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Submission + - What is this $41.8 Million of Ice Buckets going to do for ALS 1

Submitted by turning in circles
turning in circles writes: The New York Times reported that donations to ALS topped $41.8 million. This is great for raising awareness about this horrible disease. The disease is horrible because not only does it have no cure, no one really understands the causes of it. I have heard pharmaceuticals abused for not producing a cure, but they don't know how. Sorry to throw cold water on this party (ahem), but aren't there other worthy charities that are a little closer to actually helping people right now, or soon, that would be better to donate to?

Submission + - States with faster Internet speeds have smarter people, study shows 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The numbers—first crunched by the Internet provider comparison site HSI—show a distinct trend between faster Internet and higher ACT test scores. On the high end, Massachusetts scores big with an average Internet speed of 13.1Mbps, and an average ACT test score of 24.1. Mississippi, on the other hand, has an average speed of just 7.6Mbps and an average score of 18.9.

In between those two states, the other 48 fall in a positive correlation that, while not perfect, is quite undeniable. According to HSI's Edwin Ivanauskas, the correlation is stronger than that between household income and test scores, which have long been considered to be firmly connected to each other. The ACT scores were gathered from ACT.org, which has the official rankings and averages for the 2013 test, and the speed ratings were taken from Internet analytics firm Akamai’s latest report.

Comment Re:Or (Score 2) 82

It's Delaware. Give it a few years and there will probably be a form such as an electronic power of attorney, akin to a medical durable power of attorney, that will explain to the next of kin the rights and limitations of what can be passed on, and how to access the information. Probably other states will follow suit as soon as the wrinkles are worked out (and it is made clear what cloud-stored information is inheritable and what is not).

Comment Re:Moisture? (Score 1) 62

by turning in circles (#47700751) Attached to: The Data Dome: A Server Farm In a Geodesic Dome
Beaverton, Oregon, is near Portland, and it can get very humid there, so adding the additional humidity inherent in evaporative cooling could cause a potential problem. Of course, since there is no air conditioning, you don't have a condensation problem. I looked at some other sites that use evaporative cooling to cool servers, and the systems only need to cycle on ten minutes in thirty, even in 100F weather, so you could use the fans to mitigate humidity to some extent.

However, that being said, I don't see this idea working in really hot and humid climates, such as Alabama.

Comment Re:Attractive females even more likely to get fund (Score 1) 98

No no no! It's a communal/national bias? belief? also held by Google , the NSF, and other organizations, that there is a value in increasing women's participation in STEM and therefore gives money to projects that preferentially train/enable women in the sciences.

I don't believe Google and the NSF are run by women, and yet they share the bias. Also, at least for NSF, you don't have to submit a photo, so it's not just hot chicks . . .

Comment Re:Easier option (Score 1) 158

It's as easy to teach a dog to sniff money chemicals as cocaine - they are trying to make the system much cheaper by using solid phase microextraction to collect chemicals in the air or on clothing near the suspected subjects and then run gas chromatography/mass spec. Instruments are cheaper to maintain than dogs. Presumably while there may be trace amounts of cocaine in the bills, there will be lost of other chemicals in higher abundance so the Instruments will be able to find them with higher sensitivity.

I think if you wrap the cash in plastic and then take a shower and wash your clothes, you can outwit this - so if you know there is a cash-sniffing instrument, you just take a few extra steps and bypass this whole process. The only one happy is the engineers who got paid to develop the (soon to be out of date) cash-sniffing instruments.

Comment Re:Five Israeli Talking Points on Gaza - Debunked (Score 1) 868

by turning in circles (#47568685) Attached to: Gaza's Only Power Plant Knocked Offline
Bunked up or debunked? You give 5 points and spew on. I pick apart one data point which I found was 99% false. Can I trust the rest of what you wrote? With respect to Point 5, Israel uses Palestinians as human shields: One time, in 2004, Israeli soldiers tied a boy, aged 13 who, along with others, had been throwing rocks at their jeep, to the jeep and drove through the area they had driven through previously. The boy was afraid people would throw rocks at him. A law was passed in Israel in 2002 stating Palestinians could not be used as shields, and the Israeli soldiers were disciplined for this breach of the law. There is no evidence this has happened since. There is no evidence this ever happened in Gaza. There is no evidence this has ever happened when the soldiers believed they would have anything other than rocks thrown at them (since 2002). I don't accept this claim.

Comment The problem's not finding things on the internet (Score 2) 191

I'm more concerned about my searches - looking for things on the internet scares me. What you search for can define what you're thinking about more than what you find. For example, just today I was asked by a website, based on a search I ran, if I had metastatic prostate cancer. Umm, (long pause here because I don't have a prostate) no.

Submission + - Microsoft Wants To Keep The NSA Out Of Your OneDrive And Outlook Accounts (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: Ever since Edward Snowden leaked details on how the government had forced various IT companies to disclose information (or secured their willing cooperation), companies like Google, Facebook, and Microsoft have been desperate to regain their users' trust. Six months ago, Microsoft announced that it would re-engineer its products and services to provide a much higher level of security — today, the company revealed that it has reached an important milestone in that process. As of now, Outlook.com uses TLS (Transport Layer Security) to provide end-to-end encryption for inbound and outbound email — assuming that the provider on the other end also uses TLS. The TLS standard has been in the news fairly recently after discovery of a major security flaw in one popular package (gnuTLS), but Microsoft notes that it worked with multiple international companies to secure its version of the standard. Second, OneDrive now uses Perfect Forward Secrecy (PFS). Microsoft refers to this as a type of encryption, but PFS isn't a standard like AES or 3DES — instead, it's a particular method of ensuring that an attacker who intercepts a particular key cannot use that information to break the entire key sequence. Even if you manage to gain access to one file or folder, in other words, that information can't be used to compromise the entire account.

Submission + - NSA possibly using loophole for additional unconstitutional surveillance

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: By routing American traffic out of the country using either BGP or DNS attacks, a new research paper posits that the NSA could be using an Executive Order permitting unfiltered foreign data collection to justify thwarting its duty to protect the constitutional rights of American citizens. From a new article:

the lesser-known Executive Order (EO) 12333, which remains solely the domain of the Executive Branch — along with United States Signals Intelligence Directive (USSID) 18, designed to regulate the collection of American's data from surveillance conducted on foreign soil — can be used as a legal basis for vast and near-unrestricted domestic surveillance on Americans.

The legal provisions offered under EO 12333, which the researchers say "explicitly allows for intentional targeting of U.S. persons" for surveillance purposes when FISA protections do not apply, was the basis of the authority that reportedly allowed the NSA to tap into the fiber cables that connected Google and Yahoo's overseas to U.S. data centers.

Submission + - FTC Says T-Mobile Made Hundreds of Millions From Bogus SMS Charges (ftc.gov)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Today the FTC filed a complaint (PDF) against T-Mobile USA, alleging the carrier made hundreds of millions of dollars from bogus charges placed on customers' bills for unauthorized SMS services. "The FTC alleges that T-Mobile received anywhere from 35 to 40 percent of the total amount charged to consumers for subscriptions for content such as flirting tips, horoscope information or celebrity gossip that typically cost $9.99 per month. According to the FTC’s complaint, T-Mobile in some cases continued to bill its customers for these services offered by scammers years after becoming aware of signs that the charges were fraudulent." FTC chairwoman Edith Ramirez said, "It’s wrong for a company like T-Mobile to profit from scams against its customers when there were clear warning signs the charges it was imposing were fraudulent. It’s wrong for a company like T-Mobile to profit from scams against its customers when there were clear warning signs the charges it was imposing were fraudulent." According to the complaint, T-Mobile also made it hard for customers to figure out they were being billed for these services, failed to provide refunds when customers complained.

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