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Submission + - Kernel DBus Now Boots With Systemd On Fedora (phoronix.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Red Hat developers doing some holiday hacking have managed to get a bootable system with systemd + KDBUS on Fedora 20. KDBUS is a new DBus implementation for the Linux kernel that provides greater security and better performance than the DBus daemon in user-space. Systemd in turn interfaces with KDBUS for user-space interaction. Testing was done on Fedora 20 but the systemd + KDBUS configuration should work on any modern distribution when using the newest code.

Submission + - Google Makes it Harder for Marketers to Collect User Data

Submitted by cagraham
cagraham writes: In a seemingly minor update, Google announced that all Gmail images will now be cached on their own servers, before being displayed to users. This means that users won't have to click to download images in every email now — they'll just automatically be shown. For marketers, however, the change has serious implications. Because each user won't download the images from a third-party server, marketers won't be able to see open-rates, log IP addresses, or gather information on user location and browser type. Google says the changes are intended to enhance user privacy and security.

Submission + - Create your own Bullet Time camera rig with Raspberry Pi (muktware.com)

Submitted by sfcrazy
sfcrazy writes: A team of extremely creative people have created a really inexpensive bullet time set-up using Raspberry Pis — and the whole set-up costs less than a professional DSLR camera. The rig looks more like the LHC at CERN using nearly half a kilometre of network cables, 48 Raspberry Pis fitted with cameras and PiFace Control. The rig worked perfectly — in terms of doing what a bullet time set-up should do. Raspberry Pis achieved the Hollywood's 'frozen time' affect at a much lesser cost.

Submission + - Diet Drugs Work: Why Won't Doctors Prescribe Them?

Submitted by Hugh Pickens DOT Com
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes: Suzanne Koven, a primary-care doctor at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, writes in the New Yorker that the FDA has currently approved four drugs that will help patients lose weight but few primary-care physicians will prescribe them. Qsymia and Belviq work by suppressing appetite and by increasing metabolism, and by other mechanisms that are not yet fully understood. "But I’ve never prescribed diet drugs, and few doctors in my primary-care practice have, either," writes Koven and the problem is that, while specialists who study obesity view it as a chronic but treatable disease, primary-care physicians are not fully convinced that they should be treating obesity at all. The inauspicious history of diet drugs no doubt contributes to doctors’ reluctance to prescribe them. In the nineteen-forties, when doctors began prescribing amphetamines for weight loss, rates of addiction soared. But in addition, George Bray thinks that socioeconomic factors play into physicians’ lack of enthusiasm for treating obesity because obesity is, disproportionately, a disease of poverty. Because of this association, many erroneously see obesity as more of a social condition than a medical one, a condition that simply requires people to try harder. Louis Aronne likens the current attitude toward obesity to the prevailing attitude toward mental illness years ago and remembers, during his medical training, seeing psychotic patients warehoused and sedated, treated as less than human. "What the hell was I thinking when I didn’t do anything to help them? How wrong could I have been?’" Specialists are now developing programs to aid primary-care physicians in treating obesity more aggressively and effectively but first primary-care physicians will have to want to treat it. “Whether you call it a disease or not is not so germane," says Lee M. Kaplan. "The root problem is that whatever you call it, nobody’s taking it seriously enough.”

Submission + - US's nuclear launch code was 00000000 for 15 years (dailymail.co.uk)

Submitted by bsharma
bsharma writes: For nearly 20 years, the secret code to authorize launching U.S. nuclear missiles, and starting World War III, was terrifyingly simple and even noted down on a checklist.

From 1962, when John F Kennedy instituted PAL encoding on nuclear weapons, until 1977, the combination to fire the devastating missiles at the height of the Cold War was just 00000000.

This was chosen by Strategic Air Command in an effort to make the weapons as quick and as easy to launch as possible.

Submission + - arkOS self-hosted server crowdfund reaches 100% of goal

Submitted by jacook
jacook writes: As of this afternoon (November 28th) the arkOS project to create an open-source, stable and easy-to-use self-hosted data solution has achieved 100% funding in its crowdfunding campaign, with 6 days left to go. arkOS promises to use the funds to advance the stability of the platform and to extend its features to include self-hosted email and chat services, new services for dynamic DNS integration, and much more.

Submission + - Online engineering course comes with a DIY drawing robot (kickstarter.com)

Submitted by jywarren
jywarren writes: These MIT engineers working out of a hackerspace are putting on an online engineering course where you get a kit to build your own drawing robot arm. Enrollment is limited, since they are lasercutting and shipping all the robots themselves.

Submission + - E-volo's 18-Rotor Electric Volocopter Makes Maiden Flight (gizmag.com) 1

Submitted by Zothecula
Zothecula writes: E-volo recently celebrated the maiden launch of its electric two-passenger, 18-rotor VC200 "Volocopter," touting the vehicle's safety and simplicity after an indoor flight inside the dm-arena in Karlsruhe, Germany on November 17. While the copter is similar in form to both quadcopters and helicopters, the company resists the helicopter label, pointing out the numerous radically different safety and design choices that set the vehicle apart.

Submission + - Could IBM's Watson Put Google in Jeopardy? 1

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: Over at Wired, Vashant Dhar poses a provocative question: What If IBM’s Watson Dethroned the King of Search? "If IBM did search," Dhar writes, "Watson would do much better than Google on the tough problems and they could still resort to a simple PageRank-like algorithm as a last resort. Which means there would be no reason for anyone to start their searches on Google. All the search traffic that makes Google seemingly invincible now could begin to shrink over time." Mixing supercomputers with a scalable architecture of massive amounts of simple processors and storage, Dhar surmises, would provide a formidable combination of a machine that can remember, know, and think. And because the costs of switching from Google search would not be prohibitive for most, the company is much more vulnerable to disruption. "The only question," Dhar concludes, "is whether it [IBM] wants to try and dethrone Google from its perch. That’s one answer Watson can’t provide."

Submission + - German Court Affirms GPL: Source Must Match Executable

Submitted by Alsee
Alsee writes: Fantec was found to be distributing Linux based media players with an incorrect (older) version of source code. Fantec blamed their Chinese supplier for the problem, but a German Court ruled Fantec was responsible for ensuring their own compliance with the GPL. "According to the court, the company should have checked the completeness of the sources themselves or with the help of experts, even if that would have incurred additional costs." I propose a better solution. If your company is subcontracting software development simply use the supplied source to compile your executable.

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: What's the best way to work on projects while travelling?

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: I really want to go travel the world with the money I've saved up at my day job, but I also want to grow as a developer in the process. This is a long-term engagement: 2-3 years or more depending on whether my software is successful. I'll probably be hopping from hostel to hostel at first, with a few weeks at each. How do I find a good work environment in these conditions? Do hostels generally have quiet areas where work could be done? Is it OK to get out your laptop and spend the day in a cafe in Europe, assuming you keep buying drinks? What about hackerspaces — are those common on the other side of the globe? (Apartments are an option for later on, but I'm concerned about losing the social atmosphere that's built in with the hostel lifestyle.)

I've never done anything like this before, but I'm really excited about the idea! Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Submission + - James Bulger - A Fathers Story (youtube.com)

Submitted by IMMORTALTRUTHZ
IMMORTALTRUTHZ writes: The father of James Bulger, the murdered toddler, has spoken of his "hatred" of judges and the legal system for allowing his son's killers to be released.

In 1993, two-year-old James was abducted from a shopping centre in Bootle, Liverpool, by Thompson and Venables. He was tortured and his body dumped on a railway line. The program follows Mr Bulger as he makes an emotional first visit to the site of his son's death, and lays flowers on the track.

Submission + - Why We'll Never Meet Aliens (blogspot.com)

Submitted by iggychaos
iggychaos writes: The idea that aliens will come visit us is fundamentally flawed. Paul Tyma ponders the technology that would be required for such an event and examines how evolution of that technology would preclude any reason to actually make the trip.

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