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Submission + - 3-D printed gun ban fails in Senate (dailydot.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: "On Monday evening, a bill aimed at thwarting the production and distribution of plastic 3-D printed weapons was blocked by Senate Republicans. ...

The debate over the new legislation centered around the 1988 Undetectable Firearms Act, which bans the production and distribution of weapons that skirt “walk through metal detectors.” The act has been renewed on two occasions since its passage. It was due to expire again on the 9th of December.

The House voted to renew the bill last week. The rise of 3-D printing has made this year’s renewal more complicated in the Senate. Many lawmakers, particularly Democrats, feel the current Undetectable Firearms Act inadequately addresses the rising threat posed by printed plastic weapons."
Transportation

New Ford Mustang May Have Electronic "Burnout" Button 290

Posted by samzenpus from the nobody-with-a-good-car-needs-to-be-justified dept.
cartechboy writes "Ford has decided to take the burnout into the 21st century for the new 2015 Mustang. The Mustang's new 'electronic' burnout system is intended to enable perfect burnouts every time, much like launch control has made it easier to accelerate quickly from a stop. So think of every new Mustang with a bright red 'burnout' button. While the details on how the burnout control system will work remain secret, it's possible that a combination of the features used in a typical launch control system, including traction and rev-limiting controls, together with a front brake locking system, could enable Ford to pull together existing technology in a completely new way. So far Ford has no comment."

Submission + - Inside Wisconsin's Bipartisan Effort to End Warrantless Cellphone Tracking (vice.com)

Submitted by Daniel_Stuckey
Daniel_Stuckey writes: “Technology has surpassed our laws and we need to bring our laws up to date,” Sargent told the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. Earlier this year, Sargent authored a social media bill that would protect users against voyeuristic employers, educational institutions, and landlords, among others. With the work on these bills, Sargent finds herself leading Wisconsin’s privacy charge at the intersection of technology and government.

Sargent “stumbled across the metadata issue” after putting together the social media privacy bill. “Watching surveillance playout on the national level with the NSA revelations, and seeing that people were as outraged as I was, led me to believe I was on to something,” said Sargent, who felt that a mobile privacy bill had the potential to pass even in Wisconsin’s divisive political climate.

Comment COBOL was an arrow in the pioneer's back (Score 4, Insightful) 157

by Tablizer (#45644547) Attached to: Google Doodle Remembers Computing Pioneer Grace Hopper

You may scoff at COBOL, but she pioneered the idea of using a more human-friendly notation instead of machine language and its cousin, assembler. Her experiments were the precursor to Algol, which shaped all the imperative block-oriented languages we use today, including C, Java, VB, Pascal, etc.

And it made software more vendor-independent as the languages were not tied to a specific machine architecture, unlike machine code and assembler.

Before that, many scoffed at the idea of "dumbing down" programming with English-like syntax, fearing it would waste resources and invite poorly educated riff-raff into the field. (Well, maybe it did :-)

Perhaps Grace didn't get it quite right on the first try, but she helped spark a computer language revolution that led to better tools down the road. She tested waters others feared.
Medicine

Neural Prosthetic Acts Like "Bridge" Over Damaged Brain Areas 54

Posted by samzenpus from the spanning-the-gap dept.
the_newsbeagle writes "If you can't fix it, go around it. That's the thinking behind an experimental treatment for traumatic brain injury. Using an implanted microdevice, researchers recorded the electrical signals from a sensory region of a rat's brain, skipped over a damaged brain region that typically processes sensory information, and sent the electric signals on to the premotor cortex. This cyborg mouse could then move normally. What this means is that we're getting better at speaking the brain's language — even if we don't understand it, we can mimic it."

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