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Technology

Gartner Says 3D Printers Will Cost Less Than $2,000 By 2016 170

Posted by samzenpus from the get-you-one dept.
colinneagle writes "Widespread adoption of 3D printing technology may not be that far away, according to a Gartner report predicting that enterprise-class 3D printers will be available for less than $2,000 by 2016. 3D printers are already in use among many businesses, from manufacturing to pharmaceuticals to consumers goods, and have generated a diverse set of use cases. As a result, the capabilities of the technology have evolved to meet customer needs, and will continue to develop to target those in additional markets, Gartner says."
The Military

United States Begins Flying Stealth Bombers Over South Korea 567

Posted by samzenpus from the nice-day-for-a-flight dept.
skade88 writes "The New York Times is reporting that the United States has started flying B-2 stealth bomber runs over South Korea as a show of force to North Korea. The bombers flew 6,500 miles to bomb a South Korean island with mock explosives. Earlier this month the U.S. Military ran mock B-52 bombing runs over the same South Korean island. The U.S. military says it shows that it can execute precision bombing runs at will with little notice needed. The U.S. also reaffirmed their commitment to protecting its allies in the region. The North Koreans have been making threats to turn South Korea into a sea of fire. North Korea has also made threats claiming they will nuke the United States' mainland."
Linux

Submission + - The end is nigh for The Linux Game Tome (happypenguin.org)

Submitted by Sodki
Sodki writes: The Linux Game Tome, one of the most important websites related to video gaming in GNU/Linux, will shut down on the 13th of April, according to a news post published on the website. The decision was made due to the "lack both the time and the ambition to do what is necessary to keep the site afloat", which has resulted in "spam clogging the forums, lack of updates and increasing brokenness of the site". This might not be the end, though. The maintainers of The Linux Game Tome will make available a dump of the games database, so that anyone interested can cook up a new and updated version of the website, and a worthwhile effort will be considered for a transfer of ownership of the domain. The current source code of the website, which is from 1999, will not be available because "it is not fit for human consumption".
Censorship

Draft Computer Fraud and Abuse Act Update Expands Powers and Penalties 141

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the did-you-really-expect-anything-else dept.
Despite calls to limit the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, it looks like Congress is planning to drastically expand the law and penalties. walterbyrd writes with a few of the major changes listed in the draft bill (22 pages): "Adds computer crimes as a form of racketeering. Expands the ways in which you could be guilty of the CFAA — including making you just as guilty if you plan to 'violate' the CFAA than if you actually did so. Ratchets up many of the punishments. Makes a very, very minor adjustment to limit 'exceeding authorized access.' Expands the definition of 'exceeding authorized access' in a very dangerous way. Makes it easier for the federal government to seize and forfeit anything." TechCrunch also reports rumors that the plan is to push the bill through quickly for approval with a number of other "cybersecurity" bills in mid-April.

Submission + - 19-Yr-Old Develops Ocean Cleanup Array That Could Remove 7.3M Tons of Plastic (inhabitat.com)

Submitted by formaggio
formaggio writes: 19-year-old Boyan Slat has unveiled plans to create an Ocean Cleanup Array that could remove 7,2500,000 tons of plastic waste from the world’s oceans. The device consists of an anchored network of floating booms and processing platforms that could be dispatched to garbage patches around the world. Instead of moving through the ocean, the array would span the radius of a garbage patch, acting as a giant funnel. The angle of the booms would force plastic in the direction of the platforms, where it would be separated from plankton, filtered and stored for recycling.
Crime

Submission + - The ATF Isn't Convinced That 3D-Printed Guns Compare to the Real Thing (vice.com)

Submitted by derekmead
derekmead writes: 3D-printing gun parts has taken off, thanks to the likes of Cody Wilson and Defense Distributed. While the technology adds a rather interesting wrinkle to the gun control debate, the ATF currently is pretty hands-off, saying that while 3D-printed gun technology has arrived, it's not good enough yet to start figuring out how to regulate it.

"We are aware of all the 3D printing of firearms and have been tracking it for quite a while," Earl Woodham, spokesperson for the ATF field office in Charlotte, said. "Our firearms technology people have looked at it, and we have not yet seen a consistently reliable firearm made with 3D printing."

A reporter called the ATF's Washington headquarters to get a better idea of what it took to make a gun "consistently reliable," and program manager George Semonick said the guns should be "made to last years or generations." In other words, because 3D-printed guns aren't yet as durable as their metal counterparts, the ATF doesn't yet consider them as much of a concern.
Music

Scientists Study Getting an Unwanted Tune Out of Your Head 219

Posted by samzenpus from the co-stan-za dept.
Hugh Pickens writes writes "Richard Gray reports that scientists have found a way to help anyone plagued by those annoying tunes that lodge themselves inside our heads and repeat on an endless loop — when snippets of a catchy song inexplicably play like a broken record in your brain. The solution can be to solve some tricky anagrams to force the intrusive music out of your working memory allowing the music to be replaced with other more amenable thoughts. 'The key is to find something that will give the right level of challenge,' says Dr Ira Hyman, a music psychologist at Western Washington University who conducted the research. 'If you are cognitively engaged, it limits the ability of intrusive songs to enter your head.' Hyman says that the problem, called involuntary memory retrieval, is that something we can do automatically like driving or walking means you are not using all of your cognitive resource, so there is plenty of space left for that internal jukebox to start playing. Dr Vicky Williamson, a music psychologist at Goldsmiths, University of London, says that the most likely songs to get stuck are those that are easy to hum along to or sing and found that that Lady Gaga was the most common artist to get stuck in people's heads, with four of her catchy pop songs being the most likely to become earworms – Alejandro, Bad Romance, Just Dance and Paparazzi. Other surveys have reported Abba songs such as Waterloo, Changes by David Bowie or the Beatles' Hey Jude."
Power

Submission + - US to invest $6 billion for Indonesian geothermal power (mondaq.com)

Submitted by symbolset
symbolset writes: The US State Department has announced a new $6 billion initiative to promote and finance the development of 12 GW of geothermal resources in Indonesia. Indonesia is estimated to have the highest geothermal of any nation in the world, only 4% of which is in use. Secretary Kerry is expected to make the big announcement at the ASEAN summit in September in Brunei.
Science

Submission + - Graphene aerogel takes world's lightest material crown (gizmag.com) 1

Submitted by cylonlover
cylonlover writes: Not even a year after it claimed the title of the world’s lightest material, aerographite has been knocked off its crown by a new aerogel made from graphene. Created by a research team from China’s Zhejiang University in the Department of Polymer Science and Engineering lab headed by Professor Gao Chao, the ultra-light aerogel has a density of just 0.16 mg/cm3, which is lower than that of helium and just twice that of hydrogen.
Education

Google Blogger: Vietnamese HS Students Excelling At CS 291

Posted by timothy from the pho-great-justice dept.
An anonymous reader writes "A Google engineer visiting Vietnam discovered a large portion of Vietnamese high school students might be able to pass a Google interview. According to TFA (and his blog), students start learning computing as early as grade 2. According to the blogger and another senior engineer, about half of the students in an 11th grade class he visited would be able to make through their interview process. The blogger also mentioned U.S. school boards blocking computer science education. The link he posted backing up his claim goes to a Maryland Public Schools website describing No Child Left Behind technicalities. According to the link, computer science is not considered a core subject. While the blogger provided no substantial evidence of U.S. school boards blocking computer science education, he claimed that students at Galileo Academy had difficulty with the HTML image tag. According to the school's Wikipedia page, by California standards, Galileo seems to be one of the state's better secondary schools."
AI

Submission + - Can Innovation Be Automated? (hbr.org)

Submitted by
JimmyQS
JimmyQS writes: "The Harvard Business Review blog has an invited piece about Innovation Software. Tony McCaffrey at the University of Massachusetts Amherst talks about several pieces of software designed to help engineers augment their innovation process and make them more creative, including one his group has developed called Analogy Finder. The software searches patent databases using natural language processing technology to find analogous solutions in other domains. According to Dr. McCaffrey 'nearly 90% of new solutions are really just adaptations from solutions that already exist — and they're often taken from fields outside the problem solver's expertise.'"
Internet Explorer

Submission + - IE 11 to impersonate Firefox in its user agent string (neowin.net)

Submitted by Billly Gates
Billly Gates writes: With the new leaked videos and screenshots of Windows Blue released IE 11 is also included. IE 10 just came out weeks ago for Windows 7 users and Microsoft is more determined than ever to prevent IE from becoming irrelevant as Firefox and Chrome scream past it by also including a faster release schedule. A few beta testers reported that IE 11 changed its user agent string from MSIE to IE with "like gecko" command included. Microsoft maybe doing this to stop web developer stop feeding broken IE 6 — 8 code and refusing to serve HTML 5/CSS 3 whenever it detects MSIE in its user agent string. Unfortunately this will break many business apps that are tied an ancient and specific version of IE. Will this cause more hours of work for web developers? Or does IE10+ really act like Chrome or Firefox and this will finally end the hell of custom CSS tricks?

Submission + - What is the latest and greatest web development framework? 2

Submitted by emmjayell
emmjayell writes: So I haven't done much development over the past couple of years. I've been preoccupied with management, life and other hobbies. I'm experienced in C, C++, SQL, Java, Grails, RoR and some other things to a lesser extent. I enjoyed using RoR and Grails for building logic driven sites. So my question is, has anything better, new / improved hit the streets or should I just take a look at what is currently happening with Grails/RoR and use one of them? Any suggestions?
It's funny. Laugh.

Submission + - Whitehouse.gov petition to create 'The Matrix' (whitehouse.gov)

Submitted by OldFart58
OldFart58 writes: Remember the Death Star petition?

Well, now there's a petition to have the United States Cyber Command (USCYBERCOM) begin production of "The Matrix":

"By focusing our technical resources on production of a simulated reality or cyberspace (or "Matrix"), the government can ensure our country maintains its lead in cyber warfare by providing the ideal means to pacify and subdue the human population. In addition, in accordance with our green energy initiatives this will facilitate research into eventual use of human body heat and electrical activity as an energy source."

Is this the unavoidable outcome of today's perpetually escalating cyber warfare fixation, or just another way to keep the lights on once the oil runs out? Which pill will the White House choose?

Comment Re:Assange condemns greed? (Score 2) 944

by The0retical (#37733298) Attached to: Occupy Wall Street Protests Go Global

A moderate opinion on slashdot? How dare you!

You are correct on all points about the Tea Party being co-opted by politicians and the OWS movement also summarily moving in the same direction except it is being subverted by the socialist agenda. I personally believe that this is in no small part due to the 24 hour news cycle pulling some half literate socialist off the street and giving them a bit of barely comprehensible air time. The same thing could be found when the Tea Party movement started, the media grabbed one of the tricorne wearing, misspelled sign waving, isolationists stuck them up in front of the camera and said "Well here's what the Tea Party is." Obviously there are problems on all sides, however the majority of Americans straddle the fence on many many issues despite what the media and the politicians would like you to believe.

There really is no fix all to the situation, however I feel that term limits to prevent professional politicians, and hard caps on campaign spending would be a step in the right direction. It was probably a Slashdot commentator who said it best (so I'm going to rip them off) "Did you ever stop to wonder why someone would spend 80 million dollars to be elected to a 180 thousand dollar a year job? Obviously there is something else going on behind the scenes."

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