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Submission + - Federal judge rules NSA data collection legal (foxnews.com) 2

Submitted by CheezburgerBrown .
CheezburgerBrown . writes: A federal judge in New York has ruled the National Security Agency's massive data collection program is legal, one week after another federal judge ruled the opposite.

The conflicting rulings increase the likelihood that the challenges could someday end up before the Supreme Court.

The ruling on Friday came from District Judge William H. Pauley III, in the case of the ACLU vs. James Clapper, the director of national intelligence. The judge agreed with the federal government's request to dismiss the court.

copy and pasted from fox news

Submission + - Google: Tax Loopholes Good, SEO Loopholes Evil

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: "I view that you should pay the taxes that are legally required," quipped Google Chairman Eric Schmidt in a blame-the-victim-defense after Google came under fire for exploiting loopholes that allowed it to pay a mere £6m in UK tax on sales of £2.6bn. "If the British system changes the tax laws then we will comply." But don't try to get away with exploiting loopholes in Google's rules with your stupid Search Engine Optimization tricks, kids, or your site may end up sleeping with the fishes like Rap Genius. Google, you see, makes it crystal clear in its Webmaster Guidelines that it won't tolerate any BS letter-of-the-rules defenses: "These quality guidelines cover the most common forms of deceptive or manipulative behavior, but Google may respond negatively to other misleading practices not listed here. It's not safe to assume that just because a specific deceptive technique isn't included on this page, Google approves of it. Webmasters who spend their energies upholding the spirit of the basic principles will provide a much better user experience and subsequently enjoy better ranking than those who spend their time looking for loopholes they can exploit."

Submission + - Planet Earth Has 18.5 Million Developers (drdobbs.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Dr. Dobbs refers to a study by the International Data Corporation which pegs the number of developers in the world at 18.5 million. This includes professional and hobbyists. "IDC's analysis shows that the United States accounts for 19% of worldwide software developers, both professional and hobbyists, followed by China with 10% and India with 9.8%. The United States also accounts for 22% of worldwide ICT-skilled workers, followed by India with 10.4% and China with 7.6%."

Submission + - PC makers plan rebellion against Microsoft at CES (foxnews.com) 1

Submitted by Velcroman1
Velcroman1 writes: Fearing rapidly plummeting sales of traditional laptops and desktop computers — which fell by another 10 percent or so in 2013 — manufacturers are planning a revolt against Microsoft and the Windows operating system, analysts say. At the 2014 CES in Las Vegas, multiple computer makers will unveil systems that simultaneously run two different operating systems, both Windows and the Android OS that powers many of the world’s tablets and smartphones, two different analysts said recently. The new devices will be called “PC Plus” machines, explained analyst Tim Bajarin. "A PC Plus machine will run Windows 8.1 but will also run Android apps as well," Bajarin wrote. Another analyst put the threat to Windows bluntly: "This should scare the heck out of Microsoft."

Submission + - Power-loss-protected SSDs tested: only Intel S3500 passes (lkcl.net)

Submitted by lkcl
lkcl writes: After the reports on SSD reliability and after experiencing a costly 50% failure rate on over 200 remote-deployed OCZ Vertex SSDs, a degree of paranoia set in where I work. I was asked to carry out SSD analysis with some very specific criteria: budget below £100, size greater than 16Gbytes and Power-loss protection mandatory. This was almost an impossible task: after months of searching the shortlist was very short indeed. There was only one drive that survived the torturing: the Intel S3500. After more than 6,500 power-cycles over several days of heavy sustained random writes, not a single byte of data was lost. Crucial M4: fail. Toshiba THNSNH060GCS: fail. Innodisk 3MP SATA Slim: fail. OCZ: epic fail. Only the end-of-lifed Intel 320 and its newer replacement the S3500 survived unscathed. The conclusion: if you care about data even when power could be unreliable, only buy Intel SSDs.

Submission + - FILM vs. DIGITAL – Can You Tell the Diffidence? (lensvid.com) 4

Submitted by Iddo Genuth
Iddo Genuth writes: Film is fading away and almost all of us use digital cameras almost exclusively. But can we really tell the diffidence between film and digital? Photographer Joey Shanks set out to test this question by recording thousands of images with a Canon EOS 5D Mark II (set to ISO 400) and a film camera – Canon 7E with a 400 ASA Fujifilm.

He shot a long series of images which he combined into several short clips he set side by side for you to look at and decide if you can actually tell which is which.

Submission + - NASA Could Explore Titan With Squishable 'Super Ball Bot' (ieee.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: IEEE Spectrum reports on a rover design being developed at NASA Ames Research Center: Super Ball Bot. The premise is that the rover's brain and scientific equipment would be suspended in the middle on a structure made of rigid rods and elastic cables. The rods and cables would be deformable, allowing the rover to roll over complex terrain without damage. This design would be ideal for exploring a place like Saturn's moon Titan. Its atmosphere is thick enough that a probe could drop the rover from 100km above the surface, and it would survive the fall without a parachute. 'In a scenario studied by the team, the robot could be collapsed to a very compact configuration for launch. Once it reaches the moon, it would pop open and drop to the surface, flexing and absorbing the force of impact. By shortening and lengthening the cables that connect its rigid components, the ball bot could then roll about the surface. These same cables could be used to pull back parts of the robot, so that science instruments at the center could be exposed and used.'

Submission + - Snapchat Users Phone Numbers Exposed To Hackers (theguardian.com)

Submitted by beaverdownunder
beaverdownunder writes: From the Guardian:

Snapchat users’ phone numbers may be exposed to hackers due to an unresolved security vulnerability, according to a new report released by a group of Australian hackers.

Snapchat is a social media program that allows users to send pictures to each other that disappear within 10 seconds. Users can create profiles with detailed personal information and add friends that can view the photos a user shares.

But Gibson Security, a group of anonymous hackers from Australia, has published a new report with detailed coding that they say shows how a vulnerability can be exploited to reveal phone numbers of users, as well as their privacy settings.

Submission + - SSDs Cheaper Than Hard Drives? Not In This Decade (networkcomputing.com)

Submitted by CowboyRobot
CowboyRobot writes: If you shop carefully online, you can buy a general purpose enterprise SSD, such as Intel’s DC S3700 for about $2.65/GB or a read oriented drive like the Intel DC S3500 for $1.30/GB. By comparison, a 4TB nearline SATA hard disk such as Western Digital’s RE or Seagate’s Constellation cost under $400 or $0.09/GB. Interestingly, consumer/laptop SSDs are well below the magic $1/GB level with Crucial’s M500 selling for about $0.59/GB — about what hard drives cost in 2005. If we assume that SSD prices will fall at their historical 35% annual rate and hard drive prices will fall at a more conservative 15% by 2020, the enterprise SSD will cost almost 13 cents a gigabyte, more than the hard drive costs today, while the 20TB drives the hard drive vendors are promising for 2020 will cost under 3 cents a GB. The price difference will have shrunk from 30:1 to around 5:1. If drive prices fall at a closer to historical 25%, they’ll still be a tenth the cost of SSDs at the end of the decade.

Submission + - Neural Net Learns Breakout By Watching The Game On Screen--Then Thrashes Humans (medium.com)

Submitted by KentuckyFC
KentuckyFC writes: A curious thing about video games is that computers have never been very good at playing them like humans--by looking at a monitor and judging actions accordingly using. Sure, they're pretty good if they have direct access to the program itself but "hand-to-eye-co-ordination" has never been their thing. But now our superiority in this area is coming to an end. A team of AI specialists in London have created a neural network that learns to play games simply by looking at the RGB output from the console. And they've tested it successfully on a number of games from the legendary Atari 2600 system from the 1980s. The method is relatively straightforward. To simplify the visual part of the problem, the system down-samples the Atari's 128-colour, 210x160 pixel image to create an 84x84 grayscale version. Then it simply practices repeatedly to learn what to do. That's time consuming but fairly simple since at any instant in time during a game, a player can choose from a finite set actions that the game allows: move to the left, move to the right, fire and so on. So the task for any player—human or otherwise—is to choose an action at each point in the game that maximises the eventual score. The researchers say that after learning Atari classics such as Breakout and Pong, the neural net can then thrash expert human players. However, the neural net still struggles to match average human performance in games such as Seaquest, Q*bert and, most important of all, Space Invaders. So there's hope for us yet...just not for very much longer.

Submission + - Seattle May Have to Wait a Few Bits Longer for Fast, Cheap Internet

Submitted by Kyle Jacoby
Kyle Jacoby writes: In 2010, after Google Fiber's success in Kansas City, Google looked for another city to test its infrastructure. Seattle jumped at the opportunity to woo the internet giant, hoping to fuel the growing needs of its increasingly tech-centric city, but lost the bid to Austin in the end. Impatient, Seattle partnered with Gigabit Squared to deliver gigabit service using some of the city's own unused fiber. Originally slated to begin service in Fall of 2013, the project was delayed until "first quarter 2014," but there still appears to be no signs of life. Recent probing by GeekWire suggests that the project has stalled again and, in fact, may never have been moving to begin with. "When you dug into [it]... there wasn’t any money there, and there wasn’t any clear path to the money other than this general notion that if you got enough people moving in the same direction, money would show up." The Gigabit Squared toll-free phone number was even removed from their site after being disabled, and the project's prime proponent, Mayor McGinn, admits that he's "very concerned it’s not going to work." Without this project, and without motivation from the new mayor-elect, there may be no competition for the Comcast monopoly, whose current minimum price for internet-only is $49.95/mo ($64.95/mo for speeds over 6 mbps). This sharply contrasts Gigabit Seattle's announced plans for $10/mo for 5 mbps, $45 for 100 mbps, and $80 for true gigabit.

Submission + - First 3D Printed Liver Expected in 2014 (computerworld.com)

Submitted by Lucas123
Lucas123 writes: After 3D printing has produced ears, skin grafts and even retina cells that could be built up and eventually used to replace defective eye tissue, researchers expect to be able to produce the first functioning organ next year. The organ, a liver, would not be for the purpose of human implant — that will take years to complete clinical trials and pass FDA review. Instead, the liver would initially be for development and testing of pharmaceuticals. The field of 3D printing known as organs on a chip, will greatly increase the accuracy and speed of drug development and testing, researchers say. The company producing the liver, Organovo, has overcome a major stumbling block that faces the creation of any organ: printing the vascular system needed to provide it with life-sustaining oxygen and nutrients. Typically, 3D printed tissue dies in the petri dish before it can even be used because of that. "We have achieved thicknesses of greater than 500 microns, and have maintained liver tissue in a fully functional state with native phenotypic behavior for at least 40 days," said Mike Renard, Organovo's executive vice president of commercial operations.

Submission + - Utilities fight back against solar energy (bloomberg.com) 1

Submitted by JoeyRox
JoeyRox writes: The exponential growth of rooftop solar adoption has utilities concerned about their financial future. Efficiency gains and cost reductions has brought the price of solar energy to within parity of traditional power generation in states like California and Hawaii. HECO, an electric utility in Hawaii, has started notifying new solar adopters that they will not be allowed to connect to the utility's power grid, citing safety concerns of electric circuits becoming oversaturated from the rapid adoption of soloar power on the island. Residents claim it's not about safety but about the utility fighting to protect its profits.

Submission + - Google's Duplicitous Stance on Loopholes, Spirit of Law 2

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: When it comes to tax loopholes, Google has certainly embraced the letter and not the spirit of the tax law. "Google plays by the rules set by politicians," quipped Google's UK head, defending the company's payment of a mere £6m in tax on sales of £2.6bn. "I view that you should pay the taxes that are legally required," added Google Chairman Eric Schmidt. "If the British system changes the tax laws then we will comply." So, one might ask whether Rap Genius was also playing by the letter of the rules, if not the spirit, when Google penalized Rap Genius for its link schemes. After all, don't they have the same fiduciary responsibility to investors that Google says motivates its tax strategy? Well, you could ask, but it wouldn't matter. In a case of what's-good-for-the-goose-is-not-good-for-the-gander, Google makes it clear that it won't countenance BS letter-of-the-law defenses from those who seek to exploit loopholes. From the Google Webmaster Guidelines, "These quality guidelines cover the most common forms of deceptive or manipulative behavior, but Google may respond negatively to other misleading practices not listed here. It's not safe to assume that just because a specific deceptive technique isn't included on this page, Google approves of it. Webmasters who spend their energies upholding the spirit of the basic principles will provide a much better user experience and subsequently enjoy better ranking than those who spend their time looking for loopholes they can exploit." So, in Lord Google's eyes, is exploiting loopholes good AND evil?

Submission + - Houston Expands Downtown Surveilance, Unsure If It Helps (khou.com)

Submitted by SpaceGhost
SpaceGhost writes: Associated Press reports that the Houston (Texas) Police will be adding 180 surveillance cameras in the downtown area, bring the total to close to 1000. While most cover public areas (stadiums, theater district) the police suggest that Houston also has more "critical infrastructure" (energy companies) than other cities. Interestingly AP points out that "Officials say data is not kept to determine if the cameras are driving down crime." Didn't London face the same issue?

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