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Submission + - H1B Records Being Destroyed by Feds

Submitted by Foofoobar
Foofoobar writes: On the tail of 100,000 layoffs by IBM, the Feds are deleting all long term electronic records associated with the H1B program. No reason was given and this would never have been noticed until the Labor Dept posted a note saying those records were no longer available. This directly inhibits ANY research on companies using these. What is the government trying to hide?

Submission + - Well, That Didn't Work: The Segway (wired.com) 1

Submitted by turkeydance
turkeydance writes: We were all supposed to be riding Segways by now. The company was supposed to be rolling in cash, the scooter’s inventor a modern day Jay Gatsby (minus the bootlegging and murder). It didn’t happen: Today, the Segway is a punch line, a way for mall security guards to prevent sore feet. So what happened?

It’s not that it didn’t work: Envisioned as a way for people to get from home to work in urban areas, the Segway is a technological marvel. It can maintain its balance better than a human and is much more fuel efficient than a car, which are a pain to drive and park over a short journey. No, the problems that sank the Segway weren’t technological. They were social.

Submission + - Bipartisan Bill Would Mandate Warrant To Search Emails (itworld.com)

Submitted by jfruh
jfruh writes: Bills were introduced into both the House and Senate yesterday that would amend the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, requiring a warrant to search Americans' email messages stored on third-party servers even if they're more than 180 days old. The current version of the law was passed in 1986, and was written in an environment where most email users downloaded emails to their computer and erased them after reading them.

Submission + - BitTorrent's Project Maelstrom Will Protect The Free Internet With Reverse DDoS (hacked.com)

Submitted by giulioprisco
giulioprisco writes: The Pirate Bay is back online, but its recent take-down shows that there is an urgent need of a new, more resilient, decentralized and distributed Internet infrastructures and software platforms. In December, BitTorrent started testing a P2P web browser called Project Maelstrom, based on BitTorrent technology. Project Maelstrom is one of the ongoing initiatives aimed at building a new Internet that works like BitTorrent, decentralized and free. More Project Maelstrom news have been revealed recently.

Submission + - The Algorithm That 'Sees' Beauty in Photographic Portraits

Submitted by KentuckyFC
KentuckyFC writes: Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. But what if the beholder is a machine? Scientists from Yahoo Labs in Barcelona have trained a machine learning algorithm to pick out beautiful photographic portraits from a collection of not-so-beautiful ones. They began with a set of 10,000 portraits that have been rated by humans and then allowed the algorithm to "learn" the difference by taking into account personal factors such as the age, sex and race of the subject as well as technical factors such as the sharpness of the image, the exposure and the contrast between the face and the background and so on. The trained algorithm was then able to reliably pick out the most beautiful portraits. Curiously, the algorithm does this by ignoring personal details such as age, sex, race, eye colour and so on and instead focuses only on technical details such as sharpness, exposure and contrast. The team say this suggests that any subject can be part of a stunning portrait regardless of their looks. It also suggests that "perfect portrait" algorithms could be built in to the next generation of cameras, rather like the smile-capturing algorithms of today.

Submission + - Too Much Exercise Can Be As Harmful As Sedentary Lifestyle (latimes.com)

Submitted by jones_supa
jones_supa writes: The importance of exercise has been arriving at spades at the geek culture too. However, when approaching extremes, a point is reached where too vigorous exercise can be as harmful as a sedentary lifestyle. "Long-term excessive exercise may be associated with coronary artery calcification, diastolic dysfunction and large artery wall stiffening," wrote lead author Peter Schnohr of Copenhagen's Frederiksberg Hospital in a Danish study. Although previous research has found that physically active people have at least a 30% lower risk of death compared with inactive people, the ideal amount of exercise remains somewhat uncertain. In this study, strenuous joggers — people who ran faster than 11 km/h for more than 4 hours a week; or who ran faster than 11 km/h for more than 2.5 hours a week with a frequency of more than three times a week — had a mortality rate that is not statistically different from that of the sedentary group.

Submission + - One-Atom-Thin Silicene Transistors May Lead to Dramatically Faster Chips (gizmag.com)

Submitted by Zothecula
Zothecula writes: As recently as 2010, human-made silicene – an atom-thin form of silicon – was purely theoretical. But now the exotic material has been used to make transistors, and researchers have found that silicene's electrical properties lend it extraordinary potential in powering the next generation of computer chips.

Submission + - Why do some Mac owners run Linux instead of OS X? (jimlynch.com)

Submitted by JimLynch
JimLynch writes: It seems like a strange idea, doesn’t it? People buying Apple’s Mac computers to run Linux? After all, most Linux users are thrifty people and would probably consider Macs to be relatively expensive compared to the cost of other computers. But nominal price does not necessarily equate to the real value of Macs for some users.

For some people there is real value in Apple’s line of Mac computers. They don’t see the nominal price tag as a hindrance to buying one of them to run Linux, and they probably appreciate the build quality of Apple’s Macs. I certainly can’t blame them for that since Apple has a good reputation in that regard and it shows in the loyalty of its customers year after year.

But I suspect that some of them may also be saving money by buying used Macs instead of brand new ones. Amazon, for example, sells used Macbook Airs, iMacs, and Macbook Pros on its site that are significantly cheaper than new ones bought from Apple’s stores or web site. And these may work very well for Linux users that want to use Apple hardware without paying full price.

Submission + - Creating a culture of DevOps

Submitted by Jason Baker
Jason Baker writes: DevOps as an approach to integrated software development and deployment has a growing community of support in enterprise operations. But what's holding it back from becoming mainstream? Is the a lack of tools, or a lack of know-how? Over on Opensource.com, Red Hat's Gordon Haff makes the case that a DevOps culture needs to be created by evolving organizations towards greater effectiveness. "DevOps is fundamentally about adopting many of the same open source best practices. Agile. Transparency. Collaboration. Iterative fast release. Continuous integration. These come together and, over time, create an open source lifestyle and culture. They can likewise come together to make DevOps thrive."

Submission + - 8 advantages of using open source in the enterprise

Submitted by Lemeowski
Lemeowski writes: Web, mobile, and cloud solutions are increasingly built predominantly on open source infrastructure. Yet there's still a fear among many in IT about using open source in their businesses. Red Hat CIO Lee Congdon reflects on the advantages he believes open source offers over proprietary solutions: "Open source helps keep your IT organization from getting blocked because a particular capability isn’t available from a vendor. Instead of waiting for the vendor to deliver that capability, you can create it yourself," Congdon writes.

Submission + - Has the FAA found a way to protect private property rights on the moon? (examiner.com)

Submitted by MarkWhittington
MarkWhittington writes: When the Outer Space Treaty which, among other things, forbade claims of national sovereignty on other worlds was signed and ratified by the United States in 1967, little thought was given to the idea of private property rights. Now, with companies like Moon Express and Bigelow Aerospace contemplating private lunar operations, that question has become a concern. According to Reuters, the FAA may have discovered a way to enforce private property rights on the moon without, it is hoped, violating the Outer Space Treaty.

The idea is to extend the FAA’s current launch licensing authority to cover commercial activities on the moon. The agency would license, for example, a helium 3 mining facility, giving the company running it control over it and as much adjoining territory as necessary to run the operation. The size of that territory, for which a particular company would hold property and mineral rights, could be considerable.

Submission + - All your boot are belong to us.

Submitted by mrons
mrons writes: Many new features are coming for systemd.

This includes the ability to do a full secure boot. As Lennart Poettering mentions in a google+ comment: "This is really just about providing the tools to implement the full trust chain from the firmware to the host OS, if SecureBoot is available."

Submission + - WA Bill Takes Aim at Boys' Dominance of Computer Classes

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: Calling it "a bold new bill that we hope more states will follow," corporate and tech billionaire-backed Code.org tweeted its support for Washington State's House Bill 1813. Computer science and education grant recipients, HB 1813 explains, "must demonstrate engaged and committed leadership in support of introducing historically underrepresented students [including girls, low-income students, and minority students]", "demonstrate a plan to engage historically underrepresented students with computer science", and demonstrate a history of successful partnerships within the community and partner support for computer science." The legislation, sponsored by Code.org and Microsoft-friendly lawmakers, follows in the footsteps of similar private-sector efforts from Code.org, Google, and others aimed at bringing boys' 30+ year dominance of K-12 computer classes to an end. In recent years, the lack of U.S. girls and minorities in the CS and STEM "pipeline" has been cited by tech to justify its need for tech immigration reform and to excuse its woeful diversity numbers, prompting the White House to turn to private-public partnerships and tech CEOs to solve the problem, including counting on wealthy tech philanthropists and corporations to bankroll the training of 25,000 CS teachers.

Submission + - Physicists Made a Mobius Strip from Dualing Beams of Light

Submitted by rossgneumann
rossgneumann writes: A group of physicists has successfully manipulated beams of laser light into an optical mobius strip. The shape, a classic mindfuck all but nonexistent in nature, has never before been seen in such an immaterial form. Making a simple mobius strip from a strip of paper is as easy as the result is vexing. Twist once and tape the thing end to end. Ta da: a structure with just one side and one edge. Its single boundary is a closed circle; that is, to get from one "side" of the strip to the other, just follow an edge, which will eventually reveal itself to be the same edge as every other edge found on the mobius strip. Fun.

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