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Comment Re:StartSSL ? (Score 2) 97

Gotta agree, StartSSL has a serious business model that really does work in their best interest. Yeah, sure they give out free certs, until/unless you have the slightest 'professional' website, (like a portfolio site, with the sole intent of landing a job for example), and as others have pointed out, revocations cost more then a certificate from someone else to begin with.

Why is that part about revocations an issue in the first place you might ask? Because their poor user interface lead you to making a mistake that can only be done with a revocation, of course. Stay away from StartSSL and just pay good money for a cheap cert somewhere; a wildcard cert. if need be.

I learned this lesson the hard way *trying* to use StartSSL myself, and I have serious regrets having done so, especially after having to cough up all the documentation like a scan of my passport and more. You have been warned.

In contrast, the new service from 'Let's Encrypt' looks like a well-deserved breath of fresh air, and I can appreciate their list of business partners, especially EFF, the Mozilla Foundation, and the Linux Foundation.

Submission + - In Turnabout, Disney Cancels Tech Worker Layoffs (nytimes.com) 2

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: It was previously reported that Disney made laid-off workers train their foreign replacements. The New York Times reports that Disney has reversed its decision to layoff tech workers after it caused an uproar with the public, two investigations by the Department of Labor into outsourcing firms, complaints to the Justice department and calls for an investigation into the H-1B Visa program by Senator Bill Nelson.

Submission + - Uber downgraded from a hot dot-com to an average taxi company in CA (thenextweb.com)

Submitted by siddesu
siddesu writes: The California Labor Commission has ruled Uber drivers are employees and not independent contractors. The ruling has serious implications for Uber’s business model, since it will now be required to offer its drivers benefits that meet the requirements of the Californian labor laws. The labor commissioner's office has apparently awarded $4k per driver, which Uber is appealing.

Submission + - Pink Slips at Disney. But First, Training Foreign Replacements. (nytimes.com)

Submitted by operator_error
operator_error writes: The employees who kept the data systems humming in the vast Walt Disney fantasy fief did not suspect trouble when they were suddenly summoned to meetings with their boss.

“I just couldn’t believe they could fly people in to sit at our desks and take over our jobs exactly,” said one former worker, an American in his 40s who remains unemployed since his last day at Disney on Jan. 30. “It was so humiliating to train somebody else to take over your job. I still can’t grasp it.”

But the layoffs at Disney and at other companies, including the Southern California Edison power utility, are raising new questions about how businesses and outsourcing companies are using the temporary visas, known as H-1B, to place immigrants in technology jobs in the United States. These visas are at the center of a fierce debate in Congress over whether they complement American workers or displace them.

Disney “made the difficult decision to eliminate certain positions, including yours,” as a result of “the transition of your work to a managed service provider,” said a contract presented to employees on the day the layoffs were announced. It offered a “stay bonus” of 10 percent of severance pay if they remained for 90 days. But the bonus was contingent on “the continued satisfactory performance of your job duties.” For many, that involved training a replacement. Young immigrants from India took the seats at their computer stations.

“The first 30 days was all capturing what I did,” said the American in his 40s, who worked 10 years at Disney. “The next 30 days, they worked side by side with me, and the last 30 days, they took over my job completely.” To receive his severance bonus, he said, “I had to make sure they were doing my job correctly.”

Comment Re:computers (Score 1) 277

by operator_error (#49205807) Attached to: Daylight Saving Time Change On Sunday For N. America

Point well made! ...still, it shouldn't be so difficult to set the non-ntp devices, using the ntp devices as a reference, (especially when bugs appear, as happens during these seasonal changes). And even without paying a while lot of attention, you still can kind of expect bugs to happen about this time in the season.

Submission + - Microsoft and Google working together on Angular 2 JavaScript framework (betanews.com)

Submitted by Mark Wilson
Mark Wilson writes: There are unlikely partnerships, and there are unlikely partnerships — Google and Microsoft certainly make for strange bedfellows. At developer conference ng-conf in Salt Lake City, Google's Angular team revealed that it has been working with the TypeScript Team from Microsoft to produce Angular 2.

The worlds of TypeScript and AtScript have converged, resulting in the collaborative effort that is Angular 2. The new version of the JavaScript framework will be written in TypeScript and will be used to develop the next generation of web sites and web apps.

Submission + - OCO2's 1st map of CO2 output (livescience.com)

Submitted by WindBourne
WindBourne writes:

This past summer, NASA launched its first satellite devoted to measuring atmospheric carbon dioxide, a heat-trapping gas that is driving global warming.

.... scientists with the space agency unveiled the first carbon maps obtained by the spacecraft, named the Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2, or OCO-2.

This map is little bit more than a month's worth of data.
Note that the large CO2 emissions in the southern hemisphere is due to Ag with a temporary burns, while the emissions in the north are basically at its lowest points. Also note the CO2 to the east of China over the Pacific.

Submission + - Homer Simpson Nearly Calculates Higgs Boson 14 years Before its Actual Discovery (latimes.com) 1

Submitted by operator_error
operator_error writes: In the episode, titled “The Wizard of Evergreen Terrace,” a mid-life crisis inspires Homer to become an inventor in the mold of Thomas Edison. One scene features him at a blackboard working on an equation to calculate the mass of a Higgs boson, the elusive subatomic particle that is key to understanding why objects in the universe have mass in the first place. (You can see a picture of the blackboard here.)

Simon Singh, a science writer with a doctorate in particle physics, crunched Homer’s numbers and declared that the usually hapless Homer got his math pretty much right.

“That equation predicts the mass of the Higgs boson” Singh told the Independent. “If you work it out, you get the mass of a Higgs boson that’s only a bit larger than the nano-mass of a Higgs boson actually is. It’s kind of amazing as Homer makes this prediction 14 years before it was discovered.”

Well, not exactly.

According to David Kaplan, a bona fide particle physicist at Johns Hopkins University, Homer’s equation yields a value of 777 gigaelectronvolts, or GeV. The actual value measured at the Large Hadron Collider is more like 125 GeV, plus or minus a GeV.

“It is a bit off, but not insanely so,” Kaplan said.

Homer would have done even better if he hadn’t made pi the first term in his equation, Kaplan added. Without it, he’d have had “a nice guess of 99 GeV, which would not have been too shabby,” he said.

Even so, 777 GeV was not outside the realm of possibility back in 1998 – at that time, the upper limit was thought to be around 850 GeV. Still, those in the know were already seeing evidence that the true mass of the Higgs was significantly lower, Kaplan explained.

The fourth line of Homer's equation appears to show how a doughnut can evolve into a spherical body that vaguely resembles the moon.

Submission + - Activists Attacked GPS Satellites with Axes

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: Ingrid Burrington writes in The Atlantic about a little-remembered incident that occurred in 1992 when activists Keith Kjoller and Peter Lumsdaine snuck into a Rockwell International facility in Seal Beach, California and in what they called an "act of conscience" used wood-splitting axes to break into two clean rooms containing nine satellites being built for the US government. Lumsdaine took his axe to one of the satellites, hitting it over 60 times. The Brigade's target was the Navigation Satellite Timing And Ranging (NAVSTAR) Program and the Global Positioning System (GPS). Both men belonged to the Lockheed Action Collective, a protest group that staged demonstrations and blockaded the entrance at the Lockheed Missiles & Space Co. test base in Santa Cruz in 1990. They said they intentionally took axes to the $50-million Navstar Global Position System satellite to bring the public's attention to what they termed the government's attempt to control the world through modern technology. "I had to slow the deployment of this system (which) makes conventional warfare much more lethal and nuclear war winnable in the eyes of some," an emotional Kjoller told the judge before receiving an 18-month sentence. "It's something that I couldn't let go by. I tried to do what was right rather than what was convenient."

Burrington recently contacted Lumsdaine to learn more about the Brigade and Lumsdaine expresses no regrets for his actions. Even if the technology has more and more civilian uses, Lumsdaine says, GPS remains “military in its origins, military in its goals, military in its development and [is still] controlled by the military.” Today, Lumsdaine views the thread connecting GPS and drones as part of a longer-term movement by military powers toward automated systems and compared today’s conditions to the opening sequence of Terminator 2, where Sarah Connor laments that the survivors of Skynet’s nuclear apocalypse “lived only to face a new nightmare: the war against the machines.” "I think in a general way people need to look for those psychological, spiritual, cultural, logistical, technological weak points and leverage points and push hard there," says Lumsdaine. "It is so easy for all of us as human beings to take a deep breath and step aside and not face how very serious the situation is, because it's very unpleasant to look at the effort and potential consequences of challenging the powers that be. But the only thing higher than the cost of resistance is the cost of not resisting."

Submission + - Red Hat strips down for Docker (computerworld.com.au)

Submitted by angry tapir
angry tapir writes: Reacting to the surging popularity of the Docker virtualization technology, Red Hat has customized a version of its Linux distribution to run Docker containers. The Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 Atomic Host strips away all the utilities residing in the stock distribution of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) that aren't needed to run Docker containers. Removing unneeded components saves on storage space, and reduces the time needed for updating and booting up. It also provides fewer potential entry points for attackers. (Product page is here.)

Submission + - Android phone completely disabled after receiving an international call

Submitted by OneSmartFellow
OneSmartFellow writes: I was out with friends on Friday evening when I received an international phone call from a +7 phone number. It's not at all unusual for me to receive international phone calls, but, I'll admit I have never receievd one from the +7 dialing code. I answered the call, and I could only hear myself speaking. I hung up, and my phone immediately shut off. All attempts to power it back on have failed. I have tried removing the battery, and booting into recovery mode. Phone is a Nexus S with Cyanogenmod installed. It is now a paperweight. I presume I have been hacked somehow. Is there any way to recover from this experience ?

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