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Submission + - World's top climate scientists told to 'cover up' climate data (dailymail.co.uk)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: [L]eaked documents seen by the Associated Press, yesterday revealed deep concerns among politicians about a lack of global warming over the past few years. Germany called for the references to the slowdown in warming to be deleted, saying looking at a time span of just 10 or 15 years was ‘misleading’ and they should focus on decades or centuries. Hungary worried the report would provide ammunition for deniers of man-made climate change. Belgium objected to using 1998 as a starting year for statistics, as it was exceptionally warm and makes the graph look flat – and suggested using 1999 or 2000 instead to give a more upward-pointing curve. The United States delegation even weighed in, urging the authors of the report to explain away the lack of warming using the ‘leading hypothesis’ among scientists that the lower warming is down to more heat being absorbed by the ocean – which has got hotter.

This shows the foolishness of allowing politicians to get involved in the scientific process. They should be kept as far away as possible, at all times.

Submission + - The Future Will Be Modular: Tinkertoy-Like Blocks Will Build Bridges, Planes

Submitted by cartechboy
cartechboy writes: Does that sketchy bridge on your commute to work freak you out? How about that budget airplane seat your boss puts you in once a month? If you're nervous about that, then you'll probably freak out about this: Future airplanes, bridges, boats, even spacecraft may be built from modular blocks that snap together like Tinkertoys. While the idea seems strange, the parts are claimed to be up to 10 times stiffer than existing ultralight materials and the construction work will be done by tiny robots crawling along the structure as it's built. It would even be possible to disassemble one structure, say, a bridge, and repurpose it into a new building. Imagine taking apart one wing of your office building and turning it into a boat--just be sure to bring your life jacket.

Submission + - To Boldly Go Nowhere, for Now

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A recent article on Slate makes the argument that manned space exploration is not useful and we should concentrate on Robots. The article makes the claim that manned space exploration was never popular and by diverting money to robotic space exploration we can get more bang for the buck.

Submission + - Internet of Things Demands New Social Contract To Protect Privacy (securityledger.com)

Submitted by chicksdaddy
chicksdaddy writes: Changes brought about by the Internet of Things demands the creation of a whole new social contract to enshrine the right to privacy and prevent the creation of technology-fueled Orwellian surveillance states in which individual privacy protections take a back seat to security and “control.” That, according to an opinion piece penned by the head of the European Commission’s Knowledge Sharing Unit, The Security Ledger reports.

Gérald Santucci, in an essay written for the web site privacysurgeon.org (http://www.privacysurgeon.org/blog/incision/european-commission-official-warns-that-new-thinking-is-needed-for-the-future-of-privacy/), argues that technology advances, including the advent of wearable technology and the combination of inexpensive, remote sensors and Big Data analytics threaten to undermine long-held notions like personal privacy and the rights of individuals.

Current approaches to data protection are “largely inadequate” to the task of reigning in the asymmetrical changes wrought by new technology. “Data collection and video surveillance will continue to grow as ubiquitous computing pervades almost all areas of our culture, either harnessed to our body or hovering over cities to monitor people from the sky,” Santucci writes.”Therefore the question is: do we want to live in a surveillance society that might ensure justice for all, yet privacy for none or would we prefer a scenario in which individuals are fully empowered to define borders of their own personal space?”

Ultimately, Santucci sees the need to balance the "human need for privacy" with technologic innovation. "It is the honourable challenge of our generation is to build an awesome future without trading away our human need for privacy. Without trust technology cannot thrive; without technological change, human progress is impossible," he writes.

The European Union is currently embroiled in controversy over proposed changes to the Continent’s current data protection laws, which were passed almost two decades ago. A July vote by the European Parliament to adopt the directive was postponed until October, while some question whether laws are even capable of keeping up with the rapid advances in technology. (http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2013/apr/12/data-protection-law-lagging-behind-technology)

Submission + - Google planning on replacing cookies with AdID (usatoday.com)

Submitted by markjhood2003
markjhood2003 writes: According to a story published in USA Today, an anonymous source at Google familiar with the plan has revealed that Google is developing an anonymous identifier for advertising tracking, replacing the function of third party cookies currently used by most major advertisers. The new AdID supposedly gives consumers more privacy and control over their web browsing, but the ad industry is worried about putting more power in the hands of large technology companies. Sounds like the idea could have some promise, but at this point the proposal is not public so we will probably have to wait until Google reaches out to the industry, government and consumers to provide the details.

Submission + - Is HTML5 the future of book authorship? (oreilly.com)

Submitted by occidental
occidental writes: Sanders Kleinfeld writes: In the past six years, the rise of the ebook has ushered in three successive revolutions that have roiled and reshaped the traditional publishing industry. Revolution #3 isn’t really defined by a new piece of hardware, software product, or platform. Instead, it’s really marked by a dramatic paradigm change among authors and publishers, who are shifting their toolsets away from legacy word processing and desktop publishing suites, and toward HTML5 and tools built on the Open Web Platform.

Submission + - StumbleUpon Claims They've Stumbled Onto Profits

Submitted by cagraham
cagraham writes: In an interview with Bloomberg, CEO Mark Bartels says that StumbleUpon is now profitable, and expects to grow their revenue by 33% this year, up to $40 million. The service has been around since 2001, was briefly owned by eBay,and earlier this year cut its staff from 120 to 70. According to Bartels, a huge increase in mobile usage has led to the turn-around, and they now have over 100,000 advertising clients. Still, they didn't provide any hard profit numbers to Bloomberg, so you'll have to take them on their word that they've successfully monetized.

Submission + - California Public Utilities Commission approves Ride Sharing Services (latimes.com)

Submitted by Virtucon
Virtucon writes: Ride Sharing Services such as Uber, Lyft and Sidecar received a big boost today when the California Public Utilities Commission approved rules that would allow them to continue to operate as long as the followed a few rules. This makes California the first state to adopt such rules and is expected to preempt local governments who are trying to clamp down on these services and try to regulate them like local taxi companies.

Submission + - The 10 Commandments of Rational Debate (relativelyinteresting.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: 10 simple logical fallacies explained and, if understood and used correctly, can help you win your next argument. For example:

1. Though shall not attack the person’s character, but the argument itself. (“Ad hominem”)

Example: Dave listens to Marilyn Manson, therefore his arguments against certain parts of religion are worthless. After all, would you trust someone who listens to that devil worshiper?
Books

Submission + - Book Review: Citrix XenApp Performance Essentials (packtpub.com)

Submitted by gbrambilla
gbrambilla writes: A problem every system administrator has to face sooner or later is to improve the performance of the infrastructure that he administers. This is especially true if the infrastructure is a Citrix XenApp farm that publishes applications to the users, that starts complaining as soon as those applications become slow.

A couple of weeks ago I was asked to publish a new ERP application and suddenly all the hosted applications started to suffer performance problems... after some basic tests I looked on Amazon for an help and found the book I'm reviewing: Citrix XenApp Performance Essentials, by Luca Dentella, is a practical guide that helps system administrators to identify bottlenecks, solve performance problems and optimize XenApp farms thanks to best-practices and real-world examples.

Here's a short summary of its five chapters:

A well-designed infrastructure may help to solve a lot of headaches when the infrastructure is in production... in chapter 1 the book explains the most important elements of a XenApp infrastructure (session-host servers, datastore servers, web interface servers...), their role, how they work together and how to correctly size them based on the number of users and applications that will be served. This chapter includes not only best practices from Citrix, but also precious suggestions that come from author's experience with real Citrix farms.

When a farm is in production and users start to connect and work with published applications, it's very important to monitor its performance: in chapter 2 Luca explains how to monitor it, from the basic Windows Performance counters to the use of advanced Citrix tools. XenApp offers several advanced settings (CPU Utilization Management, Memory Optimization, Load evaluators ...) to improve the performance: all these features are covered in the second half of this chapter, including the new ones of version 6.5.

A typical complaint about applications published by XenApp is that they start slowly... this is usually caused by slow session start-up. Chapter 3 teaches the most frequent causes of slowness and how to reduce the start-up time, including the use of the new features of XenApp 6.5 (Session Sharing and Lingering).

Multimedia applications are becoming more and more frequently published by XenApp farms, that's why Luca wrote a chapter, the forth, to explain the technologies Citrix offers under the "HDX" brand and how you can take advantage of them for publishing video/audio/VoIP applications.

The last chapter is about remote users, i.e. users that connect to the farm using WAN (wide-area networks) connections. Citrix offers different optimizations and Citrix administrators can work together with network admins to improve the user-experience with the use of QoS, priorities... It's usually hard to understand how published applications work with slow, laggy links; Luca found an opensource tool, named WanEM, that can simulate every kind of links; in chapter 5 you'll also learn how to use it.

This book is not for people looking for a for dummies manual about Citrix XenApp: it won't teach you what is XenApp, how to install your first XenApp server or how to publish your first application. It's intended for intermediate-expert Citrix administrators that need a pratical, quick guide about an important task of their job: make sure the farms they administer work well. The first chapter is also a must read for all those IT Architects that are designing or planning a new installation: I've seen several projects fail or miss their business goals because of bad-designed architectures (presence of single point of failure, undersized servers...).

This book is also an interesting read for administrators courious about the new features of Citrix XenApp 6.5: some of them (for example session pre-launch) can be a significative improvement in your existing farm.

As the title suggest, this is not a huge book (about 130 pages), this means that not all the topics are deeply explained... sometimes you'll probably need the help of Google to find Citrix how-tos or docs to implement what is suggested: do not expect a step-by-step guide but a book that introduces many advanced features you can implement possibly with the help of Citrix manuals.

To summarize, I was satisfied about this book and I think it's worth buying: I consider myself an "expert" system administrator but I must admit I didn't know some of the features explained in this book and I realized that I didn't fully understood others: for example Luca gives an excellent explanation about what is DLL collision, a problem that on Windows OSes can cause waste of RAM memory. A special mention for chapter 5, maybe a good read with the help of a network colleague: it explains what Citrix can do to help the network guys to optimize the connection (Quality of Service, WAN scalers...) for remote users.

Submission + - What to do when your boss is ineffective

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: I have recently starting working for a company in the last year and my boss was newly promoted to his position. We all work remote except for the few days we try and meet in the office. It's becoming more and more noticeable that he's more concerned about deadlines and timelines than actually putting out functional designs and servers. He would rather put in a half working server cluster that meets a timeline he sets than actually making sure it's done right and working properly. And then when it comes back that the stuff isn't working properly, he puts it on us as if we didn't do our job.This has caused numerous people in our department to quit within the last few months leaving the only real working staff in it as me. I'd like to stay working here because the pay is decent and the advancement opportunities are good, but the 24x7 work days are killing me. I rarely spend time with my kids anymore. I have tried both the vocal approach and the subtle approach with him to no avail. Sometimes he actually just flat out doesn't respond to questions or ideas. What do I do? Mark it up as life as an admin and find a new position? Or try and convince the company and him that there's a better way to work?

Submission + - Russian government takes over country's 289-year old scientific academy (nature.com)

Submitted by ananyo
ananyo writes: Russia's lower house of parliament, the State Duma, approved controversial reforms to the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS) on 18 September. More than 330 members of the Duma voted in favour of the law, with only 107 against, in a move critics say will deprive the 289-year-old body of its independence and halt attempts to revitalize Russia’s struggling science system.
If, as is widely expected, the parliament's upper house and Russian President Vladimir Putin approve the law, the 436 institutes and 45,000 research staff of Russia’s primary basic-research organization will be managed by a newly established federal agency that reports directly to Putin. The agency will manage the academy’s 60-billion-rouble (US$1.9-billion) budget and extensive property portfolio, which includes lucrative sites in Moscow and St Petersburg, and will also have a say in the appointment of institute directors.
“This is not a reform — this is a liquidation of science in Russia,” says Alexander Kuleshov, director of the academy's Institute for Information Transmission Problems in Moscow.

Submission + - Why Are Some Hell-Bent on Intelligent Design? (boykotx.org)

Submitted by Funksaw
Funksaw writes: An Op-Ed by first-time politician, long-time Slashdotter Brian Boyko, where he talks about his experiences testifying at the Texas Board of Education in favor of actually having real science in science textbooks. But beyond that, he also tries to examine, philosophically, why there is such hardened resistance to the idea of evolution in Texas.

From the article:

[W]hat is true is that evolution tests faith. The fact of evolution is incontrovertible and supported by mounds of empirical evidence. Faith, on the other hand, is fragile. It is supported only by the strength of human will. And this is where it gets tricky. Because to many believers, faith, not works, is the only guarantee that one can pass God’s litmus test and gain access to His divine kingdom. To lose one’s faith is to literally damn oneself. So tests to that faith must be avoided at all costs. Better to be a philosophical coward than a theological failure.

Submission + - Post-post PC: Materials and technologies that could revive enthusiast computing (extremetech.com)

Submitted by Dputiger
Dputiger writes: Given the recent emphasis on mobile computing and the difficulty of scaling large cores, it's easy to think that enthusiast computing is dead. Easy — but not necessarily true. There are multiple ways to attack the problem of continued scaling, including new semiconductor materials, specialized co-processor units that implement software applications in silicon, and enhanced cooling techniques to reduce on-die hot spots.

Submission + - Harvesting ray filters won't help your liver -- and doesn't do much for the ray (washington.edu)

Submitted by vinces99
vinces99 writes: Since dried filters from the mouths of filter-feeding rays hit apothecary shop menus in Asia – the thought being that eating ground-up filters will cleanse one’s liver – there’s been no way to know which of these gentle-natured rays was being slaughtered. Unlike predatory rays that attack and crush prey with their mouths, the filter-feeder rays are generally considered harmless, even though one group is named "devil rays" and other other group includes the huge manta that measures up to 23 feet across and weighs 2½ tons. Now, scientists with the University of Washington’s Friday Harbor Laboratories have discovered enough differences in the filters to be able to identify the giant manta and eight of the devil rays using the part from inside their mouth that has been dried and is being sold. “There is no historical or traditional medical use of these filters and there’s no scientific evidence they will help your liver filter out toxins. Still there are thousands of these ray filters in the markets, especially in Indonesia,” said Misty Paig-Tran, who studied the filters in detail while earning her UW doctorate in biology. One surprising feature the rays share is that they are all capable of cross-flow filtering, Paig-Tran said. So apart from conservation implications, the new findings might be one step toward developing better industrial filters.

Submission + - Google Makes Quickoffice For Android And iOS Free For All

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Google today announced it is making Quickoffice free for everyone. That means Android and iOS users can edit Microsoft Office documents, spreadsheets, and presentations on the go without paying a dime. You can download the free versions now directly from Google Play and Apple's App Store. The only requirement is that sign in with your Google Account.

Submission + - U.S.'s Crap Infrastructure Threatens The Cloud 1

Submitted by snydeq
snydeq writes: Thanks to state-sponsored cable/phone duopolies, U.S. broadband stays slow and expensive — and will probably impede cloud adoption, writes Andrew C. Oliver. 'As a patriotic American, I find the current political atmosphere where telecom lobbyists set the agenda to be a nightmare. All over the world, high-end fiber is being deployed while powerful monopolies in the United States work to prevent it from coming here,' Oliver writes. 'I expect that cloud adoption will closely match broadband speed, cost, and availability curves. Those companies living in countries where the broadband monopoly is protected will adopt the cloud at a slower rate than those with competitive markets and municipal fiber. There's a good chance U.S. firms will fall into that group.'

Submission + - Mystery of Mars' Missing Methane Deepens (discovery.com)

Submitted by astroengine
astroengine writes: NASA's Mars rover Curiosity has been scouring the thin Martian atmosphere for methane — a potential tracer for the presence of Martian life. However, since the gas also can be produced geologically, any findings promised a meaty debate. That discussion can be shelved, perhaps permanently, new findings from a team of Curiosity scientists shows. The most extensive search yet for methane in Mars’ atmosphere has come up empty. “It’s disappointing, of course. We would have liked to get [to Gale Crater] and found lots of methane and measure all the isotopes,” lead researcher Christopher Webster, with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., told Discovery News.

Submission + - $14k and Counting for iPhone 5S Touch ID Hack (threatpost.com)

Submitted by Gunkerty Jeb
Gunkerty Jeb writes: A group of researchers, hackers, and other security enthusiast are pooling their money and offering it as a bounty to the first person that can successfully crack the Touch ID fingerprint authentication mechanism on Apple’s recently released iPhone 5S.

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