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Submission + - Bitcoin Securities Issuer Settles with SEC (thedrinkingrecord.com)

Submitted by MrBingoBoingo
MrBingoBoingo writes: The United States Securities and Exchange Commission has extracted a Settlement from Erik Voorhees that consists of $15,843.98 in profits and a penalty of $35,000 for the high crime of having been involved in financing two offerings with Bitcoin. If you read the Security and Exchange Commission's actual filing you can see that all of the fines and settlements relate to FeedZeBirds with any actions relating to S.DICE on MPEx consisting of a strong finger wag and stern look. With the light assessment in this case, it seems that the SEC's ability to act in mature Bitcoin markets like MPEx may be limited unless they work to build cooperative relationships with those markets.

Submission + - Scientists Building Sperm-Size Robots To Deliver Drugs Inside The Human Body (itworld.com)

Submitted by jfruh
jfruh writes: One of the difficulties of treating certain diseases is that it's necessary to deliver tiny amounts of medicine to very specific parts of the human body. Dutch scientists are hoping that the tiny robots they're building, inspired by sperm cells, can help. In addition to delivering drugs, the sperm-bots could clean arteries or (appropriately) assist with in vitro fertilization.

Submission + - Game of Thrones: The dragons and nuclear weapons nexus (thebulletin.org)

Submitted by Lasrick
Lasrick writes: Yes, Game of Thrones has deep meanings with a surprising number of lessons about peace and security for real life, and Timothy Westmyer of the Rising Powers Initiative explores the dragon metaphor here: 'One parallel, however, has escaped analysis: dragons as living, fire-breathing metaphors for nuclear weapons. Despite the fantasy setting, the story teaches a great deal about the inherent dangers that come with managing these game-changing agents, their propensity for accidents, the relative benefits they grant their masters, and the strain these weapons impose upon those wielding them.' As Thrones creator George R.R. Martin has said: 'Dragons are the nuclear deterrent...but is that sufficient?'

Submission + - Pirate Bay Uploader Faces $32m Lawsuit over UFC Sports Content (ibtimes.co.uk)

Submitted by concertina226
concertina226 writes: A New York online pirate who uploads live sporting events to torrent such as the Pirate Bay and Kickass Torrents is being sued for $32m (£19m).

Zuffia, the parent company of the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) pay-per-view cable channel which shows boxing and wrestling events, has launched a civil lawsuit against Steven Messina, 27, of Great Kills, Staten Island.

Messina is known online as "Secludedly" and numerous torrent files bear his name on the internet. On Kickass Torrents, he is considered to be a "verified uploader", meaning that the files he uploads are safe to download and do not contain malware or adware.

Secludedly updated his profile on Kickass Torrents to say: "My apologies to Zuffa and the UFC. All files deleted in respect for my favorite MMA organisation."

Submission + - Building a PC in the Year 1998

Submitted by roelbj
roelbj writes: Maximum PC has posted a free PDF archive of their premiere issue, dating back to September 1998. Anyone who has been building computers for a while will appreciate gems such as "When will we get to use our USB ports? (p.13); overclocking a CPU to a blistering 225 Mhz (p.64); reviews of cutting-edge CD-ROM drives, PhotoShop 5.0, the Iomega Buz, and Final Fantasy VII; and and of course the Intel/AMD debate which existed even then (p.10). If you are offended by beige, look away.

Comment Re:Backport\Upstream? Seems unlikely (Score 2) 304

by MrBingoBoingo (#46759171) Attached to: OpenBSD Team Cleaning Up OpenSSL
With something as big and messy as crufty as OpenSSL, there probably isn't a sane way to approach the problem of decrapifying it that doesn't involve first stripping it down to the minimum.The OpenBSD devs aren't Windows devs, Apple Devs, or Linux Devs. There is no "greater evil" in making something more secure in less time for your own platform when contorting themselves to maintain compatiility keeps junk that slows them in their task to the point they don't every get to the clean secure rewrite.

Submission + - Starting on intermediate maths?

Submitted by hughbar
hughbar writes: I haven't done any 'real' maths since university about 40 years ago. I wasn't useless, but not that great either, I had to do some elementary quantum mechanics and the kind of arithmetic that an empirical scientist always needs.

I'd like to start on a little more, but every entry in Wikipedia seems to lead to another entry. Can't find the end of this piece of string. Should I specialise? Is there a book or course that covers university entry and first year maths for non-mathematicians [for example, people switching major subject]? Any ideas on this welcome, I'm ready to start but just don't know where to start.

Comment Re:Want to write a kernel ? (Score 4, Insightful) 392

by MrBingoBoingo (#46541671) Attached to: The Myth of the Science and Engineering Shortage
A large problem in trying to deal with "scientists" and "engineers" as a macro problem is people in those professions aren't very fungible. To be a scientist or and engineer is to have a substantial degree of professional specialization. A micro biologist is not fungible with a zoologist, and even most microbiologists are not fungible with other microbiologist or zoologists fungible with other zoologists.

Submission + - Westboro Baptist Church founder Fred Phelps dies

Submitted by johnsnails
johnsnails writes: THE fiery founder of the Westboro Baptist Church, who drew international condemnation for outrageous and hate-filled protests that blamed almost everything, including the deaths of AIDS victims and US soldiers, on America's tolerance for gay people, has died. He was 84.

Submission + - Mark Shuttleworth calls for an end to ACPI (markshuttleworth.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: ACPI comes from an era when the operating system was proprietary and couldn't be changed by the hardware manufacturer.

We don't live in that era any more.

However, we DO live in an era where any firmware code running on your phone, tablet, PC, TV, wifi router, washing machine, server, or the server running the cloud your SAAS app is running on, is a threat vector against you.

If you read the catalogue of spy tools and digital weaponry provided to us by Edward Snowden, you'll see that firmware on your device is the NSA's best friend. Your biggest mistake might be to assume that the NSA is the only institution abusing this position of trust — in fact, it's reasonable to assume that all firmware is a cesspool of insecurity courtesy of incompetence of the worst degree from manufacturers, and competence of the highest degree from a very wide range of such agencies.

Submission + - Astronomers Glimpse Universe's First Split Second (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: If imagining the big bang makes your head ache, what happened an instant later might make it explode. Cosmologists think the just-born universe—a hot, dense soup of matter and energy—went through a burst of expansion faster than the speed of light. Like a magical balloon, the cosmos doubled its size 60 times in a span of 10-32 seconds. This phase, known as inflation, ended well before the universe was even a second old.

Now, 13.7 billion years later, cosmologists have detected what they say is the first direct evidence of this inflation—one of the biggest discoveries in the field in 20 years. From studying the cosmic microwave background (CMB)—the leftover radiation from the big bang—they have spotted traces of gravitational waves—undulations in the fabric of space and time—that rippled through the universe in that infinitesimally short epoch following its birth. The imprint of these gravitational waves upon the CMB matches what theorists had predicted for decades. The findings, announced this morning at a scientific presentation at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, also show that gravity—at the smallest scale—follows the rules of quantum mechanics, similar to other forces such as electromagnetism.

Submission + - Bitcoin Barron Challenges Berkshire (trilema.com) 2

Submitted by MrBingoBoingo

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