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Submission + - James Lovelock reflects on Gaia's legacy (nature.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: "A lot of investment in green technology has been a giant scam, if well intentioned."

The quote, and entire interview, are significant for two reasons. First, the interview is seeped with many skeptical opinions about human caused global warming, is very critical of that movement's effort to politicize science, and the person being interviewed is James Lovelock, the founder of of the concept of Gaia, a former strong advocate of global warming but now a skeptic.

Most significant however is where the interview is published. It is in Nature, one of the most important and influential science journals, which previously has been aggressively pushing global warming politics for years. That they allowed these politically incorrect opinions within their walls and then broadcast them to their readers signals a major cultural shift within the science community. It is beginning to be acceptable to be a skeptic again!

Submission + - Coming Soon to a Restaurant Near You...Things You'd Rather Not See (nypost.com)

Submitted by TchrBabe
TchrBabe writes: So NYC is now considering equipping it's Health Department inspectors with Google Glass to provide a record of restaurant inspections. Will we now have FOIL access to these behind the scenes videos of our favorite restaurants? Do we even want to see what goes on behind the scenes? "Oh look Mabel, isn't that your cat that went missing?"

Submission + - Theo De Raadt's Small Rant on OpenSSL (gmane.org) 1

Submitted by raides
raides writes: Theo De Raadt has been on a better roll as of late. Since his rant about FreeBSD plating catch up (here), he has something to say about OpenSSL. It is worth the 5 second read because it is how a few thousand of us feel about the whole thing and the stupidity that caused this panic. Enjoy

Submission + - Scientist Investigates Most Painful Body Locations for Bee Stings

Submitted by Hugh Pickens DOT Com
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes: Pain is notoriously difficult to quantify. Many pain-rating scales have been developed to bridge the gap between a patient’s perceived pain, and the medical practitioner who is trying to relieve the patient’s pain. One such scale is the Schmidt Sting Pain Index developed when Justin Schmidt judged the painfulness of stings from 78 species of Hymenopter.Schmidt’s 4-point scale ranges from 0, a sting that cannot penetrate the skin, to 4, the most painful insect sting known. Only the bullet ant, Paraponera clavata, and the tarantula hawk, Pepsis grossa, were awarded a painfulness of 4 . Now Rod McPhee reports at the Mirror that Michael Smith – a postgraduate studying bee behavior at Cornell decided to explore how pain affects different body parts by forcing insects to sting him 190 times, literally from head to toe, over five weeks. “We speculated it probably really would hurt to get stung in the testicles. Two days later, by chance, I did get stung there. But I was really surprised that it didn’t hurt as much as I thought it would.” Smith, who previously studied bee-keeping at United World College of the Atlantic, took agitated bees in forceps and applied them to 25 different areas of his body. He then rated the resulting pain from zero to ten. The results? Although his testicles were the fourth worst place to be stung – with a pain rating of 7.0 – that was only equally as painful as being stung in the palm and the cheek. The penis was only marginally more uncomfortable with a 7.3 rating. His nostril with a rating of 9.0 was the most painful, with the upper lip not far behind on 8.7. “If you’re stung in the nose and the penis, you’re going to want more stings to the penis, over the nose –if you’re forced to choose. There’s definitely no crossing of wires of pleasure and pain down there. It’s painful. Getting stung on the nose is a whole body experience. Your body really reacts. You’re sneezing and wheezing and snot is just dribbling out. It’s electric and pulsating."

Submission + - Raspberry Pi's Eben Upton: How We're Turning Everyone Into DIY Hackers (readwrite.com)

Submitted by redletterdave
redletterdave writes: Eben Upton, cofounder of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, is generally credited as the magician behind this incredible machine. While working on his doctorate in philosophy at the University of Cambridge's computer laboratory, Upton painstakingly put together Raspberry Pi prototypes by hand. Today, Upton is CEO of the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s trading company, where he oversees production and sales of the Raspberry Pi. In a lengthy interview with ReadWrite, Upton shares how he invented Raspberry Pi, and what's coming next for the $35 microcomputer.

Submission + - Los Angeles Police Officers Suspected of Tampering with Their Monitoring System 3

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: An internal audit conducted by the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) in March revealed that 'dozens of the [voice] transmitters worn by officers in Southeast Division were missing or damaged.' In the summer of 2013, this same division was found to have mysteriously lost 45% of the antennae placed on their cars to pick up the signals sent by their voice transmitters. The Southeast Division of the LAPD covers an area that has 'historically been marred by mistrust and claims of officer abuse.' For decades, the LAPD had been closely monitored by the U.S. Department of Justice, but a federal judge in 2013 decided to end that practice after being assured by the LAPD and city officials that the LAPD sufficiently monitors itself via dash-cams and voice transmitters. A formal investigation is currently being conducted to determine whether or not police officers intentionally subverted mandatory efforts to monitor and record their patrols.

Submission + - Land Rover's Transparent Hood Is The Kind Of Automotive Tech That Excites Us 1

Submitted by cartechboy
cartechboy writes: Land Rover's Transparent Hood Is The Kind Of Automotive Tech That Excites Us

When we were kids, we were promised flying cars in the future, like The Jetsons . Well, now it's the future, and we don't have any flying cars. But Land Rover just unveiled some crazy new technology called the Transparent Hood system. It's brilliant in its simplicity, and yet quite complex in its implementation. Using a web of camera images and projectors, the Transparent Hood system projects the area just in front of and underneath the nose of the vehicle onto a head-up display along the lower portion of the windshield. Not only is this obviously breathtaking, but when it comes to off-roading—or parking in tight urban spaces—this could change the game. It will allow drivers to see precisely what's below them and immediately in front of them allowing precise placement of the vehicle's front wheels. The system also displays key vehicle data including speed, incline, roll angle, steering position, and drive mode. People, this is the future, and the future is now.

Submission + - Snowden's purloined documents are now available online (aclu.org)

Submitted by Frosty Piss
Frosty Piss writes: The ACLU and others have long suspected that the National Security Agency has gone far beyond its mandate of gathering information for counter-terrorism and foreign intelligence purposes. Many Those suspicions were confirmed when, on June 5, 2013, The Guardian released the first in a series of documents provided by Edward Snowden detailing the NSA's unlawful spying activities. All of the documents released since that day, both by the media and the government, are housed in a database maintained by the ACLU and accessible by the public on-line.

Submission + - Toyota is becoming more efficient - replacing robots with humans (bloomberg.com)

Submitted by bricko
bricko writes: Toyota is becoming more efficient by replacing robots with humans
Inside Toyota Motor Corp.’s oldest plant, there’s a corner where humans have taken over from robots in thwacking glowing lumps of metal into crankshafts. This is Mitsuru Kawai’s vision of the future.

“We need to become more solid and get back to basics, to sharpen our manual skills and further develop them,” said Kawai, a half century-long company veteran tapped by President Akio Toyoda to promote craftsmanship at Toyota’s plants. “When I was a novice, experienced masters used to be called gods, and they could make anything.”

Submission + - Tesla Model S has hidden ethernet port, user runs Firefox on the 17" Screen (dragtimes.com) 1

Submitted by FikseGTS
FikseGTS writes: A Tesla Model S owner located a 4 pin connector on the left side of the Tesla Model S dashboard that turns out to be a disguised ethernet networking port. After crafting his owns patch cable to connect with the Tesla’s port, a networking connection was established between the Tesla Model S and a laptop computer.

The Model S is running a 100 Mbps, full duplex ethernet network and 3 devices were found with assiged IP addresses in the 192.168.90.0 subnet. Some ports and services that were open on the devices were 22 (SSH), 23 (telnet),53 (open domain), 80 (HTTP), 111 (rpcbind), 2049 (NFS), 6000 (X11). Port 80 was serving up a web page with the image or media of the current song being played. The operating system is modified version of Ubuntu using an ext3 filesystem. Using X11 it also appears that someone was able to somewhat run Firefox on both of the Model S screens.

Is a jailbroken Tesla Model S on the way?

Submission + - Augmented reality on the cheap (kickstarter.com)

Submitted by mkwan
mkwan writes: A couple of years ago Slashdot ran the story of a baseball cap head-up display: http://hardware-beta.slashdot.... Well, the design has evolved into something a bit more practical, and it now has its own Kickstarter. Just as unfashionable as the Rift, but at a sixth of the price!
Supporting the hat is a new wireless protocol, the Compact Augmented Reality Protocol (CARP). Loosely based on X11, it is more compact than X and improves latency by removing acknowledgements, and adds features such as anti-aliasing and ARGB colours. It also provides AR-specific capabilities such as head movement events and a coordinate system based on degrees rather than pixels.

Submission + - Norwegian Skydiver Almost Gets Hit by Falling Meteor and Captures it on Film (universetoday.com)

Submitted by reifman
reifman writes: From the apparently not April Fools department: Anders Helstrup went skydiving nearly two years ago near Hedmark, Norway and while he didn’t realize it at the time, when he reviewed the footage taken by two cameras fixed to his helmet during the dive, he saw a rock plummet past him. He took it to experts and they realized he had captured a meteorite falling during its dark flight — when it has been slowed by atmospheric braking, and has cooled and is no longer luminous.

Submission + - Brendan Eich Steps Down as Mozilla CEO (mozilla.org)

Submitted by matafagafo
matafagafo writes: Mozilla Blog says:
Brendan Eich has chosen to step down from his role as CEO. He’s made this decision for Mozilla and our community.
Mozilla believes both in equality and freedom of speech. Equality is necessary for meaningful speech. And you need free speech to fight for equality. Figuring out how to stand for both at the same time can be hard......

Submission + - FWD.us Wants More H-1B Visas, But 50% Go To Offshore Firms

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: On the day the U.S. began accepting H-1B visa applications for FY2015, Mark Zuckerberg's FWD.us PAC stepped up its lobbying efforts for more tech visas even as ComputerWorld reported that the major share of H-1B visas go to offshore outsourcing firms that use visa holders to displace U.S. workers. "The two largest H-1B users," notes ComputerWorld, "are Indian-based, Infosys, with 6,298 visas, and Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), with 6,258." ComputerWorld adds that food and agricultural company Cargill is outsourcing IT jobs to TCS, including 300 in Minnesota, the home of Sen. Amy Klobuchar, a friend-of-Zuck and sponsor of the I-Squared Act of 2013, which would allow H-1B visa caps to rise to 300,000 annually.

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