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Comment Young Enough To Deny Being Middle-Aged (Score 1) 286

by billstewart (#48631287) Attached to: At 40, a person is ...

By my late 40s I had to admit that I was probably middle-aged, and at 50 you really can't deny it, but 40? Not over the hill yet, plus it was still the boom years and everybody was having lots of fun doing new cool stuff and getting overpaid for discovering how to sell dogfood On The Internet!

Comment Re:Core business? (Score 1) 222

by lgw (#48631217) Attached to: Marissa Mayer's Reinvention of Yahoo! Stumbles

Hotmail is a legacy now, but Outlook.com is actually pretty good. It reminds me a lot of gmail before gmail went to shit. Nice clean web UI, like gmail used to have, too. It surprised me with how it doesn't suck - give it a try the next time you need a throw-away: I ended up moving there for my real email (because fuck Google).
Earth

Satellite Captures Glowing Plants From Space 40

Posted by samzenpus from the getting-that-glow dept.
sciencehabit writes About 1% of the light that strikes plants is re-emitted as a faint, fluorescent glow—a measure of photosynthetic activity. Today, scientists released a map of this glow as measured by the Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2, a NASA satellite launched in July with the goal of mapping the net amount of carbon in the atmosphere. The map reveals that tropical rainforests near the equator are actively sucking up carbon, while the Corn Belt in the eastern United States, near the end of its growing season, is also a sink. Higher resolution fluorescence mapping could one day be used to help assess crop yields and how they respond to drought and heat in a changing climate.

Submission + - Skeptics would like media to stop calling science deniers "skeptics" (csicop.org)

Submitted by Layzej
Layzej writes: Prominent scientists, science communicators, and skeptic activists, are calling on the news media to stop using the word “skeptic” when referring to those who refuse to accept the reality of climate change, and instead refer to them by what they really are: science deniers. “Not all individuals who call themselves climate change skeptics are deniers. But virtually all deniers have falsely branded themselves as skeptics. By perpetrating this misnomer, journalists have granted undeserved credibility to those who reject science and scientific inquiry.”

Comment Maybe they could re-shoot it, varying the script - (Score 0) 230

by timothy (#48630287) Attached to: "Team America" Gets Post-Hack Yanking At Alamo Drafthouse, Too

- so that it's set in Cuba instead.

(I am not kidding. In fact, call it THE INTERVIEW II: HAVANA GILA MONSTER" and make frequent in-joke references to the previous one, even though -- especially because! -- nearly no one has seen it.)

But this time, assassinate Castro, instead.

 
China

Investigation: Apple Failing To Protect Chinese Factory Workers 201

Posted by samzenpus from the HR-needs-to-be-better dept.
mrspoonsi writes with the findings of an investigation into working conditions at a factory that makes Apple products. Poor treatment of workers in Chinese factories which make Apple products has been discovered by an undercover BBC Panorama investigation. Filming on an iPhone 6 production line showed Apple's promises to protect workers were routinely broken. It found standards on workers' hours, ID cards, dormitories, work meetings and juvenile workers were being breached at the Pegatron factories. Apple said it strongly disagreed with the programme's conclusions. Exhausted workers were filmed falling asleep on their 12-hour shifts at the Pegatron factories on the outskirts of Shanghai. One undercover reporter, working in a factory making parts for Apple computers, had to work 18 days in a row despite repeated requests for a day off. Another reporter, whose longest shift was 16 hours, said: "Every time I got back to the dormitories, I wouldn't want to move. Even if I was hungry I wouldn't want to get up to eat. I just wanted to lie down and rest. I was unable to sleep at night because of the stress."
Security

Critical Git Security Vulnerability Announced 148

Posted by samzenpus from the protect-ya-neck dept.
An anonymous reader writes Github has announced a security vulnerability and has encouraged users to update their Git clients as soon as possible. The blog post reads in part: "A critical Git security vulnerability has been announced today, affecting all versions of the official Git client and all related software that interacts with Git repositories, including GitHub for Windows and GitHub for Mac. Because this is a client-side only vulnerability, github.com and GitHub Enterprise are not directly affected. The vulnerability concerns Git and Git-compatible clients that access Git repositories in a case-insensitive or case-normalizing filesystem. An attacker can craft a malicious Git tree that will cause Git to overwrite its own .git/config file when cloning or checking out a repository, leading to arbitrary command execution in the client machine. Git clients running on OS X (HFS+) or any version of Microsoft Windows (NTFS, FAT) are exploitable through this vulnerability. Linux clients are not affected if they run in a case-sensitive filesystem....Updated versions of GitHub for Windows and GitHub for Mac are available for immediate download, and both contain the security fix on the Desktop application itself and on the bundled version of the Git command-line client."

Submission + - Critical Git security vulnerability announced

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Github has announced a security vulnerability and has encourage users to update their Git clients as soon as possible. The blog post reads in part: "A critical Git security vulnerability has been announced today, affecting all versions of the official Git client and all related software that interacts with Git repositories, including GitHub for Windows and GitHub for Mac. Because this is a client-side only vulnerability, github.com and GitHub Enterprise are not directly affected. The vulnerability concerns Git and Git-compatible clients that access Git repositories in a case-insensitive or case-normalizing filesystem. An attacker can craft a malicious Git tree that will cause Git to overwrite its own .git/config file when cloning or checking out a repository, leading to arbitrary command execution in the client machine. Git clients running on OS X (HFS+) or any version of Microsoft Windows (NTFS, FAT) are exploitable through this vulnerability. Linux clients are not affected if they run in a case-sensitive filesystem....Updated versions of GitHub for Windows and GitHub for Mac are available for immediate download, and both contain the security fix on the Desktop application itself and on the bundled version of the Git command-line client."
Yahoo!

Marissa Mayer's Reinvention of Yahoo! Stumbles 222

Posted by samzenpus from the best-laid-plans dept.
schnell writes The New York Times Magazine has an in-depth profile of Marissa Mayer's time at the helm of Yahoo!, detailing her bold plans to reinvent the company and spark a Jobs-ian turnaround through building great new products. But some investors are saying that her product focus (to the point of micromanaging) hasn't generated results, and that the company should give up on trying to create the next iPod, merge with AOL to cut costs and focus on the unglamorous core business that it has. Is it time for Yahoo! to "grow up" and set its sights lower?

Submission + - Kepler Makes First Exoplanet Discovery After Mission Reboot (discovery.com)

Submitted by astroengine
astroengine writes: NASA’s Kepler space telescope has detected its first new extrasolar planet after mission engineers were able to save the mission from a premature death after two of the exoplanet hunter’s four stabilizing reaction wheels failed last year. Called “K2, the extended mission arose from an “innovative idea” that appears to have given the prolific telescope a new lease on life. “Last summer, the possibility of a scientifically productive mission for Kepler after its reaction wheel failure in its extended mission was not part of the conversation,” said Paul Hertz, NASA’s astrophysics division director at the agency’s headquarters in Washington D.C. “Today, thanks to an innovative idea and lots of hard work by the NASA and Ball Aerospace team, Kepler may well deliver the first candidates for follow-up study by the James Webb Space Telescope to characterize the atmospheres of distant worlds and search for signatures of life.”
AI

Ars Reviews Skype Translator 71

Posted by timothy from the in-the-future-everyone-will-have-been-in-the-past dept.
Esra Erimez writes Peter Bright doesn't speak a word of Spanish but with Skype Translator he was able to have a spoken conversation with a Spanish speaker as if he was in an episode of Star Trek. He spoke English. A moment later, an English language transcription would appear, along with a Spanish translation. Then a Spanish voice would read that translation.
Hardware Hacking

Extracting Data From the Microsoft Band 51

Posted by timothy from the buncha-freeloaders dept.
An anonymous reader writes The Microsoft Band, introduced last month, hosts a slew of amazing sensors, but like so many wearable computing devices, users are unable to access their own data. A Brown University professor decompiles the app, finds that the data is transmitted to the Microsoft "cloud", and explains how to intercept the traffic to retrieve the raw minute-by-minute data captured by the Band.

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