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Submission + - New Samsung SSD 840 EVO Read Performance Fix Coming Later This Month (anandtech.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The Samsung SSD 840 EVO read performance bug has been on the table for over six months now. Initially Samsung acknowledged the issue fairly quickly and provided a fix only a month after the news hit the mainstream tech media, but reports of read performance degradation surfaced again a few weeks after the fix had been released, making it clear that the first fix didn't solve the issue for all users. Two months ago Samsung announced that a new fix is in the works and last week Samsung sent us the new firmware along with Magician 4.6 for testing, which will be available to the public later this month.

Submission + - World's oldest stone tools discovered in Kenya (sciencemag.org) 1

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: Researchers say they have found the oldest tools made by human ancestors—stone flakes dated to 3.3 million years ago. That’s 700,000 years older than the oldest-known tools to date, suggesting that our ancestors were crafting tools several hundred thousand years before our genus Homo arrived on the scene. If correct, the new evidence could confirm disputed claims for very early tool use, and it suggests that ancient australopithecines like the famed “Lucy” may have fashioned stone

Submission + - Hubble and the VLT Uncover Evidence for Self-Interacting Dark Matter (discovery.com)

Submitted by astroengine
astroengine writes: A new study carried out by the ESO’s Very Large Telescope and the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has revealed for the first time that dark matter may well interact with itself — a discovery that, at first glance, seems to contradict what we thought we knew about the nature of this invisible mass.

Submission + - We the people petition to revoke Scientology's Tax exempt status (whitehouse.gov)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: There has been a lot of interest in the activities of the Church of Scientology recently, especially since the release of Alex Gibney's documentary "Going Clear". A petition against tax-exempt status for Scientology, has been started on the United States white house petition website. If it receives more than 100,000 signatures, it will qualify for an official white house response. Even slashdot has had its own run-ins with Scientology in the past. Has the time come for Scientology go "clear"?

Submission + - Road to Mars: Solving the Isolation Problem (newyorker.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: As space technology matures, new missions get funding, and humanity sets its goals ever further, space agencies are tackling some of the new problems that crop up when we try to go further away than Earth's moon. This New Yorker article takes a look at research into one of the biggest obstacles: extended isolation. Research consultant Jack Struster once wrote, "Future space expeditions will resemble sea voyages much more than test flights, which have served as the models for all previous space missions." Long-duration experiments are underway to test the effects of isolation, but it's tough to study. You need many experiments to derive useful conclusions, but you can't just ship 100 groups of a half-dozen people off to remote areas of the globe and monitor all of them. It's also borderline unethical to expose the test subjects to the kind of stress and danger that would be present in a real Mars mission. The data collected so far has been positive, but we have a long way to go. The technology and the missions themselves will probably come together long before we know how to deal with isolation. At some point, we'll just happen to hope that our best guess is good enough.

Submission + - Denver TSA Screeners Manipulated System in order to Grope Men's Genitals (cbslocal.com)

Submitted by McGruber
McGruber writes: The CBS affiliate in Denver reports: "Two Transportation Security Administration screeners at Denver International Airport have been fired after they were discovered manipulating passenger screening systems to allow a male TSA employee to fondle the genital areas of attractive male passengers."

According to law enforcement reports obtained during the CBS4 investigation, a male TSA screener told a female colleague in 2014 that he “gropes” male passengers who come through the screening area at DIA.

“He related that when a male he finds attractive comes to be screened by the scanning machine he will alert another TSA screener to indicate to the scanning computer that the party being screened is a female. When the screener does this, the scanning machine will indicate an anomaly in the genital area and this allows (the male TSA screener) to conduct a pat-down search of that area.”

Although the TSA learned of the accusation on Nov. 18, 2014 via an anonymous tip from one of the agency’s own employees, reports show that it would be nearly three months before anything was done.

Submission + - How Mission Creep Killed a Gaming Studio (dice.com)

Submitted by Nerval's Lobster
Nerval's Lobster writes: Over at Kotaku, there’s an interesting story about the reported demise of Darkside Game Studios, a game-development firm that thought it finally had a shot at the big time only to collapse once its project requirements spun out of control. Darkside got a chance to show off its own stuff with a proposed remake of Phantom Dust, an action-strategy game that became something of a cult favorite. Microsoft, which offered Darkside the budget to make the game, had a very specific list of requirements for the actual gameplay. The problem, as Kotaku describes, is those requirements shifted after the project was well underway. Darkside needed more developers, artists, and other skilled tech pros to finish the game with its expanded requirements, but (anonymous sources claimed) Microsoft refused to offer up more money to actually hire the necessary people. As a result, the game’s development imploded, reportedly followed by the studio. What’s the lesson in all this? It’s one of the oldest in the book: Escalating and unanticipated requirements, especially without added budget to meet those requirements, can have devastating effects on both a project and the larger software company.

Submission + - MIT's Picture Language Lets Computers Recognize Faces Through Inference (itworld.com)

Submitted by itwbennett
itwbennett writes: MIT researchers are working on a new programming language, called Picture, that could radically reduce the amount of coding needed to help computers recognize objects in images and video. It is a prototype of how a relatively novel form of programming, called probabilistic programming, could reduce the amount of code needed for such complex tasks. In one test of the new language, the researchers were able to cut thousands of lines of code in one image recognition program down to fewer than 50.
Iphone

Chess Grandmaster Used iPhone To Cheat During Tournament 237

Posted by Soulskill from the there's-an-app-for-that dept.
A reader sends this quote from the Washington Post: Gaioz Nigalidze's rise through the ranks of professional chess began in 2007, the year the first iPhone was released. In hindsight, the timing might not be coincidental. On Saturday, Nigalidze, the 25-year-old reigning Georgian champion, was competing in the 17th annual Dubai Open Chess Tournament when his opponent spotted something strange. "Nigalidze would promptly reply to my moves and then literally run to the toilet," Armenian grandmaster Tigran Petrosian said. "I noticed that he would always visit the same toilet partition, which was strange, since two other partitions weren't occupied." Petrosian complained to the officials. After Nigalidze left the bathroom once more, officials inspected the interior and say they found an iPhone wrapped in toilet paper and hidden behind the toilet. "When confronted, Nigalidze denied he owned the device," according to the tournament's Web site. "But officials opened the smart device and found it was logged into a social networking site under Nigalidze's account. They also found his game being analyzed in one of the chess applications." Nigalidze was expelled from the tournament, which is still ongoing and features more than 70 grandmasters from 43 countries competing for a first-place prize of $12,000. The Georgian's career is now under a microscope. His two national titles are under suspicion.

Submission + - For Persi Diaconis' Next Magic Trick (quantamagazine.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Now a professor of mathematics and statistics at Stanford University, Diaconis has employed his intuition about cards, which he calls “the poetry of magic,” in a wide range of settings. Once, for example, he helped decode messages passed between inmates at a California state prison by using small random “shuffles” to gradually improve a decryption key. He has also analyzed Bose-Einstein condensation — in which a collection of ultra-cold atoms coalesces into a single “superatom” — by envisioning the atoms as rows of cards moving around. This makes them “friendly,” said Diaconis, whose speech still carries the inflections of his native New York City. “We all have our own basic images that we translate things into, and for me cards were where I started.”

In 1992, Diaconis famously proved — along with the mathematician Dave Bayer of Columbia University — that it takes about seven ordinary riffle shuffles to randomize a deck. Over the years, Diaconis and his students and colleagues have successfully analyzed the effectiveness of almost every type of shuffle people use in ordinary life.

All except one: “smooshing.”

Submission + - US Navy researchers get drones to swarm on target (networkworld.com)

Submitted by coondoggie
coondoggie writes: The Office of Naval Research today said it had successfully demonstrated a system that lets small-unmanned aircraft swarm and act together over a particular target. The system, called Low-Cost UAV Swarming Technology (LOCUST) features a tube-based launcher that can send multiple drones into the air in rapid succession. The systems then use information sharing between the drones, allowing autonomous collaborative behavior in either defensive or offensive missions, the Navy said.

Submission + - The makerspace is the next open source frontier (opensource.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Jono Bacon explains that in the same way open source spawned millions of careers and thousands of companies, the same openness has massive potential when applied to products. It could potentially jumpstart a revolution in how we conceptualize, build, and share things and how we experiment and innovate to push the boundaries of science and technology.

Submission + - French hosting providers stand against Intelligence Law Black Box project (nbs-system.co.uk)

Submitted by nbs-system
nbs-system writes: French hosting providers stand united against the Black Box project. That is why we wrote an open letter to the French government asking its members to reconsider.

The “Black Box” project proposed by the French government goes, by some aspects, further than what was reproached to the US with the Patriot Act. This measure allowing the tapping, at any moment, of all the traffic of a hosting provider or an Internet service provider in the purpose of looking for potential terrorists seems relatively vain, very poorly targeted and economically counter-productive.

All this, beyond being useless in terms of results, seems to be a very bad direction to move in, regarding the confidentiality to which no one will ever be entitled to again, as well as for the fact that it will kill a part of French economy, one of the only ones still growing.

That is why we ask the French government to reconsider.

Submission + - Sharp Announces 4K Smartphone Display (tomshardware.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Japanese electronics giant Sharp has announced production of 5.5" displays with 4K (3840 x 2160) resolution. They'll hit the market next year. The display will have a pixel density of 806 PPI. It's not known yet which smartphone makers will build devices with these screens. The displays cost significantly more than a more typical 1080p or 1440p display, so they'll probably only make it into high-end phones. On the other hand, this will help to drive down prices for lower-resolution displays, so it could indirectly benefit everybody.

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