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Comment Recruitment vs.Retention (Score 1) 473

by braindrainbahrain (#49978641) Attached to: Learn-to-Code Program For 10,000 Low-Income Girls
This is only one of many efforts on going to recruit girls into tech, but these efforts fail to address the retention problem. How do you keep women in the field once they start working? Perhaps Google and other major companies should provide better salary or benefits so the women don't leave. Or is it easier to make tax deductible contributions to programs such as the one in TFA?

It's interesting that retention is one of the key problems the NCWIT calls out in their study, where they claim a 56% departure rate of women from the field, and yet they have no solutions to offer.

Submission + - Russian troops traced to Ukrainian battlefields through social media

Submitted by wienerschnizzel
wienerschnizzel writes: Vice News released a report on how they were able to trace a member of the regular russian army from his base near the Ukriainian border towards the battlefields in the contested territory in eastern Ukraine and back to his home in Siberia using the pictures he uploaded on his social media profile.

The methodology used is based on a report by the Atlantic Council think tank released earlier this year, that asserts that information on the movement and operations of the regular russian troops can be easily gathered from publicly available sources (such as the social media).

The russian government still denies any involvement of russian troops in the fights in Ukraine.

Submission + - Jeb Bush Skeptical Of Reports That The H-1B Program Affects US Workers 1

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: ComputerWorld's Patrick Thibodeau reports that Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush does not exactly come across as supportive or sympathetic to displaced U.S. IT workers. Asked to respond to recent stories about companies using H-1B visas to displace American workers with foreign tech labor, Bush said, "I’ve actually seen it on Fox, three or four times, this subject. I’ve been curious to know what the full story is. ... Sometimes you see things in the news reports, you don’t get the full picture. Maybe that’s the case here." Perhaps Jeb has gotten too close to the reality distortion field of Mark Zuckerberg's FWD.us PAC, whose backers include Zuck Pal Joe Green (who nixed the idea of giving jobs to "just sort of okay" U.S. workers), Lars Dalgaard (whose message to laid-off IT workers was "you don't deserve the job"), and Code.org CEO Hadi Partovi (who informed journalists that "H-1Bs in CS rarely displace [American tech workers]").

Comment Re:I know a lot of this is cutting edge... (Score 3, Interesting) 41

by braindrainbahrain (#49877097) Attached to: Parachute Problems Plague NASA's Flying Saucer
FAA Licensed Parachute Rigger here ("License to kill", lol).

Parachutes don't just unfold, they actually deploy in a very controlled fashion. All it takes is something to initiate the sequence. In human parachutes, a pilot chute is released, which pulls out a deployment bag. The bag in turn does not open until suspension lines are stretched, and once the canopy is released from the bag, it inflates due to the difference in static air pressure within. vs dynamic air pressure outside (Bernoulli's principle). There are further mechanisms to slow down deployment in order to control the deceleration and opening shock (important for human well being). Problems occur if things happen out of sequence, or if the parachute is structurally unsound.

I can't speak for the system NASA is using, but I expect there already is a unit to "unfold" the parachute, and it is all part of the parachute system already.

Submission + - Slashdot goes to shit

Submitted by methano
methano writes: Long time reader Methano is sick and tired of the stupid pop under ads screaming at him and the endless CPU churning flash ads that have come to characterize the experience of being a loyal Slashdot follower. He's seriously thinking of saying goodbye to a once enjoyable but now more often annoying web site.

Submission + - Teen hires hacker to take down school district IT systems (thestack.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A 17-year old boy from Idaho has been accused of paying a hacker to launch DDoS attacks against his school district. The teen reportedly hired a third party to organize a week’s worth of distributed denial-of-service campaigns this month against the West Ada school district – the largest educational district in the state. The cyberattacks affected networks at all 52 schools including payroll, online textbooks, virtual teaching and standardized testing. At the time of the hacking many students were undertaking Idaho Standard Achievement Testing online. The DDoS attacks caused the school systems to lose the test and results data and students were required to re-sit their exams multiple times. According to a report by KTVB-TV News, the teen has been arrested and may face State and Federal computer crime felony charges. If the unnamed student is found guilty he is likely to have to serve up to 180 days in juvenile prison. The suspect has also been suspended from Eagle High and risks potential expulsion. The minor’s parents are being held financially responsible for the damage caused by the attacks.

Submission + - Arduino announces NYC, USA based Adafruit will manufacture Arduino

Submitted by ptorrone
ptorrone writes: At Maker Faire Bay Area on Saturday it was announced that Limor Fried "Ladyada" and Adafruit, who have appeared on /. many times over the last 10 years are now going to be the USA manufacturer of the open-source Arduino. Adafruit has grown from a 1 person company out Ladyada's apartment to over 50+ employees and a 50,000 sq. foot factory in Manhattan. Adafruit is currently shipping the Arduino GEMMA, a wearable open-source micro-controller platform.

Comment Re:Sagan? Don't you mean Clarke? (Score 2) 52

I admire Clarke as much as anybody here, but he admits he did not invent the geostationary orbit (though he was the first to suggest using the orbit for communications satellites). The idea had been proposed as early as the 19th century by Tsiolkovsky. Citation available here (paywalled, sorry, but you can get the gist from the abstract).

Submission + - MAME Changing License to Fully Libre One

Submitted by jones_supa
jones_supa writes: The source code of MAME (Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator) has long been freely available, but it's never been completely libre. Instead it's been available under a modified BSID license that prohibits, among other things, commercial use of the code. MAME engineer Miodrag Milanovic explains that such license was put in place to deter "misuse of MAME in illegal ways," but it also kept legitimate commercial entities doing business with the software. Examples of such could be museums that charge entry fees from using MAME in their exhibits, or copyright holders rereleasing vintage games encapsulated inside MAME. Now the project wants to go fully open. Milanovic continues: "Our aim is to help legal license owners in distributing their games based on MAME platform, and to make MAME become a learning tool for developers working on development boards." As of yet, there are no specific details about the new license.

Submission + - Elon Musk, SpaceX, and the quest to send mice to Mars (bloomberg.com)

Submitted by braindrainbahrain
braindrainbahrain writes: The name of Elon Musk and SpaceX, the rocket company he founded, are well known to slashdottters. This article and book excerpt tells the story of the creation of SpaceX and their first rockets, how it almost sank Musk's other company, Tesla Motors, and how the inspiration for the SpaceX in the first place was the idea of sending mice to Mars.

Submission + - The Biosecurity Logic Behind Australia's Threat to Kill Johnny Depp's Dogs

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: Adam Taylor writes in the Washington Post that Australia's threat to kill Boo and Pistol, two dogs that belong to the American movie star Johnny Depp unless they leave the country by Saturday has made headlines around the world. But the logic behind the threat is typical for Australia, which has some of the strictest animal quarantine laws in the world. According to the Australian Department of Agriculture, dogs can be imported to Australia but are required to spend at least 10 days in quarantine in the country. There are also a whole variety of other restrictions on the dogs – they can only come from an approved country, they cannot be pregnant, and they must not be a banned breed. The dogs are then required to undergo a variety of tests and be fully vaccinated and microchipped. It's a time-consuming, expensive and complicated process that serves one purpose. Australia is one of a relatively small number of countries around the world that are considered rabies-free. "The reason you can walk through a park in Brisbane and not have in the back of your mind, 'What happens if a rabid dog comes out and bites me or bites my kid,' is because we've kept that disease out," says Agriculture Minister Barnaby Joyce.

Australia's geographical distance from much of the rest of the world and its relatively late contact with the West means that its biological ecosystem is unlike those of many other nations. To protect this, the country restricts what can be brought into the country. The impact of alien species on Australian wildlife was made clear early in the 20th century, when the cane toad, indigenous to Central and South America, was introduced to north Queensland in the hope of controlling the local cane beetle population. While the toads had little impact on the beetle population, they unexpectedly thrived in their new environment. Their effects on Australia's ecology include the depletion of native species that die eating cane toads; the poisoning of pets and humans; depletion of native fauna preyed on by cane toads; and reduced prey populations for native insectivores, such as skinks. The population of a few thousand cane toads introduced in 1935 is now in the millions, and are now considered pests that the Australian government is trying to eradicate.

Depp isn't the only American celebrity to run afoul of Australian biosecurity laws. In 2013, a Katy Perry album that featured flower seeds in its packaging triggered a biosecurity alert from Australia's Agriculture Department. "Most people are excited to think that there's an attachment between biosecurity and someone as popular as Katy Perry," said Vanessa Findlay, Australia's chief plant protection officer.

Submission + - Can heat really kill an SSD? (dailytech.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: This DailyTech article points to research by Seagate that says that high heat (95 degrees F) can lower data lifetimes to 6 months. I find that hard to believe, but have to admit my drives have always been used in an air conditioned office. What do others think?

http://www.dailytech.com/Seaga...

Submission + - MuckRock FOIA request releases Christopher Hitchens' FBI files (muckrock.com)

Submitted by v3rgEz
v3rgEz writes: Outspoken atheist firebrand Christopher Hitchens was never one for understatement, and apparently the FBI took notice. A Freedom of Information request from investigative news site MuckRock has resulted in the release of his 19-page FBI file, including details such as how his interest in socialism in college sparked heightened monitoring when given a scholarship to come to the United States.

Some of the pages had actually been previously released, but were then removed from the FBI's own website a few years ago. Despite the monitoring, Hitchens files have nothing on the hundreds of pages the FBI had on Richard Feynman.

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