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Comment Re:What rules prevent them from doing this already (Score 1) 221

by rahvin112 (#48714291) Attached to: Google Fiber's Latest FCC Filing: Comcast's Nightmare Come To Life

You think anybody should be allowed to use whatever city infrastructure they like?

The entire purpose of public property is for public use, it if wasn't we would be communists. To try to deny access to anyone to public property is a violation of equal protection. Anyone and everyone that wants to start a public utility of whatever sort they want should have equal access to public property as anyone else does. Exclusive agreements for public property access have been struck down every single time someone tries to enforce them because they aren't legal. Any "franchise" agreement that has terms limiting it to a single utility are illegal on their face and those terms will never be allowed to be enforced.

Comment Re:90 days to fix (Score 0) 129

You've never been through regression testing have you?

If stories of Microsoft's competence (heh heh) are to be believed (heh heh heh) then they already have a full test harness in place, and engineers tasked full-time with adding new cases to the system. Given what slips through, though, one doubts both their competence and also that they have a meaningfully representative set of PCs to test on. I'll grant you that would be difficult in the best case due to wide variation in the market, but the point stands.

Comment Re:My father is considering a Chromebook, (Score 1) 190

I find macbooks work better for my non technical family members.

I tried giving them Chromebooks once and there were all sorts of compatibility problems with printers, my daughter's school website and media sources. Windows PCs were a pain to manage and keep secure. Macbooks have better security properties and take less of my time.

Comment Re:protecting intellectual property is... theft?! (Score 1) 328

Your descendants can benefit from it. Sell copies of your book, then invest your money like everybody else that has to continue working over and over again to continue getting paid. Why do you believe you're so special that you should be able to work once, and then you and your progeny get paid indefinitely?

Submission + - Does anyone offer a simple any-to-many private email app that whitelists members 1

Submitted by arohanet
arohanet writes: In the old days (2007), I set up an email forwarding system for 125 members of an extended family who speak 5 native tongues, live in every continent except Antarctica and who include techno-dinosaurs who have mastered email, but not smart phones (umm for that matter, fax machines were a bit too hard as well).

Our sytem was simple. Send an email to family@xxxxxx.com and it forwarded to 125 members, showing which family member it came from. Hit reply, and it replied to family@xxxxxx.com. It was a free feature that came with registering the domain name.

But when we broke 100 members, our domain registrar no longer loved us... we had to shift to a host service.

That worked OK until they said we had to limit forwarding to 25 emails at a time. So I set up family1@, family2@, etc. and put 25 emails in each of the sub-forwarders.

That worked well until one of our idiot hot-head younger generation sent out an inflammatory political email that not only stirred up other family members, but he also sent it CC: to the rest of his inflammatory friends. That breached the moat that surrounded our family castle, and eventually, our treasured email address was vacuumed up by a spammer.

In the old days, that would have been OK, but in 2014, we were informed by our host that in order to not be branded a spam host by Google, they would delete all forwarding addresses to the big boys (Gmail, Hotmail, etc). So, tossed out in the wilderness, we began the search for a simple product...

An email forwarder that receives email in to a master address (family@xxxxxx.com) and then sends it out to 125 members. The ideal would have all 125 whitelisted and the rest of the world blacklisted. To keep the spam cops happy, it would be best if instead of sending out an explosion of 125 emails, it parsed them out, sending one email to each member with a 1 second delay. Surely this is easy, and surely I'm not the first person in the great wide world of technology to need such a sophisticated app?

Well, days of Google searching turned up lots of Swiss Army knife packages that do everything but what I want. We tried Google Groups, but because we don't want to ask our family members to learn a new email address xxxxxx@googlegroups.com (really, that is asking too much of our dear great-aunt Irene who was born during WW1), Google decided that forwarding from family@xxxxxx.com was spam, so it deleted all 125 email addresses in our list. Besides, anything Google gives away for free is not free, and they change their policies at will.

We tried freelists.org; works but seems to be a newsletter/forum. Attempted majordomo, but it requires technical knowledge I lack and no one in our 125 member family seems to have (which is statistically astonishing). Even tried loading Dada to the host, but so far, it seems to be a one-to-many, not an any-to-many.

So finally, we turn to the font of all knowledge, slashdot.org.

We're looking for simplicity. An application that does nothing more than forward email, but does so in a way that the spam police leave us alone. It would be best if we can just port over the 125 email addresses, not ask people to 'click to join' since this is beyond the skill level of some of our relations.

Does anyone know of such an application?

If not, is there anyone out there with technical proficiency who could write it, and make it open source?
Bitcoin

Fraud, Not Hackers, Took Most of Mt. Gox's Missing Bitcoins 108

Posted by timothy from the shocked-simply-shocked dept.
itwbennett writes Nearly all of the roughly $370 million in bitcoin that disappeared in the February 2014 collapse of Mt. Gox probably vanished due to fraudulent transactions, with only 1 percent taken by yet-to-be-identified hackers, according to a report in Japan's Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper, citing sources close to a Tokyo police probe. The disclosure follows months of investigations by police and others into the tangled mess surrounding the disappearance of the 650,000 bit coins.

Submission + - Up to 65% of cancers caused by chance.

Submitted by BarbaraHudson
BarbaraHudson writes: The Wall Street Journal and the CBC are reporting that about two-thirds of cancers are caused by random chance.

The WSJ: The researchers, from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, analyzed published scientific papers to identify the number of stem cells, and the rate of stem-cell division, among 31 tissue types, though not for breast and prostate tissue, which they excluded from the analysis. Then they compared the total number of lifetime stem-cell divisions in each tissue against a person’s lifetime risk of developing cancer in that tissue in the U.S.

The correlation between these parameters suggests that two-thirds of the difference in cancer risk among various tissue types can be blamed on random, or "stochastic," mutations in DNA occurring during stem-cell division, and only one-third on hereditary or environmental factors like smoking, the researchers conclude. "Thus, the stochastic effects of DNA replication appear to be the major contributor to cancer in humans".

The CBC: The researchers said on Thursday random DNA mutations accumulating in various parts of the body during ordinary cell division are the prime culprits behind many cancer types.

They looked at 31 cancer types and found that 22 of them, including leukemia and pancreatic, bone, testicular, ovarian and brain cancer, could be explained largely by these random mutations — essentially biological bad luck.

The other nine types, including colorectal cancer, skin cancer known as basal cell carcinoma and smoking-related lung cancer, were more heavily influenced by heredity and environmental factors like risky behaviour or exposure to carcinogens.

Overall, they attributed 65 percent of cancer incidence to random mutations in genes that can drive cancer growth.

This doesn't mean you should give up your New Years resolutions to stop smoking, eat less junk, and exercise more.

Submission + - Fraud, Not Hackers Took Most of Mt. Gox's Missing Bitcoins (itworld.com)

Submitted by itwbennett
itwbennett writes: Nearly all of the roughly $370 million in bitcoin that disappeared in the February 2014 collapse of Mt. Gox probably vanished due to fraudulent transactions, with only 1 percent taken by yet-to-be-identified hackers, according to a report in Japan’s Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper, citing sources close to a Tokyo police probe. The disclosure follows months of investigations by police and others into the tangled mess surrounding the disappearance of the 650,000 bit coins.

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