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Power

How Apple Watch Is Really a Regression In Watchmaking 415

Posted by timothy from the maybe-they-could-merge-with-timex dept.
Nerval's Lobster writes Apple design chief Jony Ive has spent the past several weeks talking up how the Apple Watch is an evolution on many of the principles that guided the evolution of timepieces over the past several hundred years. But the need to recharge the device on a nightly basis, now confirmed by Apple CEO Tim Cook, is a throwback to ye olden days, when a lady or gentleman needed to keep winding her or his pocket-watch in order to keep it running. Watch batteries were supposed to bring "winding" to a decisive end, except for that subset of people who insist on carrying around a mechanical timepiece. But with Apple Watch's requirement that the user constantly monitor its energy, what's old is new again. Will millions of people really want to charge and fuss with their watch at least once a day?
Open Source

Ask Slashdot: Aging and Orphan Open Source Projects? 155

Posted by Soulskill from the try-craigslist dept.
osage writes: Several colleagues and I have worked on an open source project for over 20 years under a corporate aegis. Though nothing like Apache, we have a sizable user community and the software is considered one of the de facto standards for what it does. The problem is that we have never been able to attract new, younger programmers, and members of the original set have been forced to find jobs elsewhere or are close to retirement. The corporation has no interest in supporting the software. Thus, in the near future, the project will lose its web site host and be devoid of its developers and maintainers. Our initial attempts to find someone to adopt the software haven't worked. We are looking for suggestions as to what course to pursue. We can't be the only open source project in this position.
United States

US Says It Can Hack Foreign Servers Without Warrants 335

Posted by Soulskill from the how-to-win-friends dept.
Advocatus Diaboli tips news that the U.S. government is now arguing it doesn't need warrants to hack servers hosted on foreign soil. At issue is the current court case against Silk Road operator Ross Ulbricht. We recently discussed how the FBI's account of how they obtained evidence from Silk Road servers didn't seem to mesh with reality. Now, government lawyers have responded in a new court filing (PDF). They say that even if the FBI had to hack those servers without a warrant, it doesn't matter, because the Fourth Amendment does not confer protection to servers hosted outside the U.S. They said, "Given that the SR Server was hosting a blatantly criminal website, it would have been reasonable for the FBI to 'hack' into it in order to search it, as any such 'hack' would simply have constituted a search of foreign property known to contain criminal evidence, for which a warrant was not necessary."
Cloud

Department of Defense May Give Private Cloud Vendors Access To Top Secret Data 60

Posted by Soulskill from the what-could-possibly-go-wrong dept.
An anonymous reader sends news that the U.S. Department of Defense is pondering methods to store its most sensitive data in the cloud. The DoD issued an information request (PDF) to see whether the commercial marketplace can provide remote computing services for Level 5 and Level 6 workloads, which include restricted military data. "The DoD anticipates that the infrastructure will range from configurations featuring between 10,000 and 200,000 virtual machines. Any vendors selected to the scheme would be subject to an accreditation process and to security screening, and the DoD is employing the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program to establish screening procedures for authorized cloud vendors, and to generate procedures for continuous monitoring and auditing."
Businesses

Complain About Comcast, Get Fired From Your Job 742

Posted by timothy from the now-that's-some-customer-feedback dept.
ub3r n3u7r4l1st writes When you complain to your cable company, you certainly don't expect that the cable company will then contact your employer and discuss your complaint. But that's exactly what happened to one former Comcast customer who says he was fired after the cable company called a partner at his accounting firm. Be careful next time when you exercise your first amendment rights. From the article: At some point shortly after that call, someone from Comcast contacted a partner at the firm to discuss Conal. This led to an ethics investigation and Conal’s subsequent dismissal from his job; a job where he says he’d only received positive feedback and reviews for his work. Comcast maintained that Conal used the name of his employer in an attempt to get leverage. Conal insists that he never mentioned his employer by name, but believes that someone in the Comcast Controller’s office looked him up online and figured out where he worked. When he was fired, Conal’s employer explained that the reason for the dismissal was an e-mail from Comcast that summarized conversations between Conal and Comcast employees. But Conal has never seen this e-mail in order to say whether it’s accurate and Comcast has thus far refused to release any tapes of the phone calls related to this matter.
Communications

LTE Upgrade Will Let Phones Connect To Nearby Devices Without Towers 153

Posted by Soulskill from the just-yell-really-loud dept.
An anonymous reader sends this excerpt from MIT's Technology Review: A new feature being added to the LTE protocol that smartphones use to communicate with cellular towers will make it possible to bypass those towers altogether. Phones will be able to "talk" directly to other mobile devices and to beacons located in shops and other businesses. Known as LTE Direct, the wireless technology has a range of up to 500 meters, far more than either Wi-Fi or Bluetooth. It is included in update to the LTE standard slated for approval this year, and devices capable of LTE Direct could appear as soon as late 2015. ... Researchers are, for example, testing LTE Direct as a way to allow smartphones to automatically discover nearby people, businesses, and other information.
United Kingdom

Piracy Police Chief Calls For State Interference To Stop Internet "Anarchy" 302

Posted by samzenpus from the lock-it-down dept.
An anonymous reader writes The City of London Police's Intellectual Property Crime Unit (PIPCU) is determined to continue its anti-piracy efforts in the years to come. However, the unit's head, Andy Fyfe, also believes that the government may have to tighten the rules on the Internet to stop people from breaking the law. PIPCU's chief believes the public has to be protected from criminals, including pirate site operators who take advantage of their trust. If that doesn't happen, then the Internet may descend into anarchy, he says, suggesting that the government may have to intervene to prevent this. The Police chief believes tighter rules may be needed to prevent people from breaking the law in the future. This could mean not everyone is allowed to launch a website, but that a license would be required, for example.
The Military

US Strikes ISIL Targets In Syria 478

Posted by timothy from the 140-characters-at-a-time dept.
Taco Cowboy writes The United States of America has launched airstrikes, along with some of its Arab partners such as Jordan, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and Qatar, against ISIL targets in Syria. ... Before the airstrike was officially announced to the press, a Syrian man living in Raqqa, Syria, tweeted about the bombings and the sounds of air drones all over Raqqa. ... Tomahawk missiles were launched from USS Arleigh Burke in the Red Sea. Stealth fighters such as F-22s were also involved in the strike.
Iphone

Friendly Reminder: Do Not Place Your iPhone In a Microwave 240

Posted by samzenpus from the bad-ideas dept.
Nerval's Lobster writes Placing your iPhone in the microwave will destroy the phone, and possibly the microwave. While that might seem obvious to some people, others have fallen for the "Wave" hoax making its way around online. The fake advertisement insists that the new iOS 8 allows users to charge their iPhones by placing them in a "household microwave for a minute and a half." Microwave energy will not charge your smartphone. To the contrary, it will scorch the device and render it inoperable. If you nuke your smartphone and subsequently complain about it online, people will probably make fun of you. (If you want a full list of things not to place in a microwave, no matter how pretty the flames, check this out.)
Media

Ask Slashdot: What To Do After Digitizing VHS Tapes? 268

Posted by samzenpus from the now-what? dept.
An anonymous reader writes Now that I've spent close to a month digitizing a desk drawer's worth of VHS tapes, deinterlacing and postprocessing the originals to minimize years of tape decay, and compressing everything down to H.264, I've found myself with a hard drive full of loosely organized videos. They'll get picked up by my existing monthly backup, but I feel like I haven't gained much in the way of redundancy, as I thought I would. Instead of having tapes slowly degrade, I'm now open to losing entire movies at once, should both of my drives go bad. Does anyone maintain a library, and if so, what would they recommend? Is having them duplicated on two drives (one of which is spun down for all but one day of the month) a good-enough long term strategy? Should I look into additionally backing up to optical discs or flash drives, building out a better (RAIDed) backup machine, or even keeping the original tapes around despite them having been digitized?
Transportation

GM To Introduce Hands-Free Driving In Cadillac Model 185

Posted by samzenpus from the look-mom-no-hands dept.
cold fjord notes that drivers will be able to switch a new Cadillac model to partial auto-pilot. General Motors Co. (GM), the largest U.S. automaker, will introduce a Cadillac model in two years that can travel on the highway without the driver holding the steering wheel or putting a foot on a pedal. The 2017 Cadillac model will feature "Super Cruise" technology that takes control of steering, acceleration and braking at highway speeds of 70 miles per hour or in stop-and-go congested traffic, Chief Executive Officer Mary Barra said yesterday in a speech at the Intelligent Transport System World Congress in Detroit. GM declined to release the name of the model that will carry the feature. Barra also said GM in two years will become the first automaker to equip a model with so-called vehicle-to-vehicle technology that enables the car to communicate with other autos with similar abilities to warn of traffic hazards and improve road safety. GM will make the V2V feature standard on its 2017 Cadillac CTS sedan, debuting in the second half of 2016, she said. The Super Cruise feature will be on a different Cadillac model and goes beyond similar technology available on some Mercedes-Benz models that operates only at low speeds.

Comment Re:MyTouch 4G Slidw (Score 1) 544

I gave in and went without a slider once I realized they were never going to come out with a narrow (portrait-oriented) slider. I want an approximately blackberry-curve-shaped keyboard that slides out at the bottom of my phone, rather than the landscape-oriented one that made me choose an original droid over a blackberry storm (well, that and the fact that the onscreen keyboard on the storm was complete shit compared to the moto droid's).

I still really want one, but they won't make it.

Comment Re:It's already going on... (Score 1) 353

by drakaan (#47415665) Attached to: Here Comes the Panopticon: Insurance Companies

I tend to agree with you. I'm not ignorant about my driving. That's the *reason* that I'm a conservative driver.

I've been a driver for 24 years. In that time, vehicles I own have been involved in 5 collisions. In two of those, the vehicles were parked and struck by other motorists. In one, the vehicle was stationary, but not parked, and struck by another motorist, in one, I backed into a car that was going around 25 mph through a gas station parking lot (lesson learned), and in one, I clipped some poor guy's '63 skylark with a humvee when doing a courier run at the very end of a 24-hour CQ shift (I still feel like a jackass about that one...I'd swear I looked right and things were clear, but I was obviously wrong).

Aside from that, I've had one claim arising from a hailstorm that beat the crap out of the family minivan.

I was not giving some list of things I do that make me perfect, because I'm not perfect. What I am is cautious, mainly because I'm not made of money, and deductibles are not my friend. I don't drive strictly the speed limit, but I always follow at a safe distance for the road conditions, and I pay attention to folks behind me who don't do the same. I let faster drivers pass me and move over to make that easier when possible. I signal lane changes and turns. I change lanes before the last minute so that I don't have to worry about cutting someone off.

I do all of those things for a couple of reasons. First, I don't want to be the cause of an accident and cause damage to myself, someone else, my car, or someone else's car because it sucks for everyone when that happens. Second, I don't want to pay any more money than I have to for the privilege of driving.

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