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Submission + - Dice Ruins Slashdot (slashdot.org) 12

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: In an attempt to modernize Slashdot, Dice has removed everything that made Slashdot unique and worthwhile and has turned it into a generic blog site. User feedback has been unanimously negative, but this is to no avail, and users will have to head elsewhere for insightful and entertaining commentary on tech news.

Submission + - Brooklyn Yogurt Shop Sting Snares Fake Reviewers for NY Attorney General 1

Submitted by Hugh Pickens DOT Com
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes: Reuters reports that nineteen companies caught writing fake reviews on websites such as Yelp, Google Local and CitySearch have been snared in a year-long sting operation by the New York Attorney General and will pay $350,000 in penalties. The Attorney General's office set up a fake yogurt shop in Brooklyn, New York, and sought help from firms that specialize in boosting online search results to combat negative reviews. Search optimization companies offered to post fake reviews of the yogurt shop, created online profiles, and paid as little as $1 per review to freelance writers in the Philippines, Bangladesh and Eastern Europe. To avoid detection the companies used "advanced IP spoofing techniques" to hide their true identities. "This investigation into large-scale, intentional deceit across the Internet tells us that we should approach online reviews with caution," said Attorney General Eric Schneiderman. "More than 100 million visitors come to Yelp each month, making it critical that Yelp protect the integrity of its content," said Aaron Schur, Yelp's Senior Litigation Counsel.

Submission + - Vote Seals the Fate of the Russian Academy of Sciences (scientificamerican.com)

Submitted by Lasrick
Lasrick writes: From the article: 'Russia's lower house of parliament, the State Duma, approved controversial reforms to the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS) on 18 September. More than 330 members of the Duma voted in favor of the law, with only 107 against, in a move critics say will deprive the 289-year-old body of its independence and halt attempts to revitalize Russia’s struggling science system.'

Submission + - Imprisoned Physicist Honored for Refusing to Work on Iran's Nuclear Program (physicscentral.com)

Submitted by I3MOUNTAINS
I3MOUNTAINS writes: Omid Kokabee, a University of Texas graduate student who has been imprisoned in Iran for more than two years, received APS's Andrei Sakharov human rights prize for refusing to collaborate on the country's nuclear program. In May, an Iranian court sentenced him to ten years in prison for "communicating with a hostile government" and receiving "illegal earnings." The so-called "illegal earnings" were the student loans he received while in Texas.

Submission + - Apollo astronaut Jim Lovell calls for NASA partnership with Golden Spike (examiner.com)

Submitted by MarkWhittington
MarkWhittington writes: Writing in the September 22, 2013 issue of “Space News” Apollo astronaut Jim Lovell, the commander of Apollo 13, endorsed the efforts of Golden Spike, a company attempting to develop a low cost method to land humans on the lunar surface for the first time since December, 1972.

Lovell has already signed on as an adviser to the commercial company.Now, however, he is suggesting a kind of public/private partnership to restart efforts to return to the moon. In effect he would either like the space agency to be Golden Spike's first customer or else to form some kind of partnership, perhaps leasing the lunar lander the company is developing for its private return to the moon effort,

Submission + - Microsoft Takes Another Stab at Tablets, Unveils Surface 2, Surface 2 Pro

Submitted by Dputiger
Dputiger writes: Microsoft has unveiled both the Surface 2 and Surface 2 Pro, updating the former with a Tegra 4 processor and the latter with a new Haswell chip. Among the additional improvements are a more comfortable kickstand with two height settings, 1080p displays for both devices, USB 3.0 support, better battery life, and a higher resolution camera. Pricing for the 32GB Surface without a Touch or Type Cover is set at $449

Submission + - Multi-Display Gaming Artifacts Shown with AMD, 4K Affected Too (pcper.com)

Submitted by Vigile
Vigile writes: Multi-display gaming has really found a niche in the world of high-end PC gaming, starting when AMD released Eyefinity in 2009 in three panel configurations. AMD expanded out to 6 screen options in 2010 and NVIDIA followed shortly thereafter with a similar multi-screen solution called Surround. Over the last 12 months or so GPU performance testing has gone through a sort of revolution as the move from software measurement to hardware capture measurement has taken hold. PC Perspective has done testing with this new technology on AMD Eyefinity and NVIDIA Surround configurations at 5760x1080 resolution and found there were some substantial anomalies in the AMD captures. The AMD cards exhibited dropped frames, interleaved frames (jumping back and forth between buffers) and even stepped, non-horizontal vertical sync tearing. The result is a much lower observed frame rate than software like FRAPS would indicate and these problems will also be found when using the current top end dual-head 4K PC displays since they emulate Eyefinity and Surround for setup.

Submission + - The NSA's next move: silencing university professors? (theguardian.com) 2

Submitted by wabrandsma
wabrandsma writes: From the Guardian:

A Johns Hopkins computer science professor blogs on the NSA and is asked to take it down.

A professor in the computer science department at Johns Hopkins, a leading American university, had written a post on his blog, hosted on the university's servers, focused on his area of expertise, which is cryptography. The post was highly critical of the government, specifically the National Security Agency, whose reckless behavior in attacking online security astonished him.

On Monday, he gets a note from the acting dean of the engineering school asking him to take the post down and stop using the NSA logo as clip art in his posts. The email also informs him that if he resists he will need a lawyer.

Why would an academic dean cave under pressure and send the takedown request without careful review, which would have easily discovered, for example, that the classified documents to which the blog post linked were widely available in the public domain?

Submission + - How Car Dealership Lobbyists Successfully Banned Tesla Motors from Texas (boykotx.org)

Submitted by Funksaw
Funksaw writes: In a political op-ed on his blog, long time Slashdot reader and contributor Brian Boyko (the guy who did that animated Windows 8 video) — now a candidate for state representative — explains how lobbyists from car dealerships successfully banned Tesla Motors from selling cars in Texas. From the Article:

Tesla Motors doesn't just present a case study of why a lack of campaign finance reform blocks meaningful reform on the issues that Democrats care about, like climate change and health care. A lack of campaign finance reform blocks reforms on both the Left and the Right. Here’s the big elephant in the room I'd like to point out to all the “elephants” in the room: With a Republican-controlled legislature, a Republican executive, and many conservatives in our judiciary, why the hell don’t we have free markets in Texas? Isn't it the very core of economic-conservative theory that the invisible hand of the free market determines who gets what resources? Doesn't the free market have the ability to direct resources to where they can most efficiently be used? I’m not saying the conservatives are right in these assumptions; but I am saying that our broken campaign finance system makes a mockery of them.

Submission + - Now PETA Wants to Sue People Who Leave Anonymous Comments (yahoo.com) 1

Submitted by MarkWhittington
MarkWhittington writes: PETA, or People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, is incensed over an article in the Huffington Post that details that organization's unsettling practice of euthanizing animals in a Virginia facility that many have assumed is a no kill shelter.

According to the New York Post, PETA wants to sue some of the people who have left comments on the article. The problem is that, following the practice of many on the Internet, many of the comments are under assumed names or are anonymous. PETA is attempting to discover the true identities of their critics so that it can sue them for defamation.

Submission + - Bombing suspect possibly caught in Boston after chase and shootout (bostonglobe.com)

Submitted by WolfWalker545
WolfWalker545 writes: Police chasing a carjacked Mercedes reported shots being fired, at some point the suspects managed to steal a Massachusetts State Police SUV, chase involved reported explosions and automatic weapons fire. One suspect was injured and has been reportedly linked to the Boston Marathon Bombing, manhunt in progress for the second suspect.

Submission + - Apple bans sale of comic book on all iOS app over explicit content (ign.com)

Submitted by RicardoGCE
RicardoGCE writes: Apple has banned all iOS apps from carrying Saga #12, a comic book created by Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples, and published by Image Comics. The reason for the ban is the depiction of oral sex appearing on the computer monitor that serves as the head of one of the characters. The content has been deemed pornographic, and sale of the comic has been blocked. Comixology will allow users to sync their purchases, however, so users of their app will be able to read the book on their i-devices, but they will not be able to buy it through the iOS version of the app.

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