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The Military

DARPA Uses Preteen Gamers To Beta Test Tomorrow's Military Software 84

Posted by timothy from the panzer-naturally-speaking dept.
Daniel_Stuckey writes with a story about an interesting (or, you might think, creepy) institution at the University of Washington's Seattle campus. It's the Center for Game Science, a research lab that makes educational video games for children, and that received the bulk of its funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the wing of the U.S. Department of Defense that supports research into experimental military technology. Why is DARPA the original primary funder of the CGS? According to written and recorded statements from current and former DARPA program managers, as well as other government documents, the DARPA-funded educational video games developed at the CGS have a purpose beyond the pretense of teaching elementary school children STEM skills.
Japan

200 Dolphins Await Slaughter In Japan's Taiji Cove 628

Posted by samzenpus from the but-we've-always-stabbed-them dept.
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "CNN reports that more than 200 bottlenose dolphins remain penned in a cove by Japanese fishermen, many of them stressed and bloodied from their attempts to escape before fishermen start to slaughter them for meat. Until now, the fishermen have focused on selecting dolphins to be sold into captivity at marine parks and aquariums in Japan and overseas as twenty-five dolphins, including a rare albino calf, were taken on Saturday 'to a lifetime of imprisonment,' and another 12 on Sunday. 'Many of the 200+ Bottlenose dolphins who are in still the cove are visibly bloody & injured from their attempts to escape the killers,' one update says. Although the hunting of dolphins is widely condemned in the west, Japanese defend the practice as a local custom — and say it is no different to the slaughter of other animals for meat. The Wakayama Prefecture, where Taiji is located condemns the criticism as biased and unfair to the fishermen. 'Taiji dolphin fishermen are just conducting a legal fishing activity in their traditional way in full accordance with regulations and rules under the supervision of both the national and the prefectural governments. Therefore, we believe there are no reasons to criticize the Taiji dolphin fishery.' Meanwhile the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society describes how about 40 to 60 local fishermen work with nets to divide up the pod, whose initial numbers were estimated by the group at more than 250. 'They tighten up the nets to bring each sub-group together then the skiffs push them toward the tarps. Under the tarps in the shallows is where the trainers work with the killers to select the "prettiest" dolphins which will sell and make the best pay day for the hunters,' the group says. The fishermen will 'kill the "undesirable" dolphins (those with nicks and scars) under the tarps to hide from our cameras when that time comes.'"

Comment Why doesn't he discuss the merits of SaaS? (Score 0) 319

by w1z7ard (#44986275) Attached to: RMS On Why Free Software Is More Important Now Than Ever Before

I very much agree that SaaS is yet another strategic approach to controlling information and the software used to gather it. But it's hard to completely throw away such a useful abstraction. From a pragmatic view, SaaS is a convenient separation of concerns applied to both infrastructure and software.

Perhaps I missed it, but does RMS actually supply a solution to problems solved by SaaS? I noticed a few already in the threads here, but this basically characterizes most choices:

1. A completely decentralized approach, where everyone shares the software and information equally.

2. Every SaaS must run and share opensource code, as well as somehow opening sourcing the content (safely) as well.

3. Assume the worst about all endpoints, eventually empirically and/or contractually trust certain ones in a white list.
Books

Calibre Version 1.0 Released After 7 Years of Development 193

Posted by timothy from the that-is-some-conservative-numbering dept.
Calibre is a feature-laden, open source e-book manager; many readers mentioned in light of the recently posted news about Barnes & Noble's Nook that they use Calibre to deal with their reading material. Reader Trashcan Romeo writes with some news on its new 1.0 release, summing it up thus: "The new version of the premier e-book management application boasts a completely re-written database backend and PDF output engine as well a new book-cover grid view."

Comment caffeine preferences, order by intensity (Score 1) 283

by w1z7ard (#42918065) Attached to: I Get Most of My Caffeine Through
In ascending order of caffeine intensity, here are my preferences.

Green Ice Tea
Black Ice Tea
Iced Yerba Mate
Iced Coffee (cold brewed, to reduce toxicity)
Iced Red Eye (coffee with 1 shot of espresso) **** my personal favorite.
Iced Black Eye (coffee with 2 shots of espresso)

Iced Black Eye's puts me in a jittery state but sometimes I order them for the flavor. I once ordered this drink with a black eye before...it was awkward.
Android

Adventures In Rooting: Running Jelly Bean On Last Year's Kindle Fire 41

Posted by samzenpus from the it's-good-to-have-a-hobby dept.
concealment writes "Luckily, the Fire's low price and popularity relative to other Android tablets has made it a common target for Android's bustling open-source community, which has automated most of the sometimes-messy process of rooting and flashing your tablet. The Kindle Fire Utility boils the whole rooting process down to a couple of steps, and from there it's pretty easy to find pretty-stable Jelly Bean ROMs. A CyanogenMod-based version is actively maintained, but I prefer the older Hashcode ROM, which is very similar to the interface on the Nexus 7."
Programming

Ask Slashdot: Am I Too Old To Retrain? 418

Posted by Soulskill from the not-unless-you're-an-mma-fighter dept.
Talcyon writes "I'm a 40-year-old developer, and it's become apparent that my .NET skillset is woefully out of date after five years of doing various bits of support. I tried the 'Management' thing last year, but that was a failure as I'm just not a people person, and a full-on development project this year has turned into a disaster area. I'm mainly a VB.NET person with skills from the .NET 2.0 era. Is that it? Do I give up a career in technology now? Or turn around and bury myself in a support role, sorting out issues with other people's/companies' software? I've been lurking around Slashdot for many years now, and this question occasionally comes up, but it pays to get the opinions of others. Do I retrain and get back up to speed, or am I too old?"

Comment TCP Fast Open (Score 4, Interesting) 143

by w1z7ard (#41513699) Attached to: Linux 3.6 Released
Sounds like a great feature! From the article:

"Fast Open could result in speed improvements of between 4% and 41% in the page load times on popular web sites. In this version only the client-side has been merged."
Facebook

Salesforce CEO Benioff: Future Software Will Look Like Facebook 156

Posted by timothy from the farmville-was-just-the-beginning dept.
Nerval's Lobster writes "Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff is unapologetic about his love for Facebook. 'I think all software is going to look like Facebook,' he told media and analysts at the Dreamforce conference in San Francisco. 'Everyone is going to have to rewrite to have a feed-based platform.' If people can collaborate on tagging a photo, he added, they could easily do the same with a product or business problem. Even as Benioff touted his Facebook love, however, Salesforce is veering away from the Facebook model in one key way: whereas Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg felt his company focused too much on HTML5 for its mobile apps, choosing to focus instead on native-app development, Salesforce is embracing HTML5 for its Salesforce Touch app, which delivers Salesforce data such as Chatter feeds and contacts to a variety of mobile devices."
AI

The Real Job Threat 990

Posted by Soulskill from the semi-intelligent-potatoes dept.
NicknamesAreStupid writes "The NYTimes reports on a book by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew P. McAfee (MIT director-level staffers), Race Against the Machine, which suggests that the true threat to jobs is not outsourcing — it's the machine! Imagine the Terminator flipping burgers, cleaning your house, approving your loan, handling your IT questions, and doing your job faster, better, and more cheaply. Now that's an apocalypse with a twist — The Job Terminator." Reader wjousts points out another of the authors' arguments: that IT advances have cost more jobs than they've created.

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