Slashdot is powered by your submissions, so send in your scoop

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×

Submission + - Slashdot poll

Submitted by vikingpower
vikingpower writes: "Precision of the most precise measuring device you ever used:
- picometers
- femtofarads
- microvolts
- attobreadcrumbs
- metric tons
- evacowboyneals
- what is this precision thing you are talking of ?
- I am in marketing, you insensitive clod !"

Submission + - Groklaw on ten years of Linux legalities: (zdnet.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Ten years ago, SCO decided to sue IBM and started a series of legal attacks on Linux. Their cases were pathetically weak, but CIOs and CFOs didn't know that. Thanks to paralegal turned legal journalist, Pamela "PJ" Jones and her Website Groklaw, executives who wanted to know what was really what with SCO's multitude of lawsuits soon learned of the FUD behind SCO's claims. SCO and its silent backer Microsoft hope for profits and slowing down Linux's corporate success would come to nothing, and SCO ended up in bankruptcy.

Comment Fuck that (Score 1) 2

by fireman sam (#43786425) Attached to: 3-D Printable Food for NASA and the Very Hungry

Who would ever want to live in a place where food is marketed the same as printer cartridges? You get the food printer with a "lite" cartridge that can only print 4 meals for $500. To purchase additional cartridges it will cost $5000. If you try to put your own food substance in the cartridge you will have the full force of the US [private company] defense force come down on you screaming DMCA.

Control the food, control the people

Submission + - Google converts links sent via Google Chat to referral links 1

Submitted by MotorMachineMercenar
MotorMachineMercenar writes: Google has apparently introduced a new feature to track user behavior in the revamped Google Chat, called Hangouts.

A friend of mine sent me a link, incidentally about an MIT study about the futility of folio hats in blocking the thought police. I use Chrome for Gmail, but being the folio-hat -wearing type, I do all my other browsing in a tightly locked down FF. I copy-pasted the link to FF, and noticed that there was flash of a Google URL before it went to the right URL.

After pasting the link to a note, I noticed it's a Google referral link, similar to the ones most (all?) links on Google search are — in case you weren't aware. So now Google knows who sent what link to whom. The only way around that is to select the entire link, and copy the text.

Now, I'm aware that by definition of me being on a Google platform they implicitly know our conversations. But the fact that they bother to make a referral link means there is even more datamining going on behind the scenes than what we already knew of.

Submission + - 3-D Printable Food for NASA and the Very Hungry (qz.com) 2

Submitted by cervesaebraciator
cervesaebraciator writes: "[...] Systems & Materials Research Corporation, just got a six month, $125,000 grant from NASA to create a prototype of his universal food synthesizer. But Contractor, a mechanical engineer with a background in 3D printing, envisions a much more mundane—and ultimately more important—use for the technology. He sees a day when every kitchen has a 3D printer, and the earth’s 12 billion people feed themselves customized, nutritionally-appropriate meals synthesized one layer at a time, from cartridges of powder and oils they buy at the corner grocery store. Contractor’s vision would mean the end of food waste, because the powder his system will use is shelf-stable for up to 30 years, so that each cartridge, whether it contains sugars, complex carbohydrates, protein or some other basic building block, would be fully exhausted before being returned to the store." No word yet on whether anyone other than the guy trying to sell the technology thinks it'll make palatable food.

Submission + - Hate, Mapped (vice.com)

Submitted by Daniel_Stuckey
Daniel_Stuckey writes: In a lot of ways, the Geography of Hate affirms what we already know: Americans are fucking racist. Homophobic and ableist, too.

But while that may not come as any great surprise, the map reveals a startling bigotry coursing beneath our preconceived notions of just where in the US hate is harbored most. Americans, it turns out, fall racist and homophobic and ableist, and are apparently vocal enough about it to spout off bigotry on social media, in no real discernible pattern, though it's often where we least expect bigotry that we find it rearing its ugly head.

The visualization comes way of Humboldt State University's Dr. Monica Stephens and the Floating Sheep--the same group that made a map of post-election Twitter hate speech. It comprises 150,000 geo-coded hate tweets flagged between June 2012 and April 2013 for including the word "chink," "gook," "nigger," "wetback," "spick," "cripple," "dyke," "fag," "homo," or "queer". At first blush it's awfully depressing, a real day ruiner, or worse. Click around and most slurs--not all, but most--see the intercontinental US pocked by deep reds, the research team's translation for "most hate." Jesus Christ. Is it 2013? It can't be 2013.

Comment Why? (Score 2) 1

Why do people assume that the hacker is only one hop away. If they were able to hack into the US network, couldn't they have also hacked into the Chinese network first?

if I was hacking a major military facility I would start by hacking into a crappy little network somewhere, from there a slightly larger network until eventually I am targeting my destination.

Or maybe it was the US hacking into the Chinese networks then hacking back into the US networks.

Submission + - UK campaigners call for ban on "Killer Robots" (yahoo.com)

Submitted by Guru2Newbie
Guru2Newbie writes: LONDON (Reuters) — Machines with the ability to attack targets without any human intervention must be banned before they are developed for use on the battlefield, campaigners against "killer robots" urged on Tuesday.

The weapons, which could be ready for use within the next 20 years, would breach a moral and ethical boundary that should never be crossed, said Nobel Laureate Jody Williams, of the "Campaign To Stop Killer Robots".

"If war is reduced to weapons attacking without human beings in control, it is going to be civilians who are going to bear the brunt of warfare," said Williams, who won the 1997 peace prize for her work on banning landmines.

Weapons such as remotely piloted drones are already used by some armed forces and companies are working on developing systems with a greater level of autonomy in flight and operation.

"We already have a certain amount of autonomy," said Noel Sharkey, professor of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics at the University of Sheffield.

"I think we are already there. If you asked me to go and make an autonomous killer robot today, I could do it. I could have you one here in a few days," he told reporters.

Comment Windows XP compatibility mode (Score 1) 2

by fireman sam (#43519197) Attached to: Some Windows XP users just can't afford to upgrade

I hardly use Windows so I'm not sure if it works or not but wouldn't setting the software to run in Windows XP compatibility mode on Windows 7 mean she wouldn't need to get the newer version of the medical software, or has the software company arbitrarily decided that if you upgrade to Windows 7 you have to upgrade their software as well?

This is a bit like forced redundancy. Imagine if you had to buy new CDs or MP3s every time you purchased a new phone.

Submission + - ZDNet proclaims "Windows: It's over" 1

Submitted by plastick
plastick writes: "You can think Windows 8 will evolve into something better, but the numbers show that Windows is coming to a dead end."

ZDNet is known to take the side of Microsoft in the past. ZDNet's Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols explains "The very day the debate came to an end, this headline appeared: IDC: Global PC shipments plunge in worst drop in a generation. Sure, a lot of that was due to the growth of tablets and smartphones and the rise of the cloud, but Windows 8 gets to take a lot of the blame too. After all, the debate wasn't whether or not Windows 8 was any good. It's not. The debate was over whether it could be saved."

Comment Are they sure? (Score 1) 1

by fireman sam (#43266441) Attached to: South Korea Backtracked Chinese IP Address in Cyberattack

Didn't the piratebay traceroute from a couple of weeks are highlight that it is easy to fake the location of servers? Also, if they attacked South Korea, surely they could also have attacked China and then used those compromised boxes to send out the attack?

Oh, that's right - they're able to attack remote systems but can only do so with one hop.

Slashdot Top Deals

E = MC ** 2 +- 3db

Close