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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."

Submission + - Edward Snowden's coworker refutes NSA claims (forbes.com)

Submitted by wannabegeek2
wannabegeek2 writes: check for dupes.

in an article which purportedly was carefully verified, a former coworker states that the NSA's current PR blitz amounts to a smear campaign against Mr. Snowden. Further, he describes him as a genius among genius's, who was given the access he needed by the NSA, and did not need to steal or dupe his coworkers to obtain passwords to accomplish his task.

Submission + - Child 'training' book triggers backlash

Submitted by mrspoonsi
mrspoonsi writes: BBC Reports: A child-raising book that advocates whipping with branches and belts has sold hundreds of thousands of copies to evangelical Christians. But the deaths of three children whose parents appear to have been influenced by the authors' teachings have provoked a growing backlash. The implements can vary. For a child under one year old, a willowy branch or a 1ft (30cm) ruler is recommended. For older children, a larger branch or a belt. But the objective of the "spanking" described in Michael and Debi Pearl's To Train Up a Child is the same — making children surrender completely to their parents' will. Like other people who have witnessed Michael Pearl's advice being put into practice, Hannah says her parents were seduced by the idea of a simple formula that would make their children compliant. "The problem is that [Pearl] tells you you have to break your children," she says. "And to get there you have to be completely ruthless." To Train Up a Child is widely seen as the most extreme of the publications produced by conservative Christians in the US who advocate corporal punishment.

Submission + - OpenSSH has a new cipher, chacha20-poly1305, from D.J. Bernstein!

Submitted by ConstantineM
ConstantineM writes: Inspired by a recent Google initiative to adopt ChaCha20 and Poly1305 for TLS, OpenSSH developer Damien Miller has added a similar protocol to ssh, chacha20-poly1305@openssh.com, which is based on D. J. Bernstein algorithms that are specifically optimised to provide the highest security at the lowest computational cost, and not require any special hardware at doing so. Some further details are in his blog, and at undeadly. The source code of the protocol is remarkably simple — less than 100 lines of code!

Submission + - Why Drone Package Delivery Will Be A Nightmare For Law Enforcement (forbes.com) 1

Submitted by SonicSpike
SonicSpike writes: Law enforcement may already be gritting its teeth over the idea of legal drone delivery. Being able to send things by drone could be hugely disruptive to the existing mail system: a peer-to-peer postal service that cuts out the USPS and FedEx. That’s fine when Amazon is shipping out books, but what about the kind of deliveries that law enforcement wants to be able to track? The existing postal system is full of surveillance.

If drones took off (heh) as a private way to send packages and letters over short or long distances, law enforcement would lose an important crime-fighting tool: their surveillance of the mail system. Much like electronic communication has gone “dark” thanks to encryption tools, the postal system could go “dark” thanks to private robot postmen.

This may sound far-fetched, but private, illicit drone deliveries are already happening. Last month, three men and a woman were caught smuggling tobacco into a Georgia prison. They used an Octocopter to do it. Unfortunately for them, their drone wasn’t an autonomous one and they had to crouch in the woods near the prison yard and watch the flight of their copter with binoculars. If it had been an autonomous drone, they may well have gotten away with the crime, and the smugglers wouldn’t be facing up to 20 years in their drone delivery zone for crossing prison guard lines with contraband.

Submission + - Large-scale trial of driverless cars to begin on open roads (telegraph.co.uk)

Submitted by SonicSpike
SonicSpike writes: Volvo is to introduce 100 driverless cars on to public roads as part of the world’s first large-scale autonomous driving pilot.

The cars will drive in normal, everyday road conditions, surrounded by pedestrians and other traffic, and will even be able to self-park, as the Swedish car-maker (which is now under Chinese ownership) attempts to demonstrate the benefits, including improved safety and efficiency, of self-driving cars.

Volvo is working alongside the Swedish Transport Administration, The Swedish Transport Agency, Lindholmen Science Park and the City of Gotehenburg, with the goal of placing both it and Sweden as leaders in the development of future mobility.

Submission + - The Quietest Place on Earth Will Cause You to Hallucinate in 45 Minutes

Submitted by Hugh Pickens DOT Com
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes: Industry Tap reports that there is a place so quiet you can hear your heart beat, your lungs breathe and your stomach digest. It's the anechoic chamber at Orfield Labs in Minnesota where 3ft of sound-proofing fiberglass wedges and insulated steel and concrete absorbs 99.99% of sound, making it the quietest place in the world. "When it’s quiet, ears will adapt," says the company’s founder and president, Steven Orfield. "The quieter the room, the more things you hear. You'll hear your heart beating, sometimes you can hear your lungs, hear your stomach gurgling loudly. In the anechoic chamber, you become the sound." The chamber is used by a multitude of manufacturers, to test how loud their products are and the space normally rents for $300 to $400 an hour. "It's used for formal product testing, for research into the sound of different things — heart valves, the sound of the display of a cellphone, the sound of a switch on a car dashboard." But the strangest thing about the chamber is that sensory deprivation makes the room extremely disorienting, and people can rarely stay in the dark space for long. As the minutes tick by in absolute quiet, the human mind begins to lose its grip, causing test subjects to experience visual and aural hallucinations. "We challenge people to sit in the chamber in the dark — one reporter stayed in there for 45 minutes," says Orfield who says even he can't stand the quiet for more than about 30 minutes. Nasa uses a similar chamber to test its astronauts putting them in a water-filled tank inside the room to see "how long it takes before hallucinations take place and whether they could work through it".

Comment Re:I'm not an artist... (Score 1) 70

From the article:

Much later, he did a computer analysis of a high-resolution scan of a Vermeer interior, and discovered “an exponential relationship in the light on the white wall.” The brightness of any surface becomes exponentially less bright the farther it is from a light source—but the unaided human eye doesn’t register that. According to Jenison, the painting he digitally deconstructed shows just such a diminution from light to dark.

This suggests that his unaided eyes wouldn't have been physically capable of seeing this exponential dropoff, even if he was a savant.

Submission + - Computer Model Reveals Escape Plan From Poverty's Vicious Circle (medium.com)

Submitted by KentuckyFC
KentuckyFC writes: Infectious disease condemns poor countries to an endless cycle of ill health and poverty. Now a powerful new model of the link between disease and economic growth has revealed why some escape plans work while others just make matters worse. The problem is that when workers suffer from poor health, economic output goes down. And if economic output goes down, there is less to spend on healthcare. And if spending on healthcare drops, workers become less healthy. And so on. So an obvious solution is for a country to spend more on healthcare. But the new model says governments must take care since the cost to a poor country can send the economy spiralling into long term decline. By contrast, an injection of capital from outside the country allows spending on healthcare to increase without any drop in economic output. "“We find that a large influx of capital is successful in escaping the poverty trap, but increasing health spending alone is not,” say the authors. And the amount required is relatively little. The model suggests that long term investment needs only to be more than 15 per cent of the cost of healthcare. But anything less than this cannot prevent the vicious circle of decline.

Comment Satellite fire detection limited by clouds (Score 1) 91

by arobatino (#45448883) Attached to: Scientists Propose Satellite Early Warning System For Forest Fires

The only mention of cloud cover I could find was in the full paper:

FUEGO — Fire Urgency Estimator in Geosynchronous Orbit — A Proposed Early-Warning Fire Detection System

One quote from the paper:

Atmospheric transmission windows in the near and mid-infrared are adequate for detecting fires. Fires
cannot be seen under heavy cloud cover, and can be detected with reduced sensitivity under smoke and
thin clouds, depending on the wavelength of the detectors, smoke particulate size, and moisture content
of the atmospheric column.

Comment Re:Linked article says exact opposite (Score 1) 257

by arobatino (#45272325) Attached to: Chrome Will End XP Support in 2015; Firefox Has No Plans To Stop

Noticed the summary is now "Chrome Will End XP Support in 2015; Firefox Has No Plans To Stop". That's no longer the exact opposite of the truth, at least, but it's still false for Chrome. The Google article only says

we’re extending support for Chrome on Windows XP, and will continue to provide regular updates and security patches until at least April 2015.

That's it. In other words, like Mozilla, Google has no plans to end XP support, but unlike Mozilla, they are promising support for a specific time. The fact that they don't commit to more than a year's extra support doesn't prove they intend to stop after that - for example, they've only committed to keeping Google Voice free for a year at a time, and it's still free years later.

Comment Linked article says exact opposite (Score 5, Informative) 257

by arobatino (#45268313) Attached to: Chrome Will End XP Support in 2015; Firefox Has No Plans To Stop

The linked article, posted 20 hours ago, actually says

Neowin asked Mozilla, the creator of Firefox, if it has any plans to end support for XP and Johnathan Nightingale, VP of Firefox at Mozilla stated, "We have no plans to discontinue support for our XP users."

and basically the same for Chrome.

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