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Comment: Education Bottlenecks (Score 1) 433

by eieken (#39224787) Attached to: Science and Engineering Workforce Has Stalled In the US
I don't know how much of a problem this is in higher academia, but according to more articles like this

And the fact that prestigious universities such as this only accept a handful of students in computer science in a year, it's not surprising. One of the more surprising things is that UW received 40 million dollars from Paul Allen a while ago, and they used it to build a giant 40 million dollar new computer science building. But the number of students they accepted per year didn't change. Why is this? If you have lots of students who want to go there, why not use extra funds you have to expand the number of applications you can accept?

I dunno, I'm sure the downward trend of education spending all over our country isn't helping universities to expand the number of students they can accept either.

Comment: Re:Absolutely nothing. (Score 1) 415

by eieken (#35977986) Attached to: Supreme Court: AT&T Can Force Arbitration

This is exactly how I felt about a lot of recent "vigilantism", either online or in real life. It's too soul crushing for me to believe that there aren't great leaders out there who do understand human behavior. The idea that you need to treat the cause and not the symptoms seems lost on most people and that makes me sad.

Comment: DMCA and Buy Something Else (Score 4, Insightful) 965

by eieken (#30972116) Attached to: Apple's Trend Away From Tinkering
What we should be doing is trying to get the DMCA overturned; It is the bane of the tinker. It's ironic because I'm guessing many of the people working on this stuff over at Apple got interested in computers because of the creativity they could express by hacking away at computers.

I should say though, that Apple is not the only company in town creating hardware, I mean honestly a lot of these articles seem to make some leap at some point about how Apple is representative of all hardware manufacturers, when I think that's just not true. They create some stylish products, people buy them, and then they miss out on hacking the hardware. If people really want the option to hack the hardware, don't buy this locked down crap. It's not like Apple is the only game in town, they live off this spotlight everyone creates for them. Just get that less stylish piece of hardware that offers tons of customization and hopefully at some point Apple will have to learn what they should be doing.
The Internet

Using the Internet To Subvert Democracy 202

Posted by kdawson
from the you-thought-diebold-was-bad dept.
david_adams writes "All the recent talk about various polls and elections being pranked or hijacked, serious and silly alike, prompted me to write an article about the technical realities behind online polling, and the political fallout of ever becoming subject to online voting for serious elections. Even if we were to be able to limit voting to legitimate, legal voters, the realities of social networking and the rise of Internet-based movements would dramatically alter the political landscape if online voting were to become commonplace."
The Courts

Kentucky Officials "Changed Votes At Voting Machines" 494

Posted by kdawson
from the smoking-gun dept.
The indispensible jamie found a report out of Kentucky of exactly the kind of shenanigans that voting-transparency advocates have been warning about: a circuit court judge, a county clerk, and election officials are among eight people indicted for gaming elections in 2002, 2004, and 2006. As described in the indictment (PDF), the election officials divvied up money intended to buy votes and then changed votes on the county's (popular, unverifiable) ES&S touch-screen voting systems, affecting the outcome of elections at the local, state, and federal levels.
Transportation

Gran Turismo 5 Prologue Spawns Real-Life Car 93

Posted by ScuttleMonkey
from the and-i'm-sure-it-will-be-affordable dept.
Car Analogy Please writes to tell us that a new car unveiled at the Paris Auto Show was modeled after the Gran Turismo 5 Prologue car. GTbyCITROËN is the first car that has been designed in tandem with a video game to then spill out onto the actual pavement. "The GTbyCITROËN is the product of a partnership built up during the creation of Gran Turismo 5 Prologue. Takumi Yamamoto, from Citroen and Kazunori Yamauchi from Polyphony Digital Inc, the games developer were inspired by each others industries to design a concept car for the game that then flowed further into the real-world. The game version of the car mirrors the real-world performance of the concept."
The Almighty Buck

+ - Should you donate to Wikipedia? Maybe not. 4

Submitted by afabbro
afabbro writes "Wikipedia is again raising funds, on the heels of its million-dollar fundraising event in January. But an analysis of their budget may give you pause. Only about half of their spending is on the technology that powers Wikipedia — the rest is being consumed by a growing overhead. Of the foundation's $4 million budget, nearly $700,000 will be spent on "finance and administration," and an additional $700,000 is budgeted for the Office of Executive Director and the board of trustees salary and expenses alone, including a plan to spend $200,000 to relocate to rent-expensive San Francisco."
Security

+ - Trojan found in brand new HD sold in Taiwan->

Submitted by
GSGKT
GSGKT writes "About 1800 of these brand new 300GB or 500GB external HD made for Maxtor in Thailand have Trojan Horse malwares (autorun.inf and ghost.pif) pre-installed. When the HD is in use, these will forward information on HD to two websites in Beijing, China): www.nice8.org or www.we168.org. Potential users of these large HD would be mid/small business, the military, and the government in Taiwan, although no one can prove this to be the continuing war/spying efforts on Taiwan by the People's Liberation Army. /. has a story on Russian Business Network moving to China recently (http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/11/09/1957239). Together, these two stories make an interesting new cyber-crime model: Infecting the HD at the manufacturing sites is far more efficient than to phish the end-users!"
Link to Original Source
Announcements

+ - Anti-Bacterial Soap No Better than Plain Soap->

Submitted by
eldavojohn
eldavojohn writes "Stop buying antibacterial soap as it's no more effective than the regular stuff and, on top of that, you are introducing a risk to a mutation of bacteria! From the article, "The team looked at 27 studies conducted between 1980 and 2006, and found that soaps containing triclosan within the range of concentrations commonly used in the community setting (0.1 to 0.45 percent wt/vol) were no more effective than plain soaps. Triclosan is used in higher concentrations in hospitals and other clinical settings, and may be more effective at reducing illness and bacteria. Triclosan works by targeting a biochemical pathway in the bacteria that allows the bacteria to keep its cell wall intact. Because of the way triclosan kills the bacteria, mutations can happen at the targeted site. Aiello says a mutation could mean that the triclosan can no longer get to the target site to kill the bacteria because the bacteria and the pathway have changed form." For the love of god, stop endangering everyone with your soapy hand held mutation experiments!"
Link to Original Source

"The way of the world is to praise dead saints and prosecute live ones." -- Nathaniel Howe

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