kshkval - Slashdot User

Dad Delivers Baby Using Wiki 249

Posted by samzenpus on Tuesday December 15, 2009 @05:29PM from the 9cm-edited dept.

sonamchauhan writes "A Londoner helped his wife deliver their baby by Googling 'how to deliver a baby' on his mobile phone. From the article: 'Today proud Mr Smith said: "The midwife had checked Emma earlier in the day but contractions started up again at about 8pm so we called the midwife to come back. But then everything happened so quickly I realized Emma was going to give birth. I wasn't sure what I was going to do so I just looked up the instructions on the internet using my BlackBerry."'"

Cell Phone Searches Require Warrant 161

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday December 15, 2009 @03:27PM from the don't-search-me-bro dept.

schleprock63 writes "The Ohio state supreme court has decided that a cell phone found on a suspect cannot be searched without a warrant. The majority based this decision on a federal case that deemed a cell phone not to be a 'closed container,' and therefore not searchable without a warrant. The argument of the majority contended that a cell phone does not contain physical objects and therefore is not a container. One dissenting judge argued that a cell phone is a container that simply contains data. He argued that the other judges were 'needlessly theorizing' about the contents of a cell phone. He compared the data contained within an address book that would be searchable." The article notes that this was apparently the first time the question has come up before any state supreme court.

Comment I get it (Score 1) 736

by kshkval on Sunday November 29, 2009 @02:58PM (#30263010) Attached to: Do You Hate Being Called an "IT Guy?"

You think being called an IT guy is bad, try being called a "male nurse." Which is what I am, but I mostly support the electronic medical record software for a hospital. There's just a way that people say it, "oh, you're a male nurse?". Every time I hear the "male nurse" remark, it's like reliving the meet the parents dinner scene in "Meet the Fockers." "You work for IT" is not as bad, but again, you are being lumped into a vague non-white non-blue collar job category in some weird way. I have friends who are certified, trained electricians who work for the Engineering Department and people say to them, "you work for Engineering?" as if being a trained guy who works in a dangerous environment shouldn't command a level of respect. All of this may have more to do with the lingering bias in the health care and hospital world towards physicians, actually. I liked Avatar8's remark, that anyone who says you work for IT simply means to say they don't have a clue about what you do or how to use computers (I think that's what he meant).

Firefox Most Vulnerable Browser, Safari Close 369

Posted by CmdrTaco on Wednesday November 11, 2009 @01:45PM from the say-what-now dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Cenzic released its report revealing the most prominent types of Web application vulnerabilities for the first half of 2009. The report identified over 3,100 total vulnerabilities, which is a 10 percent increase in Web application vulnerabilities compared to the second half of 2008. Among Web browsers, Mozilla Firefox had the largest percentage of Web vulnerabilities, followed by Apple Safari, whose browser showed a vast increase in exploits, due to vulnerabilities reported in the Safari iPhone browser." It seems a bit surprising to me that this study shows that only 15% of vulnerabilities are in IE.

Project Natal Release Details Emerge 173

Posted by CmdrTaco on Wednesday November 11, 2009 @12:12PM from the watch-me-dance-computer dept.

scruffybr writes "Today the first information about the pricing and launch of Microsoft’s Project Natal has emerged. The pricing for the hardware will be much much lower than many had anticipated, coming in at around £50 when sold separately from the console. The idea being that it’s low enough that people will purchase on impulse."

Comment An algae nightmare? (Score 1) 134

by kshkval on Sunday October 11, 2009 @08:11PM (#29714363) Attached to: Commercial Fuel From Algae Still Years Away

As a botanist, I worry about some of the new genetically engineered or the kind of super plant getting out of control. In the same manner, I guess I should worry about an enhanced high yield algae escaping some sort of super algae farm. Would it have the same effect on the environment as other specialized "plants"? Would it be some kind of fairly fragile monoculture type algae that would not do well in the wild? Algae is already a major problem in the Mediterranean and along the west coast of the US recently. I wonder if anyone has examined of this critter might be a problem? A high yield algae would certainly find it's way back into the oceans and lakes.

Comment Re:Hit by lightning (Score 1) 611

by kshkval on Sunday July 19, 2009 @11:32PM (#28752599) Attached to: Best Home Backup Strategy Now?

Yep, that's exactly what I thought as well after my next door neighbor had a break-in. It's a safe area, but why risk 10 years of digital photos? We have the safe deposit box anyway, so I bought an OWC drive that fits into it like a Russian nested doll. I back up all 3 Macs on the partitioned drive. The safe deposit box costs about $55/year, cheap at the price.

Comment Hit by lightning (Score 3, Informative) 611

by kshkval on Sunday July 19, 2009 @05:09PM (#28750199) Attached to: Best Home Backup Strategy Now?

That's exactly what happened to us... the hit took out 2 Macs and the power bricks/adapters for nearly everything else electronic in the house. And it was a strike across the street that travelled thru the dsl line, not the well-protected outlets. I always have at least one backup NOT connected and stored off-site since then. The other awful thing that convinced me to use 3 external drives was backing up to a single drive and having a bad thing happen to both the main drive in my PowerBook and the backup at the same time. The screwup was a funky restore from backup (I'll never use Intego Personal Backup again). Yes, the stupid things happen and you'd better be ready...

Comment 3 backup drives and MobileMe (Score 1) 611

by kshkval on Sunday July 19, 2009 @04:04PM (#28749663) Attached to: Best Home Backup Strategy Now?

I have so many drives from so many years of external data that I do 2 Time Machine backups to 2 separate drives, a 3d SuperDuper backup about every 3 months to a drive stored in a safe deposit box and I avail myself of MobileMe sync services. Like I said, I use SuperDuper for the backups to the externally stored drive. That way, if a Time Machine backup is corrupted or wonky, the pooch is not you know what. On an ad hoc basis I backup my user folder using SuperDuper to a portable firewire bus-powered drive from OWC... so, I really have 4 backups. Between MobileMe, my smtp email, my use of gmail and the panoply of manually run backups, I feel pretty safe. Why feel safe? Bc I have done backups to a single drive before and ruined the backup and the main drive simultaneously. It was my fault, but I learned to never depend on a single backup again. Yes, it takes time, but the 3 months I needed to sift through 5 years of data (I used Data Rescue II from ProSoft successfully) was a lot worse. The other 2 Macs in the house are also backed up to 3 backup drives each using the same approach.

Open Source Software In the Military 91

Posted by kdawson on Sunday July 19, 2009 @08:04AM from the keep-it-stupid-stupid dept.

JohnMoD writes With the advent of forge.mil, etc. the military seems to be getting on board with free and open source software. A working group meeting is going to be held at Georgia Tech in Atlanta, August 12-13, 2009. There's a pretty good lineup of speakers including a Marine from the Iraq-Marine Expeditionary Forces, who was on the ground and saw the agility open source gave to him and his soldiers. A number of OSS projects are going to be meeting there: Delta 3D, OpenCPI, FalconView, OSSIM, Red Hat, etc. Looks like there will be some good discussions."

The Hidden Costs of Microsoft's Free Office Online 174

Posted by Soulskill on Saturday July 18, 2009 @09:21AM from the free-ain't-cheap dept.

Michael_Curator writes "Despite what you've heard, the online version of Office 2010 announced by Microsoft earlier this week won't be free to corporate users. Business customers will either have to pay a subscription fee or purchase corporate access licenses (CALs) for Office in order to be given access to the online application suite (Microsoft already does this with email — the infamous Outlook Web Access). But wait — there's more! A Microsoft spokesperson told me that customers will need to buy a SharePoint server, which ranges from $4,400 plus CALs, or $41,000 with all CALs included, if they want to share documents created using the online version of Office 2010."

The NSA Wiretapping Story Nobody Wanted 144

Posted by Soulskill on Saturday July 18, 2009 @05:14AM from the since-privacy-is-such-a-minor-issue dept.

CWmike writes "They sometimes call national security the third rail of politics. Touch it and, politically, you're dead. The cliché doesn't seem far off the mark after reading Mark Klein's new book, Wiring up the Big Brother Machine ... and Fighting It. It's an account of his experiences as the whistleblower who exposed a secret room at a Folsom Street facility in San Francisco that was apparently used to monitor the Internet communications of ordinary Americans. Amazingly, however, nobody wanted to hear his story. In his book he talks about meetings with reporters and privacy groups that went nowhere until a fateful January 20, 2006 meeting with Kevin Bankston of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Bankston was preparing a lawsuit that he hoped would put a stop to the wiretap program, and Klein was just the kind of witness the EFF was looking for. He spoke with Robert McMillan for an interview."

NASA's LRO Captures High-Res Pics of Apollo Landing Sites 197

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Friday July 17, 2009 @07:27PM from the easy-to-photograph-a-sound-stage dept.

The Bad Astronomer is one of many readers who wrote to tell us about NASA's release of high-res photos showing the Apollo landing sites. The photos were taken from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and show the traces of earlier visits to the Moon. "The satellite reached lunar orbit June 23 and captured the Apollo sites between July 11 and 15. Though it had been expected that LRO would be able to resolve the remnants of the Apollo mission, these first images came before the spacecraft reached its final mapping orbit. Future LROC images from these sites will have two to three times greater resolution."

NASA Releases Restored Apollo 11 Video, But Originals Lost 173

Posted by timothy on Thursday July 16, 2009 @04:20PM from the next-year-comes-the-box-set-of-studio-masters dept.

leetrout writes "I attended a media briefing held by NASA at the Newseum in Washington, D.C. this morning where they released restored video of the Apollo 11 mission. The clips released are about 40% of the total footage to be restored by September by Lowry Digital in Burbank, CA. Wired has all the clips. A couple remarkable comments made during the briefing included the opinion from the original footage search committee that the original slow scan footage (stored as a single track on telemetry tapes) has been lost forever as the tapes were likely recycled by the mid '80s (apparently common NASA practice). Also, that someone from the applied physics laboratory was in Australia converting the slow scan directly to video. This differs from NASA's goal of merely broadcasting the event, at which it was successful. Unfortunately, no one knows where those tapes of approximately two hours of footage are located."

RIAA Loses Bid To Keep Revenues Secret 229

Posted by timothy on Thursday July 16, 2009 @02:43PM from the but-your-honor-that's-our-secret-recipe-for-money-soup dept.

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "The RIAA's motion to keep secret the record companies' 1999-to-date revenues for the copyrighted song files at the heart of the case has been denied, in the Boston case scheduled for trial July 27th, SONY BMG Music Entertainment v. Tenenbaum. The Judge had previously ordered the plaintiff record companies to produce a summary of the 1999-to-date revenues for the recordings, broken down into physical and digital sales. On the day the summary was due to be produced, instead of producing it, they produced a 'protective order motion' asking the Judge to rule that the information would have to be kept secret. The Judge rejected that motion: 'the Court does not comprehend how disclosure would impair the Plaintiffs' competitive business prospects when three of the four biggest record labels in the world — Warner Bros. Records, Sony BMG Music Entertainment, and UMG Recording, Inc. — are participating jointly in this lawsuit and, presumably, would have joint access to this information.'"

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