Journal Journal: haiku
White space yearns
drifting by alone
words unpaired
Comment Shackled Market Economics (Score 5, Interesting) 263
I fondly remember the days when products lived and died on their fitness for purpose, not in the courts. So much for free market economics. What shall we call this? SHAckled Market Economics
Comment Will I wake up in my lvl70 dwarf in 3010? (Score 1) 122
Oh my. I played WOW for a couple of years and barely got out of MC with my sanity intact. I now face the prospect of waking up in the future as my dwarf. Much as I love her, she's damned ugly and she has a big pet gorilla who smells! She's not even all-epic yet!
Submission + - Is Twitter being censored in Brazil? (blogspot.com)
Wooky_linuxer writes: Since the beginning of the Football (Soccer, in USA) World Cup brazilians have managed to make the phrase "Cala Boca Galvão" one of the trending topics. This generated much curiosity about it's meaning among non-portughese speakers — while a plethora of wrong explanations, mostly jokes made up by brazilians themselves. Now, apparently, Twitter's Trending Topics are all but blocked in Brazil, due to a court order obtained by Rede Globo de Televisão — the biggest media empire in the country.
To the curious among /. readers, Cala Boca Galvão means "Shut Up Galvão", and refers to the official narrator of Rede Globo, Galvão Bueno, in most sports events, including football.
To the curious among
Submission + - 178 Arrested in US/EU Credit Card Cloning Ops (krebsonsecurity.com)
eldavojohn writes: Authorities have moved in on 178 people accused of working in credit card cloning labs across the USA and Europe but with the bulk of the work apparently operating out of Spain. Original source states that "Police in fourteen countries participated a two-year investigation, initiated in Spain where police have discovered 120,000 stolen credit card numbers and 5,000 cloned cards, arrested 76 people and dismantled six cloning labs. The raids were made primarily in Romania, France, Italy, Germany, Ireland and the United States, with arrests also made in Australia, Sweden, Greece, Finland and Hungary. The detainees are also suspected of armed robbery, blackmail, sexual exploitation and money-laundering, the police said." Krebs notes a new credit card debuting at Turkish banks that appears to have a built in LCD that has a random six digit number associated with each transaction much like RSA SecurID keys used for computer logins.
Submission + - US experiment hints at multiple Higgs bosons (bbc.co.uk)
SpuriousLogic writes: There may be multiple versions of the elusive "God particle" — or Higgs boson — according to a new study.
Finding the Higgs is the primary aim of the £6bn ($10bn) Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiment near Geneva.
But recent results from the LHC's US rival suggest physicists could be hunting five particles, not one.
The idea of multiple Higgs bosons is supported by results gathered by the DZero experiment at the Tevatron particle accelerator, operated by Fermilab in Illinois, US.
Researchers working on the experiment observed collisions of protons and anti-protons in the Tevatron.
The collisions produced pairs of matter particles slightly more often than they yielded anti-matter particles.
Physicists had already seen such differences — known as "CP violation", but these effects were small compared to those seen by the DZero experiment.
The DZero results showed much more significant "asymmetry" of matter and anti-matter — beyond what could be explained by the Standard Model.
Bogdan Dobrescu, Adam Martin and Patrick J Fox from Fermilab say this large asymmetry effect can be accounted for by the existence of multiple Higgs bosons.
They say the data points to five Higgs bosons with similar masses but different electric charges.
Finding the Higgs is the primary aim of the £6bn ($10bn) Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiment near Geneva.
But recent results from the LHC's US rival suggest physicists could be hunting five particles, not one.
The idea of multiple Higgs bosons is supported by results gathered by the DZero experiment at the Tevatron particle accelerator, operated by Fermilab in Illinois, US.
Researchers working on the experiment observed collisions of protons and anti-protons in the Tevatron.
The collisions produced pairs of matter particles slightly more often than they yielded anti-matter particles.
Physicists had already seen such differences — known as "CP violation", but these effects were small compared to those seen by the DZero experiment.
The DZero results showed much more significant "asymmetry" of matter and anti-matter — beyond what could be explained by the Standard Model.
Bogdan Dobrescu, Adam Martin and Patrick J Fox from Fermilab say this large asymmetry effect can be accounted for by the existence of multiple Higgs bosons.
They say the data points to five Higgs bosons with similar masses but different electric charges.
Submission + - Life's Too Short To Defend Broken Code (darkreading.com)
ancientribe writes: That's the reason renowned researcher Dan Kaminsky says he came up with a brand-new way to prevent pervasive SQL injection, cross-site scripting and other injection-type flaws in software — a framework that lets developers continue to write code the way they always have, but with a tool that helps prevent them from inadvertently leaving these flaws in their apps. The tool, which he released today for input from the development and security community, basically takes the security responsibility off the shoulders of developers. Putting the onus on them hasn't worked well thus far, he says. Kaminsky's new tool is part of his new startup, Recursive Ventures.
Submission + - Half the oil coming ashore is not crude
freddled writes: CNN has a story claiming that half the oil tested from beaches around the oilspill is fuel oil, not crude, indicating that ships are taken advantage of the spill to wash out their tanks for free. Story here http://edition.cnn.com/2010/US/06/10/csi.gulf.oil.spill/index.html
Submission + - Sony makes a World Cup in 3D own goal (theinquirer.net)
DarrenE6 writes: UK PUBS have gotten embroiled in Sony's inability to deliver 3D World Cup matches
BBC and ITV own the rights in the UK, and the UK's only 3D channel is owned by Sky..... the World Cup was supposed to be 3D launch-pin not much good if you cant watch it
BBC and ITV own the rights in the UK, and the UK's only 3D channel is owned by Sky..... the World Cup was supposed to be 3D launch-pin not much good if you cant watch it
Submission + - Mr. Watson, Come Here 2.0
theodp writes: Bell and Watson, meet Jobs and Ive. If you couldn't make WWDC, Silicon Alley Insider has the humorously awkward phone call Steve Jobs made to Apple design wizard Jonathan Ive to demonstrate FaceTime on the iPhone 4. It's followed by the official Apple commercial for FaceTime, which SAI points out 'could make an angry cynic on the subway get teary.' Very cool. And if this device doesn't inspire iPhone app developers to circumvent Steve's freedom-from-porn pledge, nothing will.
Submission + - How can I capture a switch event on a USB port? 4
wilderbeest writes: My 90-year old neighbour is very much into clocks, and maintains our local church clock here in North Woochester, UK. As it's quite a way up the spire and he isn't getting any younger, he would like to monitor the accuracy of the clockwork using his computer from home.
I've come up with the following solution: An Alix 2d3 with a Huawei E220 3G modem attached to it, and Zeroshell installed on the Alix. That all works well, Zeroshell connects to my VPN and I can place the thing in the church spire as they have electricity up there. We also installed a micro switch on a part of the clock that rotates once every 5 minutes, and we get a switch on / off from that micro switch.
Now comes the hard part: I need some sort of component that I can plug into the USB port of my Alix 2d3 and connect it to the micro switch so can capture the event, timestamp it and write it to a remote database.
Any ideas? Can I use something like a USB mouse and mod it?
I've come up with the following solution: An Alix 2d3 with a Huawei E220 3G modem attached to it, and Zeroshell installed on the Alix. That all works well, Zeroshell connects to my VPN and I can place the thing in the church spire as they have electricity up there. We also installed a micro switch on a part of the clock that rotates once every 5 minutes, and we get a switch on / off from that micro switch.
Now comes the hard part: I need some sort of component that I can plug into the USB port of my Alix 2d3 and connect it to the micro switch so can capture the event, timestamp it and write it to a remote database.
Any ideas? Can I use something like a USB mouse and mod it?
Submission + - Pac-Man Ship Eats Oil Spills (Wakka Wakka Wakka) (treehugger.com)
An anonymous reader writes: The German Navy's Bottsand class oil recovery ship is built for handling seawater pollution control. The ship, with its twin hull, opens up by 65-degrees and captures seawater into its 790 cubic meter tank. It is there that the vessel separates the oil from the water, processing 140 cubic meters of water every hour.
Comment Real life Bosses respawn before you get your loot (Score 1) 88
People play MMOs to tackle non-real-world problems where X hours of hard work according to precise set of rules R gives you precisely defined outcome O, with loot from [L1, L2, L3, ...]. They play precisely to escape from the fact the same effort in the real world gets you one from [nada, less than nada, peanuts, laughed at].
There is space for the use of MMOs to train people and it's not new, but most of the time it's set up by people who think that gamers need to be patronised.
"Got Game" is an interesting read around this subject too.
Submission + - Ignored Nigerian oilspills
freddled writes: The Guardian has a story — http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/may/30/oil-spills-nigeria-niger-delta-shell — about the ongoing pollution in the Niger Delta from ExxonMobil, Shell et al. Interesting how we assign so little value to some parts of the world and so much to others. I won't even mention Bhopal.
Comment Re:Experience: forget MBCS/CITP in the job market (Score 1) 216
Oops! Misspost. Nothing to see here. Move along please. Slap me as you pass.
