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Comment Re:Overstating their case (Score 1) 168

by dangle (#45567741) Attached to: Why Competing For Tenure Is Like Trying To Become a Drug Lord

Exactly. For a while I was "going for it" to see how far I could rise in academics. I used to joke that I had risen from street thug to one of the guys that gets to sit at the bar in the local don's place. But I always added the caveat "at least I don't have to kill anyone or worry about being killed."

Submission + - Syrian Electronic Army Hacks Domain Data for Twitter, NY Times

Submitted by Trailrunner7
Trailrunner7 writes: The Syrian Electronic Army, a group known for attacking high-profile media sites in the last year or so, has in the last few hours compromised the domain information for a large number of sites, including the New York Times home page and some of Twitter’s domains. Security researchers say that the most likely attack vector was the domain registrar used by the companies.

Both the Times and Twitter, as well as a long list of other companies including Google and Yahoo, use a company called Melbourne IT as a domain registrar. Researchers following the attack say that the WHOIS and domain information for the Times and Twitter domains was changing back and forth between legitimate data and the hacked SEA data for much of the last few hours. The Times home page was offline sporadically Tuesday afternoon and the paper reported that the company’s CIO told employees to be cautious sending email “until this situation is resolved”.

Submission + - NSA to cut 90% of Sysadmins (washingtonpost.com)

Submitted by dangle
dangle writes: In an attempt to prevent future data leaks, Army Gen. Keith B. Alexander, the NSA’s director, has announced plans to cut almost all the agency's system administrators. “What we’re in the process of doing – not fast enough – is reducing our system administrators by about 90 percent,” he said last week at Fordham University in New York. Many of those systems administrators are contractors, like Snowden was. Instead of the 1,000 systems administrators NSA uses, Alexander wants to move more of the operation to the cyber cloud, called the Intelligence Community’s Information Technology Enterprise (ICITE), which relies on a network of computers linked on the Internet. “We’ve put people in the loop of transferring data, securing networks and doing things that machines are probably better at doing,” Alexander said.

Submission + - Astronomers Identify Asteroids That Can Easily Be Captured

Submitted by Hugh Pickens DOT Com
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes: Long overlooked as mere rocky chunks leftover from the formation of the solar system, asteroids have recently gotten a lot more scrutiny as NASA moves forward with plans to capture, tow, and place a small asteroid somewhere near our planet and two different private space companies, Planetary Resources and Deep Space Industries, plan to seek out and mine precious metals and water from near-Earth asteroids. Now Adam Mann reports that astronomers have identified 12 candidate Easily Retrievable Objects (EROs) ranging in size from approximately 2 meters to 60 meters in diameter that already come (cosmically) close enough to our planet, that it would take a relatively small push to put into orbits around Lagrange points near Earth using existing rocket technology. For example, 2006 RH120, could be sent into orbit around L2 by changing its velocity by just 58 meters per second with a single burn on 1 February 2021. Moving one of these EROs would be a “logical stepping stone towards more ambitious scenarios of asteroid exploration and exploitation, and possibly the easiest feasible attempt for humans to modify the Solar System environment outside of Earth (PDF),” write the authors in Celestial Mechanics and Dynamical Astronomy. None of the 12 ERO asteroids are new to astronomers; in fact one of them became briefly famous when it was found to be temporarily orbiting the Earth until 2007. But until now nobody had realized just how easily these bodies could be captured.

Submission + - NASA tests software algorithm that could precisely land future spacecraft (networkworld.com)

Submitted by coondoggie
coondoggie writes: magine if you had developed, built and flown a spacecraft that successfully traversed the cosmos but upon landing, spun out of control or hit something that destroyed the ship. Such nightmare scenarios are exactly what NASA engineers are developing sophisticated software technology to avoid. NASA is currently testing one of the more important components of such software — the algorithms that incorporate the spacecraft's trajectory, speed and landing information to guide a ship to a safe arrival. The latest algorithm, known as Fuel Optimal Large Divert Guidance algorithm (G-FOLD) is being flight-tested in conjunction with Masten Space Systems at the Mojave Air and Space Port in California.
Intel

Submission + - Intel challenges ARM on power consumption... and wins. (tomshardware.com)

Submitted by GhostX9
GhostX9 writes: Tom's Hardware just published a detailed look at the Intel Atom Z2760 in the Acer Iconia W510 and compared it to the NVIDIA Tegra 3 in the Microsoft Surface. They break it down and demonstrate how the full Windows 8 tablet outperforms the Windows RT machine in power consumption. They break down power consumption to include the role of the CPU, GPU, memory controller and display. Anandtech is also reporting similar findings, but only reports CPU and GPU utilization.
Transportation

Submission + - The New Ethanol Blend May Damage Your Vehicle 1

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "About 80 percent of the gasoline consumed in the US is blended with ethanol, primarily E10 meaning gasoline with a 10 percent mix of ethanol, generally derived from corn. Now Kate Sheppard writes that the Environmental Protection Agency has approved a new policy that will allow states to raise the blend to up to 15 percent ethanol (also known as E15), approved for use for cars and light trucks from the model year 2001 and later. A few weeks ago, AAA issued a statement saying that the EPA's new policy creates the "strong likelihood of consumer confusion and the potential for voided warranties and vehicle damage." The worry is that people will put E15 in their cars without realizing it. AAA surveyed vehicle manufacturers, and found that only about 12 million of the 240 million vehicles on the roads today are built to use E15 gasoline. The EPA will require that gas pumps with E15 bear a warning sign noting the blend and that it is not recommended for cars older than the 2001 model year. But what happens if you accidentally use it? "Nobody really knows what negative effects [E15 is] going to have on the vehicle," says Brian Lyons, Toyota's safety and quality communications manager. "We think that there needs to be a lot more study conducted to make sure there are no longer term effects on the vehicle. So far everything we've seen says there will be." The concern is that repeated, long-term exposure could cause the higher-alcohol-content fuel to degrade engine parts like valves and cylinder heads—which could potentially cost thousands of dollars to replace. Gas station owners don't like it very much either, because they'd likely have to upgrade their equipment to use it. Nor are environmental groups big fans of the EPA's decision arguing that increasing the use of ethanol can drive up food prices, and isn't the best means of reducing our reliance on foreign fuels. The ethanol lobby is the only group that really seems to like the new rule. "We've force fed a fuel into every American's car that benefits a few thousand corn farmers and ethanol refiners at the expense of virtually every other American," says Scott Faber."

Comment Thank you (Score 2) 238

by dangle (#41873255) Attached to: Hyundai Overstated MPG On Over 1 Million Cars

People forget, or never knew, how much bigger of a pain car ownership used to be. I spent the first part of my young adult life keeping the family's '71 Super Beetle alive. Easy to fix is very different from reliable. Brakes that don't self-adjust, carburetor disassembly and cleaning to allow the engine to keep from stalling for a few more months, different starting and driving methods for different temperatures. Maybe a relaxing hobby for some, but a source of life shortening stress if you depend on it for daily transportation.

Now I look forward to the time that we feel sorry for people that had to struggle with 21st century computer hassles.

Comment Re:Unexamined Lives and All That (Score 1) 342

by dangle (#41650833) Attached to: As Gas Prices Soar So Does City Biking

To clarify, the car is a great example of what society is capable of, but the way they are being used is not.

I own a car, but the more it stays in the driveway to rust in peace, the better things are for the world and for me.

Cars can have their place, but with car sharing, car rentals, public transport, I don't plan to replace my car after it dies.

Comment Beautiful Idea (Score 1) 186

by dangle (#41649495) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Dedicating Code?

How about adding her name in the 'credits' after the other developers' names, perhaps with a short compliment on her qualities as a person? Or associated more closely with your name to avoid the team feeling as if you've appropriated the entire project.

Comment Unexamined Lives and All That (Score 5, Insightful) 342

by dangle (#41648929) Attached to: As Gas Prices Soar So Does City Biking

It took me a while to make the decision to bike to work. In retrospect, my whole life was colored by car culture. They're beautiful machines, and my friends and I spent large amounts of time talking about them and using them.

I also finally realized that our understandable desire to make our lives more comfortable and effortless is ultimately unhealthy.

All my notions and excuses left me, and I've been biking to work every day, unless snow and ice preclude it.

It's such an amazing way to start and end the day, even though it's not glamorized on TV.

On business a few years ago, a nice young man who was shuttling me into downtown Copenhagen in a company car described to me his intense interest in buying his own car, despite the tax disincentives to do so. And China is abandoning their bike culture, making single occupancy vehicle trips a sign of progress. And as an American I've found myself thinking: "It's not obligatory to copy every mistake we've made, feel free to learn from our bad examples."

Submission + - CERN to announce discovery of new particle (businessinsider.com)

Submitted by
djacosta
djacosta writes: "The physics community is abuzz with the latest news that CERN researchers in Switzerland plan to announce the discovery of the Higgs boson on July 4.
But it looks like someone jumped the gun.
A video confirming the discovering of the new particle was accidentally posted on CERN's website for a brief time this morning, Tom Chivers of The Telegraph reports.
In the video, Joe Incandela, the CMS spokesperson says:
We've observed a new particle. We have quite strong evidence that there's something there. Its properties are still going to take us a little bit of time. But we can see that it decays to two photons, for example, which tells us it's a boson, it's a particle with integer spin. And we know its mass is roughly 100 times the mass of the proton. And this is very significant. This is the most massive such particle that exists, if we confirm all of this, which I think we will."

Submission + - NAVSOP: A robust solution to GPS jamming? (newscientist.com)

Submitted by dangle
dangle writes: BAE Systems has developed a positioning solution that it claims will work even when GPS is unavailable. Its strategy is to use the collection of radio frequency signals from TV, radio and cellphone masts, even WiFi routers, to deduce a position.
BAE's answer is dubbed Navigation via Signals of Opportunity (NAVSOP). It interrogates the airwaves for the ID and signal strength of local digital TV and radio signals, plus air traffic control radars, with finer grained adjustments coming from cellphone masts and WiFi routers. In any given area, the TV, radio, cellphone and radar signals tend to be at constant frequencies and power levels as they are are heavily regulated — so positions could be calculated from them. "The real beauty of NAVSOP is that the infrastructure required to make it work is already in place," says a BAE spokesman — and "software defined radio" microchips that run NAVSOP routines can easily be integrated into existing satnavs. The firm believes the technology could also work in urban concrete canyons where GPS signals cannot currently reach.

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