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Submission + - Project IceStorm passes another milestone: building a CPU (excamera.com) 2

Submitted by beckman101
beckman101 writes: FPGAs — specialized, high speed chips with large arrays of configurable logic — are usually highly proprietary. Anyone who has used one is familiar with the buggy and node-locked accompanying tools that FPGA manufacturers provide.
Project IceStorm http://www.clifford.at/icestor... aims to change that by reverse-engineering some Lattice FPGAs to produce an open-source toolchain, and today it passed a milestone. The J1 open-source CPU is building under IceStorm, and running on real hardware. The result is a fairly puny microcontroller, but possibly the world's most open one.

Submission + - FTC Accuses LifeLock of False AdvertisingAgain (ftc.gov)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: You may remember LifeLock — it's the identity protection company whose CEO published his social security number and dared people to steal his identity. Predictably, 13 different people succeeded. LifeLock was later sued for deceptive marketing practices, and eventually settled with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission to the tune of $12 million. Part of that settlement, of course, required that they refrain from misrepresenting their services in the future. Now, the FTC is taking action against them again, saying they failed to live up to that promise. The FTC claims (PDF) LifeLock falsely advertised that it "protected consumers’ sensitive data with the same high-level safeguards as financial institutions" and also failed to protect its users' data.

Submission + - Fossil fuels are messing with Carbon Dating (scientificamerican.com)

Submitted by Taco Cowboy
Taco Cowboy writes: The element Carbon comes in several isotopes, with one of them the radioactive Carbon-14

Carbon-14 is formed when some of the atmospheric Nitrogen at the upper atmosphere is bombarded by cosmic radiation and break down into the unstable radioactive isotope of Carbon-14

The unstable isotope is brought to Earth by atmospheric activity, such as storms, and becomes fixed in the biosphere. Because it reacts identically to C-12 and C-13, C-14 becomes attached to complex organic molecules through photosynthesis in plants and becomes part of their molecular makeup. Animals eating those plants in turn absorb Carbon-14 as well as the stable isotopes. This process of ingesting C-14 continues as long as the plant or animal remains alive

The natural distribution of C-14 on planet Earth used to be about one part per trillion

The carbon dating method in determining the age of an artifact is based on the amount of radioactive carbon-14 isotopes

The C-14 within an organism is continually decaying into stable carbon isotopes, but since the organism is absorbing more C-14 during its life, the ratio of C-14 to C-12 remains about the same as the ratio in the atmosphere. When the organism dies, the ratio of C-14 within its carcass begins to gradually decrease. The rate of decrease is 1/2 the quantity at death every 5,730 years. That is the half-life of C-14 and that is the base on how Carbon Dating operates

The fossil fuel which we are burning are so old they do not have contain any traceable amount of C-14, and the more we use fossil fuel, the more non-C-14 Carbon we pump into the atmosphere

If emissions continue under a business-as-usual scenario, by year 2050 a T-Shirt made in that year (2050) will have a 'Carbon-14 emission' signature as a T-Shirt worn by William the Conqueror a thousand years (if William the Conqueror had a fetish for T-Shirt), for someone using the radiocarbon dating technique

http://www.bbc.com/news/scienc...
http://www.psmag.com/nature-an...


Submission + - As Nations Hack Each Other, Protecting Personal Information Must Become Priority (forbes.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Foreign hackers are now in possession of security clearance documents that contain deeply personal secrets, and there is no way of reversing that. These individuals are caught in what Maj. Gen. Charles J. Dunlap has labeled the “hyper-personalization of war.” While there is nothing new about espionage or hacking, the size and depth of these attacks make them extremely serious. The ubiquity of technology and poor security have caused both crime and surveillance to skyrocket in frequency and specificity; those same factors are now also allowing intelligence agencies to infiltrate each others’ systems and societies. Nations are seeing identity databases as important targets for both offense and defense.

Submission + - Woman recruited by Google four times and rejected, joins suit (computerworld.com)

Submitted by dcblogs
dcblogs writes: An Ivy league graduate, with a Ph.D. in geophysics, Cheryl Fillekes, who also specializes in Linux and Unix systems, was contacted by Google recruiters four separate times over a seven year period. In each instance, she did well enough on the phone interviews to get invited to an in-person interview but was rejected every time for a job. She has since joined an age discrimination lawsuit against Google filed about two months ago by another older worker. In the past year, Fillekes bought a dairy farm in upstate New York and designed and built an on-farm creamery.

Submission + - The sad state of open IPCameras (bluecherrydvr.com) 2

Submitted by criticalmess
criticalmess writes: I'm about to give up on any decent hardware to be found to roll my own web-based camera setup around the house and office — and thought that the nerds and experts at /. would be my last resource I could pull out.
Having bought multiple IPCamera (DLink, Abus, Axis, Foscam, TP-Link, ...) and always getting the "requires DirectX" treatment, I'm wondering if there are any open and affordable IPCams out there? I've been lookint at BlueCherry and their kickstarter campaign to create a complete opensource hardware solution (http://www.bluecherrydvr.com/2013/06/21/bluecherry-open-source-high-resolution-ip-camera-update/), I've been looking at Zavio (http://www.zavio.com/) as they seem to offer the streams in an open enough format while not breaking the bank on the hardware. Anything else I should be looking at?

I can't for the love of it understand why most of these hardware companies require you to run DirectX — anybody care to enlighten the crowd?

Should be simple enough really: hardware captures images, a small embedded webserver transforms this into an RTSP stream or HTTP stream, maybe on h264 or similar — done.

Submission + - Microsoft Uses US Women's Soccer Team to Explain Why It Doesn't Hire More Women

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: "It is not surprising that the U.S. women have been dominant in the sport [of soccer] in recent years. The explanation for that success lies in the talent pipeline," writes General Manager of Citizenship & Public Affairs Lori Forte Harnick on The Official Microsoft Blog. "Said another way, many girls in the U.S. have the opportunity to learn how to play soccer and, as a result, they benefit from the teamwork, skill development and fun involved. That’s the kind of opportunity I would like to see develop for the technology sector, which presents a different, yet perhaps even more significant, set of opportunities for girls and young women. Unfortunately, the strength in the talent pipeline that we see in female soccer today is not the reality for technology. The U.S. is facing a shortage of Computer Science (CS) graduates. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, every year there are close to 140,000 jobs requiring a CS degree, but only 40,000 U.S. college graduates major in CS, which means that 100,000 positions go unfilled by domestic talent." Going with the soccer analogy, one thing FIFA realized that Microsoft didn't is that if you want girls to play your sport, you don't take away their ball!

Comment Re:It only works with no scarcity (Score 1) 503

by houstonbofh (#50093979) Attached to: A 'Star Trek' Economic System May Be Closer Than You Think

What resource limitations do solar and wind have? Does the sun ever stop shining forever or does wind stop blowing forever (outside of the obvious death of the star)? In principal, sun could be close to free, once that is true, we can recycle our current trash pretty much for 'free' and if we did, there is plenty of plastic and oil to go around for the upcoming centuries.

Because solar collectors and wind collectors are made of "stuff" and we have a finite amount of "stuff" to make them with. And that energy, once collected, is stored in some vary rare and expensive "stuff" too.

Comment Re:It only works with no scarcity (Score 1) 503

by houstonbofh (#50089587) Attached to: A 'Star Trek' Economic System May Be Closer Than You Think

Sure there is solar, and wind, but they run up against some rather hard resource limitations.

Planet-based renewables, other than breeder reactors, are pretty iffy. Space-based solar (SPS) is very reliable, and doesn't suffer downtime from weather conditions, just like breeders.

Of course all of those things take extensive materials that we do not have an unlimited supply of. And Space Based Solar, if widely adopted, would increase the imported heat to the planet faster then fossil fuels.

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