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Mars

Submission + - Distant view of Curiosity rover (scientificamerican.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: From the blog: 'a view of NASA's Curiosity rover embarking on its 250 day trip to Mars that you may not have seen before. It's an extraordinary piece of time-lapse footage taken from Australia not long after launch from Cape Canaveral. It shows a glowing plume from the Centaur stage after a burn over the Indian Ocean — the Centaur rocket has propelled Curiosity first into a low-Earth orbit and then into an escape trajectory towards Mars'

Submission + - Flying Around The World In A Solar Powered Plane (motherboard.tv)

Submitted by HansonMB
HansonMB writes: It can’t be very hard for Bertrand Piccard to explain to his family why he wants to fly around the world with only sunlight for fuel. In the 1930s, his grandfather, Auguste Piccard, a physicist and inventor, applied his excitement and interest in ballooning to designing a high-flying balloon attached to a pressurized aluminum gondola. The first of its kind, Auguste’s flying machine completed a record-breaking climb more than 50,000 feet into the air, gathering valuable data about the Earth’s upper atmosphere along the way. Fitting that Bertrand, for what it’s worth, defeated the notorious Sir Richard Branson by becoming the first man to circumnavigate the globe in a balloon in 1999.
Medicine

Submission + - Alternative medice attemps to chill critics (discovermagazine.com)

Submitted by Asmodae
Asmodae writes: Taking a page from Babs is one Stanislaw Burzynski. He runs an alternative cancer treatment called "antineoplaston therapy" and charges thousands of dollars for the privilege. From the article: Dr. Steve Novella, who certainly is an expert both in medicine and the misuses thereof, has some choice words about Burzynski and his ideas. So does David Calquhoun, a British pharmacologist. So does — at great length and detail — Dr. David Gorski, and so does the website Quackometer (and again here as well) and so does the Cancer Research UK Science blog.

This well debunked therapy has been blogged about by a high-schooler named Rhys Morgan, in a critical fashion and has received letters threatening to sue from Burzynski's clinic. As have a few other critics.

Submission + - Book Review: OpenGL 4.0 Shading Language Cookbook (packtpub.com)

Submitted by
Tommer
Tommer writes: "Hi ... the last time I wrote a book review, it was called a book report. Let me know if you have any suggestions, I would be happy to revise or add anything important that I have left out.

-- cut --

OpenGL 4.0 Shading Language Cookbook
"Over 60 highly focused, practical recipes to maximize your use of the OpenGL Shading Language"
by David Wolff

Packt Publishing
ISBN 978-1-849514-76-7
340 page PDF + example code ZIP

http://www.packtpub.com/opengl-4-0-shading-language-cookbook/book

The OpenGL Shading Language (GLSL) is evolving rapidly in tandem with
GPU hardware. Briefly, a shader is a compiled program which runs on
the massively-parallel GPU as part of the render process to determine
the colour of a pixel, the position of a vertex, or in GLSL 4.0,
pretty much anything. Older versions of OpenGL provided fixed shading,
lighting, and geometry-transformation functions. I was interested to
learn that these methods are deprecated in favour of ubiquitous GLSL.

OpenGL 4.0 Shading Language Cookbook (I'll call it "the Cookbook")
aims to get experienced OpenGL programmers up to speed using GLSL 4.0
to implement common rendering techniques, from those previously
provided by the fixed-function pipeline to more advanced variants
never before possible without CPU intervention.

To this end, the Cookbook is well-organized. The first chapter
"Getting Started with GLSL 4.0" covers the prerequisite libraries used
in the examples, how to pass data to a shader, and how to compile
C/C++ programs to use shaders. The second chapter "The Basics of GLSL
Shaders" covers simple "hello world" shaders. After that, it's
possible to skip forward into the remaining chapters to find the
recipe you're after:
        3: Lighting, Shading Effects, and Optimizations
        4: Using Textures
        5: Image Processing and Screen Space Techniques
        6: Using Geometry and Tessellation Shaders
        7: Shadows
        8: Using Noise in Shaders
        9: Animation and Particles

GPU hardware is evolving so quickly that my nVidia GeForce 9600M GT
doesn't even support OpenGL 4.0, so I couldn't test any of the sample
code. However, I had no trouble compiling the programs in the first
chapter with my old Ubuntu 10.10 system and a bit of fudging of OpenGL
4.0 constants. I was willing to presume that the code actually works
given the right GPU and produces output like the figures. All code
examples are available for download, and use qmake and the Qt OpenGL
bindings. Alternative libraries are mentioned where relevant, but I
found SDL conspicuous by its absence since it's more lightweight and
focused than the do-all Qt set.

The Cookbook organizes each recipe into 5 sections:
        Getting Ready — ingredients list
        How to do it ... — specific steps and example code
        How it works ... — explanation of the code
        There's more ... — variations on the example
        See also — links to related sections
This arrangement makes it very easy to flip to an example and find the
level of detail you need.

The code sections are mercifully brief, showing only the parts
relevant to the GLSL features being covered. The code download
includes all of these examples filled into the framework described in
the second chapter, so you can focus on reading the important stuff
but still see how it runs in context. The "See also" links aren't
hyperlinked in the PDF, but it's no big deal — most of the time this
references the previous or next section!

I'm interested in textures, so I gave chapter 4 a closer read. The
progression of examples was quite logical, covering basic texturing,
using textures for surface and lighting effects, and finally rendering
to textures. Techniques found in earlier chapters were referenced in
the "See also" sections, so I never felt lost. The requisite matrix
mathematics were covered enough to jog my memory, but not enough to
enlighten a neophyte, which is fine for a book of this level.

OpenGL 4.0 Shading Language Cookbook offers essential information for
OpenGL programmers entering the world of GLSL. Despite not being able
to run the examples, I feel like I'm ready to dive in to GLSL 4.0 once
I replace my antique GPU."
Firefox

Submission + - Firefox 11 Set to Vibrate (internetnews.com)

Submitted by darthcamaro
darthcamaro writes: Mozilla has been working on revamping Firefox for Android for months and has recently landed some interesting new mobile features that will debut in Firefox 11. The new features include Battery, SMS and Vibrator APIs.
That's right, Firefox will one day soon vibrate to notify you of a new event/message.
Government

Submission + - Senate Bill Allows Indefinite Imprisonment of Amer (blogcritics.org) 1

Submitted by Kraftwerk
Kraftwerk writes: With little public warning Democrat leaders in the Senate are attempting to rush through a National Defense Authorization Act (S. 1867) which includes controversial provisions which could open the door to authorizing the military to detain United States Citizens within the US and hold them indefinitely without charge or trial. They could even potentially face military justice instead of trial in a civilian court, with no regard for their Constitutionally protected rights.

Read more: http://blogcritics.org/politics/article/defense-bill-includes-authorization-for-indefinite/#ixzz1f72Bc2O4

You can see the live stream at http://www.c-span.org/Live-Video/C-SPAN2/
Security

Submission + - 7 Stupid Security Tricks (hp.com)

Submitted by
Esther Schindler
Esther Schindler writes: "Some of these dumb security problems are review, some you forgot, some you might need painkillers for. Wallow in these security breaches and similar madness. As Tom Henderson wrote:

The tone I set is designed to make you mad. That’s intentional; I want you to act on your anger by either smugly saying “It’s done!” or by admitting that you’re going to work on it. Now.

How many of these Stupid Security Tricks are going on in your shop?"
Security

Submission + - Behind the Government's Rules of Cyber War (securityweek.com)

Submitted by wiredmikey
wiredmikey writes: The evolution of cyber-attacks has challenged the way military and intelligence professionals define the rules of war. Deciding when malware becomes a weapon of war that warrants a response in the physical world – for example, a missile – has become a necessary part of the discussion of military doctrine.

The Pentagon recently outlined its working definition of what constitutes cyber-war and when subsequent military strikes against physical targets may be justified as result.

The main issue is attribution of cyber attacks. The Department of Defense is working to develop new ways to trace the physical source of an attack and the capability to identify an attacker using behavior-based algorithms. “..if a country is going to fire a missile at someone, it better be sure it has the right target,” said one expert.

A widely held misconception in the U.S. government is our offensive capabilities provide defensive advantage by identifying attacker toolkits and methods in foreign networks prior to them hitting our networks.

So when do malware and cyber attacks become a weapon or act of war that warrant a real-world military response?
Patents

Submission + - EU - Software Ideas Can't be Copyrighted (reuters.com)

Submitted by
bhagwad
bhagwad writes: "The EU continues to ooze common sense as a court insists that software functions themselves cannot be copyrighted. Drawing a box or moving cursor are examples. To quote: "If it were accepted that a functionality of a computer program can be protected as such, that would amount to making it possible to monopolize ideas, to the detriment of technological progress and industrial development,""
Businesses

Submission + - Does Telecommuting Make You Invisible? (itworld.com)

Submitted by
jfruhlinger
jfruhlinger writes: "Telecommuting provides many joys, including the ability to stay in your pajamas all day and the chance to work with a cat on your lap. But it does have some major drawbacks, perhaps none so serious as the fact that, if your co-workers are for the most part in an office, they can forget you exist — which means you don't get credit for your work as you deserve."

Submission + - Floating home for tech start-ups (newscientist.com)

Submitted by
JoeMerchant
JoeMerchant writes: "Max Marty, founder of Blueseed, believes that US immigration laws are stifling entrepreneurs from other countries, so he plans to buy a ship and anchor it in international waters off the coast of California. He hopes that up to a thousand developers could live and work just 20 kilometres offshore, commuting via regular ferries to the mainland for meetings with clients and investors.

Ship residents will pay around $1200 per month for basic accommodation, which Marty says compares favourably with typical rents in San Francisco."
Space

Submission + - Best way to enter private space industry as an eng

Submitted by CtownNighrider
CtownNighrider writes: I'm in my senior year of high school currently and in a selective program for future engineers. I have always been a good student and feel like I can get into most good schools (MIT is a long shot but RPI isn't). I plan on studying aerospace engineering (most likely getting a dual major with mechanical) in college and working for a company like SpaceX once I graduate. I would love any advice anyone can offer for my college search or being an engineer in general. I live in upstate NY and don't want to travel super far, I'm thinking about a 5 hour radius. I have the RPI medal so it's one of my top choices and MIT is my long shot but I'm having a tough time figuring out what schools are worth applying too. Academics come first hands down so male/female ratio and party scene aren't too important.

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: Can Racial Bias In Online Transacti 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Companies collect and buy PII and device-specific information about consumers. This information can be used to guess a consumer's racial identity. While the current potential accuracy of such guessing is unknown, the wider adoption of facial recognition technology can only make potential guesses about race better.

But, as a matter of fact, are companies online guessing about a consumer's race when deciding what to offer that consumer, or on what terms? Even if not, is racial bias exhibited by the automated decision-making models used by companies online? That is, do those models systematically make decisions based on information suggestive of racial identity but immaterial to the transaction at hand?

How can we tell?

In the physical world, civil rights organizations would send white testers and then black testers to businesses to test for disparate treatment. Can virtual identities be created which are comparable from a company's point-of-view in all material respects except for race? Can a testing organization possibly control for the many other factors which impact online experience?

Or, when it comes to online interactions, must we simply take businesses at their word that they don't discriminate?
Android

Submission + - Android SMS bug (zdnet.com)

Submitted by tecopa09
tecopa09 writes: I know the article, Android SMS bug sends your messages to random contacts, about the Android SMS bug, is rather old but have any other Slashdot readers experienced this problem? I have experienced this bug more times than I can count, as recent as yesterday but I am not able to easily duplicate the problem. From using the stock Android text messaging app to using just about all of the third-party sms apps, I have had text messages go to random recipients. Which is rather scary to think about or experience. From researching this bug, it seems like there are no clear explanations or an understanding of why this bug happens or if anything is being done to fix it. Though it does appear Google was aware of this problem. Any insight or advice into this problem would be greatly appreciated.

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