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Comment Seems a bit of a setup. (Score 2) 127

by Artifex (#46581201) Attached to: NASA Puts Its New Spacesuit Design To a Public Vote

They only have one option that mentions immediately practical applications in its supporting information. That's the Technology skin, with the applications being easier crew identification, etc. Precisely the only reason why you would think they would invest the resources to play with pretty lights on the surface of a prototype, right now. The others are designs that might be nice to have someday, if there are large populations in these environments that might want to express individuality and creativity.

Submission + - U.S. Cedes Control of DNS to ICANN (doc.gov)

Submitted by Midnight_Falcon
Midnight_Falcon writes: Sixteen years after Jon Postel's famed attempt to bring the DNS system under IANA control, the U.S has agreed to cede control of the root DNS servers of the internet to ICANN. With NSA spying (some of which utilizing the U.S's privileged access to the internet system) a hot button issue, this may indicate a step in the right direction for internationalizing the internet.

Submission + - Mozilla Scraps Firefox For Windows 8 Citing Low Adoption of Metro

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Mozilla today announced it is abandoning the Metro version of its Firefox browser, before the first release for Windows 8 even sees the light of day. Firefox Vice President Johnathan Nightingale ordered the company’s engineering leads and release managers to halt development earlier this week, saying that shipping a 1.0 version "would be a mistake." Mozilla says it simply does not have the resources nor the scale of its competitors, and it has to pick its battles. The Metro platform (which has since been renamed to Modern UI, but many prefer the older name) simply doesn’t help the organization achieve its mission as well as other platforms Firefox is available for: Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android.

Submission + - Mars Rover Opportunity Faces New Threat: Budget Ax (discovery.com)

Submitted by astroengine
astroengine writes: NASA’s baseline budget for the year beginning Oct. 1 pulls the plug on the 10-year-old Mars rover Opportunity, newly released details of the agency’s fiscal 2015 spending plan show. The plan, which requires Congressional approval, also anticipates ending the orbiting Mars Odyssey mission on Sept. 30, 2016. “There are pressures all over the place,” NASA’s planetary science division director Jim Green said during an advisory council committee teleconference call on Wednesday.

Submission + - Monster Rare Yellow Hypergiant Star Discovered (discovery.com) 2

Submitted by astroengine
astroengine writes: A gargantuan star, measuring 1,300 times the size of our sun, has been uncovered 12,000 light-years from Earth — it is one of the ten biggest stars known to exist in our galaxy. The yellow hypergiant even dwarfs the famous stellar heavyweight Betelgeuse by 50 percent. While its hulking mass may be impressive, astronomers have also realized that HR 5171 is a double star with a smaller stellar sibling physically touching the surface of the larger star as they orbit one another. “The new observations also showed that this star has a very close binary partner, which was a real surprise,” said Olivier Chesneau, of the Observatoire de la Côte d’Azur in Nice, France. “The two stars are so close that they touch and the whole system resembles a gigantic peanut.

Submission + - Bitcoin, Meet Darwin: Crypto Currency's Future (informationweek.com)

Submitted by kierny
kierny writes: Today, Bitcoin, tomorrow, the dollar? Former Central Intelligence Agency CTO Gus Hunt says governments will learn from today's crypto currencies and use them to fashion future government-protected monetary systems. But along the way, expect first-movers such as Bitcoin to fall, in a repeat of the fate of AltaVista, Napster, and other early innovators. But the prospect of fashioning a better, more stable crypto currency system — and the likelihood that Bitcoin may one day burn — is good news for anyone who cares about crypto currencies, as well as the future and reliability of our monetary systems.

Submission + - Jewish school removes evolution questions from exams

Submitted by Alain Williams
Alain Williams writes: Religious sponsored ignorance is not just in the USA, a school in Hackney, England is trying to hide the idea of evolution from its pupils. Maybe they fear that their creation story will be seen for what it is if pupils get to learn ideas supported evidence. The girls are also disadvantaged since they can't answer the redacted questions, thus making it harder to get good marks.

Submission + - Deadly Avian Flu Strain Penetrates Biossecurity Defenses in Seuol (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: A new, deadly H5N8 strain of avian influenza penetrated the biosecurity defenses of a National Institute of Animal Science (NIAS) campus near Seoul, prompting authorities to cull all of the facility's 11,000 hens and 5000 ducks. The incident highlights the difficulty of protecting poultry farms from circulating avian influenza viruses. “We are taking this situation very seriously," said Lee Jun-Won, deputy agriculture minister, at a press conference yesterday in Seoul. He noted that NIAS has the country’s most secure facilities and most vigilant staff. Lee said they were looking at three possible routes the virus could have taken onto campus: wild birds, NIAS vehicles, and supply deliveries. "We will determine the reason for the infection, and we are going to hold those responsible accountable," he said.

Submission + - UK Conservatives Promise to Scrap Human Rights Act (theguardian.com)

Submitted by vinehair
vinehair writes: At the Conservative Party Conference, UK Home Secretary Theresa May stated that the party is prepared to withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR.) "The next Conservative manifesto will promise to scrap the Human Rights Act. It's why Chris Grayling is leading a review of our relationship with the European court [of human rights]," she told the party's conference. "And it's why the Conservative position is clear – if leaving the European convention is what it takes to fix our human rights laws, that is what we should do," she said to applause.

This shortly follows a YouGov poll that claimed that up to 70% of UK voters want immigration stopped completely. What kind of picture does this paint for the future of the United Kingdom on the international stage?

Submission + - Google Has $100 for Girls Who Study Coding, $0 for Boys 1

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: "Thanks to Google," reads the Codecademy website (image), "every U.S. public high school girl who completes this 15-hour JavaScript curriculum will receive a $100 DonorsChoose.org gift code, which can be applied to a project requesting awesome resources for public school classrooms." Boys need not apply? You got it. Codecademy explains, "Why just girls? Currently only 12% of computer science graduates are women, and great tech companies like Google want to see more smart girls like you enter this awesome profession!" Sorry, Charlie. "DonorsChoose.org gift codes will be distributed only to girls," further explains the text accompanying the I'm-a-girl-at-a-U.S.-public-high-school checkbox, "but we'd love for boys to learn to code as well!" A recent FastCompany piece on DonorsChoose promoted by Melinda Gates suggests boys won't get too far protesting this promo or other girl-friendlier DonorsChoose partnerships with Code.org and Google — the non-profit reportedly has two words for critics of its tactics: 'Screw You.'

Submission + - In Norway, drones hinder firefighting helicopters (www.vgtv.no)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: On the night before sunday, the town of Laerdal in western Norway fought against the flames. More than 30 houses burned and the firefighters called in helicopters to aid in protecting the town. But this time, the firefighters met a new adversary: Drones, small remote controlled helicopters with cameras vied with firefighting helicopters for the airspace over Laerdal. The norwegian newspaper VG published a video taken by one of the drones (see link), allegedly before any firefighting helicopters had arrived on the scene. In the morning hours, Nils Erik Eggen of the local police force called for people to pull their UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) out of the area, as they were in imminent danger of colliding with the manned helicopters of the norwegian 720-squadron, with potentially fatal results.

Submission + - Alleging 'Malpractice' With Climate Skeptic Papers, Publisher Kills Journal (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: A European publisher today terminated a journal edited by climate change skeptics. The journal, Pattern Recognition in Physics, was started less than a year ago. Problems cropped up soon afterward. In July, Jeffrey Beall, a librarian at the University of Colorado, Denver, noted “serious concerns” with Pattern Recognition in Physics. As he wrote on his blog about open-access publishing, Beall found self-plagiarism in the first paper published by the journal. “In addition," says another critic, "the editors selected the referees on a nepotistic basis, which we regard as malpractice in scientific publishing.”

Comment Re:ENOUGH. OF. THE. BITCOIN. (Score 2) 396

by Artifex (#45904573) Attached to: A Rebuttal To Charles Stross About Bitcoin

http://slashdot.org/index2.pl?fhfilter=bitcoin

Over the last few months, we've been averaging a little more than 1 Bitcoin story every 2 days. Please - please, stop accepting every submission that has the word Bitcoin in it. At this point, I'd almost like them to start covering the 2016 Presidential Election. Enough.

Agreed. There should be an algorithm to make it progressively more difficult to create each Bitcoin story, with reviewers getting paid a small amount of karma for each submission they proc-- aarrgggh, doing it again!

Submission + - Homeland Security Director used handgun targeting laser as presentation pointer (timesunion.com)

Submitted by McGruber
McGruber writes: The Albany, NY Times Union newspaper reports (http://www.timesunion.com/local/article/Ready-aim-point-talk-5116592.php) that Jerome M. Hauer, the New York State Director of Homeland Security, took out his handgun and used its laser sighting device attached to the barrel as a pointer during a presentation given in the "highly secure" state emergency operations center below NY State Police headquarters.

Three Swedish emergency managers in the audience were rattled when the gun's laser tracked across one of their heads before Hauer found the map of New York at which he wanted to point. Hauer was disabled by a stroke a few years ago and can be unsteady.

Although Hauer is not a law enforcement official, he carries his loaded 9-millimeter Glock in a holster into state buildings, which is an apparent violation of NY State's Public Facilities Law prohibiting employees from entering state buildings with weapons.

Submission + - The Internet's Network Efficiencies Are Destroying the Middle Class

Submitted by Hugh Pickens DOT Com
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes: Joe Nocera says in op-ed piece in the NYT that the same network efficiencies that has given companies their great advantages are becoming the instrument of our ruin. In the financial services industry, it led to the financial crisis. In the case of a company like Wal-Mart, the adoption of technology to manage its supply chain at first reaped great benefits, but over time it cost competitors and suppliers hundreds of thousands of jobs, thus gradually impoverishing its own customer base. Jaron Lanier says that the digital economy has done as much as any single thing to hollow out the middle class. Take Kodak and Instagram. At its height, “Kodak employed more than 140,000 people.” Kodak made plenty of mistakes, but look at what is replacing it: “When Instagram was sold to Facebook for a billion dollars in 2012, it employed only 13 people.” Networks need a great number of people to participate in them to generate significant value says Lanier but when they have them, only a small number of people get paid. This has the net effect of centralizing wealth and limiting overall economic growth. It is Lanier’s radical idea that people should get paid whenever their information is used. He envisions a different kind of digital economy, in which creators of content — whether a blog post or a Facebook photograph — would receive micropayments whenever that content was used. “If Google and Facebook were smart,” says Lanier, “they would want to enrich their own customers.” So far, he adds, Silicon Valley has made “the stupid choice” — to grow their businesses at the expense of their own customers. Lanier’s message is that it can’t last. And it won’t.

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