Comment Slippery slope arguments are always bad (Score 1) 186
Their premise is the current case is not bad enough for opposition, and only some hypothetical future case is bad enough for opposition. It's a form of strawman argument.
Xerox Confirms To David Kriesel Number Mangling Occuring On Factory Settings 163
An anonymous reader writes with a followup to last week's report that certain Xerox scanners and copiers could alter numbers as they scanned documents: "In the second Xerox press statement, Rick Dastin, Vice President at Xerox Corporation, stated: 'You will not see a character substitution issue when scanning with the factory default settings.' In contrast, David Kriesel, who brought up the issue in the first place, was able to replicate the issue with the very same factory settings. This might be a serious problem now. Not only does the problem occur using default settings and everyone may be affected, additionally, their press statements may have misled customers. Xerox replicated the issue by following Kriesel's instructions, later confirming it to Kriesel. Whole image segments seem to be copied around the scanned data. There is also a new Xerox statement out now."
Swapping numbers while copying may seem like bizarre behavior for a copier, but In comments on the previous posting, several readers pointed out that Xerox was aware of the problem, and acknowledged it in the machine's documentation; the software updates promised should be welcome news to anyone who expects a copier to faithfully reproduce important numbers.
Comment because of the put-down, I imagine... (Score 1) 413
they are going to start hacking michael hayden.
Xerox Photocopiers Randomly Alter Numbers, Says German Researcher 290
First time accepted submitter sal_park writes "According to a report from German computer scientist D. Kriesel, some Xerox WorkCentre copiers and scanners may alter numbers that appear in scanned documents. Having analyzed the output of two such devices, the Xerox WorkCentre 7535 and 7556, Kriesel found that "patches of the pixel data are randomly replaced in a very subtle and dangerous way": in particular, some numbers appearing in a document may be replaced by other numbers when it is scanned."
Submission + - Hubble spots source of short GRB (redorbit.com)
symbolset writes: Researchers using the Hubble Space Telescope have imaged some evidence that the merger of neutron stars is responsible for producing a short-duration gamma ray burst. On June 3rd the Swift gamma-ray burst (GRB) mission detected GRB 130603B, a burst lasting only one tenth of a second nearly 4 billion lightyears away. Imaging with Hubble they located a small red dot which, over the course of the following two weeks dimmed. Cites an article in yesterday's special online edition of Nature.
Comment About that secret proposal... (Score 1) 650
someone ought to place a reward for leaking it. Maybe we need a kickstarter for whistleblowers.
Submission + - Less vaccination then, more measles now (wsj.com)
DavidHumus writes: Some of the longer-term effects of the anti-vaccination movement of past decades is now evident in a dramatic increase in measles. From the article: A measles outbreak infected 1,219 people in southwest Wales between November 2012 and early July, compared with 105 cases in all of Wales in 2011.
There continues to be no credible evidence that vaccination causes autism but the a significant minority believes this anyway.
There continues to be no credible evidence that vaccination causes autism but the a significant minority believes this anyway.
Submission + - Some volcanoes 'scream' at ever-higher pitches until they blow their tops (washington.edu)
vinces99 writes: Swarms of small earthquakes often precede a volcanic eruption. They can reach such rapid succession that they create a "harmonic tremor" that resembles sound made by some musical instruments. A new analysis of an eruption sequence at Alaska's Redoubt Volcano in March 2009 shows the harmonic tremor glided to substantially higher frequencies and then stopped abruptly just before six of the eruptions. Scientists at the U.S. Geological Survey's Alaska Volcano Observatory have dubbed the highest-frequency harmonic tremor at Redoubt Volcano “the screams” because the episodes reach such high pitch compared with a 1-to-5 hertz starting point. Alicia Hotovec-Ellis, a University of Washington doctoral student in Earth and space sciences and an author of two papers examining the phenomenon, has created a 10-second recording and a one-minute recording that provides a 60-times faster representation of harmonic tremor and small earthquakes.
Submission + - What Medical Tests Should Teach Us about the NSA Surveillance Program
Davak writes: In many ways finding the small amount of terrorists within the United States is like screening a population of people for a rare disease. A physician explains why collecting excessive data is actually dangerous. Each time a test is run, the number of people incorrectly identified quickly dwarfs the correct matches. Just like in medicine, being incorrectly labelled has serious consequences.
Submission + - Intel Caught Cheating in AnTuTu Benchmark To Show-up ARM? (hothardware.com)
MojoKid writes: Recently, industry analysts came forward with the dubious claim that Intel's Clover Trail+ low power processor for mobile devices had somehow seized a massive lead over ARM's products, though there were suspicious discrepancies in the popular AnTuTu benchmark that was utilized to showcase performance. It turns out that the situation is far shadier than initially thought. The version used in testing with the benchmark isn't just tilted to favor Intel — it seems to flat-out cheat to accomplish it. The new 3.3 version of AnTuTu was compiled using Intel's C++ Compiler, while GCC was used for the ARM variants. The Intel code was auto-vectorized, the ARM code wasn't — there are no NEON instructions in the ARM version of the application. Granted, GCC isn't currently very good at auto-vectorization, but NEON is now standard on every Cortex-A9 and Cortex-A15 SoC — and these are the parts people will be benchmarking. But compiler optimizations are just the beginning. Apparently the Intel code deliberately breaks the benchmark's function. At a certain point, it runs a loop that's meant to be performed 32x just once, then reports to the benchmark that the task completed successfully. Now, the optimization in question is part of ICC (the Intel C++ compiler), but was only added recently. It's not the kind of procedure you'd call by accident. AnTuTu has released an updated "new" version of the benchmark in which Intel performance drops back down 20-50%. Systems based on high-end ARM devices again win the benchmark overall, as they did previously.
Comment -1 Woosh (Score 2) 167
I've often thought slashdot would benefit from a -1 Woosh mod option.
Comment rich car buyers vs rich dealership owners (Score 1) 309
Interesting that his spawned a grassroots We The People petition. I don't see how most people have a horse in this race right now.
Monsanto Executive Wins World Food Prize 271
sfcrazy writes "A top Monsanto executive has won the prestigious World Food Prize. Secretary of State John Kerry announced the award where Robert T. Fraley, the executive vice president and CTO of Monsanto, won the prize along with two other scientists from Belgium and the US. The award was given for devising a method to insert genes from another organism into plant cells, which could produce new genetic lines with highly favorable traits."
Comment Too much housing in China already (Score 1) 307
Look at this video of their "ghost cities"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rPILhiTJv7E
Comment Re:takes a certain kind of mind -- (Score 1) 558
Video of anti-gun state senator showing she doesn't understand how guns work
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mxtu228bYFw
