inkrypted - Slashdot User

Submission + - 16 year old builds a working scientific & graphing calculator. In Minecraft. (popsci.com)

Submitted by petval on Monday March 26, 2012 @05:04PM

petval writes: This is extremely impressive. It can multiply, divide, trigonometrize, figure roots, graph quadratic functions, and everything else you always need to do when you're playing a video game. All the calculations are done by blocks.
The title really says it all. See it in action.

Submission + - Congress Capitulates to TSA; refuses to let Bruce Schneier testify (schneier.com)

Submitted by McGruber on Monday March 26, 2012 @04:51PM

McGruber writes: Following up on the earlier Slashdot story "Congress Wants Your TSA Stories" (http://yro.slashdot.org/story/12/03/23/2312228/congress-wants-your-tsa-stories), earlier today, the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Government Reform and the Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure held a hearing titled 'TSA Oversight Part III: Effective Security or Security Theater?' that was streamed line by CSPAN (http://www.c-span.org/Events/House-Hearing-Examines-TSA-Security-Initiatives/10737429331-1/).

In a blog update (http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2012/03/congressional_t.html), Bruce Schneider says that "at the request of the TSA" he was removed from the witness list.

Bruce also said "it's pretty clear that the TSA is afraid of public testimony on the topic, and especially of being challenged in front of Congress. They want to control the story, and it's easier for them to do that if I'm not sitting next to them pointing out all the holes in their position. Unfortunately, the committee went along with them."

Submission + - Why You Should Not Bring Your Laptop To Canada (vice.com)

Submitted by

pigrabbitbear

on Monday March 26, 2012 @04:51PM

pigrabbitbear writes: "I didn’t know the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund existed until I read about a 27-year-old software engineer named Ryan Matheson. He was traveling to Canada for the first time, a couple years ago, when he was randomly stopped by Customs officials at the border.

“Since both my friend and I are geeks and programmers, I brought some of my electronics, including my laptop computer. There was nothing bad or illegal on my computer. Through the customs and immigration process, I was immediately picked out and searched by a pair of customs officers. I knew I didn’t have anything to hide, so I willingly gave them my password to log in to my computer. Through an unusual search that lasted over four hours, they found anime illustrations from art books and other fully-clothed drawings of fictional anime and manga characters on my computer. Unfortunately, Canadian customs officers consider any comic or anime-style drawing suspicious.”"

Submission + - Supreme Court throws out human gene patents (yahoo.com)

Submitted by thomst on Monday March 26, 2012 @04:39PM

thomst writes: The Associated Press reports The Supreme Court on Monday threw out a lower court ruling allowing human genes to be patented, a topic of enormous interest to cancer researchers, patients and drug makers. The court overturned patents belonging to Myriad Genetics Inc. of Salt Lake City on two genes linked to increased risk of breast and ovarian cancer. The justices' decision sends the case back down to the federal appeals court in Washington that handles patent cases. The high court said it sent the case back for rehearing because of its decision in another case last week saying that the laws of nature are unpatentable. In that case, the court unanimously threw out patents on a Prometheus Laboratories, Inc., test that could help doctors set drug doses for autoimmune diseases like Crohn's disease.

Submission + - Human Noise Has Ripple Effects on Plants (scienceworldreport.com)

Submitted by

fishmike

on Monday March 26, 2012 @04:31PM

fishmike writes: "A growing body of research shows that birds and other animals change their behavior in response to human noise, such as the din of traffic or the hum of machinery.
But human clamor doesn't just affect animals."

Submission + - Murdoch faces allegations of sabotage (afr.com) 1

Submitted by

Presto Vivace

on Monday March 26, 2012 @03:47PM

Presto Vivace writes: "Neil Chenoweth, of the Australian Financial Review, reports that the BBC program Panorama is making new allegations against News Corp of serious misconduct. This time it involves the NDS division of News Corp, which makes conditional access cards for pay TV. It seems that NDS also ran a sabotage operation, hiring pirates to crack the cards of rival companies and posting the code on The House of Ill Compute (thoic.com), a web site hosted by NDS.
ITV Digital collapsed in March 2002 with losses of more than £1 billion, overwhelmed by mass piracy, as well as technical restrictions and expensive sports contracts. Its collapse left Murdoch-controlled BSkyB the dominant pay TV provider in the UK.

Chenoweth reports that James Murdoch has been an advocate for tougher penalties for pirates, “These are property rights, these are basic property rights,” he said. “There is no difference from going into a store and stealing a packet of Pringles or a handbag, and stealing something online. Right?""

Submission + - Drug Turns Immune System Against All Tumor Types (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit on Monday March 26, 2012 @03:41PM

sciencehabit writes: A single drug can shrink or cure human breast, ovary, colon, bladder, brain, liver, and prostate tumors that have been transplanted into mice, researchers have found. The treatment, an antibody that blocks a "do not eat" signal normally displayed on tumor cells, coaxes the immune system to destroy the cancer cells.

Submission + - 'Frothy Gunk' From Deepwater Horizon Spill Harming Corals (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit on Monday March 26, 2012 @03:39PM

sciencehabit writes: The massive oil spill that inundated the Gulf of Mexico in the spring and summer of 2010 severely damaged deep-sea corals more than 11 kilometers from the well site, a sea-floor survey conducted within weeks of the spill reveals. At one site, which hadn't been visited before but had been right in the path of a submerged 100-meter-thick oil plume from the spill, researchers found a variety of corals—most of them belonging to a type of colonial coral commonly known as sea fans—on a 10-meter-by-12-meter outcrop of rock. Many of the corals were partially or completely covered with a brown, fluffy substance that one team member variously calls "frothy gunk," "goop," and "snot."

Submission + - AirPlay and Apple TV in the Board Room (informationweek.com)

Submitted by __aajbyc7391 on Monday March 26, 2012 @03:36PM

__aajbyc7391 writes: Many Apple fans know the joy of sharing videos, music, and photos with friends by Airplaying them from their iPads and iPhones to an HDTV via an Apple TV box. Now, this phenomenon is starting to show up in corporate board rooms. Recognizing this trend, business intelligence (BI) software specialist MicroStrategy has integrated enhanced AirPlay support into its mobile BI app, enabling users to use their iPads to make spontaneous presentations based on dynamic data insights — resulting in what the company dubs a "PowerPoint on steroids" experience. Welcome to 21st-century conference room!

Submission + - Raspberry Pi's Gertboard expansion kit gets revised (geek.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 26, 2012 @03:16PM

An anonymous reader writes: The Raspberry Pi Foundation gave a surprise announcement last year when we were building up to the launch of the $25 PC. As well as the tiny PC, we’d also have the chance to purchase an expansion board to use with it called the Gertboard.

It was originally thought the Gertboard would launch alongside the Raspberry Pi, but that clearly didn’t happen. Where as the Raspberry Pi offers up a fully functional PC, the Gertboard extends it to allow you to power motors, flash a set of LEDs, or hook up any number of different sensors. Additional/updated functionality revealed this week includes a number of components have been combined on to a single integrated circuit meaning one component to solder instead of several. The PIC microcontroller has been replaced for a chip that offers better compatibility with Arduino, two input buttons have been added, and there’s two new chips included for analog-digital, and digital-analog conversions.

Now all we need is a release date and a price...

Submission + - China Censorship Of Social Media Is Real, Comprehensive (threatpost.com)

Submitted by

chicksdaddy

on Monday March 26, 2012 @02:55PM

chicksdaddy writes: "Threatpost has a write-up of a study by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University that provides the first conclusive evidence that Chinese government censorship extends to social media sites like Sina Weibo, the popular micro blogging Web site that many have likened to a Chinese Twitter.

The study, published in First Monday, an online publication of the University of Illinois, Chicago, found that censors in China delete around 16 percent of the messages submitted to Sina Weibo, the popular micro blogging Web site that many have likened to a Chinese version of Twitter.

The study, released in March, concludes that "soft censorship" in China — the removal of controversial subject matter from blogs and Web pages — is at least as popular as hard censorship, like the blocking of offensive sites. The result is suppression of news about events or individuals that are deemed threatening to the ruling Communist party."

Submission + - Akamai to offer IPv6 to all in April (networkworld.com)

Submitted by

netbuzz

on Monday March 26, 2012 @12:56PM

netbuzz writes: "Akamai says that it will offer IPv6 services to its entire customer base beginning next month – a long-awaited move that is expected to be a major boon to the adoption rate of the next-generation Internet Protocol. Akamai hoped to release its production-grade IPv6 services by the end of 2011, but the task proved more difficult than originally anticipated. Akamai has been beta testing its IPv6 services with key customers since last fall."

Submission + - Getting The Most Out Of SSH (itworld.com)

Submitted by

jfruh

on Monday March 26, 2012 @12:27PM

jfruh writes: "If you have to administer a *nix computer remotely, you hopefully ditched Telnet for SSH years ago. But you might not know that this tool does a lot more than offer you a secured command line. These 16 tips will help you do everything from detect man-in-the-middle attacks (how are you supposed to know if you should accept a new hosts public key, anyway?) to evading restrictions on Web surfing."

Submission + - VLC released for Android

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 26, 2012 @11:55AM

An anonymous reader writes: ZeroPaid has a story this morning on the state of VLC on Android. Apparently a couple of independent developers have taken it upon themselves to finish up the task of porting VLC. God bless the internet.

Submission + - Here's a video about Java Multiprocessor Programming (youtube.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 25, 2012 @09:29PM

An anonymous reader writes: Summary:

You know how a Process has input and output streams? Well, I am using them for inter-process communication of messages. This currently is done by object serialization streams wrapped around System.in and System.out for these little services. So, you can use another language, or another Java runtime if you needed to as a bridge.

for this example, it runs 8 processes of javaw.exe to run as little random number generating services.

*I'm not making any performance benchmark claims

*I'm just showing inter-process communication is pretty easy this way.

Also, the source is there. It's in a zip file in the linked file. Binaries are included as well in the same file.

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