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Submission + - FY 2017 NASA budget proposal place Obama on collision course with Congress (blastingnews.com)

Submitted by MarkWhittington
MarkWhittington writes: The Obama Administration has put forth its FY 2017 NASA budget proposal, according to GeekWire. The overall spending level is $19 billion, an almost $300 million cut from the current fiscal year. Much of the money comes out of the development for the Orion deep space vehicle and the heavy lift Space Launch System, the very basis of the space agency’s plans for exploring deep space beyond low Earth orbit.

Submission + - Germany fires up bizarre new fusion reactor (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by insitus
insitus writes: On 10 December, Germany’s new Wendelstein 7-X stellarator was fired up for the first time, rounding off a construction effort that took nearly 2 decades and cost €1 billion. Initially and for the first couple of months, the reactor will be filled with helium—an unreactive gas—so that operators can make sure that they can control and heat the gas effectively. At the end of January, experiments will begin with hydrogen in an effort to show that fusing hydrogen isotopes can be a viable source of clean and virtually limitless energy.

Submission + - Top Democratic senator will seek legislation to 'pierce' through encryption (dailydot.com)

Submitted by Patrick O'Neill
Patrick O'Neill writes: Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) will seek legislation requiring the ability to "pierce" through encryption to allow American law enforcement to read protected communications with a court order. She told the Senate Judiciary committee on Wednesday that she would seek a bill that would give police armed with a warrant based on probable cause the ability to read encrypted data. "I have concern about a PlayStation that my grandchildren might use," she said, "and a predator getting on the other end, and talking to them, and it's all encrypted. I think there really is reason to have the ability, with a court order, to be able to get into that."

Submission + - ESR: Radical Feminists Are Attempting to Frame Linus, Others for Sexual Assault (ibiblio.org)

Submitted by _KiTA_
_KiTA_ writes: Open Source Pioneer Eric S. Raymond has revealed explosive allegations on his blog, claiming that he has a source with evidence that the Ada Initiative, a tech initiative designed to support women in open source, has been attempting to frame Linus Torvalds and other high profile members of the Linux and Open Source community for sexual assault. Linus has been noted for never being alone at conferences as of late, apparently this is a defensive move due to repeated attempts to "scalp" him — getting him alone and then immediately pushing a fake claim of sexual harassment or assault to either have him arrested or pulled off Linux development.

Possibily related to October's Linux Kernel Dev Sarah Sharp Quits, Citing 'Brutal' Communications Style story on how feminist Sarah Sharp took words out of context to try and suggest Linus and Greg were being aggressive monsters on the Kernel Mailing List — something she equates with physical violence on her blog.

Sarah Sharp is a member of the Ada Initiative's Advisory Board, the group that is apparently behind the attempt to frame Linus, among others, for sexual misconduct.

Submission + - Lessons From a Decade of IT Failures - IEEE Spectrum (ieee.org)

Submitted by mixed_signal
mixed_signal writes: IEEE Spectrum has an online set of articles, or "lessons," on why big IT projects have failed, including analysis of the impacts of failed systems and the life cycles of failed projects. From the summary: "To commemorate the last decade’s worth of failures, we organized and analyzed the data we’ve collected. We cannot claim—nor can anyone, really—to have a definitive, comprehensive database of debacles. Instead, from the incidents we have chronicled, we handpicked the most interesting and illustrative examples of big IT systems and projects gone awry and created the five interactives featured here. Each reveals different emerging patterns and lessons. Dive in to see what we’ve found. One big takeaway: While it’s impossible to say whether IT failures are more frequent now than in the past, it does seem that the aggregate consequences are worse."
The Almighty Buck

Samsung Pay Launches In the United States 105

Posted by samzenpus from the pay-another-way dept.
An anonymous reader writes: Ready to take on Apple Pay and Android Pay, Samsung Pay is now live in the United States. The service has already launched in South Korea, where it saw over $30 million in transactions its first month. The Verge reports: "Samsung Pay may be more capable than other competing services, but its availability has some limits. First, it's only built into Samsung's newest devices: the Galaxy S6, the S6 Edge and Edge+, and the Note 5. You also need a credit or debit card from Visa, MasterCard, or American Express card, and it has to be issued by one of just a few banks: Bank of America, Citi, American Express, and US Bank are available at launch. (Samsung Pay also works with customer loyalty cards.)"

Submission + - The UK's war on porn: turning ISPs into parents (spiked-online.com)

Submitted by SMABSA
SMABSA writes: With British Prime Minister David Cameron announcing plans for porn users to be required to register their bank account/debit card as a means of age verification — Spiked-Online writer Stephen Beard explores the privacy implications, technical feasibility and motivations of such a plan.

Submission + - Police destroy cameras, but forget one? Footage ruled illegal eavesdropping (voiceofoc.org)

Submitted by Jack9
Jack9 writes: As kafkaesque nightmares continue to mount, here's a pot-related event from southern california. The video of Santa Ana police officers raiding (no arrests) a dispensary, has gone viral. This resulted in some light harassment and edible consumption, by the undercover and uniformed participants. A judge has ruled that the recording, ostensibly from cameras the officers failed to destroy, has violated the privacy of said officers. The footage has been temporarily quashed as it would do "irreparable harm" to the officers, while being investigated by internal affairs.

Submission + - Could there be another Little Ice Age coming in 2030?

Submitted by Hussman32
Hussman32 writes: According to an article in the Royal Astronomical Society "A new model of the Sun’s solar cycle is producing unprecedentedly accurate predictions of irregularities within the Sun’s 11-year heartbeat. The model draws on dynamo effects in two layers of the Sun, one close to the surface and one deep within its convection zone. Predictions from the model suggest that solar activity will fall by 60 per cent during the 2030s to conditions last seen during the ‘mini ice age’ that began in 1645."

Will the changes in solar behavior lead to a new Maunder Minimum?
 

Submission + - Thanks to the Montreal Protocol, we avoided severe ozone depletion (techienews.co.uk)

Submitted by hypnosec
hypnosec writes: Concentrations of ozone depleting chemicals was at its peak in 1993, but over the years they have declined and a new research points out that the Montreal Protocol, which came into force in 1987, has played a major role in not only ensuring that use of these chemicals is reduced, but has also helped us avoid a severe ozone depletion.

Submission + - The Machines Are Coming

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: Zeynep Tufekci writes in an op-ed at the NYT that machines can now process regular spoken language and not only recognize human faces, but also read their expressions. Machines can classify personality types, and have started being able to carry out conversations with appropriate emotional tenor. Machines are getting better than humans at figuring out who to hire, who’s in a mood to pay a little more for that sweater, and who needs a coupon to nudge them toward a sale. It turns out that most of what we think of as expertise, knowledge and intuition is being deconstructed and recreated as an algorithmic competency, fueled by big data. "Machines aren’t used because they perform some tasks that much better than humans, but because, in many cases, they do a “good enough” job while also being cheaper, more predictable and easier to control than quirky, pesky humans," writes Tufekci. "Technology in the workplace is as much about power and control as it is about productivity and efficiency."

According to Tufekci technology is being used in many workplaces: to reduce the power of humans, and employers’ dependency on them, whether by replacing, displacing or surveilling them. Optimists insist that we’ve been here before, during the Industrial Revolution, when machinery replaced manual labor, and all we need is a little more education and better skills but Tufekci says that one historical example is no guarantee of future events. "Confronting the threat posed by machines, and the way in which the great data harvest has made them ever more able to compete with human workers, must be about our priorities," concludes Tufekci. "This problem is not us versus the machines, but between us, as humans, and how we value one another."

Submission + - NASA's ARM will take a boulder from an asteroid and take it to lunar orbit (examiner.com)

Submitted by MarkWhittington
MarkWhittington writes: NASA announced more details of its controversial asteroid redirect mission. The space agency has chosen to not snag an asteroid in deep space and move it to a retrograde orbit around the moon. Instead, an uncrewed spacecraft with a solar electric propulsion system will snag a boulder off of a larger asteroid and bring it to lunar orbit for an Orion spacecraft to visit.

Submission + - FDA finds herbal supplements at GNC, Walmart don't contain what they claim

Submitted by MikeChino
MikeChino writes: The New York State Attorney General's Office is demanding that GNC, Walmart, Walgreens, and Target remove store brand herbal supplements from their shelves after the pills were found to be packed with a strange array of fraudulent—and in some cases hazardous—ingredients. Popular supplements such as ginseng, valerian root, and St. John's wort sold under store brand names at the four major retailers were found to contain powdered rice, asparagus, and even houseplants, while being completely void of any of the ingredients on the label.

Submission + - The January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics is a free PDF download (fastcompany.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: If you wanted to pinpoint the beginning of the PC era, you could do worse than to declare that it began when the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics magazine came out. It cover-featured the MITS Altair 8800, the first successful PC, and inspired Paul Allen and Bill Gates to found "Micro-Soft." I wrote about the issue, which is now available for free in PDF form (along with every other issue of Popular Electronics).

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