Comment U.S (Score 1) 395
U.S great country
Submission + - US electrical grid on the edge of failure (nature.com)
ananyo writes: Facebook can lose a few users and remain a perfectly stable network, but where the national grid is concerned simple geography dictates that it is always just a few transmission lines from collapse, according to a mathematical study of spatial networks. The upshot of the study is that spatial networks are necessarily dependent on any number of critical nodes whose failure can lead to abrupt — and unpredictable — collapse.
The warning comes ten years after a blackout that crippled parts of the midwest and northeastern United States and parts of Canada. In that case, a series of errors resulted in the loss of three transmission lines in Ohio over the course of about an hour. Once the third line went down, the outage cascaded towards the coast, cutting power to some 50 million people. The authors say that this outage is an example of the inherent instability the study describes. But others question whether the team’s conclusions can really be extrapolated to the real world. “The problem is that this doesn’t reflect the physics of how the power grid operates,” says Jeff Dagle, an electrical engineer at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Washington, who served on the government task force that investigated the 2003 outage.
The warning comes ten years after a blackout that crippled parts of the midwest and northeastern United States and parts of Canada. In that case, a series of errors resulted in the loss of three transmission lines in Ohio over the course of about an hour. Once the third line went down, the outage cascaded towards the coast, cutting power to some 50 million people. The authors say that this outage is an example of the inherent instability the study describes. But others question whether the team’s conclusions can really be extrapolated to the real world. “The problem is that this doesn’t reflect the physics of how the power grid operates,” says Jeff Dagle, an electrical engineer at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Washington, who served on the government task force that investigated the 2003 outage.
Submission + - X.Org Foundation Loses 501(c)3 "Non-Profit" Status (phoronix.com)
An anonymous reader writes: The X.Org Foundation that is the organization behind driving the X.Org Server projects, Mesa, and Wayland open-source programs had their 501(c)3 status revoked by the IRS. It turns out the X.Org Foundation lost their 501(c)3 status after quite a lot of work to become a non-profit organization with guidance from the Software Freedom Law Center, but they got in trouble after failing to routinely file their taxes on time. There's also been a host of other X.Org accounting errors in recent years. There was also the recent news of the IRS going after open-source projects too.
Submission + - 100% fail rate on Liberia University's admission exam
slew writes: Apparently none of the 24K+ students who sat for the 2013 Liberia University entrance exam got a passing mark, and fewer than a hundred managed to pass the either the english (pass level 70%) or math (pass level 50%) sections required to qualify to be part of the normal class of 2k-3k students admitted every year...
Historically, the pass rate has been about 20-30% and in recent years, the test has been in multiple-guess format to facilitate grading. The mathematics exam generally focuses on arithmetic, geometry, algebra, analytical geometry and elementary statistic and probability; while the English exam generally focuses on grammar, sentence completion, reading comprehension and logical reasoning.
However, as a testatment to the over-hang of a civil war, university over-crowding, corruption, social promotion, the admission criteria was apparently temporarily dropped to 40% math and 50% english to allow the provisional admission of about 1.6K students. And people are calling foul...
Historically, the pass rate has been about 20-30% and in recent years, the test has been in multiple-guess format to facilitate grading. The mathematics exam generally focuses on arithmetic, geometry, algebra, analytical geometry and elementary statistic and probability; while the English exam generally focuses on grammar, sentence completion, reading comprehension and logical reasoning.
However, as a testatment to the over-hang of a civil war, university over-crowding, corruption, social promotion, the admission criteria was apparently temporarily dropped to 40% math and 50% english to allow the provisional admission of about 1.6K students. And people are calling foul...
Submission + - Wall St. traders allegedly stole code, resource to start own company (networkworld.com) 1
coondoggie writes: alk about starting a business on shaky ground. The Manhattan District Attorney's office says former Wall Street traders stole electronic trading source code and data from their then trading firm in an effort to start up their own financial business.
Submission + - Confirmed: ChromeCast will be able to play local content (muktware.com)
sfcrazy writes: As you all know about the story that ChromeCast update disabled the playback of local content. Many though, including me that Google is going Apple's path. But Google has confirmed that it will allow every kind of content.
Google Statement: We’re excited to bring more content to Chromecast and would like to support all types of apps, including those for local content. It's still early days for the Google Cast SDK, which we just released in developer preview for early development and testing only. We expect that the SDK will continue to change before we launch out of developer preview, and want to provide a great experience for users and developers before making the SDK and additional apps more broadly available.
So no need to fear!
Submission + - Break Microsoft Up
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes: Tom Worstall writes in Forbes that the that the only way to get around the entrenched culture that has made Microsoft a graveyard for the kind of big ideas that have inspired companies like Apple, Google, and Amazon is to split the company up so as to remove conflicts between new and old products and with Ballmer's departure instead of finding someone new to run the company, bring in experts to handle the legal side and find suitable CEOs for the new companies. "The underlying problem for Microsoft is that the computing market has rapidly left behind the company's basic strategy of controlling the machines that people use with operating-system software," says Erik Sherman. "The combination of mobile devices that broke Microsoft's grip on the client end, and cloud computing that didn't necessarily need the company in data centers, shattered this form of control." Anyone can see how easily you could split off the gaming folks, business division, retail stores, and hardware division says John Dvorak. Each entity would have agreements in place for long-term supply of software and services. "This sort of shake up would ferret out all the empire builders and allow for new and more creative structures to emerge. And since everyone will have to be in a semi-startup mode, the dead wood will be eliminated by actual hard work."
Submission + - Has Apache Software Foundation Lost Its Way?
snydeq writes: Complaints of stricture over structure, signs of technical prowess on the wane — the best days of the Apache Software Foundation may be behind, writes InfoWorld's Serdar Yegalulp. 'Since its inception, the Apache Software Foundation has had a profound impact in shaping the open source movement and the tech industry at large. ... But tensions within the ASF and grumbling throughout the open source community have called into question whether the Apache Way is well suited to sponsoring the development of open source projects in today's software world. Changing attitudes toward open source licensing, conflicts with the GPL, concerns about technical innovation under the Way, fallout from the foundation's handling of specific projects in recent years — the ASF may soon find itself passed over by the kinds of projects that have helped make it such a central fixture in open source, thanks in some measure to the way the new wave of bootstrapped, decentralized projects on GitHub don't require a foundationlike atmosphere to keep them vibrant or relevant.' Meanwhile, Andrew C. Oliver offers a personal perspective on his work with Apache, why he left, and how the foundation can revamp itself in the coming years: 'I could never regret my time at Apache. I owe it my career to some degree. It isn't how I would choose to develop software again, because my interests and my role in the world have changed. That said, I think the long-term health of the organization requires it get back to its ideals, open up its private lists, and let sunshine disinfect the interests. My poorly articulated reasons for leaving a long time ago stemmed from my inability to effect that change.'
Submission + - Lord Blair: we need laws to stop 'principled' leaking of state secrets (theguardian.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Tougher laws are needed to prevent members of the public from revealing official secrets, former Metropolitan police commissioner Lord Blair has said.
The peer insisted there was material the state had to keep secret, and powers had to be in place to protect it.
The intervention comes after police seized what they said were thousands of classified documents from David Miranda – the partner of Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald, who has been reporting leaks from the former US intelligence officer Edward Snowden.
The Home Office has defended the use of anti-terrorism laws to detain and question Miranda at Heathrow airport earlier this month.
The peer insisted there was material the state had to keep secret, and powers had to be in place to protect it.
The intervention comes after police seized what they said were thousands of classified documents from David Miranda – the partner of Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald, who has been reporting leaks from the former US intelligence officer Edward Snowden.
The Home Office has defended the use of anti-terrorism laws to detain and question Miranda at Heathrow airport earlier this month.
Submission + - The World Fair of 2014 according to Asimov (from 1964) (nytimes.com) 2
Esther Schindler writes: If you ever needed evidence that Isaac Asimov was a genius at extrapolating future technology from limited data, you'll enjoy this 1964 article in which he predicts what we'll see at the 2014 world's fair. For instance:
Robots will neither be common nor very good in 2014, but they will be in existence. The I.B.M. exhibit at the present fair has no robots but it is dedicated to computers, which are shown in all their amazing complexity, notably in the task of translating Russian into English. If machines are that smart today, what may not be in the works 50 years hence? It will be such computers, much miniaturized, that will serve as the "brains" of robots. In fact, the I.B.M. building at the 2014 World's Fair may have, as one of its prime exhibits, a robot housemaid*large, clumsy, slow- moving but capable of general picking-up, arranging, cleaning and manipulation of various appliances. It will undoubtedly amuse the fairgoers to scatter debris over the floor in order to see the robot lumberingly remove it and classify it into "throw away" and "set aside." (Robots for gardening work will also have made their appearance.)
General Electric at the 2014 World's Fair will be showing 3-D movies of its "Robot of the Future," neat and streamlined, its cleaning appliances built in and performing all tasks briskly. (There will be a three-hour wait in line to see the film, for some things never change.)
It's really fun (and sometimes sigh-inducing) to see where he was accurate and where he wasn't. And, of course, the whole notion that we'd have a world's fair is among the inaccurate predictions.
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