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Submission + - DARPA contemplates vast ocean network (networkworld.com)

Submitted by coondoggie
coondoggie writes: Probably one of the last and perhaps unforgiving areas of the world not truly “wired” is above and below the ocean. Researchers at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) want to explore the possibility of seriously changing that notion and develop what it calls “a system-of-systems architecture and critical components to support networked maritime operations, to include undersea, surface, and above surface domains.”
Image

Murder Suspect Asked Siri Where To Hide a Dead Body Screenshot-sm 160

Posted by samzenpus from the worst-laid-plans dept.
An anonymous reader writes A Florida man currently on trial for murder reportedly attempted to use Siri to garner ideas about where to bury the body of his dead roommate. According to police allegations, a University of Florida student named Pedro Bravo murdered his roommate via strangulation in late September of 2012 over a dispute involving Bravo's ex- girlfriend. According to a detective working the case, Bravo subsequently fired up Siri on his iPhone and asked it "I need to hide my roommate."

Submission + - Cisco to slash up to 6,000 jobs (8% of workforce) (networkworld.com)

Submitted by alphadogg
alphadogg writes: Cisco Systems will cut as many as 6,000 jobs over the next 12 months, saying it needs to shift resources to growing businesses such as cloud, software and security. The move will be a reorganization rather than a net reduction, the company said. It needs to cut jobs because the product categories where it sees the strongest growth, such as security, require special skills, so it needs to make room for workers in those areas, it said. “If we don’t have the courage to change, if we don’t lead the change, we will be left behind,” Chairman and CEO John Chambers said on a conference call.
Books

Student Bookstores Beware, Amazon Comes To Purdue Campus 95

Posted by samzenpus from the saving-bucks-on-books dept.
First time accepted submitter Kilroy1218 writes After freezing tuition past their original deadline Purdue University announced a partnership with Amazon today which aside from greatly competitive book pricing "will bring staffed customer order pickup and drop-off locations to Purdue's campus, as well as expedited shipping benefits phased in over the course of the 2014-2015 academic year." “This relationship is another step in Purdue’s efforts to make a college education more affordable for our students,” said President Mitch Daniels. “With the pressure on college campuses to reduce costs, this new way of doing business has the potential to change the book-buying landscape for students and their families.”
Medicine

UCSD To Test Safety of Spinal Stem Cell Injection 43

Posted by samzenpus from the learning-to-walk-again dept.
An anonymous reader writes Researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine have launched a clinical trial to investigate the safety of neural stem cell transplantation in patients with chronic spinal cord injuries. This Phase I clinical trial is recruiting eight patients for the 5-year study. Pre-clinical studies of these cells by Ciacci and Martin Marsala, MD, at the UC San Diego School of Medicine, showed that these grafted neural stem cells improved motor function in spinal cord injured rats with minimal side effects indicating that human clinical trials are now warranted.

Submission + - Cisco Slashing Up To 6,000 Jobs (itworld.com)

Submitted by itwbennett
itwbennett writes: Cisco Systems will cut as many as 6,000 jobs over the next 12 months, saying it needs to shift resources to growing businesses such as cloud, software and security. Cisco has about 74,000 employees, so the cuts will affect about 8 percent of its staff. The move will be a reorganization rather than a net reduction, the company said. It needs to cut jobs because the product categories where it sees the strongest growth, such as security, require special skills, so it needs to make room for workers in those areas, it said.

Submission + - Gartner: Internet of Things has reached hype peak (networkworld.com)

Submitted by Brandon Butler
Brandon Butler writes: In the annual battle of the buzzwords, the Internet of Things has won. Each year the research firm Gartner puts out a Hype Cycle of emerging technologies, a sort of report card for various trends and buzzwords. This year, IoT tops the list. On another note, somewhat surprising is that Gartner says the "cloud computing" is not just hype anymore, but becoming a mainstream technology.

Submission + - Historians Rediscover Einstein's Forgotten Model of the Universe

Submitted by KentuckyFC
KentuckyFC writes: In 1931, after a 3- month visit to the US , Einstein penned a little known paper that attempted to show how his theory of general relativity could account for some of the latest scientific evidence. In particular, Einstein had met Edwin Hubble during his trip and so was aware of the latter's data indicating that the universe must be expanding. The resulting model is of a universe that expands and then contracts with a singularity at each end. In other words, Einstein was studying a universe that starts with a big bang and ends in a big crunch. What's extraordinary about the paper is that Einstein misspells Hubble's name throughout and makes a number of numerical errors in his calculations. That's probably because he wrote the paper in only 4 days, say the historians who have translated it into English for the time. This model was ultimately superseded by the Einstein-de Sitter model published the following year which improves on this in various ways and has since become the workhorse of modern cosmology.

Submission + - Murder suspect asked Siri where to hide a dead body (networkworld.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A Florida man currently on trial for murder reportedly attempted to use Siri to garner ideas about where to bury the body of his dead roomate. According to police allegations, a University of Florida student named Pedro Bravo murdered his roomate via strangulation in late September of 2012 over a dispute involving Bravo's ex- girlfriend.

According to a detective working the case, Bravo subsequently fired up Siri on his iPhone and asked it "I need to hide my roomate."

Comment Digital versus Analog (Score 1) 161

by Taco Cowboy (#47660305) Attached to: New Watson-Style AI Called Viv Seeks To Be the First 'Global Brain'

I've always felt that our meatbrains have a pretty incredible capacity for taking WAGs at NP problems (i.e. traveling salesman). And I feel like an AI would just bring itself to its knees trying to find the 100% best solution to NP questions asked of it

There has been a classical on that topic, and it boils down to Digital versus Analog

In Digital, everything either is a "0" (zero) or a "1" (one), which means, everything is either true, or false

In Analog, as there is no definite "0" nor definite "1", nothing is so clear cut as there are a lot of shades of grey in between.

Our meatbrain can cope with a lot of stuffs that the digital computer can't precisely because our brain makes its decision based on imprecise feedback
User Journal

Journal Journal: The Danger of Over-Reliance on the Net 2

Journal by Taco Cowboy
Since its inception the Net has taken over much of human civilization's attention and it has become the main viaduct for much of the communication and information flow, so much so that the act of letter-writing has become an ancient (and almost extinct) art

In other words, an over-reliance on the Internet has developed, and the problem is getting more and more serious

Internet will not last forever, and if that happen, what will human societies become?
Government

Scientists Who Smuggle Radioactive Materials 66

Posted by Soulskill from the probably-more-ethical-than-most-ways-they-can-get-funding dept.
Lasrick writes: Although the complicity of scientists in the smuggling of radioactive materials has been a long-standing concern, smuggling-prevention efforts have so far failed to recognize a key aspect to the problem: scientists are often sought out to test the quality and level of the material well before it is taken to the black market. Egle Murauskaite of the U.S. National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START) describes why concentrating on this aspect of the smuggling process, long considered less egregious than the actual selling of the material, could really make a difference in keeping radioactive materials off the black market in the first place.

Submission + - Giant Greek tomb discovered (telegraph.co.uk)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Archeologists have uncovered the largest tomb ever discovered in Greece and think it is linked to the reign of Alexander the Great.

The tomb, dating to around 300 BC, may have held the body of one of Alexander’s generals or a member of his family. It was found beneath a huge burial mound near the ancient site of Amphipolis in northern Greece. Antonis Samaras, Greece’s prime minister, visited the dig on Tuesday and described the discovery as “clearly extremely significant”.

A broad, five-yard wide road led up to the tomb, the entrance of which was flanked by two carved sphinxes. It was encircled by a 500 yard long marble outer wall. Experts believe a 16ft tall lion sculpture previously discovered nearby once stood on top of the tomb.

The excavations began in 2012, and by this month hope to identify who actually was buried there.
Media

Xbox One Will Play Media from USB Devices, DLNA Servers 112

Posted by Soulskill from the revolution-will-not-be-streamed dept.
New submitter Mauro sends word that Microsoft has announced upcoming Xbox One support for streaming media both from attached USB devices, such as flash drives, and DLNA media servers. Compatibility with a broad list of media formats will be added by the end of the year, including .MKV files. They also followed up last week's announcement of a digital TV tuner with an interesting twist: it will be able to stream broadcasts over a local network to devices running the Smartglass app, which is available on Windows, Android, and iOS.

Submission + - The IPV4 internet has broken (www.nux.ro) 2

Submitted by pla
pla writes: Due to a new set of routes published today, the internet has effectively undergone a schism. All routers with a TCAM allocation of 512k (or less), in particular Cisco Catalyst 6500 and 7600's, have started randomly forgetting portions of the internet. Time to switch to all IPV6 yet?

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