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Submission + - Congress's Scientific Illiterates Are Resigning the World to Ruin (vice.com) 1

Submitted by Lasrick
Lasrick writes: Brian Merchant at Motherboard examines the March 26th at the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology's 2015 budget request hearing...the one White House adviser Dr. John Holdren addressed to defend funding for science programs. Video clips prove the comments that are difficult to believe, when you read them. It's pretty appalling, and it isn't any better in the US Senate, as Merchant points out.

Submission + - Saturn's Moon Enceladus Has Underground Ocean (discovery.com)

Submitted by astroengine
astroengine writes: Gravity measurements made with the Saturn-orbiting Cassini spacecraft indicate the small moon Enceladus has an ocean sandwiched between its rocky core and icy shell, a finding that raises the prospects of a niche for life beyond Earth. The Cassini data shows the body of water, which is in the moon’s southern hemisphere, must be as large or larger than Lake Superior and sitting on top of the moon’s rocky core at a depth of about 31 miles. "The ocean may extend halfway or more toward the equator in every direction," said planetary scientist David Stevenson, with the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

Submission + - ZunZuneo: USAID funded "Cuban Twitter" to undermine Communist regime (washingtonpost.com)

Submitted by barlevg
barlevg writes: In a country where the government severely limits access to the world wide web, ZunZeneo, an anonymous SMS-based social network, drew more than 40,000 Cuban users at its peak, the Associated Press reports. On it, people shared news and opinions about music and culture. But what none of its subscribers knew was that the project was secretly funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), though a series of shell corporations and foreign bank accounts, and that its stated goal was “renegotiate the balance of power between the state and society” in the Communist stronghold, hopefully leading to a "Cuban Spring."

Submission + - Mt. Gox Questioned by Employees for at Least 2-years

Submitted by Rambo Tribble
Rambo Tribble writes: Reuters reports that Mt. Gox employees began to question the handling of funds at least two years ago. Although only CEO Mark Karpeles had full access to financial records, a group of a half-dozen employees began to suspect client funds were being diverted to cover operating costs, which included Karpeles' toys, such as 'racing version of the Honda Civic imported from Britain'. Employees confronted Karpeles in early 2012, only to be given vague assurances with a "pay no attention to the man behind the curtain" ring. Unfortunately, since Mt. Gox was not regulated as a financial institution under Japanese law, it is unclear what recourse might be gained in pursuing this question.

Submission + - 500GB To 1TB On An mSATA Stick - Samsung SSD 840 EVO mSATA Tested (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: Shortly after 2.5-inch versions of Samsung's SSD 840 EVO drives hit the market, the company prepared an array of mSATA drives featuring the same controller and NAND flash. The Samsung SSD 840 EVO mSATA series of drives are essentially identical to their 2.5" counterparts, save for the mSATA drives' much smaller form factor. Like their 2.5" counterparts, Samsung's mSATA 840 EVO series of drives feature an updated, triple-core Samsung MEX controller, which operates at 400MHz. The 840 EVO's MEX controller has also been updated to support the SATA 3.1 spec, which incorporates a few new features, like support for queued TRIM commands. Along with the MEX controller, all of the Samsung 840 EVO mSATA series drives feature LPDDR2-1066 DRAM cache memory. The 120GB drive sports 256MB of cache, the 250GB and 500GB drive have 512MB of cache, and the 750GB and 1TB drives have 1GB of cache. Performance-wise, SSD 840 EVO series of mSATA solid state drives performs extremely well, whether using synthetic benchmarks, trace-based tests like PCMark, or highly-compressible or incompressible data.

Submission + - Software upgrade at 655 million kilometers (esa.int)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The Rosetta probe was launched in 2004 with a mission that required incredible planning and precision: land on a comet. After a decade in space, the woke from hibernation in January. Now, Rosetta has spotted its target. 'Rosetta is currently around 5 million kilometres from the comet, and at this distance it is still too far away to resolve – its light is seen in less than a pixel and required a series of 60–300 second exposures taken with the wide-angle and narrow-angle camera. The data then travelled 37 minutes through space to reach Earth, with the download taking about an hour per image.' Now it's time to upgrade the probe's software. Since it's currently 655,000,000 kilometers from Earth, the operation needs to be flawless. 'When MIDAS is first powered up, it boots into "kernel mode" – the kernel manages a very robust set of basic operations for communicating with the spacecraft and the ground and for managing the more complex main program. From kernel mode we can upload patches to the main software, verify the current contents, or even load an entirely new version.' The Rosetta blog is coninually being updated with progress on the mission, and the Planetary Society has more information as well. The probe will arrived at the comet in August, and will attempt landing in November.

Submission + - Crows Complete Basic Aesop's Fable Task (phys.org)

Submitted by jones_supa
jones_supa writes: New Caledonian crows — already known to be smart — may also understand how to displace water to receive a reward, with the causal understanding level of a 5-7 year-old child, according to results published in the open access journal PLOS ONE by Sarah Jelbert from University of Auckland and colleagues. As demonstrated in the included video, Scientists used the Aesop's fable riddle — in which subjects drop stones into water to raise the water level and obtain an out-of reach-reward — to assess New Caledonian crows' causal understanding of water displacement. Crows completed 4 of 6 water displacement tasks, including preferentially dropping stones into a water-filled tube instead of a sand-filled tube, dropping sinking objects rather than floating objects, using solid objects rather than hollow objects, and dropping objects into a tube with a high water level rather than a low one. However, they failed two more challenging tasks, one that required understanding of the width of the tube, and one that required understanding of counterintuitive cues for a U-shaped displacement task. The authors note that these tasks did not test insightful problem solving, but were directed at the birds' understanding of volume displacement.

Submission + - iOS 7 hits fastest adoption rate, runs on 85 percent of iOS device (blogspot.com)

Submitted by nayanP
nayanP writes: The Developer page of Apple has been updated this week with a chart that shows – 85 percent of iOS devices are running the iOS7. The chart has been measured by the App store during a 7 day period that ended on 23rd of March. While in the December last year the iOS 7 was running on 74 percent of all iOS devices.
In September 2013 the iOS 7 began its colorful journey along with the new iPhone 5S and iPhone 5C. Even though the iPhone 5C wasn’t sold too much and even 3 million unsold iPhone 5c models are still resting on the shelves of Carriers and retailers, iPhone 5S is a grand hit and Apple sold millions of iPhone 5S models which is preloaded with iOS 7 that helped iOS 7 to gain this huge adoption rate so fast.
As usual this fast adoption rate of iOS 7 means declining of iOS 6 in a fast pace. In the last 4 months alone the usage of iOS 6 has gone down to 12 percent from 24 percent and it seems iOS 7 is showing the fastest and highest adoption rate than any other previous major iOS release.
Now when it comes to comparison between adoption rate of iOS 7 and Android 4.4 Kitkat, in December last year only 1.1 percent of Android Smartphones were found to be running the latest version of Android and after 4 months still only 2.5 percent of Android devices are running Android Kitkat, while majority of Android Smartphones are running on Jelly Bean (v4.1.x to v4.3) that was initially launched in July 2012, even there are still close to 20 percent of Android devices are running Android Gingerbread (v2.3.3 to v2.3.7). That was released on December 2010. So, guys what do you think? Can iOS 7 score full 100 or can the Android Kitkat gain enough adoption rate to keep up with iOS 7.

Submission + - What is the Multiverse, and why do we think it exists?

Submitted by StartsWithABang
StartsWithABang writes: You might think that you're significant, but on a cosmic scale, you're not even an atom compared to the observable Universe. And the entirety of the observable Universe is just a small fraction of what the unobservable Universe must consist of, but it gets worse. In the aftermath of the BICEP2 results, confirming that our Universe underwent a period of cosmic inflation which set up the hot Big Bang, the laws of physics lead us to the conclusion that the Multiverse is real. But prospects for the next holy grail — figuring out what the properties of this Multiverse are — appear grim.

Submission + - WikiLeaks: Walmart bid Stratfor to investigate rival CEO's alleged affair (dailydot.com)

Submitted by Jah-Wren Ryel
Jah-Wren Ryel writes: In the wake of the trial of Jeremy Hammond, an Anonymous activist who received a 10-year sentence after pleading guilty to hacking the company, WikiLeaks released its final batch of Stratfor files—and it’s potentially scandalous.

According to leaked files, Walmart tasked Stratfor with investigating the alleged extramarital affairs of a CEO who worked for one of the corporation’s global competitors. It’s presented in the context of job recruitment, but, given the competitive nature of the businesses involved, the effort could be construed as an attempt at corporate espionage.

Submission + - Phosphor Watches founder bilks customers out of $314k with Kickstarter project (kickstarter.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Phosphor Watches founder, Donald Brewer, received over $314,000 from over 2,200 Kickstarter pledges for a watch that was supposed to be delivered in Nov. of 2012. Well, its Oct. 2013 and the watches still haven't been delivered. In fact, there hasn't even been an update from Mr. Brewer since August.

If a Kickstarter project with the backing of a company like Phosphor Watches, Stefan Andren as Creative Director (Design Director for Nike+), a "working prototype" and software development from Softeq, cannot pull a project together, what are we to believe happened?

I have tried contacting Kickstarter and Donald Brewer to no avail. All Kickstarter feels obligated to do is send a message to Mr. Brewer "with a reminder of [their] Terms of Use", and a "reminder of [their] expectations regarding posting consistent updates".

It is apparent that Donald Brewer has abandoned the project and bilked 2,278 backers.

I want to bring failed Kickstarter project to the attention of the Slashdot community as a cautionary tale to potential Kickstarter supporters, and look for suggestions on how to the defrauded backers should proceed.

Interestingly, Phosphor Watches still has the item on their website (Items TT001 through TT008), and the watches are now for sale on AliExpress.com (product ID: 1332039375).

Submission + - Pissed-off Martha Stewart out to exterminate patent troll Lodsys (gigaom.com)

Submitted by McGruber
McGruber writes: Gigaom's Jeff John Roberts reports that Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, Inc. (MSLO) has filed a lawsuit against Lodsys, a shell company that gained infamy two years ago by launching a wave of legal threats (http://paidcontent.org/2011/10/13/419-app-developer-gives-in-to-lodsys-in-david-and-goliath-patent-fight/) against small app makers, demanding they pay for using basic internet technology like in-app purchases or feedback surveys.

In the complaint filed this week in federal court in Wisconsin, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia asked a judge to declare that four magazine iPad apps are not infringing Lodsys’ patents, and that the patents are invalid because the so-called inventions are not new. The complaint explained how Lodsys invited the company to “take advantage of our program” by buying licenses at $5,000 apiece. It also calls the Wisconsin court’s attention to Lodsys’ involvement in more than 150 Texas lawsuits. In choosing to sue Lodsys and hopefully crush its patents, Martha Stewart is choosing a far more expensive option than simply paying Lodsys to go away.

Submission + - Utility sets IT department on path to self-destruction (computerworld.com) 1

Submitted by dcblogs
dcblogs writes: Northeast Utilities has told IT employees that it is considering outsourcing IT work to India-based offshore firms, putting as many as 400 IT jobs at risk. The company is saying a final decision has not been made. But Conn. State Rep. and House Majority Leader Joe Aresimowicz, who is trying to prevent or limit the outsourcing move, says it may be a done deal. NU may be prompting its best IT employees to head to the exits. It also creates IT security risks from upset workers. The heads-up to employees in advance of a firm plan is "kind of mind mindbogglingly stupid," said David Lewis, who heads a Connecticut-based human resources consulting firm OperationsInc, especially "since this is IT of all places." The utility's move makes sense, however, if is it trying to encourage attrition to reduce severance costs.

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