Comment Re:What he really said (Score 1) 681
Very much so... As my father would say, "please attack me for what I said, not something you made up"
Bill Nye Disses "Regular" Software Writers' Science Knowledge 681
conoviator writes Bill Nye, one of the foremost science educators in the United States states that only the upper crust members of American science and technology (with degrees from top tier schools) understand science, particularly climate change. He opines that "regular software writers" dwell in the realm of the semi-science-literate. Nye rates science education in the U.S. an F. ("But if it makes you feel any better, you can say a B-minus.")
Submission + - OS X, iOS and Linux have more vulnerabilities than Windows (betanews.com)
An anonymous reader writes: This startling fact comes from the National Vulnerability Database (described as the "US government repository of standards based vulnerability management data") which details security issues detected in different operating systems and software titles.
http://nvd.nist.gov/
http://nvd.nist.gov/
Submission + - What If We Lost the Sky?
HughPickens.com writes: Anna North writes in the NYT that a report released last week by the National Research Council calls for research into reversing climate change through a process called albedo modification: reflecting sunlight away from earth by, for instance, spraying aerosols into the atmosphere. But such a process could, some say, change the appearance of the sky — and that in turn could affect everything from our physical health to the way we see ourselves. “You’d get whiter skies. People wouldn’t have blue skies anymore.” says Alan Robock.“Astronomers wouldn’t be happy, because you’d have a cloud up there permanently. It’d be hard to see the Milky Way anymore.”
According to Dacher Keltner, a psychology professor at the University of California, losing the night sky would have big consequences. “When you go outside, and you walk in a beautiful setting, and you just feel not only uplifted but you just feel stronger. There’s clearly a neurophysiological basis for that," says Keltner adding that looking up at a starry sky provides “almost a prototypical awe experience,” an opportunity to feel “that you are small and modest and part of something vast.” If we lose the night sky “we lose something precious and sacred.” “We’re finding in our lab that the experience of awe gets you to feel connected to something larger than yourself, see the humanity in other people,” says Paul K. Piff. “In many ways it’s kind of an antidote to narcissism.” And the sky is one of the few sources of that experience that’s available to almost everybody: “Not everyone has access to the ocean or giant trees, or the Grand Canyon, but we certainly all live beneath the night sky.”
Alan Robock says one possible upside of adding aerosols could be beautiful red and yellow sunsets as “the yellow and red colors reflect off the bottom of this cloud.” Robock recommends more research into albedo modification: “If people ever are tempted to do this, I want them to have a lot of information about what the potential benefits and risks would be so they can make an informed decision. Dr. Abdalati says that deploying something like albedo modification is a last-ditch effort adding that “we’ve gotten ourselves into a climate mess. The fact that we’re even talking about these kinds of things is indicative of that.”
According to Dacher Keltner, a psychology professor at the University of California, losing the night sky would have big consequences. “When you go outside, and you walk in a beautiful setting, and you just feel not only uplifted but you just feel stronger. There’s clearly a neurophysiological basis for that," says Keltner adding that looking up at a starry sky provides “almost a prototypical awe experience,” an opportunity to feel “that you are small and modest and part of something vast.” If we lose the night sky “we lose something precious and sacred.” “We’re finding in our lab that the experience of awe gets you to feel connected to something larger than yourself, see the humanity in other people,” says Paul K. Piff. “In many ways it’s kind of an antidote to narcissism.” And the sky is one of the few sources of that experience that’s available to almost everybody: “Not everyone has access to the ocean or giant trees, or the Grand Canyon, but we certainly all live beneath the night sky.”
Alan Robock says one possible upside of adding aerosols could be beautiful red and yellow sunsets as “the yellow and red colors reflect off the bottom of this cloud.” Robock recommends more research into albedo modification: “If people ever are tempted to do this, I want them to have a lot of information about what the potential benefits and risks would be so they can make an informed decision. Dr. Abdalati says that deploying something like albedo modification is a last-ditch effort adding that “we’ve gotten ourselves into a climate mess. The fact that we’re even talking about these kinds of things is indicative of that.”
Submission + - Fake Komodia root SSL certs in use by over +100 companies (forbes.com)
Billly Gates writes: Lenovo and Superfish are not the only companies who used the fake root SSL certificates by Komodia to spy and decrypt network traffic. Komodia advertises its products including a SSL-digestor to rid the obtrusive thing we call encryption and security. So far game accelerators are mentioned as some have seen these certs installed with Asus lan accelerator drivers.
Submission + - What Do Old Techies Do After They Retire?
HughPickens.com writes: Peter T. Kilborn writes in the NYT about the generation of the baby boomer programmers, engineers, and technical people who are now leaving the bosses, bureaucracies, commutes and time clocks of their workaday careers to tackle something consuming and new, whether for material reward or none at all. “Retirement gives them the opportunity to flex their experience,” says Dr. William Winn speaking of a postchildhood, postfamily-rearing, “third age” of “productive aging” and “positive aging.” Nancy K. Schlossberg calls men and women who exploit the skills of their old jobs “continuers" and those who take up something new “adventurers.” Continuers and adventurers make up the vigorous end of Dr. Schlossberg’s retirement spectrum, opposite those she calls “retreaters” who disengage from life and “spectators” who just watch.
For example, 75-year-old Seth R. Goldstein, with four degrees in mechanical and electrical engineering from MIT and retired for thirteen years, still calls himself an engineer. But where he was previously a biomedical engineer with the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda with 12 patents, he now makes kinetic sculptures in his basement workshop that lack any commercial or functional utility. But his work, some of which is on display at the Visionary Arts Museum in Baltimore, has purpose. Goldstein is pushing the envelope of engineering and hoping to stir the imaginations of young engineers to push their own envelopes. For example "Why Knot?” a sculpture Goldstein constructed, uses 10 electric motors to drive 10 mechanisms to construct a four-in-hand knot on a necktie that it wraps around its own neck. Grasping, pulling, aligning and winding the lengths of the tie, Mr. Knot can detect the occasional misstep or tear, untie the knot and get it right. Unlike Rube Goldberg’s whimsical contraptions, Mr. Goldstein’s is no mere cartoon. It works, if only for Mr. Knot.
According to Kilborn, people like Goldstein don't fit the traditional definition of retirement, which according to Webster's Dictionary means the "withdrawal from one's position or occupation or from active working life. Retirement implies that you're just leaving something; it doesn't reflect that you're going to something," says Schlossberg. "But it is really a career change. You are leaving something that has been your primary involvement, and you are moving to something else."
For example, 75-year-old Seth R. Goldstein, with four degrees in mechanical and electrical engineering from MIT and retired for thirteen years, still calls himself an engineer. But where he was previously a biomedical engineer with the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda with 12 patents, he now makes kinetic sculptures in his basement workshop that lack any commercial or functional utility. But his work, some of which is on display at the Visionary Arts Museum in Baltimore, has purpose. Goldstein is pushing the envelope of engineering and hoping to stir the imaginations of young engineers to push their own envelopes. For example "Why Knot?” a sculpture Goldstein constructed, uses 10 electric motors to drive 10 mechanisms to construct a four-in-hand knot on a necktie that it wraps around its own neck. Grasping, pulling, aligning and winding the lengths of the tie, Mr. Knot can detect the occasional misstep or tear, untie the knot and get it right. Unlike Rube Goldberg’s whimsical contraptions, Mr. Goldstein’s is no mere cartoon. It works, if only for Mr. Knot.
According to Kilborn, people like Goldstein don't fit the traditional definition of retirement, which according to Webster's Dictionary means the "withdrawal from one's position or occupation or from active working life. Retirement implies that you're just leaving something; it doesn't reflect that you're going to something," says Schlossberg. "But it is really a career change. You are leaving something that has been your primary involvement, and you are moving to something else."
Breakthrough In Face Recognition Software 142
An anonymous reader writes: Face recognition software underwent a revolution in 2001 with the creation of the Viola-Jones algorithm. Now, the field looks set to dramatically improve once again: computer scientists from Stanford and Yahoo Labs have published a new, simple approach that can find faces turned at an angle and those that are partially blocked by something else. The researchers "capitalize on the advances made in recent years on a type of machine learning known as a deep convolutional neural network. The idea is to train a many-layered neural network using a vast database of annotated examples, in this case pictures of faces from many angles. To that end, Farfade and co created a database of 200,000 images that included faces at various angles and orientations and a further 20 million images without faces. They then trained their neural net in batches of 128 images over 50,000 iterations. ... What's more, their algorithm is significantly better at spotting faces when upside down, something other approaches haven't perfected."
Comment Re:Not an American, not doing business in America. (Score 1) 102
Regrettably, extradition hearings look to see if a case can be made by the prosecutors. If so, the person is shipped off, unless there is an extraordinary issue, like the person is to be executed for jaywalking (;-))
Comment Re:Where Is My D-Bag Boss? (Score 1) 102
If they're innocent until proven guilty, should the profits of their putative crimes be seized? Or should it wait until after they're convicted, if at all?
Comment Re:Where Is My D-Bag Boss? (Score 1) 102
He seems to be close to owing more to his lawyers than the sum of what he has and what he claims is his family's. If the cause is the US seizing his assets on the basis of his guilt after charging him with something expensive, then the obvious conclusions follow...
Comment Re:Why plea deal? (Score 1) 102
Plea deals are a bug-fix for wasted efforts in the courts, but like many bug-fixes, they contain their own bugs.
If the court process is expensive enough, any organization with money can can almost always bankrupt someone with less money, and thereby force them into accepting a plea deal. If it's officers of the court (prosecutors) it's particularly heinous: they're using the defendant's money against them..
The bug-fix needs a bug-fix, one that isn't subject to being gamed. In Canada we used to have supported programmes for fighting unjust laws, and even unfair convictions. We still have them, but they're done almost completely pro-bono. IMHO, the government of the day seems quite unwilling to pay for anything that advances the cause of justice...
--dave
No, IANAL, I'm just grumpy about at political attacks on and perversion of natural justice.
Submission + - Week long movie of Pluto produced by New Horizons
schwit1 writes: Cool images! Using New Horizons’ long range camera scientists have compiled a movie showing Charon and Pluto orbiting each other during the last week of January 2015.
Pluto and Charon were observed for an entire rotation of each body; a “day” on Pluto and Charon is 6.4 Earth days. The first of the images was taken when New Horizons was about 3 billion miles from Earth, but just 126 million miles (203 million kilometers) from Pluto—about 30% farther than Earth’s distance from the Sun. The last frame came 6½ days later, with New Horizons more than 5 million miles (8 million kilometers) closer.
The wobble easily visible in Pluto’s motion, as Charon orbits, is due to the gravity of Charon, about one-eighth as massive as Pluto and about the size of Texas.
Our view of Pluto, and Charon, is only going to get better as New Horizons zooms towards its July fly-by.
Submission + - Trans-Pacific Partnership Enables Harsh Penalties For Filesharing (eff.org)
An anonymous reader writes: The EFF went through a recently leak of the secretive Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement, an international agreement in development that among other things would impose new intellectual property laws on much of the developed world. The EFF highlights one section in particular, which focuses on the punishments for copyright infringement. The document doesn't set specific sentences, but it actively encourages high monetary penalties and jail terms. Its authors reason that these penalties will be a deterrent to future infringement. "The TPP's copyright provisions even require countries to enable judges to unilaterally order the seizure, destruction, or forfeiture of anything that can be 'traceable to infringing activity,' has been used in the 'creation of pirated copyright goods,' or is 'documentary evidence relevant to the alleged offense.' Under such obligations, law enforcement could become ever more empowered to seize laptops, servers, or even domain names."
Submission + - How Slashdot Inspired Our New Redundancy Feature (speedify.com)
agizis writes: In October, there was an 'Ask Slashdot' post, wondering how to use a VPN, "so that the same TCP and UDP traffic goes over both links, and the fastest packet on either link 'wins' and the other is discarded?" At the time, there was no good solution. Thanks to Speedify's new "Redundant Mode, this is now possible. By sending UDP traffic over every link, Speedify really can drop average latency significantly. Your opponents in Battlefield won't stand a chance!
Submission + - David Carr dies after moderating event with Edward Snowden & Glenn Greenwald (washingtonpost.com)
McGruber writes: David Carr, the New York Times media columnist who overcame numerous battles with addiction to become one of the nation’s most recognizable and respected journalists, died on Thursday after collapsing in the newsroom, the New York Times announced on Thursday evening. He was 58.
On Thursday evening, Carr moderated "Citizenfour — New York Times Talk at The New School" [http://events.newschool.edu/event/new_york_times_talk_at_the_new_school_citizenfour#.VN2BFPk7tcY] a panel conversation that included Edward Snowden, filmmaker Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald to discuss last year’s National Security Agency surveillance revelations. Afterward, he collapsed at his office around 9 p.m., NY Times spokesman Eileen Murphy said.
On Thursday evening, Carr moderated "Citizenfour — New York Times Talk at The New School" [http://events.newschool.edu/event/new_york_times_talk_at_the_new_school_citizenfour#.VN2BFPk7tcY] a panel conversation that included Edward Snowden, filmmaker Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald to discuss last year’s National Security Agency surveillance revelations. Afterward, he collapsed at his office around 9 p.m., NY Times spokesman Eileen Murphy said.
