Realize They're Hard

Submitted by HonorPoncaCityDotCom
HonorPoncaCityDotCom writes: Khadeeja Safdar reports in the WSJ that researchers who surveyed 655 incoming college students found that while math and science majors drew the most interest initially, not many students finished with degrees in those subjects. Students who dropped out didn’t do so because they discovered an unexpected amount of the work and because they were dissatisfied with their grades. “Students knew science was hard to begin with, but for a lot of them it turned out to be much worse than what they expected,” says Todd R. Stinebrickner, one of the paper’s authors. “What they didn’t expect is that even if they work hard, they still won’t do well.” The authors add that the substantial overoptimism about completing a degree in science can be attributed largely to students beginning school with misperceptions about their ability to perform well academically in science. "“If more science graduates are desired, the findings suggest the importance of policies at younger ages that lead students to enter college better prepared (PDF) to study science."

Submission + - The Pope criminalizes leaks (usatoday.com) 1

Submitted by PolygamousRanchKid
PolygamousRanchKid writes: Pope Francis overhauled the laws that govern the Vatican City State on Thursday, criminalizing leaks of Vatican information and specifically listing sexual violence, prostitution and possession of child pornography as crimes against children that can be punished by up to 12 years in prison.

But without the leaks, how would we find out about those crimes against children?

Many of the new provisions were necessary to bring the city state's legal system up to date after the Holy See signed international treaties, such as the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child. Others were necessary to comply with international norms to fight money-laundering, part of the Vatican's push toward financial transparency.

One new crime stands out, though, as an obvious response to the leaks of papal documents last year that represented one of the gravest Vatican security breaches in recent times. Paolo Gabriele, the butler for then-Pope Benedict XVI, was tried and convicted by a Vatican court of stealing Benedict's personal papers and giving them to an Italian journalist, Gianluigi Nuzzi. Using the documents, Nuzzi published a blockbuster book on the petty turf wars, bureaucratic dysfunction and allegations of corruption and homosexual liaisons that afflict the highest levels of Catholic Church governance. Gabriele, who said he wanted to expose the "evil and corruption" that plagued the Holy See, was convicted of aggravated theft and sentenced to 18 months in the Vatican's police barracks.

Oh, well. I guess plugging leaks won't stop all those shenanigans, but we just won't hear about it any more. This actually makes me feel like leaking something. If the Pope says it is dirty, and a sin, it must be a whole lot of fun doing it . . .

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