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Submission + - The Apache Software Foundation now accepting BitCoin for donations (newsbtc.com)

Submitted by rbowen
rbowen writes: The Apache Software Foundation is the latest not-for-profit organization to accept bitcoin donations, as pointed out by a user on the Bitcoin subreddit.

The organization is well known for their catalog of open-source software, including the ubiquitous Apache web server, Hadoop, Tomcat, Cassandra, and about 150 other projects. Users in the community have been eager to support their efforts using digital currency for quite a while.

The Foundation accepts donations in many different forms: Amazon, PayPal, and they’ll even accept donated cars.

On their contribution page the Apache Software Foundation has published a bitcoin address and QR code. As of this afternoon, the address has already collected on the order of 4 BTC.

Submission + - Hal Finney, PGP and Bitcoin pioneer passes away

Submitted by brokenin2
brokenin2 writes: Hal Finney, the number two programmer for PGP and the first person to receive a Bitcoin transaction has passed away. From the article on Coindesk: "Shortly after collaborating with Nakamoto on early bitcoin code in 2009, Finney announced he was suffering from ALS. Increasing paralysis, which eventually became near-total, forced him to retire from work in early 2011."

Submission + - Watch This Inventor Survive a Fireworks Blast in a Metal Suit (dice.com)

Submitted by Nerval's Lobster
Nerval's Lobster writes: Labor Day is nigh, and with it the official end of summer. It’s time to pack away the umbrellas and beach towels, and perhaps spend a few minutes flipping through photos of all the fun times you had over the past couple months: the grilling, the trips, the fireworks oh yes, the fireworks Chances are pretty good that you’ve set off more than a few fireworks in your time. But Colin Furze, the British inventor and YouTube celebrity who once co-hosted Sky1’s Gadget Geeks? Well, he puts everybody’s love of fireworks to shame. He loves fireworks so much, in fact, that he built a giant metal suit so he could stand in the middle of an epic pyrotechnic display. No matter how good your own engineering skills (or strong your courage), it's inadvisable to try this at home. But it's sure fun to watch.

Submission + - Fraunhofer's Google Glass App Detects Human Emotions in Real Time (gizmag.com)

Submitted by Zothecula
Zothecula writes: Over a number of years, researchers at Germany's Fraunhofer Institute have developed software to measure human emotion through face detection and analysis. Dubbed SHORE (Sophisticated High-speed Object Recognition), the technology has the potential to aid communication for those with disabilities. Now the team has repurposed the software as an app for Google Glass, with a view to bringing its emotion-detecting technology to the world.
Google

Google Testing Drone Delivery System: 'Project Wing' 52

Posted by Soulskill from the ok-google-bring-me-a-pizza dept.
rtoz writes: Google's research division, Google X, is developing a fleet of drones to deliver goods. This drone delivery system is called "Project Wing," and Google X has been developing it in secret for the past two years. During a recent test in Australia, drones successfully delivered a first aid kit, candy bars, dog treats, and water to a couple of Australian farmers. The self-flying vehicle uses four electrically-driven propellers to get around, and it has a wingspan of about five feet. It weighs just under 19 pounds and can take off and land without a runway. Google's long-term goal is to develop drones that could be used for disaster relief by delivering aid to isolated areas.

Submission + - See No Evil: Kickstarter's humblest gaming story (redbull.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Interesting interview up today with the developer of See No Evil, a PC Steam game created by a 19 year old. The game is a remarkable mix of Monument Valley, Limbo and Hitman Go that relies heavily on sound as a puzzle mechanic, but perhaps what's most impressive about it is the back story: the game was pulled together using just $2,000 of Kickstarter funds, and successfully released, despite the last minute discovery of game breaking bugs which developer Gabriel Priske worked through the night to solve. It makes you wonder: if a teenager can deliver on his Kickstarter promises by himself, what were all the teams who have failed to doing with the cash they raised?
Transportation

For $1.5M, DeepFlight Dragon Is an "Aircraft for the Water" 76

Posted by timothy from the ok-I-want-one dept.
Zothecula writes No one with red blood in their veins buys a sports car and hands the keys to a chauffeur, so one of the barriers to truly personal submarining has long been the need for a trained pilot, not to mention the massive logistics involved in transporting, garaging and launching the underwater craft ... until now. Pioneering underwater aviation company DeepFlight is set to show an entirely new type of personal submarine at the 2014 Monaco Yacht Show next week, launching the personal submarine era with a submersible that's reportedly so easy to pilot that it's likely to create a new niche in the tourism and rental market.

Submission + - Google drops authorship with picture from search results.

Submitted by qubezz
qubezz writes: Did you notice the pictures of "experts" in your Google search results over the last few years? If a webmaster wanted a site to appear fancy and stand out in search results, a Google Plus profile had to link to your site, and pages recognized as articles needed continuous creation.

The "Authorship" feature, which rolled out in 2011 as another part of the Google+ social and real name marketing push, had its author profile pictures pulled from the search results in June this year. The remainder of the feature is now finally dead, with little fanfare.

Emil Protalinski at thenextweb.com (note the importance of author?) reports:

Google today stopped showing authorship in search results, meaning articles will no longer include a link to the Google+ profile of their author. The company says that it found the information isn’t as useful to its users as it hoped, and in some cases even distracts from the overall search results.
Transportation

How the World's Fastest Electric Car Is Pushing Wireless Charging Tech 49

Posted by timothy from the amping-up dept.
An anonymous reader writes With the first ever season of Formula E revving up in China next month, it's clear there's more to electric cars than Tesla. But the race cars hitting the track in Beijing don't have anything on the speed of Drayson Racing Technology's Lola B12 69/EV, which holds the record for the world's fastest lightweight electric car, and which uses the kind of power technologies that could one day have applications off the track too—like charging your phone wirelessly.
Wikipedia

Why Women Have No Time For Wikipedia 579

Posted by timothy from the busy-doing-real-stuff dept.
Andreas Kolbe writes Wikipedia is well known to have a very large gender imbalance, with survey-based estimates of women contributors ranging from 8.5% to around 16%. This is a more extreme gender imbalance than even that of Reddit, the most male-dominated major social media platform, and it has a palpable effect on Wikipedia content. Moreover, Wikipedia editor survey data indicate that only 1 in 50 respondents is a mother – a good proportion of female contributors are in fact minors, with women in their twenties less likely to contribute to Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation efforts to address this "gender gap" have so far remained fruitless. Wikipedia's demographic pattern stands in marked contrast to female-dominated social media sites like Facebook and Pinterest, where women aged 18 to 34 are particularly strongly represented. It indicates that it isn't lack of time or family commitments that keep women from contributing to Wikipedia – women simply find other sites more attractive. Wikipedia's user interface and its culture of anonymity may be among the factors leading women to spend their online time elsewhere.

Submission + - MIPS Tempts Hackers with Raspbery Pi-like Dev Board (linuxgizmos.com) 1

Submitted by __aajbyc7391
__aajbyc7391 writes: In a bid to harness the energy and enthusiasm swirling around today’s open, hackable single board computers, Imagination Technologies, licensor of the MIPS ISA, has unveiled the Creator C120 development board, the ISA's counter to ARM's popular Raspberry Pi and BeagleBone Black SBCs. The MIPS dev board is based on a 1.2GHz dual-core MIPS32 system-on-chip and has 1GB RAM and 8GB flash, and there's also an SD card slot for expansion. Ports include video, audio, Ethernet, both WiFi and Bluetooth 4.0, and a bunch more. OS images are already available for Debian 7, Gentoo, Yocto, and Arch Linux, and Android v4.4 is expected to be available soon. Perhaps the most interesting feature of the board is that there's no pricing listed yet, because the company is starting out by giving the boards away free to developers who submit the most interesting projects.
Canada

Canada Tops List of Most Science-Literate Countries 221

Posted by timothy from the one-end-of-the-moose-has-more-gravity dept.
An anonymous reader writes "A recent survey of scientific education and attitudes showed the Canadian population to have the highest level of scientific literacy in the world, as well as the fewest reservations about the direction of scientific progress (full report). A key factor is a high level of scientific knowledge among the general population (despite comparatively low numbers of people employed in STEM fields). Another is a higher level of comfort with choosing rationality over religious belief — only 25% of Canadians surveyed agreed with the statement "We depend too much on science and not enough on faith", as opposed to 55% in the U.S. and 38% in the E.U.

I also wonder if the vaunted Canadian healthcare system plays a role. When advances in medical science are something you automatically expect to benefit from personally if you need them, they look a lot better than when you have to scramble just to cover your bills for what we have now."
Red Hat Software

Brian Stevens Resigns As Red Hat CTO 39

Posted by timothy from the more-time-with-family dept.
darthcamaro (735685) writes Since November of 2001, Brian Stevens has been the CTO of Red Hat. As of August 28, that's no longer the case. Under Stevens' tenure, Red Hat transformed its business, adding Red Hat Enterprise Linux, acquiring JBoss, Qumranet, Gluster and Ceph as well as joining (and now leading) the OpenStack Foundation. So why did he leave? No official word, but apparently it is to pursue a new opportunity that Stevens just could not pass up.

Submission + - The downside of police having cameras 3

Submitted by Presto Vivace
Presto Vivace writes: Why do we object to people wearing Google Glass but call for police to be equiped with cameras? True wearing a camera would make it more difficult for officers to lie (unless the camera accidentaly breaks). But just as Google Glass picks up everything — so would a police offier's camera. Do we want that?
Cellphones

Judge Lucy Koh Rejects Apple's Quest For Anti-Samsung Injunction 30

Posted by timothy from the sound-reasoning dept.
The Associated Press, in a story carried by The Financial Express, reports that Federal Judge Lucy Koh has has rejected Apple's attempt to block the sale of several older Samsung smartphones that copied features in the iPhone. Wednesday's rebuff comes nearly four months after a jury awarded Apple Inc. $119 million in damages for Samsung's infringements on technology used in the trend-setting iPhone. The amount was well below the $2.2 billion in damages that Apple had been seeking in the latest round of legal wrangling between the world's two leading smartphone makers since the tussle began four years ago. The Register also carries the story, and notes Perhaps because the ongoing battle was turning the two companies into law firms rather than tech titans, the two agreed to abandon all patent lawsuits outside the USA earlier this month. However, Apple still wanted the infringing features extirpated from American stores, and was seeking to have phones nobody bought banned as ammo for future battles.

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