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Medicine

Maybe You Don't Need 8 Hours of Sleep After All (theatlantic.com) 315

Posted by timothy from the depends-on-your-genes-perhaps dept.
schwit1 writes: You've heard of the Paleo diet, but the next big thing in health may well be the Paleo sleep schedule. A UCLA researcher studied three hunter-gatherer and hunter-farmer groups -- the Hadza in Tanzania, San in Namibia, and Tsimane in Bolivia, "who live roughly the same lifestyle humans did in the Paleolithic," as NPR reports -- and determined our ancient ancestors may not have slept nearly as much we thought, and may have actually slept less than modern Westerners. "People like to complain that modern life is ruining sleep, but they're just saying: Kids today!" Jerome Siegel tells the Atlantic . "It's a perennial complaint but you need data to know if it's true." Siegel found that members of the three aforementioned groups sleep between 5.7 hours and 7.1 hours per night. That's less than is recommended for our health, yet the groups seemed very healthy indeed. (And if you're feeling insomniac, some earlier Slashdot stories about sleep are also pretty thought-provoking.)

Comment Re:Isn't this a no brainer? (Score 1) 474

They will never be able to vet all the ads. I used to work for a major news website and the Ad Ops people there were always swamped. They also only knew a bit of HTML. There is no way they will be reading all that minified javascript.

The only way to prevent malware from occasionally slipping through the cracks would be to remove scripting.
Programming

Ask Slashdot: Selecting a Version Control System For an Inexperienced Team 325

Posted by samzenpus from the help-please dept.
An anonymous reader writes: I have been programming in Python for quite a while, but so far I have not used a version control system. For a new project, a lot more people (10-15) are expected to contribute to the code base, many of them have never written a single line of Python but C, LabVIEW or Java instead. This is a company decision that can be seen as a Python vs. LabVIEW comparison — if successful the company is willing to migrate all code to Python. The code will be mostly geared towards data acquisition and data analysis leading to reports. At the moment I have the feeling, that managing that data (=measurements + reports) might be done within the version control system since this would generate an audit trail on the fly. So far I have been trying to select a version control system, based on google I guess it should be git or mercurial. I get the feeling, that they are quite similar for basic things. I expect, that the differences will show up when more sophisticated topics/problems are addressed — so to pick one I would have to learn both — what are your suggestions? Read below for more specifics.
Debian

Debian Dropping Linux Standard Base (lwn.net) 220

Posted by Soulskill from the not-quite-as-standard-as-before dept.
basscomm writes: For years (as seen on Slashdot) the Linux Standard Base has been developed as an attempt to reduce the differences between Linux distributions in an effort significant effort. However, Debian Linux has announced that they are dropping support for the Linux Standard Base due to a lack of interest.

From the article: "If [Raboud's] initial comments about lack of interest in LSB were not evidence enough, a full three months then went by with no one offering any support for maintaining the LSB-compliance packages and two terse votes in favor of dropping them. Consequently, on September 17, Raboud announced that he had gutted the src:lsb package (leaving just lsb-base and lsb-release as described) and uploaded it to the "unstable" archive. That minimalist set of tools will allow an interested user to start up the next Debian release and query whether or not it is LSB-compliant—and the answer will be 'no.'"

Comment Re:Pretty easy, based on criminal records... (Score 4, Insightful) 244

by beakerMeep (#50597995) Attached to: Police Program Aims to Pinpoint Those Most Likely to Commit Crimes

A lot of parolees are placed at a serioius disadvantage though.
- Have trouble getting a job due to a record.
- Often have to pay ridiculously high fines and "fees" related to their processing and incarceration
- Rarely get good medical treatment for addictions.
- Were often forced into the system by a plea deal

If we are serious about preventing recidivism, we would lay better foundations for helping these people become productive members of society.

Sadly, the reality is that our society prays upon those least able to defend themselves. No one wants to stand up for a convicted ______.

Here's a link about the "fees" http://nation.time.com/2013/08...
Security

CIA Details Agency's New Digital and Cyber Espionage Focus 35

Posted by samzenpus from the better-late-than-never dept.
coondoggie writes: It's about 10 years late to the party, but come October 1, the Central Intelligence Agency will add a new directorate that will focus on all things cyber and digital espionage. The CIA's Deputy Director, David Cohen, said to a Cornell University audience last week that once the new Directorate of Digital Innovation (DDI) is up and running, "it will be at the center of the Agency's effort to inject digital solutions into every aspect of our work. It will be responsible for accelerating the integration of our digital and cyber capabilities across all our mission areas—human intelligence collection, all-source analysis, open source intelligence, and covert action."
The Internet

UrlHosted Experiment: Host Content Within the URL 138

Posted by timothy from the because-he-can-is-all-you-need dept.
New submitter graphicore writes to point out an experimental "unhosted" app that challenges the concept of the URL. By putting the post data after the # mark, the URL is (mis-)used as the data storage. You can store your data within your bookmarks list, host it via a URL-shortener(!) like here: http://goo.gl/DYxr5m or attach it directly to a tweet I also attached the full-url to this slashdot post :-) This raises the question about who is hosting the content and it will probably break the internet. This is a quote from Google's shortener policy: "Please remember that goo.gl directs you to content that is already in existence on the internet. This is not content hosted by Google." It could also become a storage strategy for any other web app. The app is GPL v3, no strings attached. And there's always DNS, too.
Privacy

Finnish Politician Suggests Embedding Chips In Citizens To Protect the Welfare State 312

Posted by timothy from the logical-conclusions dept.
New submitter janit writes that social benefits to Finnish citizens living outside of Finland have in recent days been the cause of controversy, and links to an article which suggests just how much of a controversy: A politician from the True Finns Party, Pasi Mäenranta, is also worried about the abuse of the benefits. He published a post on Facebook, where he suggests that all Finnish citizens leaving the country be embedded with an identification chip. Sounds like a parallel system might be a popular idea with some U.S. presidential candidates, too.

Comment Re:Wow Finland! (Score 1) 330

by beakerMeep (#50289479) Attached to: Finnish Police: If You See Uber Car, Call 911

In Finland?

You know that's the price for a corporate medallion too, right? That's what outs him. It's a particular segment of a completely unrelated market. You think that applies? Check out his other posts on uber, he drops that shit in everywhere. His info is not out of date, he is just lying. That $1 million number is a favorite talking point of the pro-uber zealots, because it's big and lacks context.

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