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Comment Re:Android implementation is crap anyway (Score 2) 340

You can do this, after app updates. I had a 2013 Moto G, and you can listen to FM radio on Bluetooth, as long as you have a wired headphone plugged in.

I've tried with an audio cable without headphones, and it works; but perhaps because the connector is low-quality, the phone thinks I'm pressing the headphone remote button, which makes the radio randomly pause.

This is specific to Motorola, which seems to record the analogue radio output, and then sends it through Android's audio system as digital audio. The app can also record FM broadcasts. This does sometimes mess up the system audio output, but stopping the radio app Activity usually fixes it.

I also remember that installing CyanogenMod on the Nexus One would enable its FM radio, but there is no recording or Bluetooth functionality.

Comment Re:Except for Mozilla and Colts (Score 1) 128

That's a lot of popular websites, sure, but how many of these websites are commonly used in China? How many of these websites even have a Chinese version? After all, not everybody speaks English.

LinkedIn has entered the Chinese market, but it's not as well-known as local sites such as 51job, Pokemon games still aren't available in Chinese, and wordpress.org is only of interest to people who self-host blogs (wordpress.com has been blocked for a couple of years). The rest, few have even heard of.

China has its own web ecosystem, so blocking these websites has only minimal impact to the typical user. It would be developers and expats who will bear the most impact.

Submission + - GOP Bill to Outlaw EPA 'Secret Science' that is Not Transparent, Reproducible

Submitted by Hugh Pickens DOT Com
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes: Fox News reports that Republican lawmakers in the House are pushing legislation that would prohibit the EPA from proposing new regulations based on science that is not transparent or not reproducible. The bill introduced by Rep. David Schweikert, R-Ariz., would bar the agency from proposing or finalizing rules without first disclosing all "scientific and technical information" relied on to support its proposed action. "Public policy should come from public data, not based on the whims of far-left environmental groups,” says Schweikert. “For far too long, the EPA has approved regulations that have placed a crippling financial burden on economic growth in this country with no public evidence to justify their actions.” The bill, dubbed the Secret Science Reform Act of 2014 (HR 4012), would prohibit the EPA’s administrator from proposing or finalizing any rules unless he or she also discloses “all scientific and technical information” relied on by the agency in the regulations' development including all data, materials and computer models. According to Schweikert's press release a 2013 poll from the Institute of Energy Research found that 90 percent of Americans agree that studies and data used to make federal government decisions should be made public. "Provisions in the bill are consistent with the White House’s scientific integrity policy, the President’s Executive Order 13563, data access provisions of major scientific journals, the Bipartisan Policy Center and the recommendations of the Obama administration’s top science advisors."

Submission + - Chicago transit system fooled by federal ID cards

Submitted by johnslater
johnslater writes: The Chicago Transit Authority's new "Ventra" stored-value fare card system has another big problem. It had a difficult birth, with troubles earlier this fall when legitimate cards failed to allow passage, or sometimes double-billed the holders. Last week a server failure disabled a large portion of the system at rush hour. Now it is reported that some federal government employee ID cards allow free rides on the system. The system is being implemented by Cubic Transportation Systems for the bargain price of $454 million.

Submission + - AMD Confirms Kaveri APU is A 512 GPU Core Integrated Processor (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: At APU13 today, AMD announced a full suite of new products and development tools as part of its push to improve HSA development. One of the most significant announcements to come out the sessions today-- albeit in a tacit, indirect fashion, is that Kaveri is going to pack a full 512 GPU cores. There's not much new to see on the CPU side of things — like Richland/Trinity, Steamroller is a pair of CPU modules with two cores per module. AMD also isn't talking about clock speeds yet, but the estimated 862 GFLOPS that the company is claiming for Kaveri points to GPU clock speeds between 700 — 800MHz. With 512 cores, Kaveri picks up a 33% boost over its predecessors, but memory bandwidth will be essential for the GPU to reach peak performance. For performance, AMD showed Kaveri up against the Intel 4770K running a low-end GeForce GT 630. In the intro scene to BF4's single-player campaign (1920x1080, Medium Details), the AMD Kaveri system (with no discrete GPU) consistently pushed frame rates in the 28-40 FPS range. The Intel system, in contrast, couldn't manage 15 FPS. Performance on that system was solidly in the 12-14 FPS range — meaning AMD is pulling 2x the frame rate, if not more.

Submission + - A Plan to Fix Daylight Savings Time by Creating Two National Time Zones

Submitted by Hugh Pickens DOT Com
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes: Allison Schrager writes in the Atlantic that losing another hour of evening daylight isn't just annoying. It's an economically harmful policy with minimal energy savings. "The actual energy savings are minimal, if they exist at all. Frequent and uncoordinated time changes cause confusion, undermining economic efficiency. There’s evidence that regularly changing sleep cycles, associated with daylight saving, lowers productivity and increases heart attacks." So here's Schrager's proposal. This year, Americans on Eastern Standard Time should set their clocks back one hour (like normal), Americans on Central and Rocky Mountain time do nothing, and Americans on Pacific time should set their clocks forward one hour. This will result in just two time zones for the continental United States and the east and west coasts will only be one hour apart. "America already functions on fewer than four time zones," says Schrager. "I spent the last three years commuting between New York and Austin, living on both Eastern and Central time. I found that in Austin, everyone did things at the same times they do them in New York, despite the difference in time zone. People got to work at 8 am instead of 9 am, restaurants were packed at 6 pm instead of 7 pm, and even the TV schedule was an hour earlier. " Research based on time use surveys found American’s schedules are already determined more by television than daylight suggesting, in effect, that Americans already live on two time zones. Schrager says that this strategy has already been proven to work in other parts of the world. China has been on one time zone since 1949, despite naturally spanning five time zones and in 1983, Alaska, which naturally spans four time zones, moved most of the state to a single time zone. "It sounds radical, but it really isn’t. The purpose of uniform time measures is coordination. How we measure time has always evolved with the needs of commerce.," concludes Schrager. "Time is already arbitrary, why not make it work in our favor?"

Submission + - DoD News Aggregation Service "The Early Bird" Dead After 65 Years (foreignpolicy.com)

Submitted by SanDogWeps
SanDogWeps writes: Periodically viewed as copyright infringement by the media, the Department of Defense's "Early Bird" has been delivering applicable headlines to the Armed Forces since 1948. It stopped updating on October 1st, along with a number of other government products, but when the lights turned back on, The Early Bird remained dark. A number of reasons have been floated, including applicability in the internet age, cost, and a lack of interest. Others claim The Early Bird was nothing more than a propaganda machine, by culling articles that painted DoD in a favorable light.

Submission + - US executions threaten supply of anaesthetic used for surgical procedures (nature.com) 2

Submitted by ananyo
ananyo writes: Allen Nicklasson has had a temporary reprieve. Scheduled to be executed by lethal injection in Missouri on 23 October, the convicted killer was given a stay of execution by the state’s governor, Jay Nixon, on 11 October — but not because his guilt was in doubt. Nicklasson will live a while longer because one of the drugs that was supposed to be used in his execution — a widely used anaesthetic called propofol — is at the centre of an international controversy that threatens millions of US patients, and affects the way that US states execute inmates.
Propofol, used up to 50 million times a year in US surgical procedures, has never been used in an execution. If the execution had gone ahead, US hospitals could have lost access to the drug because 90% of the US supply is made and exported by a German company subject to European Union (EU) regulations that restrict the export of medicines and devices that could be used for capital punishment or torture.
This is not the first time that the EU’s anti-death-penalty stance has affected the US supply of anaesthetics. Since 2011, a popular sedative called sodium thiopental has been unavailable in the United States.
“The European Union is serious,” says David Lubarsky, head of the anaesthesiology department at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine in Florida. “They’ve already shown that with thiopental. If we go down this road with propofol, a lot of good people who need anaesthesia are going to be harmed.”

Submission + - The internet is a "US colony" (pcpro.co.uk)

Submitted by nk497
nk497 writes: Web users are vulnerable to mass online spying because the US has too much power online, according to a leading security researcher. Discussing revelations of US spying at his LinuxCon keynote speech, F-Secure’s chief research officer Mikko Hypponen argued that the internet had "become a US colony", at the expense of democracy. "We’re back in the age of colonisation," he said. "We should think about the Americans as our masters."

Hypponen argued that its dominance over the web gave the US too much power over foreign countries, noting that while the majority of European politicians likely use US services every day, most US politicians and business leaders don’t, for example, use Swedish-based cloud services. "It’s an imbalanced situation," he said. "All the major services are based in the US."

Submission + - PHP.net Compromised

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The open source PHP project site was compromised earlier today. The site appears to have been compromised and had some of its javascript altered to exploit vulnerable systems visiting the website. Googles stop-badware system caught this as well and flagged php.net as distributing malware, warning users who’s browsers support it not to visit the site. The comment by a Google employee over the hacker news thread (official google webmaster forum thread) seems to suggest that php.net wasn't incorrectly flagged. So stay safe.

Submission + - Wikipedia and the War on Sockpuppets (slashdot.org)

Submitted by Nerval's Lobster
Nerval's Lobster writes: Wikipedia editors are actively engaged in a wide-ranging battle against PR firms attempting to edit the crowdsourced encyclopedia’s entries to reflect their clients’ best interests. Over the past couple weeks, those Wikipedia editors have isolated several hundred user accounts linked to people “paid to write articles on Wikipedia promoting organizations or products,” according to Sue Gardner, executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, which oversees Wikipedia’s operations. Those users’ accounts violate Wikipedia’s guidelines, “including prohibitions against sockpuppetry and undisclosed conflicts of interest.” Some 250 suspicious user accounts have already been nuked. Correcting biased text is a thankless job for those Wikipedia editors—the literary-world equivalent of killing endless hordes of zombies approaching your protective fence. But that job gets even harder when a PR agency deploys dozens, or even hundreds of writers to systematically adjust clients’ Wikipedia pages. While Gardner didn’t mention the names of such agencies in her statement, The Daily Dot cited a firm named Wiki-PR that brags on its Website about its skill in building client-friendly Wikipedia pages. “We build, manage and translate Wikipedia pages for over 12,000 people and companies,” is one of its advertising slogans. Other services include “crisis editing” and “concept development.” Wiki-PR has not yet responded to Slashdot’s request for comment, and the firm’s Twitter page is now locked. And therein lies the downside of crowdsourcing: it’s great to have a million people building something for you, but not all those hands and minds are necessarily working in your actual best interest. Whether or not Wiki-PR sticks around, other PR firms are surely doing their best to change online history.

Submission + - Most IT workers DON'T have STEM (Science, Tech, Engineering, Math) degrees (wsj.com)

Submitted by McGruber
McGruber writes: The Wall Street Journal's Michael Totty shares some stereotype-shattering statistics about IT workers: Most of them don't have college degrees in computer science, technology, engineering or math. About a third come to IT with degrees in business, social sciences or other nontechnical fields, while more than 40% of computer support specialists and a third of computer systems administrators don't have a college degree at all!

The analysis is based upon two job categories as defined by the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics: network and computer systems administrator, and computer support specialist.

Submission + - How to FIx Healthcare.GOV: Go Open-Source! (businessweek.com) 1

Submitted by McGruber
McGruber writes: Over at Bloomberg Businessweek (http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-10-16/open-source-everything-the-moral-of-the-healthcare-dot-gov-debacle), Paul Ford explains that the debacle known as ealthcare.gov makes clear that it is time for the government to change the way it ships code: namely, by embracing the open source approach to software development that has revolutionized the technology industry.

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