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Submission Summary: 0 pending, 20 declined, 13 accepted (33 total, 39.39% accepted)

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Submission + - Massachusetss Rep. Katherine Clark Calls for Prosecution of Gamergate Trolls

PvtVoid writes: Representative Katherine Clark of Massachusetts is urging the Department of Justice to prioritize prosecution against online harassers of women:

We have to stop seeing this as just an internet issue,” said Clark. “When women are targeted with violent threats online, they are not only forced to fear for their safety, but their ability to fully participate in our economy is jeopardized. We have to examine how well we’re enforcing existing protections and work to keep the internet open for everyone.”

She specifically mentions Gamergate in her statement.

Good for her.

Submission + - Genetically engineered yeast makes it possible to brew morphine (nytimes.com)

PvtVoid writes: The New York times reports that newly developed yeast strains will soon make it possible to create morphine from fermentation of sugar:

This rapid progress in synthetic biology has set off a debate about how — and whether — to regulate it. Dr. Oye and other experts said this week in a commentary in Nature Chemical Biology that drug-regulatory authorities are ill prepared to control a process that will benefit the heroin trade much more than the prescription painkiller industry. The world should take steps to head that off, they argue, by locking up the bioengineered yeast strains and restricting access to the DNA that would let drug cartels reproduce them.

Submission + - Why do men exist? (phys.org)

PvtVoid writes: Biologists have long puzzled about how evolutionary selection, known for its ruthless requirement for efficiency, allows the existence of males — when in so many species their only contribution to reproduction are spermatozoa.

But research published today in Nature shows that sexual selection — when males compete and females choose over reproduction — improves population health and protects against extinction, even in the face of genetic stress from high levels of inbreeding.

Submission + - Fraud Rampant in Apple Pay (nytimes.com)

PvtVoid writes: An industry consultant, Cherian Abraham, put the fraud rate at 6 percent, compared with a traditional credit card fraud rate that is relatively minuscule, 10 cents for every $100 spent. [i.e. one tenth of one percent]

The vulnerability in Apple Pay is in the way that it — and card issuers — “onboard” new credit cards into the system. Because Apple wanted its system to have the simplicity for which it has become famous and wanted to make the sign-up process “frictionless,” the company required little beyond basic credit card information about a user. Nor did it provide much information to the banks, like full phone numbers and addresses, that might help them detect fraud early.

The banks, desperate to become their customers’ default card on Apple Pay — most add only one to their iPhones — did little to build their own defenses or to push Apple to provide more detailed information about its customers. Some bank executives acknowledged that they were were so scared of Apple that they didn’t speak up.

Submission + - Virgin Galactic Dumps Scaled Composites for Spaceship Two

PvtVoid writes: Virgin Galactic, following an aggressive schedule to build a replacement for the Spaceship Two which crashed in October, is doing so without partner Scaled Composites, according to the Los Angeles Times. Kevin Mickey, the president of Scaled Composites, confirmed this week that his company would no longer be involved in testing. He said Scaled would still work as a consultant to Virgin Galactic.

Submission + - Chris Kluwe Posts Epic Takedown of #Gamergate (medium.com)

PvtVoid writes: Call it a troll submission if you wish. Fuck that. This is a must-read.

Thus, when I see an article titled “Gamers are dead,” referring to the death of the popular trope of a pasty young man in a dimly lit room, it fills me with joy, because it means WE FUCKING WON. So many people are playing games now that they are popular culture. They are not going away. All sorts of cool things, that I like, are now things that a whole bunch of other people like! There’s enough space now for people to make games that are strange and disturbing and maybe highlight a different perspective of the world, because gaming is no longer a niche activity, it’s something that everybody does. There is room for art in video games. That’s awesome!

You slopebrowed weaseldicks with zero reading comprehension and even less critical thinking skills who think an article claiming “Gamers are dead” is something bad? Fuck me sideways with a sandblaster.

Read on for more that ain't from Bennett.

Submission + - iPhone 6 rollout makes $23 billion in Apple market cap evaporate (guardianlv.com)

PvtVoid writes: Apple's stock has now dropped below $100 per share, wiping out more than $23 billion dollars in market capitalization since the botched release of the iPhone 6.

'Despite the iOS 8 bugs and bent iPhones that have cost Apple approximately $23 billion, the company’s stocks are still up this year by over 20 percent, leading the race ahead of Standard & Poor’s 500’s general gain of seven percent. But a market slump just days after a crucial new product release is a major blow for any company. The iPhone, Apple’s most widely recognized and critical product, accounts for over half its stock value. With such serious problems hovering over its new release, this drastic change in stocks comes as little surprise.'

Does it make sense that a messy software update and some bent cases should be responsible for that much value disappearing? Is there too much market cap tied to a single consumer product to begin with?

Submission + - Washington Post covers #gamergate (washingtonpost.com)

PvtVoid writes: Rape threats. A hacking attempt on her Web site. The online publication of personal information, including her phone number and home address. Countless comments on her Tumblr calling her a “slut” and worse, including one that read: “Are you reading this? Of course you are. I will kill you.”

This is what indie video game developer Zoe Quinn has been dealing with for the past month, ever since an ex-boyfriend wrote a blog post implying that she had traded sex for positive reviews. The post sparked a virulent campaign against Quinn and an all-out online war about the future of the video-game industry.

Submission + - WSJ Reports Boeing to beat SpaceX for manned taxi to ISS (wsj.com)

PvtVoid writes: The Wall Street Journal reports (paywalled) that NASA is poised to award a key contract for manned transport to the International Space Station to Boeing over rival SpaceX:

Recent signals from the Obama administration, according to the officials, indicate that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's leadership has concluded on a preliminary basis that Boeing's proposed capsule offers the least risky option, as well as the one most likely to be ready to transport U.S. crews to the international space station within three years. The officials cautioned that a last-minute shift by NASA chief Charles Bolden, who must vet the decision, could change the result of the closely watched competition.

Here is a non-paywalled link to an article at CNET

Submission + - The National Review has had it with nerd chic. (nationalreview.com)

PvtVoid writes: One part insecure hipsterism, one part unwarranted condescension, the two defining characteristics of self-professed nerds are (a) the belief that one can discover all of the secrets of human experience through differential equations and (b) the unlovely tendency to presume themselves to be smarter than everybody else in the world. Prominent examples include MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry, Rachel Maddow, Steve Kornacki, and Chris Hayes; Vox’s Ezra Klein, Dylan Matthews, and Matt Yglesias; the sabermetrician Nate Silver; the economist Paul Krugman; the atheist Richard Dawkins; former vice president Al Gore; celebrity scientist Bill Nye; and, really, anybody who conforms to the Left’s social and moral precepts while wearing glasses and babbling about statistics.

The pose is, of course, little more than a ruse — our professional “nerds” being, like Mrs. Doubtfire, stereotypical facsimiles of the real thing. They have the patois but not the passion; the clothes but not the style; the posture but not the imprimatur. Theirs is the nerd-dom of Star Wars, not Star Trek; of Mario Kart and not World of Warcraft; of the latest X-Men movie rather than the comics themselves.

Submission + - Gofor: Uber for Drones (gofordrones.com)

PvtVoid writes: Gofor claims to be developing an app that summons a drone on demand using your smartphone or tablet. From the web site: "Drones are summoned much like taxis in other popular service apps. Your desired task is either noted at the outset using presets, or customized using voice commands. Once the drone arrives, your phone's flashlight is used to pair your device with the drone. From there, it depends on the task, the object-based UI is very easy to understand. "

Submission + - NSF Researcher Suspended for Mining Bitcoin (cio.com)

PvtVoid writes: In the semiannual report to Congress by the NSF Office of Inspector General, the organization said it received reports of a researcher who was using NSF-funded supercomputers at two universities to mine bitcoin. The computationally intensive mining took up about $150,000 worth of NSF-supported computer use at the two universities to generate bitcoins worth about $8,000 to $10,000, according to the report. It did not name the researcher or the universities.

Submission + - Your Princess Is in Another Castle: Misogyny, Entitlement, and Nerds

PvtVoid writes: Jeopardy champion Arthur Chu pens a heartfelt takedown of misogyny in nerd culture:

What the fuck is wrong with us?

How much longer are we going to be in denial that there’s a thing called “rape culture” and we ought to do something about it?

[...]

To paraphrase the great John Oliver, listen up, fellow self-pitying nerd boys—we are not the victims here. We are not the underdogs. We are not the ones who have our ownership over our bodies and our emotions stepped on constantly by other people’s entitlement. We’re not the ones where one out of six of us will have someone violently attempt to take control of our bodies in our lifetimes.

Submission + - Julie Ann Horvath Quits GitHub, Citing Harrassment (twitter.com)

PvtVoid writes: From TechCrunch: The exit of engineer Julie Ann Horvath from programming network GitHub has sparked yet another conversation concerning women in technology and startups. Her claims that she faced a sexist internal culture at GitHub came as a surprise to some, given her former defense of the startup and her internal work at the company to promote women in technology.

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