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Comment Re:Linux - Gentoo based for about 10+yrs, now Arch (Score 1) 599

by deepseabird (#52760081) Attached to: My main computer runs the following operating system:
I ran Gentoo at home and at work for more than a decade ... swapped to Arch because I always seemed to be looking at Archlinux documentation to find out what was going awry in my gentoo installations :-) I like both, I wouldn't recommend Gentoo for neophytes. Arch is pretty good across all the skill levels though. It is definitely faster to install things on ;-)

Submission + - The Upsides of a Surveillance Society

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: Citing the comeuppance of ESPN reporter Britt McHenry, who was suspended from her job after her filmed ad-hominem attack on a person McHenry deemed to be beneath her in terms of appearance, education, wealth, class, status went viral, The Atlantic's Megan Garber writes that one silver lining of the omnipresence of cameras it that the possibility of exposure can also encourage us to be a little kinder to each other. "Terrible behavior," Garber writes, "whether cruel or violent or something in between, has a greater possibility than it ever has before of being exposed. Just as Uber tracks ratings for both its drivers and its users, and just as Yelp can be a source of shaming for businesses and customers alike, technology at large has afforded a reciprocity between people who, in a previous era, would have occupied different places on the spectrum of power. Which can, again, be a bad thing — but which can also, in McHenry's case, be an extremely beneficial one. It's good that her behavior has been exposed. It's good that her story going viral might discourage similar behavior from other people. It's good that she has publicly promised 'to learn from this mistake.'"

Submission + - Incorrectly built SLS welding machine to be rebuilt

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: A giant welding machine, built for NASA's multi-billion dollar Space Launch System (SLS), has to be taken apart and rebuilt because the contractor failed to reinforce the floor, as required, prior to construction.

Sweden's ESAB Welding & Cutting, which has its North American headquarters in Florence, South Carolina, built the the roughly 50-meter tall Vertical Assembly Center as a subcontractor to SLS contractor Boeing at NASA's Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans.

ESAB was supposed to reinforce Michoud's floor before installing the welding tool, but did not, NASA SLS Program Manager Todd May told SpaceNews after an April 15 panel session during the 31st Space Symposium here. As a result, the enormous machine leaned ever so slightly, cocking the rails that guide massive rings used to lift parts of the 8.4-meter-diameter SLS stages The rings wound up 0.06 degrees out of alignment, which may not sound like much, "but when you're talking about something that's 217 feet [66.14 meters] tall, that adds up," May said.

Asked why ESAB did not reinforce the foundation as it was supposed to, May said only it was a result of "a miscommunication between two [Boeing] subcontractors and ESAB."

It is baffling how everyone at NASA, Boeing, and ESAB could have forgotten to do the reinforcing, even though it was specified in the contract. It also suggests that the quality control in the SLS rocket program has some serious problems.

Comment C is close to optimal (Score 1) 641

by deepseabird (#48561957) Attached to: How Relevant is C in 2014?
I'm not trolling here, I've spent way too many years using C++ to earn a crust and am an unpreposessing Scheme junkie too. The purpose of a language is to provide an automatic mapping from our "headspace" into something the computer understands. Complex semantics make this process more prone to overt errors and much more vulnerable to subtle errors that seem to work. Simple languages lay everything on the table, there is very little buried deeply in libraries. Really good code is usually "bespoke" code which someone has thought carefully about, not the result of putting a bunch of popular object classes into a code-supercollider. Good programmers can use C as safely as they can use C++, Java, Python or any of the other rising/risen stars; arguing that C provides little protection (using whatever metaphor you like) is just trolling: C isn't a language that you *expect* to protect you -- you take extra care with it. Pick the tools for the jobs -- there are a lot of jobs that need to be explicit, clear and easily checked: C beats the other popular imperative languages hands down here. Bet Ron Swanson codes in C (or assembler if he wants that "hand-tooled" feel).

Submission + - Breakthrough in LED Construction Increases Efficiency by 57 Percent (gizmag.com)

Submitted by Zothecula
Zothecula writes: With LEDs being the preferred long-lasting, low-energy method for replacing less efficient forms of lighting, their uptake has dramatically increased over the past few years. However, despite their luminous outputs having increased steadily over that time, they still fall behind more conventional forms of lighting in terms of brightness. Researchers at Princeton University claim to have come up with a way to change all that by using nanotechnology to increase the output of organic LEDs by 57 percent.

Submission + - Indian Mars Mission Beams Back First Photographs (discovery.com)

Submitted by astroengine
astroengine writes: India’s Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM) got straight to work as it closed in on Martian orbit on Tuesday — it began taking photographs of the Red Planet and its atmosphere and surface as it slowed down to reach its ultimate destination. After a two day wait, those first images are slowly trickling onto the Internet. And they’re beauties!

Submission + - Multimedia multitasking shrinking human brains (sussex.ac.uk)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: It seems that switching between laptop, smart phone and tablet may be shrinking our brains and leaving us prone to higher levels of anxiety and stress reports news research from the University of Sussex in the UK. The researchers point out that the link is currently a correlation rather than a proof of causation, but they do suggest that people who used a higher number of media devices concurrently also had smaller grey matter density — in other words they have smaller brains.

Comment Re: the idea of Socialism (Score 1) 619

Too right. Actually, the central idea behind socialism is that the economy is geared to satify social and economic need (production for utility), rather than to accumulate capital -- who actually owns/controls the means of production depends on who is interpreting the word "socialism". The Soviet Union was not socialist in this sense. Many of the modern democracies seem to employ both capitalist and socialist policies in their government of both social and economic spheres. They aren't antithetic.

Comment Re:Hit it. (Score 1) 701

by deepseabird (#47503255) Attached to: Favorite "Go!" Phrase?
Yup. It's got to be a tag-team for best efffect; fortunately you can grow your own and ensure that your offspring are bluesy enough. "Our Lady of Blessed Accelleration, don't fail me now!" is pretty god if you are driving solo ....

Submission + - Ars editor learns feds have his old IP addresses, full credit card numbers (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by mpicpp
mpicpp writes: FOIA request turns up 9 years of records, including plaintext credit card numbers

In May 2014, Cyrus Farivar reported on his efforts to learn what the feds know about me whenever I enter and exit the country. In particular, he wanted my Passenger Name Records (PNR), data created by airlines, hotels, and cruise ships whenever travel is booked.

ASK ARS: CAN I SEE WHAT INFORMATION THE FEDS HAVE ON MY TRAVEL?

One Ars editor tries to FOIA travel documents on himself.
But instead of providing what he had requested, the United States Customs and Border Protection (CBP) turned over only basic information about my travel going back to 1994. So he appealed—and without explanation, the government recently turned over the actual PNRs I had requested the first time.
The 76 new pages of data, covering 2005 through 2013, show that CBP retains massive amounts of data on us when we travel internationally. His own PNRs include not just every mailing address, e-mail, and phone number I've ever used; some of them also contain:

The IP address that I used to buy the ticket
His credit card number (in full)
The language he used
Notes on his phone calls to airlines, even for something as minor as a seat change
The breadth of long-term data retention illustrates yet another way that the federal government enforces its post-September 11 "collect it all" mentality.

Submission + - States That Raised Minimum Wage See No Slow-Down in Job Growth

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The U.S. Department of Labor has released data that some proponents of raising minimum wage are touting as evidence that higher minimum wage promotes job growth. While the data doesn't actually establish cause and effect, it does "run counter to a Congressional Budget Office report in February that said raising the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour, as the White House supports, would cost 500,000 jobs." The data shows that the 13 states that raised their minimum wages in January added jobs at a faster rate than those that didn't. Other factors likely contributed to this outcome, but some economists are simply relieved that the higher wage factor didn't have a dramatically negative effect in general.

Submission + - Can the Multiverse be Tested Scientifically? (discovery.com)

Submitted by astroengine
astroengine writes: Physicists aren’t afraid of thinking big, but what happens when you think too big? This philosophical question overlaps with real physics when hypothesizing what lies beyond the boundary of our observable universe. The problem with trying to apply science to something that may or may not exist beyond our physical realm is that it gets a little foggy as to how we could scientifically test it. A leading hypothesis to come from cosmic inflation theory and advanced theoretical studies — centering around the superstring hypothesis — is that of the "multiverse," an idea that scientists have had a hard time in testing. But now, scientists at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, in Ontario, Canada, have, for the first time, created a computer model of colliding universes in the multiverse in an attempt to seek out observational evidence of its existence.

Submission + - MicroxWin Creates Linux DIstribution That Runs Debian/Ubuntu & Android Apps (phoronix.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: VolksPC who developed MicroXwin as a lightweight X Window Server has come up with their own Linux distribution. Setting apart VolksPC's distribution from others is that it's based on both Debian and Android and has the capability to run Debian/Ubuntu/Android apps together in a native ARM experience. The implementation doesn't depend on VNC or other similar solutions of the past that have tried to join desktop apps with mobile Android apps. This distribution is also reportedlby compatible with all Android applications. The distribution is expected to begin shipping on an ARM mini-PC stick.

Comment Blacksmith (Score 1) 509

by deepseabird (#47463427) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Future-Proof Jobs?
First, I have a lot of sympathy with the "maths" and "maths & science" suggestions, since a good maths degree can take you anywhere, but I have to suggest blacksmithing. There is a *reason* that "Smith", "Smit", "Schmidt" and the many other variants are common. Fun, useful, relies on very little high tech resources, and even works when the grid goes down. There are a lot of people out there earning a living making beautiful ironwork, but probably still not *too many*. Tell her to strike while the iron is hot! ;-)

Submission + - The Placebo Effect occurs with Computer Applications too

Submitted by vrml
vrml writes: In medicine, it is well-known that sugar pills sometimes produce the same effects as real drugs (Placebo Effect). But could that happen with computers too? Can it be that the things a computer application claims to do are “all in our mind” and the app is actually a sham? The first scientific study of the Placebo Effect in computing, just published by the International Journal of Human-Computer Studies , gives an affirmative answer. The experiment considered affective computing, that is those fancy applications that claim to know user’s emotions by detecting physiological parameters with sensors. Researchers took two well-known affective computing systems and used them to control in real-time the state of an avatar that looked more and more nervous as users’ stress level increased, and more and more relaxed as it decreased. But they also considered a third system in which, unbeknown to users, the sensors were disconnected from the computer and the avatar state was controlled by a random stream of physiological data instead of the real user’s data. Results show that participants believed that the sham application was able to display their stress level. Even worse, only one of the two (costly) affective computing systems produced better results than the placebo. This suggests that evaluations of such novel computer applications should include also a placebo condition, as it is routinely done in medicine but not yet in computer science.

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