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Submission + - The Newest Organized Labor Group: Start-up Employees (ieee.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Last Friday may turn out to have marked the beginning of Silicon Valley's organized labor movement--startup employees met in Palo Alto "to share war stories and to start developing what organizers called a 'Startup Employee Equity Bill of Rights'".

Submission + - Theresa May warns Yahoo that its move to Dublin is a security worry (theguardian.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Theresa May summoned the internet giant Yahoo for an urgent meeting on Thursday to raise security concerns after the company announced plans to move to Dublin where it is beyond the reach of Britain's surveillance laws.

By making the Irish capital rather than London the centre of its European, Middle East and Africa operations, Yahoo cannot be forced to hand over information demanded by Scotland Yard and the intelligence agencies through "warrants" issued under Britain's controversial anti-terror laws.

"There are concerns in the Home Office about how Ripa will apply to Yahoo once it has moved its headquarters to Dublin," said a Whitehall source. "The home secretary asked to see officials from Yahoo because in Dublin they don't have equivalent laws to Ripa. This could particularly affect investigations led by Scotland Yard and the national crime agency. They regard this as a very serious issue."

Submission + - Untrackable cellphone?

Submitted by gurps_npc
gurps_npc writes: We all know how easy it is for the NSA to bug and track your cellphone.

Does anyone sell a cellphone with:

1) Hard wired bright light that always comes on when the cellphone has power.

2) With a physical power on/off that connects and disconnects the battery?

Submission + - The Surprising Origin Of The Big Bang Theory (wgbhnews.org) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Public radio's WGBH News reports, "Between the announcement this week that scientists have detected primordial gravitation waves and FOX's reboot of Carl Sagan's groundbreaking series, "Cosmos", the Big Bang theory is enjoying its biggest moment since it banged the observable universe into existence 13.8 billion years ago. While the Big Bang is as old as the universe itself, our concept of it is still strikingly new — less than 100 years old. And if you dig into its origins, you come across a curious fact. ... The Big Bang theory was first proposed by a Roman Catholic priest. It wasn't just any priest. It was Monseigneur George Lemaître, a brilliant Belgian who entered the priesthood following his service as an artillery officer in the Belgian army during World War I. He was also an accomplished astronomer and a talented mathematician and physician. After earning his graduate degree in astronomy from the University of Cambridge in England, he came to Boston and spent a year at the Harvard College Observatory before earning his doctorate at MIT. ... At a conference in the 1930s, where Lemaître presented his theory, Einstein reportedly remarked, "This is the most beautiful and satisfactory explanation of creation to which I have ever listened.""

Submission + - NASA Wants Developers To Simulate Coastal Floods

Submitted by rjmarvin
rjmarvin writes: NASA has challenged developers to build software that improves life on Earth and advances space exploration before, but now they're asking them to simulate cataclysmic natural disaster http://sdt.bz/68958. The space agency is partnering with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for the third annual International Space Apps Challenge https://2014.spaceappschalleng.... Participants are tasked to create and deploy data-driven visualizations and simulations charting the impact of sea level rise and erosion on future coastal flooding.

Submission + - Einstein's 'Lost' Model Of the Universe Discovered 'Hiding in Plain Sight'

Submitted by Hugh Pickens DOT Com
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes: Dick Ahlstrom reports that Irish researchers have discovered a previously unknown model of the universe written in 1931 by physicist Albert Einstein that had been misfiled and effectively “lost” until its discovery last August while researchers been searching through a collection of Einstein’s papers put online by the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. “I was looking through drafts, but then slowly realised it was a draft of something very different,” says Dr O’Raifeartaigh. “I nearly fell off my chair. It was hidden in perfect plain sight. This particular manuscript was misfiled as a draft of something else.” In his paper, radically different from his previously known models of the universe, Einstein speculated the expanding universe could remain unchanged and in a “ steady state” because new matter was being continuously created from space. “It is what Einstein is attempting to do that would surprise most historians, because nobody had known this idea. It was later proposed by Fred Hoyle in 1948 and became controversial in the 1950s, the steady state model of the cosmos,” says O’Raifeartaigh. Hoyle argued that space could be expanding eternally and keeping a roughly constant density. It could do this by continually adding new matter, with elementary particles spontaneously popping up from space. Particles would then coalesce to form galaxies and stars, and these would appear at just the right rate to take up the extra room created by the expansion of space. Hoyle’s Universe was always infinite, so its size did not change as it expanded. It was in a ‘steady state’. “This finding confirms that Hoyle was not a crank,” says Simon Mitton. “If only Hoyle had known, he would certainly have used it to punch his opponents." Although Hoyle’s model was eventually ruled out by astronomical observations, it was at least mathematically consistent, tweaking the equations of Einstein’s general theory of relativity to provide a possible mechanism for the spontaneous generation of matter. Einstein's paper attracted no attention because Einstein abandoned it after he spotted a mistake and then didn’t publish it but the fact that Einstein experimented with the steady-state concept demonstrates Einstein's continued resistance to the idea of a Big Bang, which he at first found “abominable”, even though other theoreticians had shown it to be a natural consequence of his general theory of relativity.

Comment Re:Hand out the PP slides after the talk. (Score 5, Funny) 181

by Freshly Exhumed (#46427927) Attached to: Physics Forum At Fermilab Bans Powerpoint

But... but... explain to me how you can get a chalk board or white board to go "whooooooosh" when you go on to the next set of bullet points! I don't know about you but if it doesn't go "whooooooosh" I've lost everything salient and important about what you've presented. Oh ya one other thing... how do you get neat visual effects like folds and crinkly dissolves to happen with a chalk board or white board?

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