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Submission + - The President supports Net Neutrality (washingtonpost.com)

Submitted by Charliemopps
Charliemopps writes:

One of the issues around net neutrality is whether you are creating different rates or charges for different content providers. That's the big controversy here. So you have big, wealthy media companies who might be willing to pay more and also charge more for spectrum, more bandwidth on the Internet so they can stream movies faster. I personally, the position of my administration, as well as a lot of the companies here, is that you don’t want to start getting a differentiation in how accessible the Internet is to different users. You want to leave it open so the next Google and the next Facebook can succeed.

— President Obama

Submission + - WSJ: Computer Programming Is a Trade; Let's Act Like It (wsj.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: From the story "Fortunately, it turns out that a computer-science degree isn't necessary to get a job in programming. Fourteen percent of the members of some teams at Google don't have a college degree, and 67% of the programming jobs in the U.S. are at nontech companies where other kinds of industry experience are more likely to be valued.

Computer programming, in other words, has become a trade. Like nursing or welding, it's something in which a person can develop at least a basic proficiency within weeks or months. And once budding coders learn enough to get their first jobs, they get onto the same path to upward mobility offered to their in-demand, highly paid peers."

Submission + - Wikipedia Denies DMCA Take-Down Request Because a Monkey Took the Selfie 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Back in 2011, an English photographer went to Indonesia on a photography shoot and had his camera temporarily stolen by a black macaque monkey. While the camera was in its possession, the monkey took various pictures, including a selfie that went viral and landed on Wikimedia Commons under the public domain. The photographer insisted that he owns the copyright and filed a DMCA take-down request, but Wikimedia denied the request, arguing, "To claim copyright, the photographer would have had to make substantial contributions to the final image, and even then, they'd only have copyright for those alterations, not the underlying image. This means that there was no one on whom to bestow copyright, so the image falls into the public domain." Wikimedia's rejection of the monkey selfie DMCA take-down request is recorded in its first ever transparency report issued on Wednesday.

Submission + - Idiot Left Driver's Seat In Self-Driving Infiniti, On The Highway

Submitted by cartechboy
cartechboy writes: Self-driving cars are coming, that's nothing new. People are somewhat nervous about this technology, and that's also not news. But it appears self-driving cars are already hear, and one idiot was dumb enough to climb out of the driver's seat while his car cruised down the highway. The car in question is a new Infiniti Q50 which has Active Lane Control and adaptive cruise control. Both of which essentially turn the Q50 into an autonomous vehicle while at highway speeds. While impressive, taking yourself out of a position where you can quickly and safely regain control of the car if needed is simply dumb. After watching the video, it's abundantly clear why people should be nervous about autonomous vehicles. It's not the cars and tech we need to worry about, it's idiots like this guy.

Submission + - Google Wants Everyone to Have Stock Android on Every Phone (ibtimes.co.uk)

Submitted by DavidGilbert99
DavidGilbert99 writes: Google has silently released a very significant update to its Google Now Launcher app. Previously limited to Nexus devices, the app now works with any smartphone or tablet running Android 4.1 or above and allows users to experience the stock Android interface rather than the manufacturer-imposed skin. This is the first step on a major push by Google to wrestle back control of Android from the likes of Samsung, HTC and LG.

Comment Re:Expert:Ebola Vaccine At Least 50 White People A (Score 1) 390

by RavenLrD20k (#47606197) Attached to: "Secret Serum" Used To Treat Americans With Ebola
A well-built car can last 20+ years at the cost of ~$10-20K (maintenance and fuel included, your mileage may vary) and facilitates a larger area with which to look and keep employment, with the option of displaying a sense of style for paying a bit more. In other words, a car can actually reinforce a higher standard of living and often is an optional expense. A long term prescription is often a matter of life and death that is extorted into a forced money sink that you must either pay or die that also brings with it a stigma that there is something quite literally wrong with you...that can also drain your bank of about $10-20K+ over the same 20 year period.
Science

Study: Dinosaurs "Shrank" Regularly To Become Birds 138

Posted by samzenpus from the getting-small dept.
An anonymous reader writes A new study suggests that large dinosaurs shrunk to small birds to survive over a period of around 50 million years. Aside from a few large species, most modern birds are predominantly tiny and look nothing at all like their prehistoric meat-eating ancestors. The evolutionary process that governed this transformation has not been well understood, but now researchers from the University of Adelaide in Australia have put together a detailed family tree mapping the evolution of therapod dinosaurs to the agile flying birds we see today. Their results indicated that meat-eating dinosaurs underwent several distinct periods of miniaturization over the last 50 million years which took them down from an average weight of 163kg to just 0.8kg before finally becoming modern birds.

Comment Re: I like it. (Score 1) 306

by RavenLrD20k (#47575573) Attached to: Amazon's eBook Math

So why do the paperback versions of a $15 hardback book generally cost $7 - $8? Paperbacks as well as Hardbacks still need all of the above support personnel you speak of. At $9.99 Amazon is STILL coming in above the paperback price of most books.

I'm sorry, but the arguments that Scalzi puts forth above are absolute shit, and you have the hint of schill about you. There is no reason that the electric format should cost anywhere near the cost of a hardback. Hell, IMHO the electronic format should really be below the paperback price because of the lack of dead leaf being used for its production... but I can understand the industry's desire to hold on to their model and I feel, much as Amazon seems to, that $10 is a reasonable compromise.

If they REALLY want to milk the consumer they should use a similar model for E-books that they use for paperbacks; as in, release the first edition hardback at $15, wait a month for sales to start becoming stale, then release the paperback and E-book at the same time at the reduced rate.

Submission + - Law and Governance as a "Social Technology"

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Virgin’s Entrepreneur blog has an article on an idea called "Startup Cities” which argues that governments should adopt the trial-and-error processes of tech startups. By giving municipalities strong autonomy, the article argues, reforms can be piloted on a smaller scale as different municipalities try different political solutions. From the article: "The biggest paradox of today’s world is that we have rapid, constant progress in physical technologies like phones and computers, but billions of people have no access at all to good law and governance, or what you might call ‘social technologies’. If we can treat law and governance as tech – then perhaps we can innovate in it.” The idea brings to mind Nassim Taleb’s argument that political risk should be spread over small, local jurisdictions so that policies don’t bring down entire countries if they fail.

Submission + - Senate Bill Would Ban Most Bulk Surveillance (reuters.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Today Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT) introduced a bill that would ban bulk collection of telephone records and internet data for U.S. citizens. This is a stronger version of the legislation that passed the U.S. House in May, and it has support from the executive branch as well. "The bill, called the USA Freedom Act, would prohibit the government from collecting all information from a particular service provider or a broad geographic area, such as a city or area code, according to a release from Leahy's office. It would expand government and company reporting to the public and reform the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which reviews NSA intelligence activities. Both House and Senate measures would keep information out of NSA computers, but the Senate bill would impose stricter limits on how much data the spy agency could seek."

Comment Re:Wow ... (Score 4, Informative) 419

by RavenLrD20k (#47558953) Attached to: A 24-Year-Old Scammed Apple 42 Times In 16 Different States
Hell, at the retail outlet I used to work at, manager made a blanket policy that if the POS returned a request for an Auth code we just outright declined the transaction, handed the customer an Experian business card and asked if they had another form of payment. If the customer asked if he could call his bank to get an Auth code (Red Flag) we would say that our business system did not allow for manual authorizations (which was true. The system the manager put in place didn't allow for ManAuths, even if the POS did).

Submission + - Tiny glass pyramids used to create self-cooling solar cells (geek.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Solar panels need to be placed in direct sunlight in order to function, but that means they get hot, become less efficient, and age quickly. For every 1 degree Celsius the temperature increases, solar cell efficiency decreases by 0.5%. So at a typical peak temperature of 55 degrees a 30% efficient solar panel is only converting around 21% of the solar energy.

What we need is passive cooling, and a team at Standford Uni has solved the problem using tiny glass pyramids to manipulate the properties of light.

Submission + - Developing Desktop Applications with PHP using wxPHP

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Unlike other general purpose scripting languages like Python, Perl or Lua, PHP usage has been mostly limited to web applications. wxPHP is a wrapper of wxWidigets that lets you develop cross-platform desktop applications using PHP, which revives a usage scenario for the language. The authors of the project believe that developing with wxPHP leads to decreased development time and easier interpolation with web applications. In contrast to its older brother PHP-GTK, wxPHP applications look native in all platforms, the extension is easier to build and more up to date. Binary builds for various platforms that use latest PHP versions are available, also the GUI designer wxFormBuilder has PHP support.

Submission + - Better Living Through Data (ifweassume.com)

Submitted by jradavenport
jradavenport writes: Using 2 years of continuous (every 1 minute) monitoring of my MacBook Air battery usage, I have been able to study my own computer use patterns in amazing detail. This dataset includes 293k measurements, or more than 204 days of use over 2 years. I use the laptop more than 50hours per week on average, and my most productive day is Tuesday. Changes in my work/life balance have begun to appear over the 2 year span, and I am curious if such data can help inform how much computer use is healthy/effective.

Submission + - It's now possible to print computer memory on paper (citeworld.com)

Submitted by Caleb Garling
Caleb Garling writes: Paper is cheap, flexible, and widespread, making it a good candidate as a substrate, but one of the issues with printing conductive materials to paper is one of the reasons paper works so well for ink: absorption. Being porous and uneven is an unwanted quality when trying to lay down the very precise structures necessary for electronics.

To get around this, principal researcher Der-Hsien Lien and team first coated the paper in a layer of carbon. Their aim was to make a type of resistive random access memory (RRAM), where a voltage is applied across a layer of insulator via an electrode. Each "bit" on the paper would be an insulator sandwiched by two electrodes with a state of 1 or 0.

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