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Submission + - Ask Slashdot : The gas leak problem

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: After many years I now have a backup of all my digital data in (at least) two physical locations. But what do people recommend to backup my physical data? And then how to prove my identity?

I call it 'gas leak', because a gas leak in my town caused an explosion that leveled the house. That would have destroyed all my paperwork that proves who I am. If I'd come home from work and said 'buy that's my house', how would I prove it knowing my key no longer fits the smoldering lock?

If I'd left my wallet at home, my bank cards would have been destroyed so I couldn't withdraw money or book into a hotel. Or if I'd left my phone at the office I wouldn't know anyone's number to call, or get anyone to vouch for me.

What preventative steps can you take?

(Since having this nightmare, I've exported my phones VCF file to an online repo, make online notes of all my bank account numbers and passport ID, keep ICE numbers with me at all times (separate from phone/wallet), and hidden a spare mobile phone and house key in a box in a nearby field, but there must be more to do!)

Submission + - CISPA 3.0: The Senate's New Bill As Bad As Ever (vice.com)

Submitted by Daniel_Stuckey
Daniel_Stuckey writes: CISPA is back for a third time—it has lost the 'P,' but it's just as bad for civil liberties as ever. The Senate Intelligence Committee is considering a new cybersecurity bill that contains many of the provisions that civil liberties groups hated about the Cybersecurity Information Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA). Most notably, under the proposed bill companies could not be sued for incorrectly sharing too much customer information with the federal government, and broad law enforcement sharing could allow for the creation of backdoor wiretaps. The bill, called the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act of 2014 (embedded below), was written by Senate Intelligence Chair Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.) and is currently circulating around the committee right now but has not yet been introduced. Right now, the bill is only a “discussion draft,” and the committee is still looking to make revisions to the bill before it is officially introduced.

Submission + - Microsoft continues to lose money with each Surface it sells, tablet share at 6% 1

Submitted by DroidJason1
DroidJason1 writes: Revealed from a 10-Q filed by Microsoft with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Microsoft has been losing $300 million and counting for the Surface in the last nine months. Data from Strategy Analytics has also revealed that Microsoft's Windows-powered tablets now own a 6% global tablet share, in Q1 of 2014. Android, on the other hand, remains at the top with a 66% global share. Apple's iOS fell to 28%.

Submission + - DIY Raspberry Eye - head-mounted computer with a see-through display (hackaday.io) 1

Submitted by katique
katique writes: Enthusiastic engineer Roman Rolinsky created a 'Google Glass'-similar Borg-looking wearable computer based on RPi with 2.4" TFT LCD. As he explains on his Hackaday page: "the semi-transparent mirror was extracted from a game called Eye of Horus Beamsplitter, and the projection lens is cut from a plastic 3x Fresnel magnifying lens. The box and mounting parts are 3D-printed from ABS. Head strap comes from GoPro. One RPi USB port is used for WiFi, and second for 2.4Ghz small wireless keyboard/mouse combo". His head-mounted computer costs up to 100$ and allows to work in both text and (non-accelerated) graphical modes. Voice command and camera module could be added. With some further improvement, Raspberry Eye could be a good base for augmented reality devices

Submission + - Hulu Blocks VPN Users (torrentfreak.com)

Submitted by electronic convict
electronic convict writes: Hulu, apparently worried that too many non-U.S. residents are using cheap VPN services to watch its U.S. programming, has started blocking IP address ranges belonging to known VPN services. Hulu didn't announce the ban, but users of the affected VPNs are getting this message:

Based on your IP-address, we noticed that you are trying to access Hulu through an anonymous proxy tool. Hulu is not currently available outside the U.S. If you’re in the U.S. you’ll need to disable your anonymizer to access videos on Hulu.

Hulu may make Hollywood happy by temporarily locking out foreign users—at least until they find new VPN providers. But in so doing it's now forcing its U.S. customers to sacrifice their privacy and even to risk insecure connections. Hulu hasn't even implemented SSL on its site.

Submission + - Why Speed-Reading Apps Don't Work (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: Does reading faster mean reading better? That’s what speed-reading apps claim, promising to boost not just the number of words you read per minute, but also how well you understand a text. There’s just one problem: The same thing that speeds up reading actually gets in the way of comprehension, according to a new study. Apps like Spritz or the aptly named Speed Read are built around the idea that these eye movements, called saccades, are a redundant waste of time. It’s more efficient, their designers claim, to present words one at a time in a fixed spot on a screen, discouraging saccades and helping you get through a text more quickly. But that's not what researchers have found.

Submission + - Some Birds Thrive in Chernobyl's Radioactive Glow (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: Nearly 28 years after the worst nuclear accident in history, several bird species are doing the seemingly impossible: flourishing inside the radioactive Chernobyl Exclusion Zone in Ukraine. Due to lingering radiation from the 1986 meltdown of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, humans aren’t allowed to live there—but the region has become an accidental ecological testing ground for scientists interested in studying the effects of radiation on wild animals. Ionizing radiation damages living cells by producing free radicals, leading to genetic damage and, eventually, death. An animal’s only hope is to neutralize those free radicals by upping its production of antioxidants. And that’s exactly what most birds in Chernobyl seem to be doing.

Submission + - Illinois Governor Wonders If Black Republicans Are Like Jewish Nazis (freebeacon.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The Washington Free Beacon reports, "Illinois Democratic Gov. Pat Quinn is in some hot water with the Jewish community after his campaign tweeted—and then quietly deleted—several messages urging backers to read an article comparing black Republican voters to Jews who collaborated with the Nazis. Chicago Sun Times readers were stunned last week to find that writer Neil Steinberg has penned a column comparing black supporters of Republican gubernatorial candidate Bruce Rauner to Jews who collaborated with the Nazis against their brethren. “As a general rule, individuals will sell out the interests of their groups in return for personal benefit,” Steinberg wrote in his column, which claimed that Rauner is buying off the black community and its leaders. “It isn’t just a black thing. Jews collaborated with the Nazis during World War II, helping them to round up their own people in the hopes they’d be the last to go.” Quinn’s camp praised the piece and tweeted it out to supporters several times. The tweets were deleted after local Jewish community officials quietly communicated their outrage to the governor."

Submission + - 3D Printed houses are a reality! (3dprinterplans.info)

Submitted by mspohr
mspohr writes: China’s Shanghai WinSun Decoration Design Engineering company has released new images and further details on its 3D printed houses. The ten houses were built entirely out of recycled materials, in less than 24 hours.
The monstrous 3D printer measures 32-meters long, by 10-meters wide, by 6.6-meters high and is fully capable of printing the 200 square meter houses, in Shanghai’s Qingpu district. It uses a mixture of construction and industrial waste to produce each house. The inexpensive materials used during the printing process and the lack of labor, means each house can be printed for under $5,000, an impressive achievement for a relatively new construction process.

Submission + - Blood of world's oldest woman hints at limits of life (newscientist.com) 1

Submitted by porkchop_d_clown
porkchop_d_clown writes: When Hendrikje van Andel-Schipper died in 2005, she was the oldest woman in the world. Today New Scientist is reporting that, at the end of her life, most of her white blood cells had been produced by just two stem cells — implying the rest of her blood stem cells had already died, and hinting at a possible limit to the human life span.

Submission + - Punching Mantis Shrimp Inspires Super-Tough Composites (gizmag.com)

Submitted by Zothecula
Zothecula writes: A new lightweight, super strong material has been discovered thanks to one of nature’s most violent sociopaths. The peacock mantis shrimp may look like a colorful, reasonably mild-mannered aquarium dweller, but its claws have the punch of a .22 bullet. A team of researchers led by University of California, Riverside, has developed a carbon composite that imitates the claw’s structure. The result is a promising new material that may one day be used to build cars and airplanes.

Submission + - Are Habitable Exoplanets Bad News for Humanity?

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The discovery of Kepler-186f last week has dusted off an interesting theory regarding the fate of humanity and the link between that fate and the possibility of life on other planets. Known as the The Great Filter, this theory attempts to answer the Fermi Paradox (why we haven't found other complex life forms anywhere in our vast galaxy) by introducing the idea of an evolutionary bottleneck which would make the emergence of a life form capable of interstellar colonization statistically rare. As scientists gear up to search for life on Kepler-186f, some people are wondering if humanity has already gone through The Great Filter and miraculously survived or if it's still on our horizon and may lead to our extinction.

Submission + - The Science of Shakespeare

Submitted by Hugh Pickens DOT Com
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes: Dan Falk writes in Scientific American that in the last few years, scholars have begun to look more closely at William Shakespeare’s interest in the scientific discoveries of his time—asking what he knew, when he knew it, and how that knowledge might be reflected in his work. Astronomer Peter Usher argues that examples of the playwright’s scientific knowledge can be found in works spanning his entire career and has taken a particular interest in Hamlet, which he sees as an allegory about competing cosmological worldviews. "According to Usher, the play references not only Copernicus, but also Ptolemy, as well as Tycho Brahe (PDF), who pushed for a hybrid model of the solar system (a compromise that preserved elements of the ancient Ptolemaic system as well as the new Copernican model). Digges, too, is central to Usher’s theory. When Hamlet envisions himself as “a king of infinite space," could he be alluding to the new, infinite universe described—for the first time—by his countryman Thomas Digges?" Usher’s proposal may sound far-fetched—but even skeptics do a double take when they look at Tycho Brahe’s coat of arms, noticing that two of Tycho’s relatives were named “Rosencrans” and “Guildensteren.”

According to Falk, Shakespeare’s characters were connected to the cosmos in a way that seems quite foreign to the modern reader. Whether crying for joy or shedding tears of anguish, they look to the heavens for confirmation, calling out to “Jupiter” or “the gods” or “the heavens” as they struggle to make sense of their lives. "[Shakespeare] lived in an age of belief, yet a streak of skepticism runs through his work, especially toward the end of his career; in King Lear it reaches an almost euphoric nihilism. His characters often call upon the gods to help them, but their desperate pleas are rarely answered. Was Shakespeare a closet atheist, like his colleague Christopher Marlowe?

Submission + - MIT Designs Tsunami Proof Floating Nuclear Reactor (mit.edu)

Submitted by Amtrak
Amtrak writes: MIT has created designs for a nuclear plant that would avoid the downfall of the Fukushima Daiichi plant. The new design calls for the nuclear plant to be placed on a floating platform modeled after the platforms used for offshore oil drilling.

A floating platform several miles offshore, moored in about 100 meters of water, would be unaffected by the motions of a tsunami; earthquakes would have no direct effect at all. Meanwhile, the biggest issue that faces most nuclear plants under emergency conditions — overheating and potential meltdown, as happened at Fukushima, Chernobyl, and Three Mile Island — would be virtually impossible at sea.

Submission + - Ubuntu Linux 14.04 LTS Trusty Tahr Released

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Ubuntu Linux version 14.04 LTS (code named "Trusty Tahr") has been released and available for download. This updated version includes the Linux kernel v3.13.0-24.46, Python 3.4, Xen 4.4, Libreoffice 4.2.3, MySQL 5.6/MariaDB 5.5, Apache 2.4, PHP 5.5, improvements to AppArmor allow more fine-grained control over application, and more. The latest release of Ubuntu Server is heavily focused on supporting cloud and scale-out computing platforms such as OpenStack, Docker, and more. As part of the wider Ubuntu 14.04 release efforts the Ubuntu Touch team is proud to make the latest and greatest touch experience available to our enthusiast users and developers. You can install Ubuntu on Nexus 4 Phone (mako), Nexus 7 (2013) Tablet (flo), and Nexus 10 Tablet (manta) by following these instructions. On a hardware front, ARM multiplatform support has been added, enabling you to build a single ARM kernel image that can boot across multiple hardware platforms. Additionally, the ARM64 and Power architectures are now fully supported. See detailed release note for more information here and a quick upgrade to a newer version of Ubuntu is possible over the network.

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The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not "Eureka!" (I found it!) but "That's funny ..." -- Isaac Asimov

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