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Submission + - Scientists Confirm World's Oldest Creature...But Kill it Determining Its Age (mirror.co.uk) 3

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: In 2006, climate change experts from Bangor University in north Wales found a very special clam while dredging the seabeds of Iceland. At that time scientists counted the rings on the inside shell to determine that the clam was the ripe old age of 405. Unfortunately, by opening the clam which scientists refer to as "Ming," they killed it instantly.

Cut to 2013, researchers have determined that the original calculations of Ming's age were wrong, and that the now deceased clam was actually 102 years older than originally thought. Ming was 507 years old at the time of its demise.

“But we are absolutely certain that we’ve got the right age now."

Submission + - ATF Tests Show 3D Printed Guns Can Explode, Injure Users (computerworld.com)

Submitted by Lucas123
Lucas123 writes: The ATF has been testing 3D printed guns over the past year and, not surprisingly, has found that depending on the thermoplastics, 3D printers and CAD designs used, some can explode on the first attempt to shoot them. The ATF published videos this week of the tests on YouTube showing what looked like a Liberator model of a 3D gun exploding upon being fired. Another model, created with the popular ABS polymer and an advanced printer, could fire as many as 8 shots. The tests were published at a time when a law passed in 1988 banning the sale of plastic guns made entirely of plastic is set to expire next month.
Privacy

P2P Data Not Private, But It Could Be 59

Posted by timothy from the don't-tell-eve dept.
Frequent correspondent Bennett Haselton writes with a forward-looking response to a recent ruling that peer-to-peer network participants have little privacy interest in files stored on their computer and that they have made available via P2P. Writes Bennett: "A court rules that law enforcement did not improperly 'search' defendants' computers by downloading files that the computers were sharing via P2P software. This seems like a reasonable ruling, but such cases may become rare if P2P software evolves to the point where all downloads are routed anonymously through other users' computers." Read on for the rest.

Submission + - TSA Screening Barely Working Better Than Chance (theverge.com)

Submitted by rwise2112
rwise2112 writes: The General Accounting Office (GAO) has completed a study of the TSAs SPOT (Screening of Passengers by Observation Techniques) program and found the program is only slightly better than chance at finding criminals. Given that the TSA has spent almost a billion dollars on the program, that's a pretty poor record. As a result, the GAO is requesting that both Congress and the president withhold funding from the program until the TSA can demonstrate its effectiveness.

Submission + - All-in-one Digital Credit Card (cnet.com)

Submitted by NoImNotNineVolt
NoImNotNineVolt writes: Coin, a Y Combinator-backed startup, has started accepting pre-orders for a device as slim as a standard piece of payment plastic that can hold eight credit, debit, and gift cards in its dynamic magnetic stripe. Paired with the Coin smartphone app via Bluetooth low energy, card details can easily be swapped in and out of the device. A minimalist user interface on the device itself allows the owner to toggle between the loaded cards and then swipe just as they would their ordinary card. All card details are encrypted (both on the device and in the smartphone app), and the device's on-board battery is expected to last for two years of typical usage. No support for chip&pin (EMV) yet, so this may have limited utility outside of the USA. They expect to start shipping in summer of 2014.

Submission + - Google Books case dismissed on Fair Use Grounds

Submitted by NewYorkCountryLawyer
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes: In a case of major importance, the long simmering battle between the Authors Guild and Google has reached its climax, with the court granting Google's motion for summary judgment, dismissing the case, on fair use grounds. In his 30-page decision (PDF), Judge Denny Chin — who has been a District Court Judge throughout most of the life of the case but is now a Circuit Court Judge — reasoned that, although Google's own motive for its "Library Project" (which scans books from libraries without the copyright owners' permission and makes the material publicly available for search), is commercial profit, the project itself serves significant educational purposes, and actually enhances, rather than detracts from, the value of the works, since it helps promote sales of the works. Judge Chin also felt that it was impossible to use Google's scanned material, either for making full copies, or for reading the books, so that it did not compete with the books themselves.

Submission + - Amazon hints at details on its CIA Franken-cloud (networkworld.com)

Submitted by coondoggie
coondoggie writes: Amazon Web Services recently won a reported $600 million contract to build the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) a cloud. But that cloud will not look like any other cloud on the planet. Amazon will build the cloud using AWS architectures and AWS will manage it, but executives hinted that it will not be accessed the way other customers use AWS services through the public Internet. “We’re managing the operations in the data center,” Andy Jassy, Amazon’s senior vice president and the head of the company’s cloud computing division AWS said about the CIA deal. “It’s our hardware, it’s our networking.”

Submission + - PostgreSQL now available on Amazon's RDS

Submitted by wumbler
wumbler writes: For a long time, Amazon has already provided MySQL support as part of its 'Relational Database Service' (RDS). Developers didn't have to worry about replication and high availability, since Amazon took care of this automatically, relieving site operators from the complex system administration tasks associated with setting up and running a database cluster. The big drawback of RDS? Only MySQL was supported, fans of the ever more popular PostgreSQL were left out. Today, Amazon finally announced availability for PostgreSQL. Amazon's RDS just became a whole lot more interesting.
Bitcoin

Bitcoin Hits $400 Ahead of Senate Hearing On Virtual Currency 276

Posted by timothy from the and-I-used-to-regret-not-buying-domain-names dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The value of bitcoin has surged through the $400 barrier for the first time, as unprecedented growth sees the virtual currency's value quadruple in just three months. Meanwhile, on 18 November, a Senate subcommittee is scheduled to hold a hearing on virtual currencies like bitcoin and its lesser-known competitors litecoin and altcoin. The hearing comes after a unit of the Treasury Department earlier this year issued guidelines stating virtual currencies should be subject to the same anti-money-laundering laws as traditional currency-transfer businesses like Western Union."

Submission + - NSA wants to reveal its secrets to prevent Snowden from revealing them first

Submitted by binarstu
binarstu writes: According to a recent report by Tom Gjelten of NPR, 'NSA officials are bracing for more surveillance disclosures from the documents taken by former contractor Edward Snowden — and they want to get out in front of the story. ... With respect to other information held by Snowden and his allies but not yet publicized, the NSA is now considering a proactive release of some of the less sensitive material, to better manage the debate over its surveillance program.'

Comment Re:Meh (Score 1) 49

by A nonymous Coward (#45424598) Attached to: Serious proposals to replace obamacare begin

Your only limit on a conversation is refusal to take part. If you bring up corruption in a half-assed manner and I call you out and show how the problem is far wider than you are willing to admit, you don't get to call a foul on me for expanding the conversation. That's 3 year old behavior.

You especially don't get to try to limit the conversation to your original post on the one hand, and then widen it on the other hand by telling me to go read other comments of yours. That's admission that you wish to withdraw your original comment because it wasn't reflective of your rhoughts.

My opinions of you are necessarily as fact-free as your opinions of me. My facts showing the depth and breadth of crony corruption are sitting there waiting for you to answer with something other than "I was only talking about insurance since 2010" or more opinions on me, which apparently is ok for thee but not for me.
DRM

DRM To Be Used In Renault Electric Cars 231

Posted by timothy from the insert-coin-to-continue dept.
mahiskali writes with this interesting news via the EFF's Deep Links "The new Renault Zoe comes with a 'feature' that absolutely nobody wants. Instead of selling consumers a complete car that they can use, repair, and upgrade as they see fit, Renault has opted to lock purchasers into a rental contract with a battery manufacturer and enforce that contract with digital rights management (DRM) restrictions that can remotely prevent the battery from charging at all. This coming on the heels of the recent Trans-Pacific Partnership IP Rights Chapter leak certainly makes you wonder how much of that device (car?) you really own. Perhaps Merriam-Webster can simply change the definition of ownership."

Submission + - Cognitive Computing For All: IBM Releases A Legion Of Watsons

Submitted by malachiorion
malachiorion writes: The first examples of what developers can do with the new Watson API are pretty lame—health coaching, personal shopping... But the tech behind Watson, and its transition from a single system to a cloud-based species, essentially, of cognitive computing software, is a very big deal. My analysis for Popular Science: http://www.popsci.com/blog-network/zero-moment/cognitive-computing-all-ibm-releases-legion-watsons

Submission + - Stephen Wolfram Developing New Programming Language (slashdot.org)

Submitted by Nerval's Lobster
Nerval's Lobster writes: Stephen Wolfram, the chief designer of the Mathematica software platform and the Wolfram Alpha “computation knowledge engine,” has another massive project in the works—although he’s remaining somewhat vague about details for the time being. In simplest terms, the project is a new programming language—which he’s dubbing the “Wolfram Language”—which will allow developers and software engineers to program a wide variety of complex functions in a streamlined fashion, for pretty much every single type of hardware from PCs and smartphones all the way up to datacenters and embedded systems. The Language will leverage automation to cut out much of the nitpicking complexity that dominates current programming. “The Wolfram Language does things automatically whenever you want it to,” he wrote in a recent blog posting. “Whether it’s selecting an optimal algorithm for something. Or picking the most aesthetic layout. Or parallelizing a computation efficiently. Or figuring out the semantic meaning of a piece of data. Or, for that matter, predicting what you might want to do next. Or understanding input you’ve given in natural language.” In other words, he’s proposing a general-purpose programming language with a mind-boggling amount of functions built right in. At this year’s SXSW, Wolfram alluded to his decades of work coming together in “a very nice way,” and this is clearly what he meant. And while it’s tempting to dismiss anyone who makes sweeping statements about radically changing the existing paradigm, he does have a record of launching very big projects (Wolfram Alpha contains more than 10 trillion pieces of data cultivated from primary sources, along with tens of thousands of algorithms and equations) that function reliably. At many points over the past few years, he’s also expressed a belief that simple equations and programming can converge to create and support enormously complicated systems. Combine all those factors together, and it’s clear that Wolfram’s pronouncements—no matter how grandiose—can’t simply be dismissed. But it remains to be seen how much of an impact he actually has on programming as an art and science.
Communications

EU To Allow 3G and 4G Connections On Planes 106

Posted by timothy from the never-never-never-never-hang-up dept.
jfruh writes "In America we're celebrating the fact that we don't have to stow our Kindles during takeoff and landing anymore, but the EU is going a step further and not requiring passengers to switch their phones to "airplane" mode anymore. If you're on an airplane with a Network Control Unit that regulate cellular connections, you can text and make calls over standard 3G and 4G networks. You'll want to watch out for roaming charges, though, especially if you're on a flight crossing national borders."

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I tell them to turn to the study of mathematics, for it is only there that they might escape the lusts of the flesh. -- Thomas Mann, "The Magic Mountain"

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