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Submission + - Baton Bob receives $20,000 settlement for Coerced Facebook Post (clatl.com)

Submitted by McGruber
McGruber writes: After arresting him during a June 2013 street performance, Atlanta Police Officers forced costumed street performer "Baton Bob" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baton_Bob) to make a pro-police statement on his Facebook page before they would allow him to be released on bond. (http://yro.slashdot.org/story/14/07/01/1538226/baton-bob-strikes-back-against-police-that-coerced-facebook-post-from-him)

Social media coverage of the incident triggered a six-month internal police investigation into the arrest. Atlanta Police Officer H.J. Davis was given a one-day suspension, then resigned from the Atlanta Police department a few weeks later. Atlanta Police Lt. Jeffrey Cantin received a five-day suspension for "violating responsibilities of a supervisor".

Baton Bob also filed a federal lawsuit against the city, arguing that officers made a wrongful arrest that violated, well, nearly every constitutional right you can name. Those included Jamerson's "right to free speech, his right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures, his right to remain silent while in custody, his right to be free from compelled speech, his right to counsel, and his right to privacy."

The City of Atlanta's legal department reviewed the case and determined that a $20,000 settlement would "be in the best interest of the city" rather than fighting the claims in court.

Comment Re:Passwords are insecure. (Score 1) 2

by Bomarc (#49707333) Attached to: Banks Conspire
I'll go one step further: All business (esp banks) that have lost customer info should be required to pay the customer who had the info taken (weather or not any actual info was used).

I'm getting tired of the "breaches" (and regular notifications)... if they can't guard the barn door closed - then wall it up until they can. I'm putting my money in the "bank" for a reason, not under the mattress.

Submission + - Banks Conspire 2

Submitted by Jim Sadler
Jim Sadler writes: I'll keep it short. Why do banks, charge cards and others have such lousy password software? My bank allows twenty letters or numbers but not all combinations of letters and numbers. Then on top of that one can not use symbols or ASCI symbols in ones password. Needless to say pass phrases are also banned. For example "JackandJillwentupthehilltofetch1394pounds of worms." would be very hard to crack and very easy to recall.
              I can't imagine why such passwords would be so hard to handle for financial institutions and they have everything in the world to lose from sloppy security. So just why, considering that these institutions complain of mega money being lost, do they not have a better password system? Do they somehow gain when money goes missing?

Submission + - Canadian Prime Minister to Music Lobby: Here's Your Copyright Term Extension (michaelgeist.ca)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The Canadian government's decision to extend the term of copyright for sound recordings in the budget may have taken most copyright observers by surprise, but not the music industry. The extension will reduce competition, increase costs for consumers, and harm access to Canadian Heritage, but apparently all it took was a letter from the music industry lobby to the Prime Minister of Canada. Michael Geist reports on a letter sent by Prime Minister Stephen Harper to the music lobby on the day the change was announced confirming that industry lobbying convinced him to extend the term of copyright without any public consultation or discussion.

Submission + - Kepler Observes Neptune Dance with Its Moons

Submitted by Liquid Tip
Liquid Tip writes: NASA's K2 mission has the capability to stare continuously at a single field of stars for months at time. The video shows K2 observations spanning 70 days from November, 2014 through January, 2015 reduced to 34 seconds. During this time some some members of our Solar System are seen passing through the K2 field-of-field, including some asteroids and the giant outer planet Neptune which appears at day 15. A keen eyed observe will also notice an object close orbit around Neptune. It is the large moon Triton which orbits every 5.8 days. The fainter moon Nereid can be seen tracing Neptune’s motion

Feed Google News Sci Tech: Mercury's Magnetic Field Was Once As Strong As Earth's - Study - Design & Tr (google.com)

From feed by feedfeeder

Design & Trend
Mercury's Magnetic Field Was Once As Strong As Earth's - Study
Design & Trend
(Photo : Getty Images/NASA) Mercury's magnetic field may once have been as strong as Earth's. Data from NASA's Messenger spacecraft, which orbited Mercury for four years before crashing into its surface a week ago, suggests that Mercury's liquid metal...
Data from MESSENGER reveals secrets of Mercury's Magnetic FieldNY City News
NASA Messenger last WORDS, Mercury's magnetic field is 4 billion years oldThe Hoops News
Mercury's Mysterious Magnetic Past Goes Back 4B YearsSci-Tech Today
The Market Business-Space.com-University of British Columbia
all 108 news articles

Comment Re:"Kills Off PCs" -- Um, no it doesn't. (Score 1) 107

by Bomarc (#49635107) Attached to: Self-Destructing Virus Kills Off PCs

Did the submitter even bother to read the article??

Actually he did. The article has the quote "kill off"... (I was going to post the same thing when the article was in Firehose -- but decided not to) however if you read the article the PC isn't killed (reality nothing is) just the MBR is nuked. Anyone ever hear of "backup" ?

The only thing "exciting" about this one is the detection that is being removed ... then it removed the MBR. But there is no elaboration on this action.

Submission + - The Medical Bill Mystery

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: Elisabeth Rosenthal writes in the NYT that she has spent the past six months trying to figure out a medical bill for $225 that includes "Test codes: 105, 127, 164, to name a few. CPT codes: 87481, 87491, 87798 and others" and she really doesn't want to pay it until she understands what it’s for. "At first, I left messages on the lab’s billing office voice mail asking for an explanation. A few months ago, when someone finally called back, she said she could not tell me what the codes were for because that would violate patient privacy. After I pointed out that I was the patient in question, she said, politely: “I’m sorry, this is what I’m told, and I don’t want to lose my job.”" Bills variously use CPT, HCPCS or ICD-9 codes. Some have abbreviations and scientific terms that you need a medical dictionary or a graduate degree to comprehend. Some have no information at all. Heather Pearce of Seattle told me how she’d recently received a $45,000 hospital bill with the explanation “miscellaneous.”

So what's the problem? “Medical bills and explanation of benefits are undecipherable and incomprehensible even for experts to understand, and the law is very forgiving about that,” says Mark Hall. “We’ve not seen a lot of pressure to standardize medical billing, but there’s certainly a need.” Hospitals and medical clinics say that detailed bills are simply too complicated for patients and that they provide the information required by insurers but with rising copays and deductibles, patients are shouldering an increasing burden. One recent study found that up to 90 percent of hospital bills contain errors and an audit by Equifax found that hospital bills that totaled more than $10,000 contained an average error of $1,300. “There are no industry standards with regards to what information a patient should receive regarding their bill,” says Cyndee Weston, executive director of the American Medical Billing Association. “The software industry has pretty much decided what information patients should receive, and to my knowledge, they have not had any stakeholder input. That would certainly be a worthwhile project for our industry.”

Submission + - Recent Paper Shows Fracking Chemicals in Drinking Water, Industry Attacks It (nytimes.com)

Submitted by eldavojohn
eldavojohn writes: A recent paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences turned up 2-Butoxyethanol from samples collected from three households in Pennsylvania. The paper's level headed conclusion is that more conservative well construction techniques should be used to avoid this in the future and that flowback should be better controlled. Rob Jackson, another scientist who reviewed the paper, stressed that the findings were an exception to normal operations. Despite that, the results angered the PR gods of the Marcellus Shale Gas industry and awoke beltway insider mouthpieces to attack the research — after all, what are they paying them for?

Comment Re:If Boeing believed in software QA.... (Score 1) 250

by Bomarc (#49602665) Attached to: Long Uptime Makes Boeing 787 Lose Electrical Power

You have no idea what you are talking about.

Then you have never looked for a software tester / QA position at Boeing.

For example you search Boeing jobs for QA on 5/2/2015 you will see 15 jobs -- none are software specific QA, two of them are software fields ... including Cloud Architect 4 and a Software Release Engineer

If you search for test you will see 97 (Adjusted search for only IT); and a typical job posting (most of the "Software Engineer" postings) will have something like:
Other duties may include:
-- Develops software verification plans, test procedures and test environments, executing the test procedures and documenting test results to ensure software system requirements are met;

They may "conform to the DO-178B / DO-178C standard" ... but my point is the person performing the test is NOT a software QA professional, rather is the developer of the software.

Full disclosure: There currently are a few QA/test positions open -- including one that is a subsidiary of Boeing.

Comment If Boeing believed in software QA.... (Score 2) 250

by Bomarc (#49599917) Attached to: Long Uptime Makes Boeing 787 Lose Electrical Power
For all of the QA at Boing; they don't believe in software QA. Take a look at their job openings some time: In years of searching, I've seen only one software QA position, and it wasn't dealing with aircraft. Any such search results will return developers that are to write their own tests against the spec. Developers are not Testers.... and I'll ask: How many more such bugs are out there?

I know of two other software "bugs" ... that can be attributed to a lack of QA. How many people will die due to a bad management decision on the part of Boeing?
Disclosure: Yes, I'm a software QA / Test professional.

Submission + - Scientists have paper on gender bias rejected because they're both women (dailylife.com.au)

Submitted by ferrisoxide.com
ferrisoxide.com writes: A paper co-authored by researcher fellow Dr. Fiona Ingleby and evolutionary biologist Dr. Megan Head — on how gender differences affect the experiences that PhD students have when moving into post-doctoral work — was rejected by peer-reviewed PLoS One journal because they didn’t ask a man for help.

A (male) peer reviewer for the journal suggested that the scientists find male co-authors, to prevent “ideologically biased assumptions.” The same reviewer also provided his own ironically biased advice, when explaining that women may have fewer articles published because men's papers "are indeed of a better quality, on average", "just as, on average, male doctoral students can probably run a mile race a bit faster".

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