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Submission + - Texas Drivers Stopped at Roadblock Asked for Saliva, Blood (nbcdfw.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Some drivers along a busy Fort Worth street on Friday were stopped at a police roadblock and directed into a parking lot, where they were asked by federal contractors for samples of their breath, saliva and even blood.

It was part of a government research study aimed at determining the number of drunken or drug-impaired drivers.The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which is spending $7.9 million on the survey over three years, said participation was "100 percent voluntary" and anonymous. The 'participants' hardly agree.

Comment Fair Credit Reporting Act (Score 1) 519

by AlienSexist (#45437363) Attached to: Woman Facing $3,500 Fine For Posting Online Review
Such abusive actions on the part of a merchant whereby they involve credit agencies could violate the Fair Credit Reporting Act. Statutory and punitive penalties may apply. It all depends on the appropriate characterization of the customer/merchant relationship, if the merchant is considered a creditor, and the permissibility of the merchant filing a report to the credit bureaus under the circumstances.

Don't forget an earlier story where a court ruled that Zappos Terms of Service Agreement was invalid because it "didn't force customers to click through to it."

Submission + - Why Do Users Uninstall Apps? (intel.com) 1

Submitted by jones_supa
jones_supa writes: In mobile app development, one of the more daunting problems facing developers is user engagement; how to get users keep my app installed? Intel has done a little bit of research to find the most common cases. Apps that don’t offer anything helpful or unique tend to be the ones that are uninstalled the most frequently. People cycle through apps incredibly quickly to find the best-fitting. Then a lot of apps have a naturally limited lifecycle; i.e., apps that are centered around a movie release or tracking a pregnancy. Aside that, there seems to be a few common factors that can contribute to uninstallation: lengthy forms, asking for ratings, collecting unnecessary data, user unfriendliness, unnecessary notifications and of course, bugs. Additionally, if people have paid even a small price for the app, they are more committed to keep it installed.

Submission + - Linux 3.13 Kernel To Bring Major Features (phoronix.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: There's many improvements due in the Linux 3.13 kernel that just entered development. On the matter of new hardware support there's open-source driver support for Intel Broadwell and AMD Radeon R9 290 "Hawaii" graphics, NFTables will eventually replace IPTables, the multi-queue block layer is supposed to make disk access much faster on Linux, HDMI audio has improved, Stereo/3D HDMI support is found for Intel hardware, file-system improvements, and support for limiting the power consumption of individual PC components.

Submission + - Why Letting Your Insurance Company Monitor How You Drive is a Good Thing 1

Submitted by Hugh Pickens DOT Com
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes: Kim Gittleson reports at BBC that car insurance firms like Progressive in the US are trying to convince consumers that letting them monitor their driving behavior is actually a good thing and say that the future of car insurance is not just being able to monitor individual drivers to give them lower prices but also to make them better drivers. "Now that we can observe directly how people drive, we think this will change the way insurance works," says Dave Pratt, who says that Progressive has more than a trillion seconds of driving data from 1.6 million customers. "18 year old guys pay a lot for insurance, but some 18 year olds are really safe drivers and they deserve a better deal." Better big data technologies, like the telematic driving data collected by car companies (PDF) or even information gathered from social media profiles, can help augment that risk profile. "If I'm a driver that doesn't drive that frequently, and I have a pattern that would indicate that I drive more carefully than an average person with my profile, then I may be able to save 30-40% on my car insurance, and that's pretty significant," says Joe Reifel. For now, using big data analytics for insurers is still in the early stages. Only 2% of the US car insurance market offers an insurance product based on monitoring driving but that proportion is projected to grow to around 10-15% of the market by 2017. And other countries, like Italy and the UK, are already using the data to analyze not just risk profiles but also to determine who is at fault in car accidents. The future, most analysts agree is create a continuous feedback loop between insurers and consumers, so that consumers will react to the big data analyses that insurers do on them and change their behavior accordingly. “Bad drivers will at some point need to improve their driving or accept [having] to pay for the real risk they represent,” says Jacques Amselem.

Submission + - NASA, Boeing flaunt high-tech wing that could alter future aircraft design (networkworld.com) 1

Submitted by coondoggie
coondoggie writes: NASA and Boeing this week showed off new technology that could go a long way toward reducing the size, weight and drag of future, greener aircraft. NASA and Boeing said they recently completed tests of technology they call Active Flow Control, which places small, computer controlled devices known as actuators on the surface of a wing that then blow air in a sweeping motion along the span of the aircraft's surface.

Submission + - Hotel tycoon seeks property rights on the moon (cnbc.com)

Submitted by SonicSpike
SonicSpike writes: The founder of Bigelow Aerospace, Robert Bigelow, made a fortune in the hotel and real estate businesses, and he's pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into an enterprise that will create inflatable habitats designed for life beyond Earth. He entered into an agreement with NASA to provide a report on how ventures like his could help NASA get back to the moon, and even Mars, faster and cheaper.

Bigelow is applying to the Federal Aviation Administration's Office of Commercial Space Transportation to amend a 1967 international agreement on the moon so that a system of private property rights can be established there. "When there isn't law and order," he said, "there's chaos."

Bigelow said he believes the right to own what one discovers on the moon is the incentive needed for private enterprise to commit massive amounts of capital and risk lives. "It provides a foundational security to investors," he said.

Bigelow does not feel that any one nation should own the moon.

"No one 'anything' should own the moon," he said. "But, yes, multiple entities, groups, individuals, yes, they should have the opportunity to own the moon."

Submission + - DOJ says Lavabit cannot prevent search warrants by 'locking its front gate' (computerworld.com)

Submitted by SonicSpike
SonicSpike writes: Even after obtaining the encryption keys from secure email provider Lavabit through a court, the government was prevented by the court order and various laws from accessing other Lavabit users' accounts, the U.S. Department of Justice said Tuesday in a filing in an appeal by Lavabit.

The government said in the filing in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit that the information it wanted from a single unnamed account was user log-in information and the date, time, and duration of the email transmissions, and dismissed Lavabit's "parade of hypotheticals" regarding unlawful actions the government could take. "Were a government officer to do as Lavabit fears and 'rummage' through other users' communications without authorization, that would be a crime," DOJ wrote.

Lavabit shut down in August citing an ongoing legal battle it was not allowed to discuss at the point. Founder Ladar Levison said he was shutting down the secure email service rather than become "complicit in crimes against the American people." The government is said to have been looking for email information of former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, who since June disclosed through newspapers certain documents about surveillance programs by the U.S. National Security Agency. The target user name has been redacted in the Lavabit records.

Submission + - A Quantum of Stability (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by Rambo Tribble
Rambo Tribble writes: In a breakthrough with implications for quantum computing, an international team of researchers have managed to maintain qubits' state, at room temperature, for a record-shattering 39 minutes. The original article can be found at Science Magazine, http://www.sciencemag.org/content/342/6160/830

A more approachable article can be found at the BBC: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-24934786

Submission + - Senators: NRC stifled financial probe of Entergy (syracuse.com)

Submitted by mdsolar
mdsolar writes: Two U.S. senators have accused the Nuclear Regulatory Commission of backing away from a probe of the worsening finances of Entergy Corp.'s nuclear plants, including the FitzPatrick plant in Oswego County, after Entergy complained about the inquiry.

In a letter Thursday to NRC Chairman Allison Macfarlane, Sen. Edward Markey, D-Mass., and Sen. Bernard Sanders, I-Vt., said nuclear safety regulators are duty-bound to evaluate the financial fitness of plant operators.

The senators expressed "grave concern'' over reports that NRC staff members were told to stop asking Entergy for financial information after Entergy complained to higher-ups at the NRC.

"In our opinion, financial distress and the failure to maintain sufficient operating funds would be expected to signal the potential for future degradations in safety brought about by a licensee's need to conserve funding,'' they wrote.

Submission + - Yahoo sells off its URL stash (foxnews.com)

Submitted by zippo01
zippo01 writes: Yahoo is looking to sell off several 29 of its URL's for 3.5 million. "Yahoo is going through some very, very early spring cleaning by selling off a stash of 29 Web domains, including gems like crackers.com, sled.com, and religious.net. OK, that last one might not be such a hot commodity – but it’ll still cost you between $10,000 and $24,000."

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