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Submission + - Homo Erectus Was The Original Starting Pitcher (insidescience.org)

Submitted by LalenaAIP
LalenaAIP writes: "It's completely ordinary to see today's athletes throw a javelin hundreds of feet in the air or fire baseballs accurately and in excess of 90 mph dozens of times during a game. However, not every close human relative has that ability to throw, despite the great strength that many possess."

Submission + - London house as an optical illusion (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by Kittenman
Kittenman writes: The BBC is carrying footage of a London house that allows members of the public to scale walls, stand on windows, and other superhero stuff, all without any bite from a radioactive spider.

Submission + - MS to Indie Devs: Ya' gotta have a publisher! (forbes.com)

Submitted by Loadmaster
Loadmaster writes: The new Oddworld game New 'n' Tasty is coming to every platform in the current generation and even the next generation but not the Xbox One. It's not that developer Oddworld Inhabitants isn't porting the game. It's not that they hate Microsoft or the Xbox One. No, it's that Microsoft has taken an anti-indie dev stance with the Xbox One. While the game industry is moving to Kickstarter and self-funded shops, Microsoft has decided all developers must have a publisher to grace their console.

It just gets worse for Microsoft's new console. They spy on you, control who you let borrow, restrict how you can sell the game, and now they are forcing indie developers to split profit with a partner in the form of an unnecessary publisher. The adage for Microsoft products is that they get it right on rev. 3, but here it seems they've bombed it. Big time.

Submission + - Can Crowdfunding, Fund An Electric Car Startup? (gofundme.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Crowdfunding has funded many great companies, but never an alternative energy company. GreenStar Motors an electric car startup located in New York City, has just launched their crowdfunding campaign. They hope to raise a startup capital amount of $20k. Will it work?

In the last 5 years we have seen over a dozen electric vehicle (EV) startups fail, miserably. So why would someone who has seen all these failures occur try to startup their on electric car company? Well, its 22-year-old founder Elvin, claims that he found solutions to the two biggest hurdles that electric cars face today. Elvin states, “The two biggest barriers with today’s electric cars are 1. Range anxiety and 2. Charging the in-car battery while living in a city with limited access to public charging stations. We figured out a way to both reduce range anxiety and charge the in-car battery while living in a city with limited to no access to public charging stations. (While some people believe the biggest hurdle with electric cars is the price we believe that once manufacturing scales go up, prices wil drop down dramatically)."

Those are some bold claims, but why a goal of $20k? That surely is not enough to fund such a capital-intensive venture. “We are seeking to raise $20K. While $20K won’t be nearly enough to fund our project, it will be enough to start the process of patenting, copyrighting, and trademarking our first few major innovations. We prefer to go the route of private capital. If possible we would like to avoid going the route of government loans like a few other electric car startups have done. We believe the government has enough to worry about. As far as we know we are the first car company to ever come out of New York. We are also the first EV company trying to raise funds through crowdfunding”

The future is electric. Lets not fight it and instead embrace it. Change is something that most people have trouble with, but change is what powered the revolutions that gave us the amazing, innovative technology we have today. Change will also be the driver behind the awesome, electric, smart, connected cars with 750+ mile range, of tomorrow. We are automotive enthusiast, we are committed to making the best cars on the road, but we need a bit of help from you. We can’t do it with out you!

Check out the crowdfunding campaign at: http://www.gofundme.com/LetsSaveTheWorld

(We understand that some people do not believe in global warming or dont believe its caused by humans, but whats wrong with cleaner air?!)

Submission + - Inside the NSA's secret Utah data center (foxnews.com)

Submitted by Velcroman1
Velcroman1 writes: As Americans demand answers about the government's wholesale electronic snooping on its citizens, the primary snooper — the National Security Agency (NSA) — is building a monstrous digital datacenter in a remote corner of Utah capable of sorting through and storing every e-mail, voicemail, and social media communication it can get its hands on. This top-secret data warehouse could hold as many as 1.25 million 4-terabyte hard drives, built into some 5,000 servers to store the trillions upon trillions of ones and zeroes that make up your digital fingerprint. And that's just one way to catalog people, said Charles King, principal analyst at data center consulting firm Pund-IT. "The NSA — like any large organization — is using numerous kinds of storage systems," King told FoxNews.com, including "innovative SSD and in-memory systems for high performance applications like real time analytics."

Submission + - Majority of Americans Say NSA Phone Tracking Is Not OK To Fight Terrorism (rasmussenreports.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: According to a weekend poll by Rasmussen, a majority of Americans believe that the feds are spying too much on US citizens, and oppose programs which collect Americans' phone records without specific suspicion of wrongdoing. Rasmussen's results appear to contradict those of an earlier, widely reported Pew survey on this issue.

Submission + - Google Asks Government for More Visible National Security Requests (slashdot.org)

Submitted by Nerval's Lobster
Nerval's Lobster writes: In an open letter addressed to U.S. attorney general Eric Holder and FBI director Robert Mueller, Google chief legal officer David Drummond again insisted that reports of his company freely offering user data to the NSA and other agencies were untrue. “However,” he wrote, “government nondisclosure obligations regarding the number of FISA national security requests that Google receives, as well as the number of accounts covered by those requests, fuel that speculation.” In light of that, Drummond had a request of the two men: “We therefore ask you to help make it possible for Google to publish in our Transparency Report aggregate numbers of national security requests, including FISA disclosures—in terms of both the number we receive and their scope.” Apparently Google’s numbers would show “that our compliance with these requests falls far short of the claims being made.” Google, Drummond added, “has nothing to hide.” As part of its regularly updated Transparency Report, Google posts information about the National Security Letters (NSLs) it receives from the federal government; however, the government requires Google to report NSLs as a numerical range rather than an exact number. But even if Google does end up displaying more information about government requests, it doesn’t seem as if many Americans are dismayed about their privacy being invaded: according to a new survey by the Pew Research Center and The Washington Post (conducted after the Snowden story broke), concerns about terrorist threats outweigh the need for privacy. “Currently 62 [percent] say it is more important for the federal government to investigate possible terrorist threats, even if that intrudes on personal privacy,” read the survey’s summary. “Just 34 [percent] say it is more important for the government not to intrude on personal privacy, even if that limits its ability to investigate possible terrorist threats.”

Submission + - Apply for Edward Snowden's old job! (disinfo.com)

Submitted by tobiah
tobiah writes: Like many of us here I expect your first reaction to Snowden's disclosure on the NSA was "Primo job opening!". And you were correct, Booz Allen Hamilton is now advertising for sys admin position in Hawaii with a $200k salary, all the perks. So polish up those resumés and join the team that watches everything!

Submission + - Mozilla, Reddit, EFF, 83 others demand halt of PRISM, NSA Spying (paritynews.com)

Submitted by hypnosec
hypnosec writes: Civil liberties organizations and internet companies including Mozilla and Reddit have teamed up and are demanding for a swift action and calling for a complete halt of PRISM as well as any other internet surveillance activities that the NSA is involved in. A total of 86 such groups and companies are sending out a letter to Congress demanding the closure of PRISM and have also launched a new online campaign dubbed "StopWatching.US" and are inviting users to sign the petition. The letter demands for a congressional investigatory committee, similar to the Church Committee of the 1970s, while also demanding for legal reforms in domestic spying. The letter also demands that public officials who are responsible for such illegal surveillance be held accountable.

Submission + - Font Fight! 13 Best Programming Fonts (itworld.com)

Submitted by itwbennett
itwbennett writes: The best programming fonts, it’s generally agreed, should, among other things, be monospaced (for code alignment), sans-serif, readable at a small size and clearly distinguish between certain common characters (e.g., zero from the letter O, lower case L from the number 1). Here are some of the most popular over the last 20+ years.

Submission + - Australian Communications and Media Authority releases detailed malware data. (acma.gov.au)

Submitted by ozmanjusri
ozmanjusri writes: The Australian Communications and Media Authority has published detailed statistics of malware infections identified by their online security team (AISI). The team scans and identifies and compromised computers on Australian IP addresses and reports daily to around 130 participating ISPs.

Their breakdown shows about infected 16,500 devices are online at any one time. The malware type for all infections is available on the site.

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