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Google

Google Sued Over Children's In-App Android Purchases 45

Posted by samzenpus
from the won't-somebody-please-think-of-the-children? dept.
jfruh writes "Android apps sold through the Google Play app store require the user to enter their username and password before making an in-app purchase — but once they've done that, they can continue to do so for half an hour without re-authenticating. Now a lawsuit is claiming this loophole allows children to run up in-app purchases on their parents' credit cards, 'causing Google to pocket millions of dollars.'"

Comment: Re:What we've learned from Bitcoin (Score 1) 175

by IamTheRealMike (#46471507) Attached to: The Future of Cryptocurrencies

For example, scaling the network up to 2000 transactions per second would result in a Bitcoin node downloading about 1 MB per second. No big deal, until you realize that means each node will need about 2.6 TB of bandwidth each month, and that's just to handle the needs of 10% of the population of the United States, assuming 5 transactions per person per day.

As pointed out by another poster, 2.6 TB of transfer quota per month is trivial even by today's standards: anyone can afford that. And should Bitcoin ever scale to those levels it won't be relying on today's resources, it'll be relying on tomorrow's. So your own example falls apart almost immediately.

Also, rather than just guessing what the US population "needs" why not take a look at existing networks? 2000tps is about a fifth of VISA traffic for the whole world. Of course not every transaction goes via VISA, but it should indicate to you that maybe your numbers are once again a bit sketchy.

You can read an article I wrote a long time ago here: http://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Scalability. It goes over the various ways the system scales up. Performance is unintuitive, there's no substitute for just working it out on the back of an envelope. Bear in mind we live in a world where single websites can generate a large fraction of total internet traffic and not go bankrupt.

Earth

Diamond Suggests Presence of Water Deep Within Earth 24

Posted by samzenpus
from the deep-water dept.
sciencehabit writes "A 40 micrometer crystal trapped inside a diamond unearthed by magma in Brazil could help settle a long-standing debate about the amount of water in Earth's mantle. Spectroscopic analysis reveal that the crystal contains hydrogen-oxygen bonds, which suggests it's composed of at least 1.4% water. The place where the diamond was produced--Earth's lower mantle--may not be typical of the entire lower mantle, but if it is then there could be a lot of water down there. This would be important, as changes in the temperature in the mantle could cause it to expel highly pressurized steam, which could lead to volcanic eruptions."
NASA

Mars Rover Opportunity Faces New Threat: Budget Ax 81

Posted by samzenpus
from the no-rover-for-you dept.
astroengine writes "NASA's baseline budget for the year beginning Oct. 1 pulls the plug on the 10-year-old Mars rover Opportunity, newly released details of the agency's fiscal 2015 spending plan show. The plan, which requires Congressional approval, also anticipates ending the orbiting Mars Odyssey mission on Sept. 30, 2016. 'There are pressures all over the place,' NASA's planetary science division director Jim Green said during an advisory council committee teleconference call on Wednesday."

Comment: Re:Let me know if you find it (Score 1) 596

No. First you buy the coal stocks and then, after the stock price runs up from the artificial demand created by this goofy scheme to buy out all of coal companies, you sell the coal stocks and then buy natural gas stocks. The coal stocks will go up as soon as the scheme starts buying. Natural gas stocks won't go up that much until the scheme actually starts limiting the coal supply.

My bet is that there are enough unexploited coal deposits that this scheme will mainly result in a bunch of coal mining start ups and will never seriously impact the supply of coal. Same thing happened when Standard Oil tried to create an oil monopoly back in the 19th century. Lots of people got rich starting and selling oil companies.

Cheers,
Dave

Comment: Re:Not so much (Score 1) 596

There is no such thing as economic security. I recognize that and work for a society that lets me keep what I earn.

Your idea of economic security comes at my expense with me at the wrong end of the tax collector's gun. All of the mass murders of the 20th century (Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, etc.) promised economic security if only their subjects gave them enough power and relinquished their real liberty. You know. The old, "From each according to his abilities to each according to his needs." If those are your idea of "civilized standards", I'll pass.

Cheers,
Dave

Programming

Study: Happiness Improves Developers' Problem Solving Skills 67

Posted by samzenpus
from the think-happy dept.
itwbennett writes "Researchers at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano in Italy have found that happier programmers (or, more specifically, computer science students at the university) were significantly more likely to score higher on a problem solving assessment. The researchers first measured the emotional states of study participants using a measure devised by psychologists called the Scale of Positive and Negative Experience Affect Balance (SPANE-B) score. They then tested participants' creativity (ability to write creative photo captions) and problem-solving ability (playing the Tower of London game). The results: happiness didn't affect creativity, but did improve problem-solving ability."
Music

Neil Young's "Righteous" Pono Music Startup Raises $1 Million With Kickstarter 213

Posted by samzenpus
from the I've-been-a-miner-for-a-format-of-gold dept.
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Jose Pagliery reports at CNN that the 68-year-old rock star unveiled his startup, Pono, at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas raising $1.4 million in a single day. Young has developed a portable music player that stores high-resolution recordings and promises to deliver all the delicate details that get chopped out of modern-day formats, like MP3s and CDs. 'Pono' is Hawaiian for righteous. 'What righteous means to our founder Neil Young is honoring the artist's intention, and the soul of music. That's why he's been on a quest, for a few years now, to revive the magic that has been squeezed out of digital music.' With 128 GB of space, the PonoPlayer can carry about 3,200 tracks of high-resolution recordings while an MP3 player of the same size can hold maybe 10 times that many songs. Young says the MP3 files we're all listening to actually are pretty poor from an audio-quality standpoint and only contains about five percent of the audio from an original recording. But isn't FLAC already lossless? What makes Pono better?"
Hardware

NVIDIA Unveils Lineup of GeForce 800M Series Mobile GPUs, Many With Maxwell 59

Posted by samzenpus
from the brand-new dept.
MojoKid writes "The power efficiency of NVIDA's Maxwell architecture make it ideal for mobile applications, so today's announcement by NVIDIA of a new top-to-bottom line-up of mobile GPUs—most of them featuring the Maxwell architecture—should come as no surprise. Though a couple of Kepler and even Fermi-based GPUs still exist in NVIDIA's new line-up, the heart of the product stack leverages Maxwell. The entry-level parts in the GeForce 800M series consist of the GeForce GT 820M, 830M, and 840M. The 820M is a Fermi-based GPU, but the 830M and 840M are new chips that leverage Maxwell. The meat of the GeForce GTX 800M series consist of Kepler-based GPUs, though Maxwell is employed in the more mainstream parts. NVIDIA is claiming the GeForce GTX 880M will be fastest mobile GPU available, but the entire GTX line-up will offer significantly higher performance then any integrated graphics solution. The GeForce GTX 860M and 850M are essentially identical to the desktop GeForce GTX 750 Ti, save for different frequencies and memory configurations. There are a number of notebooks featuring NVIDIA's GeForce 800M series GPUs coming down the pipeline from companies like Alienware, Asus, Gigabyte, Lenovo, MSI and Razer, though others are sure the follow suit. Some of the machines will be available immediately."

Comment: Re:What about the rail unions who may stop this (Score 2) 596

And how many "modern" coal fired plants are being built? Not many due to pollution limits. On the other hand, there are lots of old coal fired plants that were located close to population centers. I usually pass a couple of coal trains each day hauling Wyoming coal down to Colorado Springs (where I work) and points south like Pueblo and on into New Mexico. Quite a few only make it as far as Denver. Not many power plants up near the mines in Wyoming (also not many people).

Another funny thing about that. Recently had a local political flap about plans to build some new high tension transmission lines where there hadn't been any before. You should have heard the outcry against building "ugly power lines". Nobody seems to notice a couple more coal trains on the same tracks though.

Other point... That's "several million new tons of domestic coal". You apparently missed the "new". Can't find a number for how much domestic coal they haul but they ship about 30 to 35 million tons a year for export. Just one railroad.

Cheers,
Dave

Comment: Re:This is what Thatcher was good at (Score 3, Interesting) 596

Are you still dancing on that woman's grave? Jeez, conservatives didn't celebrate this much when Joseph Freaking Stalin died.

Didn't Hate Week sate your hatred? You know, the week after she died when you had hate parades to show just how much you hated her. No, seriously, this really happened. Hate parades.

Liberals hate conservatives but they REALLY hate conservatives like Thatcher and Reagan who got it right. Conservatives like Bush Jr. and Palin are easy targets and ad hominem attacks that discredit the person rather than the ideas. Thatcher and Reagan put their ideas into operation and both countries benefited. That's what really pisses off the liberals. They'd rather have the country going down a rat hole the way GB was under Labour governments than admit a conservative like Thatcher was right.

Cheers,
Dave

Backed up the system lately?

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