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Comment open source / source code (Score 1) 69

by timothy (#46721067) Attached to: Interviews: Ask Bre Pettis About Making Things

Bre:

In the larger world of 3-D printing, obviously there are manufactures who have never been particularly maker-friendly. You started off, though, with very affordable kits, and a connection to the RepRap foundation, which emphasized open source code, reproduceability, openness, etc.

(Wikipedia's a bit out of date on this front, but as of this moment, the entry there says "MakerBot Industries' products are designed to be built by anyone with basic technical skills and are described as about as complicated as assembling IKEA furniture.[8] The printers are sold as do it yourself kits, requiring only minor soldering.")

  A lot of the excitement that I had when I first saw MakerBots (at Seattle's Metrix CreateSpace) derived from the fact that one of the Maker Bots they had was built with pieces printed by the other, RepRap style. It seems like a lot of the innovation in the earlier models was based on shared enthusiasm and tinkering. The company has since moved away from the open source hardware model. Do you have any regrets about this? Are there open source contributions that the company is making but that just aren't well known?

Submission + - Are You Apocalypse Useful?

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Young people, when choosing a profession, are often told to "do what you love." That's why we have experts in such abstruse fields as medieval gymel. If there's a worldwide catastrophe in which civilization is interrupted, how useful would that profession be? In a post-apocalypse world, medical doctors would be useful, as would most scientists and engineers. Bad news for Slashdotters is that decades without computers would render computer science and related professions useless. What do you consider to be the most useful and mostly useless post-apocalypse professions? Should everyone be required to study a few apocalypse-appropriate subjects?

Submission + - The FBI Gamified the Hunt For One of Its Most Wanted (vice.com)

Submitted by Daniel_Stuckey
Daniel_Stuckey writes: The FBI just gamified its latest manhunt. As I was just scanning the bureau's many twitter feeds, I saw a couple of fresh tweets reporting that William Bradford Bishop, Jr. had just been added to the bureau's most wanted list.

When I clicked on the tweet that offered a photo gallery of Bishop, the 'Family Annihilator,' some studio-lit photos of this gallery-quality clay bust were far beyond the everyday mug shots I'd expected.

"Am I'm picking out which glasses my character in GTA will wear?" I thought as I looked at artist Karen Taylor's masterful 3D rendering of Bishop. Bishop is a man who has been a fugitive for almost 40 years (he's 77 now, and Taylor age-processed him to look that old) after allegedly killing his mother, his wife, and their three sons in Bethesda, Md. Bishop, a former Foreign Service officer for the State Department, is described by the FBI as "highly intelligent," and investigators on his case believe he could be hiding in plain sight.

Feed Google News Sci Tech: Limited number of Google Glass will be available to buy on Tuesday - Los Angeles (google.com)

From feed by feedfeeder

New York Daily News
Limited number of Google Glass will be available to buy on Tuesday
Los Angeles Times
If you've been unsuccessful tracking down a pair of Google Glass, now's your chance. Beginning Tuesday at 6 a.m. Pacific time, U.S. adults can purchase the Explorer version of Google's head-mounted, Internet-connected computer for $1,500 plus tax on the...
Google Glass available to anyone for one day onlyCNN
You Too Can Buy Google Glass on April 15th OnlyTom's Guide
Google Makes Glass Available To Anyone (Who Can Afford it) (For A Few Days)Forbes
eWeek-Register-Chicago Tribune
all 110 news articles

Submission + - There are now 271 Million Registered Web Domain with.tk the #2 Domain after .com (eweek.com)

Submitted by darthcamaro
darthcamaro writes: Every year more and more web domains are registered and 2013 was no exception. There are now 271 million Top Level Domains registrations on the web today. Not surprisingly .com is the most popular domain with 112 million registered domain. What is surprising is that the number two TLD in the world is the .tk country-code TLD for Tokelau, a small territory in the South Pacific Ocean belonging to New Zealand.

Submission + - Comcast PAC gave money to every senator examining Time Warner Cable merger (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: It's no surprise that Comcast donates money to members of Congress. Political connections come in handy for a company seeking government approval of mergers, like Comcast's 2011 purchase of NBCUniversal and its proposed acquisition of Time Warner Cable (TWC).

But just how many politicians have accepted money from Comcast's political arm? In the case of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which held the first congressional hearing on the Comcast/TWC merger yesterday, the answer is all of them.

Submission + - James Lovelock reflects on Gaia's legacy (nature.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: "A lot of investment in green technology has been a giant scam, if well intentioned."

The quote, and entire interview, are significant for two reasons. First, the interview is seeped with many skeptical opinions about human caused global warming, is very critical of that movement's effort to politicize science, and the person being interviewed is James Lovelock, the founder of of the concept of Gaia, a former strong advocate of global warming but now a skeptic.

Most significant however is where the interview is published. It is in Nature, one of the most important and influential science journals, which previously has been aggressively pushing global warming politics for years. That they allowed these politically incorrect opinions within their walls and then broadcast them to their readers signals a major cultural shift within the science community. It is beginning to be acceptable to be a skeptic again!

Submission + - Science Is Running Out of Things to Discover

Submitted by Hugh Pickens DOT Com
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes: John Horgan writes in National Geographic that scientists have become victims of their own success and that "further research may yield no more great revelations or revolutions, but only incremental, diminishing returns." The latest evidence is a "Correspondence" published in the journal Nature that points out that it is taking longer and longer for scientists to receive Nobel Prizes for their work. The trend is strongest in physics. Prior to 1940, only 11 percent of physics prizes were awarded for work more than 20 years old but since 1985, the percentage has risen to 60 percent. If these trends continue, the Nature authors note, by the end of this century no one will live long enough to win a Nobel Prize, which cannot be awarded posthumously and suggest that the Nobel time lag "seems to confirm the common feeling of an increasing time needed to achieve new discoveries in basic natural sciences—a somewhat worrisome trend." One explanation for the time lag might be the nature of scientific discoveries in general—as we learn more it takes more time for new discoveries to prove themselves. Researchers recently announced that observations of gravitational waves provide evidence of inflation, a dramatic theory of cosmic creation. But there are so many different versions of "inflation" theory that it can "predict" practically any observation, meaning that it doesn't really predict anything at all. String theory suffers from the same problem. As for multiverse theories, all those hypothetical universes out there are unobservable by definition so it's hard to imagine a better reason to think we may be running out of new things to discover than the fascination of physicists with these highly speculative ideas. According to Keith Simonton of the University of California, "the core disciplines have accumulated not so much anomalies as mere loose ends that will be tidied up one way or another."

Submission + - MA Governor Wants Non-Compete Agreements Outlawed. Will it Matter?

Submitted by curtwoodward
curtwoodward writes: Entrepreneurs in Massachusetts say the state's legal enforcement of non-competition agreements hurts innovation — if you're going to get sued by Big Company X, you're probably not going to leave for a startup in the same industry. But those contracts have powerful supporters, including EMC, which is by far the state's largest tech company. Gov. Deval Patrick is finally picking a side in the debate by introducing his own bill to outlaw non-competes and adopt trade-secrets protections instead. Just one catch: he's a lame duck, and will be out of office in January.

Feed Google News Sci Tech: FTC OKs Facebook+WhatsApp, warns against privacy violations - CNET (google.com)

From feed by feedfeeder

Washington Post
FTC OKs Facebook+WhatsApp, warns against privacy violations
CNET
Facebook may have cleared a hurdle in its purchase of WhatsApp, but the FTC will be watching closely to keep the social networks honest. by Jennifer Van Grove @jbruin; April 10, 2014 1:37 PM PDT. comments. 0. facebook. twitter. linkedin. googleplus.
FTC implores WhatsApp to keep its promises on privacy in Facebook dealPCWorld
FTC Says Facebook, WhatsApp Must Honor User Privacy Policies (1)Businessweek
Facebook says WhatsApp deal cleared by FTCChicago Tribune
MediaPost Communications-AllFacebook
all 46 news articles

Submission + - Huawei Tries to Overcome 'Fear of Huawei'

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Documents leaked by former NSA analyst Edward Snowden and published last month suggest that the US government was actually involved in hacking Huawei network equipment in order to spy on China and other countries, including US allies, using Huawei hardware.
Huawei has been working hard to fight the allegations, claiming that security concerns are unfounded and that the company has been caught in a "trade conflict" between the US and China.

Submission + - Google Chrome allows websites to spy on nearby conversations (ibtimes.com)

Submitted by AllTheTinfoilHats
AllTheTinfoilHats writes: A security flaw in Google Chrome that allows any website you visit with the browser to listen in on nearby conversations. It doesn't allow sites to access your microphone's audio, but provides them with a transcript of the browser's speech-to-text transcriptions of anything in range.

It was found by a programmer in Israel, who says Google issued a low-priority label to the bug when he reported it, until he wrote about it on his blog and the post started picking up steam on social media.

The website has to keep you clicking for eight seconds to keep the microphone on, and Google says it has no timeline for a fix.

Submission + - Future Airline Safety Instructions will be given by Game Apps (uniud.it)

Submitted by vrml
vrml writes: They revealed the existence of their project only to aviation safety specialists at the recent FAA Conference on Cabin Safety in Philadelphia . Now a team of Italian researchers from the HCI Lab of the University of Udine has publicly released the first in a set of aviation safety apps on which they are working. Their mission is to propose novel, first-of-their-kind solutions to a well-known problem in aviation safety: passengers lack preparedness about what to do in aircraft emergencies, and do not pay attention or do not clearly comprehend the pre-flight briefings and safety cards used by airlines to instruct them about safety. So the project is re-inventing safety cards and briefings with new media, turning them into games and apps. The first game they decided to release focuses specifically on the “Brace for impact” position: players can pose the body of their avatar in the 3D airplane cabin and get a personalized simulation of a crash landing . To win the game, you must save your avatar (and yourself).

Submission + - Open Source Embroidermodder goes where no embroiderer has gone before (mrxstitch.com)

Submitted by supermatt
supermatt writes: Even Linus Torvalds has had trouble with the proprietary formats of Embroidery machines. Enter Embroidermodder 2, an open source program on Kickstarter to create and edit digital embroidery designs.

Jonathan Greig and Josh Varga launched a Kickstarter for Embroidermodder 2, an open source, cross-platform program to create and edit embroidery designs.

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