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Submission + - UNC scientists open source their genomic research (opensource.com)

Submitted by ectoman
ectoman writes: The human genome specifies more than 500 "kinases," enzymes that spur protein synthesis. Four hundred of them are still mysteries to us, even though knowledge about them could spark serious medical innovations. But scientists at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, have initiated an open source effort to map them all—research they think could pioneer a new generation of drug discovery. As members of the Structural Genomics Consortium, the chemical biologists are spearheading a worldwide community project. "We need a community to build a map of what kinases do in biology," one said. "It has to be a community-generated map to get the richness and detail we need to be able to move some of these kinases into drug facilities. But we're just doing the source code. Until someone puts the source code out there and makes it available to everybody, people won't have anything to modify."

Submission + - Tech Nightmares That Keep Turing Award Winners Up At Night

Submitted by itwbennett
itwbennett writes: At the Heidelberg Laureate Forum in Germany this week, RSA encryption algorithm co-inventor Leonard Adelman, 'Father of the Internet' Vint Cerf, and cryptography innovator Manuel Blum were asked 'What about the tech world today keeps you up at night?' And apparently they're not getting a whole lot of sleep these days. Cerf is predicting a digital dark age arising from our dependence on software and our lack of 'a regime that will allow us to preserve both the content and the software needed to render it over a very long time.' Adelman worries about the evolution of computers into 'their own species' — and our relation to them. Blum's worries, by contrast, lean more towards the slow pace at which computers are taking over: '"The fact that we have brains hasn't made the world any safer,' he said. 'Will it be safer with computers? I don't know, but I tend to see it as hopeful.'

Submission + - What The GNOME Desktop Gets Right & KDE Gets Wrong (phoronix.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: An intern at Phoronix has provided a fresh perspective on the KDE vs. GNOME desktop debate after exclusively using GNOME for the past week while being a longtime KDE user. He concluded his five-page editorial-which did raise some valid points throughout-with, "Gnome feels like a product. It feels like a singular experience. When you use it, it feels like it is complete and that everything you need is at your fingertips. It feel's like THE Linux desktop...In KDE it's just some random-looking window popup that any application could have created...KDE doesn't feel like cohesive experience. KDE doesn't feel like it has a direction its moving in, it doesn't feel like a full experience. KDE feels like its a bunch of pieces that are moving in a bunch of different directions, that just happen to have a shared toolkit beneath them." However, with the week up and against his criticism, he's back to using KDE.

Submission + - The Cure Culture: Our Obsession With Cures That Are 'Just Around the Corner' (vice.com)

Submitted by citadrianne
citadrianne writes: There is no cure for cystic fibrosis. There is no cure for cancer. There is no cure for diabetes. There is no cure for HIV. There is no cure for Tay-sachs or Huntington's disease or ALS.

"The idea of a cure is simpler, it's more appealing as a fantasy."

And yet, scientists, the media, and the foundations that fund research consistently promise patients and their families that cures for very serious, lifelong diseases are imminent, or at least "around the corner." For cystic fibrosis, that cure has been pitched as being gene therapy, in which a faulty gene is replaced with a functioning one.

Why are we telling our children, our friends, and our family members that we are going to cure them? What is a cure? What does it mean to be cured of a disease that is encoded within your DNA from the moment you become a zygote until the moment you are dead? What does it mean to be cured of a disease that has already, soon after you're born or diagnosed, wreaked havoc on your body? And why are we eschewing or overlooking treatments—real, honest-to-god treatments—that can let patients lead longer, more normal lives?

Submission + - Automakers Unwilling To Share Driver Data (Yet) (startribune.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: With Apple and Google both vying for a place in your car's dashboard, you might start worrying to what extent the data you generate while driving might be analyzed or shared with advertisers. The good news is that car manufacturers are not keen to give this data away — some has specifically said they won't let Google or Apple get their hands on it. The bad news is that they feel this way because they see your data as a new source of profit — they're just deciding how best to harvest it. One executive at Ford said, "We need to control access to that data. We need to protect our ability to create value." According to the article, "Auto companies hope to profit from in-vehicle data in a variety of ways, including the provision of travel planning services and auto repair and service information they hope will bring drivers to dealerships. They also expect to work with insurance companies, providing information that would allow insurers to base their rates on a driver’s behavior behind the wheel."

Submission + - NYC Asks Google Maps For Fewer Left Turns (citylab.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Members of the New York City Council have sent a letter to Google asking that its Maps navigation system provide users an option to "reduce left turns." Pedestrian safety is the issue they're trying to improve. In the U.S., a quarter of all accidents involving pedestrians happen while a vehicle is making a left turn. "The first cause of death for New York City children under 13 is not gangs, it’s not poverty, not violence. It's being hit by cars and trucks. This is the time for the city to reach out to the private sector, so they can help us to provide information to drivers about where you should avoid making left turns." The council members are also asking for an option that would let truckers stay on known truck routes, hoping that would prevent the problems that arise when big-rigs wander onto streets not large enough to safely handle them.

Submission + - NASA's New Horizons focuses on Pluto's largest moon Charon (examiner.com)

Submitted by MarkWhittington
MarkWhittington writes: New Horizons has already discovered much of what was previously unknown about Pluto, the dwarf planet that is the former ninth planet from the sun. NASA reported that the space probe has also uncovered some of the secrets of Pluto’s largest moon, Charon. It has found indications of impact craters on the moon’s gray surface as well as a chasm that seems to be bigger than the Grand Canyon on Earth. Charon has a diameter of just 1440 miles. Bu contrast, Earth has a diameter of 7918 miles.

Submission + - ELIoT, distributed programming for the Internet of Things

Submitted by descubes
descubes writes: ELIoT (Extensible Language for the Internet of Things) is a new programming language designed to facilitate distributed programming. A code sample with less than 20 lines of code looks like a single program, but really runs on three different computers to collect temperature measurements and report when they differ. ELIoT transforms a simple sensor API into a rich, remotely-programmable API, giving your application the opportunity to optimize energy usage and minimize network traffic.

Using less resources than Bash, and capable of serving hundred of clients easily on a Raspberry Pi, ELIoT transparently sends program fragments around, but also the data they need to function, e.g. variable values or function definitions. This is possible because, like in Lisp, programs are data. ELIoT has no keywords, and program constructs such as loops or if-then-else are defined in the library rather than in the language. This makes the language very flexible and extensible, so that you can adapt it to the needs of your application.

The project is still very young (published last week), and is looking for talented developers interested in distributed programming, programming languages or language design.

Submission + - First Java 0-Day In Two Years Exploited By Pawn Storm Hackers

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Another zero-day vulnerability is being exploited in attacks spotted in the wild: this time, the targeted software is Java. The flaw was spotted by Trend Micro researchers, who are closely monitoring a targeted attack campaign mounted by the economic and political cyber-espionage operation Pawn Storm. The existence of the flaw was discovered by finding suspicious URLs that hosted the exploit. The exploit allows attackers to execute arbitrary code on target systems with default Java settings.

Submission + - U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission hunting insider trading hackers (thestack.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission are actively investigating the FIN4 financial hacking group identified by FireEye last December [http://it.slashdot.org/story/14/12/01/1827235/cyber-ring-stole-secrets-for-gaming-us-stock-market], according to a Reuters exclusive [http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/06/23/us-hackers-insidertrading-idUSKBN0P31M720150623]. In an unprecedented extension of its usual practice, the SEC is soliciting information about security breaches from private companies, which are not obliged to reveal them unless the breach enters into categories covered by federal law. Former SEC Head of Internet Enforcement John Reed Stark describes the proactive stance of the organisation as an ‘absolute first’.

Submission + - The 2015 Open Source Summer Reading List (opensource.com)

Submitted by ectoman
ectoman writes: Opensource.com has just published its annual Open Source Summer Reading List. This year's edition contains 15 recommendations for books that celebrate open source values and practices. Topics include Python programming, Grace Hopper, open-minded leadership, and teaching children to code. And until July 3, five readers can win one copy of any book from the list.

Submission + - Who Owns Your Overtime?

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: Fran Sussner Rodgers writes in the NYT that a little-noticed change in the American workplace is about to occur when later this month the Department of Labor is expected to announce an adjustment to the Fair Labor Standards Act raising the salary threshold for overtime from $23,660 per year to at least double that theshold. In 1975, the last year the threshold was significantly raised, 60 percent of salaried workers fell within the requirement for overtime pay while today, only 8 percent do so the new requirement should be a welcome change for millions of American workers.

But the change also speaks to an issue that affects everyone, whether eligible for overtime or not — the clash between the finite amount of time employees actually have versus the desire of employers to treat time as an inexhaustible resource. Employees in the United States currently work more hours than workers in any of the world’s 10 largest economies except Russia. When everything over 40 hours is free to the employer, the temptation to demand more is almost irresistible. But for most employees, the ones exempt from overtime rules, their managers have little incentive to look for ways to use their time more efficiently. "We are a tired, stressed and overworked nation, which has many negative consequences for our personal health and the care of our children. As a nation, we work harder and longer than almost all of our competitors, and much of that work is uncompensated," writes Rodgers. "Time is our personal currency. We parcel it out, hour by hour, to meet the demands placed on us. We all pay a steep price, as individuals and as a nation, when we can’t meet our most important obligations."

Submission + - Recycling is Dying 1

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: Aaron C. Davis writes in the Washington Post that recycling, once a profitable business for cities and private employers alike, has become a money-sucking enterprise. Almost every recycling facility in the country is running in the red and recyclers say that more than 2,000 municipalities are paying to dispose of their recyclables instead of the other way around. “If people feel that recycling is important — and I think they do, increasingly — then we are talking about a nationwide crisis,” says David Steiner, chief executive of Waste Management, the nation’s largest recycler.

The problem with recylcing is that a storm of falling oil prices, a strong dollar and a weakened economy in China have sent prices for American recyclables plummeting worldwide. Trying to encourage conservation, progressive lawmakers and environmentalists have made matters worse. By pushing to increase recycling rates with bigger and bigger bins — while demanding almost no sorting by consumers — the recycling stream has become increasingly polluted and less valuable, imperiling the economics of the whole system. “We kind of got everyone thinking that recycling was free,” says Bill Moore. “It’s never really been free, and in fact, it’s getting more expensive.”

One big problem is that China doesn't want to buy our garbage anymore. In the past China had sent so many consumer goods to the United States that all the shipping containers were coming back empty. So US companies began stuffing the return-trip containers with recycled cardboard boxes, waste paper and other scrap. China could, in turn, harvest the raw materials. Everyone won. But China has launched "Operation Green Fence" — a policy to prohibit the import of unwashed post-consumer plastics and other "contaminated" waste shipments. In China, containerboard, a common packaging product from recycled American paper, is trading at just over $400 a metric ton, down from nearly $1,000 in 2010. China also needs less recycled newsprint; the last paper mill in Shanghai closed this year. "If the materials we are exporting are so contaminated that they are being rejected by those we sell to," says Valerie Androutsopoulos, "maybe it’s time to take another look at dual stream recycling."

Submission + - Adblock Plus victorious again in court (businessinsider.com)

Submitted by Xochil
Xochil writes: Adblock Plus, which claims to be the most popular ad blocking tool, has been victorious again in court versus publishers who took out lawsuits against its owner company Eyeo demanding that users should not be allowed to legally block ads on their sites.

Submission + - How Much C++ Should You Know for an Entry-Level C++ Job? (dice.com)

Submitted by Nerval's Lobster
Nerval's Lobster writes: How much C++ do you need to know to land an entry-level job that's heavy in C++? That's a question Dice posed to several developers. While the exact topic was C++, the broader question of "How much X do you actually need to know to make money off it?" could also apply to any number of programming languages. In the case of C++, basics to know include virtual methods, virtual destructors, operator overloading, how templates work, correct syntax, the standard library, and more. Anything less, and a senior developer will likely get furious; they have a job to do, and that job isn't teaching the ins and outs of programming. With all that in mind, what's a minimum level of knowledge for a programming language for entry-level developers?

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This is clearly another case of too many mad scientists, and not enough hunchbacks.

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