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Transportation

EU Secretly Plans To Put a Back Door In Every Car By 2020 364

Posted by timothy from the don't-worry-we'll-only-track-you dept.
An anonymous reader writes "A secretive EU body has agreed to develop a device to be fitted to all cars allowing police to cut off any engine at will, it emerged today. The device, which could be imposed within a decade, would also allow police to track a vehicle's movements as well as immobilise it. According to The Daily Telegraph a group of senior EU officials, including several Home Office mandarins, have signed off the proposal at a secret meeting in Brussels."

Submission + - Multifunctional Micro USB Stick (east-sky.cn)

Submitted by eastsky07
eastsky07 writes: One end of 600 — GUSD Series is a USB port and the other end is a micro USB port, you can connect both a PC and an Android device. Users can completely throw away the annoying USB adapter. Because after pulled out from the computer, the Micro USB stick can be directly inserted into an Android device.

Submission + - Ball lightning caught on video and spectrograph (phys.org) 2

Submitted by symbolset
symbolset writes: Ball lightning has been reported for hundreds of years, and experimentally produced, but for the first time a natural will 'o wisp has been captured on video and amazingly, spectrograph, accidentally by researchers studying ordinary lightning.

Submission + - Debian init system: Bdale Garbee, Keith Packard back systemd (itwire.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The Debian technical committee may end up in a stalemate when it votes on which init system should be the default for the next release of its community GNU/Linux distribution after two of its members, Bdale Garbee and Keith Packard, indicated they backed systemd.

Comment Re:You're wrong. (Score 2) 232

Also important is: which version are you looking at? The 1.4 series (still updated) is intended for smaller/embedded installs, while the 2.x series is intended for mainstream (especially desktop) usage

It's also important to ask why they are even looking at the main gpg executable and not gpgv?

gpgv is a stripped-down version of gnupg which is only able to check signatures. It is smaller than the full-blown gnupg and uses a different (and simpler) way to check that the public keys used to make the signature are trustworthy.
Google

Google Removes "Search Nearby" Function From Updated Google Maps 255

Posted by timothy from the where-are-you-again? dept.
First time accepted submitter BillCable writes "One of the most useful and intuitive features of Google's Map tool was the "Search nearby" link. After searching for a location, users could click on a marker on the map to pop open a window with the address and other details. This window also contained a link to 'Search nearby' — extremely useful if you want to find a list of restaurants near a hotel, the closest pharmacy, or any other business you might want to patronize. Google recently updated their map tool, and 'Search nearby' is no longer present. The 300 posts to the Google Product Forums complaining about this omission indicates this is a feature Maps users sorely miss. Google's work-around (detailed by Google staff in said thread) are a poor substitute and unreliable. There is no indication Google will add the feature to their new tool. For now users are able to revert to the original Google Maps with the 'Search nearby' feature intact. But there's concern that when Google discontinues support that the feature will be lost. So why would Google remove one of its best features?"

Comment Re:Ray tracer + web server + image encoder + clock (Score 1) 47

by stderr_dk (#45868595) Attached to: Source Code For 22nd IOCCC Winners Has Been Released

Does the program include its own PNG format algorithms, or am I missing something?

The PNGs generated by the program are simple enough to be constructed more or less one byte at a time.

Same goes for the web server: did he really write his own web server in mills.c?

No, not really. At least not a fully functional one. His "webserver" simply waits for connections, read characters one at a time until it gets an empty line (the end of the HTTP requests), sends the "200 OK" and "Refresh: 1" headers, writes the PNG data directly to the socket and closes the connection. The "webserver" doesn't care what resources you request or if you use "GET", "HEAD", "POST" or something else.
Businesses

Justine Sacco, Internet Justice, and the Dangers of a Righteous Mob 399

Posted by samzenpus from the everyone-loves-a-loser dept.
An anonymous reader writes "So what exactly was the injustice that everyone was fighting against here? There were no pro-Sacco factions, nobody thought her comment was funny, and it became clear early on that her employers were not going to put up with this. It was quite easy for groups to unite against her precisely because it was such an obviously idiotic comment to make. By the time Valleywag had posted her tweet, the damage to her career was already done; there wasn't any 'need' for further action by anyone. The answer is a bit darker – this wasn't really about fairness, it was about entertainment."

Comment Re:How about GMT? (Score 1) 545

by stderr_dk (#45313213) Attached to: A Plan To Fix Daylight Savings Time By Creating Two National Time Zones

The UK isn't on Zulu time - they have daylight savings time (don't know about Portugal and W. Africa).

DST in the EU starts on the last Sunday of March and ends on the last Sunday of October, so for Portugal it's:

$ TZ=Europe/Lisbon date -d "Oct 27 00:59:59 UTC 2013"
Sun Oct 27 01:59:59 WEST 2013
$ TZ=Europe/Lisbon date -d "Oct 27 01:00:00 UTC 2013"
Sun Oct 27 01:00:00 WET 2013

I don't know the DST rules for the various countries in West Africa, but (shameless plug) tzdata-javascript.org has a demo where you can compare the time in two different timezones.
Beer

The Fascinating Science Behind Beer Foam 73

Posted by timothy from the ok-now-explain-my-flickering-lights dept.
RenderSeven writes "Science has so far been at a loss to explain why tapping a beer bottle with another causes it to explosively foam over. Thanks to a grant from the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, a research team at the University of Madrid studying fluid mechanics has found the answer with some fascinating slow-motion video. Their soon-to-be-published paper found that tapping the bottle (or shooting it with a laser) causes a series of compression and expansion waves, that generate unstable buoyant plumes, quickly turning most of the liquid into foam. PhysicsBuzz notes that the process is very rapid and nearly unstoppable once started."

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