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Submission + - Homeland Security settles lawsuit of reporter whose home they illegally searched 1

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: In a lawsuit settlement Homeland Security has agreed to pay $50,000 and promise to return everything they seized — including confidential files and paperwork that identified Homeland Security whistleblowers –during an illegal raid of a reporter’s home.

Audrey Hudson, an award-winning journalist most recently at the Washington Times, told The Daily Signal she was awoken by her barking dog around 4:30 a.m. on Aug. 6, 2013, to discover armed government agents had descended on her property under the cover of darkness. The agents had a search warrant for her husband’s firearms. As they scoured the home, Hudson was read her Miranda rights.

While inside Hudson’s house, a U.S. Coast Guard agent confiscated documents that contained “confidential notes, draft articles, and other newsgathering materials” that Hudson never intended for anyone else to see. The documents included the identities of whistleblowers at the Department of Homeland Security. The Coast Guard is part of Homeland Security.

The settlement requires the government to return all documents, destroy all notes made from these papers, and promise it did not copy anything. Does anyone believe this?

Submission + - Conservative Groups Accuse FCC Of Helping Net Neutrality Advocates File Comments (itworld.com)

Submitted by jfruh
jfruh writes: Conservative groups opposed to net neutrality have beef with the FCC, claiming the commission helped pro-net neutrality advocates file comments on the subject without similarly helping opponents. In other news out of this camp, it turns out their claims of sending out 2.4 million letters to Congress opposing net neutrality specifically meant getting 800,000 people to send three letters each.

Submission + - Scientists observe elusive particle that is its own antiparticle (scienceblog.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Princeton scientists say they've observed an exotic particle that behaves simultaneously like matter and antimatter, a feat they argue could eventually enable powerful computers based on quantum mechanics. Using a two-story-tall microscope floating in an ultralow-vibration labl, the physicists captured a glowing image of a particle known as a "Majorana fermion" perched at the end of an atomically thin wire — just where it had been predicted to be after decades of study and calculation dating back to the 1930s.

Comment Re:Simple answer (Score 1) 942

by jenningsthecat (#48045859) Attached to: David Cameron Says Brits Should Be Taught Imperial Measures

Beyond the reason of "I didn't write it", what was wrong with the comment that was already there which asked the same thing, to which replies have actually been left,...

I apologise if my comment was a repeat of an earlier one. If it was a repeat, then I simply missed the earlier comment. I regularly start out to post a comment, see that somebody else has said essentially the same thing, get annoyed that somebody beat me to the punch, then refrain from posting - but I'm not gonna catch 'em all, especially if they were posted while I was still composing mine, or if there are already a lot of comments.

...and is this a sock puppet to the account with the mod point that your comment received?

Nope. I don't do the sock puppet thing, (never have, it's just not my style), and I only have one Slashdot account.

Submission + - Preserving a people's heritage through PlayStation 4 (redbull.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A new feature on upcoming 2D PC/Xbox/PS4 game Never Alone reveals the surprising story behind the game's creation: before working with publisher E-Line Media to create the game about native Alaskan folklore, the Cook Inlet Tribal Council considered investing in real estate and even funeral homes to help preserve Iñupiat culture. Instead they turned to modern technology to help share their heritage, focusing on a game with Limbo and Journey-esque qualities to appeal to as wide an audience as possible.

"With the puzzle platformer genre, which wasn't necessarily the obvious choice, there are certain benefits," says E-Line president Alan Gershenfeld. "They tend to be linear, so there is a spine to the core story... We could have the anchor of a story that had been passed down from generation to generation, but still weave in the themes and motifs."

Comment Why governments hate this so much (Score 2) 651

by jenningsthecat (#48040029) Attached to: The $1,200 DIY Gunsmithing Machine

Of all the politicians bleating about the dangers of home-made untraceable weapons, and (probably) exhorting us to 'think of the children', how many of them are motivated primarily by concern for their fellow man? I'm betting it's at least a minority, and perhaps a vanishingly small one. No, I think most of them are reacting primarily out of fear - fear of losing their power over the citizenry; fear of primal, animalistic human urges that they want to see only on football fields and battlefields; and fear for their own skins.

I'm very much anti-gun and am strongly in favour of gun control. As a Canadian I contrast the level of gun violence here with that in the US and am thankful my country's traditions are so different. I really don't want to live in a crazy, bullet-riddled land. But in the face of rapidly-growing government power, and rampant governmental abuses of citizens, I'm starting to see the wisdom of people having access to guns. I'd like to think we can find a better way though.

Submission + - Sea monkeys may stir the world's oceans (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: The tiny swirls created by brine shrimp and other minuscule aquatic creatures could mix the seas’ upper layers as well as winds and waves do, a new study suggests. Such “biomixing” could play an important role in redistributing heat, salt, and nutrients in the upper layers of the ocean. However, some researchers question how effectively biomixing blends the waters of the wave-thrashed sunlit surface with those from the cool, calm depths. The work comes thanks to blue and green lasers, which were used to induce thousands of 5-millimeter-long brine shrimp to “migrate” to and from the bottom of a 1.2-meter-deep tank.

Submission + - Elon Musk: We Must Put a Million Humans On Mars To Safeguard Humanity (aeon.co)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Elon Musk's ambitions for SpaceX keep getting bigger. First he wanted to make the trip to Mars affordable, then he wanted to establish a city-sized colony, and now he's got his eye on the future of humanity. Musk says we need a million people on Mars to form a "sustainable, genetically diverse civilization" that can survive as humanity's insurance policy. He continued, "Even at a million, you’re really assuming an incredible amount of productivity per person, because you would need to recreate the entire industrial base on Mars. You would need to mine and refine all of these different materials, in a much more difficult environment than Earth. There would be no trees growing. There would be no oxygen or nitrogen that are just there. No oil." How fast could we do it? Within a century, once the spacecraft reusability problem is solved. "Excluding organic growth, if you could take 100 people at a time, you would need 10,000 trips to get to a million people. But you would also need a lot of cargo to support those people. In fact, your cargo to person ratio is going to be quite high. It would probably be 10 cargo trips for every human trip, so more like 100,000 trips. And we’re talking 100,000 trips of a giant spaceship."

Submission + - Antarctica Has Lost Enough Ice to Cause Measurable Shift in Gravity 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Contrary to what we all learned in high school physics, gravity is not constant. It actually shows slight variations on different parts of the Earth's surface, and the variations correlate with the density of the material on that surface. The European Space Agency (ESA) has been measuring gravity for four years, mapping these variations and recording the changes those variations have undergone. Its data indicates "a significant decrease [in gravity] in the region of Antarctica where land ice is melting fastest". Further analysis is, of course, planned so that the whole of Antarctica can be taken into account and "the clearest picture yet of the pace of global warming" can be determined on that continent.

Submission + - Something keeps coming and going in a sea on Titan

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Cassini images taken in 2007, 2013, and 2014 of one of Titan’s largest hydrocarbon seas find that a mysterious feature there keeps appearing and disappearing.

The mysterious feature, which appears bright in radar images against the dark background of the liquid sea, was first spotted during Cassini’s July 2013 Titan flyby. Previous observations showed no sign of bright features in that part of Ligeia Mare. Scientists were perplexed to find the feature had vanished when they looked again, over several months, with low-resolution radar and Cassini’s infrared imager. This led some team members to suggest it might have been a transient feature. But during Cassini’s flyby on August 21, 2014, the feature was again visible, and its appearance had changed during the 11 months since it was last seen.

Scientists on the radar team are confident that the feature is not an artifact, or flaw, in their data, which would have been one of the simplest explanations. They also do not see evidence that its appearance results from evaporation in the sea, as the overall shoreline of Ligeia Mare has not changed noticeably. The team has suggested the feature could be surface waves, rising bubbles, floating solids, solids suspended just below the surface, or perhaps something more exotic.

That the seasons are slowly changing on Titan is probably contributing to the transient nature of this feature.

Submission + - Debate Simmers Over Disclosing Warrantless Spying (nytimes.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Obama administration lawyers have been debating whether the Treasury Department must inform the people or groups it lists as foreign terrorists when it relies on warrantless surveillance as the basis for the designation, according to officials familiar with the deliberations.

Intelligence officials are said to oppose being more forthcoming about who has been subjected to surveillance, especially in cases involving noncitizens abroad — who do not have Fourth Amendment privacy rights — because such information would tip them off that the National Security Agency had intercepted their communications.

But a provision in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, requires the government to disclose when it uses information from eavesdropping in any “proceeding” against people. In 2008, Congress made the N.S.A.’s warrantless surveillance program a part of FISA, but the full implications of applying its disclosure provision to that program were initially overlooked.

Outside specialists said the same part of the law may apply to other government decisions that rely on such intelligence, including adding names to the “no fly” list and deciding whether to approve visas and licenses that require a security screening.

Submission + - U.S. Law Enforcement Seeks to Halt Apple-Google Encryption of Mobile Data (bloomberg.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: U.S. law enforcement officials are urging Apple and Google to give authorities access to smartphone data that the companies have decided to block, and are weighing whether to appeal to executives or seek congressional legislation.

The new privacy features, announced two weeks ago by the California-based companies, will stymie investigations into crimes ranging from drug dealing to terrorism, law enforcement officials said.

“This is a very bad idea,” said, chief of the Washington Metropolitan Police Department, in an interview. Smartphone communication is “going to be the preferred method of the pedophile and the criminal. We are going to lose a lot of investigative opportunities.”

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