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Medicine

Measles Resurgent Due To Fear of Vaccination 668

Posted by Soulskill from the don't-take-medical-advice-from-nude-models dept.
florescent_beige writes "In the September Mayo Clinic Proceedings, Gregory Poland, M.D. writes that 'More than 150 cases of measles have been reported in the United States already this year and there have been similar outbreaks in Europe, a sign the disease is making an alarming comeback (abstract). The reappearance of the potentially deadly virus is the result of unfounded fears about a link between the measles shot and autism that have turned some parents against childhood vaccination.'" This follows the recent release of a massive review of studies into the side effects of vaccination, summarized here by Nature, which did not find convincing support for the idea that MMR shots caused autism.
Security

Get Cyber-Mercenaries Suggests Ex NSA, CIA Director 135

Posted by samzenpus from the watch-out-for-the-black-ice dept.
siliconbits writes "One of the architects of US foreign policy under George W. Bush, General Michael Hayden, suggested that the US Government should consider creating a "Digital Blackwater" during a conversation at an event called the Aspen Security Forum. Blackwater was the US private military group founded in 1997 and which has been renamed as Xe Services LLC, a move possibly linked with a number of controversies that arose after the company expanded its security-related operations into Iraq and Afghanistan. Recruiting mercenaries, Hayden suggested 'might be one of those big new ideas in terms of how we have to conduct ourselves in this new cyber domain.'"
China

Governments, IOC and UN Hit By Massive Cyber Attack 122

Posted by CmdrTaco from the because-mcafee-says-so dept.
fysdt writes "IT security firm McAfee claims to have uncovered one of the largest ever series of cyber attacks. It lists 72 different organisations that were targeted over five years, including the International Olympic Committee, the UN and security firms. McAfee will not say who it thinks is responsible, but there is speculation that China may be behind the attacks. Beijing has always denied any state involvement in cyber-attacks, calling such accusations 'groundless.'"
Government

Outgoing Federal CIO Warns of 'IT Cartel' In DC 198

Posted by Soulskill from the interweb-industrial-complex dept.
CWmike writes "In a wide-ranging discussion Friday with President Barack Obama's top science advisors, Federal CIO Vivek Kundra warned of the dangers of open data access and was sharply critical of government IT contracting, telling the committee: '...We almost have an IT cartel within federal IT' made up of very few companies that benefit from government spending 'because they understand the procurement process better than anyone else.' He added: 'It's not because they provide better technology.'"
Security

Los Alamos Fire Idles NSA Supercomputer 65

Posted by CmdrTaco from the disko-inferno dept.
ygslash writes "Among the many facilities shut down since Monday at Los Alamos National Laboratory due to the approaching wildfire is Cielo, one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world. The National Nuclear Security Administration's three national laboratories - Los Alamos, Sandia, and Lawrence Livermore - all share computing time on Cielo, according to Associated Press." Update: 06/30 14:48 GMT by S : As readers have pointed out, this article refers to the National Nuclear Security Administration, not the National Security Agency. Summary updated to reflect that.
Transportation

Scottish Scientists Develop Whisky Biofuel 172

Posted by CmdrTaco from the you-mad-geniuses dept.
RabbitWho writes "It gives a whole new meaning to the phrase 'one for the road.' Whisky, the spirit that powers the Scottish economy, is being used to develop a new biofuel which could be available at petrol pumps in a few years. This biofuel can be produced from two main by-products of the whisky distilling process – 'pot ale,' the liquid from the copper stills, and 'draff,' the spent grains. Copious quantities of both waste products are produced by the £4bn whisky industry each year, and the scientists say there is real potential for the biofuel, to be available at local garage forecourts alongside traditional fuels. It can be used in conventional cars without adapting their engines. The team also said it could be used to fuel planes and as the basis for chemicals such as acetone, an important solvent."

Comment Re:Cutting corners is the name of the game (Score 1) 383

by castle (#33006018) Attached to: BSOD Issues On Deepwater Horizon

Part of the problem *is* that it's not real money.

Overall it's just chits of debt to the federal reserve, if it were real money, you could run out, thus providing a sustainable feedback mechanism which would probably lessen the bad things that "capitalism" is being blamed for in this case, and others.

Corporations themselves rely on the states that define them. Liability shields and incestuous dealings with regulators (revolving doors and their attendant failures of regulatory oversight) abound in many industries.

In this instance you'd think the ridiculously low quality computers would be detected by the frequent audits of the private backers of the endeavor, if those backers had any sense. BP being a multinational plays by all the rules on paper, shit happens, since they just rent the land from the government, the landlord gets to pay the bills / suffer the consequences with little to no recompense when it all goes to hell.
Bug

Microsoft Says No To Paying Bug Bounties 148

Posted by timothy from the like-mel-gibson-in-ransom dept.
Trailrunner7 writes "In the wake of both Mozilla and Google significantly increasing their bug bounties to the $3,000 range, there have been persistent rumors in the security community that Microsoft soon would follow suit and start paying bounties as well. However, a company official said on Thursday that Microsoft was not interested in paying bounties. 'We value the researcher ecosystem, and show that in a variety of ways, but we don't think paying a per-vuln bounty is the best way. Especially when across the researcher community the motivations aren't always financial. It is well-known that we acknowledge researcher's contributions in our bulletins when a researcher has coordinated the release of vulnerability details with the release of a security update,' Microsoft's Jerry Bryant said."
Programming

Modern Day Equivalent of Byte/Compute! Magazine? 327

Posted by timothy from the must-have-tape-drive dept.
MochaMan writes "I grew up in the '80s on a steady diet of Byte and Compute! magazines, banging in page after page of code line by line, and figuring out how sound, graphics, and input devices worked along the way. Since then, the personal computer market has obviously moved away from hobbyists intent on coding and understanding their machines down to the hardware, but I imagine there must still be a market for similar do-it-yourself articles. Perhaps the collective minds of Slashdot can divine some online sources of fun and educational mini-projects like 'write your own assembler' or 'roll your own bootloader.'"
It's funny. Laugh.

Newsweek Easter Egg Reports Zombie Invasion 93

Posted by kdawson from the it-takes-braaains dept.
danielkennedy74 writes "Newsweek.com becomes the latest in a long list of sites that will reveal an Easter egg if you enter the Konami code correctly (up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, b, a, enter). This is a cheat code that appeared in many of Konami's video games, starting around 1986 — my favorite places to use it were Contra and Life Force, 30 lives FTW. The Easter egg was probably included by a developer unbeknownst to the Newsweek powers that be. It's reminiscent of an incident that happened at ESPN last year, involving unicorns."
Graphics

Intel Abandons Discrete Graphics 165

Posted by timothy from the out-of-the-lifeboat dept.
Stoobalou writes with this excerpt from Thinq: "Paul Otellini may think there's still life in Intel's Larrabee discrete graphics project, but the other guys at Intel don't appear to share his optimism. Intel's director of product and technology media relations, Bill Kircos, has just written a blog about Intel's graphics strategy, revealing that any plans for a discrete graphics card have been shelved for at least the foreseeable future. 'We will not bring a discrete graphics product to market,' stated Kircos, 'at least in the short-term.' He added that Intel had 'missed some key product milestones' in the development of the discrete Larrabee product, and said that the company's graphics division is now 'focused on processor graphics.'"
Image

Doctors Seeing a Rise In "Google-itis" Screenshot-sm 368

Posted by samzenpus from the sounds-like-rickets-to-me dept.
It's one of the fastest-growing health issues that doctors now face: "Google-itis." Everyone from concerned mothers to businessmen on their lunch break are typing in symptoms and coming up with rare diseases or just plain wrong information. Many doctors are bringing computers into examination rooms now so they can search along with patients to alleviate their fears. "I'm not looking for a relationship where the patient accepts my word as the gospel truth," says Dr. James Valek. "I just feel the Internet brings so much misinformation to the (exam) room that we have to fight through all that before we can get to the problem at hand."
Image

Programming Clojure Screenshot-sm 109

Posted by samzenpus from the read-all-about-it dept.
eldavojohn writes "Programming Clojure by Stuart Halloway was very near to the perfect book for me. It covers many things common to many Lisp languages while highlighting in moderate detail the things that make Clojure unique and worthy of some attention. The book spends a large amount of time dealing with the intricacies of interfacing fluidly with Java (down to a package rewrite inside a large project). This fits me perfectly as a Java programmer, and I now feel ready to experiment with peppering functional language capabilities into an object oriented language. The book also strives to show how to simplify multithreading through functional programming, which is good because I find multithreading in Java a serious headache that few are good at. Programming Clojure, released in May 2009, is currently the only book out there devoted to Clojure, and the introduction is written by the language's creator, Rich Hickey, who says, 'What is so thrilling about Stuart's book is the extent to which he "gets" Clojure.' The book earns its place on the Pragmatic Bookshelf by guiding the user through rewriting a part of Ant into a new build tool called Lancet — adding to the project what you just learned about Clojure at the end of each chapter." Keep reading for the rest of eldavojohn's review.
Movies

Submission + - Parts of Iron Man 2 costumes made on a 3D printer (bnet.com)

Submitted by bizwriter
bizwriter writes: The production company for Iron Man 2 the gloves that Robert Downey Jr. wore in the movie on a 3D printer. The technology let them control the fit of the piece down to 10 microns. Apparently in the first movie, the gloves fit badly, hampered the actor's movements, and kept falling apart, so someone had to keep putting them back together during shooting.

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