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Submission + - Ocumetics Bionic Lens could give you vision 3x better than 20/20 (www.cbc.ca)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Imagine being able to see three times better than 20/20 vision without wearing glasses or contacts — even at age 100 or more — with the help of bionic lenses implanted in your eyes.

Dr. Garth Webb, an optometrist in British Columbia who invented the Ocumetics Bionic Lens, says patients would have perfect vision and that driving glasses, progressive lenses and contact lenses would become a dim memory as the eye-care industry is transformed.

Webb says people who have the specialized lenses surgically inserted would never get cataracts because their natural lenses, which decay over time, would have been replaced.

Perfect eyesight would result "no matter how crummy your eyes are," Webb says, adding the Bionic Lens would be an option for someone who depends on corrective lenses and is over about age 25, when the eye structures are fully developed.

Submission + - Despite Windows 10, Third-Party Start Menus Will Live On (softpedia.com)

Submitted by jones_supa
jones_supa writes: Microsoft is bringing back the Start Menu in Windows 10, and after the Windows 8 saga, when a lot of adopters looked for third-party alternatives to make the desktop look more familiar, some developers might now be worried that nobody would ever use their apps again. In Windows 10, the new Start Menu will indeed be developed based on users' feedback, but there's no doubt that not everyone can be pleased with this new approach. Rich customization options aren't offered, so you won't be able to change too many things about the default configuration. The second reason is the Windows 7 feel that all users coming from this particular OS version expect to find: an appearance with more depth, and no Live Tiles. Based on your experience with the Technical Preview, are you happy with what Microsoft is providing as the Start Menu, or still see value in third-party replacements?

Submission + - Australia criminalise teaching encryption? (theconversation.com)

Submitted by petherfile
petherfile writes: According to Daniel Mathews new laws that have been passed but not yet come into effect could criminalize teaching encryption. He details how a ridiculously broad law could effectively make anything regarding encryption of over 512 bits criminal if your client is not Australian. It could apparently even conceivably include division as a controlled thing of military interest.

Submission + - Jason Scott of textfiles.com Wants Your AOL & Shovelware CDs (textfiles.com) 1

Submitted by eldavojohn
eldavojohn writes: You've probably got a spindle in your close tor a drawer full of CD-ROM media mailed to you or delivered with some hardware that you put away "just in case" and now (ten years later) the case for actually using them is laughable. Well, a certain mentally ill individual named Jason Scott has a fever and the only cure is more AOL CDs. But his sickness doesn't stop there, "I also want all the CD-ROMs made by Walnut Creek CD-ROM. I want every shovelware disc that came out in the entire breadth of the CD-ROM era. I want every shareware floppy, while we’re talking. I want it all. The CD-ROM era is basically finite at this point. It’s over. The time when we’re going to use physical media as the primary transport for most data is done done done. Sure, there’s going to be distributions and use of CD-ROMs for some time to come, but the time when it all came that way and when it was in most cases the only method of distribution in the history books, now. And there were a specific amount of CD-ROMs made. There are directories and listings of many that were manufactured. I want to find those. I want to image them, and I want to put them up. I’m looking for stacks of CD-ROMs now. Stacks and stacks. AOL CDs and driver CDs and Shareware CDs and even hand-burned CDs of stuff you downloaded way back when. This is the time to strike." Who knows? His madness may end up being appreciated by younger generations!

Submission + - Marvel's female superheros are gradually becoming more super (societyforscience.org)

Submitted by RhubarbPye
RhubarbPye writes: A new study shows an increasing trend in the power and significance of female superhero characters in the Marvel comic book universe. Several criteria were used to examine the trend, including cover art, dialog, and the actual superpowers. Over 200 individual comic books from Marvel's 50+ year history were compared for the study. What's of particular interest is the study's author is a 17-year old high school student from Ohio.

Submission + - Google Offers Cheap Cloud Computing For Low-Priority Tasks (itworld.com)

Submitted by jfruh
jfruh writes: Much of the history of computing products and services involves getting people desperate for better performance and faster results to pay a premium to get what they want. But Google has a new beta service that's going in the other direction — offering cheap cloud computing services for customers who don't mind waiting. Jobs like data analytics, genomics, and simulation and modeling can require lots of computational power, but they can run periodically, can be interrupted, and can even keep going if one or more nodes they're using goes offline.

Submission + - Two thirds of public sector workers keep quiet on major security breaches (thestack.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A cybersecurity survey conducted by British IT and telecom firm Daisy Group has revealed that almost two thirds of public sector employees would not report a serious data breach that they thought would cause problems in the workplace. The research, which was based on a study involving 2,000 public sector staff, also discovered that many workers held a negligent attitude toward sufficient password protection. It found that respondents were willing to sidestep corporate security policies to ease their work life. The survey showed that 64% of employees in the public sector would keep quiet about major security breaches, and that 5% had disabled password protection features on a laptop, mobile or other mobile devices. 20% confirmed that they do not regularly update their passwords, while a further 8% answered that they used ‘simple’ passwords that could be easily guessed. Daisy Group’s product director of cloud services Graham Harris explained that the survey served to highlight the importance of staff awareness and involvement in effective IT security management.

Submission + - A Way to Brew Morphine Raises Concerns Over Regulation (nytimes.com)

Submitted by Mr D from 63
Mr D from 63 writes: All over the world, the heavy heads of opium poppies are nodding gracefully in the wind — long stalks dressed in orange or white petals topped by a fright wig of stamens. They fill millions of acres in Afghanistan, Myanmar, Laos and elsewhere. Their payload — the milky opium juice carefully scraped off the seed pods — yields morphine, an excellent painkiller easily refined into heroin.

But very soon, perhaps within a year, the poppy will no longer be the only way to produce heroin’s raw ingredient. It will be possible for drug companies, or drug traffickers, to brew it in yeast genetically modified to turn sugar into morphine.

Almost all the essential steps had been worked out in the last seven years; a final missing one was published Monday in the journal Nature Chemical Biology.

Submission + - Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team responds in Nepal (opensource.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Since the devastating earthquake in Nepal, there have been responses from all over the world from relief agencies, governments, non-profits, and ordinary citizens. One interesting effort has been from the crowdsourced mapping community, especially on OpenStreetMap.org, a free and open web map of the world that anyone can edit (think the Wikipedia of maps.)

The Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT), an NGO that works to train, coordinate, and organize mapping on OpenStreetMap for humanitarian, disaster response, and economic development, has mobilized volunteers from around the world to help map since the Haiti earthquake in 2010.

Submission + - Stock Market Valuation Exceeds Its Components' Actual Value (bloomberg.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: James Tobin, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, developed something called a "Q value" — it's the ratio between two numbers: 1) the sum of all publicly-trader companies' stock valuation and 2) the value of all these companies' actual assets, if they were sold. Bloomberg reports that since the stock market has been so strong for such a long time, now, that ratio has gone over 1 — in other words, the market values companies about 10% higher than the sum of their actual assets. The Q value is now the highest it's been since the Dot-com bubble. Similar peaks in the past hundred years have all been quickly followed by crashes.

Now, that's not to say a crash is imminent — experts disagree on the Q value's reliability. One said, "the ratio’s doubling since 2009 to 1.10 is a symptom of companies diverting money from their businesses to the stock market, choosing buybacks over capital spending. Six years of zero-percent interest rates have similarly driven investors into riskier things like equities, elevating the paper value of assets over their tangible worth." Others point out that as the digital economy grows, a greater portion of publicly traded companies lack the tangible assets that were the hallmark of the manufacturing boom.

Submission + - The Auto Industry May Follow in IBM's Footsteps (techcrunch.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: An article at TechCrunch looks at some interesting parallels between the current automobile industry and the PC industry of the 1980s. IBM was dominant in 1985, employing four times as many people as its nearest competitor. But as soon as Windows was released, the platform became more important for end users than the manufacturer. Over the next decade, IBM lost its throne. In 2015, we're on the cusp of a similar change: the computerized car. Automakers, though large and well-established, haven't put much effort into building the platform on which their cars run. Meanwhile, Google's Android Auto and Apple CarPlay are getting better and better. As soon as those hit a breakthrough point where it's more important for a customer to have the platform than the manufacturer's logo on the side, the industry is likely to look like a replay of the PC industry in the 1980s.

Submission + - Learning About Constitutional Law With Star Wars (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: In an upcoming paper (PDF) for the Michigan Law Review, scholar Cass Sunstein draws on Star Wars to make a couple key points about how constitutional law works. He writes, "Human beings often see coherence and planned design when neither exists. This is so in movies, literature, history, economics, and psychoanalysis—and constitutional law. Contrary to the repeated claims of George Lucas, its principal author, the Star Wars series was hardly planned in advance; it involved a great deal of improvisation and surprise, even to Lucas himself. Serendipity and happenstance, sometimes in the forms of eruptions of new thinking, play a pervasive and overlooked role in the creative imagination, certainly in single-authored works, and even more in multi-authored ones extending over time. ... The misdescription appears to respond to a serious human need for sense-making and pattern-finding, but it is a significant obstacle to understanding and critical reflection. Whether Jedi or Sith, many authors of constitutional law are a lot like the author of Star Wars, disguising the essential nature of their own creative processes."

Submission + - European Internet Users Urged To Protect Themselves Against Facebook Tracking 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: In the wake of the revelations about Facebook's tracking of users who do not own a Facebook account, the Belgian Privacy Commission has issued a set of recommendations for both Facebook, website owners and end users. The recommendations are based on the results of an extensive analysis of Facebook’s revised policies and terms (rolled out on January 30, 2015) conducted by the inter-university research center EMSOC/SPION, which concluded that the company is acting in violation of European law. According to them Facebook places too much burden on its users to protect their privacy, and then doesn't offer simple tools and settings to do so, and sets up some problematic default settings. They also don't provide adequate information for users to make informed choices.

Submission + - Turning an Arduino Project Into Prototype (digitaljunky.io)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Those of us who fiddle with electronics are probably familiar with this scenario: you've just finished assembling a project using your Arduino/Raspberry Pi/whatever, and it works! You'd like to set it up for long-term use, but... it's just a mass of wires and LEDs and switches. Tech enthusiast Alexis Matelin has written up a handy, brief guide for turning that mass of wires into a self-contained prototype. He goes from planning out your circuit to designing your schematic to making your board, then working on an enclosure and a battery holder. Matelin also links to a variety of resources for the individual steps involved. It's a straightforward guide written for amateurs. Those of you who have experience with building permanent micro-controller projects: what would you add?

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