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Microsoft

Ballmer To Retire 633

Posted by Soulskill from the flying-chair-alert-level-green dept.
Today Microsoft announced that CEO Steve Ballmer will be retiring within the next 12 months. He said, "There is never a perfect time for this type of transition, but now is the right time. ... My original thoughts on timing would have had my retirement happen in the middle of our company’s transformation to a devices and services company. We need a CEO who will be here longer term for this new direction." Ballmer, 57, has been Microsoft's CEO since taking over the role from Bill Gates in January, 2000. The company's board of directors has formed a committee to find a replacement for Ballmer, and he will continue his duties until a new CEO is found. Questions about Ballmer's fitness to remain CEO have been circulating for the past several years, particularly after the company struggled to get a foothold in the mobile market. It will be interesting to see how this affects Microsoft's stock price. Upon retirement, Ballmer will be able to cash out hundreds of millions of dollars worth of Microsoft stock.

Comment Without validation, it's only a cool toy (Score 1) 128

Mr Aigon has since schooled himself in all the procedures for take off and landing and says he is able to fly his 'plane' just like a real-life pilot.

No. he's proven he's able to fly his simulator, not the real aircraft. An actual training flight simulator goes through an exhaustive validation to ensure it is accurately reproducing the aircraft within the envelope of interest. While he may have been able to get real cockpit parts to get the look of the real cockpit, there's no guarantee that his simulator reproduces the real flight envelope of the aircraft accurately, or that the system components were assembled in a way as to properly reproduce the aircraft system response. And training in an inaccurate simulator can be worse than training in no simulator at all.

Still, kudos for the DYI simulator. It's a cool grown-up toy, but it's not a training device.

Comment It's the market, stupid! (Score 2) 814

by wired_parrot (#44295749) Attached to: Hardly Anyone Is Buying 'Smart Guns'

I know people will try to make this an issue about gun regulation, but ultimately this just boils downs to market economics.

People who are in favour of gun regulation, and who would be for this type of device, by and large simply don't buy guns.

People who do buy guns - sportsmen, hunters, and other gun enthusiasts - tend to be against greater regulation, especially if it will additional costs in the purchase of their firearm.

The type of person who would buy these "smart guns" - a gun enthusiast who's willing to pay more to have more control on their firearms - is going to be very small at best. It shouldn't have come as a surprise to anyone that these guns weren't going to sell...

Comment Apollo artifacts are still US property (Score 1) 255

by wired_parrot (#44237145) Attached to: House Democrats Propose National Park On the Moon

Aren't all artifacts left by the Apollo missions still considered US property and therefore still protected by federal law? As far as I know, the US government never relinquished ownership, and therefore no additional protection is needed.

All this does is add unnecessary bureaucracy and administrative costs. Once this "park" is set up, the artifacts will have to be catalogued, regulations drafted, lawyers proficient in space law consulted -all this will be non-trivial expenses for little benefit.

Comment Full autonomy was never the goal (Score 1) 352

by wired_parrot (#43471781) Attached to: Why Self-Driving Cars Are Still a Long Way Down the Road
Full autonomy is not the immediate goal for most car companies. The more tangible near-term goal is to implement piecemeal aspects of technology as various "driver-assist" or safety devices. New cars on the market are already being offered with automatic parking, lane departure warning systems, autonomous cruise control amongst others. The goal is not to eliminate the driver but to reduce driver workload and eliminate the risk of accidents through various collision avoidance devices. Eventually, as automation in driver's seat increase the public may be more willing to accept a fully autonomous vehicle, but that was never the near term goal.

Submission + - CERN Gives Away Higgs Boson Particles To 10 Lucky Winners (ibtimes.com)

Submitted by redletterdave
redletterdave writes: In an unprecedented move sure to shake up the world of particle physics, CERN announced on Monday that it will give away its newly-discovered Higgs boson particles in a lottery. But given the rarity of Higgs boson particles – only one particle is created out of one million million collisions – CERN will only be able to reward 10 lucky winners. 'At CERN, we have always believed in sharing the results of our research, and the time has come to make that tangible,' said CERN director of research Sergio Bertolucci. 'This is our way of saying thanks for the incredible level of enthusiasm that has greeted this discovery.'
DRM

Submission + - Netflix streamed over HTML5 for ARM Chromebook, end of silverlight? (muktware.com)

Submitted by sfcrazy
sfcrazy writes: Netflix has pushed an update today to its Chrome Store app which brings support for the ARM-based Samsung Chromebook. This is a major change as instead of using Microsoft's Silverlight Netflix is using HTML5 video streaming (which now supports DRM for HTML5 on Chromebooks). Recently Google enabled the much controversial DRM support for HTML5 in Chrome OS to bring services like Netflix to Chromebooks using HTML5 instead of controversial Silverlight of Microsoft.
Star Wars Prequels

Submission + - This Isn't the Petition Response You're Looking For (whitehouse.gov)

Submitted by fractalVisionz
fractalVisionz writes: The White House officially responded to the petition to secure resources and funding to begin Death Star construction by 2016, as previously covered by Slashdot. With costs estimated over $850,000,000,000,000,000 (that's quadrillion), and a firm policy stating "The Administration does not support blowing up planets" the US government will obviously pass. However, that is not to say that we do not already have a death star of our own, floating approximately 120 miles above the earth's surface.

The response ends in a call to those interested in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) fields of study:

If you do pursue a career in a science, technology, engineering or math-related field, the Force will be with us! Remember, the Death Star's power to destroy a planet, or even a whole star system, is insignificant next to the power of the Force.
Security

Submission + - After Weeks Of Trying, UK Cryptographers Fail To Crack World War II Code

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A dead pigeon discovered a few weeks ago in a UK chimney may be able to provide new answers to the secrets of World War II. Unfortunately, British cryptographers at the country’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) have been unable to crack the code encrypting a message the bird was tasked with sending and say they are confident it cannot be decoded “without access to the original cryptographic material.”
Transportation

Submission + - With Pot Legal, Police Worry About Traffic Safety 13

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "AP reports that with Pot soon legal under state laws in Washington and Colorado, officials in both states are trying to figure out how to keep stoned drivers off the road as law enforcement officials wonder about whether the ability to buy or possess marijuana legally will bring about an increase of marijuana users on the roads. "We've had decades of studies and experience with alcohol," says Washington State Patrol spokesman Dan Coon. "Marijuana is new, so it's going to take some time to figure out how the courts and prosecutors are going to handle it. But the key is impairment: We will arrest drivers who drive impaired, whether it be drugs or alcohol." Marijuana can cause dizziness and slowed reaction time, and drivers are more likely to drift and swerve while they're high and Marijuana legalization activists agree people shouldn't smoke and drive. But setting a standard comparable to blood-alcohol limits has sparked intense disagreement because unlike portable breath tests for alcohol, there's no easily available way to determine whether someone is impaired from recent pot use. If scientists can't tell someone how much marijuana it will take for him or her to test over the threshold, how is the average pot user supposed to know? "A lot of effort has gone into the study of drugged driving and marijuana, because that is the most prevalent drug, but we are not nearly to the point where we are with alcohol," says Jeffrey P. Michael, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's impaired-driving director. "We don't know what level of marijuana impairs a driver.""
Government

Department of Homeland Security Wants Nerds For a New "Cyber Reserve'" 204

Posted by samzenpus from the grabbing-geeks dept.
pigrabbitbear writes "Just three weeks after Defense Secretary Leon Panetta told an audience at the Sea, Air and Space Museum that the U.S. is on the brink of a 'cyber Pearl Harbor,' the government has decided it needs to beef up the ranks of its digital defenses. It's assembling a league of extraordinary computer geeks for what will be known as the 'Cyber Reserve.'"
Earth

Earthquakes Correlated With Texan Fracking Sites 259

Posted by Soulskill from the all-your-fault dept.
eldavojohn writes "A recent peer reviewed paper and survey by Cliff Frohlich of the University of Texas' Institute for Geophysics reveals a correlation between an increase in earthquakes and the emergence of fracking sites in the Barnett Shale, Texas. To clarify, it is not the actual act of hydrofracking that induces earthquakes, but more likely the final process of injecting wastewater into the site, according to Oliver Boyd, a USGS seismologist. Boyd said, 'Most, if not all, geophysicists expect induced earthquakes to be more likely from wastewater injection rather than hydrofracking. This is because the wastewater injection tends to occur at greater depth, where earthquakes are more likely to nucleate. I also agree [with Frohlich] that induced earthquakes are likely to persist for some time (months to years) after wastewater injection has ceased.' Frohlich added, 'Faults are everywhere. A lot of them are stuck, but if you pump water in there, it reduces friction and the fault slips a little. I can't prove that that's what happened, but it's a plausible explanation.' In the U.S. alone this correlation has been noted several times."
Android

Submission + - Android SMS Malware Firm Fined £50,000 (sophos.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A Moscow-based firm has been ordered to refund victims who lost money as a result of Android malware.

Earlier this year, security firm Sophos discovered a malicious link that had been spread on Facebook — which would force an Android app to automatically download onto visiting smartphones.

The app, detected as Andr/Opfake-C, tricked users into believing they would have access to online games — but actually subscribed to a premium rate SMS service at a cost of £10.

Moscow-based firm (translated as Connect Ltd) is said to have made up to £250,000 from the scheme.

UK regulatory authority PhonepayPlus has fined the firm £50,000, ordered it to repay all victims and banned them from introducing other premium rate services without permission for the next two years.
Apple

Submission + - Apple working the broken patent system (informationweek.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A pretty tight op-ed on how apple used the broken parts of the patent system to gain a very favorable portion of the smart-phone market from a design perspective.

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