Slumdog - Slashdot User

Submission + - X-37B to fly again

Submitted by schwit1 on Monday March 30, 2015 @11:43PM

schwit1 writes: The May 6 Atlas 5 launch will carry one of the Air Force’s two X-37B mini-shuttles on a new mission in space.
The Air Force won’t yet confirm which of the Boeing-built spaceplanes will be making the voyage. The first craft returned in October from a 675-day mission in space following a 224 day trek in 2010. OTV No. 2 spent 469 days in space in 2011-2012 on its only mission so far. “The program selects the Orbital Test Vehicle for each activity based upon the experiment objectives,” said Capt. Chris Hoyler, an Air Force spokesperson. “Each OTV mission builds upon previous on-orbit demonstrations and expands the test envelope of the vehicle. The test mission furthers the development of the concept of operations for reusable space vehicles.”

There are indications that the Air Force wants to attempt landing the shuttle at Kennedy this time.

Why You Should Choose Boring Technology 232

Posted by Soulskill on Monday March 30, 2015 @10:12PM from the predictable-headaches dept.

An anonymous reader writes Dan McKinley, a long-time Etsy engineer who now works at online payment processor Stripe, argues that the boring technology option is usually your best choice for a new project. He says, "Let's say every company gets about three innovation tokens. You can spend these however you want, but the supply is fixed for a long while. You might get a few more after you achieve a certain level of stability and maturity, but the general tendency is to overestimate the contents of your wallet. Clearly this model is approximate, but I think it helps. If you choose to write your website in NodeJS, you just spent one of your innovation tokens. If you choose to use MongoDB, you just spent one of your innovation tokens. If you choose to use service discovery tech that's existed for a year or less, you just spent one of your innovation tokens. If you choose to write your own database, oh god, you're in trouble. ... The nice thing about boringness (so constrained) is that the capabilities of these things are well understood. But more importantly, their failure modes are well understood."

Submission + - Amazon testing drone delivery in Canada (www.cbc.ca)

Submitted by Keith J Duhaime on Monday March 30, 2015 @08:50PM

Keith J Duhaime writes: According to the CBC, it appears that US red tape is a boon to developing and testing drones in Canada. Amazon is apparently testing drones for delivery somewhere in British Columbia, Canada at a secret location near the US border. They are using other countries too, but seem to be frustrated with the regulatory environment in the US itself.

Submission + - Bitcoin in China still chugging along, a year after clampdown (computerworld.com.au)

Submitted by angry tapir on Monday March 30, 2015 @07:50PM

angry tapir writes: A year after China began tightening regulations around Bitcoin, the virtual currency is still thriving in the country, albeit on the fringes, according to its largest exchange. Bitcoin prices may have declined, but Chinese buyers are still trading the currency in high volumes with the help of BTC China, an exchange that witnessed the boom days back in 2013, only to see the bust following the Chinese government's announcement, in December of that year, that banks would be banned from trading in bitcoin.

Oops: World Leaders' Personal Data Mistakenly Released By Autofill Error 140

Posted by samzenpus on Monday March 30, 2015 @06:08PM from the sounds-like-a-case-of-the-mondays dept.

mpicpp writes in with this story about a mistake that saw personal details of world leaders accidentally disclosed by the Australian immigration department. "With a single key stroke, the personal information of President Obama and 30 other world leaders was mistakenly released by an official with Australia's immigration office. Passport numbers, dates of birth, and other personal information of the heads of state attending a G-20 summit in Brisbane, Australia, were inadvertently emailed to one of the organizers of January's Asian Cup football tournament, according to The Guardian. The U.K. newspaper obtained the information as a result of an Australia Freedom of Information request. Aside from President Obama, leaders whose data were released include Russian President Vladimir Putin, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Chinese President Xi Jinping and British Prime Minister David Cameron. The sender forgot to check the auto-fill function in the email 'To' field in Microsoft Outlook before hitting send, the BBC reports."

Video Hand-Drawn and Inkjet Printed Circuits for the Masses (Video) 33

Posted by Roblimo on Monday March 30, 2015 @05:26PM from the give-your-kids-paper-plates-with-lights-that-tell-them-to-eat-their-veggies dept.

We started looking at ways to make instant hand-drawn or inkjet-printed circuit boards because Timothy met an engaging young man named Yuki Nishida at SXSW. Yuki is a co-founder of AgIC, a company that makes conductive ink pens and supplies special paper you can use to write or draw circuits or, if you have the right model of Brother printer, to print them with special inkjet inks. The AgIC people are aggressively putting the 'A' in STEAM by marketing their products to artists and craftspeople. Indeed the second line on their website's home page says, 'AgIC offers handy tools to light up your own art works.' This is an excellent niche, and now that AgIC has developed a circuit eraser (due to ship this April), it may lead to all kinds of creative designs. And as is typical with this kind of company these days, AgIC has been (at least partly) crowdfunded.

A little cursory Google searching will soon lead you to other companies selling into the home/prototype circuit board market, including Cartesian Co and their Argentum 3-D printer that does prototype and short-run PCBs and only costs $899 (on special at the time this was written) and Electroninks, which markets the Circuit Scribe pen and associated materials with an emphasis on education. There are others in this growing field, and a year from now there will probably be more of them, all working to replace the venerable breadboard the same way electronic calculators replaced slide rules.

Comment Re:I'm all for abolishing the IRS (Score 0) 349

by lgw on Monday March 30, 2015 @04:44PM (#49374213) Attached to: Sign Up At irs.gov Before Crooks Do It For You

When we had that 90% tax rate, the tax code was nothing but loopholes. It's important to remember that the more you make, the more flexibility you have in how, where, and when you get compensated. Remember the Maryland millionaires tax? One year later, 1/3 of the people in that bracket went missing. If you own houses in two states, how hard is it to change your residency? France has a problem today with people leaving to avoid their recent high rates (also a 90% top rate IIRC).

But you're talking about an income tax, not a wealth tax. When it comes to non-property wealth, it takes a very small tax indeed to totally change the game, and create a huge disincentive to to business here (or at least to find some way to own US stocks from elsewhere, I guess). Large investment firms move will their assets around immediately for a 0.1% better guaranteed annual return. A 1% difference in property tax rates makes a big difference in affording a new house (and in a regressive way).

Maybe people are confused about how much overall property (wealth or otherwise) there is to begin with?

Silk Road Investigators Charged With Stealing Bitcoin 144

Posted by samzenpus on Monday March 30, 2015 @04:41PM from the was-that-wrong? dept.

itwbennett writes Two former U.S. government agents face charges related to stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of bitcoin while assisting with an investigation of the Silk Road underground online marketplace, with one accused of using a fake online persona to extort money from operators of the site. Facing charges of wire fraud and money laundering are Carl Force, 46, of Baltimore, a former special agent with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency, and Shaun Bridges, 32, of Laurel, Maryland, a former special agent with the U.S. Secret Service. Both served on the Baltimore Silk Road Task Force, which investigated illegal activity on the Silk Road website, the Department of Justice said Monday in a press release.

Comment Re:I'm all for abolishing the IRS (Score 1) 349

by lgw on Monday March 30, 2015 @04:11PM (#49373859) Attached to: Sign Up At irs.gov Before Crooks Do It For You

But as long as it prevents the successful from having an unhindered better standard of living than everyone else, it's a win.

Since the rest of your post seems sane, I'm just assuming my sarcasm detector is on the fritz again with this line.

Robots4Us: DARPA's Response To Mounting Robophobia 101

Posted by samzenpus on Monday March 30, 2015 @04:00PM from the hug-your-robot dept.

malachiorion writes DARPA knows that people are afraid of robots. Even Steve Wozniak has joined the growing chorus of household names (Musk, Hawking, Gates) who are terrified of bots and AI. And the agency's response--a video contest for kids--is equal parts silly and insightful. It's called Robots4Us, and it asks high schoolers to describe their hopes for a robot-assisted future. Five winners will be flown to the DARPA Robotics Competition Finals this June, where they'll participate in a day-after discussion with experts in the field. But this isn't quite as useless as it sounds. As DRC program manager Gill Pratt points out, it's kids who will be impacted by the major changes to come, moreso than people his age.

Comment Re:I'm all for abolishing the IRS (Score 1) 349

by lgw on Monday March 30, 2015 @03:40PM (#49373547) Attached to: Sign Up At irs.gov Before Crooks Do It For You

Sometimes people accuse progressives of wanting to punish success, to hurt the rich just for the sake of hurting. Your plan is why people say stuff like that.

In practice, when individual states start "taxing millionaires", the millionaires move to different states. We're just looking for a way to fund the government here, as a means to the end of improving everyone's standard of living. A plan that would cause the successful to move elsewhere might raise some funds for a while, but is a terrible long-term strategy for improving standard of living. (And I'm fully aware that some actually want to build a metaphorical wall around the nation to keep the successful from escaping - not the sort of nation I want to live in.)

China's Foreign Ministry: China Did Not Attack Github, We Are the Major Victims 137

Posted by samzenpus on Monday March 30, 2015 @03:17PM from the it-wasn't-us dept.

An anonymous reader writes At the Regular Press Conference on March 30, China's Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Hua Chunying responded on the charge of DDoS attack over Github. She said: "It is quite odd that every time a website in the US or any other country is under attack, there will be speculation that Chinese hackers are behind it. I'd like to remind you that China is one of the major victims of cyber attacks. We have been underlining that China hopes to work with the international community to speed up the making of international rules and jointly keep the cyber space peaceful, secure, open and cooperative. It is hoped that all parties can work in concert to address hacker attacks in a positive and constructive manner."

Submission + - Open Source DevOps Tool for AWS VPC

Submitted by TheSync on Monday March 30, 2015 @03:02PM

TheSync writes: In AWS, you can now build "virtual private clouds" as complex as your data center. But it can be a challenge to set them up using AWS best practices and reference architectures in a repeatable manner. Nucleator is a new Open Source DevOps tool to help you "stamp out" secure, scalable, and highly-available AWS environments.

Comment Re:And what good would it do? (Score 1) 447

by Tom on Monday March 30, 2015 @02:56PM (#49373129) Attached to: Why the Final Moments Inside a Cockpit Are Heard But Not Seen

"one psychiatrist" is not a valid citation. Point me to a name, a study, and some literature to explain why this discovery hasn't taken the medical world by storm, I'm always happy to expand my knowledge.

Book Review: Future Crimes 27

Posted by samzenpus on Monday March 30, 2015 @02:34PM from the read-all-about-it dept.

benrothke writes Technology is neutral and amoral. It's the implementers and users who define its use. In Future Crimes: Everything Is Connected, Everyone Is Vulnerable and What We Can Do About It, author Marc Goodman spends nearly 400 pages describing the dark side of technology, and those who use it for nefarious purposes. He provides a fascinating overview of how every major technology can be used to benefit society, and how it can also be exploited by those on the other side. Keep reading for the rest of Ben's review.

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