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Submission + - Linus Torvalds suspends key Linux developer (networkworld.com)

Submitted by alphadogg
alphadogg writes: An argument between developers of some of the most basic parts of Linux turned heated this week, resulting in a prominent Red Hat employee and code contributor being banned from working on the Linux kernel. Kay Sievers, a well-known open-source software engineer, is a key developer of systemd, a system management framework for Linux-based operating systems. Systemd is currently used by several prominent Linux distributions, including two of the most prominent enterprise distros, Red Hat and SUSE. It was recently announced that Ubuntu would adopt systemd in future versions as well. Sievers was banned by kernel maintainer Linus Torvalds on Wednesday for failing to address an issue that caused systemd to interact with the Linux kernel in negative ways.

Submission + - NYPD Denies Freedom of Information Request for Freedom of Information Handbook (freebeacon.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Journalist Shawn Musgrave filed a records request under New York’s Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) for the police department’s FOIL handbook, the guide officers use to apply public record law.

However, the NYPD told Musgrave its Freedom of Information handbook is not covered by FOIL, arguing it is protected under attorney-client privilege.

Submission + - New anti-leaks legislation in the US (rt.com)

Submitted by alcarinque
alcarinque writes: At a panel on cyber security at Georgetown University, the National Security Agency (NSA) director, General Keith Alexander, made statements that suggested the NSA has been working on some kind of "media leaks legislation". The legislation would obviously be in response to the disclosures from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, but, until now, there has been no public indication that any anti-leaks legislation would be proposed in response to what Snowden disclosed.
The legislation would target those journalists that publish disclosures from sites like Wikileaks to the general public, damaging the freedom of speech of the mass media.

Submission + - Apple Drops Snow Leopard Security Updates, Doesn't Tell Anyone (computerworld.com)

Submitted by Freshly Exhumed
Freshly Exhumed writes: As Apple issued an update for Mavericks, Mountain Lion, and Lion yesterday, Snow Leopard users have not seen a security update since September, 2013. This would not be noteworthy if Apple, like a host of other major software vendors, would clearly spell out its OS support policies and warn users of such changes, but they have not. Thus, the approximately 20% of Mac users still running Snow Leopard now find themselves in a very vulnerable state without the latest security updates.

Submission + - Yes, You Too Can Be An Evil Network Overlord - On The Cheap With OpenBSD, pflow (blogspot.ca)

Submitted by badger.foo
badger.foo writes: Have you ever wanted to know what's really going on in your network? Some free tools with surprising origins can help you to an almost frightening degree. Peter Hansteen shares some monitoring insights, anecdotes and practical advice in his latest column on how to really know your network. All of it with free software, of course.

Submission + - Blood Test of 4 BioMarkers Predicts Death Within 5 Years (plosmedicine.org) 1

Submitted by retroworks
retroworks writes: NHS and the Daily Telegraph report on two studies (original and repeat duplicating results) in Estonia and Finland which predict whether an apparently healthy human will likely die within 5 years. The four biomarkers that appeared to determine risk of mortality in the next five years were:

alpha-1-acid glycoprotein – a protein that is raised during infection and inflammation
albumin – a protein that carries vital nutrients, hormones and proteins in the bloodstream
very-low-density lipoprotein (VLDL) particle size – usually known for being “very bad” cholesterol
citrate – a compound that is an essential part of the body’s metabolism

Researchers found that people in the top 20% of the summary score range were 19 times more at risk of dying in the next five years than people in the lowest 20%.

Submission + - The Science of Solitary Confinement

Submitted by Hugh Pickens DOT Com
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes: Joseph Stromberg writes in Smithsonian Magazine that although the practice of solitary confinement has been largely discontinued in most countries, it's become increasingly routine over the past few decades within the American prison system and now it's estimated that between 80,000 and 81,000 prisoners are in some form of solitary confinement nationwide. Once employed largely as a short-term punishment, it's now regularly used as way of disciplining prisoners indefinitely, isolating them during ongoing investigations, coercing them into cooperating with interrogations and even separating them from perceived threats within the prison population at their request. "We really are the only country that resorts regularly, and on a long-term basis, to this form of punitive confinement," says Craig Haney. "Ironically, we spend very little time analyzing the effects of it." Most prisoners in solitary confinement spend at least 23 hours per day restricted to cells of 80 square feet, not much larger than a king-size bed, devoid of stimuli (some are allowed in a yard or indoor area for an hour or less daily), and are denied physical contact on visits from friends and family, so they may go years or decades without touching another human, apart from when they're placed in physical restraints by guards. A majority of those surveyed experienced symptoms such as dizziness, heart palpitations, chronic depression, while 41 percent reported hallucinations, and 27 percent had suicidal thoughts and one study found that isolated inmates are seven times more likely to hurt or kill themselves than inmates at large. But the real problem is that solitary confinement is ineffective as a rehabilitation technique and indelibly harmful to the mental health of those detained achieving the opposite of the supposed goal of rehabilitating them for re-entry into society. "We are all social beings, and people who are in environments that deny the opportunity to interact in meaningful ways with others begin to lose a sense of self, of their own identity," says Haney. "They begin to withdraw from the little amount of social contact that they are allowed to have, because social stimulation, over time, becomes anxiety-arousing." Rick Raemisch, the new director of the Colorado Department of Corrections, voluntarily spent twenty hours in solitary confinement in one of his prisons and wrote an op-ed about his experience in The New York Times. "If we can’t eliminate solitary confinement, at least we can strive to greatly reduce its use," wrote Raemisch. "Knowing that 97 percent of inmates are ultimately returned to their communities, doing anything less would be both counterproductive and inhumane."

Submission + - The Higgs Boson Re-Explained by the Mick Jagger of Physics

Submitted by Hugh Pickens DOT Com
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes: Jorge Cham, author of the comic strip Ph.D. comics, recently found himself on a bus crossing the Israel-Jordan border sitting next to Eilam Gross, head of the Atlas Higgs Group, one of the two groups that found the famous particle. When Cham asked Gross for feedback on the Higgs Boson animation he had done last year, Gross told Cham "It's all wrong" and told Cham that he had yet to see a truly correct explanation of what the the Higgs Boson is. For the next three hours Gross, also known as the "Mick Jagger of physics," told Cham the story of the Higgs Boson and asked him to put it into a new comic strip. The result is a new comic re-explaining the Higgs Boson. "So how does this explain things like inertia?" "That's another bus ride." As an interesting side note Gross was once asked what Higgs was good for and replied that when [J.J.] Thomson discovered the electron, in 1895, he raised a glass of champagne and proposed a toast “to the useless electron.”

Submission + - Where is Everybody?

Submitted by StartsWithABang
StartsWithABang writes: You've heard of the Drake equation as a way to estimate the number of intelligent species in our galaxy. Well, that's 50 years old, and astrophysics knows a whole lot more now! Here's a fantastic answer to the question of "If stars, planets, and biological processes are so common in the Universe, then where is everyone?" with both optimistic and pessimistic estimates for life, intelligent life, and intelligent-life-right-now in our galaxy and in the entire Universe.

Submission + - Microsoft Circles the Wagons to Defeat ODF in the UK (consortiuminfo.org)

Submitted by Andy Updegrove
Andy Updegrove writes: Three weeks ago, we heard that Francis Maude, a senior UK government minister, was predicting the conversion to open source office suites by UK government agencies. Lost in the translation in many stories was the fact that this was based not on an adopted policy, but on a proposal still open for public comment — and subject to change. It should be no surprise that Microsoft is trying to get the UK to add OOXML, its own format standard, to the UK policy. Why? According to a messaging sent to its UK partners, because it believes that a failure to include OOXML "will cause problems for citizens and businesses who use office suites which don’t support ODF, including many people who do not use a recent version of Microsoft Office or, for example, Pages on iOS and even Google Docs." Of course, that's because Microsoft pushed OOXML as an alternative to ODF a decade ago. If you don't want the same objection to be valid a decade from now, consider making your views known at the Cabinet Office Standards Hub. The deadline is February 26.

Comment I ran accross this video it may help (Score 1) 134

by smylingsam (#46258537) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: E-ink Reader For Academic Papers?

Hi,

I was looking for Kindle alternatives the other day and ran across across this vlog about best e-ink devices of 2013. of note for you may be the Icarus and sony large format e-ink readers.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...

the vlog authors at http://www.youtube.com/user/go... have their own store. You may want to look into the (rather expensive) sony and icarus pen enabled devices.

As far as kindle goes, if you root the kindle you can access Cool Reader and other tools that may do what you want.

I would also suggest looking into Calibre and its ecosystem of plugins.

Comment Bricklaying is well understood (Score 1) 716

by smylingsam (#46227149) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Should Developers Fix Bugs They Cause On Their Own Time?

Bricklaying,Steel working etc are all "Well Understood". There are well understood, fixed, unwavering rules on how it is done. there is big branch of engineering, "trade craft", and its associated math(s) that describes this VERY precisely. Only new materials change those rules.
There is no such level of understanding for Computer software. We could debate if certain functional languages COULD reach this level of sophistication, but that debate simply does not apply to most programming work. Even now we don't even have reliable code checking tools that are 100% accurate.
Feel free to expound on the argument but at its base you simply cant compare the two disciplines.

Submission + - First Amputee in the world with a prosthetic hand wired to nerves (youtube.com)

Submitted by kalman5
kalman5 writes: Dennis Aabo Sørensen is the first amputee in the world to feel sensory rich information — in real-time — with a prosthetic hand wired to nerves in his upper arm. Sørensen could grasp objects intuitively and identify what he was touching while blindfolded.
More (french) on: http://actu.epfl.ch/news/une-p...

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