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Submission + - Someone is trolling the Linux kernel mailing lists really hard (themukt.com) 1

Submitted by sfcrazy
sfcrazy writes: Someone named Nicholas Krause is all over the Linux kernel mailing lists. Nick seems to have ‘started’ his kernel journey by posting a message about ‘finding’ a kernel developer jot at the kernel hub. Later he graduated to become a ‘patcher’ akin to ‘Transporter’ of Jason Statham and started sending patches to different kernel mailing lists. There are many theories around why the patcher might be doing it. Some say that he is writing a University Thesis on trolling the kernel development process (either by seeing if an obviously broken patch could be snuck past the peer review system, or to see if he can try to get someone to lose their temper much like Linus is supposed to do all the time — not realizing that this only happens to people who really should know better, not to clueless newbies), are that he’s a badly written AI chatbot, or just a clueless high school student with more tenacity than one usually expects at that age,” says Theodore.

Submission + - Spain's Link Tax Taxes My Patience (computerworld.com)

Submitted by rsmiller510
rsmiller510 writes: Spain's new tax on linking to Spanish newspaper articles is ill defined and short sighted and ends up protecting a dying industry, while undermining a vibrant one. In another case of disrupted industries turning to lawmakers to solve their problems, this one makes no sense at all, especially given the state of the Spanish economy and the fact that it comes 15 years too late to even matter.

Submission + - Snowden reveals scale of US aid to Israel which explains turmoil in Middle East

Submitted by ltorvalds11
ltorvalds11 writes: The turmoil gripping the Middle East is a direct result of the provision of cash, weapons and surveillance to Israel by the US, the latest Snowden leak illustrates. In a bold examination, the former Guardian journalist reveals the amazing contrast between what the United States says publicly, and what it does behind the curtain.
In fact, "the single largest exchange between NSA and ISNU (Israeli SIGINT National Unit) is on targets in the Middle East which constitute strategic threats to US and Israeli interests," the leaked paper reveals. One of the "key priorities" of this cooperation is "the Iranian nuclear development program, followed by Syrian nuclear efforts, Lebanese Hizbullah plans and intentions, Palestinian terrorism, and Global Jihad." The paper talks about "targeting and exploiting" these. Greenwald goes on to list the occasions on which the US has been exposed as supplying arms to Israel;
the last such occasion was just before the start of the operation in Gaza, wherein a $1 billion stockpile of ammunition the US stored in Israel specifically for situations like these was used.

Comment Re:Disengenous (Score 2) 306

by mspohr (#47570565) Attached to: Amazon's eBook Math

I'm sure Amazon has the data to back up their economic argument of the relative sales at 9.99 vs 14.99 for most books.
They want to sell more books and generate more revenue. This helps them, the publishers and authors.
I don't see anything evil here.

Submission + - New tools help neuroscientists analyze 'big data' (esciencenews.com)

Submitted by mspohr
mspohr writes: "New technologies for monitoring brain activity are generating unprecedented quantities of information. That data may hold new insights into how the brain works — but only if researchers can interpret it. To help make sense of the data, neuroscientists can now harness the power of distributed computing with Thunder, a library of tools developed at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Janelia Research Campus.
"Freeman chose to build on a new platform called Spark. Developed at the University of California, Berkeley's AMPLab, Spark is rapidly becoming a favored tool for large-scale computing across industry, Freeman says. Spark's capabilities for data caching eliminates the bottleneck of loading a complete data set for all but the initial step, making it well-suited for interactive, exploratory analysis, and for complex algorithms requiring repeated operations on the same data. And Spark's elegant and versatile application programming interfaces (APIs) help simplify development. Thunder uses the Python API, which Freeman hopes will make it particularly easy for others to adopt, given Python's increasing use in neuroscience and data science.
Researchers can find everything they need to begin using the open source library of tools at http://freeman-lab.github.io/t...
To make Spark suitable for analyzing a broad range of neuroscience data — information about connectivity and activity collected from different organisms and with different techniques — Freeman first developed standardized representations of data that were amenable to distributed computing. He then worked to express typical neuroscience workflows into the computational language of Spark."

Submission + - STEM worker shortage is IT industry fantasy (usatoday.com) 1

Submitted by Tailhook
Tailhook writes: Ron Hira, professor of public policy at Howard University and Paula Stephan is a professor of economics at Georgia State University; `As longtime researchers of the STEM workforce and immigration who have separately done in-depth analyses on these issues, and having no self-interest in the outcomes of the legislative debate, we feel compelled to report that none of us has been able to find any credible evidence to support the IT industry's assertions of labor shortages.' — `there is a remarkable concurrence among a wide range of researchers that there is an ample supply of American workers (native and immigrant, citizen and permanent resident) who are willing and qualified to fill the high-skill jobs in this country. The only real disagreement is whether supply is two or three times larger than the demand.'

Submission + - Internet Census 2012 Data Examined: Authentic but Chaotic and Unetical (sigcomm.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A team of researchers at the TU Berlin and RWTH Aachen presented an analysis of the Internet Census 2012 data set in the July edition of the ACM Sigcomm Computer Communication Review journal. After its release on March 17, 2013 by an anonymous author, the Internet Census data created an immediate media buzz, mainly due to its unethical data collection methodology that exploited default passwords to form the Carna botnet.
The now published analysis suggests that the released data set is authentic and not faked, but also reveals a rather chaotic picture. The Census suffers from a number of methodological flaws and also lacks meta-data information, which renders the data unusable for many further analyses. As a result, the researchers have not been able to verify several claims that the anonymous author(s) made in the published Internet Census report. The researchers also point to similar but legal efforts measuring the Internet and remark that the illegally measured Internet Census 2012 is not only unethical but might have been overrated by the press.

Submission + - Collaboration isn't what they taught you in school (opensource.com)

Submitted by jenwike
jenwike writes: Throughout most of my education, I was taught that collaboration was cheating. With the exception of teacher-sanctioned group projects, I had learned that working with others to solve problems was not acceptable. So, when I got to college and the first assignment in my computer science class was to read an article about the benefits of pairwise programming and open source, I was very confused. Fast forward about nine months. I applied for a marketing internship at Red Hat and had just been offered the job. Here's what I learned about real collaboration in the workplace. (by Kristen DeMaria)

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