The0retical - Slashdot User

Submission + - The ATF Isn't Convinced That 3D-Printed Guns Compare to the Real Thing (vice.com)

Submitted by derekmead on Monday March 25, 2013 @05:22PM

derekmead writes: 3D-printing gun parts has taken off, thanks to the likes of Cody Wilson and Defense Distributed. While the technology adds a rather interesting wrinkle to the gun control debate, the ATF currently is pretty hands-off, saying that while 3D-printed gun technology has arrived, it's not good enough yet to start figuring out how to regulate it.

"We are aware of all the 3D printing of firearms and have been tracking it for quite a while," Earl Woodham, spokesperson for the ATF field office in Charlotte, said. "Our firearms technology people have looked at it, and we have not yet seen a consistently reliable firearm made with 3D printing."

A reporter called the ATF's Washington headquarters to get a better idea of what it took to make a gun "consistently reliable," and program manager George Semonick said the guns should be "made to last years or generations." In other words, because 3D-printed guns aren't yet as durable as their metal counterparts, the ATF doesn't yet consider them as much of a concern.

Scientists Study Getting an Unwanted Tune Out of Your Head 219

Posted by samzenpus on Monday March 25, 2013 @02:02PM from the co-stan-za dept.

Hugh Pickens writes writes "Richard Gray reports that scientists have found a way to help anyone plagued by those annoying tunes that lodge themselves inside our heads and repeat on an endless loop — when snippets of a catchy song inexplicably play like a broken record in your brain. The solution can be to solve some tricky anagrams to force the intrusive music out of your working memory allowing the music to be replaced with other more amenable thoughts. 'The key is to find something that will give the right level of challenge,' says Dr Ira Hyman, a music psychologist at Western Washington University who conducted the research. 'If you are cognitively engaged, it limits the ability of intrusive songs to enter your head.' Hyman says that the problem, called involuntary memory retrieval, is that something we can do automatically like driving or walking means you are not using all of your cognitive resource, so there is plenty of space left for that internal jukebox to start playing. Dr Vicky Williamson, a music psychologist at Goldsmiths, University of London, says that the most likely songs to get stuck are those that are easy to hum along to or sing and found that that Lady Gaga was the most common artist to get stuck in people's heads, with four of her catchy pop songs being the most likely to become earworms – Alejandro, Bad Romance, Just Dance and Paparazzi. Other surveys have reported Abba songs such as Waterloo, Changes by David Bowie or the Beatles' Hey Jude."

Submission + - US to invest $6 billion for Indonesian geothermal power (mondaq.com)

Submitted by symbolset on Monday March 25, 2013 @12:07AM

symbolset writes: The US State Department has announced a new $6 billion initiative to promote and finance the development of 12 GW of geothermal resources in Indonesia. Indonesia is estimated to have the highest geothermal of any nation in the world, only 4% of which is in use. Secretary Kerry is expected to make the big announcement at the ASEAN summit in September in Brunei.

Submission + - Graphene aerogel takes world's lightest material crown (gizmag.com) 1

Submitted by cylonlover on Monday March 25, 2013 @12:02AM

cylonlover writes: Not even a year after it claimed the title of the world’s lightest material, aerographite has been knocked off its crown by a new aerogel made from graphene. Created by a research team from China’s Zhejiang University in the Department of Polymer Science and Engineering lab headed by Professor Gao Chao, the ultra-light aerogel has a density of just 0.16 mg/cm3, which is lower than that of helium and just twice that of hydrogen.

Google Blogger: Vietnamese HS Students Excelling At CS 291

Posted by timothy on Monday March 25, 2013 @12:01AM from the pho-great-justice dept.

An anonymous reader writes "A Google engineer visiting Vietnam discovered a large portion of Vietnamese high school students might be able to pass a Google interview. According to TFA (and his blog), students start learning computing as early as grade 2. According to the blogger and another senior engineer, about half of the students in an 11th grade class he visited would be able to make through their interview process. The blogger also mentioned U.S. school boards blocking computer science education. The link he posted backing up his claim goes to a Maryland Public Schools website describing No Child Left Behind technicalities. According to the link, computer science is not considered a core subject. While the blogger provided no substantial evidence of U.S. school boards blocking computer science education, he claimed that students at Galileo Academy had difficulty with the HTML image tag. According to the school's Wikipedia page, by California standards, Galileo seems to be one of the state's better secondary schools."

Submission + - Can Innovation Be Automated? (hbr.org)

Submitted by

JimmyQS

on Sunday March 24, 2013 @09:31PM

JimmyQS writes: "The Harvard Business Review blog has an invited piece about Innovation Software. Tony McCaffrey at the University of Massachusetts Amherst talks about several pieces of software designed to help engineers augment their innovation process and make them more creative, including one his group has developed called Analogy Finder. The software searches patent databases using natural language processing technology to find analogous solutions in other domains. According to Dr. McCaffrey 'nearly 90% of new solutions are really just adaptations from solutions that already exist — and they're often taken from fields outside the problem solver's expertise.'"

Submission + - IE 11 to impersonate Firefox in its user agent string (neowin.net)

Submitted by Billly Gates on Sunday March 24, 2013 @09:05PM

Billly Gates writes: With the new leaked videos and screenshots of Windows Blue released IE 11 is also included. IE 10 just came out weeks ago for Windows 7 users and Microsoft is more determined than ever to prevent IE from becoming irrelevant as Firefox and Chrome scream past it by also including a faster release schedule. A few beta testers reported that IE 11 changed its user agent string from MSIE to IE with "like gecko" command included. Microsoft maybe doing this to stop web developer stop feeding broken IE 6 — 8 code and refusing to serve HTML 5/CSS 3 whenever it detects MSIE in its user agent string. Unfortunately this will break many business apps that are tied an ancient and specific version of IE. Will this cause more hours of work for web developers? Or does IE10+ really act like Chrome or Firefox and this will finally end the hell of custom CSS tricks?

Submission + - What is the latest and greatest web development framework? 2

Submitted by emmjayell on Sunday March 24, 2013 @08:07PM

emmjayell writes: So I haven't done much development over the past couple of years. I've been preoccupied with management, life and other hobbies. I'm experienced in C, C++, SQL, Java, Grails, RoR and some other things to a lesser extent. I enjoyed using RoR and Grails for building logic driven sites. So my question is, has anything better, new / improved hit the streets or should I just take a look at what is currently happening with Grails/RoR and use one of them? Any suggestions?

Submission + - Whitehouse.gov petition to create 'The Matrix' (whitehouse.gov)

Submitted by OldFart58 on Thursday March 21, 2013 @08:30PM

OldFart58 writes: Remember the Death Star petition?

Well, now there's a petition to have the United States Cyber Command (USCYBERCOM) begin production of "The Matrix":

"By focusing our technical resources on production of a simulated reality or cyberspace (or "Matrix"), the government can ensure our country maintains its lead in cyber warfare by providing the ideal means to pacify and subdue the human population. In addition, in accordance with our green energy initiatives this will facilitate research into eventual use of human body heat and electrical activity as an energy source."

Is this the unavoidable outcome of today's perpetually escalating cyber warfare fixation, or just another way to keep the lights on once the oil runs out? Which pill will the White House choose?

Comment Re:Assange condemns greed? (Score 2) 944

by The0retical on Sunday October 16, 2011 @05:24PM (#37733298) Attached to: Occupy Wall Street Protests Go Global

A moderate opinion on slashdot? How dare you!

You are correct on all points about the Tea Party being co-opted by politicians and the OWS movement also summarily moving in the same direction except it is being subverted by the socialist agenda. I personally believe that this is in no small part due to the 24 hour news cycle pulling some half literate socialist off the street and giving them a bit of barely comprehensible air time. The same thing could be found when the Tea Party movement started, the media grabbed one of the tricorne wearing, misspelled sign waving, isolationists stuck them up in front of the camera and said "Well here's what the Tea Party is." Obviously there are problems on all sides, however the majority of Americans straddle the fence on many many issues despite what the media and the politicians would like you to believe.

There really is no fix all to the situation, however I feel that term limits to prevent professional politicians, and hard caps on campaign spending would be a step in the right direction. It was probably a Slashdot commentator who said it best (so I'm going to rip them off) "Did you ever stop to wonder why someone would spend 80 million dollars to be elected to a 180 thousand dollar a year job? Obviously there is something else going on behind the scenes."

Comment Re:Normal communications.. (Score 4, Insightful) 155

by The0retical on Saturday October 15, 2011 @04:37PM (#37725844) Attached to: District Attorney Critiques Gizmodo Emails In iPhone 4 Prototype Case

Granted everyone makes those types of comments however the problem with this situation is that you have an official from an agency established to serve the tax payers deriding one of their constituents to a journalist on record.

There is such a thing as discretion and this DA just stick his foot in his mouth because this is going to be thrown back at him. Hopefully there will be consequences when the next elections come around and constituents finally decide that they cannot have their rights further eroded.

Submission + - Government warrant for Verizon Tracking Data (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by The0retical on Wednesday August 24, 2011 @03:19AM

The0retical writes: "On Monday, Judge Nicholas Garaufis of the Eastern District of New York soundly rejected this line of reasoning. The federal government had asked the courts to order Verizon Wireless to turn over 113 days of location data about a suspect's cell phone. It did so under a provision of the Stored Communications Act that only requires law enforcement to show that the records are "relevant and material to an ongoing criminal investigation.""

The judge went on to state:

"The fiction that the vast majority of the American population consents to warrantless government access to the records of a significant share of their movements by 'choosing' to carry a cell phone must be rejected," he wrote. "In light of drastic developments in technology, the Fourth Amendment doctrine must evolve to preserve cell-phone user's reasonable expectation of privacy in cumulative cell-site-location records."

Submission + - FBI "stole" our server, says Instapaper

Submitted by nk497 on Friday June 24, 2011 @05:02AM

nk497 writes: Website Instapaper has accused the FBI of stealing its server, after it went offline following a raid at hosting company DigitalOne. "As far as I know, my single DigitalOne server was among those taken by the FBI (which I’m now calling “stolen” since I assume it was not included in the warrant)," said founder Marco Arment. The server has since been returned, but Arment is still moving his service away from DigitalOne: "I’m not convinced that they did everything they could to prevent the seizure of non-targeted servers, and their lack of proactive communication with the affected customers is beneath the level of service I expect from a host."

Submission + - Will Capped Data Plans Kill The Cloud?

Submitted by theodp on Sunday June 19, 2011 @10:10AM

theodp writes: With the introduction of its Chromebook, Google is betting big on the Cloud. As is Apple, with its iCloud initiative. So too are Netflix and Skype. Unfortunately, their very existence is threatened by data-capping carriers, who seem hell-bent to make sure that the network is NOT the computer. 'I don't know what the solution is,' writes David Pogue. 'I don't know if anyone's thinking about this. But there are big changes coming. There are big forces about to shape our lives online. And at the moment, they're on a direct collision course.'

Submission + - Obama's Security Chief: US Needs Cybersecurity Aid (threatpost.com)

Submitted by Trailrunner7 on Tuesday June 14, 2011 @07:15AM

Trailrunner7 writes: The Obama administration has been making a lot of noise about cybersecurity lately, with the introduction of the International Strategy for Cyberspace and a national data breach notification bill. But we haven't really heard much from the man responsible for all of this policymaking: Howard Schmidt. Threatpost has a two-part exclusive interview with Schmidt, Obama's cybersecurity coordinator, in which he discusses the need for the U.S. to conduct offensive operations online, the dire nature of the cybercrime problem and the effect that groups like Anonymous have had on the administration's policy and thinking.

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