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Submission + - Steam after death?

Submitted by kuzb
kuzb writes: I'm a gamer. I probably will be until the day it's not possible anymore. Like many others, I've got heavy investment in my steam library which now encompasses hundreds of titles and represents thousands of dollars. As a gamer, the games I've acquired are as important to me as any other item which might have sentimental value to someone else.

It got me thinking, what happens to all this media when I die? What happens with other services where I have media? Is it legal for me to will this content to someone else, or do all the rights to such content just vanish?

Submission + - Hillary Clinton Used Personal Email at State Dept., Possibly Breaking Rules (nytimes.com) 1

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: The NYT reports that Hillary Rodham Clinton exclusively used a personal email account to conduct government business as secretary of state, State Department officials said, and may have violated federal requirements that officials’ correspondence be retained as part of the agency’s record. Clinton did not have a government email address during her four-year tenure at the State Department. Her aides took no actions to have her personal emails preserved on department servers at the time, as required by the Federal Records Act. “It is very difficult to conceive of a scenario — short of nuclear winter — where an agency would be justified in allowing its cabinet-level head officer to solely use a private email communications channel for the conduct of government business,” says Jason R. Baron. A spokesman for Clinton defended her use of the personal email account and said she has been complying with the “letter and spirit of the rules.”

Submission + - Karjisatsu: Is the culture around IT causing us to burnout or worse... (itrevolution.com)

Submitted by HockeyPuck
HockeyPuck writes: A blog by John Willis explores the story of one industry peer, Carlo Flores, and his battle against Karoshi or "Death from Overwork". All-night, holiday work, excessive hours, excessive sales efforts, bullying, fear of losing one’s job, and of course screwed up management. Most of the modern day startups have all kinds of tales of employees and ex-employees telling stories related to these stresses., whom can we turn to when we're burning and stressing out? We can turn to each other.

Submission + - How Kickstarter project can massively exceed its funding goals and still fail (medium.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: In November, 2013, a Kickstarter project for a software-defined camera trigger scored £290,386 (~$450,000) in funding after asking for a mere £50,000. After almost a year of delays, they've now announced the project is dead. Their CEO has published a lengthy article about how such a successful funding round can still turn into a failed product. In short: budgeting. To get their software into a workable state, they ended up spending 940% of the amount they'd originally allocated to software development. Their protoyping went over budget, too, and they had to spend a fair bit in legal fees to fend off a major lens manufacturer complaining about their product's name. Still, they had more funding than they expected, and would have been able to deal with these costs. Unfortunately, the bill of materials for their final product clocked in way higher than they expected. They would have had to sell the device at about $350 each, when they were originally targeting a $99 price point. (And that figure assumes good sales — with a smaller production run, price per unit goes even higher. The company is now going to refund the remaining money left over from its Kickstarter campaign — about 20% of the total. They're also open sourcing the software and sharing the PCB designs and schematics.

Submission + - Most Doctors Give in to Parents to Alter Vaccine Schedules

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: Catherine Saint Louis reports at the NYT that according to a survey of 534 primary care physicians, a wide majority of pediatricians and family physicians acquiesce to parents who wish to delay vaccinating their children, even though the doctors feel these decisions put children at risk for measles, whooping cough and other ailments. One-third of doctors said they acquiesced “often” or “always”; another third gave in only “sometimes.” According to Dr. Paul A. Offit, such deference is in keeping with today’s doctoring style, which values patients as partners. “At some level, you’re ceding your expertise, and you want the patient to participate and make the decision,” says Offit, a pediatrician specializing in infectious diseases. “It is sad that we are willing to let children walk out of our offices vulnerable to potentially fatal infections. There’s a fatigue here, and there’s a kind of learned helplessness.”

Part of the problem is the lack of a proven strategy to guide physicians in counseling parents. “Unfortunately, we don’t have a solid evidence base in terms of how to communicate to patients about vaccines,” says Saad Omer adding that although he does not sanction the use of alternative vaccine schedules, he understands why primary care physicians keep treating these patients — just as doctors do not kick smokers out of their practices when they fail to quit. Dr. Allison Kempe, the study’s lead author and a pediatrician at Children’s Hospital Colorado, thinks the time has come to acknowledge that the idea that “vaccine education can be handled in a brief wellness visit is untenable” and says that we may need pro-vaccine parents and perhaps even celebrities to star in marketing campaigns to help “reinforce vaccination as a social norm.” "Whether the topic is autism or presidential politics," says Frank Bruni, "celebrity trumps authority and obviates erudition."

Comment Re:Java (Score 2) 407

Actually not bad advice, if the poster wants to get into OOP.

Objective-C is the obvious choice if you also want to make money developing for Mac OS X

With Apple switching to swift, you'll be learning an orphan language. Best bet is to learn c, then c++. This way you get the basics first.

However, if you think you're going to make money developing for OSX starting from zero, seriously, what universe do you think you're in?

Submission + - US Supreme Court Gives Tacit Approval for Govt to Collect DNA With No Warrant

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to review a case involving the conviction of a man based solely on the analysis of his "inadvertently shed" DNA. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) argues that this tacit approval of the government's practice of collecting anyone's DNA anywhere without a warrant will lead to a future in which people's DNA are "entered into and checked against DNA databases and used to conduct pervasive surveillance."

Submission + - Apple Pay security scam nets fraudsters millions of dollars (betanews.com)

Submitted by Mark Wilson
Mark Wilson writes: The big names in tech are falling over themselves to get new payment systems out of the door at the moment. At MWC, Sundar Pichai confirmed Android Pay is on its way, and we've also learned about Samsung Pay from the Barcelona event. The convenience of paying with a smartphone is undeniable, but there are unavoidable security concerns.

Having been adopted by millions of Americans — and with plans to expand into Europe and beyond — Apple Pay is serving to highlight important security problems. Lax verification systems used by banks coupled with criminals exploiting stolen credit cards and IDs mean Apple Pay is used to make millions of dollars worth of fraudulent purchases. So how does it work?

Comment Re:not the first time (Score 1) 136

by blue trane (#49167463) Attached to: Photo First: Light Captured As Both Particle and Wave

" It doesn't make sense to ask which one it is - a "puff" of light is neither a particle, nor a wave, but a different kind of stuff which has some properties of each."

But this is like the Academie Francaise outlawing certain words. It is an academic exercise. Nature, and language, is far more expressive than (some) physicists, and academicians, would have you believe.

Comment Re:not the first time (Score 1) 136

by blue trane (#49167443) Attached to: Photo First: Light Captured As Both Particle and Wave

Outside the wire, the effect is on the ether.

Yves Couder provides a macroscopic experiment that duplicates the diffraction patterns of photons self-interfering: Single Particle Diffraction and Interference at a Macroscopic Scale.

The reason he won't go so far as to say that's what's happening on a quantum level is, that it requires an ether. And we all know that Einstein disproved the ether (actually he just came up with a, supposedly, simpler model).

Comment Re:Uses a 15x15 room, it's a Holodeck (Score 1) 96

by BarbaraHudson (#49167413) Attached to: Valve and HTC Reveal "Vive" SteamVR Headset
It doesn't need to be transparent, so we have a multitude of materials we can make it out of that are light. It'll feel like they're walking uphill, but the purpose of a hamster ball is to allow the little rat to get exercise while being safe from the family dog and cat. It could be marketed as a panic ball in case of an attack by zombies.

Submission + - Astronomers Find a Dusty Galaxy That Shouldn't Exist (nationalgeographic.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Peering back in time to find the very earliest objects in the universe, an international team of astronomers has discovered a galaxy that shouldn't be there at all.

The problem, the scientists report Monday in Nature , is that while the tiny galaxy dates from just 700 million years or so after the big bang, it's far more dusty than something this young and small has any right to be.

The dusty galaxy is just one of the recent surprises astronomers have found. "Last week," says Marrone, "we learned of an incredibly massive black hole in the early universe. Now we have this average galaxy with significant amounts of dust. We've had this cartoon picture of the early universe, but it's clear that we really don't know what's going on."

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