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Comment Re:God (Score 1) 794

by arobatino (#46376287) Attached to: Whole Foods: America's Temple of Pseudoscience

I perceive them differently because Whole Foods isn't trying to shove their beliefs into the public schools. Everyone should have the right to believe silly nonsense, but no one has the right to impose their beliefs on others, and they especially don't have the right to use the instruments of government to do so.

I agree that creationism shouldn't be taught in public schools. The thing is, under the current system, the government effectively coerces people into sending their kids to public schools, through taxes. So if you want your kids taught differently, you have to double pay either by sending them to private school, or home schooling them.

Comment Re: Well for once I agree with religious crazies (Score 1) 363

by arobatino (#46310585) Attached to: UAE Clerics' Fatwa Forbids Muslims From Traveling To Mars

Unlike the conditions the early settlers were subjected to, Mars has a much more predictable environment, so the risk of death should be much lower. Unfortunately, with vastly improved communication today, if people on Mars die, we'll all hear about it immediately, so it'll seem worse.

Comment Re:It's the devil (Score 1) 108

by arobatino (#46227209) Attached to: Massive New Cambrian-Era Fossil Bed Found

I always though the Fundamentalist position was that fossils were put there by God, so as to test the faith of hapless followers.

If that's true, then creationists are being blasphemous when they suggest that their beliefs are supported by physical evidence, since an omniscient, omnipotent God wouldn't leave any. (Although they're obviously not above it if that's what it takes to get it taught in public schools.)

Submission + - Rosetta is Awake. Prepares to Chase Comet (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: The European comet-chasing probe Rosetta is up and running again today after it successfully roused itself from a 2½-year sleep and signaled anxious controllers on the ground. The spacecraft had been put into hibernation during the most distant part of its 10-year journey in pursuit of comet 67 P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko because sunlight was too dim to keep its solar-powered systems running. Dozing in a slow stabilizing spin, Rosetta could not receive signals from the ground, so there was a risk that some problem might prevent it from responding to its preset alarm call at 10:00 GMT this morning. Even then, there were many processes to go through before news reached Earth: The spacecraft’s heaters would need to warm up its systems, its startrackers get a fix, boosters halt the spin, solar arrays turn towards the sun, and, finally, its communications antenna would need to point at Earth. It was not till 18.18 GMT today that the signal was picked up by NASA’s ground stations at Goldstone, California, and Canberra in Australia, and transmitted to the European Space Agency’s (ESA’s) control center at Darmstadt in Germany. “This was one alarm clock not to hit snooze on, and after a tense day we are absolutely delighted to have our spacecraft awake and back online,” Fred Jansen, ESA’s Rosetta mission manager, said in a statement.

Submission + - Legendary Demonoid BitTorrent Tracker Apparently Back Online (torrentfreak.com) 1

Submitted by Freshly Exhumed
Freshly Exhumed writes: TorrentFreak has broken the news that after more than a year of downtime the Demonoid tracker came back online on January 9, 2014. The tracker is linked to nearly 400,000 torrent files and more than a million peers, which makes it one of the largest working BitTorrent trackers on the Internet. There is no word yet on when the site will make a full comeback, but the people behind it say they are working to revive one of the most famous file-sharing communities. As the single largest semi-private BitTorrent tracker that ever existed, Demonoid used to offer a home to millions of file-sharers. Note that this is apparently the original Demonoid and not the d2 site that claims to be using the Demonoid database.

Submission + - Researchers propose alternative way to allocate science funding (embo.org)

Submitted by arobatino
arobatino writes: From the article:

The new approach is possible due to recent advances in mathematics and computer technologies. The system involves giving all scientists an annual, unconditional fixed amount of funding to conduct their research. All funded scientists are, however, obliged to donate a fixed percentage of all of the funding that they previously received to other researchers. As a result, the funding circulates through the community, converging on researchers that are expected to make the best use of it. “Our alternative funding system is inspired by the mathematical models used to search the internet for relevant information,” said Bollen. “The decentralized funding model uses the wisdom of the entire scientific community to determine a fair distribution of funding.”

Submission + - Yahoo's Email Encryption Needs Work (itworld.com)

Submitted by itwbennett
itwbennett writes: On Tuesday, Yahoo delivered on a promise that it made in October to enable email encryption for everyone by default by January 8. While this is a great step, the company's HTTPS implementation appears to be inconsistent across servers and even technically insecure in some cases, according to Ivan Ristic, director of application security research at security firm Qualys. For example, some of Yahoo's HTTPS email servers use RC4 as the preferred cipher with most clients. 'RC4 is considered weak, which is why we advise that people either don't use it, or if they feel they must, use it as a last resort,' Ristic said.

Submission + - North Carolina destroys historical records .. (wordpress.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: North Carolina destroys historical records ..

on Friday, December 6, 2013, at 6:00 in the evening (after all the county workers had left, and with no notice to the local historical group involved in the project), a team from the North Carolina Archives swept in and confiscated ALL the materials – with the cover of Law Enforcement! They took the documents to the County Incinerator, and methodically burned EVERYTHING. They did this while a few locals stood by, not understanding why or precisely what was happening.

Comment Re:I'm sorry Senator, your question isn't valid (Score 1) 363

by arobatino (#45866891) Attached to: Senator Bernie Sanders Asks NSA If Agency Is Spying On Congress

As we have stated previously, meta-data is NOT data

Except when companies want to release metadata such as the number of national security orders received, in which case this one integer is so sensitive that they are forced to drop the lowest 10 significant bits and only report it in bands of 1,000. It's safe to assume that the NSA gets to store all the bits in their integers.

Comment Re:And the opinon of the NY Times matters because? (Score 1) 354

by arobatino (#45847875) Attached to: The New York Times Pushes For Clemency For Snowden

If the NSA pays folks to play video games, they will most certainly also pay folks to troll Slashdot. The comment that you responded to above looks, smells, walks and talks like a government flak.

See Hanlon's Razor. There are more than enough mindless authoritarians in the general population willing to do this for free.

Submission + - Peakl Oil Threat Gone - Era of Cheap Biofuels finaly here?

Submitted by Bodhammer
Bodhammer writes: Pacific Northwest Nation Labs has developed a new technology that turns algae to crude in an hour. This press release http://www.pnnl.gov/news/release.aspx?id=1029 describes process and the partner they have selected for the pilot plant. The process is efficient and produces crude oil which can be traditionally refined, clean water, gas which can be burned or cleaned to make LNG, and nutrients that can go back into the process. Is this the end of the Peak Oil threat?

Submission + - NSA's Malware Heroics Questioned By Security Experts (informationweek.com)

Submitted by CowboyRobot
CowboyRobot writes: The NSA helped foil a "nation state" that planned to launch a BIOS-bricking malware attack against the United States. That claim was delivered Sunday night in an 'Inside the NSA' segment on CBS's 60 Minutes that was partially filmed inside the intelligence agency's headquarters. The agency, of course, is struggling to repair its image — and stave off additional oversight or curtailing of its intelligence-gathering techniques — since documents leaked by former agency contractor Edward Snowden revealed how the NSA has created a massive digital dragnet that's been intercepting millions of Americans' communications and related tracking data. Industry analysts have said that the fallout from those revelations could cost technology businesses billions in lost revenue over the next few years. Miller's interviewees included NSA director Gen. Keith Alexander, who first approached CBS about doing the news segment. But Alexander relied on evasion and doublespeak when it came to addressing some of the NSA's more contentious practices, for example when responding to questions about whether the agency hacks into datacenters run by the likes of Google and Yahoo. "We do target terrorist communications. And terrorists use communications from Google, from Yahoo, and from other service providers. So our objective is to collect those communications no matter where they are."

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