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Comment Smoke and mirrors (Score 0) 44

A typical roofing system on a commercial building begins to fail inside twenty years. It costs a crapton of money to roof/re-roof a building when there are only a few obstacles. Now cover it with retrofitted solar panels; labor intensive at best. Nevermind that the building probably wasn't engineered for the additional weight. Providing that 80% of the required power is going to be very expensive.

Submission + - The Munich Linux Project is to be cancelled and rolled back

Submitted by Qbertino
Qbertino writes: Apparently , as German IT News Website Heise.de reports, LiMux, the prestigious FOSS project of replacing the entire cities administration IT with FOSS based systems is about to be cancelled and decommissioned.

A paper set up by a board of city officials wants to reorganise the cities IT to "commonly used software" and a base client of the cities software running on MS Windows that integrates well with the cities ERP system based on SAP. The best possible integration of office software products with SAP is the goal, which looks like LibreOffice will be ruled out. The OS independence of the system is stated as a goal, but is seen by the article as more of a token gesture than a true strategy. The costs of remigration back to non-FOSS systems aren't mentioned.

Currently roughly 15 000 Systems in Munich are running on FOSS, 5000 on Windows. The city concil will make the final decision on this next week. Oppositional parties like the Greens and the Pirates call the move a huge leap backwards to the Quasi-Monopoly of Microsoft Windows and a waste of resources.

Submission + - The Music Industry's New War Is About So Much More Than Copyright (fastcompany.com)

Submitted by tedlistens
tedlistens writes: Last month, Taylor Swift, U2, and around 180 other artists signed a letter calling on US lawmakers to reform the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, or DMCA, which it said allowed "major tech companies to grow and generate huge profits” while leaving artists underpaid. (Though YouTube isn't mentioned by name, it's obvious to which "major tech companies” the letter is referring.) Still, while complaining (or hearing complaints) about low revenues from digital music has become as much a rock & roll cliche as devil horns or dying young, a deeper read of the industry's latest campaign against Silicon Valley “greed” (and 8 helpful charts) reveals that this "war" on online streaming is more complex than it seems: in spite of its efforts at a subscription service, YouTube's ad-based royalties remain a major issue. And untangling it is more important than ever: as it seeps again into the halls of Congress, the debate could impact copyright, online ads, and the future of making and listening to music.

Submission + - Ransomware Wreaks Havoc in the Cloud (lmgsecurity.com)

Submitted by rye
rye writes: Today, researchers at LMG Security released a video of the "Jigsaw" ransomware spreading across the "HackMe, Inc." corporate network in their "Play Lab," starting with the very first click on a phishing email, all the way to the encryption of HackMe, Inc's cloud repository. Watch as the ransomware spreads to the company's networked file share and OneDrive cloud repository. A perfectly creepy "Billy the Puppet" head pops up as the ransom note is printed in green letters across the desktop.

Want your colleagues or management to understand the true potential damage of ransomware? Just show them this video. Then, unplug your network cable, crawl under your desk and hide.

"What does it actually LOOK like when ransomware encrypts all the files on an employee workstation and then moves on to encrypt your company’s file share, and even cloud-based documents?"

Submission + - How (and why) FreeDOS keeps DOS alive (computerworld.com.au)

Submitted by angry tapir
angry tapir writes: In August it will be 35 years since of the release of version 1.0 of MS-DOS (or PC DOS as it was known at the time). Despite MS-DOS being long dead, the FreeDOS community has kept DOS alive, with the open source project having been founded some 22 years ago. I caught up with the founder of the project about the plans for the next version of FreeDOS and what keeps the open source OS alive.

Submission + - SPAM: Has Physics Gotten Something Really Important Really Wrong?

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Some researchers now see popular ideas like string theory and the multiverse as highly suspect. These physicists feel our study of the cosmos has been taken too far from what data can constrain with the extra "hidden" dimensions of string theory and the unobservable other universes of the multiverse. Of course, there are many scientists who continue to see great promise in string theory and the multiverse. But, as Marcelo and I wrote in The New York Times last year, it all adds up to muddied waters and something some researchers see as a "crisis in physics."

Smolin and Unger believe this crisis is real — and it's acute. They pull no punches in their sense that the lack of empirical data has led the field astray. As they put it:

"Science is corrupted when it abandons the discipline of empirical validation or dis-confirmation. It is also weakened when it mistakes its assumptions for facts and its ready-made philosophy for the way things are."

Thus, the goal of The Singular Universe and The Reality of Time is to take a giant philosophical step back and see if a new and more promising direction can be found. For the two thinkers, such a new direction can be spelled out in three bold claims about the world.

  1. There is only one universe
  2. Time is real
  3. Mathematics is selectively real

Taken together, these three claims constitute a significant departure from mainstream ideas in physics. But their most important consequence is that nothing, not even the laws of physics, live above time. The universe is time-bound and time-saturated. Thus, there is no eternal reality of perfect mathematical form. Even the laws of physics themselves must be subject to change. That is the most radical of Unger and Smolin's radical ideas.
Link to Original Source

Submission + - Tata's Buffalo office, Clinton's 'brainchild,' since closed (computerworld.com)

Submitted by dcblogs
dcblogs writes: In 2003, Tata Consultancy Services, a large India-based outsourcing firm, opened an office Buffalo office, which it described as then Sen. Hillary Clinton's "brainchild." At the announcement Clinton said, "TCS could have located anywhere in the country. I am proud but not surprised that they chose Buffalo." It became a talking point for Clinton in her defense of offshore outsourcing. "Well, of course I know that they outsource jobs, that they've actually brought jobs to Buffalo," said Clinton to Lou Dobbs, then at CNN, in a 2004 interview. "They've created 10 jobs in Buffalo and have told me and the Buffalo community that they intend to be a source of new jobs in the area, because, you know, outsourcing does work both ways." But Tata has since closed that office, and with it, Clinton's example that outsourcing works both ways.

Submission + - Indian Student Jailed for Cheating on Exams

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: BBC reports that Ruby Rai, a 17-year-old schoolgirl in India, has been thrown in jail after cheating on her exams. Ranked first in the Bihar state exams — Rai said in a video interview that her main subject political science was about cooking. After the video went viral, Rai was made to re-sit her exams, and was arrested after she failed and had her original results cancelled. Examiners who retested Rai told reporters they were "shocked" by her performance. When asked to write an essay about the Indian poet Tulsidas, she only wrote "Tulsidas ji pranam (Salutations to Tulsidas)". Meanwhile, arrest warrants have been issued for several other students who performed well in the exams, including Saurabh Shrestha who topped the science stream, but later could not say that H2O was water. Last March as many as 300 people were arrested for cheating in Bihar after the Hindustan Times published images of dozens of men climbing the walls of a test center to pass answers inside.

Submission + - As It Searches for Suspects, the FBI May Be Looking at You (technologyreview.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: The FBI has access to nearly 412 million photos in its facial recognition system—perhaps including the one on your driver's license. But according to a new government watchdog report, the bureau doesn't know how error-prone the system is, or whether it enhances or hinders investigations.

Since 2011, the bureau has quietly been using this system to compare new images, such as those taken from surveillance cameras, against a large set of photos to look for a match. That set of existing images is not limited to the FBI's own database, which includes some 30 million photos. The bureau also has access to face recognition systems used by law enforcement agencies in 16 different states, and it can tap into databases from the Department of State and the Department of Defense. And it is in negotiations with 18 other states to be able to search their databases, too.

Adding to the privacy concerns is another finding in the GAO report: that the FBI has not properly determined how often its system makes errors and has not “taken steps to determine whether face recognition systems used by external partners, such as states and federal agencies, are sufficiently accurate” to support investigations.

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