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+ - Device Keeps Liver Alive Outside Body For 24 Hours->

Submitted by kkleiner
kkleiner writes "A new device will keep a liver alive outside of the human body for up to 24 hours. Developed at Oxford, the OrganOx circulates oxygenated red bloods cells and nutrients through the liver while maintaining the proper temperature. Doctors estimate that this new technique could double the number of livers available, saving the lives of thousands who die every year awaiting transplant."
Link to Original Source

+ - Kubuntu Linux 13.04 "Raring Ringtail" Released->

Submitted by jrepin
jrepin writes "The new version of GNU/Linux distribution Kubuntu 13.04, codenamed Raring Ringtail, comes with KDE software Compilation 4.10, Linux kernel 3.8, X.Org 7.7, Mesa 3D 9.1, GCC 4.7 and other updated core software. Included is is the new version of the Muon Suite for app install and upgrades, which introduces support for installing Plasma widgets. Version 2 of Rekonq web browser adds a bunch of new features. Homerun is a full screen alternative to the Kickoff application launcher menu. Available on the default install is also Oxygen Sans, a new font from KDE's artists."
Link to Original Source

+ - Ubuntu Server 13.04 Released

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "Canonical today announced that Ubuntu Server 13.04 is available for download, featuring high-availability (HA) for OpenStack along with industry-leading capabilities for scale out storage, networking and compute. Ubuntu Server 13.04 is the only distribution of OpenStack that makes high-availability (HA) a standard feature, underlining its position as the easiest and fastest way to deploy an OpenStack cloud for production purposes. Enterprises on 12.04 LTS can upgrade to the latest OpenStack version, “Grizzly,” from the Ubuntu Cloud Archive."

+ - British Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg 'Kills' Snoopers Charter ->

Submitted by judgecorp
judgecorp writes "The Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg, has effectively "killed" the Communications Data Bill which would have required service providers to share personal communications data with the police. Clegg has withdrawn the support of the Liberal Democrat Party (part of the Coalition in power in the UK) from the so-called "Snooper's Charter". The announcement is timed to block the measure from the Queen's Speech on 8 May, which introduces the next programme of planned legislation."
Link to Original Source

+ - COCK-A-DOODLE-DOO: NASA rovers scrawl giant willy on Mars->

Submitted by puddingebola
puddingebola writes "From the article, "The US space agency's $820m exploration rovers Spirit and Opportunity set out for Mars in 2003 and, once landed in 2004, got busy looking for signs of water, a critical building block for life, on the Red Planet. But while the Jet Propulsion Lab's pair were driving around, they left criss-crossing tracks in the Martian sand, which appear to sketch out a crude drawing of an erect manhood and testicles.""
Link to Original Source

+ - How a group of engineers have injected signal into a train that goes at 125mph->

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "It's really annoying when I can't get phone signal on a train. Looks like things are on the mend, though; I've just found an article about how a bunch of UK engineers have managed to inject phone signal into a moving train. Hopefully this'll become more widespread soon."
Link to Original Source

+ - Diamond shows promise for a quantum Internet->

Submitted by ananyo
ananyo writes "A future quantum version of the Internet might be built from diamond crystals rather than silicon chips. Physicists report that they have entangled information kept in pieces of diamond 3 metres apart, so that measuring the state of one quantum bit (qubit) instantly fixes the state of the other — a step necessary for exchanging quantum information over large distances (abstract)."
Link to Original Source
Electronic Frontier Foundation

DOJ Often Used Cell Tower Impersonating Devices Without Explicit Warrants 146

Posted by Unknown Lamer
from the bending-the-rules dept.
Via the EFF comes news that, during a case involving the use of a Stingray device, the DOJ revealed that it was standard practice to use the devices without explicitly requesting permission in warrants. "When Rigmaiden filed a motion to suppress the Stingray evidence as a warrantless search in violation of the Fourth Amendment, the government responded that this order was a search warrant that authorized the government to use the Stingray. Together with the ACLU of Northern California and the ACLU, we filed an amicus brief in support of Rigmaiden, noting that this 'order' wasn't a search warrant because it was directed towards Verizon, made no mention of an IMSI catcher or Stingray and didn't authorize the government — rather than Verizon — to do anything. Plus to the extent it captured loads of information from other people not suspected of criminal activity it was a 'general warrant,' the precise evil the Fourth Amendment was designed to prevent. ... The emails make clear that U.S. Attorneys in the Northern California were using Stingrays but not informing magistrates of what exactly they were doing. And once the judges got wind of what was actually going on, they were none too pleased:"
Science

+ - Intercontinental mind-meld unites two rats->

Submitted by
ananyo
ananyo writes "The brains of two rats on different continents have been made to act in tandem. When the first, in Brazil, uses its whiskers to choose between two stimuli, an implant records its brain activity and signals to a similar device in the brain of a rat in the United States. The US rat then usually makes the same choice on the same task.
Miguel Nicolelis, a neuroscientist at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, says that this system allows one rat to use the senses of another, incorporating information from its far-away partner into its own representation of the world. “It’s not telepathy. It’s not the Borg,” he says. “But we created a new central nervous system made of two brains.
Nicolelis says that the work, published today, is the first step towards constructing an organic computer that uses networks of linked animal brains to solve tasks. But other scientists who work on neural implants are sceptical."
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Databases

A New Approach To Database-Aided Data Processing 45

Posted by Soulskill
from the think-of-the-database-as-free-child-labor dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The Parallel Universe blog has a post about parallel data processing. They start off by talking about how Moore's Law still holds, but the shift from clock frequency to multiple cores has stifled the rate at which hardware allows software to scale. (Basically, Amdahl's Law.) The simplest approach to dealing with this is sharding, but that introduces its own difficulties. The more you shard a data set, the more work you need to do to separate out the data elements that can't interact. Optimizing for 2n cores takes more than twice the work of optimizing for n cores. The article says, 'If we want to continue writing compellingly complex applications at an ever-increasing scale we must come to terms with the new Moore's law and build our software on top of solid infrastructure designed specifically for this new reality; sharding just won't cut it.' Their solution is to transfer some of the processing work to the database. 'This because the database is in a unique position to know which transactions may contend for the same data items, and how to schedule them with respect to one another for the best possible performance. The database can and should be smart.' They demonstrate how SpaceBase does this by simulating a 10,000-spaceship battle on different sets of hardware (code available here). Going from a dual-core system to a quad-core system at the same clock speed actually doubles performance without sharding."

+ - Linus' hammer->

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes ""Microsoft's signing service will only sign runnable EFI PE binaries" and the patchset to
accomodate this non starter has been roundly rejected by our beloved kernel dictator, in
terms any fan of 70's porn can appreciate."
Link to Original Source
Businesses

+ - How H-1B Visas Are Screwing Tech Workers->

Submitted by
hessian
hessian writes "To be sure, America's tech economy has long depended on foreign-born workers. "Immigrants have founded 40 percent of companies in the tech sector that were financed by venture capital and went on to become public in the U.S., among them Yahoo, eBay, Intel, and Google," writes Laszlo Bock, Google's senior VP of "people operations," which, along with other tech giants such as HP and Microsoft, strongly supports a big increase in H-1B visas. "In 2012, these companies employed roughly 560,000 workers and generated $63 billion in sales."

But in reality, most of today's H-1B workers don't stick around to become the next Albert Einstein or Sergey Brin. ComputerWorld revealed last week that the top 10 users of H-1B visas last year were all offshore outsourcing firms such as Tata and Infosys. Together these firms hired nearly half of all H-1B workers, and less than 3 percent of them applied to become permanent residents. "The H-1B worker learns the job and then rotates back to the home country and takes the work with him," explains Ron Hira, an immigration expert who teaches at the Rochester Institute of Technology. None other than India's former commerce secretary once dubbed the H-1B the "outsourcing visa.""
Link to Original Source
Earth

+ - Six of Hanford's Nuclear Waste Tanks Badly Leaking ->

Submitted by
SchrodingerZ
SchrodingerZ writes "Recent review of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington state (where the bulk of Cold War nuclear material was created) has found that six of its underground storage tanks are badly leaking. Estimations say each tank is leaking 'anywhere from a few gallons to a few hundred gallons of radioactive material a year'. Washington's governor, Jay Inslee said in a statement on Friday that 'Energy officials recently figured out they had been inaccurately measuring the 56 million gallons of waste in Hanford’s tanks.' The Hanford cleanup project has been one of the most expensive American projects for nuclear cleanup. Plans are in place to create a treatment plant to turn the hazardous material into less hazardous glass (proposed to cost $13.4 billion), but for now officials are trying just to stop the leaking from the corroded tanks. Today the leaks do not have an immediate threat on the environment, but 'there is [only] 150 to 200 feet of dry soil between the tanks and the groundwater', and are just five miles from the Colombia River."
Link to Original Source
Medicine

+ - WH: 370K 'Seriously Mentally Ill' To Go Untreated

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes "The White House took to Twitter Saturday night, warning its 3,680,252 followers that 'more than 370,000 seriously mentally ill adults and emotionally disturbed children' will be left untreated when automatic spending cuts triggered by the sequester take effect on March 1. Presumably, the tweet was intended to engender sympathy and prompt a call for action. Still, it's likely to also conjure up images of attacks by Adam Lanza, James Holmes, Jared Lougher, and others. With the shooting at Newtown putting a spotlight on U.S. mental health care, the White House has been stressing the importance of 'access to mental health treatment' to prevent gun violence."

Comment: Re:Not only wrong, but 100% wrong (Score 4, Interesting) 191

by rb12345 (#42974617) Attached to: Microsoft, BSA and Others Push For Appeal On Oracle v. Google Ruling
Finding APIs copyrightable could get extremely interesting if parts of HTML5 or new network protocols count and were implemented in GPL-licenced code first... Would that essentially prevent Microsoft and Apple from legally implementing those standards?

VMS must die!

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