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Comment Re:Accountability (Score 1) 459

Ah but here's the rub; these scientists do control whether they make predictions or not. They made negligent predictions. They should be held responsible for those. If their job requires them to be responsible for something outside their abilities or competence than ethics requires them to resign, even, or rather, especially, if they think it is impossible to do

Comment Re:Accountability (Score 0) 459

With no scientists around, they could just sacrifice a virgin to the volcano gods and that would prevent the earthquakes.

Well that would only lead to one dead virgin instead of the 300 dead in Italy. Regardless of what you think scientists don't design buildings, unless they're architects and engineers as well. If they did they'd be arrested for practicing engineering without a license. If an Engineer signs off on a building design and it fails in an earthquake when it shouldn't, believe me he's going to be held liable. But if he's a scientist, well, they can't be held liable for their practice, because hey Its SCIENCE! Its not like they told everyone to not worry when the people in the area were getting scared and deciding to leave, oh wait that's exactly what happened!
Earth

Submission + - The Pacific Ocean is Polluted With Coffee (sciencedirect.com) 2

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: People aren’t the only ones getting a jolt from caffeine these days; in a new study published in Marine Pollution Bulletin, scientists found elevated concentrations of caffeine in the Pacific Ocean in areas off the coast of Oregon. With all those coffee drinkers in the Pacific Northwest, it should be no surprise that human waste containing caffeine would ultimately make its way through municipal water systems and out to sea – but how will the presence of caffeine in our oceans affect human health and natural ecosystems?
Wine

Submission + - ReactOS Presented to Russian President Putin (reactos.org) 2

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: While President Putin was touring the area of Seliger Youth Forum, Marat Karatov demonstrated what can only be described as a fair amount of daring when he called out to the president and requested to present ReactOS to him. Putin agreed, and the project has now presented ReactOS to two successive Russian presidents. Putin responded to the presentation by stating he would think on it.
Operating Systems

Submission + - Linux Developer Working on Windows 8 Secure Boot Bypass (paritynews.com)

Submitted by hypnosec
hypnosec writes: Windows 8 is going to be equipped with a secure boot technology from Microsoft dubbed Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) that will effectively lockup the operating system tightly and will prevent users from installing other operating system – be it Linux or Windows XP, Windows 7 and as a matter of fact another instance of Windows 8. This is definitely not good news and there has been already a lot of talk going on about the secure boot option of Windows 8. To bypass this, James Bottomley, chair at Linux Foundation's Technical Advisory Board has made public Intel Tianocore UEFI boot image along with some code. Developers can use this to get around the secure boot option of Windows 8.
Android

Submission + - Meet Jolla, the startup combating Apple and Google by breathing life into MeeGo (bgr.com)

Submitted by zacharye
zacharye writes: A new Finnish company called Jolla made a bit of a splash earlier this month by declaring it will become a new smartphone vendor using the MeeGo operating system to power its devices. Interest in MeeGo in United States is tepid, but in Europe and Asia, the OS attracted a lot of interest before Nokia chose to effectively kill its development in 2011. Can Jolla help resurrect MeeGo as a viable mobile OS alternative, or is this crusade just a lost cause in a market dominated by Google and Apple?
Open Source

Submission + - Why isn't there an Open Source EMR project? 2

Submitted by tripleevenfall
tripleevenfall writes: We've seen FOSS projects take on operating systems and other key desktop applications — so where is the major project effort to develop an open source Electronic Medical Record suite? With only a few major corporations like Cerner and Epic controlling the market and delivering spotty quality at times, is it time for a major effort to show what Open Source can do to reduce cost in the health care industry?
Medicine

Submission + - The camera that can see through frosted glass, and around corners (extremetech.com)

Submitted by
MrSeb
MrSeb writes: "Scientists in Israel have created a camera that can see around corners, or through solid objects such as frosted glass, and skin. The most exciting facet of this innovation is that the camera uses natural light to perform the imaging — such as a lamp, or the Sun — and not lasers or X-rays. Ori Katz, Eran Small, and Yaron Silberberg of the Weizmann Institute have shown that they can accurately resolve an object that’s hiding behind nearly opaque obstacles, or around a corner (or in another room, as long as the door’s open). In both cases, the light is scattered by the obstacle (the frosted glass, the corner wall), creating what appears to be white noise — but their camera, using spatial light modulation, can take these speckles of noise and enhance them "1000-fold" (the scientists' words) to recreate the image with surprising accuracy. Back in March, MIT announced a similar innovation — but it uses a laboratory-sized setup involving a femtosecond laser and complex hardware to discern time-of-flight. The Israeli camera looks like it uses off-the-shelf parts — and the fact that it works with natural light rather than a laser is rather cool. Its primary use will be in medical imaging (it's hard to get a sharp image of inside the brain, or other organs), but wannabe superheroes might find the technology interesting as well."
Medicine

Submission + - Colbert Calls Gates Foundation a 'Slut Factory'

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: Appearing on The Colbert Report this week to talk about the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s new initiative to make contraceptives more widely available in developing nations, Melinda Gates laughed off the jabs of cantankerous faux right-winger Colbert. "It’s a wildly controversial stance because you know from the culture wars in the United States, if you are in favor of contraception you are automatically a slut," Colbert said. "Aren’t you afraid that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will be thought of as a slut factory?" On a more serious note, a real threat to Gates' crusade to revolutionize contraception worldwide — which Melinda says should be 'totally uncontroversial' — is coming from the Catholic right, which excoriated her first public speech on the issue at a TEDxChange conference in early April.

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