timothy - Slashdot User

Submission + - Boeing to take space tourists on its CST-100 spacecraft to the ISS (examiner.com)

Submitted by MarkWhittington on Friday September 19, 2014 @11:44PM

MarkWhittington writes: According to a Thursday story in Investment Business Daily, Boeing, whose CST-100 spacecraft was one of the two winners of NASA’s commercial crew competition, will reserve one seat per flight for a paying tourist. For a price comparable to what space tourists now pay for trips on the Russian Soyuz, anyone will be able to take a jaunt to the International Space Station. The move places Boeing in direct competition with the Russians, who are working through a company called Space Adventures for their tourist space jaunts.

Submission + - KDE Software UI to become simpler in future (themukt.com)

Submitted by sfcrazy on Friday September 19, 2014 @11:05PM

sfcrazy writes: KDE Software is often criticized for being too complicated for an average user to use. Try setting up Kmail and you would know what I mean. The KDE developers are aware of it and now they are working on making KDE UI simpler. KDE usability team lead Thomas Pfeiffer Thomas prefers a layered feature exposure so that users can enjoy certain advanced features at a later stage after they get accustomed to the basic functionality of the application. He quotes the earlier (pre-Plasma era) vision of KDE 4 – “Anything that makes Linux interesting for technical users (shells, compilation, drivers, minute user settings) will be available; not as the default way of doing things, but at the user’s discretion.” And he goes ahead to remind the simplified form in KDE HIG (Human Interface Guidelines) – “Simple by default, powerful when needed.”

Submission + - Video Released from The World First Open Source Cinematic Videocam (indiegogo.com)

Submitted by atagunov on Friday September 19, 2014 @10:28PM

atagunov writes: Video clips have been released as crowdfunding starts for the world first open source cinematic videocam.

"I am a filmmaker myself ... I would like to have powerful tools that I know to have full control over and that I can tune and tweak"

says Sebastian Pichelhofer of Apertus association. He is working on Axiom Beta the 2nd generation Apertus videocam fully open sourced under GPL and OHL.

This cool little project may need a bit of help with crowdfunding least they have diffculty reaching from current EUR 56k to the target amount of EUR 100k.

Submission + - US Law Proposed to Limit US Search Warrants for Data Stored Abroad

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 19, 2014 @09:39PM

An anonymous reader writes: On Thursday, a bipartisan law was introduced in the Senate that would limit US law enforcement's ability to obtain user data from US companies with servers physically located abroad. Law enforcement would still be able to gain access to those servers with a US warrant, but the warrant would be limited to data belonging to US citizens. This bill, called the LEADS Act (PDF), addresses concerns by the likes of Microsoft and other tech giants that worry about the impact law enforcement over-reach will have on their global businesses. Critics remain skeptical: "we are concerned about how the provision authorizing long-arm warrants for the accounts of US persons would be administered, and whether we could reasonably expect reciprocity from other nations on such an approach."

Submission + - NY Magistrate: Legal Papers Can Be Server Via Facebook (nypost.com)

Submitted by Wylde Stile on Friday September 19, 2014 @09:37PM

Wylde Stile writes: A Staten Island, NY family court support magistrate allowed a man to serve his ex-wife via Facebook. The man tried to serve the woman in person and via mail, but the woman moved with no forwarding address. The children would not return his calls so he has no way to get the address. The magistrate decided that in-person and mail would not work

The ex-wife maintains an active Facebook account. She even liked some photos on the current wife Facebook page days before the ruling. The magistrate conclude that the ex-wife could be served through Facebook.

Submission + - Android Apps Now Unofficially Able to Run on Any Major Desktop OS

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 19, 2014 @09:12PM

An anonymous reader writes: A developer, who goes by the handle Vladikoff, has tweaked Google's App Runtime for Chrome (ARC) to allow any Android app to run on any major desktop operating system, not just the handful announced last week which were also limited to Chrome OS. His tweaked version of ARC is re-packaged as ARChon. The install isn't very straightforward, and you have to be in developer mode on Chrome. But there's a support forum on reddit. The extension will work on any OS running the desktop version of Chrome 37 and up as long as the user also installs chromeos-apk, which converts raw Android app packages (APKs) to a Chrome extension. Ars Technica reports that apps run this way are buggy, fast, and crash often but expresses optimism for when Google officially "opens the floodgates on the Play Store, putting 1.3 million Android apps onto nearly every platform".

Submission + - Why a Chinese Company is the Biggest IPO Ever in the US

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 19, 2014 @08:36PM

An anonymous reader writes: The Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba has made headlines lately in US financial news. At the closing of its Initial Public Offering (IPO) on Friday, it had raised $21.8 billion on the New York Stock Exchange, larger even than Visa's ($17.9 billion), Facebook's ($16 billion), and General Motors ($15.8 billion) IPOs. Some critics do say that Alibaba's share price will plummet from its current value of $93.60 in the same way that Facebook's and Twitter's plummeted dramatically after initial offerings. Before we speculate, however, we should take note of what Alibaba is exactly. Beyond the likes of Amazon and eBay, Alibaba apparently links average consumers directly to manufacturers, which is handy for an economy ripe for change. Approximately half of Alibaba's shares "were sold to 25 investment firms", and "most of the shares went to US investors".

Feed Techdirt: PACER Finally Agrees To Put Back Court Documents That Were Deleted (google.com)

From feed by feedfeeder on Friday September 19, 2014 @08:12PM

Sooner or later this had to happen. Back in August, with no warning, the PACER electronic court document system, overseen by the Administrative Office of the judicial system, announced that as part of an "upgrade" it had deleted a bunch of cases. Once this started getting some attention, officials gave a weak, nonsensical "explanation" for why no one could figure out how to take some PDFs and move them to the new system. As for why it couldn't work with many, many public-service oriented archivers -- who all offered to host the deleted works -- no answer was ever given. Recently, however, Congress started to ask questions, and then all of a sudden the Administrative Office decided to wake up to the fact that this was a bad idea. The missing documents will soon be back.

"The Administrative Office is working to restore electronic access to these cases by converting the docket sheets in these cases to PDF format which will allow us to make them available in PACER," said David Sellers, assistant director for public affairs at the AO, in a statement to the Washington Post. "This process will be completed in the four appellate courts by the end of October. We are also working to provide a similar solution for the dockets on the legacy system in the California Central bankruptcy court."

Of course, still nothing is being done to actually make the PACER system more accessible to the public and dumping the ridiculous 10 cents/per page fee the system charges (which almost certainly breaks the law). Maybe if Congress started asking questions about that travesty as well, we'd finally start to see some real improvements.

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Submission + - Data archiving standards need to be future-proofed (enterprisestorageforum.com)

Submitted by storagedude on Friday September 19, 2014 @06:33PM

storagedude writes: Imagine in the not-too-distant future, your entire genome is on archival storage and accessed by your doctors for critical medical decisions. You'd want that data to be safe from hackers and data corruption, wouldn't you? Oh, and it would need to be error-free and accessible for about a hundred years too. The problem is, we currently don't have the data integrity, security and format migration standards to ensure that, according to Henry Newman at Enterprise Storage Forum. Newman calls for standards groups to add new features like collision-proof hash to archive interfaces and software.

'It will not be long until your genome is tracked from birth to death. I am sure we do not want to have genome objects hacked or changed via silent corruption, yet this data will need to be kept maybe a hundred or more years through a huge number of technology changes. The big problem with archiving data today is not really the media, though that too is a problem. The big problem is the software that is needed and the standards that do not yet exist to manage and control long-term data,' writes Newman.

Submission + - Google's Doubleclick ad servers exposed millions of computers to malware (theverge.com)

Submitted by wabrandsma on Friday September 19, 2014 @05:08PM

wabrandsma writes: from The Verge:
Last night, researchers at Malwarebytes noticed strange behavior on sites like Last.fm, The Times of Israel and The Jerusalem Post. Ads on the sites were being unusually aggressive, setting off anti-virus warnings and raising flags in a number of Malwarebytes systems. After some digging, researcher Jerome Segura realized the problem was coming from Google's DoubleClick ad servers and the popular Zedo ad agency. Together, they were serving up malicious ads designed to spread the recently identified Zemot malware. A Google representative has confirmed the breach, saying "our team is aware of this and has taken steps to shut this down."

Submission + - 'Reactive' Development Turns 2.0 (readwrite.com)

Submitted by electronic convict on Friday September 19, 2014 @04:34PM

electronic convict writes: First there was "agile" development. Now there's a new software movement—called 'reactive' development—that sets out principles for building resilient and failure-tolerant applications for cloud, mobile, multicore and Web-scale systems. ReadWrite's Matt Asay sat down with Jonas Bonér, the author of the Reactive Manifesto (just released in version 2.0), for a discussion of what, exactly, the reactive movement aims to fix in software development and how we get there from here.

Submission + - Researchers Report Largest DNA Origami To Date (acs.org)

Submitted by MTorrice on Friday September 19, 2014 @11:50AM

MTorrice writes: Bioengineers can harness DNA’s remarkable ability to self-assemble to build two- and three-dimensional nanostructures through DNA origami. Until now, researchers using this approach have been limited to building structures that are tens of square nanometers in size. Now a team reports the largest individual DNA origami structures to date, which reach sizes of hundreds of square nanometers. What’s more, they have developed a less expensive way to synthesize the DNA strands needed, overcoming a tremendous obstacle to scaling up the technology.

Submission + - Why the iPhone 6 Maintained the Same Base Memory as the iPhone 5 (computerworld.com)

Submitted by Lucas123 on Friday September 19, 2014 @09:52AM

Lucas123 writes: When the iPhone 5 was launched two years ago, the base $199 (with wireless plan) model came with 16GB of flash memory. Fast forward to this week when the iPhone 6 was launched with the same capacity. Now consider that the cost of 16GB of NAND flash has dropped by more than 13% over the past two years. So why would Apple increase capacity on its $299 model iPhone 6 to 64GB (eliminating the 32GB model), but but keep the 16GB in the $199 model? The answer may lie in the fact that the 16GB iPhone is, and has been, by far the best selling model. IHS analyst Fang Zhang believes Apple is using that to push users to its iCloud storage service. Others believe restricting storage capacity allows Apple to afford the new features, like NFC and biometrics.

Submission + - Seeking recommendations for places to take kids to get interested in space

Submitted by orange_account on Friday September 19, 2014 @09:47AM

orange_account writes: Where are good places in the US to bring kids to get them excited about space? Places like the Kennedy Space Center, Johnson Space Center, and local planetariums come to mind. What other places have everyone here enjoying bringing kids to? I'd especially appreciate recommendations with more science and less gift shops.

Submission + - The disaster and ensuing coverup of the Obamacare website

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 19, 2014 @09:29AM

An anonymous reader writes: New reports reveal significant corruption in the Obama administration’s botched effort to create the Obamacare website.
The Government Office of Accountability released a report earlier this week detailing the security flaws in the site, but a report from the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform released yesterday is even more damning. Titled, “Behind the Curtain of the HealthCare.gov Rollout,” the report fingers the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which oversaw the development of the site, and its parent Department of Health and Human Services.

“Officials at CMS and HHS refused to admit to the public that the website was not on track to launch without significant functionality problems and substantial security risks,” the report says. “There is also evidence that the Administration, to this day, is continuing its efforts to shield ongoing problems with the website from public view.”

The evidence includes emails that show Obamacare officials more interested in keeping their problems from leaking to the press than working to fix them. This is both both a coverup and incompetence.

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