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+ - Ask Slashdot: Easy Wifi Enabled Tablet For My Dad

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "I'm looking to pick up a Tablet for my father. He is in his 70's and the internet it a bit of a mystery to him but he asked me about a way to send/receive email and watch online videos. He is NOT interested in getting a smartphone or moving off of his cheap NO data phone plan. But he is interested in getting a Tablet and using the free wifi that is available in his building. Here is my question: Can you recommend a Tablet equivalent to those phones with the big numbers that they sell to older people? Basically what I am saying is does there exist a tablet with an interface that would be simple and easy to use for someone who has very little experience with computer GUIs?"

+ - The Climate of Middle-Earth->

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes "One does not simply model the climate of Mordor; unless, of course, you are the University of Bristol’s Dan Lunt, who has created a climate simulation of J. R. R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth from The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Using supercomputers and a model originally developed by the U.K. Met Office, his study compares Middle-earth’s climate with those of our (modern) and the dinosaur’s (Late Cretaceous) worlds. The Middle-earth model reveals that the Shire—home to the Hobbits—would enjoy weather much like England’s East Midlands, with an average temperature of 7C and about 61 cm of rainfall each year. An epic journey to Mount Doom, however, would see a shift in climate, with the subtropical Mordor region being more like Los Angeles or western Texas."
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+ - Facebook Patents Inferring Income of Users 2

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes "Among the patents granted to Facebook this week by the USPTO is one for Inferring Household Income for Users of a Social Networking System. "For example," Facebook explains, "an assumption might be made about a user that reads CNN.com and nytimes.com every day that the user is in a higher income bracket than another user that only reads TMZ.com and PerezHilton.com on the theory that a user who reads newspapers might be assumed to make more money than a user who only reads celebrity gossip blogs." Advertisements such as those for travel packages, cars, and home mortgages, Facebook adds, "are targeted to users based on income bracket," which might also be inferred by "gathering and analyzing different types of information about a user's geographic location." Hey, what could go wrong?"

+ - Intel SSD Roadmap Points To 2TB Drives Arriving In 2014 And HET MLC NAND-> 2

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes "A leaked Intel roadmap for solid state storage technology suggests the company is pushing ahead with its plans to introduce new high-end drives based on cutting-edge NAND flash. It's significant for Intel to be adopting 20nm NAND in its highest-end data center products, because of the challenges smaller NAND nodes present in terms of data retention and reliability. Intel introduced 20nm NAND lower in the product stack over a year ago, but apparently has waited till now to bring 20nm to the highest end. Reportedly, next year, Intel will debut three new drive families — the SSD Pro 2500 Series (codenamed Temple Star), the DC P3500 Series (Pleasantdale) and the DC P3700 Series (Fultondale). The Temple Star family uses the M.2 and M.25 form factors, which are meant to replace the older mSATA form factor for ultrabooks and tablets. The M.2 standard allows more space on PCBs for actual NAND storage and can interface with PCIe, SATA, and USB 3.0-attached storage in the same design. The new high-end enterprise drives, meanwhile, will hit 2TB (up from 800GB), ship in 2.5" and add-in card form factors, and offer vastly improved performance. The current DC S3700 series offers 500MBps writes and 460MBps reads. The DC P3700 will increase this to 2800MBps read and 1700MBps writes. The primary difference between the DC P3500 and DC P3700 families appears to be that the P3700 family will use Intel's High Endurance Technology (HET) MLC, while the DC P3500 family sticks with traditional MLC."
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+ - German court invalidates Microsoft FAT patent-> 1

Submitted by walterbyrd
walterbyrd writes "Microsoft storage patent that was used to get a sales ban on products from Google-owned Motorola Mobility in Germany has been invalidated by the German Federal Patent Court.

Microsoft's FAT (File Allocation Table) patent, which concerns a "common name space for long and short filenames" was invalidated on Thursday, a spokeswoman for the Federal Patent Court said in an email Friday. She could not give the exact reasons for the court's decision before the written judicial decision is released, which will take a few weeks."
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+ - Diet Drugs Work: Why Won't Doctors Prescribe Them?

Submitted by Hugh Pickens DOT Com
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Suzanne Koven, a primary-care doctor at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, writes in the New Yorker that the FDA has currently approved four drugs that will help patients lose weight but few primary-care physicians will prescribe them. Qsymia and Belviq work by suppressing appetite and by increasing metabolism, and by other mechanisms that are not yet fully understood. "But I’ve never prescribed diet drugs, and few doctors in my primary-care practice have, either," writes Koven and the problem is that, while specialists who study obesity view it as a chronic but treatable disease, primary-care physicians are not fully convinced that they should be treating obesity at all. The inauspicious history of diet drugs no doubt contributes to doctors’ reluctance to prescribe them. In the nineteen-forties, when doctors began prescribing amphetamines for weight loss, rates of addiction soared. But in addition, George Bray thinks that socioeconomic factors play into physicians’ lack of enthusiasm for treating obesity because obesity is, disproportionately, a disease of poverty. Because of this association, many erroneously see obesity as more of a social condition than a medical one, a condition that simply requires people to try harder. Louis Aronne likens the current attitude toward obesity to the prevailing attitude toward mental illness years ago and remembers, during his medical training, seeing psychotic patients warehoused and sedated, treated as less than human. "What the hell was I thinking when I didn’t do anything to help them? How wrong could I have been?’" Specialists are now developing programs to aid primary-care physicians in treating obesity more aggressively and effectively but first primary-care physicians will have to want to treat it. “Whether you call it a disease or not is not so germane," says Lee M. Kaplan. "The root problem is that whatever you call it, nobody’s taking it seriously enough.”"

+ - About 25 Percent of HealthCare.gov Applications Have Errors->

Submitted by itwbennett
itwbennett writes "An estimated one in four user applications sent from HealthCare.gov to insurance providers have errors introduced by the website, an official with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services said during a press briefing Friday. The errors include missing forms, duplicate forms and incorrect information in the applications, such as wrong information about an applicant's marital status, said Julie Bataille, communications director for HHS Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). While the software bugs leading to the errors have largely been fixed, as many as 10 percent of insurance applications may still have errors and consumers who have used HealthCare.gov to buy insurance and have concerns that their applications haven't been processed or have errors should contact their insurers, Bataille said."
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+ - Transit Riders Don't Know Where Shit Is->

Submitted by Daniel_Stuckey
Daniel_Stuckey writes "According to new research, drivers, walkers, and bicyclists will generally provide us with more useful directions than transit riders. Published in Urban Planning , "Going Mental" shows that cognitively active travelers, regardless of commute by foot or car, tend to trump cognitively passive travelers, (those who frequent public buses and trains) in perceiving distance. Questioning cognitively active, passive, and mixed travelers about distances from a survey site to LA's city hall, the research demonstrated that the passive bus and subway riders have less of a grip on distance. Actively cognitive travelers, according to the results, were more likely to integrate street names in their directions, and also exhibited a sharper understanding of distances."
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Input Devices

Create Your Own Bullet Time Camera Rig With Raspberry Pi 86

Posted by timothy
from the price-elasticity-of-frippery dept.
sfcrazy writes "A team of extremely creative people have created a really inexpensive bullet time set-up using Raspberry Pis — and the whole set-up costs less than a professional DSLR camera. The rig looks more like the LHC at CERN using nearly half a kilometre of network cables, 48 Raspberry Pis fitted with cameras and PiFace Control. The rig worked perfectly — in terms of doing what a bullet time set-up should do. Raspberry Pis achieved the Hollywood's 'frozen time' effect at a much lesser cost."

+ - Create your own Bullet Time camera rig with Raspberry Pi->

Submitted by sfcrazy
sfcrazy writes "A team of extremely creative people have created a really inexpensive bullet time set-up using Raspberry Pis — and the whole set-up costs less than a professional DSLR camera. The rig looks more like the LHC at CERN using nearly half a kilometre of network cables, 48 Raspberry Pis fitted with cameras and PiFace Control. The rig worked perfectly — in terms of doing what a bullet time set-up should do. Raspberry Pis achieved the Hollywood's 'frozen time' affect at a much lesser cost."
Link to Original Source

+ - Lost Martian data recovered by open source.->

Submitted by Phrogger
Phrogger writes "NASA launched the Viking Lander in 1975. This ambitious project was the first to successfully reach and photograph the surface of Mars. The public domain data was stored magnetic tapes, state of the art at the time but discovered to be deteriorating in the '90's. Even though the data was transferred to CD's, it's in a now inaccessible proprietary format that even NASA itself can't decode. Now "a small, pioneering, Canadian software studio" Cartesian Theatre, which is developing Avaneya , a GPL game for Linux, has reverse-engineered this format and released Avaneya: Viking Landing Remastered with the 14 gig historic mission data set on the DVD. Their original purpose was "initially intended as an internal research tool to facilitate the studio's need for reference material to assist in the production of lucid and highly realistic virtual environments for its ambitious upcoming cerebral science fiction game title, Avaneya . Public interest, however, inspired the studio to consider the data recovery challenge in a different light – as a creative opportunity to leverage crowd sourcing to offset costly research and development of the game, as well as in the direct interest of the general public.""
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Google News Sci Tech: Internet-free Twitter heading to international cell phone markets - Examiner.com->

From feed by feedfeeder

Examiner.com
Internet-free Twitter heading to international cell phone markets
Examiner.com
Interested in Twitter but don't have a cell phone that connects to the Internet? That's ok, because a version of the social media service that does not require a web connection will soon be available to international users. According to Reuters on Thursday,...

and more

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+ - Ask Slashdot: Best FLOSS iTunes Replacement in 2013? 1

Submitted by cs80
cs80 writes "I've been looking high and low for a decent, open-source, cross-platform audio player that can import an existing iTunes library and sort my files based on their ID3 tags.
Nightingale, with its iTunes-like interface, would have been the obvious answer, but its file organization feature was pulled for being too buggy. What open-source audio player did you migrate to after dumping iTunes?"

+ - DNA Testing Company Won't Offer Health Information Anymore->

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes "The company 23andMe will no longer provide health information to people who purchase its DNA testing kit, it announced last night.The change was "to comply with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s directive to discontinue new consumer access during our regulatory review process," the statement said. While current customers will still have access to a 23andMe online database noting the health issues associated with their particular DNA, the company will not update that information, and customers who purchased its Personal Genome Service (PGS) on or after 22 November will receive only information about their ancestry and their raw genetic data without interpretation."
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+ - Do Earthquakes Spread Like Wildfire?->

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes "A simple model of forest fires could help explain the distribution of the sizes of earthquakes and their aftershocks, a theoretical physicist says. In the so-called Drössel-Schwabl model, trees sprout at random on a square grid like a vast checkerboard. Once the forest gets dense enough, lightning sets a random tree on fire, and fire spreads instantaneously among trees that occupy adjacent squares. The conflagration continues until there are no more neighbors to jump to. Then, the process starts all over again. In the team's model, the “forest” is the plane of a fault cutting through Earth’s crust, divided into a 10,000-by-10,000 grid. Sprouting trees correspond to the buildup of stress along the fault; burning areas, to the part of the fault that moves during a quake."
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A conference is a gathering of important people who singly can do nothing but together can decide that nothing can be done. -- Fred Allen

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