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Submission + - Icy Jupiter moon may be actively recycling its surface (sciencemag.org)

sciencehabit writes: Europa, the intriguing ice-encrusted moon of Jupiter, may be resurfaced through plate tectonics, scientists have discovered. The result would make Europa the only known body in the solar system besides Earth with plate tectonics, a process in which cold giant platters of crustâ"or in this case, iceâ"float around on top of warmer, more viscous layers in the bodyâ(TM)s interior. The discovery also makes the moon more interesting in the search for extraterrestrial life, because the recycling action of plate tectonics would provide an important way to exchange chemicals between the surface and the water ocean that lies beneath the moonâ(TM)s ice cap.

Submission + - Reddit Moderator Outs Reddit Admins (soundcloud.com) 8

Khyber writes: While the censorship is strong over at Reddit, details from a (former) moderator of one of the largest subreddits on the site have been leaked in the form of an an audio recording of a Skype conversation between an unidentified journalist and the moderator himself. User posts are being deleted rapidly from Reddit over in the /r/gaming subreddit, users are being shadowbanned, or hard-banned. (I've had my account dropped.) Really interesting parts of the 50-minute long audio sit around ~10:30 and ~26 minute marks, where the moderator details threats made against him and other moderators, and also a bit near the end regarding their censorship/spam control tools, and how anyone can effectively be banned for any made up reason, commonly-used ones being vote manipulation, brigading, and alt account creation. There is also talk about how subreddits for encryption get monitored much more closely and censored much more often than larger subreddits, such as /r/gaming.

As someone I know has put it, "...given that Reddit says that it views itself as a government for a new type of community, this is disturbing."

Comment Re:Hire the recovered patients (Score 2, Insightful) 55

And isn't all this a good example of how Darwinism works? The survivors have proven that they can beat the disease and their genes will be more likely to spread causing the next outbreak of this strain in the future to be less serious.

Cruel - yes, but nature is cruel and doesn't have favorites.

Comment Re:FAA admits to alien role in populating the worl (Score 1) 222

Well - if FAA goes after those doing tornado research they are essentially just getting bad publicity. It seems to me that they essentially just try to shoot down every operation that is competing with the paperwork path of the FAA.

Better set up a new set of rules instead, since as long as you operate it for other than private use but use it in a way that doesn't invade privacy or on your own property then I don't see a problem with using a drone (which is a RC model anyway.)

Submission + - GPL risk shown when popular Minecraft plugins shut down by DMCA.

Maxo-Texas writes: One of the primary programmers, Wesley Wolfe (Wolvereness), who contributed over 23,000 lines of code to the Bukkit project which enhances Minecraft server performance and allows others to write "mods" and "plugins" submitted a DMCA request September 5th, preventing use of his code in the popular Bukkit or Spigot (and numerous other Minecraft plugins, mods, and other open source enhancements that depend on them). This has the effect of freezing all further development for multi-player server Minecraft based on these addons until the issue is resolved.

The programmer says that Mojang must release the Minecraft server code to the public domain since decompiled, deobfuscated versions of the java code are included in the Bukkit project before he will withdraw the DMCA. Mojang has never released the real source code and has stated they will not opensource the server code to meet the GPL and LGPL licensing requirements.

Read more here:
http://www.spigotmc.org/thread...

This approach might be a risk for other GPL and LGPL projects out there which are derivative of or enhance non GPL programs or products.

Submission + - Aging Nuclear Reactors May Close in Japan (scientificamerican.com)

mdsolar writes: Japan will push nuclear operators to draft plans to scrap a quarter of the country's 48 reactors, which are either too old or too costly to upgrade to meet new standards imposed after the Fukushima disaster, the Nikkei reported on Friday.

The government is betting that by forcing older units considered more vulnerable to disaster to shut down it may gain public support to restart newer units, the Nikkei reported.

All reactors in Japan have been shut down after the 2011 nuclear crisis at Fukushima caused by a major earthquake and tsunami.

Public opinion turned against nuclear power after the disaster, but the governments wants to restart units deemed safe by a new more independent regulator and cut Japan's reliance on expensive imports of fossil fuels.

Submission + - Army can't track spending on $4 billion system to track spending

schwit1 writes: Our government in action: An inspector general has found that the Army was unable to track the spending on a project designed to help the Army track spending.

As of this February, the Army had spent $725.7 million on the system, which is ultimately expected to cost about $4.3 billion. The problem, according to the IG, is that the Army has failed to comply with a variety of federal laws that require agencies to standardize reporting and prepare auditable financial statements. “This occurred because DOD and Army management did not have adequate controls, including procedures and annual reviews, in place to ensure GCSS-Army compliance with Treasury and DOD guidance,” the IG report concludes.

Submission + - Mozilla 1024-Bit Cert Deprecation Leaves 107,000 Sites Untrusted (threatpost.com)

msm1267 writes: Mozilla has deprecated 1024-bit RSA certificate authority certificates in Firefox 32 and Thunderbird. While there are pluses to the move such as a requirement for longer, stronger keys, at least 107,000 websites will no longer be trusted by Mozilla.

Data from HD Moore's Project Sonar, which indexes more than 20 million websites, found 107,535 sites using a cert signed by what will soon be an untrusted CA certificate. Grouping those 107,000-plus sites by certificate expiration date, the results show that 76,185 certificates had expired as of Aug. 25; of the 65 million certificates in the total scan, 845,599 had expired but were still in use as of Aug. 25, Moore said.

Comment Re:affirmative (Score 2) 203

Just look at some of the more successful companies - many of them have had a "skunk works" department where they could do the research and innovations in a less restricted area.

And a lot of creative people are also less socially competent, which means that they have a harder time to get funding.

Submission + - Cobol Forever! (computerworld.com)

mspohr writes: Interesting article in Computerworld about Cobol's die hard fans which include large companies with millions of lines in Cobol code which they keep up to date even though there is a dwindling supply of Cobol coders. One example is Blue Cross:
"The healthcare insurer processes nearly 10% of all healthcare claims in the U.S., and uses six top-of-the line IBM zEnterprise EC12 systems running millions of lines of optimized Cobol to process 19.4 billion online healthcare transactions annually. Its custom-built claims processing engine has been thoroughly modernized and kept up to date, says BCBS of SC vice president and chief technology officer Ravi Ravindra. "It was always in Cobol, and it always will be."
"Cobol was designed to handle transactional workloads, and for large-scale transaction processing it still can't be beat..."
"Some 23 of the world's top 25 retailers, 92 of the top 100 banks, and the 10 largest insurers all entrust core operations to Cobol programs running on IBM mainframes"
So... should we all start learning Cobol?

Comment It's a difference between theory and practice. (Score 1) 546

Some degrees contains a lot of theory around algorithms but they miss the point of how do you code in a good way - produce code that's easy to maintain.

The bulk of the code written is essentially just bread and butter, check this, check that, merge strings, store data, retrieve data. Few have to concern themselves with indexing algorithms, best function to seek data - it's in the database API.

The "How to write quality code" chapter seems to have been lost (if it ever did exist) for many that are coming out fresh on the job market.

Employing someone with a degree in Computer Science can even mean that you employ a code jockey that re-invents functionality that already exists in a library - with the risk of new interesting bugs introduced.

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