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Submission + - Advice for a College Dropout? 1

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: "I dropped out of college today," begins the touching inaugural post on Life of a Dropout, which will strike a chord with anyone who's done or contemplated doing the same. "Life had gotten messed up to such extent that suicide seemed to be a much much better option. So when I woke up today I got a third person view of my life, and felt like I had to get out of this situation and prevent myself from doing any harm to myself. I have been in this college for 3 years now, and the only good it did to me was that it allowed me to meet awesome people and as a result I developed as a software developer." So, any words of advice or encouraging anecdotes for a dropout/developer who's trying to start things afresh?
The Military

Robotic Space Plane Launches In Mystery Mission This Week 110

Posted by samzenpus from the flying-into-a-mystery dept.
mpicpp writes: The United States Air Force's robotic X-37B space plane will carry a NASA experiment into orbit when it launches on its next mystery mission Wednesday. The liftoff will begin the reusable space plane's fourth mission, which is known as OTV-4 (short for Orbital Test Vehicle-4). Since it's classified it's not entirely clear what the space plane will be doing once it leaves Earth Wednesday. This has led to some speculation that the vehicle might be a weapon, but officials have repeatedly refuted that notion, saying X-37B flights simply test a variety of new technologies. The X-37B looks like a miniature version of NASA's now-retired space shuttle. The robotic, solar-powered space plane is about 29 feet long by 9.5 feet tall (8.8 by 2.9 meters), with a wingspan of 15 feet (4.6 meters) and a payload bay the size of a pickup-truck bed. Like the space shuttle, the X-37B launches vertically and lands horizontally, on a runway.

Submission + - Lessig will be at June 4th Seattle Premiere of "Killswitch"

Submitted by Funksaw
Funksaw writes: Lawrence Lessig will be speaking alongside Marianne Williamson at the Seattle premiere of "Killswitch: The Battle to Control the Internet" and the following reception.

Tickets are $15 for the movie and reception, and every dollar of those funds will be used to support the work of the New Hampshire Rebellion (which Lessig founded) to reduce the corrupting influence of money in American politics.

Submission + - Oculus Has No Plans to Block Virtual Reality Porn (variety.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Facebook-owned Oculus VR has no plans to prevent the adult entertainment industry from using its Rift virtual reality headset, which is scheduled to launch as a consumer product within the first quarter of 2016, according to Oculus founder Palmer Luckey.

Asked about plans to block any X-rated content or apps during a panel at the first Silicon Valley Virtual Reality Conference in San Jose, Calif., on Monday, Luckey responded: "The rift is an open platform. We don't control what software can run on it," adding: "And that's a big deal."

Luckey's remarks stood out as most of his fellow panelists tried to dodge controversial questions around topics like adult entertainment as well as motion sickness and other side effects of using virtual reality headsets.

Submission + - This Well-Funded Startup Could Turn Bitcoin Mining On Its Head (itworld.com)

Submitted by itwbennett
itwbennett writes: A startup company whose backers include Qualcomm, Cisco Systems and a former ARM executive, and which reportedly has raised 'well north of $116 million' has just come out of stealth mode. The first thing to know about the company, which calls itself 21, is that it has designed an embedded chip for bitcoin mining. The details aren’t entirely clear, but the plan seems to be to get its bitcoin mining chip embedded into millions of smartphones and tablets, and for those devices to work collectively to mine new currency. But the company has larger ambitions: It sees its chip as a way to solve the problem of micro payments and it could also be used to pay for the chips themselves.
AI

Forecasting the Next Pandemic 57

Posted by samzenpus from the I-don't-feel-so-good dept.
sciencehabit writes: A new study led by Barbara A. Han, a disease ecologist at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies, suggests a computer model that incorporates machine learning can pinpoint, with 90% accuracy, rodent species that are known to harbor pathogens that can spread to humans. Sciencemag reports on the study: "Han and her team first used their program to identify lifestyle patterns common to rodents harboring diseases like black plague, rabies, and hanta virus and found that their model had an accuracy rate of 90%. After the machine had 'learned' the telltale signs, the researchers searched for new rodents that fit the profile but were not previously thought to be carriers. So far, the model has identified more than 150 new animal species that could harbor zoonotic diseases, the researchers report online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The computer program also predicted 58 new infections in rodents that were already known to carry one zoonotic disease."

Submission + - How LinkedIn's Founder Helped Ignite Silicon Valley's Bitcoin Fever (fastcompany.com)

Submitted by Lashdots
Lashdots writes: In his new book on Bitcoin, the New York Times' Nathaniel Popper sheds light on a critical moment for the currency and the underlying technology in early 2014: At breakfast in the hills above Palo Alto, Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn, met with Wences Cesares, an Argentinian entrepreneur and the founder of a Bitcoin wallet company called Xapo. Hoffman already believed in Bitcoin as a globally available asset, similar to gold, and had started to acquire Bitcoins for his portfolio. Now he wanted into Xapo. The next day, Marc Andressen would declare his love for Bitcoin in The New York Times. Andressen was already investing his own money into the unpublicized Bitcoin mining company, 21e6, and his firm, Andreessen Horowitz, had also made a secret $25 million investment in 21e6, helping make it the best funded Bitcoin company in the world. And within a month, Hoffman and a partner managed to raise another round for Xapo, doubling the value of the company, at $100 million.
Social Networks

Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team Responds In Nepal 25

Posted by samzenpus from the lending-a-hand dept.
An anonymous reader writes with news about the efforts of the The Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team to help in the aftermath of the earthquake in Nepal. The team asks those living in the affected areas to help out by reporting which buildings are damaged, which are still standing, and where fissures and other quake damage is located. Opensource.com has a profile of their efforts which reads: 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.

Comment Re:I never pretended it would help for a long time (Score 1) 185

by Tailhook (#49721473) Attached to: Navy's New Laser Weapon: Hype Or Reality?

I am jsut stating that it should help.

Covering your weapons in mirrors is stupid and impractical. The "just put mirrors on everything LOLZ" trope your kind always trots out doesn't become more feasible just because you're naive enough to keep repeating it.

For a much cheaper price than such a lser system itself.

Defense is always more expensive that offence. It's easier to break things. That's why being wealthy is important to self preservation.
Businesses

FTC Recommends Conditions For Sale of RadioShack Customer Data 54

Posted by samzenpus from the rules-of-the-game dept.
itwbennett writes: The FTC has weighed in on the contentious issue of the proposed sale of consumer data by RadioShack, recommending that a settlement with failed online toy retailer Toysmart.com be adopted as a model for dealings going forward. Director of the FTC's bureau of consumer protection Jessica L. Rich wrote in a letter to a court-appointed consumer privacy ombudsman that the agency's concerns about the transfer of customer information inconsistent with RadioShack's privacy promises "would be greatly diminished if certain conditions were met." These include: that the data was not sold standalone, and if the buyer is in the same lines of business, they agree to be bound by the same privacy policies.
Biotech

Genetically Engineered Yeast Makes It Possible To Brew Morphine 333

Posted by samzenpus from the let-it-rise dept.
PvtVoid writes: The New York times reports that newly developed yeast strains will soon make it possible to create morphine from fermentation of sugar. While no one has claimed to make morphine in lab from scratch yet, concerns are already being raised about potential abuse. According to the Times article: "This rapid progress in synthetic biology has set off a debate about how — and whether — to regulate it. Dr. Oye and other experts said this week in a commentary in Nature Chemical Biology that drug-regulatory authorities are ill prepared to control a process that will benefit the heroin trade much more than the prescription painkiller industry. The world should take steps to head that off, they argue, by locking up the bioengineered yeast strains and restricting access to the DNA that would let drug cartels reproduce them.

Comment Re:Cats vs windmills (Score 1) 164

by Reziac (#49719559) Attached to: Wind Turbines With No Blades

I had a neutered male cat who from about 9 months old spent all day, every day, killing gophers. Within a few months he'd completely exterminated them within about half a mile of my house. He only ate part of the first gopher of the day, far as I ever saw.

Most predators kill for fun as well as for food and for training their young; it's not at all unusual. -- That's the real problem with wolves vs domestic sheep; it's so much fun to shoot fish in a barrel that they wind up killing a whole flock just for jollies.
The Almighty Buck

Stock Market Valuation Exceeds Its Components' Actual Value 335

Posted by Soulskill from the of-wary-bulls dept.
An anonymous reader writes: James Tobin, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, developed a concept called "Q-value" — it's the ratio between two numbers: 1) the sum of all publicly-traded companies' stock valuations and 2) the value of all these companies' actual assets, if they were sold. Bloomberg reports that the continued strength of the stock market has now caused that ratio to go over 1 — in other words, the market values companies about 10% higher than the sum of their actual assets. The Q value is now at its highest point 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.

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