Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Submission + - New Jersey Gov. Christie: Parents should have choice in vaccinations 3

kwyjibo87 writes: New Jersey Governor and self-appointed public health expert Chris Christie weighed in on the public debate of whether or not parents should have a choice in vaccinating their children, telling reporters in the U.K. "I also understand that parents need to have some measure of choice in things as well, so that’s the balance that the government has to decide," adding "Not every vaccine is created equal and not every disease type is as great a public health threat as others." These statements from Gov. Christie follow President Obama commenting in an interview with NBC: "There is every reason to get vaccinated — there aren’t reasons to not."

Gov. Christie quickly backpedaled on his "vaccine choice" comments, with the Governor's office stating, "The Governor believes vaccines are an important public health protection and with a disease like measles there is no question kids should be vaccinated," but amending: "At the same time different states require different degrees of vaccination, which is why he was calling for balance in which ones government should mandate."

Submission + - Mozilla dusts off old servers, lights up Tor relays (theregister.co.uk)

TechCurmudgeon writes: According to The Register:

Mozilla has given the Tor network a capacity kick with the launch of 14 relays that will help distribute user traffic. Engineers working under the Foundation's Polaris Project inked in November pulled Mozilla's spare and decommissioned hardware out of the cupboard for dedicated use in the Tor network. It included a pair of Juniper EX4200 switches and three HP SL170zG6 (48GB ram, 2*Xeon L5640, 2*1Gbps NIC) servers, along with a dedicated existing IP transit provider (2 X 10Gbps). French Mozilla engineer Arzhel Younsi (@xionoxfr) said its network was designed to fall no lower than half of its network capacity in the event of maintenance or failure.

The Polaris initiative was a effort of Mozilla, the Tor Project and the Centre for Democracy and Technology to help build more privacy controls into technology.

Submission + - NVIDIA GTX 970 Specifications Corrected, Memory Pools Explained (pcper.com)

Vigile writes: Over the weekend NVIDIA sent out its first official response to the claims of hampered performance on the GTX 970 and a potential lack of access to 1/8th of the on-board memory. Today NVIDIA has clarified the situation again, this time with some important changes to the specifications of the GPU. First, the ROP count and L2 cache capacity of the GTX 970 were incorrectly reported at launch (last September). The GTX 970 has 52 ROPs and 1792 KB of L2 cache compared to the GTX 980 that has 64 ROPs and 2048 KB of L2 cache; previously both GPUs claimed to have identical specs. Because of this change, one of the 32-bit memory channels is accessed differently, forcing NVIDIA to create 3.5GB and 0.5GB pools of memory to improve overall performance for the majority of use cases. The smaller, 500MB pool operates at 1/7th the speed of the 3.5GB pool and thus will lower total graphics system performance by 4-6% when added into the memory system. That occurs when games request MORE than 3.5GB of memory allocation though, which happens only in extreme cases and combinations of resolution and anti-aliasing. Still, the jury is out on whether NVIDIA has answered enough questions to temper the fire from consumers.

Comment Re:Show me the use case (Score 2) 74

Well, be happy because you are wrong. Many businesses don't need VR - like the corner market and such - but many businesses do. Anything design related like engineering companies, architecture firms, all the way to travel and entertainment. Hospitals and medical research, automotive, and so on. All will benefit greatly from being able to see and explore things they never could before. This puts million dollar 3D visualization facilities in reach of just about everyone.

And while there are many lining up to play GTA5 or similar first person mayhem kinds of games, regular people can have the equivalent of million dollar simulators in their own homes both for training and for enjoyment. Flight and driving simulations are transformed when the visuals become what you would actually see from cabs, cabins, and cockpits.

There isn't one killer app. It's a killer view in all sorts of different apps. Until you actually experience it it is hard to describe well enough to convey. What I can tell you is I have flown the real deal commercial and military flight simulators. Full motion, hemispherical projection, etc. They may have real cockpits but the out the window view is a 2D projection and flat. Very cool but not totally immersive. Do that in an Oculus Rift and now everything is 3D. You can use a mouse to aim and click on knobs and switches which isn't so realistic, but whatever plane you want to fly is simply a matter of programming. And it is far more immersive and real feeling than any simulator I've ever been in. That is no exaggeration. It's the same for driving sims. In 3D you can "feel" the car breaking loose just from the slight changes in angles that you can now perceive with the head tracking and 3D view. It is astonishing.

Architecture firms have been going nuts that they can now actually enter their creations and fine tune things as well as show them to customers. It's not just a "this is nice" kind of thing. The reports are that the architects are having "wow" moments and are modifying designs that they thought were fine before but once they can explore them in virtual space, they see that things could be even better.

Plenty of people won't have any use for VR at all. But plenty of others will see it as a game changer for their profession, their training, their hobbies, and possibly even their health. It's something you really need to experience to understand. And for the uses that really will push VR into all aspects of any kind of design and training, the game demonstrations don't cut it either.

VR is very weird. Those that haven't seen what it can do are much more likely to claim it is unimportant and will never catch on. Those that have seen can see the potential in everything from games and sims to real world valuable insight generators in many professions. I would bet you haven't actually experienced VR and therefor suffer from the inability to extrapolate. Trust me on this. When you put on an HMD and look around some environment you could never see otherwise, any environment that a computer can generate and synthesize, you will understand.

Comment Nice! I was one of the ones hit by these charges! (Score 5, Informative) 51

I started getting text messages on some celebrity quiz game but was just deleting them until I finally got tired of them. I looked the company up online and saw where people were complaining about getting slammed and charges showing up. I checked my bill and sure enough - there were the charges. I hadn't noticed them because they were down a couple of extra layers under something like "miscellaneous charges". I called T-Mobile to stop it and get the charges refunded but they had me contact the charging company to dispute and the charging company would only refund a couple of months. This had been going on for about 5 months. I called T-Mobile and insisted on total refunds and just got a runaround. I called my Senator and told his staff about it. They intervened and T-Mobile contacted me and gave me a full refund. The Senator's staff contacted me again and asked if I minded if my case data was used in their investigation and I told them not at all. Looks like it has all finally bore fruit.

The company - I would have to check my files for the name - said I had visited some web site and signed up for their celibrity quiz game. I had a static IP address at the time and sure as shit, they had it. I had apparently visited a site that was simply harvesting IP addresses, or somehow they associated my IP with my name. I would never sign up for some celebrity quiz. It was a simple slam.

Glad they all got nailed!

Submission + - Satellite captures glowing plants from space (sciencemag.org)

sciencehabit writes: About 1% of the light that strikes plants is re-emitted as a faint, fluorescent glow—a measure of photosynthetic activity. Today, scientists released a map of this glow as measured by the Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2, a NASA satellite launched in July with the goal of mapping the net amount of carbon in the atmosphere. The map reveals that tropical rainforests near the equator are actively sucking up carbon, while the Corn Belt in the eastern United States, near the end of its growing season, is also a sink. Higher resolution fluorescence mapping could one day be used to help assess crop yields and how they respond to drought and heat in a changing climate.

Submission + - Uber limits 'God view' to improve rider privacy (cnn.com)

mpicpp writes: Uber has rolled back employee access to its "God view" mode, which allows the company to track riders' locations and other data.

The ride service company was faced with questions about its privacy policies from U.S. Senator Al Franken, following a series of recent privacy debacles. Uber's updated policy is detailed in its response to the senator's questions.

Franken sent Uber a letter in November after news reports made two things clear: The ride service company collects lots of data on customers — and some executives don't exercise that power responsibly.

In one case, an Uber employee using "God View" easily tracked a reporter's movements on her way to a meeting. In another case, Uber executive Emil Michael proposed digging up dirt on journalists who were critical of his company and spread details of their personal lives.

Submission + - NASA Provides Details of Unique Method for 3d Printing on Other Planets (3dprint.com)

ErnieKey writes: A major application of 3d printing that could revolutionize space travel, is that of ultimately using 3d printers to create structures on non-terrestrial bodies like the moon, other planets, and even asteroids. Researchers from NASA's Kennedy Space Center have been working to develop solutions to materials issues, and recently presented initial findings on the potential for using in-situ materials like basalt for 3D printing. Their innovative method is based on only using in-situ supplies, and not materials that need to be brought into space.
User Journal

Journal Journal: WTF, Firefox??? 7

As usual when I boot on Patch Tuesday, I open a bunch of tabs, the notebook slows to a crawl, and this time it was locked up so tight that Windows gave a message saying it couldn't display the message and to use the power button. I had to pull the battery to reboot the damned thing.

So I start Firefox back up and it says it's updating. It finally opens, with an extra tab, one telling me that it changed my default search to Yahoo.

Submission + - Utilities Face Billions In Losses From Distributed Renewables (computerworld.com)

Lucas123 writes: Over the next 10 years, adoption of distributed power in the form of renewables such as solar power has the potential to reduce revenues to grid utilities by as much as $48 billion in the U.S. and by $75 billion in Europe, according to a new study. The study, by Accenture, revealed that utility executives are more nervous about the impact of distributed — or locally generated renewable power — than ever before. with 61% of those surveyed this year indicating they expect significant or moderate revenue reductions compared to only 43% last year. The cost of rooftop solar-powered electricity will be on par with prices for common coal or oil-powered generation in two years, and the technology to produce it will only get cheaper, according to a recent report from Deutsche Bank. New technologies, such as more efficient solar cells, are also threatening to increase efficiencies and drive adoption.

Submission + - Warmer Pacific Ocean could release millions of tons of methane (washington.edu)

vinces99 writes: Off the U.S. West Coast, methane gas is trapped in frozen layers below the seafloor. New research from the University of Washington shows that water at intermediate depths is warming enough to cause these carbon deposits to melt, releasing methane into the sediments and surrounding water. Researchers found that water off the coast of Washington is gradually warming at a depth of 500 meters (about a third of a mile down), the same depth where methane transforms from a solid to a gas. The research suggests that ocean warming could be triggering the release of a powerful greenhouse gas.

Scientists believe global warming will release methane from gas hydrates worldwide, but most of the focus has been on the Arctic. The new paper estimates that, from 1970 to 2013, some 4 million metric tons of methane has been released from hydrate decomposition off Washington's coast. That’s an amount each year equal to the methane from natural gas released in the 2010 Deepwater Horizon blowout off the coast of Louisiana, and 500 times the rate at which methane is naturally released from the seafloor.

Slashdot Top Deals

Science is to computer science as hydrodynamics is to plumbing.

Working...