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Submission + - Silicon Valley and Rand Paul: A Love Story (cnn.com)

Submitted by SonicSpike
SonicSpike writes: Wooing the Patagonia-wearing, Blue Bottle coffee-sipping denizens of Silicon Valley, and especially San Francisco, may seem like a fool's errand for much of the GOP, but not for Paul, who recently made his second swing through the Bay Area in as many years. Indeed, his libertarian leanings, which can rankle Republican Party pooh-bahs, resonate in the Valley, where folks are messianic about private enterprise's potential to solve all the world's challenges. Among the technorati, Paul's willingness to engage ideas outside the mainstream isn't a liability — it's his strongest virtue.

It's all part of Paul's high-stakes gambit to expand the GOP's appeal in precincts generally hostile to conservatives. "I see almost unlimited potential for us in Silicon Valley," Paul tells Fortune in an April interview in his Capitol Hill office after his trip. "Many more of them are libertarian-leaning Republicans than they are Democrats, and they may not know it yet."

Submission + - Senator Rand Paul Suggests Backing Bitcoin With Stocks (businessinsider.com)

Submitted by SonicSpike
SonicSpike writes: While he likes it in principle, Paul said there's one thing he would change about it to align it more with those values: have it backed by something of value, in this case, he proposes, stocks.

Here's the full quote:

I was looking more at it until that recent thing [sic]. And actually my theory, if I were setting it up, I'd make it exchangeable for stock. And then it'd have real value. And I'd have it pegged, and I'd have a basket of 10 big retailers I think it would work, but I think, because I'm sort of a believer in currency having value, if you're going to create a currency, have it backed up by — you know, Hayek used to talk about a basket of commodities? You could have a basket of stocks, and have some exchangeability, because it's hard for people like me who are a bit tangible. But you could have an average of stocks, I'm wondering if that's the next permutation."

Submission + - Congressman Massie Recognized for Social Media Accountability and Transparency (congressfoundation.org)

Submitted by SonicSpike
SonicSpike writes: Congressman Massie received one of the first-ever Gold Mouse Awards for Social Media by the Congressional Management Foundation (CMF), a nonpartisan nonprofit working to improve communications between citizens and Congress and enhance operations in Capitol Hill offices. Congressman Massie received the award for exemplary accountability and transparency.

“I believe it is my responsibility to be accessible and accountable to constituents, whether I am in Kentucky or in Washington, D.C.,” said Rep. Massie. “I pledge to continue this transparent dialogue with my constituents while also discovering new and innovative ways to connect with them.”

The CMF Best Practices Report describes Rep. Massie’s Social Media use: “It is clear from his Facebook and Twitter posts that Rep. Massie takes his representational duties seriously. Their tone and content throughout his tenure have demonstrated his sense of accountability to constituents. In addition to expressing his views on both national issues and issues important to him, personally—as many Members do on social media—he also provides occasional rationales for key votes to help explain his actions to his constituents. When working in the district, he posts the towns he’ll be visiting, along with photos and summaries of his meetings to help constituents understand the work he does when the House is in recess. Rep. Massie also engages constituents in his work by inviting them to send questions during his media appearances and even when he is participating in committee hearings. Many posts also ask questions to invite opinions and feedback, and these generate significant comments and discussion in which he often participates. In these and other ways, Rep. Massie uses social media to demonstrate accountability and transparency.”

Rep. Massie is one of only 17 out of 535 Senators and Representatives to receive the first Gold Mouse Award for social media. CMF’s awards for social media emphasize specific practices, which include the following: demonstrating an effort to be transparent and accountable; focusing on constituents and constituent service; and attempting to keep constituents informed and engaged in the work of Congress.

Submission + - SpaceX Sues to Shoot for the Stars (theamericanconservative.com)

Submitted by SonicSpike
SonicSpike writes: CEO Elon Musk is opening a new case against the federal government, which he claims is unfairly excluding SpaceX from competition to launch Air Force and military satellites. Currently, the next round of 36 rocket core purchases are earmarked specifically for United Launch Alliance (ULA), a joint venture by Boeing and Lockheed Martin.

The bottleneck that SpaceX is facing is a matter of certification. Currently, SpaceX is not eligible to compete for contracts, because the company’s inspection and evaluation by the Air Force is still in process. Musk is requesting that the certification process he refers to as just “a paperwork exercise” be sped up. If the bureaucracy is impossible to rush, he’d settle for it slowing down, and waiting to award the long-term contract until SpaceX is eligible to compete.

Submission + - Congressman Introduces A Bill Declaring Bitcoin A Currency, Not Property (newsbtc.com)

Submitted by SonicSpike
SonicSpike writes: Congressman Steve Stockman of the 36th District of Texas is embracing digital currency. He made himself known in the Bitcoin space at the end of last year when he began accepting Bitcoin donations for a Senate campaign.

Last night at the New York City Bitcoin Center, Representative Stockman brought a copy of a bill he’s planning to introduce to the 113th Congress (second session) on the topic of virtual currencies.

Entitled “To change the tax status of virtual currencies from property to currency”, the bill (formally called the Virtual Currency Tax Reform Act) seeks to change how the Internal Revenue Service and other authoritative agencies in the United States views virtual currencies.

As you may recall, the IRS released guidance not long ago indicating that Bitcoin and other virtual currency users classify their holdings as property as opposed to currency. For users, this has become rather problematic primarily because by the rules, users would have to keep track of all of their transactions and calculate gains/losses at the end of the year...

Submission + - Congressman Introduces Bill Declaring Bitcoin A Currency, Not Property

Submitted by SonicSpike
SonicSpike writes: Congressman Steve Stockman of the 36th District of Texas is embracing digital currency. He made himself known in the Bitcoin space at the end of last year when he began accepting Bitcoin donations for a Senate campaign.

Last night at the New York City Bitcoin Center, Representative Stockman brought a copy of a bill he’s planning to introduce to the 113th Congress (second session) on the topic of virtual currencies.

Entitled “To change the tax status of virtual currencies from property to currency”, the bill (formally called the Virtual Currency Tax Reform Act) seeks to change how the Internal Revenue Service and other authoritative agencies in the United States views virtual currencies.

As you may recall, the IRS released guidance not long ago indicating that bitcoin and other virtual currency users classify their holdings as property as opposed to currency. For users, this has become rather problematic primarily because by the rules, users would have to keep track of all of their transactions and calculate gains/losses at the end of the year.

Submission + - Is Bitcoin the Key to Digital Copyright? (reason.com)

Submitted by SonicSpike
SonicSpike writes: Bitcoin’s technology could help solve one of the gnarliest problems of 21st Century copyright. If you buy a book at Barnes and Noble, you are free to give it away to a friend after you’ve read it, or sell it to a used book store. But you can’t if you buy that same book for your Kindle or iPad. To lend, sell, or give away a digital copy of a digital book or song is copyright infringement.

The Bitcoin network allows one to transfer tokens called bitcoins, and to date these tokens have been used to represent money. But there’s no reason they could not represent a particular instance of a song or a book or a movie.

Particular music files could be associated with a particular user’s public Bitcoin addresses and encrypted in such a way that the user’s corresponding private key is needed to play the songs. Selling, lending, or giving away a song or a book would be as simple as sending it to someone else’s public address. At that point, only recipient’s private keys can unlock the file. And this would all be cryptographically provable, without requiring trust.

An astute reader will have noticed that this would essentially be a kind of universal digital rights management (DRM) scheme, and that’s certainly the case. But unlike traditional DRM, the system would not rely on central corporate authority, but on a decentralized network that is quickly emerging as a new standard Internet protocol. Alternatively, no DRM can be employed and the blockchain can simply serve as registry to legitimate transfers.

Submission + - Industry claims "6 strikes" piracy warning system is working (thehill.com)

Submitted by SonicSpike
SonicSpike writes: A national effort to crack down on Internet piracy through a "six strikes" system is seeing success, according to the program’s director.

Privacy advocates and online free speech groups expressed concerns at the February 2013 launch of theCopyright Alert System, a voluntary agreement between the entertainment industry and major Internet providers that aims to reduce online piracy through peer-to-peer networks by sending warnings to users.

The goal of the system, Lesser said, is simply to educate subscribers when copyright infringement is happening.

“It’s a non-punitive system” that is “intended to be education-based,” Lesser told The Hill in an interview.

Through the system, participating Internet providers — AT&T, Cablevision, Comcast, Time Warner Cable and Verizon — send notices to subscribers who share copyrighted content through peer-to-peer networks such as BitTorrent.

The notices escalate if infringement continues up to six notices; the first notice alerts the subscriber that infringement is happening while the fifth and sixth come with “mitigation measures,” such as temporarily slowed Internet speeds.

While it has been dubbed the “six strikes” system, the Copyright Alert System stops interacting with users, even if their accounts continue to share infringing material, after the sixth notice.

Submission + - Federal wood burning rule prompts rural backlash (wsj.com)

Submitted by SonicSpike
SonicSpike writes: This is a follow-up to what was previously reported here on SlashDot: http://news.slashdot.org/story...

________________

A federal proposal to clean up the smoke wafting from wood-burning stoves has sparked a backlash from some rural residents, lawmakers and manufacturers who fear it could close the damper on one of the oldest ways of warming homes on cold winter days.

Proposed regulations from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency would significantly reduce the amount of particle pollution allowed from the smokestacks of new residential wood-powered heaters.

Wood-burning stoves are a staple in rural homes in many states, a cheap heating source for low-income residents and others wanting to lessen their reliance on gas or electric furnaces. Outdoor models often cost several thousand dollars, but indoor stoves can cost as little as a few hundred dollars and sometimes double as fashionable centerpieces in homes.

Some manufacturers contend the EPA's proposed standards are so stringent that the higher production costs would either force them out of business or raise prices so high that many consumers could no longer afford their products.

Submission + - Company uses drone to inspect structural integrity of building; FAA takes issue (knoxnews.com) 1

Submitted by SonicSpike
SonicSpike writes: Owners of the drone used to inspect the McClung warehouses in Knoxville, TN may have broken federal aviation regulations.

The federal government currently prohibits the use of drones, also known as unmanned aerial vehicles, for commercial purposes, according to the Federal Aviation Administration website.

“The way we look at it, if it’s a profit making enterprise, it’s commercial,” said Les Dorr, FAA spokesman. “You can’t fly an unmanned commercial aircraft by claiming you are following the model aircraft guidelines,” Dorr said.

Leslie Noel, marketing director for Kentucky-based Donan Engineering, said Wednesday the company only got permission to fly the drone from the property owner, Knoxville’s Community Development Corporation.

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: Can infrared LEDs thwart traffic cameras?

Submitted by SonicSpike
SonicSpike writes: IR emitters (such as what's at the end of your remote control) will show up on camera even if they are not visible to the naked eye.

Could this be applied to traffic / red light / speed cameras?

For example, if you were to put a bunch of IR LEDs around your license plate to light it up, could you wash out the image enough to prevent a good capture by a traffic camera?

Submission + - Feds Want Cars To Be Able To Talk To Each Other (newschannel9.com)

Submitted by SonicSpike
SonicSpike writes: Officials are moving to require automakers to equip new vehicles with technology that lets them warn each other when they're plunging toward peril.

The action, still a couple of years off, has "game-changing potential" to cut crashes, deaths and injuries, officials said Monday.

A radio beacon would continually transmit a vehicle's position, heading, speed and other information. Cars would receive the same information back from other vehicles, and a vehicle's computer would alert the driver to an impending collision. Some systems may automatically brake to avoid an accident if manufacturers choose to include that option.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which has been working with automakers on the technology for the past decade, estimates vehicle-to-vehicle communications could prevent up to 80 percent of accidents that don't involve drunken drivers or mechanical failure.

Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx said the Obama administration decided to announce its intention to require the technology in new vehicles in order to "send a strong signal to the (automotive industry) that we believe the wave of the future is vehicle-to-vehicle technology."

Government officials declined to give an estimate for how much the technology would increase the price of a new car, but the transportation society estimate it would cost about $100 to $200 per vehicle. Automakers are enthusiastic about vehicle-to-vehicle technology, but feel there are important technical, security and privacy questions that need to be worked out first, said Gloria Bergquist, a spokeswoman for the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers.

Submission + - FDA approves pill camera to screen colon (timesfreepress.com) 1

Submitted by SonicSpike
SonicSpike writes: U.S. regulators have cleared a bite-size camera to help screen patients who have trouble with colonoscopies.

The ingestible pill camera from Given Imaging is designed to help doctors spot polyps and other early signs of colon cancer. The Food and Drug Administration cleared the device for patients who have had trouble with the cringe-inducing colonoscopy procedure, which involves probing the large intestine with a tiny camera embedded in a four-foot long, flexible tube.

The Israeli company's technology, developed from missile defense systems, uses a battery-powered camera to take high-speed photos as it slowly winds its way through the intestinal tract over eight hours. The images are transmitted to a recording device worn around the patient's waist and later reviewed by a doctor.

Submission + - Supercomputer models one second of human brain activity (telegraph.co.uk)

Submitted by SonicSpike
SonicSpike writes: The most accurate simulation of the human brain to date has been carried out in a Japanese supercomputer, with a single second’s worth of activity from just one per cent of the complex organ taking one of the world’s most powerful supercomputers 40 minutes to calculate.

Researchers used the K computer in Japan, currently the fourth most powerful in the world, to simulate human brain activity. The computer has 705,024 processor cores and 1.4 million GB of RAM, but still took 40 minutes to crunch the data for just one second of brain activity.

The project, a joint enterprise between Japanese research group RIKEN, the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University and Forschungszentrum Jülich, an interdisciplinary research center based in Germany, was the largest neuronal network simulation to date.

It used the open-source Neural Simulation Technology (NEST) tool to replicate a network consisting of 1.73 billion nerve cells connected by 10.4 trillion synapses.

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