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Submission + - Yahoo mail turns 17 today (latesttoptechnews.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: For our birthday wish, we'd like to hear from you — what's your favorite email moment of the past 17 years? Tell us about your long distance love, the video attachment of your grandchild's first steps, your mom's comforting advice. The endless email chain between you and your friends. The job offer of your dreams, or when you accidentally clicked reply-all, but it worked out beautifully.

Submission + - Andrea Rossi's E-Cat Fusion Reactor "Verified" by "Reputable" Researchers

Submitted by Bulldozer2003
Bulldozer2003 writes: A team of Italian and Swedish scientists observed an operating E-Cat reactor over a 32-day period. In their report they determined that the device was outputting energy at a scale greater than any known chemical reactions could have released. They also were able to measure the isotopes of nickel in the device before and after, finding the "natural" ratio of Ni 58 to 60 having been almost completely replaced by Ni 62.

Any nuclear scientists out there that can comment on the report in better detail? This most recent observation of the E-Cat answers some of the criticisms I've personally had with researchers not being allowed physical access to the E-Cat before and after running it.

ExtremeTech also offers a summary of the report.

Submission + - BitHammer. The BItTorrent BanHammer. (github.com) 2

Submitted by michaelcole
michaelcole writes: It's name is BitHammer. It searches out, and bans BitTorrent users your local sub-net. Enjoy.

I'm a digital nomad. That means I travel and work, often using a shared WIFI. Over the last year, I've been plagued by rogue BitTorrent users who've crept onto these public WIFI's either with a stolen/cracked password, or who lie right to my face (and the WIFI owners) about it.

These users clog up the residential routers connection tables, and make it impossible to use tools like SSH, or sometimes even web browsing. Stuck for a day, bullied from the WIFI, I wrote BitHammer as a research project. It worked rather well. It's my first Python program. I hope you find it useful.

Submission + - Why there's no such thing as a free quark

Submitted by StartsWithABang
StartsWithABang writes: If you want an electron to be free, all you have to do is put in enough energy to ionize an atom. If you want a mass to be free, all you need is enough energy to overcome its gravitational binding. But a quark is a tricky thing: as much as we might try, we can never free it from being bound to other quarks (or antiquarks). The reason is tricky, and its explanation won the Nobel Prize exactly 10 years ago. Here's a great explainer o the physics behind it.

Submission + - We talked to 4 major banks about the future of Apple Pay (dailydot.com)

Submitted by Molly McHugh
Molly McHugh writes: We spoke with Navy Federal Credit Union, USAA, Chase, and PNC—banks who are working with Apple to incorporate Apple Pay—to find out just how secure Apple Pay will be when the "October" release date finally arrives. (USAA tells us that Apple Pay will be available for its Visa and MasterCard carrying customers starting Nov. 7.)

Submission + - Decline of bees and other pollinators could worsen global malnutrition (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: Although bees, butterflies, and other winged creatures serve as natural pollinators for many of the world’s plants, they contribute only modestly to the world’s agricultural production—accounting for between 5% and 10% of the production of food crops. However, such natural pollinators may play a disproportionately large role in human nutrition and health, according to a new study. That's because pollinators support crops that deliver essential nutrients to malnourished regions of the world, the data show, suggesting that regions already facing food shortages and nutritional deficiencies may be especially hard hit by the global decline of bees and other pollinators.

Submission + - Schmidt Says Attack on Google Prompted Encryption Changes

Submitted by Trailrunner7
Trailrunner7 writes: Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Google, said that the changes to Android's encryption model, which have angered law enforcement officials, should have come as no surprise to law enforcement and government agencies, given the events of the last couple of years.

“The people who are criticizing this should’ve expected this. After Google was attacked by the British version of the NSA we were annoyed to no end,” Schmidt said. “We put in encryption end to end, at rest and in transit. Law enforcement has many many ways to get this information without doing this.”

After the details of Apple’s and Google’s encryption changes became public, some in the law enforcement community have suggested that the companies should include a backdoor in their devices. Both Sen. Ron Wyden and Schmidt dismissed this suggestion out of hand.

“U.S. companies shouldn’t be forced to build backdoors into their products,” Wyden said.

Submission + - Multitasking Damages Your Brain And Career (forbes.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: You’ve likely heard that multitasking is problematic, but new studies show that it kills your performance and may even damage your brain.

Research conducted at Stanford University found that multitasking is less productive than doing a single thing at a time. The researchers also found that people who are regularly bombarded with several streams of electronic information cannot pay attention, recall information, or switch from one job to another as well as those who complete one task at a time.

A Special Skill?

But what if some people have a special gift for multitasking? The Stanford researchers compared groups of people based on their tendency to multitask and their belief that it helps their performance. They found that heavy multitaskers—those who multitask a lot and feel that it boosts their performance—were actually worse at multitasking than those who like to do a single thing at a time. The frequent multitaskers performed worse because they had more trouble organizing their thoughts and filtering out irrelevant information, and they were slower at switching from one task to another. Ouch.

Multitasking reduces your efficiency and performance because your brain can only focus on one thing at a time. When you try to do two things at once, your brain lacks the capacity to perform both tasks successfully.

Comment WiFi Directional Panel Antennas on the Ceiling (Score 1) 250

by Bulldozer2003 (#45584913) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Recommendations For Beautiful Network Cable Trays?
Using directed antennas attached to decent APs will ensure clients are connecting to the closest AP and reduce interference from omni-directional antennas spewing the signal everywhere. Attach flat-panel antennas to the ceiling pointing down over each cluster of workspaces.
Facebook

Submission + - Facebook to Receive 2012 Tax Refund of $429 Million (ctj.org)

Submitted by Bulldozer2003
Bulldozer2003 writes: Citizens for Tax Justice recently analyzed Facebook's first annual 10-k financial report to the SEC as a publicly traded company. "Hidden in the report’s footnotes is an amazing admission: despite $1.1 billion in U.S. profits in 2012, Facebook did not pay even a dime in federal and state income taxes. Instead, Facebook says it will receive net tax refunds totaling $429 million." -CTJ
This is only the beginning as Facebook still has over $2 billion in tax breaks they did not utilize this year.
NASA

Submission + - NASA Loses Contact with Space Station Over Software Update (cbslocal.com)

Submitted by kodiaktau
kodiaktau writes: Reports early Tuesday morning say that a software update to the Space Station caused a communication blackout with Houston control. Remediation of the update has allowed the astronauts limited communication every 90 minutes or so. It is expected that the issue will be resolved today.
Japan

Submission + - Sensors pick up North Korean radioactivity (nature.com)

Submitted by
gbrumfiel
gbrumfiel writes: "A global network of sensors has picked up faint traces of radioactive gas that probably seeped from last week's underground nuclear test by North Korea. The detection of xenon-133 in Japan and Russia provide further evidence of the nuclear nature of the test, but offer no hint as to the type of weapon used. Atmospheric modelling by the Central Institute for Meteorology and Geodynamics in Vienna shows that the gas likely seeped from North Korea's test site on 15 February, three days after the original test. That indicates that the test was well sealed deep underground."

Submission + - Does the Higgs Boson Reveal Our Universe's Doomsday? (discovery.com)

Submitted by
astroengine
astroengine writes: "If calculations of the newly discovered Higgs boson particle are correct, one day, tens of billions of years from now, the universe will disappear at the speed of light, replaced by a strange, alternative dimension, one theoretical physicist calls boring. "It may be that the universe we live in is inherently unstable and at some point billions of years from now it’s all going to get wiped out. This has to do with the Higgs energy field itself,” Joseph Lykken, with the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill., told Discovery News. "This calculation tells you that many tens of billions of years from now there’ll be a catastrophe.""

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