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Submission + - Number of billionaires globally doubles since start of financial crisis (westmeathexaminer.ie)

Submitted by monkeyFuzz
monkeyFuzz writes: According to the article, since the financial crisis began, the number of billionaires worldwide has more than doubled and interestingly enough apparently, if the world's three richest people were to spend $1m every single day each, it would take each one of them around 200 years to exhaust all of their wealth

Submission + - FCC Wants To Regulate VoIP Like Last-Mile Copper (itworld.com)

Submitted by jfruh
jfruh writes: Copper telecom connections and traditionally switched telephone networks are on their way out, most people agree. But FCC regulations that opened last-mile phone networks up to competition among providers don't apply to next-generation VoIP networks. The FCC is now eyeing new regulations that will keep that competition alive.

Submission + - The 7th Underhanded C Contest is Online (underhanded-c.org)

Submitted by Xcott Craver
Xcott Craver writes: The 7th Underhanded C Contest is now open. The goal of the contest is to write code that is as readable, clear, innocent and straightforward as possible, and yet somehow exhibits evil behavior that cannot be seen even when staring at the source code.

The winners from 2013 are also online, and their clever and insightful submissions make for fun reading.

Submission + - Scotland Builds Wind Farms of the Future Under the Sea

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: The Pentland Firth is a raw, stormy sound between the Scottish mainland and the Orkney Islands, known for some of the world’s fastest flowing marine waters. Daily tides here reach 11 miles per hour, and can go as high as 18 – a breakneck current that’s the reason people are describing Scotland as the Saudi Arabia of tidal power. Now Megan Garber reports in The Atlantic that a new tidal power plant, to be installed off the Scottish coast aims to make the Scotland a world leader for turning sea flow into electricity. Underwater windmills, the BBC notes, have the benefit of invisibility—a common objection to wind turbines being how unsightly they are to human eyes. Undersea turbines also benefit from the fact that tides are predictable in ways that winds are not: You know how much power you're generating, basically, on any given day. The tidal currents are also completely carbon-free and since sea water is 832 times denser than air, a 5 knot ocean current has more kinetic energy than a 350 km/h wind.

MeyGen will face a challenge in that work: The turbines are incredibly difficult to install. The Pentland Firth is a harsh environment to begin with; complicating matters is the fact that the turbines can be installed only at the deepest of ocean depths so as not to disrupt the paths of ships on the surface. They also need to be installed in bays or headlands, where tidal flows are at their most intense. It is an unbelievably harsh environment in which to build anything, let alone manage a vast fleet of tidal machines beneath the waves. If each Hammerfest machine delivers its advertised 1MW of power, then you need 1,000 of them to hope to match the output of a typical gas or coal-fired power station. "The real aim," says Keith Anderson, "is to establish the predictability which you get with tidal power, and to feed that into the energy mix which includes the less predictable sources like wind or wave. The whole point of this device is to test that it can produce power, and we believe it can, and to show it's robust and can be maintained."

Submission + - Silicon Valley Swings to Republicans (rt.com)

Submitted by phantomfive
phantomfive writes: Silicon Valley is making a mark in Washington as Google has recently replaced Goldman as the largest lobbyist, but until recently, most of the money in from Silicon Valley went to democratic candidates. In 2014, that has changed, and Republicans are getting most of the money. Why the change? Gordon Crovitz suggests it's because Harry Reid blocked patent reform. Reid gets a large chunk of donations from trial lawyers, who oppose the reform.

Submission + - Australian divorce courts (and all others) will be able to get your internet rec (theregister.co.uk)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: "A series of slips by the nation's top cop followed by communications minister Malcolm Turnbull has made Australia's data retention bill even more of a potential horror than it seemed when it was introduced last week." Writes Richard Chirgwin in an article about Australia's new legislation.. "lawyers are already gathering, telling the ABC's PM program that metadata could be demanded in family law cases and insurance cases" it continues, with the inevitable result that your internet browsing history will be used against people trying to resist demands during divorce. "What's depressing is that Australians probably won't take to the streets about this issue."

Comment Re:Compared to Azure (Score 1) 94

by bmimatt (#47994093) Attached to: Amazon Forced To Reboot EC2 To Patch Bug In Xen

When hosting your app in the cloud, regardless of provider, it is considered best practice to design for failure. That means your code should anticipate any/all stack layers to become unavailable. If you're doing it right, a service failure should be detected and automatic failover executed. Alternatively, a new instance should be provisioned, bootstrapped and thrown into production. Think: infrastructure as code. Welcome to the 21-st century.

Comment Re:Murphy says no. (Score 1) 265

by bmimatt (#47433105) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Unattended Maintenance Windows?

Yes.
Also, this is one of these scenarios, where virtualization pays. You can simply spin up a new set of boxes (ideally via puppet,chef, whatever) and cut over to it once the new cluster has been thoroughly tested and tested some more. Human eye watching/managing the cutover still recommended, if not required.

Submission + - Police ask blogger to remove tweet about Ukip (theguardian.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Police have asked a blogger to remove a tweet that fact-checked Ukip policies but did not break any laws after receiving a complaint from a Ukip councillor, prompting concern over attempts to stifle debate.

Michael Abberton was visited by two Cambridgeshire police officers on Saturday. He was told he had not committed any crimes and no action was taken against him, but he was asked to delete some of his tweets, particularly a tongue-in-cheek one on 10 reasons to vote for Ukip, such as scrapping paid maternity leave and raising income tax for the poorest 88% of Britons.

Submission + - Should Killer Robots be Banned in Policing? (ibtimes.co.uk)

Submitted by concertina226
concertina226 writes: The United Nations will debate the use of killer robots for the first time at the UN Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW) this week, but human rights activists are calling for the robots to be banned.

Human Rights Watch and Harvard Law School's International Human Rights Clinic have published a new report entitled "Shaking the Foundations: The Human Rights Implications of Killer Robots", which calls for killer robots to be banned to prevent a potential arms race between countries.

Killer robots, or fully autonomous weapons, do not yet exist but would be the next step after remote-controlled armed drones used by the US military today. Fully autonomous weapons would have the ability to identify and fire on targets without human intervention, putting compliance with international humanitarian laws in doubt.

Among the problems with killer robots highlighted in the report is the risk of criminal liability for a military officer, programmer or weapons manufacturer who created or used an autonomous weapon with intent to kill.

If a robot killed arbitrarily, it would be difficult to hold anyone accountable.

Submission + - Why tech activists must become campaign finance reform activists (nathanmarz.com)

Submitted by Funksaw
Funksaw writes: In a blog post called: 'Why we in tech must support Lawrence Lessig', former Twitter engineer Nathan Marz makes the argument that technological issues, such as net neutrality, broadband monopolies, and extended copyrights, can't be addressed until campaign finance reforms are enacted, and that initiatives such as Lawrence Lessig's Mayday PAC need to be supported. FTA:

This issue is so important and touches so many aspects of our society that I believe it's our duty as citizens to fight for change any way we can. We have to support people who are working day and night on this, who have excellent ideas on how to achieve reform.

Submission + - Have you changed your password lately? Does it even matter? (blogspot.no)

Submitted by badger.foo
badger.foo writes: Do frequent password changes actually matter security wise? Or do they just make us pick the minimum complexity password the system will accept? I want your opinion. In his latest piece, Peter Hansteen wants your opinion on common security enforcement practices and even offers a poll about enforced password changes. Let loose the debate rage!

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