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Submission + - Back to 'The Future of Programming'

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: Bret Victor's The Future of Programming (vimeo) should probably be required viewing this fall for all CS majors — and their professors. For his recent DBX Conference talk, Victor took attendees back to the year 1973, donning the uniform of an IBM systems engineer of the times, delivering his presentation on an overhead projector. The 60's and early 70's were a fertile time for CS ideas, reminds Victor, but even more importantly, it was a time of unfettered thinking, unconstrained by programming dogma, authority, and tradition. "The most dangerous thought that you can have as a creative person is to think that you know what you're doing," explains Victor. "Because once you think you know what you're doing you stop looking around for other ways of doing things and you stop being able to see other ways of doing things. You become blind." He concludes, "I think you have to say: 'We don’t know what programming is. We don’t know what computing is. We don’t even know what a computer is.' And once you truly understand that, and once you truly believe that, then you’re free, and you can think anything.”

Submission + - Vision chip restores sight to blind man (guardian.co.uk)

Submitted by jobiwankanobi
jobiwankanobi writes: A man left blind by a devastating eye disease has been able to read letters, tell the time and identify a cup and saucer on a table after surgeons fitted him with an electronic chip to restore his vision.
Facebook

Submission + - Facebook's Open Compute Project Gains Big Partners (ostatic.com)

Submitted by Thinkcloud
Thinkcloud writes: Heavy hitting tech companies like HP, Salesforce, AMD, and VMWare have joined Facebook’s Open Compute Project. Sam Dean muses on what impact might this project have on high-end computing and data centers in a decade's time?
Power

Submission + - Wind Power Without the Blades (discovery.com) 1

Submitted by
Warmlight
Warmlight writes: "Noise from wind turbine blades, inadvertent bat and bird kills and even the way wind turbines look have made installing them anything but a breeze. New York design firm Atelier DNA has an alternative concept that ditches blades in favor of stalks. Resembling thin cattails, the Windstalks generate electricity when the wind sets them waving. The designers came up with the idea for the planned city Masdar, a 2.3-square-mile, automobile-free area being built outside of Abu Dhabi. Atelier DNA’s "Windstalk"project came in second in the Land Art Generator competition a contest sponsored by Madsar to identify the best work of art that generates renewable energy from a pool of international submissions."

Submission + - I'm trying to block Chinese visitors from visitng our website

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Ok -HELP !
  we are a small manufacturer and I'm tired of our stuff getting knocked off so I am thinking of a plan of how to block visitors from China from accessing our site and getting "inspired"

1) my first plan was to sense for chinese language browsers but that's not much of a stop gap

2) is there a way to block a site based on ip blocks and if so what are china's ip blocks ?

3) a third and more compelling strategy is to pepper our homepage with links to

Reporters Without Borders
Wikileaks
Falun Gong
Nobel Prize
Tiananmen square massacre
Amnesty International
Central Tibetan Administration
Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements in China
Tawain Indepedence
Free Tibet

and hope that our site get's black mailed by chinese censors — any thoughts . experiences ?
Businesses

Submission + - CEO Pay Increased 127 Times Faster Than Worker Pay Over Last 30 Years (thinkprogress.org)

Submitted by suraj.sun
suraj.sun writes: From 1978 to 2011, CEO pay at American firms has risen 725 percent, a rise substantially greater than stock market growth and the painfully slow 5.7 percent growth in worker compensation, more than 127 times faster than worker pay over the same time period, according to new data from the Economic Policy Institute. In 1978, CEOs took home 26.5 times more than the average worker. They now make roughly 206 times more than workers, EPI found. The pay isn’t always tied to the performance of their businesses — as ThinkProgress has noted, CEOs at companies like Bank of America often pocket huge pay increases even as the company’s stock price plummets and jobs are cut. On the other end, workers’ wages aren’t tied to productivity either. Despite substantial gains in productivity since the 1970s, worker pay has remained flat.

As a result, American income inequality has skyrocketed, growing worse than it is in countries like Pakistan and Ivory Coast. Wealth inequality is worse than it was even in Ancient Rome. And, as pay skyrockets and tax rates fall for the richest Americans, the rising inequality has left the bottom 95 percent of Americans saddled with more debt than ever before.
Security

Submission + - If you truly wish to know a man, follow the movements of his mouse (psmag.com) 1

Submitted by __aaqpaq9254
__aaqpaq9254 writes: Tom Jacobs has a very cool little story about an Israeli research team introducing a novel way of verifying a computer is being operated by its rightful user. Its method, described in the journal Information Sciences, “continuously verifies users according to characteristics of their interaction with the mouse.” Cool stuff

Comment Re:Why these ideas will not gain traction (Score 1) 284

by jobiwankanobi (#39283025) Attached to: Book Review: Occupy World Street
I'm not a big Obama fan, but most of the critics of Obama criticize him for the wrong reasons. Newsweek aired a cover article "Why are Obama's Critics so Dumb?", and most of the critics in this forum prove that article's point. They blame him for the economy when he inherited the worst recession in history (that was not a depression). Or they say he should have turned around the economy sooner or that his stimulus didn't work. If you want to criticize Obama, how about doing it for real reasons, like his signing NDAA on New Year's Eve when he should have vetoed it (as a former constitutional law professor), or how trillions escaped from the Federal Reserve in zero percent interest loans to banks, which turned around and reinvested in U.S. treasury bonds, which amounted to our taxes turning their losses into profits. How about criticizing him for being Wall Street's butt boy? Or saying one thing and his justice department doing something different altogether? Or for not closing Guantanamo?
Iphone

Submission + - Apple Wins Patent for "iWallet" (ibtimes.com) 1

Submitted by
redletterdave
redletterdave writes: "Apple won a major patent on Tuesday for its "iWallet" technology, which is a digital system that uses near-field communication (NFC) technology to complete credit card transactions and manage subsidiary financial accounts directly on your iPhone. On the home screen for iWallet, users can see their entire credit card profiles, statements, messages from their banks, and even adjust preferences or add additional cards. Within preferences, users can schedule credit card payments and set parental controls on their children, which allows kids to use their iPhones as wallets but limits the extent to which they can use it. Users can track their payments and statements within the iTunes billing system, which keeps the credit card information safe and secure."
Privacy

Submission + - $1B of TSA Nude Body Scanners Made Worthless (wordpress.com)

Submitted by
TheNextCorner
TheNextCorner writes: "This video is here to demonstrate that the TSA’s insistence that the nude body scanner program is effective and necessary is nothing but a fraud, just like their claims that the program is safe (radiation what?) and non-invasive (nude pictures who?). The scanners are now effectively worthless, as anyone can beat them with virtually no effort."

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