Comment GNU Congressman? (Score 1) 163
One of the new legislators-who've-written-code is Will HURD.
Comment Re:XP as well? (Score 1) 178
No, it just means that MS isn't issuing a patch for XP. At least not exactly. They have released a patch today "for WEPOS and POSReady 2009", which is the branding given to the point-of-sale variant of Windows XP, which Microsoft still offers support for. There's a registry hack that makes Windows XP identifiy itself as Windows POS [insert joke here] when contacting the MS Update servers, and machines running that variant will get the patch.
Or so I'm told.
Comment not going to change (Score 1) 204
"it does make you wonder how long organizations can afford to continue promoting incompetent bosses in today's very dynamic and competitive business world."
Indefinitely? As long as all organizations are doing it, there's no competitive disadvantage to it. And as long as the job market remains one in which the overall supply of workers exceeds the demand (no change of that in sight), employees will continue to put up with unhappiness, incompetent bosses, etc (at least up to the point where the incompetent boss fires them for threatening their own employment
AT&T To "Pause" Gigabit Internet Rollout Until Net Neutrality Is Settled 308
An anonymous reader writes AT&T says it will halt its investment on broadband Internet service expansion until the federal rules on open Internet are clarified. "We can't go out and just invest that kind of money, deploying fiber to 100 cities other than these two million [covered by the DirecTV deal], not knowing under what rules that investment will be governed," AT&T Chief Randall Stephenson said during an appearance at a Wells Fargo conference, according to a transcript provided by AT&T. "And so, we have to pause, and we have to just put a stop on those kind of investments that we're doing today."
Comment pointless (Score 2) 164
And some people wonder why I don't have cable-TV service.
Comment Re:ah, I understand (Score 1) 430
By their logic, Boris Yeltsin (Putin's predecessor as President), as well as Viktor Zubkov and Sergei Stepashin (his immediate predecessors as Prime Minister) are now tainted as self-loathing closeted homo/bisexuals
What Will It Take To Make Automated Vehicles Legal In the US? 320
ashshy writes Tesla, Google, and many other companies are working on self-driving cars. When these autopilot systems become perfected and ubiquitous, the roads should be safer by orders of magnitude. So why doesn't Tesla CEO Elon Musk expect to reach that milestone until 2013 or so? Because the legal framework that supports American road rules is incredibly complex, and actually handled on a state-by-state basis. The Motley Fool explains which authorities Musk and his allies will have to convince before autopilot cars can hit the mainstream, and why the process will take another decade.
Ebola Does Not Require an "Ebola Czar," Nor Calling Up the National Guard 384
Lasrick writes: David Ropeik explores risk-perception psychology and Ebola in the U.S. "[O]fficials are up against the inherently emotional and instinctive nature of risk-perception psychology. Pioneering research on this subject by Paul Slovic, Baruch Fischhoff, and others, vast research on human cognition by Daniel Kahneman and colleagues, and research on the brain's fear response by neuroscientists Joseph LeDoux, Elizabeth Phelps, and others, all make abundantly clear that the perception of risk is not simply a matter of the facts, but more a matter of how those facts feel. ... People worry more about risks that are new and unfamiliar. People worry more about risks that cause greater pain and suffering. People worry more about threats against which we feel powerless, like a disease for which there is no vaccine and which has a high fatality rate if you get it. And people worry more about threats the more available they are to their consciousness—that is, the more aware people are of them."
Comment Re:Local Backups (Score 1) 150
Having all of your data off-site in the cloud without local back-ups is as foolish as having all of your data local with no off-site back-ups.
Comment Re:Read below to see what Bennett has to say. (Score 1) 622
"Most of the other rebuttals being offered, are logically incoherent, and, as such, are not likely to change the minds of the victim-blamers," is perhaps the funniest bit of empathy-challenged nonsense I've read in a while. Because the people who are irrationally blaming the victims are clearly going to be persuaded only by the most mathematically sound argument?
Comment PETA are not p.e.t.a. (Score 1) 367
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals are an embarrassment to most people who are for the ethical treatment of animals. They are the intellectual equivalent of anti-vaxxers, homeopaths, and people without celiac disease who won't eat gluten.
Comment Dark Data (Score 1) 23
Has this class of data been termed "Dark Data" yet?
Brown Dog: a Search Engine For the Other 99 Percent (of Data) 23
aarondubrow writes: We've all experienced the frustration of trying to access information on websites, only to find that the data is trapped in outdated, difficult-to-read file formats and that metadata — the critical data about the data, such as when and how and by whom it was produced — is nonexistent. Led by Kenton McHenry, a team at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications is working to change that. Recipients in 2013 of a $10 million, five-year award from the National Science Foundation, the team is developing software that allows researchers to manage and make sense of vast amounts of digital scientific data that is currently trapped in outdated file formats. The NCSA team recently demonstrated two publicly-available services to make the contents of uncurated data collections accessible.
Comment one step closer (Score 1) 107
One step closer to those Heisenberg compensators that Miles and Reg were always trying to fix.
First Teleportation of Multiple Quantum Properties of a Single Photon 107
KentuckyFC writes Photons have many properties, such as their frequency, momentum, spin and orbital angular momentum. But when it comes to quantum teleportation, physicists have only ever been able to to transmit one of these properties at a time. So the possibility of teleporting a complete quantum object has always seemed a distant dream. Now a team of Chinese physicists has worked out how to teleport more than one quantum property. The team has demonstrated it by teleporting both the spin and orbital angular momentum of single photons simultaneously. They point out that there is no reason in principle why the technique cannot be generalized to include other properties as well, such as a photon's frequency, momentum and so on. That's an important step towards teleporting complex quantum objects in their entirety, such as atoms, molecules and perhaps even small viruses.
