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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."
Businesses

20-Somethings Think It's OK To Text and Answer Calls In Business Meetings 453

Posted by Soulskill from the why-can't-you-play-angry-birds-like-everyone-else dept.
RichDiesal writes "In an upcoming article in Business Communication Quarterly, researchers found that more than half of 20-somethings believe it appropriate to read texts during formal business meetings, whereas only 16% of workers 40+ believe the same thing. 34% of 20-somethings believe it appropriate to answer the phone in the middle of a meeting (i.e., not excusing yourself to answer the phone — answering and talking mid-meeting!). It is unclear if this is happening because more younger workers grew up with mobile technology, or if it's because older workers have the experience to know that answering a call in the middle of a meeting is a terrible idea. So if you're a younger worker, consider leaving your phone alone in meetings to avoid annoying your coworkers. And if you're an older worker annoyed at what you believe to be rude behavior, just remember, it's not you – it's them!"
Microsoft

Charlie Stross: Why Microsoft Word Must Die 479

Posted by timothy from the codependence-is-harmful dept.
Jeremiah Cornelius writes "Rapture of the Nerds co-author Charlie Stross hates Microsoft Word, worse than you do. Best of all, he can articulate the many structural faults of Word that make his loathing both understandable and contagious. 'Steve Jobs approached Bill Gates... to organize the first true WYSIWYG word processor for a personal computer -- ...should it use control codes, or hierarchical style sheets? In the end, the decree went out: Word should implement both formatting paradigms. Even though they're fundamentally incompatible... Word was in fact broken by design, from the outset — and it only got worse from there.' Can Free Software do any better, than to imitate the broken Microsoft model? Does document formatting even matter this much, versus content?"

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”.
Privacy

Should Cops Wear Google Glass? 223

Posted by samzenpus from the the-eyes-have-it dept.
Nerval's Lobster writes "Over at The Kernel, staff writer Greg Stevens wonders whether police departments around the world should outfit their officers with Google Glass. There's some logic behind the idea. A cop with wearable electronics constantly streaming audio and video back to a supervisor (or even a Website) would be less likely, at least in theory, to take liberties with civilians' civil liberties. But not everybody thinks it's such a good idea. Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst with the ACLU's Speech, Privacy and Technology Project, wrote in a recent blog posting that society needs to make choices 'about the extent to which we want to allow the government to store up that data so that it has the power to hit 'rewind' on everybody's lives.' In the view of that organization, 'that's just too much power.' That being said, law enforcement wearing electronics that streams constant video and audio data would still be subject to the law. 'If the officer is recording a communication he has in public with someone, there's probably no wiretap problem since there's at least the consent of one party and no expectation of privacy,' Hanni M. Fakhoury, a staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, wrote in an email to Slashdot. 'But if he's recording peripheral communications between two separate individuals, than there's potential wiretap liability depending on the circumstances.' What do you think? Are cops wearing Google Glass (or similar wearable electronic) a good idea?"

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.

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