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Tesla Drops on Partial Model S Recall
TheStreet.com
NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- Tesla Motors (TSLA) shares dropped 1.96% to $101.36 after the company announced it will be recalling some versions of the popular Model S because of a faulty mounting bracket. In a note on the company's Web site, Tesla said...

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+ - AR glasses let profs know if students are understanding their lectures->

Submitted by cylonlover
cylonlover writes "Despite university professors telling their students to shout out if they don’t understand what’s being said in a lecture, few students are likely to feel comfortable raising their hand in front of the class and saying “I don’t get it.” Scientists at Spain’s la Universidad Carlos III de Madrid are hoping to address that situation, with a set of augmented reality glasses that let profs see who’s “not getting it,” without those students having to say so verbally."
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+ - NSA's Role In Terror Cases Concealed From Defense Lawyers

Submitted by Rick Zeman
Rick Zeman writes ""Confidentiality is critical to national security." So wrote the Justice Department in concealing the NSA's role in two wiretap cases. However, now that the NSA is under the gun, it's apparently not, according to New York attorney Joshua Dratel: “National security is about keeping illegal conduct concealed from the American public until you’re forced to justify it because someone ratted you out" as the first he heard of the NSA's role in his client's case was "....when [FBI deputy director Sean] Joyce disclosed it on CSPAN to argue for the effectiveness of the NSA’s spying.
Dratel challenged the legality of the spying in 2011, and asked a federal judge to order the government to produce the wiretap application the FBI gave the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to justify the surveillance.
“Disclosure of the FISA applications to defense counsel – who possess the requisite security clearance – is also necessary to an accurate determination of the legality of the FISA surveillance, as otherwise the defense will be completely in the dark with respect to the basis for the FISA surveillance,” wrote Dratel.

The government fought the request in a remarkable 60-page reply, some of it redacted as classified in the public docket. The Justice Department argued that the defendants had no right to see any of the filings from the secret court, and instead the judge could review the filings alone in chambers. “Confidentiality is critical to national security,” the government wrote."

+ - Google's crazy lack of focus: Is it really serious about enterprise?->

Submitted by curtwoodward
curtwoodward writes "Driverless cars. Balloon-based wireless networks. Face-mounted computers. Gigabit broadband networks. In recent months, Google has been unveiling a series of transformative side projects that paint a picture of the search pioneer expanding far beyond an online advertising company. At the same time, Google has been trying to convince enterprise software buyers that it's finally, really, truly serious about competing with Microsoft for their business. Which version of Google's future should you believe?"
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+ - Shades of Jack Ryan: altering text in eBooks to track pirates->

Submitted by wwphx
wwphx writes "German researchers have created a new DRM feature that changes the text and punctuation of an e-book ever so slightly. Called SiDiM, which Google translates to “secure documents by individual marking,” the changes are unique to each e-book sold. These alterations serve as a digital watermark that can be used to track books that have had any other DRM layers stripped out of them before being shared online. The researchers are hoping the new DRM feature will curb digital piracy by simply making consumers paranoid that they’ll be caught if they share an e-book illicitly.

Seems like I recall reading about this in Tom Clancy's Hunt for Red October when Jack Ryan used this technique to identify someone who was leaking secrets to the Russians. It would be so very difficult for someone to write a little program that, when stripping the DRM, randomized a couple of pieces of punctuation to break the hash that the vendor is storing along with the sales record of the individual book."
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+ - Oculus Rift raises another $16 million->

Submitted by Craefter
Craefter writes "On the E3 it seems that the Oculus Rift caused a mental erection with the investors this year. Some investors (Spark Capital and Matrix Partners) were able to push $16 million in the direction of Oculus VR in the hopes for the product to hype.
This is all very nice, the HD unit looks a bit more slick than the ski goggles with the tablet glued in front of it from the first version but it would have been better if the next gen consoles would commit support for it. We all know how well the wave stick from the PS3 was adapted as an afterthought.
That said, major titles like the 9 year old Half-Life 2 and the 6 year old Team Fortress 2 are getting full support for the Oculus. I hope in the future developers would implement support for a VR headset per-default in their games and not years after the fact. A bit like the EAX standard from Soundblaster. That worked out well too."
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+ - Fanboys and trolls are the cancer killing Free Software-> 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "Martin Gräßlin, the maintainer of the KWin window manager, writes an informative blog post about his experiences with the less favorable pockets of the Free Software community:

Years ago I had a clear political opinion. I was a civil-rights activist. I appreciated freedom and anything limiting freedom was a problem to me. Freedom of speech was one of the most important rights for me. I thought that democracy has to be able to survive radical or insulting opinions. In a democracy any opinion should have a right even if it’s against democracy. I had been a member of the lawsuit against data preservation in Germany. I supported the German Pirate Party during the last election campaign because of a new censorship law. That I became a KDE developer is clearly linked to the fact that it is a free software community.

But over the last years my opinion changed. Nowadays I think that not every opinion needs to be tolerated. I find it completely acceptable to censor certain comments and encourage others to censor, too. What was able to change my opinion in such a radical way? After all I still consider civil rights as extremely important. The answer is simple: Fanboys and trolls.

"
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+ - Google Patents Image-Capturing Walking Sticks 2

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes "GeekWire reports that Google has patented an image-capturing walking stick, which can boldly go where no Google Street View Car can. The walking stick has embedded cameras and location sensors, and a switch at the bottom that causes the device to snap pictures whenever the stick hits the ground. The patent also covers using canes and crutches in a similar fashion."

+ - Microsoft to start dumping Surface RT to schools for $199->

Submitted by onyxruby
onyxruby writes "In a move that will remind many of Apple in the 80's Microsoft is going to start dumping Surface RT computers to educational institutions. In a further effort to try to gain mind share for their disastrous Surface RT platform Microsoft is giving away 10,000 Surface RT's to teachers through the ISTE (International Society for Technology in Education).

The strategy of flooding the educational market was quite successful for Apple. Unfortunately for Microsoft today's computers require management and the Surface RT presents significant management challenges in terms of the inability to join the computer to a domain or available management tools."
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+ - First particle comprising four quarks discovered->

Submitted by ananyo
ananyo writes "Physicists have resurrected a particle that may have existed in the first hot moments after the Big Bang. Arcanely called Zc(3900), it is the first confirmed particle made of four quarks, the building blocks of much of the Universe’s matter. Until now, observed particles made of quarks have contained only three quarks (such as protons and neutrons) or two quarks (such as the pions and kaons found in cosmic rays)."
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+ - Rep. Jerrold Nadler Does Not Think the NSA Can Listen to U.S. Phone Calls 1

Submitted by mozumder
mozumder writes "Sorry Slashdot, but your faith in your high-school dropout IT support Jesus is undermined once again, as the bombshell story on Rep. Jerrold Nadler was apparently false. Looks like he just misunderstood the initial briefing.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a statement on this as well, saying: "The statement that a single analyst can eavesdrop on domestic communications without proper legal authorization is incorrect and was not briefed to Congress. Members have been briefed on the implementation of Section 702, that it targets foreigners located overseas for a valid foreign intelligence purpose, and that it cannot be used to target Americans anywhere in the world."

It is now time to relearn everything about the NSA programs. Sometimes you actually do need more than a GED to understand systems designs."

+ - NY's Bloomberg and SF mayor announce tech summits->

Submitted by Clarklteveno
Clarklteveno writes "New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his San Francisco counterpart, Ed Lee, said at a news conference Friday that they are sponsoring a pair of technology summits over the next year. The mayors said the "digital cities" summits — one in New York in September and another in San Francisco early next year — will seek to find ways to use technology to solve problems the cities face. The mayors made the announcement after touring the office of San Francisco-based mobile payment company Square with co-founder Jack Dorsey, who also helped found Twitter. Bloomberg pointed to power outages and dangerous winds and flooding from Hurricane Sandy as examples of issues the summits would seek to address."
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+ - Astronauts Must Deal with Perchlorate (piosonous soil) on Mars->

Submitted by Thorfinn.au
Thorfinn.au writes "The pervading carpet of perchlorate chemicals found on Mars may boost the chances that microbial life exists on the Red Planet — but perchlorates are also perilous to the health of future crews destined to explore that way-off world.

Perchlorates are reactive chemicals first detected in arctic Martian soil by NASA's Phoenix lander that plopped down on Mars over five years ago in May 2008.

It is likely both of NASA's Viking Mars landers in 1976 measured signatures of perchlorates, in the form of chlorinated hydrocarbons. Other U.S. Mars robots — the Sojourner, Spirit and Opportunity — detected elemental chlorine. Moreover, orbital measurements taken by the Mars Odyssey spacecraft show that chlorine is globally distributed.
  Smith said microbes on Earth use perchlorate for an energy source. They actually live off highly oxidized chlorine, and in reducing the chlorine down to chloride, they use the energy in that transaction to power themselves. In fact, when there's too much perchlorate in drinking water, microbes are used to clean it up, he said.

Furthermore, seasonal flow features seen on Mars may be caused by high concentrations of the brines of perchlorate, which has a strong attraction to water and can drastically lower its freezing point, Smith told SPACE.com.

Devilishly dangerous

The high levels of perchlorate found on Mars would be toxic to humans, Smith said."
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+ - Ortiz-Heymann: The Prior Generation

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes "Two decades before the White House was petitioned to remove U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz and her Assistant U.S. Attorney Stephen Heymann from their jobs for the allegedly overzealous prosecution of Aaron Swartz, the Boston Globe reported on allegations of 'sometimes heavy-handed tactics and inaccuracies' of an NFL investigation into sexual harassment charges made by a sportswriter against the New England Patriots that was led by Watergate prosecutor Philip Heymann (Stephen's father) and included Ortiz. 'From the day Philip Heymann and his colleagues walked into Foxboro Stadium to investigate Lisa Olson's charges of sexual harassment,' the Globe reported, 'the New England Patriots were on the defensive, and apparently, they stayed there to the end. One day after conducting a preliminary six-hour interview with Olson, Heymann introduced each investigator to the Patriots and outlined their backgrounds at a meeting he later called benign. Yet he also said two weeks ago, "They were frightened from the beginning by the way I introduced people. I said that Jerry O'Sullivan had been US Attorney. I said Jim Ring had been FBI special agent in charge of organized crime."' Regarding Ortiz, the Globe reported, 'Heymann investigator Carmen Ortiz wrote in a memo of her Oct. 18, 1990, interview with [Lisa Olson] that she took no notes and did not tape-record the conversation. Yet she used direct quotes when writing up her 15-page report on the session. When asked to explain, she referred the Globe to Heymann.' Aside from transcripts of two interviews (the tapes of which were destroyed), the Globe reported the NFL kept no notes on its interviews with 89 other people. '"It was contemplated that there would be a motion such as this [a lawsuit by Olson] and we did not want to create that type of document," an NFL attorney explained. According to the Globe, an attorney representing the Patriots said that 'one reason the tapes were destroyed may be that the NFL did not want anyone to hear raised voices or pounding of tables. He said some of those interviewed were not allowed to leave the room and had their livelihoods threatened if they did not cooperate.' Curiously, the elder Heymann featured prominently in a recently-upheld DOJ motion to keep the names of key people involved in the Aaron Swartz case secret — a postcard threat received by Philip Heymann was cited by Ortiz's office as evidence of why such secrecy was necessary."

"If you are afraid of loneliness, don't marry." -- Chekhov

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