Follow Slashdot stories on Twitter

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×

Submission + - US Government confiscates passport of citizen while overseas, doesn't say why (motherjones.com) 1

Submitted by Faizdog
Faizdog writes: The US State Department has confiscated the passport of a US citizen who is overseas. Due to that, he is in a precarious situation regarding his legal status.

The State Dept. has given no explanation for their actions.

Federal law requires that US citizens be granted a hearing before their passports are revoked. According to the man’s attorneys: “Having a passport is part of a citizen’s right to international travel, because without a passport you’re not able to move about or return to the US they can revoke it if they believe it has been obtained fraudulently. But here, there isn’t any allegation of wrongdoing.”

How does one answer the question “papers please?” when they government has taken your papers?

Submission + - The FAA Thinks It Can Regulate Paper Planes and Baseballs (vice.com)

Submitted by Daniel_Stuckey
Daniel_Stuckey writes: Ever throw a baseball? Or a paper plane? Watch out—the Federal Aviation Administration thinks that anything that flies through the air might be aircraft that it can regulate.

That’s a bit hyperbolic, but not by much. Last month, a federal judge ruled that the Federal Aviation Administration didn’t correctly regulate drones, so anyone could fly them legally. In that case, the judge decided two things: The FAA never made drone regulations and standard aircraft regulations the FAA has do not apply to drones because they aren’t “aircraft” in the traditional sense (at least as far as the FAA has traditionally defined them). In their original argument, the FAA said that it has the right to regular anything that flies through the air—and, in an appeal to that decision, they’ve decided to double down on the whole thing.

We’ve covered that case plenty, so if you need anything more than a quick primer, you can check out the specifics here. Basically what happened was, a couple years ago, a drone pilot named Raphael Pirker flew his 5 pound, styrofoam drone around the University of Virginia, and got paid to do it. That angered the FAA, who has been trying to keep commercial drone flights grounded. But, because they never actually made regulations, they went after Pirker for the “reckless operation of an aircraft,” which turned out to be a really bad idea, because the FAA has always specifically referenced “model aircraft” when it wants to talk about RC aircraft or drones. Furthermore, the statute they tried to get Pirker on references things like pilots walking around the cabin and flight attendants being distracting—clearly not something you can do on a foam drone.

Submission + - U.S. Biomedical Research 'Unsustainable,' Prominent Researchers Warn (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: The U.S. biomedical science system "is on an unsustainable path" and needs major reform, four prominent researchers say. Researchers should "confront the dangers at hand,” the authors write, and “rethink” how academic research is funded, staffed, and organized. Among other issues, the team suggests that the system may be producing too many new researchers and forcing them to compete for a stagnating pool of funding.

Submission + - Carpenter who cut off his fingers makes 'Robohand' with 3-D printer (cnn.com)

Submitted by mpicpp
mpicpp writes: "I was in a position to see exactly what happens in the human hand. I got the basics of what it's all about and thought yeah, I'll make my own."
Richard van As is recalling the moment in May 2011 when he sat in a Johannesburg hospital waiting to hear if his fingers could be stitched back on. Just an hour earlier, he had been in his carpentry workshop sawing wood when the saw slipped and ripped diagonally through the four fingers on his right hand. "It all happened too quickly to know what actually happened," he remembers.

Rather than fear the outcome, or dwell on the repercussions of losing his fingers, he was already thinking of ways to fix the problem, like a true carpenter.

After days of scouring the Internet he couldn't find anywhere to buy a functional prosthetic finger and he was astonished at the cost of prosthetic hands and limbs which began in the tens of thousands of dollars. But his online surfing paid off as it brought him to an amateur video posted by a mechanical effects artist in Washington State, by the name of Ivan Owen.

Submission + - Climate scientist: Why nuclear power may be the only way to avoid geoengineering (sagepub.com)

Submitted by Lasrick
Lasrick writes: Tom Wigley is one of the world's top climate scientists, and in this interview he explains his outspoken support for both nuclear energy and research into climate engineering. Wigley was one of the first scientists to break the taboo on public discussion of climate engineering as a possible response to global warming; in a 2006 paper in the journal Science, he proposed a combined geoengineering-mitigation strategy that would address the problem of increasing ocean acidity, as well as the problem of climate change. In this interview, he argues that hat renewable energy alone will not be sufficient to address the climate challenge, because it cannot be scaled up quickly and cheaply enough, and that opposition to nuclear power 'threatens humanity’s ability to avoid dangerous climate change.'

Submission + - What's needed for the 60TB hard drive 1

Submitted by Lucas123
Lucas123 writes: Within the next 6 years, Seagate expects to produce a 60TB hard disk drive using HAMR technology. But WD and Seagate are currently on separate paths toward expanding capacity. Seagate with Singled Magnetic Recording (SMR) and WD with helium-filled drives. Computerworld has published a series of slides explaining what has been used up until this point and what will be needed to reach the 60TB end goal.

Submission + - 200 million social security numbers possibly stolen in Experian breach (mercurynews.com)

Submitted by Beeftopia
Beeftopia writes: A 2012 breach at credit reporting company Experian may be much larger than first reported. The article states, "In what could be one of the biggest data breaches in history, the federal government and authorities in several states are investigating the criminal sale of Social Security numbers, bank account data and other personal information for up to 200 million U.S. citizens."

The investigations stem from the 2012 case of Hieu Minh Ngo, who sold names, addresses, Social Security numbers, dates of birth, places of work, duration of work, dates of employment, state driver's license numbers, mother's maiden names, bank account numbers, bank routing numbers, email account names and addresses and other account passwords, court records show.

Submission + - Supporters Rally After Teacher Removed For 'Dangerous' Science Projects

Submitted by Hugh Pickens DOT Com
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes: Howard Blume reports that Greg Schiller, a popular Los Angeles high school science teacher, has been suspended after students turned in projects designed to shoot small projectiles that appeared dangerous to administrators, spurring a campaign calling for his return to the classroom. One project used compressed air to propel a small object, but it was not connected to a source of air pressure, so it could not have been fired. (Fun Fact: In 2012, President Obama tried out a more powerful air-pressure device at a White House Science Fair that could launch a marshmallow 175 feet.) Another project used the power from an AA battery to charge a tube surrounded by a coil. A school employee saw the air-pressure project and raised concerns about what looked to her like a weapon and both projects were confiscated as evidence. "It is the practice of the Los Angeles Unified School District to reassign an employee to a non-classroom setting when there are allegation related to student safety," said a statement by the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD). "We will always err on the side of protecting students." Hundreds of students and parents have rallied around Schiller after his suspension and organized a rally on his behalf at the campus, gathered hundreds of signatures on a petition calling for his reinstatement and set up a facebook page called "Free Schiller." “As far as we can tell, he’s being punished for teaching science,” says Warren Fletcher, president of United Teachers Los Angeles.

Submission + - The Graffiti Drone (vice.com)

Submitted by tedlistens
tedlistens writes: KATSU is known for his adventurous and speculative vandalism, but his new project is not fake or hypothetical, though it does elevate his work to new heights. He has developed a system to attach a spray can to a quadcopter, creating one of the world's first graffiti drones. The drone is capable of spraying canvases or walls hundreds of feet high, granting the artist access to spaces that were previously inaccessible. At the Silicon Valley Contemporary art fair, which opened Thursday, KATSU is showing a series of drone-painted canvasses—and preparing to take the drone out on the town. "There are a lot of disadvantages to drones, you know. It’s not like, ‘oh, I’ll slip off the edge of this bridge and die’," he tells the Center for the Study of the Drone at Motherboard, which also has a video. "Its like, ‘I might have the drone drift off and I might kill someone.’"

Submission + - Are You Apocalypse Useful?

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Young people, when choosing a profession, are often told to "do what you love." That's why we have experts in such abstruse fields as medieval gymel. If there's a worldwide catastrophe in which civilization is interrupted, how useful would that profession be? In a post-apocalypse world, medical doctors would be useful, as would most scientists and engineers. Bad news for Slashdotters is that decades without computers would render computer science and related professions useless. What do you consider to be the most useful and mostly useless post-apocalypse professions? Should everyone be required to study a few apocalypse-appropriate subjects?

Submission + - .NET JIT Getting SIMD Support (msdn.com)

Submitted by iONiUM
iONiUM writes: As per the MSDN article, the long proposed user request for SIMD support has finally been answered. A NuGet package preview is available here. From the article: "You may think that task-based programming or offloading work to threads is already the answer. While multi-threading is certainly a critical part, it’s important to realize that it’s still important to optimize the code that runs on each core. SIMD is a technology that employs data parallelization at the CPU level. Multi-threading and SIMD complement each other: multi-threading allows parallelizing work over multiple cores while SIMD allows parallelizing work within a single core."

Submission + - Land Rover's Transparent Hood Is The Kind Of Automotive Tech That Excites Us 1

Submitted by cartechboy
cartechboy writes: Land Rover's Transparent Hood Is The Kind Of Automotive Tech That Excites Us

When we were kids, we were promised flying cars in the future, like The Jetsons . Well, now it's the future, and we don't have any flying cars. But Land Rover just unveiled some crazy new technology called the Transparent Hood system. It's brilliant in its simplicity, and yet quite complex in its implementation. Using a web of camera images and projectors, the Transparent Hood system projects the area just in front of and underneath the nose of the vehicle onto a head-up display along the lower portion of the windshield. Not only is this obviously breathtaking, but when it comes to off-roading—or parking in tight urban spaces—this could change the game. It will allow drivers to see precisely what's below them and immediately in front of them allowing precise placement of the vehicle's front wheels. The system also displays key vehicle data including speed, incline, roll angle, steering position, and drive mode. People, this is the future, and the future is now.

Comment Re:Yet Another Crap Extruder (Score 1) 143

by leftover (#46687767) Attached to: A Bid To Take 3D Printing Mainstream

Fused-filament is actually welding because the molten material is the same as the 'base' material. The real problem is shrinkage in going from melt to solid. The same problem occurs in 2-part polymers since they shrink as they both polymerize and cool. (They get bleep-ing HOT during the process!) Some of the other processes (selective UV curing, selective laser sintering) avoid that problem and produce much better surface quality but at the cost of even longer build times and extremely more expensive materials.

Submission + - Tesla Model S has hidden ethernet port, user runs Firefox on the 17" Screen (dragtimes.com) 1

Submitted by FikseGTS
FikseGTS writes: A Tesla Model S owner located a 4 pin connector on the left side of the Tesla Model S dashboard that turns out to be a disguised ethernet networking port. After crafting his owns patch cable to connect with the Tesla’s port, a networking connection was established between the Tesla Model S and a laptop computer.

The Model S is running a 100 Mbps, full duplex ethernet network and 3 devices were found with assiged IP addresses in the 192.168.90.0 subnet. Some ports and services that were open on the devices were 22 (SSH), 23 (telnet),53 (open domain), 80 (HTTP), 111 (rpcbind), 2049 (NFS), 6000 (X11). Port 80 was serving up a web page with the image or media of the current song being played. The operating system is modified version of Ubuntu using an ext3 filesystem. Using X11 it also appears that someone was able to somewhat run Firefox on both of the Model S screens.

Is a jailbroken Tesla Model S on the way?

Submission + - Nest Halts Sales of Nest Protect After Discovering Dangerous Flaw (thestar.com)

Submitted by fructose
fructose writes: It seems that the Nest Protect has a flaw in it's software that, under the right circumstances, could disable the alarm and not notify the owners of a fire. To remedy this flaw, they are disabling the Nest Wave feature through automatic updates. Owners who don't have their Nest Protects connected to their WiFi net or don't have a Nest account are suggested to either update the device manually or return it to Nest for a full refund. While they work out the problem, all sales are being halted to prevent unsafe units from being sold. There have been no reported incidents resulting from this flaw, but they aren't taking any chances. Considering the potential danger involved, I'd say this is a pretty safe move.

Slashdot Top Deals

E = MC ** 2 +- 3db

Close