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Comment Re:Not Uncommon for Portland (Score 2) 332

by windwalker13th (#46801707) Attached to: Why Portland Should Have Kept Its Water, Urine and All
I don't remember the exact details and I can't find the articles on the stupid website of the Oregonian but basically the process was sleazy. There was something about the way they awarded the contracts for the caping was inappropriate. The issue that I think pissed off the people trying to keep the reservoirs uncovered was that the Portland Water Bureau didn't bother filing the paperwork for an exemption from the Department of Homeland Security which then forced the City of Portland to cap/discontinue use of the open air reservoirs. Rochester NY which has the same kind of open air reservoirs applied for and was granted exemptions to keep their open air reservoirs. Yet in Portland despite the outcry to keep the reservoirs uncovered, didn't bother filing the paperwork to keep that option open.

Comment Not Uncommon for Portland (Score 5, Interesting) 332

by windwalker13th (#46801593) Attached to: Why Portland Should Have Kept Its Water, Urine and All
This is not the first time that Portland has emptied a reservoir. This is the only time that it has made national news. One of the times that they drained the reservoir was for when somebody was attempting to pee in it and it was unclear if the intoxicated individual had actually urinated into the reservoir.

The reservoirs in Portland are a bit of a contentious subject. We Portlanders greatly appreciate our open air reservoirs however the City Water Bureau does not. Despite a large public outcry to keep our open air reservoirs our water department despite saying that they were working to keep our reservoirs, did not file for a waiver from the department of homeland security to keep the reservoirs open air. While most Portlanders recognize the importance of controlling access to our water supply we wish that the water department listened to public comment more and acted less like a dictator.

Submission + - Do backups on Linux no longer matter? (sourceforge.net) 5

Submitted by cogcritter
cogcritter writes: In June of 2009, the dump/restore utilities version 0.4b42 for Linux's ext3 filesystem were released. This was the last version where incremental dumps could actually be used. A bug introduced in 0.4b43, one year later, causes restore to fail when processing an incremental backup unless, basically, no directory deletions occurred since the level 0 part of the backup set was taken.

The bug is certainly present in Debian Wheezy, and comments in Debian's defect tracking system suggest that the bug has permeated out into other distros as well.

How can Linux's backup/restore tools for its popular ext2/ext3 filesystem be broken for 3+ years, and nobody seems to care? Does nobody take backups? Or do they not use incremental backups? How many people are going to find themselves scrambling when they next NEED to restore a filesystem, and find themselves in possession of long-broken tools?

Just in case this article is where some hapless sysadmin ends up, the workaround is to go to dump.sf.net, go to the files section, pull down the 0.4b42 version and build it for yourself. For me, I think going forward I'm going to switch to filesystem mirroring using rsync.

Submission + - Land Rover's Transparent Hood Is The Kind Of Automotive Tech That Excites Us 1

Submitted by cartechboy
cartechboy writes: Land Rover's Transparent Hood Is The Kind Of Automotive Tech That Excites Us

When we were kids, we were promised flying cars in the future, like The Jetsons . Well, now it's the future, and we don't have any flying cars. But Land Rover just unveiled some crazy new technology called the Transparent Hood system. It's brilliant in its simplicity, and yet quite complex in its implementation. Using a web of camera images and projectors, the Transparent Hood system projects the area just in front of and underneath the nose of the vehicle onto a head-up display along the lower portion of the windshield. Not only is this obviously breathtaking, but when it comes to off-roading—or parking in tight urban spaces—this could change the game. It will allow drivers to see precisely what's below them and immediately in front of them allowing precise placement of the vehicle's front wheels. The system also displays key vehicle data including speed, incline, roll angle, steering position, and drive mode. People, this is the future, and the future is now.

Submission + - The Microscopic Future of Surgical Robotics (popsci.com)

Submitted by malachiorion
malachiorion writes: I'm not referring to an Inner Space-style nano-scale journey into the patient, but a move towards micro-scale bot-assisted procedures, such as attaching tiny blood vessels only barely visible under a microscope. That's the direction being explored by Intuitive Surgical, makers of the most common (and most embattled) surgical bot, the da Vinci System. Other companies and labs are working towards their own robotic microsurgeons, including a Canadian system that already removed a patient's tumor. But when Intuitive's head of medical research is this excited about zooming in during surgery and creating entirely new treatments, it's a safe bet that microscopic procedures are the direction surgical bots are headed. My story for Popular Science.

Submission + - Elite Violinists Fail to Distinguish Legendary Violins From Modern Fiddles (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: If you know only one thing about violins, it is probably this: A 300-year-old Stradivarius supposedly possesses mysterious tonal qualities unmatched by modern instruments. However, even elite violinists cannot tell a Stradivarius from a top-quality modern violin, a new double-blind study suggests. Like the sound of coughing during the delicate second movement of Beethoven's violin concerto, the finding seems sure to annoy some people, especially dealers who broker the million-dollar sales of rare old Italian fiddles. But it may come as a relief to the many violinists who cannot afford such prices.

Submission + - Verizon Knows your Wi-Fi SSID and Key (wlanbook.com) 4

Submitted by FuzzyFox
FuzzyFox writes: While browsing my Verizon FIOS account settings on their web site, I happened to notice my Wi-Fi SSID was prominently displayed. Below that, I noticed a link that would also display the WPA2 password for my private network.

I was really surprised by this, because I did not tell Verizon this information, or ask them to store it on my behalf. It appears they have lifted the information remotely from the ActionTec router that they supplied me with.

It bothers me that they are storing this information about me, because it could conceivably be (1) stolen by hackers, (2) subpoena'd by the government, (3) silently borrowed by the NSA, or other uses that haven't yet come to mind.

Do other ISP's also silently store their customers' password information without the knowledge of the customer? Should we be outraged about this? I would rather that my private information not be stored without my consent, at the very least.

Submission + - Traffic Light Robot in Kinshasa (theprepaideconomy.com)

Submitted by Taco Cowboy
Taco Cowboy writes: To many, Africa is a backwater continent.

Unbeknownst to most, however, there are genuine and very practical inventions that came out of Africa, one of which is the Humanoid Street Light Robots.

In Kinshasa, two humanoid street light figures have been installed in a busy road junction. They stand 8 foot tall, made of stainless steel and aluminium, and powered by solar panel.

Featuring green and red lights, Kinshasa's robot cops are designed to merge some of the functions of human officers and traffic lights. The anthropomorphic robots can raise or bend their arms to stop passing vehicles or let others pass, and are also programmed to speak, indicating to pedestrians when they can cross the road.

The street light robots are equipped with rotating chests and surveillance cameras that record the flow of vehicles.

While these "Robots" might seem " primitive " to some, nevertheless they fulfill a needed role and there are plans to install more street light robots in other busy road junctions.

Submission + - Mathematician Teaches How to Win $1 Billion on NCAA Basketball

Submitted by Hugh Pickens DOT Com
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes: Jake Simpson reports at The Atlantic that Mathematician Tim Chartier, a Davidson College professor who specializes in ranking methods, teaches a math-heavy form of bracketology — the science of predicting the annual NCAA college basketball tournament at Davidson College in North Carolina. Chartier’s academic research is in ranking methods where he looks at things like the page-ranking algorithms of Google. "In 2009, my collaborator Amy Langville said: “You know what? ESPN has this huge online bracket tournament. Let’s create brackets with our ranking methods, just to see if it’s creating meaningful information.” Chartier’s formula, an evolving code-based matrix that ranks each of the 68 tournament teams, has helped several Davidson students score in the 96th percentile (or higher) in ESPN’s bracket challenge and this year, Chartier’s goal is to help someone win the $1 billion prize offered by Warren Buffett to anyone who correctly predicts all 63 games of the men’s tournament. Chartier uses two methods. One is the Colley Method, named after astrophysicist Wesley Colley who developed a method used by the BCS for college football (PDF). His basketball method only counts wins and losses, not margin of victory. The other method is the Massey method created by sports statistician Kenneth Massey (PDF), which does integrate scores. Chartier has not been banned from any office pools — at least none that he knows of. But as a result of coming pretty darn close to filling out a perfect bracket just by crunching the numbers, brackets have become a labor of love. "Now that the brackets are actually out, I've had students in and out of my office all week, sharing new ideas," says Chartier. "For me, that's more fun than filling out a bracket. They will all be filling out brackets, so it's like I'm doing parallel processing. I know what might work, but watching them figure out the odds, is a thrill."

Submission + - Overuse of Bioengineered Corn Unsurprisingly Gives Rise to Resistant Pests

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Though warned by scientists that overuse of a variety of corn engineered to be toxic to corn rootworms would eventually breed rootworms with resistance to its engineered toxicity, the agricultural industry went ahead and overused the corn anyway with little EPA intervention. The corn was planted in 1996. First reports of rootworm resistance were officially documented in 2011, though agricultural scientists weren't allowed by seed companies to study the engineered corn until 2010. The corn's continued over-use is predicted given current trends, and as resistance eventually spreads to the whole rootworm population, farmers will be forced to start using pesticides once more, thus negating the economical benefits of the engineered corn. 'Rootworm resistance was expected from the outset, but the Bt seed industry, seeking to maximize short-term profits, ignored outside scientists. The next pest-fighting trait “will fall under the same pressure and the insect will win."'

Submission + - Monster Rare Yellow Hypergiant Star Discovered (discovery.com) 2

Submitted by astroengine
astroengine writes: A gargantuan star, measuring 1,300 times the size of our sun, has been uncovered 12,000 light-years from Earth — it is one of the ten biggest stars known to exist in our galaxy. The yellow hypergiant even dwarfs the famous stellar heavyweight Betelgeuse by 50 percent. While its hulking mass may be impressive, astronomers have also realized that HR 5171 is a double star with a smaller stellar sibling physically touching the surface of the larger star as they orbit one another. “The new observations also showed that this star has a very close binary partner, which was a real surprise,” said Olivier Chesneau, of the Observatoire de la Côte d’Azur in Nice, France. “The two stars are so close that they touch and the whole system resembles a gigantic peanut.

Submission + - A New Frontier for the Sharing Economy, Hiding in 170M New York Cab Rides

Submitted by curtwoodward
curtwoodward writes: Wanna share a cab? Despite all of the powerful communications devices in millions of pockets and purses, that's still the quickest way to split a fare in a big city. Researchers at MIT's Sensable City Lab say the system's overdue for an upgrade. They mapped all of the taxi rides in New York City in 2011, more than 170 million trips made by more than 13,500 cabs. By comparing the GPS coordinates of the pickup and drop-off locations with the timestamps of those rides, they figured it's possible to reduce cab miles by 40 percent if just a fraction of cab passengers were willing to add a few minutes to their trip and double up with someone else. You can play with the data yourself at HubCab.

Comment Your Kids Soccer Game (Score 2) 519

by windwalker13th (#46424061) Attached to: Massachusetts Court Says 'Upskirt' Photos Are Legal
<quote><p>Write a law to make it illegal to photograph anyone without their written consent, or in the case of a government agency a warrant.</p><p>it solves the upskirt issue, the paparazzi problem, and ends those annoying red light cameras.</p></quote>

So you want to take a picture of your son/daughter playing soccer . . . .. you will now need to get every other parent guardians signature just incase you accidentally take a picture of their child.

However one might consider this that the pictures were taken with the intent to disseminate. Unless they are disseminated without any profit being made then they are being used for commercial purpose. Hence if they are on a upskirt website they are being used for commercial purpose because the owners of those sites make revenue from adds by providing content. However I'm not sure how well his would actually stand up.

Submission + - Patented new implant stimulates orgasms in women (newscientist.com)

Submitted by SpankiMonki
SpankiMonki writes: A US patent has been granted for a new machine that stimulates orgasms for women at the push of a button. The device, which is a little smaller than a packet of cigarettes, is designed as a medical implant that uses electrodes to trigger an orgasm. The device could help some women who suffer from orgasmic dysfunction.

Submission + - Hubble Witnesses Mysterious Breakup of Asteroid (discovery.com)

Submitted by astroengine
astroengine writes: Hubble has observed some weird things since it was launched in 1990, but this is probably one of the strangest. In September 2013, the Catalina and Pan-STARRS sky surveys spotted a mysterious object in the asteroid belt, a region of rocky debris that occupy the space between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. Follow-up observations by the Keck Observatory in Hawaii resolved three separate objects within the fuzzy cloud. It was so strange that Hubble mission managers decided to use the space telescope to get a closer look. And what they saw has baffled and thrilled astronomers in equal measure. “This is a really bizarre thing to observe — we’ve never seen anything like it before,” said co-author Jessica Agarwal of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, Germany. “The break-up could have many different causes, but the Hubble observations are detailed enough that we can actually pinpoint the process responsible.”

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