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Comment All I can say is..... WOW! (Score 2) 353

by madirad (#41960977) Attached to: John McAfee Accused of Murder, Wanted By Belize Police

Jeez - I knew this guy. For me this is what makes this story incredibly interesting.

He used to frequent a fairly small yoga class in Aptos about 10 years ago with his wife at the time. I remember he brought in a bunch of yoga books which he wrote and gave copies to everybody. I didn't know he was the McAfee guy at first but he seemed like an interesting person.

He later suffered from the local small-town rumor mill for something he did that I didn't pay attention to.

But this story is astounding to me! It reads like a gangster movie script.

Comment WiFi enabled printer? (Score 0) 203

by madirad (#38321078) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Best Way To Print From an Android Tablet?

The hardware is there to print from a WiFi device like an Android tablet. Windows computers are able to print this way with the drivers available to them so it may be a hack to do it from Android. You would need a conduit to allow all apps to print this way.

OTOH, printing from a given app would be easier to do, just have to reverse-engineer the printer drivers.
Movies

Submission + - Rights to Intelligent Design move to be auctioned (wsj.com) 1

Submitted by
madirad
madirad writes: "The WSJ reports:
Actor Ben Stein’s controversial documentary, which blasts evolution in favor of intelligent design, is up for the sale to the highest bidder.That’s right. Between June 21 and June 28, you can submit bids online for all the rights to Stein’s “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed” film. According to Forbes, it’s up for grabs as part of the liquidation of film producer Premise Media Holdings LP. The company filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy in December 2009 and is now seeking to sell the rights, court papers show.
In the film, Stein—a lawyer and former speechwriter for President Richard Nixon as well as the monotone-voiced teacher in both the movie “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” and television’s “The Wonder Years”—argues that the academic world unfairly
punishes those who question evolution and support the theory of intelligent design."
Crime

Things You Drink Can Be Used To Track You 202

Posted by timothy from the don't-hate-me-because-I'm-a-beautiful-spy dept.
sciencehabit writes with an intriguing story about the potential of figuring out where people have been by examining their hair: "That's because water molecules differ slightly in their isotope ratios depending on the minerals at their source. Researchers found that water samples from 33 cities across the United State could be reliably traced back to their origin based on their isotope ratios. And because the human body breaks down water's constituent atoms of hydrogen and oxygen to construct the proteins that make hair cells, those cells can preserve the record of a person's travels. Such information could help prosecutors place a suspect at the scene of a crime, or prove the innocence of the accused." Or frame someone by slipping them water from every country on the terrorist watchlist.
Software

Submission + - Casino Loses Some $60,000 Due to Software Upgrade (ieee.org)

Submitted by madirad
madirad writes: The Lumiere Place Casino & Hotel in downtown St. Louis, Missouri had to shut down its slot machines this Wednesday morning after a software upgrade the previous night went badly, a story in the St. Louis Today reports. The slot machines were shut down from 0800 to 1130 when they were brought back on-line.

The casino reportedly brings in an average of $23,100 per hour while it is open. Wednesday morning is not a busy time so the losses were likely less than that or conversely, what could have occurred over a weekend.

An intriguing bit of the story was that IBM technicians were called in to fix the problem, which wasn't described in any detail. I may be wrong, but I don't think IBM is in the slot machine software business, so I suspect the problem had to do with some networking software connecting the slot machines themselves.
Apple

Has Apple Created the Perfect Board Game Platform? 531

Posted by kdawson from the triple-word-score dept.
andylim writes "recombu.com is running an interesting piece about how Apple has created a 'Jumanji (board game) platform.' The 9.7-inch multi-touch screen is perfect for playing board games at home, and you could use Wi-Fi or 3G to play against other people when you're on your own. What would be really interesting is if you could pair the iPad with iPhones, 'Imagine a Scrabble iPad game that used iPhones as letter holders. You could hold up your iPhone so that no one else could see your letters and when you were ready to make a word on the Scrabble iPad board, you could slide them on to the board by flicking the word tiles off your iPhone.' Now that would be cool."
Math

Man Uses Drake Equation To Explain Girlfriend Woes 538

Posted by samzenpus from the less-math-more-social-science dept.
artemis67 writes "A man studying in London has taken a mathematical equation that predicts the possibility of alien life in the universe to explain why he can't find a girlfriend. Peter Backus, a native of Seattle and PhD candidate and Teaching Fellow in the Department of Economics at the University of Warwick, near London, in his paper, 'Why I don't have a girlfriend: An application of the Drake Equation to love in the UK,' used math to estimate the number of potential girlfriends in the UK. In describing the paper on the university Web site he wrote 'the results are not encouraging. The probability of finding love in the UK is only about 100 times better than the probability of finding intelligent life in our galaxy.'"
Security

Torpig Botnet Hijacked and Dissected 294

Posted by timothy from the why-would-you-want-to-get-rid-of-it dept.
An anonymous reader writes "A team of researchers at UC Santa Barbara have hijacked the infamous Torpig botnet for 10 days. They have released a report (PDF) that describes how that was done and the data they collected. They observed more than 180K infected machines (this is the number of actual bots, not just IP addresses), collected 70GB of data stolen by the Torpig trojan, extracted almost 10K bank accounts and credit card numbers worth hundreds of thousands of dollars in the underground market, and examined the privacy threats that this trojan poses to its victims. Considering that Torpig has been around at least since 2006, isn't it time to finally get rid of it?"
Medicine

Merck Created Phony Peer-Review Medical Journal 213

Posted by timothy from the do-they-meet-atop-the-space-needle-or-what dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "Don't believe everything you read on the internet is a good rule to follow, but it turns out that you can't even believe a 'peer reviewed scientific journal' as details emerge that drug manufacturer Merck created a phony, but real sounding, peer-review journal titled the 'Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine' to publish data favorable to its products. 'What's sad is that I'm sure many a primary care physician was given literature from Merck that said, "As published in Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine, Fosamax outperforms all other medications...."' writes Summer Johnson in a post on the website of the American Journal of Bioethics. One Australian rheumatologist named Peter Brooks who served as an 'honorary advisory board' to the journal didn't receive a single paper for peer-review in his entire time on the board, but it didn't bother him because he apparently knew the journal did not receive original submissions of research. All this is probably not too surprising in light of Merck's difficulties with Vioxx, the once $2.5 billion a year drug that was pulled from the market in September 2004, after a study showed it doubled the risk of heart attack and stroke in long-term users resulting in payments by Merck of $4.85 billion to settle personal injury claims from former users, but it bears repeating that 'if physicians would not lend their names or pens to these efforts, and publishers would not offer their presses, these publications could not exist.'"
GNU is Not Unix

Basic Linux Boot On Open Graphics Card 177

Posted by timothy from the bumblebee-flies-anyway dept.
David Vuorio writes "The Open Graphics Project aims to develop a fully open-source graphics card; all specs, designs, and source code are released under Free licenses. Right now, FPGAs (large-scale reprogrammable chips) are used to build a development platform called OGD1. They've just completed an alpha version of legacy VGA emulation, apparently not an easy feat. This YouTube clip shows Gentoo booting up in text mode, with OGD1 acting as the primary display. The Linux Fund is receiving donations, so that ten OGD1 boards can be bought (at cost) for developers. Also, the FSF shows their interest by asking volunteers to help with the OGP wiki."
Image

DIY Space Photography 106

Posted by samzenpus from the exploring-on-a-budget dept.
Four Spanish teenagers sent a camera-operated weather balloon into the stratosphere. The boys built the electronic sensor components from scratch. Gerard Marull Paretas, Sergi Saballs Vila, Marta Gasull Morcillo and Jaume Puigmiquel Casamort attached a £56 camera to a heavy duty £43 latex balloon, and sent their science project 20-miles above the Earth. Team leader Gerard Marull, 18, said, "We were overwhelmed at our results, especially the photographs, to send our handmade craft to the edge of space is incredible."
Space

Rocket Hobbyists Prevail Over Feds In Court Case 546

Posted by kdawson from the up-up-and-away dept.
Ellis D. Tripp writes "DC District Court judge Reggie Walton has finally ruled in the 9-year old court case pitting the model rocketry community against the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. The ruling is a 'slam dunk' for the rocketry community, stating that the BATFE ignored scientific evidence and overstepped its bounds by classifying ammonium perchlorate composite propellant (APCP) as an 'explosive.' Effective immediately, the BATFE has no legal jurisdiction over hobby rocket motors, and a federal Low Explosives User's Permit will no longer be needed in order to purchase APCP motors. The full text of the Judge's decision is reproduced at the link."

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