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Submission + - Will Overselling Global Warming Lead To A New Scientific Dark Age? 5

Submitted by Hugh Pickens DOT Com
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes: Patrick Michaels writes in Forbes that atmospheric physicist Garth Paltridge has laid out several well-known uncertainties in climate forecasting including our inability to properly simulate clouds that are anything like what we see in the real world, the embarrassing lack of average surface warming now in its 17th year, and the fumbling (and contradictory) attempts to explain it away. According to Paltridge, an emeritus professor at the University of Tasmania and a fellow of the Australian Academy of Science, virtually all scientists directly involved in climate prediction are aware of the enormous uncertainties associated with their product. How then is it that those of them involved in the latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) can put their hands on their hearts and maintain there is a 95 per cent probability that human emissions of carbon dioxide have caused most of the global warming that has occurred over the last several decades? In short, there is more than enough uncertainty about the forecasting of climate to allow normal human beings to be at least reasonably hopeful that global warming might not be nearly as bad as is currently touted. Climate scientists, and indeed scientists in general, are not so lucky. They have a lot to lose if time should prove them wrong. "In the light of all this, we have at least to consider the possibility that the scientific establishment behind the global warming issue has been drawn into the trap of seriously overstating the climate problem—or, what is much the same thing, of seriously understating the uncertainties associated with the climate problem—in its effort to promote the cause," writes Paltridge. "It is a particularly nasty trap in the context of science, because it risks destroying, perhaps for centuries to come, the unique and hard-won reputation for honesty which is the basis of society’s respect for scientific endeavor."

Submission + - T-Mobile Writes The Best Press Release You'll Ever See From A Phone Company (techdirt.com)

Submitted by Reverand Dave
Reverand Dave writes: At the beginning of January, AT&T directly began offering T-Mobile users $450 to switch. Apparently the company has realized that if it can't buy T-Mobile directly, it might as well just buy its customers. Now, most companies when targeted by a larger competitor in this manner might sort through a variety of responses, and I'm sure at some point, perhaps late at night under the influence of an extra alcoholic beverage or two, someone might suggest the following. But to actually go ahead with it... well... that's a bit bold. In short, T-Mobile flips the offer on its head, noting that since it only applies to T-Mobile users, AT&T users now have a "risk free" way to test out T-Mobile — and they throw in hilarious fake quotes from AT&T Mobility's CEO, Ralph de la Vega, mock the "death star" and a variety of other things you don't normally see in a telco press release — such as comparing de la Vega to Darth Vader.

Submission + - "Honey Encryption" to Bamboozle Attackers with Fake Secrets

Submitted by Hugh Pickens DOT Com
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes: Tom Simonite writes at MIT Technology Review that security researcher Ari Juels says that trickery is the missing component from the cryptography protecting sensitive data and proposes a new encryption system with a devious streak. It gives encrypted data an additional layer of protection by serving up fake data in response to every incorrect guess of the password or encryption key. If the attacker does eventually guess correctly, the real data should be lost amongst the crowd of spoof data. The new approach could be valuable given how frequently large encrypted stashes of sensitive data fall into the hands of criminals. Some 150 million usernames and passwords were taken from Adobe servers in October 2013, for example. If an attacker uses software to make 10,000 attempts to decrypt a credit card number, for example, they would get back 10,000 different fake credit card numbers. “Each decryption is going to look plausible,” says Juels. “The attacker has no way to distinguish a priori which is correct.” Juels previously worked with Ron Rivest, the “R” in RSA, to develop a system called Honey Words to protect password databases by also stuffing them with false passwords. Juels says that by now enough password dumps have leaked online to make it possible to create fakes that accurately mimic collections of real passwords and is currently working on creating the fake password vault generator needed for Honey Encryption to be used to protect password managers. This generator will draw on data from a small collection of leaked password manager vaults, several large collections of leaked passwords, and a model of real-world password use built into a powerful password cracker. "Honeywords and honey-encryption represent some of the first steps toward the principled use of decoys, a time-honored and increasingly important defense in a world of frequent, sophisticated, and damaging security breaches."

Submission + - This 400-HP 3-Cylinder Race Car Engine Can Fit In Your Hands 2

Submitted by cartechboy
cartechboy writes: Motorsports used to be about lots of horsepower, torque, and big engines. In recent years there's been a shift to downsizing engines, using less fuel, and even using alternative energy such as clean diesel and hybrid powertrains. Today Nissan unveiled a 400-horsepower 1.5-liter three-cylinder turbocharged engine that weighs only 88 pounds. This engine will be part of the advanced plug-in hybrid drivetrain that will power the ZEOD RC electrified race car that will run in the 2015 LMP1 class during the race season. Nissan says the driver of the ZEOD RC will be able to switch between electric power and gasoline power with the batteries being recharged via regenerative braking. Even more impressive, according to Nissan, for every hour the ZEOD RC races, the car will be able to run one lap of the Le Mans' 8.5-mile Circuit de la Sarthe on electric power alone. If true, that will make it the first race car in history to complete a lap during a formal race with absolutely zero emissions. If this all works, we could be witnessing the future of motorsports unfold before our eyes later this year when the ZEOD RC makes its race debut at this year's Le Mans 24 Hours in June.

Submission + - Nintendo Considering Mobile After 3rd Straight Annual Loss (readwrite.com)

Submitted by redletterdave
redletterdave writes: After forecasting a third straight annual loss on Friday, Nintendo president Satoru Iwata said the company is considering a big shift which could possibly—finally—place its hit game franchises like Super Mario Bros. and Zelda in the hands of iOS and Android users. 'We are thinking about a new business structure,' Iwata said at a press conference. 'Given the expansion of smart devices, we are naturally studying how smart devices can be used to grow the game-player business. It’s not as simple as enabling Mario to move on a smartphone.'

Submission + - End of Moore's Law forcing radical innovation (computerworld.com)

Submitted by dcblogs
dcblogs writes: With Moore's Law the technology industry has been coasting along on steady, predictable performance gains. But stability and predictability are also the ingredients of complacency and inertia. At this stage, Moore's Law may be more analogous to golden handcuffs than to innovation. With its end, systems makers and governments are being challenged to come up with new materials and architectures. The European Commission has written of a need for "radical innovation in many computing technologies." The U.S. National Science Foundation, in a recent budget request, said technologies such as carbon nantube digital circuits to molecular-based approaches including biologically inspired systems will likely be needed. The slowdown in Moore's Law, has already hit HPC and Marc Snir, director of the Mathematics and Computer Science Division at the Argonne National Laboratory, and a computer science professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, outlined, in a series of slides, the proplem of going below 7nm on chips, and the lack of alternative technologies.

Comment Double Dipping (Score 4, Informative) 229

This is called "double dipping". These providers are not supposed to be able to do this according to the common carrier rules. The subscriber pays and they get their allotment. Any other payments to "overlook" a data cap that are made by a third party violates the common carrier rules because it creates an unfair advantage for large companies. They can afford to pay a fee to basically make the little guy penalized (having the little guys data count against the subscriber). If the subscribers complained to the FCC this pilot project would be stopped dead in its tracks.

I fear though that the only people that would care are the technically minded subscribers. The others would be snowed by some marketing speak.

Submission + - Init wars: Debian inclining towards upstart as default (itwire.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: More than a month and a half after Debian leader Lucas Nussbaum asked the technical committee to decide on the init system to be used in the next release, Jessie, the discussion is still ongoing. But some committee members have taken positions and at this stage it looks like upstart will end up being the default.

Submission + - If UNIX Were a Religion 2

Submitted by Hugh Pickens DOT Com
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes: Charles Stross has written a very clever article where he describes the religious metaphor he uses with non-technical folks to explain the relationship between Mac OS X and UNIX. There is one true religion in operating systems says Stross and it is UNIX although there's also an earlier, older, more arcane religion with far fewer followers, MULTICS, from which UNIX sprang as a stripped-down rules-deficient heresy. If MULTICS is Judaism then UNIX is Christianity. By the mid-1970s there were two main sects: AT&T UNIX, which we may liken unto the Roman Catholic Church, and BSD UNIX, which we may approximate to the Orthodox Churches. In an attempt to control the schisms, the faithful defined a common interoperating subset of the one true religion that all could agree on—the Nicene Creed of UNIX which is probably POSIX. Stross says that today the biggest church in the whole of UNIX is Mac OS X, which rests on the bedrock of Orthodox BSD but "has added an incredible, towering superstructure of fiercely guarded APIs and proprietary user interface stuff that renders it all but unrecognizable to followers of the Catholic AT&T path." But lo, in the late 1980s, UNIX succumbed to the sins of venality, demanding too much money from the faithful and so, in 1991 Linus Torvalds nailed his famous source code release to the cathedral door and kicked off the Reformation. "The Linux wars were brutal and unforgiving and Linux itself splintered into a myriad of fractious Protestant churches, from the Red Hat wearing Lutherans to the Ubuntu Baptists." More recently, a deviant faith has sprung from Linux. "Android is the Church of Latter Day Saints of UNIX: hard-working, sober, evangelizing the public, and growing at a ferocious rate. There are some strange fundamentalist Mormon Android churches living in walled communities under the banners of Samsung and Amazon, but for the most part the prosperous worship at the Church of Google." Stross notes that as with all religion, those sects with most in common are the ones who hold the most vicious grudges against one another. "Is that clear?"

Submission + - Safeway Suspends Worker for SciFi Parody of His Firing

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: After making light of a bad situation — Safeway's closing of its Chicagoland Dominick's grocery store chain and termination of 6,000 workers — with a satirical SciFi YouTube clip, Dominick's employee Steve Yamamoto found himself suspended just one day before the grocery chain closed up shop for good. "My store manager got a phone call that she had to suspend me," Yamamoto told NBC Chicago. "I was like, 'Are you serious?' It's crazy as it is. I'm just dumbfounded." Perhaps Safeway was concerned that viewers of Yamamoto's video might think that aliens, robots, and monsters did Dominick's in, although the Chicago Tribune suggests financial machinations as a more likely culprit: "By pulling the plug on Chicago [Dominick's], Safeway could not only satisfy [hedge fund] Jana, but also generate a $400 million to $450 million tax benefit."

Submission + - Next Carsharing Advance: Electric Cars From A Vending Machine

Submitted by cartechboy
cartechboy writes: When you're in a waiting room and get hungry, what do you do? You hit the vending machine for a candy bar or some salty snack food. Now, if you're in China and you need to borrow an electric car from the local car-sharing service, you can do exactly the same thing: go and get one from the vending machine. Just like the Smart-car dispensers seen across Europe, the Kandi car-sharing service dispenses two-seat electric cars with a 75-mile range from a big tower that looks like a huge vending machine full of candy, errrrr, cars. It costs $3.25 an hour to rent one, and China hopes it'll help cut emissions from transportation. So the next time you're in China, and you need a car, just hit up the biggest vending machine you can find.

Comment Re:Yes, because moderation is oh so hard to do (Score 5, Insightful) 384

by DigiWood (#45795625) Attached to: Internet Commenting Growing Away From Anonymity

Companies like the ones you mentioned are all about not paying someone to do what to you and I would be something simple: Moderate the discussion. They also don't want the readership doing the moderation because that could potentially be at odds with the publications owners views.

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