It's an international group which helps defend falsely accused "geeks of color". Here are two recent examples of FTR projects.

1. Ambassador program flies students and techs overseas to meet and qualify buyers of used tech who people are afraid to sell to based on "ewaste" myths. http://resource-recycling.com/...

2. Defense and petitions of UK TV repairman and ex-pat Nigerian Joe Benson, imprisoned in UK for "e-waste crime" based on "common knowledge" that 80% of exports of used equipment to Africa are burned in primitive dumps. FairTradeRecycling got the UN to fund actual research of the containerloads in question, which revealed 91% reuse and repair, better than brand new product, and found the African geeks who buy and repair used equipment were earning 6 times average wages (Ghana, Nigeria). http://resource-recycling.com/...

Disclosure, I'm the founder.

Breaking up the cable companies probably wouldn't do much without a new technology introduction. Break up of AT&T worked in retrospect because of advances in cell phone transmission, a leapfrog technology. Otherwise the Baby Bells would have still owned the local cable (like Fairpoint in New England).

I despise so much about Comcast. They have tech support / sales entertwined... Phone support techs in faraway lands read scripted lines like "your modem is at end-of-life". The "tech's" only knowledge of my modem is that it isn't rented from Comcast, can't tell me anything else? C'mon Tech Supporter! ...If you know it's "end of life" you must know when I bought it and must know what it is, right..? Ohhh... All you know is there's no monthly rent charge? Unfortunately, for now it's the fastest and cheapest bandwidth I can get. No other company is going to run a cable to my house. I doubt making "Baby Comcast/TWC" changes that. There has to be a technical advance, probably via satellite service. When Direct TV can compete technologically, cable will play nice.

Oy. The 2,000 year old man must be what? 2030, 2040 by now?

For a few more thousand, they could get ED-209 to roam the hallways.

Well, Yes, I understand, but that methodology (comparing identical twins to fraternal twins) was already used in 1992 to study alcoholism, and among the reasons it was not definitive is that taste buds are genetically inherited (for example), and dopamine receptors are genetically inherited. They could not say that alcoholism was genetic because correlations /= causation, and it was possible that diet and other causes, e.g. habits affected by taste, were being measured. http://pubs.niaaa.nih.gov/publ...

... It seemed to me that if the 1992 study could not determine whether alcoholism was genetic, or environmental, that the original poster had made a valid observation. If alcohol consumption could be caused by diet preference (e.g. people who love the taste of beer start drinking earlier in life, when the brain is developing, leading to stronger habits / dependencies), gut flora could also be affected by diet preference, habit, or tastes. I guess you could argue that is a genetic trait, but not nearly in as assertive a way as the Summary suggests.

Agreed, finding correlating microbes in the guts of twins does not seem to prove genetic causality, if the twins grew up in the same family and same environment. Since we know that the microbes can be passed between mammals via fecal matter ( https://www.sciencenews.org/ar... ) and identical twins are likely exposed to the same traces of fecal matter, I don't see how they have proven genetic causality. The study is behind a paywall unfortunately.

Since the idea of both tidal and wave energy has been promoted since OPEC price disruptions of the 1970s (see Severn Barrage) but has never been successfully implemented (due to economic costs, largely managing brine and mollusks), either A) they have figured out a simple solution, or 2) they came up with a more novel solution, more interesting than the article suggests, or C) this is /.

I hope these women read the entire EULA agreement!

Last month I got a photo of a bird splattered into the side of my red house. No window for 2 meters. I'd upload it but this is /. not /. beta

"The fact is that the number of passwords you should memorize is pretty small..." ...Says the author. I mostly agree with him but feel that any password is as weak as the weakest internal security of the weakest site you use it on. It drives me nuts when coworkers use a complex password on a news site or to register to leave a comment somewhere. Unless you know all the employees at Slashdot, /. should be the weakest password you use. What, someone's gonna steal your mod points? The use of complex passwords on low risk sites confuses users who, when they forget their passwords, wind up "guessing" important passwords onto weak sites.

FTFA "The spokesperson said that based on the forensic investigation to date, no personal information, no debit card PIN numbers, no email addresses and no social security numbers were obtained by the attackers."

Maybe it's only Tesco and Walmart, then.

http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2013/11/08/tesco-facial-recognition-scanners_n_4241801.html

http://adage.com/article/digital/facebook-walmart-write-rules-facial-recognition/245707/