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Comment Re: This is just an attempt by the Republicans... (Score 2) 140

I see a number of errors in your claim. Fukushima has the potential to be 25 to 30x radio-nucleotide release greater than Chernobyl.

1st item, the single Chernobyl reactor(Unit 4) while somewhat higher power output core, was ~1/2 of combined power rating of the melted Fukushima cores(unit's 1,2,3)

2nd) Chernobyl unit 4 was newly constructed, and it's core burntime was still in it's infancy.. (~2yrs), It may or may not have undergone it's first refueling swap-out (~1/3 of the core). Meanwhile Fukushima involved 30+ year old reactors(Unit's 1,2, and 3), with 3 fully mature cores, upwards of 5 years of burn-time per core near the start of the next refueling cycle (I.E. ~Worse case for radio-nucleotides) .

3rd, Fukushima is far from over. all indications point to a melt through below the plant, into an subterranean river flow, which will end up carrying the contents of those melted cores into the pacific ocean.

3rd) Iodine-131 is still being detected onsite. I.E. fission is still occurring, thus Fukushima is still of moving target. Note: At relatively low neutron flux levels indicate that the fission yield of I-131 will be maximized(~6x greater)

4th) Unlike fallout on land, where isotope mobility is somewhat limited, the Pacific ocean is far more efficient in respect towards bio-concentration of radio isotopes up the food chain.

Be prepared to write off the food chain for Northern Pacific ocean for the next hundred years or so. It's being subjected to equivalent fallout of ALL Atmospheric Nuclear Weapons ever detonated (worldwide 1945-1980) by just this one incident.

Submission + - "Happy Birthday" Public Domain after all? (techdirt.com)

jazzdude00021 writes: No song has had as contentious of copyright history as "Happy Birthday." The song is nearly ubiquitous at birthday parties in the USA, and even has several translations with the same tune. Due to copyrights held by Warner Music, public performances have historically commanded royalty fees. However, a new lawsuit has been brought to prove that "Happy Birthday" is, and always has been in the public domain.The discovery phase for this lawsuit ended on July, 11 2014, yet this past week new evidence surfaced from Warner Music that may substantiate the claim that the lyrics were in the public domain long before the copyright laws changed in 1927. From the source:

And, here's the real kicker: they discovered this bit of evidence after two questionable things happened. (1) Warner/Chappell Music (who claims to hold the copyright for the publishing, if it exists) suddenly "found" a bunch of relevant documents that it was supposed to hand over in discovery last year, but didn't until just a few weeks ago, and (2) a rather important bit of information in one of those new documents was somewhat bizarrely "blurred out." This led the plaintiffs go searching for the original, and discover that it undermines Warner Music's arguments, to the point of showing that the company was almost certainly misleading the court. Furthermore, it definitively shows that the work was and is in the public domain.


Comment Re:no, nature abhor' a monoculture.. (Score 1) 272

Microsoft's new forced update policy, increases the level of software monoculture. It's just a matter of time before some inventive hacker penetrates M$ security model, then it's all over.

The hacker will inevitability choose an exponential distribution model, where each newly infected machine becomes a host, and a sender. While M$ repair mechanism(update) remains stuck with a linear model. (relativity fixed number of update distribution machines).

Game over, M$ looses. Customers data is encrypted and held for ransom, if they are lucky. The end of Microsoft as a OS vendor.

I recommend that one stay's far, far, away from M$ new win 10 OS offering, unless you and your clients enjoy being part of a herd being lined up for slaughter.

Comment Re:no, nature abhor' a monoculture.. (Score 1) 272

Microsoft's new forced update policy, increases the level of software monoculture. It's just a matter of time before some inventive hacker penetrates M$ security model, then it's all over. The hacker will inevitability choose an exponential distribution model, where each newly infected machine becomes a host, and a sender. While M$ repair mechanism(update) remains stuck in a linear world. (relativity fixed number of update distribution machines). Game over, M$ looses. Customers data is encrypted and held for ransom if they are lucky. The end of Microsoft as a OS vendor. I recommend that one stay's far, far, away from M$ new OS offering, unless you and your clients enjoy being part of a herd being lined up for slaughter.

Submission + - Internet Escort Slays Alleged Serial Killer

HughPickens.com writes: The Washington Post reports that an internet escort in Charleston, W.Va., may have saved her own life and the lives of many other women, when she shot and killed an alleged attacker who showed up at the woman’s home on July 18 after answering an escort ad she had placed on Backpage.com. Neal Falls showed up with multiple pairs of handcuffs and a Subaru full of weapons and tools, including a shovel, knives, a bulletproof vest, a machete, bleach, trash bags, sledgehammers and axes. In Falls’s pocket, police said, was a list of names of potential future victims, all of whom are sex workers who advertised on Backpage. Investigators are trying to determine whether Falls is responsible for a string of slayings targeting sex workers in Ohio and Nevada. “We are entering his DNA profile into CODIS, which is a national crime DNA database, to see if it matches any previous submissions from anywhere in the United States,” says Steve Cooper, the Charleston Police Department’s chief of detectives,. “If his DNA has been located in any other crimes and his profile was entered into CODIS, there will be a match.”

From the moment Falls showed up at the home of his latest alleged victim, he turned violent. “I knew he was there to kill me,” says the victim who asked not to be identified. Falls pulled a gun on her and began strangling her. “When he strangled me he just wouldn’t let me get any air. I grabbed my rake and when he laid the gun down to get the rake out of my hands, I shot him. I just grabbed the gun and shot behind me.” Local authorities are treating the shooting as an act of self-defense. According to Cooper, "when we find multiple sets of handcuffs, a machete, an axe, a bulletproof vest and container of bleach, the first thing that comes to an investigator’s mind is, ‘This is a serial killer kit.'"

Comment Re:Exactly I've made this point here many times (Score 1) 188

huh?? Per your link, Earth receives 1.74E+17 watts from the sun.

Math time
1.74E+17 watts *365.24*24(hours in a year) == 1.21E+21 watt hours per year.
1.55E+17 Watt/hr/year(Humanity's Raw Energy Consumption) / 1.21E+21 Watt/hr/year (Sol's gift to earth) == 1.02E-4 .
You're still on the high side by a factor of ~25x

Percent wise harvesting 0.01% of the sun's solar flux would more than service humanity energy requirements. Reminder, for the most part, we waste ~85% of RAW energy content. I.E. deduct ~33% digging up/mining/transporting/refining/etc. Then another ~75% converting fossil chemical into thermal energy first, then into kinetic, then optionally electrical energy(then back to kinetic) before it does any useful work.

Even of that 15% we don't waste directly, how much of that is dedicated to manufacturing infrastructure for all those non-renewable energy industries and military assets to defend them? Let's say we knock off another 33%, Humanity get's 10% useful work from all of our current energy harvesting efforts, thus shift that 0.01% solar harvest number down another order of magnitude to 0.001% to replace that 10%.

I.E. Directly harvesting 1/10,000th of the Sol's bounty directed towards earth will free humanity of a lot bad habits, and it will set the world toward a much more peaceful path in to the future.

Submission + - Microsoft Finally Kills Windows XP Antivirus (databreachtoday.com)

kierny writes: Shed a tear for enthusiasts of aging Microsoft Windows operating systems. That's because Microsoft is finally deep-sixing Windows XP — the antivirus engine, that is. After seven years of related warnings, Microsoft on July 14 stopped updating its built-in Microsoft Security Essentials software, or feeding it new signature updates. Other antivirus vendors are continuing to promise XP-compatibility for their products, as is Google for Chrome — for now.

Of course, old tech never dies — it just fades asymptotically away. But the 12% of all desktops and laptops still running XP show that breaking up [with aging Microsoft operating systems] is still hard to do.

Submission + - Adblock Plus Reduces University Network Bandwidth Use By 40 Percent

Mickeycaskill writes: Simon Fraser University in British Colombia, Canada claims it saved between 25 and 40 percent of its network bandwidth by deploying Adblock Plus across its internal network.

The study tested the ability of the Adblock Plus browser extension in reducing IP traffic when installed in a large enterprise network environment, and found that huge amounts of bandwidth was saved by blocking web-based advertisements and video trailers.

The experiment carried out over a period of six week, and involved 100 volunteers in an active enterprise computing environment at the university. The study’s main conclusions were that Adblock Plus was not only effective in blocking online advertisements, but that it “significantly” reduced network data usage.

Although the university admits there are some limitations of the study, it suggests that the reduced network data demand would lead to lower infrastructure costs than a comparable network without Adblock Plus.

Submission + - Office of Personnel Management. Not a hack: a Giveaway!

bbsguru writes: According to ArsTechnica The OPM loss of personal info on 14 million-and-counting US Federal empolyees and contractors wasn't so much a theft as a sharing...

From the article...
Some of the contractors that have helped OPM with managing internal data have had security issues of their own—including potentially giving foreign governments direct access to data long before the recent reported breaches. A consultant who did some work with a company contracted by OPM to manage personnel records for a number of agencies told Ars that he found the Unix systems administrator for the project "was in Argentina and his co-worker was physically located in the [People's Republic of China]. Both had direct access to every row of data in every database: they were root. Another team that worked with these databases had at its head two team members with PRC passports. I know that because I challenged them personally and revoked their privileges. From my perspective, OPM compromised this information more than three years ago and my take on the current breach is 'so what's new?'

Submission + - Bad day for Cyber (kgmi.com)

mitcheli writes: From the "skynet-has-become-selfaware" dept:
In short order, three major outages occurred morning. First United Airlines reported a system wide grounding of all flights due to "technical difficulties" with little details to follow. Following that, the New York Stock Exchange reported "technical difficulties" while suspending all trading. And now the Wall Street Journal's website is in limited operations due to "technical difficulties". While initial reports on NYSE state that there is no malicious activity as a result of the outage, few details have been released at this time.

Comment Re: Assumptions are the mother of all ... (Score 1) 172

lol. I purchased several with the express intent to not upgrade.

Same here, actually a number of my clients XP legacy apps have 16 bit installers, ergo no go Win 7 natively. These apps are installed in XPvirt boxes under Windows 7. I have no idea if Win 10 pro will support XPvirt boxes or if support for them will shortly disappear thereafter in some sort of forced update..

My advice to any business owner, would be to avoid this latest Win 10 release like the plague, they still don't have a stable build and it's less than 1 month before product release. I feel that using Win 10 is a high risk proposition at best, let someone else be the guinea pig.

Submission + - Apple DID conspire to inflate ebook prices, must pay $450 million (betanews.com)

Mark Wilson writes: On the same day that Apple Music launched, Apple received some bad news from the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. In a 2 to 1 vote, judges ruled that the company did conspire with publishers to inflate the prices of ebooks sold through iBookstore, agreeing with a 2013 ruling.

The judges found that Apple had violated federal antitrust law in coming to arrangements with five publishers, resulting in book prices jumping from $9.99 to between $12.99 and $14.99. Two years ago US District Judge Denise Cote said that Apple was "central" to a price-fixing conspiracy. The ruling having been upheld today, Apple will now have to pay $450 million.

Submission + - SCOTUS denies Google's request to appeal Oracle API (c) case

Neil_Brown writes: The Supreme Court of the United States has today denied Google's request to appeal against the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit's ruling (PDF) that the structure, sequence and organization of 37 of Oracle's APIs (application program interfaces) was capable of copyright protection. The case is not over, as Google can now seek to argue that, despite the APIs being restricted by copyright, its handling amounts to "fair use".

Professor Pamela Samuelson has previously commented (PDF) on the implications if SCOTUS declined to hear the appeal.

More details at The Verge.

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