Follow Slashdot stories on Twitter

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Transportation

Texas Drivers Stopped At Roadblock, Asked For Saliva, Blood 783

Posted by Soulskill from the also-need-an-eyeball-scraping-and-a-chunk-of-lung dept.
schwit1 writes "Some drivers along a busy Fort Worth street on Friday were stopped at a police roadblock and directed into a parking lot, where they were asked by federal contractors for samples of their breath, saliva and even blood. It was part of a government research study aimed at determining the number of drunken or drug-impaired drivers.The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which is spending $7.9 million on the survey over three years, said participation was '100 percent voluntary' and anonymous. The 'participants' hardly agree."

Comment Re:Liberty is the only thing in danger here. (Score 1) 550

The really interesting thing here in my opinion is why all of those things have been ineffectual. It seems to start when the anti-gun lobby proposes a law with the intent of doing nothing other than hassling gun owners (safety is almost always given lip service but never actually intended). Then the pro-gun lobby shows up and strips the teeth out of the law, even if by sheer random chance it happens to make sense. The end result is a mess of really stupid and confusing gun laws that don't actually accomplish anything other than confusing everyone.

It's not actually very interesting at all. Every compromise between "shall not" and "may" initiated by "shall not" is always a win for "shall not" and always a loss for "may".

It doesn't matter if it's gun rights, abortion rights, voting rights, or anything else, really.
Security

FBI Reports US Agencies Hacked By Anonymous 156

Posted by timothy from the can't-quite-put-a-finger-on-it dept.
Rambo Tribble writes "Reuters is reporting that the FBI has issued a warning to several U.S. Government agencies that the Anonymous collective has hacked their systems. Included in the list of compromised agencies are the U.S. Army, Department of Energy, Department of Health and Human Services, and potentially many more agencies. The avenue of attack: Adobe Cold Fusion."

Comment Re:Pinball (Score 1) 283

by Applekid (#45436891) Attached to: In an arcade with only the following games ...

Which is a mistake of the poll. Six options refer to actual games, and one option refers to a genre. A potentially interesting poll is completely ruined.

How I would vote depends on WHICH pinball games where there. Faced with Black Knight or F-14 Tomcat the choice between whether to hit up the pinball or the video side is pretty easy.
Transportation

Why Letting Your Insurance Company Monitor How You Drive Can Be a Good Thing 567

Posted by Soulskill from the everybody's-an-above-average-driver dept.
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Kim Gittleson reports at BBC that car insurance firms like Progressive are trying to convince consumers that letting them monitor their driving behavior is actually a good thing. They say that the future of car insurance is not just being able to monitor individual drivers to give them lower prices, but also to make them better drivers. 'Now that we can observe directly how people drive, we think this will change the way insurance works,' says Dave Pratt, who says that Progressive has more than a trillion seconds of driving data from 1.6 million customers. '18-year-old guys pay a lot for insurance, but some 18-year-olds are really safe drivers and they deserve a better deal.' Better big data technologies, like the telematic driving data collected by car companies (PDF) or even information gathered from social media profiles, can help augment that risk profile. 'If I'm a driver that doesn't drive that frequently, and I have a pattern that would indicate that I drive more carefully than an average person with my profile, then I may be able to save 30-40% on my car insurance, and that's pretty significant,' says Joe Reifel. For now, using big data analytics for insurers is still in the early stages. Only 2% of the U.S. car insurance market offers an insurance product based on monitoring driving, but that proportion is projected to grow to around 10-15% of the market by 2017. And other countries, like Italy and the U.K., are already using the data to analyze not just risk profiles but also to determine who is at fault in car accidents. The future, most analysts agree is create a continuous feedback loop between insurers and consumers, so that consumers will react to the big data analyses that insurers perform and change their behavior accordingly. 'Bad drivers will at some point need to improve their driving or accept [having] to pay for the real risk they represent,' says Jacques Amselem."
Programming

Zuckerberg To Teach 10 Million Kids 0-Based Counting 295

Posted by Soulskill from the why-not-mix-things-up-and-start-at-pi dept.
theodp writes "'Why do programmers start counting at zero?' wondered Mike Hoye, questioning the conventional programming wisdom. Code.org will soon introduce the practice to a hoped-for audience of 10 million schoolchildren as part of Computer Science Education Week's Hour of Code. In a tutorial created by engineers from Microsoft, Google, Twitter and Facebook that's intended to introduce programming to kids as young as six years old, an otherwise breezy lesson featuring look-ma-no-typing Blockly and characters out of Angry Birds and Plants vs. Zombies, a Mark Zuckerberg video introducing the concept of Repeat Loops includes an out-of-place JavaScript example that shows kids it's as easy as 0-1-2-3 to generate 4 lines of lyrics from Happy Birthday to You by using zero-based numbering with a For-loop and ternary If statement. Accompanying videos by Bill Gates on If Statements and basketball star Chris Bosh on Repeat Until Blocks show the Code.org tutorial is still a work-in-progress. That's no big deal, since CSEdWeek has pushed back the delivery date for final Hour of Code tutorials from its prior little-time-for-testing due date to Dec. 9th, the first day of a five-day period during which teachers are expected to deliver the lessons to 10 million students."
Government

ATF Tests Show 3D Printed Guns Can Explode 233

Posted by timothy from the atf-vs-the-people dept.
Lucas123 writes "The ATF has been testing 3D printed guns over the past year and, not surprisingly, has found that depending on the thermoplastics, 3D printers and CAD designs used, some can explode on the first attempt to shoot them. The ATF published videos this week of the tests on YouTube showing what looked like a Liberator model of a 3D gun exploding upon being fired. Another model, created with the popular ABS polymer and an advanced printer, could fire as many as 8 shots. The tests were published at a time when a law passed in 1988 banning the sale of guns made entirely of plastic is set to expire next month." I hope they post the videos when they do the same tests on Solid Concepts' 1911.
Education

A Makerbot In Every Classroom 152

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the now-do-it-with-a-reprap dept.
Daniel_Stuckey writes "At the start of this year, President Obama nicely summed up the grandiose promise of 3D printing — or rather, the hype surrounding it. In his State of the Union address the president suggested the fledgling technology could save manufacturing by ushering in a second industrial revolution. That shout-out inspired a spate of buzzkill blog posts pointing out — rightly enough — that despite its potential, 3D printing is still in its infancy. It's not the panacea for the struggling economy we want it to be, at least not yet. Apparently the naysayers weren't enough to kill the 3D-printing dream, because, with support from the federal government, MakerBot announced its initiative to put a 3D printer in every school in America. The tech startup and the administration are betting big that teaching kids 3D printing is teaching them the skills they'll need as tomorrow's engineers, designers, and inventors." Caveat: Makerbot no longer produces open hardware, and they are pushing proprietary Autodesk software and educational materials as part of the free 3D printer. Makerbot also launched a call for open models of math manipulatives on Thingiverse (you might remember them from elementary school) so that teachers have something useful to print immediately.
Facebook

Facebook Patented Making NSA Data Handoffs Easier 137

Posted by Soulskill from the can-make-a-fortune-on-the-infringement-suits dept.
theodp writes "In June, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg blasted 'outrageous press reports' about the PRISM surveillance program, denying that Facebook was ever 'part of any program to give the U.S. or any other government direct access to our servers.' What Zuckerberg didn't mention, and what the press overlooked, is that the USPTO granted Facebook a patent in May for its Automated Writ Response System. Like the NSA-enabling systems described by the NY Times on the same day Zuckerberg cried foul, the patent covers technical methods to more efficiently share the personal data of users with law enforcement agencies (LEAs) in response to lawful government requests via APIs and secured portals installed at company-controlled locations. 'While handing over data in response to a legitimate FISA request is a legal requirement,' the Times noted, 'making it easier for the government to get the information is not, which is why Twitter could decline to do so.'"

Comment Re:BT (Score 1) 336

The worst part about third party installers like sourceforge is that it will ask you "I agree to the terms of agreement to install Ask.com toolbar" and then you uncheck it and it installs anyways. This almost never fails, and it's not fishy English, they install it regardless and blame it on a technical glitch.

The technical glitch was letting you uncheck it at all. :)

Comment Re:Good geeks? (Score 1) 388

by Applekid (#45373251) Attached to: The NSA Is Looking For a Few Good Geeks

This is exactly right, and those kinds of geeks are not "good" geeks. They are a kind of evil themselves.

Your rocket scientist reference is both correct and a good example of that: Oppenheimer famously replied to someone asking if he was bothered by the fact that his work was being used to kill lots of innocent people and his response was that his only worry was getting them to go up. It was someone else's job to worry about where they come down.

That's pure evil, right there.

What a shock: when we grant a monopoly on snuffing out liberties to the state, the only people who are attracted to working for the state are those with desires to snuff out liberties.

Slashdot Top Deals

Air pollution is really making us pay through the nose.

Close