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Comment They are there to take your money ... (Score 3) 589

by Taco Cowboy (#48622995) Attached to: Top Five Theaters Won't Show "The Interview" Sony Cancels Release

...You know... Police, Army, Navy, Air Force, NSA, CIA, FBI, NRA, bronies...

If you are an American, you should know ...
 
The cops are there to enjoy Dunkin Donuts

The Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine are there to be used to invade yet another foreign country

The NSA, CIA, FBI are there to invade our privacy

The IRS are there to harass us and to take our money

As for the congress ? They are there to talk shit
The Military

Navy Develops a Shark Drone For Surveillance 45

Posted by samzenpus from the head-lasers-not-included dept.
An anonymous reader writes The Navy is testing a new underwater drone called GhostSwimmer, which is designed to a look like a shark and conduct surveillance work. It is being adapted by the chief of naval operations' Rapid Innovation Cell (CRIC) project, Silent NEMO, in Norfolk, Va.. GhostSwimmer is 5 feet long and weighs almost 100 pounds. It can operate in water depths from 10 inches to 300 feet, and is designed to operate autonomously for long periods of time, according to the Navy.
Google

ODF Support In Google Drive 40

Posted by Soulskill from the better-late-than-never dept.
An anonymous reader writes: Google's Chris DiBona told a London conference last week that ODF support was coming next year, but today the Google Drive team unexpectedly launched support for all three of the main variants — including long-absent Presentation files. You can now simply open ODT, ODS and ODP files in Drive with no fuss. It lacks support for comments and changes but at least it shows progress towards full support of the international document standard, something conspicuously missing for many years.

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: How do you quantify the privacy risk of various technologies?

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: I'm personally concerned about privacy in light of revelations by various whistle blowers. However, I'm really struggling to quantify the privacy risks posed by various technologies. I'm currently considering giving up on popular web applications and social networks by Google, Dropbox, Facebook, etc. However, I'm unable and or unwilling to give up on a cell phone and Internet connection. However, I wonder if there is any point to giving up on web apps if Verizon is recording and providing backdoor access to my cell phone location, telephone calls, messages, browsing habits, etc.

In general, how would you quantify the privacy risk of the following activities on a scale from one to ten?

- Owning a cell phone registered in your name
- Having an Internet connection registered in your name
- Using cloud services by Google, Dropbox, etc.
- Using social networks
- Having a car with the ability to transmit data
- Any of the dozens of other ways that I give up my privacy on a daily basis, but hadn't considered
Network

Single Group Dominates Second Round of Anti Net-Neutrality Comment Submissions 218

Posted by Soulskill from the spamming-for-liberty dept.
New submitter aquadood writes: According to the Sunlight Foundation's analysis of recent comment submissions to the FCC regarding Net Neutrality, the majority (56.5%) were submitted by a single organization called American Commitment, which has "shadowy" ties to the Koch brothers' network. The blog article goes on to break down the comments in-depth, showing a roughly 60/40 split between those against net neutrality and those for it, respectively.

Submission + - Researchers accidentally discover how to turn off skin aging gene

Submitted by BarbaraHudson
BarbaraHudson writes: While exploring the effects of the protein-degrading enzyme Granzyme B on blood vessels during heart attacks, professor David Granville and other researchers at the University of British Columbia couldn’t help noticing that mice engineered to lack the enzyme had beautiful skin at the end of the experiment, while normal mice showed signs of age. The discovery pushed Granville’s research in an unexpected new direction.

The researchers built a mechanized rodent tanning salon and exposed mice engineered to lack the enzyme and normal mice to UV light three times a week for 20 weeks, enough to cause redness, but not to burn. At the end of the experiment, the engineered mice still had smooth, unblemished skin, while the normal mice were deeply wrinkled.

Granville is also continuing to examine the effects of Granzyme B on aneurysms, especially of the aorta, the largest blood vessel in the human body. "When we inhibit Granzyme B in that model we can affect the collagen organization and strength of collagen in the aorta and prevent rupturing".

Submission + - Is the Higgs Boson a Piece of the Matter-Antimatter Puzzle? (stanford.edu)

Submitted by TaleSlinger
TaleSlinger writes: Why there's more matter than antimatter is one of the biggest questions confounding particle physicists and cosmologists, and it cuts to the heart of our own existence. In the time following the Big Bang, when the budding universe cooled enough for matter to form, most matter-antimatter particle pairs that popped into existence annihilated each other. Yet something tipped the balance in favor of matter, or we – and stars, planets, galaxies, life – would not be here.

The paper is based on a phenomenon called CP – or charge-parity – violation, the same phenomenon investigated by BaBar. CP violation means that nature treats a particle and its oppositely charged mirror-image version differently.

"Searching for CP violation at the LHC is tricky," Dolan said. "We've just started to look into the properties of the Higgs, and the experiments must be very carefully designed if we are to improve our understanding of how the Higgs behaves under different conditions.”

The theorists proposed that experimenters look for a process in which a Higgs decays into two tau particles, which are like supersized cousins of electrons, while the remainder of the energy from the original proton-proton collision sprays outward in two jets. Any mix of CP-even and CP-odd in the Higgs is revealed by the angle between the two jets.

"I wanted to add a CP violation measurement to our analysis, and what Matt, Martin and Michael proposed is the most viable avenue,” Philip Harris, a staff physicist at CERN and co-author of the paper said, adding that he's looking forward to all the data the LHC will generate when it starts up again early next year at its full design strength.

"Even with just a few months of data we can start to make real statements about the Higgs and CP violation," he said.

Submission + - A New Law For Superconductors (mit.edu)

Submitted by TaleSlinger
TaleSlinger writes: MIT researchers have discovered a new mathematical relationship — between material thickness, temperature, and electrical resistance — that appears to hold in all superconductors. They describe their findings in the latest issue of Physical Review B.

The result could shed light on the nature of superconductivity and could also lead to better-engineered superconducting circuits for applications like quantum computing and ultralow-power computing.

“We were able to use this knowledge to make larger-area devices, which were not really possible to do previously, and the yield of the devices increased significantly,” says Yachin Ivry, a postdoc in MIT’s Research Laboratory of Electronics, and the first author on the paper.

“None of the admitted theory up to now explains with such a broad class of materials the relation of critical temperature with sheet resistance and thickness,” says Claude Chapelier, a superconductivity researcher at France’s Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission. “There are several models that do not predict the same things.”

Chapelier says he would like to see a theoretical explanation for that relationship. But in the meantime, “this is very convenient for technical applications,” he says, “because there is a lot of spreading of the results, and nobody knows whether they will get good films for superconducting devices. By putting a material into this law, you know already whether it’s a good superconducting film or not.”

Submission + - Single group dominates second round of Anti Net-Neutrality Comment Submissions (sunlightfoundation.com)

Submitted by aquadood
aquadood writes: According to the Sunlight Foundation's analysis of recent comment submissions to the FCC regarding Net Neutrality, the majority (56.5%) were submitted by a single organization called American Commitment with "shadowy" ties to the Koch brothers' network. The blog article goes on to break down the comments in a very in depth way, showing a roughly 60% anti and 40% pro split.

Submission + - An early gift: ODF support in Google Drive (infoworld.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Google's Chris DiBona told a London conference last week that ODF support was coming next year, but today the Google Drive team unexpectedly launched support for all three of the main variants — including long-absent Presentation files. You can now simply open ODT, ODS and ODP files in Drive with no fuss. It lacks support for comments and changes but at least it shows progress towards full support of the international document standard, something conspicuously missing for many years.
Privacy

Microsoft Gets Industry Support Against US Search Of Data In Ireland 137

Posted by timothy from the encrypt-what-you-must dept.
An anonymous reader writes Tech giants such as Apple and eBay have given their support in Microsoft's legal battle against the U.S. government regarding the handing over of data stored in an Irish datacenter. In connection with a 2014 drugs investigation, U.S. prosecutors issued a warrant for emails stored by Microsoft in Ireland. The firm refused to hand over the information, but in July was ordered by a judge to comply with the investigation. Microsoft has today filed a collection of letters from industry supporters, such as Apple, eBay, Cisco, Amazon, HP, and Verizon. Trade associations including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and Digital Rights Ireland have also expressed their support.

Submission + - Microsoft gets industry support against U.S. Irish search warrant (thestack.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Tech giants such as Apple and eBay have given their support in Microsoft’s legal battle against the U.S. government regarding the handing over of data stored in an Irish data centre. In connection with a 2014 drugs investigation, U.S. prosecutors issued a warrant for emails stored by Microsoft in Ireland. The firm refused to hand over the information, but in July was ordered by a judge to comply with the investigation. Microsoft has today filed a collection of letters from industry supporters, such as Apple, eBay, Cisco, Amazon, HP, and Verizon. Trade associations including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and Digital Rights Ireland have also expressed their support.
Communications

Skype Unveils Preview of Live English-To-Spanish Translator 99

Posted by timothy from the stick-this-in-your-ear dept.
mpicpp writes that Microsoft, after demoing the technology back in May, is giving some real-world exposure to its Skype-based translation. The Skype preview program will kick-off with two spoken languages, Spanish and English, and 40+ instant messaging languages will be available to Skype customers who have signed-up via the Skype Translator sign-up page and are using Windows 8.1 on the desktop or device. Skype asked two schools to try Skype Translator – Peterson School in Mexico City, and Stafford Elementary School in Tacoma, USA – playing a game of 'Mystery Skype' in which the children ask questions to determine the location of the other school. One classroom of children speaking Spanish and the other speaking English, Skype Translator removed this language barrier and enabled them to communicate.

Comment EIMAC Spoof Data Sheet (Score 2) 100

by Taco Cowboy (#48607859) Attached to: The Joker Behind the Signetics 25120 Write-Only Memory Chip Hoax

From TFA:

...If you look on the last note on the 25120 data sheet, I had included, âoeDue credit to EIMAC for inspiration.â.

I had always admired an EIMAC high powered vacuum tube spoof data sheet put out by Eitel-McCullough,Inc. I saw it when I was a teen Ham Operator and must have memorized it. That was in the late 1940â(TM)s.

So far I havenâ(TM)t relocated a copy of the EIMAC spoof data sheet. You need it to see the relevance. It pictured a melted EIMAC power tube and offered humorous specifications. If you know where there is a copy, let me know ...

Anyone here got a copy of the EIMAC Spoof Data Sheet?

Wanna share with us?
Media

Webcast Funerals Growing More Popular 70

Posted by Soulskill from the morbid-new-of-the-day dept.
HughPickens.com writes: Lex Berko reports in The Atlantic that although webcasting has been around since the mid-1990s, livestreamed funerals have only begun to go mainstream in the last few years. The National Funeral Directors Association has only this year introduced a new funeral webcasting license that permits funeral homes to legally webcast funerals that include copyrighted music. The webcast service's growing appeal is, by all accounts, a result of the increasing mobility of modern society. Remote participation is often the only option for those who live far away or have other barriers — financial, temporal, health-related — barring them from attending a funeral. "It's not designed to replace folks attending funerals," says Walker Posey. "A lot of folks just don't live where their family grew up and it's difficult to get back and forth."

But some funeral directors question if online funerals are helpful to the grieving process and eschew streaming funerals live because they do not want to replace a communal human experience with a solitary digital one. What happens if there's a technical problem with the webcast — will we grieve even more knowing we missed the service in person and online? Does webcasting bode well for the future of death acceptance, or does it only promote of our further alienation from that inevitable moment? "The physical dead body is proof of death, tangible evidence that the person we love is gone, and that we will someday be gone as well," says Caitlin Doughty, a death theorist and mortician. "To have death and mourning transferred online takes away that tangible proof. What is there to show us that death is real?"

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