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Comment Full autonomy was never the goal (Score 1) 352

by wired_parrot (#43471781) Attached to: Why Self-Driving Cars Are Still a Long Way Down the Road
Full autonomy is not the immediate goal for most car companies. The more tangible near-term goal is to implement piecemeal aspects of technology as various "driver-assist" or safety devices. New cars on the market are already being offered with automatic parking, lane departure warning systems, autonomous cruise control amongst others. The goal is not to eliminate the driver but to reduce driver workload and eliminate the risk of accidents through various collision avoidance devices. Eventually, as automation in driver's seat increase the public may be more willing to accept a fully autonomous vehicle, but that was never the near term goal.

Submission + - CERN Gives Away Higgs Boson Particles To 10 Lucky Winners (ibtimes.com)

Submitted by redletterdave
redletterdave writes: In an unprecedented move sure to shake up the world of particle physics, CERN announced on Monday that it will give away its newly-discovered Higgs boson particles in a lottery. But given the rarity of Higgs boson particles – only one particle is created out of one million million collisions – CERN will only be able to reward 10 lucky winners. 'At CERN, we have always believed in sharing the results of our research, and the time has come to make that tangible,' said CERN director of research Sergio Bertolucci. 'This is our way of saying thanks for the incredible level of enthusiasm that has greeted this discovery.'
DRM

Submission + - Netflix streamed over HTML5 for ARM Chromebook, end of silverlight? (muktware.com)

Submitted by sfcrazy
sfcrazy writes: Netflix has pushed an update today to its Chrome Store app which brings support for the ARM-based Samsung Chromebook. This is a major change as instead of using Microsoft's Silverlight Netflix is using HTML5 video streaming (which now supports DRM for HTML5 on Chromebooks). Recently Google enabled the much controversial DRM support for HTML5 in Chrome OS to bring services like Netflix to Chromebooks using HTML5 instead of controversial Silverlight of Microsoft.
Star Wars Prequels

Submission + - This Isn't the Petition Response You're Looking For (whitehouse.gov)

Submitted by fractalVisionz
fractalVisionz writes: The White House officially responded to the petition to secure resources and funding to begin Death Star construction by 2016, as previously covered by Slashdot. With costs estimated over $850,000,000,000,000,000 (that's quadrillion), and a firm policy stating "The Administration does not support blowing up planets" the US government will obviously pass. However, that is not to say that we do not already have a death star of our own, floating approximately 120 miles above the earth's surface.

The response ends in a call to those interested in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) fields of study:

If you do pursue a career in a science, technology, engineering or math-related field, the Force will be with us! Remember, the Death Star's power to destroy a planet, or even a whole star system, is insignificant next to the power of the Force.
Security

Submission + - After Weeks Of Trying, UK Cryptographers Fail To Crack World War II Code

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A dead pigeon discovered a few weeks ago in a UK chimney may be able to provide new answers to the secrets of World War II. Unfortunately, British cryptographers at the country’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) have been unable to crack the code encrypting a message the bird was tasked with sending and say they are confident it cannot be decoded “without access to the original cryptographic material.”
Transportation

Submission + - With Pot Legal, Police Worry About Traffic Safety 13

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "AP reports that with Pot soon legal under state laws in Washington and Colorado, officials in both states are trying to figure out how to keep stoned drivers off the road as law enforcement officials wonder about whether the ability to buy or possess marijuana legally will bring about an increase of marijuana users on the roads. "We've had decades of studies and experience with alcohol," says Washington State Patrol spokesman Dan Coon. "Marijuana is new, so it's going to take some time to figure out how the courts and prosecutors are going to handle it. But the key is impairment: We will arrest drivers who drive impaired, whether it be drugs or alcohol." Marijuana can cause dizziness and slowed reaction time, and drivers are more likely to drift and swerve while they're high and Marijuana legalization activists agree people shouldn't smoke and drive. But setting a standard comparable to blood-alcohol limits has sparked intense disagreement because unlike portable breath tests for alcohol, there's no easily available way to determine whether someone is impaired from recent pot use. If scientists can't tell someone how much marijuana it will take for him or her to test over the threshold, how is the average pot user supposed to know? "A lot of effort has gone into the study of drugged driving and marijuana, because that is the most prevalent drug, but we are not nearly to the point where we are with alcohol," says Jeffrey P. Michael, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's impaired-driving director. "We don't know what level of marijuana impairs a driver.""
Android

Submission + - Android SMS Malware Firm Fined £50,000 (sophos.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A Moscow-based firm has been ordered to refund victims who lost money as a result of Android malware.

Earlier this year, security firm Sophos discovered a malicious link that had been spread on Facebook — which would force an Android app to automatically download onto visiting smartphones.

The app, detected as Andr/Opfake-C, tricked users into believing they would have access to online games — but actually subscribed to a premium rate SMS service at a cost of £10.

Moscow-based firm (translated as Connect Ltd) is said to have made up to £250,000 from the scheme.

UK regulatory authority PhonepayPlus has fined the firm £50,000, ordered it to repay all victims and banned them from introducing other premium rate services without permission for the next two years.
Apple

Submission + - Apple working the broken patent system (informationweek.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A pretty tight op-ed on how apple used the broken parts of the patent system to gain a very favorable portion of the smart-phone market from a design perspective.
Security

Submission + - Frankenstein - Stitching Code Bodies Together To Hide Malware (i-programmer.info) 1

Submitted by mikejuk
mikejuk writes: A recent research technique manages to hide malware by stitching together bits of program that are already installed in the system to create the functionality required. Although the Frankenstein system is only a proof of concept, and the code created just did some simple tasks, sorting and XORing, without having the ability to replicate, computer scientists from University of Texas, Dallas, have proved that the method is viable.
What it does is to scan the machine’s disk for fragments of code, gadgets, that do simple standard tasks. Each task can have multiple gadgets that can be used to implement it and each gadget does a lot of irrelevant things as well as the main task. The code that you get when you stitch a collection of gadgets together is never the same and this makes it difficult to detect the malware using a signature. Compared to the existing techniques of hiding malware the Frankenstein approach has lots of advantages — the question is, is it already in use?

Submission + - Wiper May have Links with DuQu, Stuxnet; Kaspersky Analysis Indicates (paritynews.com)

Submitted by hypnosec
hypnosec writes: Wiper malware known for its unforgiving ways hasn’t left a clue behind of its origin or its code as it deletes itself as well as everything in its path once activated but, security researchers over at Kaspersky Lab may have just found a couple of evidences that may point to the origins of Wiper. According to Kaspersky, Wiper has a couple of characteristics that it shares with DuQu and Stuxnet indicating that probably the malware has its roots in US and Israel. Still the security company says that the evidence might just be circumstantial and that one shouldn’t come to conclusions just yet.
Science

Submission + - Calorie Restriction May Not Extend Lifespan (sciencemag.org) 1

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: Slash your food intake and you can live dramatically longer—at least if you're a mouse or a nematode. But a major study designed to determine whether this regimen, known as caloric restriction, works in primates suggests that it improves monkeys' health but doesn't extend their lives. Researchers not involved with the new paper say the results are still encouraging. Although the monkeys didn't evince an increase in life span, both studies show a major improvement in "health span," or the amount of time before age-related diseases set in. "I certainly wouldn't give up on calorie restriction as a health promoter" based on these findings, says molecular biologist Leonard Guarente of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.

Comment Creates barrier of entry for competitors (Score 2) 84

It seems to that the various privacy laws in place across Europe targeting Google Maps have little effect on Google, which has enough resources that they can easily apply technical fixes to tackle each states differing privacy requirement. The net effect though, is to provide a high barrier of entry for competitors. A young startup wishing to start a competing street level mapping service will not have army of lawyers to sort through each states differing laws. Nor may they have the technical expertise to accurately implement blurring algorithms to the satisfaction of the courts. In short, while these laws are intended to target Google, they end up benefiting it, by making it more difficult for competitors to enter the field.
Microsoft

Submission + - Is Microsoft's Kinect A Gaming Failure? (hothardware.com)

Submitted by
MojoKid
MojoKid writes: "E3 is well underway in Los Angeles, and Microsoft has already made a major splash with its "SmartGlass" technology, game demos, and its announcement that a Kinect-powered version of Internet Explorer will debut on the Xbox 360. This is a marked change from last year, when Kinect was the unquestioned centerpiece of Microsoft's display and the company's demos focused on how Kinect-powered games used your full body as a controller. Kinect is in the interesting position of having both sold extremely well while failing to move the bar forward in any of the ways Microsoft projected in the run up to it's launch. Scroll through the ratings on Kinect-required titles, and the percentages are abysmal. Kinect's biggest problem is rooted in ergonomics. Gamepads with buttons may be crude approximations of real life, but they're simple and intuitive. They're also flexible — a great many games have conditional scenarios that allow the same button to perform different functions depending on what's going on within the game. Pure Kinect games don't have a simple mechanism to incorporate these features, and there's no easy way around them. The motion-controller's most enduring features may ultimately be its capabilities outside the gaming sphere."
The Military

Submission + - Air Force believes anti-g suit is cause of F-22's oxygen problems (flightglobal.com) 2

Submitted by wired_parrot
wired_parrot writes: The USAF believes it may have identified the root cause of the F-22 Raptor's oxygen troubles: pilots are running into physiological limitations in attempting to breath oxygen while under high-g loads, leading to a condition know as acceleration atelectasis. This is being aggravated by the anti-g suit worn by pilots, which puts pressure in their chest. It may be that the F-22 has reached the edge of what a human pilot can handle
Businesses

Submission + - As Facebook prepares IPO, a wave of apps startups follows behind (siliconvalley.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Facebook, which is set to go public next week, has spawned a wave of startups based on its apps platform, particularly in the Bay Area. A University of Maryland study estimates that at the Facebook ecosystem supports at least 18 times as many jobs as the parent company itself. The Mercury News article contains a chart of the top 20 Facebook apps developers in the Bay Area, based on active users; Zynga is #1 by a large margin. Meanwhile, some social networking entrepreneurs are trying to avoid becoming dependent on Facebook's platform.

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