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Linux

Submission + - What a Year for Linux (linux.com)

Submitted by
JClo
JClo writes: "The Linux Foundation releases year in review video today. Highlights include Torvalds' Millennium Tech Prize, Raspberry Pi, Android, Red Hat $1B, and more. Missing: Linus flipping the bird."
Government

Submission + - And the Noose Tightens (dropbox.com)

Submitted by
interval1066
interval1066 writes: "In a breathtaking new move by (another) little-known national security agency, the personal information of all US citizens will be available for casual perusal. The "National Counterterrorism Center" (I've never heard of this org) may now "examine the government files of U.S. citizens for possible criminal behavior, even if there is no reason to suspect them." This is different from past bureaucratic practice (never mind due process) in that a government agency not in the list of agencies approved to to certain things without due process may completely bypass due process and STORE (for up to 5 years) these records, the org doesn't need a warrant, or have any kind of over-site of any kind. They will be sifting through these records looking for "counter-insurgency activity", supposedly with an eye to prevention. If this doesn't wake you up and chill you to your very bone, not too sure there is anything that will anyway.
The story is behind a pay wall that I have access too so I copied the web page from the WSJ and put it in my public drop box folder."
The Matrix

Submission + - Is the Universe a Simulation? (phys.org) 2

Submitted by olsmeister
olsmeister writes: Ever wonder if the universe is really a simulation? Well, physicists do too. Recently, a group of physicists have devised a way that could conceivably prove one way or the other whether that is the case. There is a paper describing their work on arXiv. Some other physicists propose that the universe is actually a giant hologram with all the action actually occurring on a two-dimensional boundary region.

Submission + - Accelerometer for Physics Experiments. (instructables.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Hi Slashdot,
    I am in a high school Physics class and for a recent experiment to measure the acceleration due to gravity our teacher had us drop NXT bricks with accelerometers off of balconies to be caught by someone below. The problem was as you might guess and fortunately never happened was that if the NXT was missed $200 of NXT and sensors would be destroyed. As we were preforming the experiment I thought of a way to replicate the experiment with an Arduino and accelerometer for $50. Hope you like it!
Ben

http://www.instructables.com/id/Accelerometer-Shield-for-Physics-Class-and-beyond/
Math

Submission + - SmoothLife - A Continuous Conway's Life (i-programmer.info) 2

Submitted by mikejuk
mikejuk writes: Conway's Game of Life is well known, but what about a version that works not on a discrete grid but in the continuum? It has all of the features of Life, including gliders, and it really looks alive.
A paper published at the end of last year by Stephan Rafler described a generalization of Life to a continuous domain. He called it SmoothLife. Now we have a new video by Tim Hutton of SmoothLifeL (a particular version of the rule) in action complete with gliders — see the video.
Does it have a purpose? Does it have to?
Privacy

Submission + - Stallman on Unity: Canonical will have to hand over users' data to governments (benjaminkerensa.com)

Submitted by
Giorgio Maone
Giorgio Maone writes: "Ubuntu developer and fellow mozillian Benjamin Kerensa chatted with various people about the new Amazon Product Results in the Ubuntu 12.10 Unity Dash. Among them, Richard Stallman told him that this feature is bad because: 1. "If Canonical gets this data, it will be forced to hand it over to various governments."; 2. Amazon is bad. Concerned people can disable remote data retrieval for any lens and scopes or, more surgically, use sudo apt-get remove unity-lens-shopping."
Hardware

Submission + - Inside the Ultrabook factory (pcpro.co.uk)

Submitted by
Barence
Barence writes: "PC Pro has been given rare access to Samsung’s Korean HQ to find out what challenges were faced in making the slimmest laptop in the world.

The feature reveals the processes Samsung's designers went through to create the Series 9 laptop in only 9,000 man hours, such as how every laptop case starts life as a brick of aluminium, and how CNC machining hollows out the laptop’s body to within an accuracy of one-thousandth of a millimetre.

The feature also reveals the battery of stress tests each laptop design is put through. "To our right, a laptop is clamped tight to a metal plate, while a metal arm tirelessly thrusts a dummy D-SUB socket in and out of its right-hand edge. That metal arm repeats the process 4,500 times before the laptop moves to the next test bench, and the process starts again. Every port on the laptop undergoes the same process before it’s declared fit for purpose.""
Canada

Submission + - The city of Edmonton invite hackers to crack their voting system (edmonton.ca) 6

Submitted by
AchilleTalon
AchilleTalon writes: "2012 Jellybean Internet Voting Election

Offering Edmonton electors an Internet voting option will depend on the results of the 2012 Jellybean Internet Voting Election (Jellybean Election), a mock election being conducted by the City this fall. The purpose of the Jellybean Election is two-fold:

1 To gauge the readiness of Edmontonians to use internet voting as a valid alternative in the 2013 General Election
2 To test the technology and ensure the internet voting system meets the City’s expectations for voter privacy, security, auditability and usability."

Comment The "iPad Killer" is not in the $200 price range (Score 1) 657

by yanom (#40863175) Attached to: Why the Tablet Market is Really the iPad Market
Every time someone comes out with a cool, low-priced tablet (Kindle Fire, Nook Tablet, now Nexus 7) the media trumpets it as "the iPad Killer". But it never is, because those tablets occupy a different niche. There will not be an "iPad killer" tablet until there's one in the iPad's price range that truly is better. The Xoom came close...

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