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Submission + - FreeDOS is 20 years old

Submitted by Jim Hall
Jim Hall writes: In a June 29, 1994 post in comp.os.msdos.apps on USENET, a physics student announced an effort to create a completely free version of DOS that everyone could use. That project turned into FreeDOS, 20 years ago! Originally intended as a free replacement for MS-DOS, FreeDOS has since advanced what DOS could do, adding new functionality and making DOS easier to use. And today in 2014, people continue to use FreeDOS to support embedded systems, to run business software, and to play classic DOS games!

Submission + - British Ambassador Says Leaks Would Have Helped Hitler (techdirt.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Where do you go when the assertions that Snowden's leaks will cause grave damage and irreparable harm to national security still fail to unite the world against the former NSA contractor? It appears you head to alternate realities where Snowden leaks documents during the early 1940s, thus dooming Britain to cowering at the feet of Hitler.

        If Edward Snowden had been around during World War II, Adolf Hitler would have been able to score victories against the United Kingdom, according to the British ambassador to the U.S.

        In remarks at The Ripon Society commemorating the U.S. and British alliance, Ambassador Peter Westmacott said leaks like Snowden's would have allowed the Nazis to overrun allied forces in the Battle of the Atlantic and gain the upper hand...

        "[T]here are moments ... when it is absolutely essential that intelligence operations in defense of our national security remain secret," he added. "These things are important. It's not frivolous and it is not hiding things."

        "It is actually necessary for our national security to ensure that our real secrets remain secret."

Submission + - A Physicist Says He Can Tornado-Proof the Midwest with 1,000-Foot Walls 1

Submitted by meghan elizabeth
meghan elizabeth writes: University of Drexel physicist Rongjia Tao has a utopian proposal to build three massive, 1,000-foot high, 165-foot thick walls around the American Midwest, in order to keep the tornadoes out.

Building three unfathomably massive anti-tornado walls would count as the infrastructure project of the decade, if not the century. It would be also be exceedingly expensive. So is Tao serious? Absolutely.

Submission + - $500k "Energy-Harvesting" Kickstarter scam unfolding right now. (drop-kicker.com)

Submitted by FryingLizard
FryingLizard writes: For a while I've been following the saga of the Kickstarter "iFind" Bluetooth 4.0 tracking tag. Nothing new about such tags (there are many crowdfunded examples; some have delivered, some have disappointed), but this one claims it doesn't require any batteries — it harvests its energy from electromagnetic emissions (wifi, cell towers, TV signals, etc). The creators have posted no evidence other than some slick photoshop work, an obviously faked video, and some easily disproven data and classic bad science.
So far they've picked up half a million in pledges. With six days to go until they walk off with the money, skeptics abound (10min in) including some excellent dissections of their claims. The creators have yet to post even a single photo of the magical device, instead posting empty platitudes and claims that such secrecy is necessary to protect their IP.

Using just their published figures, their claims are readily refuted, yet still backers flock in. Kickstarter appear uninterested in what can only be described as a slow-motion bank robbery, despite their basic requirement to demonstrate a prototype.
It seems self-evident that such scams should not be allowed to propagate on Kickstarter, for the good of other genuine projects and the community at large.
Skeptics are maintaining a google doc with many of the highlights of the action.

Bring your own popcorn and enjoy the show.

Submission + - Emails Show Feds Asking Florida Cops to Deceive Judges (wired.com) 1

Submitted by Advocatus Diaboli
Advocatus Diaboli writes: Police in Florida have, at the request of the U.S. Marshals Service, been deliberately deceiving judges and defendants about their use of a controversial surveillance tool to track suspects, according to newly obtained emails. At the request of the Marshals Service, the officers using so-called stingrays have been routinely telling judges, in applications for warrants, that they obtained knowledge of a suspect’s location from a “confidential source” rather than disclosing that the information was gleaned using a stingray.

Submission + - Age discrimination in the tech industry

Submitted by Presto Vivace
Presto Vivace writes: Tech industry job ads: Older workers need not apply

It’s a widely accepted reality within the technology industry that youth rules. But at least part of the extreme age imbalance can be traced back to advertisements for open positions that government regulators say may illegally discriminate against older applicants. Many tech companies post openings exclusively for new or recent college graduates, a pool of candidates that is overwhelmingly in its early twenties. ...

“In our view, it’s illegal,” Raymond Peeler, senior attorney advisor at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the federal agency that enforces workplace discrimination laws said about the use of “new grad” and “recent grad” in job notices. “We think it deters older applicants from applying.”

Am I the only one who thinks that much of the quality control and failed projects in the tech industry can be attributed to age discrimination?

Comment Re:THIS is a potentially "huge score" for Linux (Score 2) 143

In prior discussions APK kept dodging questions about whether or not he has been diagnosed as mentally ill in some way by a psychologist or psychiatrist. He never would say yes or no to that one

and why in arse cunting fuck should he? what business is that of anyone about anyone on here?

Submission + - EFF to unveil Open Wireless Router for Open Wireless Movement (techienews.co.uk)

Submitted by hypnosec
hypnosec writes: A new movement dubbed the Open Wireless Movement is asking users to open up their private Wi-Fi networks for total strangers – a random act of kindness – with an aim of better securing networks and facilitating better use of finite broadband resources. The movement is supported by non-profit and pro-internet rights organisations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), Mozilla, Open Rights Group, and Free Press among others. EFF is planning to unveil one such innovation – Open Wireless Router – at the Hackers on Planet Earth (HOPE X) conference to be held next month on New York. This firmware will allow individuals to share their private Wi-Fi to total strangers to anyone without a password.

Submission + - Mozilla is Working on a Firefox OS-powered Streaming Stick

Submitted by SmartAboutThings
SmartAboutThings writes: Mozilla took the world by surprised when it announced that it was developing a Firefox operating system that would be used for mobile phones, especially in developing markets. Now, there are already a few devices out there, but it seems that this isn’t the last step for the company whose name is still associated with the famous web browsers. According to a recent report from GigaOM, Mozilla is currently working on a secretive project which has the purpose of developing a Chromecast-like media streaming stick powered by Firefox-OS.

Submission + - Open-Source NVIDIA Driver Steps Up Its Game & Runs Much Faster (phoronix.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: With the Linux 3.16 kernel the Nouveau driver now supports re-clocking for letting the NVIDIA GPU cores and video memory on this reverse-engineered NVIDIA driver run at their designed frequencies. Up to now the Nouveau driver has been handicapped to running at whatever (generally low) clock frequencies the video BIOS programmed the hardware to at boot time, but with Linux 3.16 is experimental support for up-clocking to the hardware-rated speeds. The results show the open-source NVIDIA driver running multiple times faster, but it doesn't work for all NVIDIA hardware, causes lock-ups for some GPUs at some frequencies, and isn't yet dynamically controlled. However, it appears to be the biggest break-through in years for this open-source NVIDIA driver that up to now has been too slow for most Linux games.

Submission + - The Scary New Evidence on BPA-Free Plastics (motherjones.com) 2

Submitted by The Grim Reefer
The Grim Reefer writes: Today many plastic products, from sippy cups and blenders to Tupperware containers, are marketed as BPA-free. But CertiChem and its founder, George Bittner's findings—some of which have been confirmed by other scientists—suggest that many of these alternatives share the qualities that make BPA so potentially harmful.

Those startling results set off a bitter fight with the $375-billion-a-year plastics industry. The American Chemistry Council, which lobbies for plastics makers and has sought to refute the science linking BPA to health problems, has teamed up with Tennessee-based Eastman Chemical—the maker of Tritan, a widely used plastic marketed as being free of estrogenic activity—in a campaign to discredit Bittner and his research. The company has gone so far as to tell corporate customers that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) rejected Bittner's testing methods. (It hasn't.) Eastman also sued CertiChem and its sister company, PlastiPure, to prevent them from publicizing their findings that Tritan is estrogenic, convincing a jury that its product displayed no estrogenic activity. And it launched a PR blitz touting Tritan's safety, targeting the group most vulnerable to synthetic estrogens: families with young children. "It can be difficult for consumers to tell what is really safe," the vice president of Eastman's specialty plastics division, Lucian Boldea, said in one web video, before an image of a pregnant woman flickered across the screen. With Tritan, he added, "consumers can feel confident that the material used in their products is free of estrogenic activity."

Submission + - Chile starts construction of world's largest telescope (foxnews.com)

Submitted by mpicpp
mpicpp writes: The partial demolition of Cerro Armazones, a mountain in northern Chile's Antofagasta region, marked the start of constructing the world's largest and most powerful telescope, an instrument capable of capturing 14 times more light than existing telescopes.

At 2:00 p.m. Thursday, the blasting of Cerro Armazones, 3,060 meters (11,800 feet) high, removed from the peak between 25 and 30 meters (80 and 100 feet) of its height in order to create a plain some 200 meters (655 feet) long, on which to mount the European Extremely Large Telescope, or E-ELT, a project of the European Southern Observatory.

On this site will be built a structure 60 meters (200 feet) high and 80 meters (260 feet) in diameter, with mirrors of 39.3 meters (129 feet) which in 10 years will begin to explore the origins of the universe.

The telescope will shed light on the "dark ages" of the universe, when the Milky Way was only 500,000 years old, and thanks to its enormous size it could also contribute to finding extraterrestrial life by detecting whether exoplanets have oxygen in their atmospheres.

Submission + - Red Hat Assistant General Counsel Analyses Super Court's Patent Ruling (opensource.com)

Submitted by ectoman
ectoman writes: Yesterday, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a groundbreaking decision concerning software patents, claiming that abstract ideas are not by themselves patentable. The ruling was a cause for celebration among those opposed to software patent abuse, like Red Hat's Vice President and Assistant General Counsel, Rob Tiller. Today, Tiller analyzes and offers some context for the Court's ruling, which "uses the traditional common law methodology of comparing one case to previous similar cases and harmonizing with those most similar."

Submission + - Teaching Creationism As Science Now Banned In Britain's Schools (www.gov.uk) 2

Submitted by sandbagger
sandbagger writes: The UK has banned the teaching of creationism as science in all schools receiving public money. The new regulations were published last week with little to-do, state the 'requirement for every academy and free school to provide a broad and balanced curriculum in any case prevents the teaching of creationism as evidence based theory in any academy or free school.'

Submission + - GCHQ destruction of Guardian computers raises questions 1

Submitted by GoddersUK
GoddersUK writes: Remember when, in an exercise in pointlessness, men in black from GCHQ oversaw destruction of computer equipment that the Guardian had been using to report the Snowden disclosures? Well Privacy International are reporting that the Guardian let them take a look at the destroyed computers and they were surprised by what they found. Under the direction of GCHQ technicians the Guardian staff seemingly intentionally and specifically targeted apparently mundane components of the computers in question, including chips on the keyboard and trackpad controllers and the LCD inverter. This raises two disturbing possibilities: Either GCHQ's technicians are incompetent or they know something about computer hardware that we don't. Especially given that GCHQ knew the distruction was all a charade so there was no reason to be paranoid in performing it.

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