Become a fan of Slashdot on Facebook

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Transportation

If Ridesharing Is Banned, What About Ride-Trading? 353

Posted by samzenpus from the hop-on dept.
Bennett Haselton writes "The city of Seattle just imposed new limits on commercial app-based ride-sharing companies like Uber and Lyft, effectively protecting taxi companies from low-cost competition in the form of smartphone apps. If other cities follow suit, could a company help ridesharers circumvent the restrictions by creating a ride-trading app, allowing drivers to earn 'miles' by driving passengers, and redeem those miles later to get rides for themselves?" Continue reading below to see what Bennett has to say.

Comment Re: "Vulnerable"? (Score 1) 93

by sh00z (#46620663) Attached to: Security Evaluation of the Tesla Model S

As an aside: We worked with CAA (Canadian version of AAA) and once every month or so we'd get a fax to unlock a vehicle (usually a Ford for some reason) who's keyless entry fob's battery had died. We would arrive and they are holding their key in their hand, pressing the button to unlock it and they are getting frustrated the vehicle isn't unlocking. I would calmly ask to see their key, walk up to the door and stick it in the door's keyway and turn it. The look on their face was always priceless. I even had one lady confess she didn't know that was even possible.

But if the car has an alarm system and it's active, this doesn't help much. If I unlock my car with a physical key, there's a three-step process I need to do in order to disable the alarm and engine kill. If your owners didn't realize their keys would work, what's the likelihood they'd then remember everything else required before driving away?
The Courts

U.S. Court: Chinese Search Engine's Censorship Is 'Free Speech' 284

Posted by Soulskill from the filtering-the-internet dept.
jfruh writes: "You will probably not be surprised to learn that Chinese search giant Baidu censors a wide range of content, particularly political material deemed to be pro-democracy — and does so for users everywhere, not just in China. A group of activists filed suit against Baidu in New York for violating free speech laws, but the judge in the case declared (PDF) that, as a private entity in the United States, Baidu has the right to provide whatever kind of search results it wants, even for political reasons."
Windows

Ask Slashdot: Preparing For Windows XP EOL? 423

Posted by timothy from the stock-up-like-y2k dept.
An anonymous reader writes "As most of us working in IT may know, Microsoft will stop supporting Windows XP on April 8th, 2014. Although this fact has been known for quite some time, XP is still relatively popular in companies and also enjoys noticeable marketshare for home users. Even ATMs are running XP and will continue to do so for some time. A lot of companies/users don't want to change because they see no additional benefit to do a costly upgrade, no reason to change a running system, and they may in some cases be right with their assumptions. So what is the best way to secure this remaining Windows XP systems? Installing the latest security patches, checking firewall status and user permissions etc. should be fairly obvious, as Microsoft Security Essentials may also not receive updates anymore, changing antivirus programs seems a sensible thing to do."

Submission + - California Senator Yee (Brown v. EMA) indicted on corruption charges (mercurynews.com)

Submitted by Hotawa Hawk-eye
Hotawa Hawk-eye writes: California state Senator Leland Yee, known for sponsoring the law banning the sale of violent video games to minors that was overturned in Brown V. Entertainment Merchants Association, was indicted by the FBI on public corruption charges Wednesday morning. According to the article, targets of the early-morning raids in this case are expected to appear in court Wednesday afternoon.
Math

Mathematician Gives Tips On How To Win $1 Billion On NCAA Basketball 76

Posted by samzenpus from the winning-the-pool dept.
Hugh Pickens DOT Com (2995471) writes "Jake Simpson reports at The Atlantic that Mathematician Tim Chartier, a Davidson College professor who specializes in ranking methods, teaches a math-heavy form of bracketology — the science of predicting the annual NCAA college basketball tournament at Davidson College in North Carolina. Chartier's academic research is in ranking methods where he looks at things like the page-ranking algorithms of Google. 'In 2009, my collaborator Amy Langville said: "You know what? ESPN has this huge online bracket tournament. Let's create brackets with our ranking methods, just to see if it's creating meaningful information."' Chartier's formula, an evolving code-based matrix that ranks each of the 68 tournament teams, has helped several Davidson students score in the 96th percentile (or higher) in ESPN's bracket challenge and this year, Chartier's goal is to help someone win the $1 billion prize offered by Warren Buffett to anyone who correctly predicts all 63 games of the men's tournament.

Chartier uses two methods. One is the Colley Method, named after astrophysicist Wesley Colley who developed a method used by the BCS for college football (PDF). His basketball method only counts wins and losses, not margin of victory. The other method is the Massey method created by sports statistician Kenneth Massey (PDF), which does integrate scores. Chartier has not been banned from any office pools — at least none that he knows of. But as a result of coming pretty darn close to filling out a perfect bracket just by crunching the numbers, brackets have become a labor of love. 'Now that the brackets are actually out, I've had students in and out of my office all week, sharing new ideas,' says Chartier. 'For me, that's more fun than filling out a bracket. They will all be filling out brackets, so it's like I'm doing parallel processing. I know what might work, but watching them figure out the odds, is a thrill.'"
Medicine

Survey Finds Nearly 50% In US Believe In Medical Conspiracy Theories 395

Posted by samzenpus from the that's-what-they-want-you-to-think dept.
cold fjord writes in with some bad news for the people using water fluoridation to pacify the public and install a new world government. "About half of American adults believe in at least one medical conspiracy theory, according to new survey results. (paywalled, first page viewable) Some conspiracy theories have much more traction than others ... three times as many people believe U.S. regulators prevent people from getting natural cures as believe that a U.S. spy agency infected a large number of African Americans with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). J. Eric Oliver, the study's lead author from University of Chicago, said people may believe in conspiracy theories because they're easier to understand than complex medical information. ... Some 49 percent of the survey participants agreed with at least one of the conspiracies. In fact, in addition to the 37 percent of respondents who fully agreed that U.S. regulators are suppressing access to natural cures, less than a third were willing to say they actively disagreed with the theory. — One of the conspiracy theories, that the U.S. created HIV, was created for an active disinformation campaign by the Soviet Union against the U.S. as a form of political warfare during the Cold War, and still gets repeated."

Comment Re:Solution that might be a crime (Score 1) 747

by Hotawa Hawk-eye (#46484649) Attached to: Measles Outbreak In NYC

Assault and battery, probably. And then you'd be the defendant in a civil law suit, which even if you win will require time and legal fees.

A different solution: unless your child has a medical reason (allergy to one of the ingredients in the vaccine, compromised immune system, or the like -- "I don't want it" doesn't count) not to have the vaccine, the child won't be permitted in public school. This includes the classroom, extracurricular activities, etc. The parents will have to arrange (and pay) for alternate schooling, to protect the general school population. The principals, superintendents, and school boards can even describe it as "We're thinking of the children."

Comment Re:Why not badging of the doors ? (Score 1) 130

Don't lock the door to the room. Lock the doors to the cabinets that contain the equipment, like mailboxes at the post office, in such a way that the person unlocking the door is logged (badges or PIN or something similar.) If someone wants a piece of equipment they unlock the cabinet door, extract the equipment, use it, and put it back. Or they get the equipment out, close the door, and unlock the door again to return it.

Put a small window in the doors so you can easily see if the equipment is present and if it's not the last person to unlock the door either has the equipment or is responsible for explaining where it is or what happened to it.

Comment Re:"... as a means to reduce theft." (Score 1) 158

The patriot act's language always targeted everyone.

the cellphone owner is the only person who should have the option to "kill" the device.

Until some enterprising young hacker finds out the developer, paid too much for too little work, used the same packet with a obvious identifier for all phones, and you can start trolling people in very expensive ways.

... or until someone develops an app that exploits insecurities in the phone's software to remotely brick specific/all phones nearby and sells the app or gives it away. Then anyone could brick anyone else's phone for fun or use the threat of bricking to extort money from the phone's owner.

Comment Re:They would have to take budget from somewhere e (Score 5, Interesting) 166

by Hotawa Hawk-eye (#46397215) Attached to: NASA Forgets How To Talk To ICE/ISEE-3 Spacecraft

Agreed. In 2013, NASA's budget of 17.8 billion dollars made up one half of one percent of the total US budget of about 3.8 trillion dollars. Rounding to the nearest integer, the largest chunk of the budget pie (the Department of Health and Human Services) had a budget 53 times as large as NASA. The Social Security Administration? 50 times. The Department of Defense? 38 times.

To put it another way, we pay 14 NASAs in interest on the national debt!
Earth

Scottish Independence Campaign Battles Over BBC Weather Forecast 286

Posted by timothy from the y'canna-take-our-laaaaandform dept.
00_NOP writes "The political battle over Scotland's independence ballot — to take place in September this year — has now moved on to how the BBC project the UK on their national weather forecast. The BBC use a projection based on the view of Britain from geostationary weather satellites and so there is naturally some foreshortening at the northern end of Britain (Scotland, in other words). But nationalist campaigners say this means Scottish viewers are constantly being shown a distorted image of their country which makes it look smaller and hence (in their view) less able to support independence. In response others have suggested that the nationalists are truly 'flat earthers.'"

Slashdot Top Deals

Nothing happens.

Close