Archaemic - Slashdot User

World's Worst PR Guy Gives His Side 576

Posted by samzenpus on Thursday December 29, 2011 @12:13PM from the silence-is-golden dept.

First time accepted submitter Narnie writes "Follow up to Tuesday's story of a PR rep's lack of professionalism. Kyle Orland provides a follow up interview with Paul Christoforo after a simple email chain escalated into internet infamy. N-Control official response to Paul Chrostoforo's actions can be found here. Kotaku.com even has a whole section devoted to covering the entire ordeal. I for one found myself caught following the news releases and in awe of the combined load forced on penny-arcade's servers from Slashdot, Reddit, Digg, Kotaku, and other news sites covering the story."

Police Encrypt Radios To Tune Out Public 242

Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday November 23, 2011 @04:21PM from the for-our-ears-only dept.

Hugh Pickens writes writes "Police departments around the country are moving to shield their radio communications from the public as cheap, user-friendly technology has made it easy for anyone to use handheld devices to keep tabs on officers responding to crimes and although law enforcement officials say they want to keep criminals from using officers' internal chatter to evade them, journalists and neighborhood watchdogs say open communications ensures that the public receives information as quickly as possible that can be vital to their safety. 'Whereas listeners used to be tied to stationary scanners, new technology has allowed people — and especially criminals — to listen to police communications on a smartphone from anywhere,' says DC Police Chief Cathy Lanier who says that a group of burglars who police believe were following radio communications on their smartphones pulled off more than a dozen crimes before ultimately being arrested. But encryption also makes it harder for neighboring jurisdictions to communicate in times of emergency. 'The 9/11 commission concluded America's number one vulnerability during the attacks was the lack of interoperability communications,' writes Vernon Herron, 'I spoke to several first responders who were concerned that their efforts to respond and assist at the Pentagon after the attacks were hampered by the lack of interoperability with neighboring jurisdictions.'"

Warner Brothers: Automated Takedown Notices Hit Files That Weren't Ours 157

Posted by timothy on Saturday November 12, 2011 @01:31AM from the let-god-sort-'em-out dept.

itwbennett writes "In a court case between Hotfile.com and Hollywood studios, Warner Brothers admitted they sent takedown orders for thousands of files they didn't own or control. Using an automated takedown tool provided by Hotfile, Warner Brothers used automated software crawlers based on keywords to generate legal takedown orders. This is akin to not holding the Post Office liable for what people mail, or the phone companies liable for what people say. But the flip side is that hosters must remove files when receiving a legal takedown notice from the copyright holder — even when the copyright holders themselves don't know what material they actually own."

Help Rename the Department of Homeland Security 382

Posted by samzenpus on Monday November 07, 2011 @11:47AM from the department-of-silly-claims dept.

Hugh Pickens writes "James Fallows writes tongue in cheek that U.S. Department of Fear, led by Secretary of Fear Malcolm P. Stag III, is running a poll. To what should we re-name the Department of Homeland Security? 'Possibilities include Department of ScaredyCatLand Security, reflecting the prevailing mentality of an era, and Department of Fatherland Security, to make us sound strong,' writes Fallows. 'There are many more to choose from, plus you can write in your own nominees. But act now, because the polls close Tuesday.'"

MS Traces Duqu Zero-Day To Font Parsing In Win32k 221

Posted by timothy on Saturday November 05, 2011 @07:00AM from the if-only-smarts-and-ethics-went-together dept.

yuhong writes "MS has traced the Duqu zero-day to a vulnerability in font parsing in win32k. Many file formats like HTML, Office, and PDF support embedded fonts, and in NT4 and later fonts are parsed in kernel mode! Other possible attack vectors, for example, include web pages visited using web browsers that support embedded fonts without the OTS font sanitizer (which recent versions of Firefox and Chrome have adopted)." Adds reader Trailrunner7: "This is the first time that the exact location and nature of the flaw has been made public. Microsoft said that the permanent fix for the new vulnerability will not be ready in time for next week's November patch Tuesday release."

California Declares Today "Steve Jobs Day" 333

Posted by samzenpus on Sunday October 16, 2011 @11:48AM from the final-goodbye dept.

First time accepted submitter onezeta writes "California Gov. Jerry Brown, in an announcement via a Twitter post, has declared it 'Steve Jobs Day.' The Apple co-founder's life as a technology trailblazer will be marked Sunday by his company's home state at a private memorial service and in a television documentary airing tonight at 8 pm EST on Discovery."

Does Italian Demo Show Cold Fusion, or Snake Oil? 479

Posted by timothy on Thursday October 06, 2011 @11:02AM from the how-much-would-you-bet dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Today, Wired.co.uk is running a story, 'Cold fusion rears its head as "E-Cat" research promises to change the world.' It gives an overview of the technology that claims to fuse hydrogen and nickel into copper, with no radioactive by-products, to produce copious amounts of heat, inexpensively, with a 1 megawatt plant scheduled to come on line later this month. Apparently, Wired was not aware that today is a big test in Italy by scientists from around the world, who will be observing the technology in operation, including self-looped mode. A real-time update page has been set up at PESWiki, which has been a primary news provider of this technology since it was announced last January." Wired's article is remarkably optimistic. I'd love for this to be true, but many decades of scientific-looking free-energy machine scams make it hard to be other than cynical; the claim of a secret catalyst which "can be produced at low cost," controlled-access for outside observers, the lack of published science to explain the claimed effect, and skepticism even from the free-energy world — along with a raft of pro-E-Cat websites registered anonymously earlier this year — all make it sound like this follows the marketing style of previous "over unity" / perpetual motion machines. I invite Andrea Rossi to take part in a Slashdot interview, if he's willing to answer readers' questions about his claims.

Comment Re:Wrong assessment (Score 1) 1345

by millennial on Thursday September 29, 2011 @09:40PM (#37562090) Attached to: Science and Religion Can and Do Mix, Mostly

I ecourage you to review Genesis 22:7,8.

Isaac spoke up and said to his father Abraham, "Father?" "Yes, my son?" Abraham replied. "The fire and wood are here," Isaac said, "but where is the lamb for the burnt offering?"

Abraham answered, "God himself will provide the lamb for the burnt offering, my son." And the two of them went on together.

God WILL provide, not God HAS provided. Abraham knew God was not evil and therefore God would not allow Isacc to be killed. Maybe he would resurect him. Maybe the knife wouldn't hurt Isacc. He had no idea how god would resolve the issue, but he knew he would be returning with Isacc.

Okay. So... in essence... what we have is this:

"Daddy, why are you taking me out into the woods with a knife?"

"Well, son, we're going to go sacrifice an animal to God together."

"But daddy, I don't see a sheep or a goat; where's the animal we're going to sacrifice?"

(knowing full well that the plan is to kill his son) "Oh, don't worry about it, kiddo. I'm sure we'll find something we can sacrifice."

This is called "lying to your son so you can obey your god," not having faith that God will provide. There's no evidence at all that Abraham thought God would save Isaac.

Comment Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy (Score 1) 627

by millennial on Tuesday September 13, 2011 @02:49PM (#37390264) Attached to: "Wi-Fi Refugees" Shelter in West Virginia Mountains

TFA says some scientists have done such an experiment and it appeared to indicate the subject actually could detect radio waves.

A couple problems: first, a study with a single test subject is not at all scientific (what were the controls?); second, how many people did they go through with negative results before they hit on one with "positive" results?

"Wi-Fi Refugees" Shelter in West Virginia Mountains 627

Posted by samzenpus on Tuesday September 13, 2011 @11:46AM from the break-out-the-tinfoil dept.

The 13,000 sq mile U.S. Radio Quiet Zone is an area in West Virginia where all wireless transmissions are banned because of the large number of radio telescopes located there. (This official page shows a map of the Zone; an old Wired article is fascinating reading.) These high-tech telescopes have attracted unlikely neighbors, people who claim to have Wi-Fi allergies. In recent years, scores of people have moved to the area to escape the "damage" that electromagnetic fields can cause them. From the article: "Diane Schou is unable to hold back the tears as she describes how she once lived in a shielded cage to protect her from the electromagnetic radiation caused by waves from wireless communication. 'It's a horrible thing to have to be a prisoner,' she says. 'You become a technological leper because you can't be around people. It's not that you would be contagious to them — it's what they're carrying that is harmful to you.'"

theSkyNet Wants Your Spare CPU Cycles 136

Posted by Soulskill on Tuesday September 13, 2011 @02:13AM from the i-just-bet-it-does dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Thousands of PC users are being called on to donate their spare CPU cycles to help create a massive grid computing engine to process terabytes of radio astronomy data as part of theSkyNet project. It will be used for, among other things, processing the huge amount of data expected to flow off Australia's forthcoming Square Kilometre Array telescope." One can only assume that "other things" will include achieving sentience and finding John Connor.

'Cosmo' — a C#-Based Operating System 406

Posted by timothy on Monday September 05, 2011 @02:56PM from the because-they-want-to-that's-why dept.

Billly Gates writes "A new operating system called Cosmo has been developed, written entirely in C#. It shows the naysayers you can write a full OS kernel without C. So far, you need Visual Studio to compile and run it, as Mono is not supported. However, the source code can be compiled with the Express editions of Visual Studio. The project plans to add VB.NET support soon."

Microsoft 'Ribbonizes' Windows 8 File Manager 951

Posted by Soulskill on Monday August 29, 2011 @05:22PM from the statistically-driven-interface dept.

CWmike writes "Microsoft said today it will 'ribbonize' the file manager in next year's Windows 8, adding Explorer to the short list of integrated applications that already sport the interface in Windows 7. Microsoft's Alex Simons, director of program management, released screenshots of the new ribbon interface planned for Explorer (scroll way down). 'We evaluated several different UI command affordances including expanded versions of the Vista/Windows 7 command bar, Windows 95/Windows XP style toolbars and menus, several entirely new UI approaches, and the Office style ribbon,' explained Simons. 'Of these, the ribbon approach offered benefits in line with our goals.' Plans by Microsoft and others to ribbonize applications have often met resistance. 'We knew that using a ribbon for Explorer would likely be met with skepticism by a set of power users, but there are clear benefits,' Simons said."

PS Vita Specs Announced 259

Posted by Soulskill on Saturday August 20, 2011 @07:14PM from the hamsters-with-crash-helmets dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Sony has announced the hardware specs for the PS Vita and the details have confirmed most fans' hopes instead of their fears. The heart of the system is an ARM-developed Cortex A9 chip with four cores and a PowerVR SGX GPU. The screen is a 5-inch OLED capacitive touch-screen (with multi-touch) and a resolution of 960 x 544. The system will include 512MB of RAM and an additional 128MB of discrete VRAM. There will be front and rear cameras capable of 60fps at VGA resolution (640 x 480)."

Apple Patents Cutting 3.5mm Jack in Half 369

Posted by Unknown Lamer on Thursday August 18, 2011 @02:50PM from the twice-as-proprietary dept.

An anonymous reader writes with an article on a recent patent application by Apple. From the article: "Apple likes thin devices and considers the depth of the iPod, iPhone and iPad as critical component of the aesthetic appearance of a product and has been very aggressive in finding ways to trim fat from its portable devices: The 3.5 mm audio-connector stands in the way of future design improvements: Apple suggests to simply cut it in half."

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