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Prominent GitHub Engineer Julie Ann Horvath Quits Citing Harrassment 368

Posted by samzenpus
from the hostile-environment dept.
First time accepted submitter PvtVoid writes in with the story of Julie Ann Horvath alleging a culture of sexism at GitHub. "The exit of engineer Julie Ann Horvath from programming network GitHub has sparked yet another conversation concerning women in technology and startups. Her claims that she faced a sexist internal culture at GitHub came as a surprise to some, given her former defense of the startup and her internal work at the company to promote women in technology."

+ - Bitcoin Barron Challenges Berkshire-> 2

Submitted by MrBingoBoingo
MrBingoBoingo writes "Bitcoin Tychoon Mircea Popescu, recent savior of OpenBSD, has wagered 1000 BTC that Bitcoin will outperform Berkshire Hathaway over the next year. The wager falls into a long tradition of high value parimutuel bets in Bitcoin that center around financial outcomes, serving a role in Bitcoin similar to the one insurance does in more mature markets."
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The Almighty Buck

Gates Warns of Software Replacing People; Greenspan Says H-1Bs Fix Inequity 373

Posted by samzenpus
from the man-with-the-plan dept.
dcblogs writes "Bill Gates and Alan Greenspan, in separate forums, offered outlooks and prescriptions for fixing jobs and income. Gates is concerned that graduates of U.S. secondary schools may not be able stay ahead of software automation. 'These things are coming fast,' said Gates, in an interview with the American Enterprise Institute 'Twenty years from now labor demand for a lots of skill sets will be substantially lower, and I don't think people have that in their mental model.' Meanwhile, former Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan believes one way to attack income inequity is to raise the H-1B cap. If the program were expanded, income wouldn't necessarily go down much, but it would go down enough to make an impact. Income inequality is a relative concept, he argued. People who are absolutely at the top of the scale in 1925, for instance, would be getting food stamps today, said Greenspan. 'You don't have to necessarily bring up the bottom if you bring the top down.'"

+ - Silicon Valley Billionaire Takes Out $201 Million Life Insurance Policy

Submitted by Hugh Pickens DOT Com
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "The Mercury News reports that somewhere in Silicon Valley, a "mystery billionaire" has bought what the Guinness Book of World Records says is the most valuable life insurance policy in history — a policy that will pay his survivors a cool $201 million. Was it Larry Ellison? Eric Schmidt? Elon Musk? Zuck? Nobody knows because the name of the buyer is a closely guarded secret. "We don't want hit men running around Palo Alto trying to find him — or members of his own estate," joked Dovi Frances, the Southern California financial services provider who sold the policy. By last count, California boasts 111 billionaires with more than a third of them in tech, while San Francisco has 20 billionaires alone so it could be any of them. But why does a billionaire even need to take out life insurance when he or she has so many other assets. The most likely answer to this question is taxes and estate planning. Upon death, an estate would be liable to pay off loans on any leveraged properties, plus a lot of money as part of the death taxes owed. This could force the estate to liquidate holdings to raise the money to pay off these liabilities even if it weren’t the most opportune time to sell the assets. By taking out the life insurance policy, it would give the estate more flexibility in paying off the taxes and other debts owed, without necessarily having to sell assets to do so. “In California, there are state death taxes that are exceptionally high (45 percent),” says Frances adding that the policy is actually a combination of more than two dozen policies, underwritten by 19 different insurers because if any single company had to pay out such a lavish benefit, it could be crippling. “If your properties are leveraged then those loans are called immediately and need to be paid off, you want to hedge yourself against such a risk so [your beneficiary] can receive the proceeds without being exposed to taxes.""

+ - Ask Slashdot: How to foil web marketing analytics?

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "With all the recently popular news stories about insidious web surveillance, I'm feeling prompted to go on the offensive in a civilly disobedient way, but probably need some help guiding and refining how to do it effectively. I'm thinking of something like using wget or curl to automate web page downloads on a more-or-less continuous basis for a wide variety of innocuous topics so that the traffic monitored from my home IP address will have diluted value to marketeers and other hucksters, i.e., artificially increasing the volume and variety of traffic so that my actual browsing habits are obscured. I have already figured out that I need to set the “user agent” string to something besides those two application names, but what else is needed to to make this pastime effectively neutralize the ability of invasively-snooping marketeers to get any value out of what they record?"
United Kingdom

UK Government Wants "Unsavory" Web Content To Be Removed 208

Posted by samzenpus
from the won't-somebody-please-think-of-the-children? dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The UK minister for immigration and security, James Brokenshire has called for the government to do more to deal with 'unsavoury', rather than illegal, material online. 'Terrorist propaganda online has a direct impact on the radicalisation of individuals and we work closely with the internet industry to remove terrorist material hosted in the UK or overseas,' Brokenshire told Wired.co.uk in a statement."
NASA

Jack A. Kinzler, Savior of the Skylab Mission, Dies At 94 31

Posted by samzenpus
from the rest-in-peace dept.
puddingebola writes "From his New York Times Obituary, 'Had Jack A. Kinzler not built model planes as a boy, had he not visited the post office as a youth and had he not, as a grown man, purchased four fishing rods at $12.95 apiece, Skylab — the United States' $2.5 billion space station — would very likely have been forfeit.' An excellent obit from the NYT, recounting the story of how Kinzler saved the Skylab mission with a telescoping parasol to patch a damaged heat shield. An inventive thinker and tinkerer, Mr. Kinzler was also responsible for the flags and plaques placed during the Apollo mission."
Wireless Networking

Harsh Wireless Conditions? Send In the Drone Hot Spot 19

Posted by samzenpus
from the stay-connected dept.
coondoggie writes "The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has moved along a project it says would use hot-spot enabled drones to bring wireless communications to even the most distant and harsh environments. The project known as Fixed Wireless at a Distance is designed specifically to overcome the challenge inherent with cell communication in remote areas and this week the agency awarded L-3 $16.4 million to support the next iteration of the system."

+ - This Solar-Powered Toilet Torches Poop for Public Health-> 2

Submitted by Daniel_Stuckey
Daniel_Stuckey writes "The goal is to build a self-contained block of toilets, similar to Coca-Cola's community blocks, that can also provide clean water and power for phone charging—to essentially turn toilets into a community center.

"I think it's hard to make sanitation as sexy as a cell phone, but by integrating into the community and making it a hub, it can be something more popular," Linden said.

The toilet itself, called the Sol-Char, is a fascinating bit of engineering. In order to sanitize waste without the help of massive treatment facilities, Linden's team instead designed the toilet to scorch waste in a chamber heated by fiber optic cables that pipe in heat from solar collectors on the toilet's roof.

"A solar concentrator has all this light focused in on one centimeter. It'd be fine if we could bring everyone's fecal waste up to that one point, like burning it with a magnifying glass," Linden said. "But that's not practical, so we were thinking of other ways to concentrate that light.""
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Input Devices

Steam Controller Drops Touchscreen 77

Posted by Soulskill
from the walking-back-innovation dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Last year Valve announced a new game controller that was trying to innovate on the designs that have been with us for over a decade now. The biggest changes were replacing analog sticks with circular touchpads and plopping a small touchscreen into the middle of the controller. Valve has now revamped their prototype hardware, and the touchscreen is nowhere to be seen. In its place are stop/play buttons (which appear similar to start/select buttons) and a bigger Steam logo button. They've also moved around the directional and ABXY buttons, reverting to a more traditional layout (picture). They'll be demonstrating the latest prototype next week at GDC."
Earth

Forests Around Chernobyl Aren't Decaying Properly 161

Posted by Soulskill
from the this-is-what-happens-when-forests-aren't-educated-properly dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Smithsonian Magazine has an article about one of the non-obvious effects of the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown: dead organisms are not decomposing correctly. 'According to a new study (abstract) published in Oecologia, decomposers—organisms such as microbes, fungi and some types of insects that drive the process of decay—have also suffered from the contamination. These creatures are responsible for an essential component of any ecosystem: recycling organic matter back into the soil. Issues with such a basic-level process, the authors of the study think, could have compounding effects for the entire ecosystem.' The scientists took bags of fallen leaves to various areas around Chernobyl and found that locations with more radiation caused the leaves to retain more than half of their original weight after almost a year. They're now beginning to worry that almost three decades of dead brush buildup is contributing to the area's fire risk, and a large fire could distribute radioactive material beyond Chernobyl's exclusion zone."
Piracy

Controversial Torrent Streaming App 'Popcorn Time' Shuts Down, Then Gets Reborn 188

Posted by Soulskill
from the why-buy-the-cow dept.
An anonymous reader writes "A piece of software called 'Popcorn Time' drew a lot of attention last week for encapsulating movie torrents within a slick, stream-based UI that made watching pirated films as easy as firing up Netflix. The app ran into trouble a few days ago when it was pulled from its hosting provider, Mega, and now Popcorn Time's creators say they're shutting it down altogether. They say it was mainly an experiment: 'Piracy is not a people problem. It's a service problem. A problem created by an industry that portrays innovation as a threat to their antique recipe to collect value. It seems to everyone that they just don't care. But people do. We've shown that people will risk fines, lawsuits and whatever consequences that may come just to be able to watch a recent movie in slippers. Just to get the kind of experience they deserve.' However, the software itself isn't a complete loss — the project is being picked up by the founder of a torrent site, and he says development will continue."
Privacy

Snowden A Hero? Gates Says No, Woz Says Yes 313

Posted by Soulskill
from the time-for-a-cage-match dept.
hcs_$reboot writes "In a lengthy interview from Rolling Stone, Bill Gates, was asked: 'Do you consider [Snowden] a hero or a traitor?' The Microsoft founder responded, 'I certainly wouldn't characterize him as a hero. ... You won't find much admiration from me'. What about government surveillance? 'The government has such ability to do these things. ... But the specific techniques they use become unavailable if they're discussed in detail. Rolling Stone retorts that privacy can be an issue: 'We want safety, but we also want privacy,' says the journalist. Bill Gates tells his main priority focuses on stopping the bad guys: 'Let's say you knew nothing was going on. How would you feel? I mean, seriously. I would be very worried. Technology arms the bad guys with orders of magnitude more [power]. Not just bad guys. Crazy guys.' Meanwhile, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak expressed the opposite opinion about Snowden at a tech conference in Germany. 'He is a hero to me, but he may be a traitor to other people and I understand the reasons for them to think that way. I believe that Snowden believed, like I do, that the U.S. has a right to freedom. '"

+ - Why Are There More Old Songs on iTunes than Old eBooks?->

Submitted by Paul J Heald
Paul J Heald writes "The vast majority of books and songs from the 20th Century are out-of-print. New data show music publishers doing an admirable job of digitizing older content, but book publishers fail miserably at putting old works in eBook form. New research by Paul Heald explains why."
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In any formula, constants (especially those obtained from handbooks) are to be treated as variables.

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