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Submission + - New Technology for Building Homes Lower Costs by 50%! (i24news.tv)

Submitted by Iddo Genuth
Iddo Genuth writes: An Israeli entrepreneur has developed a smart building block that has the potential to revolutionize the construction industry, reducing building and running costs for new homes.

The new block, currently under development, is called S-brick. It looks like a large concrete Lego piece with built in holes and a v-shape part which can be removed, exposing the inner porous structure. This design combines several distinct advantages. The S-block is made from a special concrete developed in Germany that is as strong as steal — eliminating the need for expensive and time consuming metal reinforcements in the building. Each block has holes for running pipes, plumbing and electrical wires. The outer part of the block is removable, allowing easy access for inserting the pipes during construction and inspecting and maintaining them later on. These are just two of almost a dozen unique advantages of the S-brick compared to any existing comparable building technology which according to the developers could reduce building costs by as much as 50%.

Submission + - US Court Rules Against Government for Using Seized Data Beyond Scope of Warrant

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit last week reversed a tax evasion conviction against an accountant because the government had used data from his computers that were seized under a warrant targeting different suspects. The Fourth Amendment, the court pointed out, 'prevents the seizure of one thing under a warrant describing another.' Law enforcement originally made copies of his hard drives and during off-site processing, separated his personal files from data related to the original warrant. However, 1.5 years later, the government sifted through his personal files and used what it found to build a case against him. The appeals court held that '[i]f the Government could seize and retain non-responsive electronic records indefinitely, so it could search them whenever it later developed probable cause, every warrant to search for particular electronic data would become, in essence, a general warrant', which the Fourth Amendment protects against. The EFF hopes that the outcome of this appeal will have implications for the NSA's dragnet surveillance practice.

Submission + - Social Movie Nerd (runpee.com)

Submitted by fleebait
fleebait writes: For the guy who does movies the old fashioned theatre way, here's an application to use after paid for a high priced theatre ticket, and you can't hit the pause button.

Runpee

Submission + - Employees who stay more than 2 years paid 50% less (forbes.com)

Submitted by fleebait
fleebait writes: According to Forbes:

The worst kept secret is that employees are making less on average every year. There are millions of reasons for this, but we’re going to focus on one that we can control. Staying employed at the same company for over two years on average is going to make you earn less over your lifetime by about 50% or more.

Submission + - NIgerian born UK TV repairman sentenced 16 months prison for 91% reuse (theguardian.com) 1

Submitted by retroworks
retroworks writes: The Guardian uses a stock photo of obvious electronic junk in its coverage of the sentencing of Joseph Benson of BJ Electronics. But film of the actual containers showed fairly uniform, sorted televisions which typically work for 20 years. In 2013, the Basel Convention Secretariat released findings on a two-year study of the seized sea containers containing the alleged "e-waste", including Benson's in Nigeria, and found 91% working and repaired product. The study, covered in Slashdot last February, declared the shipments legal, and further reported that they were more likely to work than new product sent to Africa (which may be shelf returns from bad lots, part of the reason Africans prefer used TVs from nations with strong warranty laws).

Director of regulated industry Harvey Bradshaw of the UK tells the Guardian: "This sentence is a landmark ruling because it's the first time anyone has been sent to prison for illegal waste exports." But 5 separate university research projects question what the crime was, and whether prohibition in trade is really the best way to reduce the percentage of bad product (less than 100% waste). Admittedly, I have been following this case from the beginning and interviewed both Benson and the Basel Secretariat Executive Director, and am shocked that the UK judge went ahead with the sentencing following the publication of the E-Waste Assessment Study last year. http://retroworks.blogspot.com... But what do Nerds at Slashdot think about the campaign to arrest African geeks who pay 10 times the value of scrap for used products replaced in rich nations?

Submission + - When drones fall from the sky (washingtonpost.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: More than 400 large U.S. military drones have crashed in major accidents around the world since 2001, a record of calamity that exposes the potential dangers of throwing open American skies to drone traffic, according to a year-long Washington Post investigation.

Submission + - Overeager Compilers Can Open Security Holes In Your Code (itworld.com)

Submitted by jfruh
jfruh writes: Creators of compilers are in an arms race to improve performance. But according to a presentantation at this week's annual USENIX conference, those performance boosts can undermine your code's security. For instance, a compiler might find a subroutine that checks a huge bound of memory beyond what's allocated to the program, decide it's an error, and eliminate it from the compiled machine code — even though it's a necessary defense against buffer overflow attacks.

Submission + - NADA Is Terrified Of Tesla

Submitted by cartechboy
cartechboy writes: It's no secret that the National Automobile Dealers Association has been trying to block Tesla from selling cars directly from consumers, but to date, it has been defeated countless times in many states. Now NADA put out a release and promotional video touting the benefits of dealer franchises, something Tesla has shunned. NADA mentions price competition, consumer safety, local economic benefits, and added value. While NADA argues its points, there's no question that Tesla could easily turn around and argue right back with valid counter points. There may be some truth to NADA's claims, but there are some gaping holes in the arguments that can't be ignored, and I'm sure Tesla won't. Hey NADA, you scared?

Submission + - Kingston and PNY caught bait-and-switching cheaper components after good reviews

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Over the past few months, we’ve seen a disturbing trend from first Kingston, and now PNY. Manufacturers are launching SSDs with one hardware specification, and then quietly changing the hardware configuration after reviews have gone out. The impacts have been somewhat different (more on that) but in both cases, unhappy customers are loudly complaining that they’ve been cheated, tricked into paying for a drive they otherwise wouldn’t have purchased.

Comment Re:uh no (Score 1) 173

by fleebait (#47235937) Attached to: Dell Exec Calls HP's New 'Machine' Architecture 'Laughable'

It might be just a little more than just a game changer.

Stop thinking about computers as boxes with wires, screens and disks, and start thinking about building the nervous system of a human being. Our bodies use distributed computing all over the place, with the vagus nervous system for the organs, with their own chemical memories, and feedback loops, the localized muscle memory systems for arms, legs, fingers, locally stored programs that run semi-autonomously.

If you read about memristors on Wikipedia, you can begin to see the possibilities of interfacing with biologic systems, and the newer bioligic chemical sensors within the organs, and appendages. Distribute local semi-dedicated processors with the distributed memory systems, and now we're talking about leaps ahead for automotons, and robotics. Who needs a stupid file oriented operating system, when the information needed for a process is stored locally.

Unix is so yesterday, as well as any other file orientated storage system.

How do you organize your brain? Do you have file cabinets, with tabs, disks? pictures? No, it's some sort of random access sensory system that relates to previously accessed information. Something like the memristors they are talking about.

It's coming down to defining the complete application, before building the actual machine itself.

I imagine early prototypes may be in a metal box with wires, but interface is going to be a new problem. Most likely all fibre connections before connecting directly to sensors and embedding sensory processing at the sensor itself -- -- and so on.

Comment Re:Inspiring (Score 1) 257

by fleebait (#47235881) Attached to: HP Unveils 'The Machine,' a New Computer Architecture

It might be just a little more than just a game changer.

Stop thinking about computers as boxes with wires, screens and disks, and start thinking about building the nervous system of a human being. Our bodies use distributed computing all over the place, with the vagus nervous system for the organs, with their own chemical memories, and feedback loops, the localized muscle memory systems for arms, legs, fingers, locally stored programs that run semi-autonomously.

If you read about memristors on Wikipedia, you can begin to see the possibilities of interfacing with biologic systems, and the newer bioligic chemical sensors within the organs, and appendages. Distribute local semi-dedicated processors with the distributed memory systems, and now we're talking about leaps ahead for automotons, and robotics. Who needs a stupid file oriented operating system, when the information needed for a process is stored locally.

Unix is so yesterday, as well as any other file orientated storage system.

How do you organize your brain? Do you have file cabinets, with tabs, disks? pictures? No, it's some sort of random access sensory system that relates to previously accessed information. Something like the memristors they are talking about.

It's coming down to defining the complete application, before building the actual machine itself.

I imagine early prototypes may be in a metal box with wires, but interface is going to be a new problem. Most likely all fibre connections before connecting directly to sensors and embedding sensory processing at the sensor itself -- -- and so on.

Submission + - Android 5 is coming, and only Google knows what's in it. (google.com) 2

Submitted by TodLiebeck
TodLiebeck writes: It's Friday the 13th, and I'm terrified of something that's hiding just around the corner: "Android 5".

Yesterday, various tech blogs speculated that a clock showing "5:00" in a few Android screenshot tweets from Google means Android 5.0's time is soon. Whether "5" is really 4.5 or 5.0 isn't important, we are in the standard release window for a major update to Android, and Google I/O is two weeks away.

What will "5" bring? What will it break?

Only Google and its partners know the answer.

The Android "Open Source" Project has no open beta program. And because of that, it has no real path for user and developer feedback. We'll know what's in it when the final release shows up. Even Apple, whose practice is "we'll tell you what you want", has a beta program for iOS.

Since I don't know what Android "5" is, I'll first resort to wild speculation of what it could be. Recall that Android 4.4 KitKat brought us dramatically reduced user file storage with its prohibitions on writing to MicroSD cards. Perhaps "5" will extend this further, with an iPhone-like app-sandboxing of the internal storage filesystem as well. Such a move would make Android much more dependent on cloud storage (like Google Drive) and could be argued as a security enhancement. Yes, I've gone for a worst-case scenario for effect, but given how willing Google was to make changes that were detrimental to the user in KitKat, a worst-case scenario isn't impossible. I don't think this example is terribly likely, but a similar profoundly negative change could easily be on its way to another part of Android. This happens when you don't ask your customers for their opinions.

Only those with access to Android's "private codelines" know for sure: https://source.android.com/sou...

We do know there are numerous security enhancements to the underlying Linux operating system in a forthcoming Android update. See Chainfire's blog for the full report: https://plus.google.com/+Chain.... It appears that modifications to the /system partition (where the Android OS itself lives) will only be possible with a custom device recovery. This could be very bad news for developers and power-users on carriers that exclusively provide devices with locked bootloaders (e.g. Verizon and AT&T). They will effectively be prohibited from running customized versions of the Android OS (ROMs).

The hardened security aspect is perfectly fine with me, providing I can hold the keys to those locks on the device I pay for. But, at least in the USA, the "big two" carriers insist on having that privilege to themselves. It's a great shame that things have fallen so far that the freedom of Linux and the security of Linux are at odds.

Not testing software and not developing publicly has an additional obvious flaw: the product often has quality issues. Many Nexus device owners are well aware: they are the guinea pigs for new Android releases. While I can't substantiate it, it's easy to imagine that carriers and OEMs wait for issues to resolve as Nexus owners struggle through their involuntary beta testing. If a trivial semantic change were made to correctly call those initial Nexus releases "betas", then perhaps those competing against the platform wouldn't mock us all for having to wait six months for updates to the latest version.

The Android platform needs to do away with the strict secrecy and closed development. It's understandable that some aspects need to take place behind closed doors and then be released with a bang. It's not reasonable to do that to the vast majority of the Android OS, or to do it without any kind of open beta and feedback period.

Google, you need to consider your users and developers, not just your partners. Users and developers jumped on this bandwagon because it was an open platform that wasn't supposed to be controlled like this. If you want Android to continue to succeed because people love it, then Android's development process needs to listen to the people.

Disclaimer:

I make my living writing Android apps as an independent developer. I've spent the last five years pouring my heart into it, and I very much want Android to succeed, for both benevolent and selfish reasons.

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