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Government

US Open Government Sites To Close 385

Posted by timothy from the spending-other-people's-money dept.
SEWilco writes "US government sites which promote open government are going to shut down soon due to not enough funding being directed at them."
AI

Google's Driverless Car and the Logic of Safety 510

Posted by timothy from the professor-I-have-the-solution dept.
mikejuk writes "Google's driverless car could save more than 1 million deaths per year and tens of millions of injuries. It is an impressive achievement, but will we allow it to take over the wheel? Sebastian Thrun puts the case for it in a persuasive TED Talk video. However it may be OK for human drivers to kill millions of people each year but one human fatality might be enough to finish the driverless car project — in fact it might not even take a death as an injury might cause the same backlash. Robot drivers might kill far fewer people than a human driver but it remains to be seen if we can be logical enough to accept the occasional failure of algorithm or hardware. Put simply we might have all seen too many 'evil robot' movies."
Privacy

Hackers Steal Kroger's Customer List 185

Posted by timothy from the now-they-know-who-buys-food dept.
wiredmikey writes "Kroger, the nation's largest traditional grocery retailer with more than 338,000 associates, notified customers today of a breach of the database that stores its customers' names and email addresses. The company said the incident occurred at Epsilon, the third-party vendor Kroger uses to manage its customer email database." Reader SatanClauz SatanClauz quotes the email that went out to Kroger customers ("We were notified and became aware of unauthorized access to our email list by someone outside our company. We want to assure you that the only information that was obtained were names and email addresses."), writing "At least they were smart enough to separate the email db from the rest of customer information! — or so they say..."

Comment Missing proper filtering mechanisms (Score 2) 141

by bebraw (#35676316) Attached to: 50% of Tweets Consumed Come From<nobr> <wbr></nobr>.05% of Users

I've been using Twitter for around half a year now. In some ways it's highly useful. I use it mainly to share links and some casual observations. There are times when I participate in brief discussions as well.

There's one thing the whole concept fails at, though: following. The system is just too general by default. There is no simple way for me to cherry pick topics I'm interested in. I know there are hashtags but they don't quite fit the bill. I would like to be able to combine these concepts somehow (follow this person's tweets tagged this and that).

Perhaps it would make sense to provide specific pipes (ie. sports, art, programming, ...) that can be used to transmit specific type of information and in which other people can subscribe to. I believe this would provide a nice compromise, at least for me.

It's possible I have been missing something obvious all this time. Just thought to elaborate on my issues with Twitter. :)
Microsoft

MS Wants Laws To Block Products Made By Software Pirates 617

Posted by Soulskill from the grasping-at-imported-straws dept.
kaptink writes with this quote from Groklaw: "Microsoft seems to be trying to get its own personal unfair competition laws passed state by state, so it can sue US companies who get parts from overseas companies who used pirated Microsoft software anywhere in their business. The laws allow Microsoft to block the US company from selling the finished product in the state and compel them to pay damages for what the overseas supplier did. So if a company overseas uses a pirated version of Excel, let's say, keeping track of how many parts it has shipped or whatever, and then sends some parts to General Motors or any large company to incorporate into the finished product, Microsoft can sue not the overseas supplier but General Motors, for unfair competition. So can the state's Attorney General. I kid you not. For piracy that was done by someone else, overseas. The product could be T shirts. It doesn't matter what it is, so long as it's manufactured with contributions from an overseas supplier, like in China, who didn't pay Microsoft for software that it uses somewhere in the business. It's the US company that has to pay damages, not the overseas supplier."
Idle

Full Bladder Improves Decision Making 229

Posted by CmdrTaco from the can't-talk-now-gotta-go dept.
anymouse writes "What should you do when you really, REALLY have to 'go'? Make important life decisions, maybe. Controlling your bladder makes you better at controlling yourself when making decisions about your future, too, according to a study to be published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science."
GUI

Microsoft Shows Off Radical New UI, Could Be Used In Windows 8 403

Posted by timothy from the trial-balloon dept.
autospa writes "In a three and a half minute video, Microsoft may have shown the world what it has in store for the eagerly awaited Windows 8. In the video Microsoft showed a radically different interface from past versions of Windows — even Windows 7. Running on Surface 2, the touch-screen successor to the original Microsoft Surface, the device accepts input from a Windows Phone 7 handset (HTC HD7). Gone are the icons that drive Windows, OS X, and Linux operating systems of past and present. In their place are 'bubbles' that interact with files and post streaming information off the internet."
Businesses

Music Execs Stressed Over Free Streaming 375

Posted by Roblimo from the buying-less-but-listening-more dept.
itwbennett writes "At the Digital Music Forum East conference, held Thursday in New York, music industry watchers gathered to puzzle anew over the continuing decline in music sales. 'We have lost 20 million buyers in just five years,' said Russ Crupnick, a president at the analyst firm NPD Group who spoke at the conference. Moreover, only about 14 percent of buyers account for 56 percent of revenue for the recording industry. In years past, the blame was put on digital music piracy. At this year's conference, however, the focus was on free streaming Internet services, such as Pandora, MySpace, Spotify and even YouTube."
Businesses

Nokia Plan B Was Just a Hoax 142

Posted by samzenpus from the break-out-plan-c dept.
suraj.sun writes "There's been a lot of chatter about a 'Nokia Plan B' over the past 48 hours — the site was put up by nine young investors who outlined an audacious plan to rally shareholders, get themselves elected onto Nokia's board, and radically change the company's direction by firing Stephen Elop and committing massive resources to MeeGo. There's just one problem, though: the nine young investors don't really exist — according to the last tweet on the @NokiaPlanB Twitter account, it was all a hoax perpetuated by 'one very bored engineer who really likes his iPhone.' Ouch. That explains why the now-defunct site abruptly gave up the cause this morning after just 36 hours of existence."
Novell

London Stock Exchange Finishes Switch To Linux 106

Posted by Soulskill from the takes-a-while-to-put-on-a-good-tux dept.
DMandPenfold writes "The London Stock Exchange has successfully set into live trading a new matching engine based on Novell SUSE Linux technology, following successful last-step setup procedures on Saturday. The move has been billed as one of the LSE's most significant technological developments since the increasing prevalence of electronic trading led to the closure of the traditional exchange floor in 1986. LSE chief executive Xavier Rolet has insisted that the exchange, once a monopoly, will deliver record speed and stable trading in order to fight back against the fast erosion of its dominant marketshare by specialist electronic rivals."
Java

Java Floating Point Bug Can Lock Up Servers 157

Posted by Roblimo from the here-a-bug-there-a-bug-everywhere-a-bug-bug dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Here we go again: Just like the recently-reported PHP Floating Point Bug causes servers to go into infinite loops when parsing certain double-precision floating-point numbers, Sun/Oracle's JVM does it, too. It gets better: you can lock up a thread on most servers just by sending a particular header value. Sun/Oracle has known about the bug for something like 10 years, but it's still not fixed. Java Servlet containers are patching to avoid the problem, but application code will still be vulnerable to user input."
Intel

Intel Resumes Shipping of Faulty Sandy Bridge Chip 203

Posted by CmdrTaco from the oh-that'll-be-fine dept.
arcticstoat writes "After causing chaos among motherboard makers by revealing a flaw in its 6-series motherboard chipsets, Intel has announced plans to recommence shipments of the faulty silicon, before the fixed chips have even started shipping. Intel claims it decided to start reshipping the chipsets after lengthy discussions with computer manufacturers. "As a result of these discussions and specific requests from computer makers,' says the company, 'Intel is resuming shipments of the Intel 6-series chipset for use only in PC system configurations that are not impacted by the design issue." The announcement follows Intel's recent exposure of a well publicised design fault that affects the 3Gbps SATA ports (typically ports 2 to 5) in Intel's P67 and H67 chipsets. As such, we assume that the new systems based on the faulty chipsets will either come with a separate SATA controller card, or that they will only use the two (unaffected) 6Gbps SATA ports provided by the chipset."
Crime

Researchers Lift Fingerprints From Clothing 40

Posted by samzenpus from the dust-it-all dept.
cylonlover writes "Refining an existing technique that's been used to successfully recover fingerprint detail from smooth objects such as glass and plastic, forensic scientists have managed to create a kind of photo negative of fingerprint impressions on fabric. It's a bit hit and miss at the moment, but even when clear ridge detail isn't retrieved, the technique could still prove useful to investigators looking for other evidence."

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