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Science

Submission + - nanostructured semiconductor alloy crystals heat to be manipulated like light (eurekalert.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A new technique allows allows thermocrystals to be created that can manipulate heat (a vibration of the atomic lattice of a material). Predicted manipulations include the ability to selectively transmit / reflect or concentrate heat much like light waves can be manipulated by lenses and mirrors. Applications range from better thermoelectric devices to switchable heat insulating/transmitting materials etc. Perhaps this will result in better cooling/heating mechanisms or more efficient engines.
Businesses

Submission + - Hosting Giants Teaming Against Small Businesses (simplecdn.com)

Submitted by
BlueToast
BlueToast writes: "Hosting giants SoftLayer, ThePlanet, Hosting Services Inc., and UK2 Group are teaming up to wipe out small competitors like SimpleCDN. Though ThePlanet isn't directly involved in the slicing of SimpleCDN's throat, ThePlanet runs the sales chat scripts for SoftLayer (check your NoScript). As a loyal customer of SimpleCDN, I really do not appreciate the disruption of service to a company I have been with for over a year on fabulous cloud services. As a supporter of small and medium businesses, I will not bow and give my money to the top dogs of the hosting realm. I doubt I will get far in my frustration against these huge companies, but the least I can do is try in attempt of voicing my frustration across the internet."
Firefox

Submission + - Don't Begrudge Mozilla for Being a Commercial Open (ostatic.com)

Submitted by Thinkcloud
Thinkcloud writes: Do you hate the idea of anyone tracking your habits and usage patterns online? I'm convinced that most of us hate the idea, and even more convinced that users of Linux and open source platforms and applications hate it even more than the average user does. Efforts are ongoing to track your habits very closely, though, and that's why it's worth paying attention to the ongoing debate over Mozilla's stance on web privacy. Canonical COO and noted open source blogger Matt Asay has a good piece up on the topic at The Register, and The Wall Street Journal has been covering it as well. So far, Mozilla appears to have behaved
Crime

Submission + - Court returns stolen Stargate MMO to founder (evtrib.com)

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: A Maricopa County Superior Court judge has ended a bitter dispute over control of a Mesa video game company’s assets, effectively giving the online combat game Stargate Resistance and the long-delayed MMORPG Stargate Worlds back to Cheyenne Mountain Entertainment. Fresh Start tried to remove all of Cheyenne Mountain’s assets from its offices on Feb. 24, but was prevented from doing so when the police arrived. Networking cords had been cut and left to hang loose, and PC cases were empty shells that had been gutted of components such as hard drives. But time may finally have run out for Worlds, Cheyenne Mountain’s signature project: The ruling comes as MGM Studios has apparently terminated the license it granted in 2006 for the Arizona company to produce video games based on the Stargate movies and TV shows.

Submission + - Word Processors: One Writer's Further Retreat 1

Submitted by ch-dickinson
ch-dickinson writes: In 2003, I posted an essay ("Word Processors: One Writer's Retreat") here about my writing experience--professional and personal--that led to a novel draft in vi(m) and I outlined reasons I chose a simple non-WYSIWYG text editor rather than a more full-featured word processor.
        A few novels later, in 2010 now, I decided to try a text editor that predates even vi: ed. I'd run across ed about 20 years ago, working at a software company and vaguely recalled navigation of a text file meant mentally mapping such commands as +3 and -2: ed didn't click with me then.
        But writing a novel draft is mule work, one sentence after another, straight ahead--no navigating the text file. The writer must get the story down and my goal is 1,000 words a day, every day, until I'm done. I have an hour to 90 minutes for this. So when I returned after two decades, I was impressed with how efficiently ed generates plain text files.
        Documentation for ed is available on the Internet, but I found it a great help to take Richard Gauthier's USING THE UNIX SYSTEM (1981) with me when I reported for jury duty in Portland, Oregon. His 30-page discussion of "the editor" is thorough and gave me some sense of the power for this pioneer text editor (cut & pastes, for example).
        As I said, what drives my mule-like early morning routine is word count. The text editor ed has no internal word count tool (through dropping back to the command line gives, of course, wc). What I had to do was quite simple: I converted byte-counts (which ed does with each write to the file) into word equivalents. So if my style of writing runs 5.6 characters per word, then a word goal of 1,000 words is simply 5,600 bytes. Every day, I set my target byte count and once there, I quit.
        In less than three months, I finished a 72,000-word novel draft and give ed credit for not slowing me down. Based on my experience writing novels with plain text editors (vim, geany, and now ed), I understand how few computing resources are needed to take manuscript composition off a typewriter and put it on a personal computer. The advantages of the latter are several, including less retyping, easier revision, and portability among different systems. Whether going from typewriter to personal computer makes for better writing I'll leave to others for comment.
        What doesn't make for better writing is confusing text on demand (that daily word count that grows to a manuscript) with desktop publishing. Desktop publishing makes so many word processors into distracting choice-laden software tools. Obviously, there is a place for a manuscript as pdf file compliant with appropriate Acrobat Distiller settings, but that ends, not begins, the process. I like to think I'm not putting the cart before the horse.
        So why would I recommend ed for a wordsmith? I'd say it comes down to just enough computing resources to do the job. WYSIWYG word processors have a cost and intuitively I think there's cerebral bus contention between flow of words onto the screen and keeping a handle on where the mouse arrow is (among other things).
        But then perhaps I've a "less is more" bias (I have a car with nonpower steering--better road feel; I ride a fixed single-speed bike--ditto). That feeling is the sum of things there (and things left out). When I ride my fixie bike, it seems to know why I ride. Similarly, when I invoke ed, the text editor, it seems to know why I write. An illusion, sure, but also a harmony that goes with being responsible for all of it and staying focussed (without any distracting help balloons!).

One of Charlie Dickinson's novels is available for download at cetus-editons.com

Submission + - Human Rights Groups Join Criticism of WikiLeaks (wsj.com) 1

Submitted by e065c8515d206cb0e190
e065c8515d206cb0e190 writes: Several human rights organizations contacted Wikileaks and pressed them to do a better job at hiding information that endangers civilians from their leaked documents. Wikileaks editor Julian Assange issued a strong rebuke. From the article:

Mr. Assange then replied: "I'm very busy and have no time to deal with people who prefer to do nothing but cover their asses. If Amnesty does nothing I shall issue a press release highlighting its refusal," according to people familiar with the exchange.
Idle

Submission + - Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Internet (motherboard.tv) 1

Submitted by MMBK
MMBK writes: Our friends at JESS3 have unveiled The Ex-Blocker. It’s a Firefox and Chrome plugin that erases all name and likeness of your ex from the internet, even if they become a meme, or the president. You’ll no longer have to threaten to delete your Facebook account or concoct an elaborate e-hoax to assuage the reality-shattering complications that are born from break-ups. Simply construct an internet that omits bad vibes all together.
IT

Submission + - 'Robin Sage' Duped Military, Security Pros (darkreading.com)

Submitted by ancientribe
ancientribe writes: A social networking experiment of a phony female military security professional known as"Robin Sage" (named after a U.S. Army Special Forces training exercise) worked way too well, fooling even the most security-savvy professionals on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. It also led to the leakage of sensitive military information after an Army Ranger accepted "Robin's" friend request on Facebook and his photos from Afghanistan exposed geolocation information accessible to "Robin." The researcher who conducted the experiment will show off his findings at the upcoming Black Hat USA conference in Las Vegas, where the real woman pictured in the profiles is scheduled to introduce him for his presentation.

Submission + - FBI failed to break the encryption of hard drives (globo.com)

Submitted by benoliver
benoliver writes: Not even FBI was able to decrypt files of Daniel Dantas (Brazilian banker accused of "financial crimes" by the Brazilian justice). Hard drives were seized by the feds during Operation Satyagraha, in 2008. Information is protected by sophisticated encryption system. The hard drives seized by federal police at the apartment of banker Daniel Dantas, in Rio de Janeiro, during Operation Satyagraha. The operation began in July 2008. According to a report published on Friday (25) by the newspaper Folha de S. Paulo, after a year of unsuccessful attempts, the U.S. federal police returned the equipment to Brazil in April. According to the report, the fed only requested help from USA in early 2009, after experts from the National Institute of Criminology (INC) failed to decode the passwords on the hard drives. The government has no legal instrument to compel the manufacturer of the American encryption system or Dantas to give the access codes.

Submission + - What Happened to Obama's Open Source Adviser (whitehouse.gov)

Submitted by gov_coder
gov_coder writes: Back in January of 2009, various new articles announced that former SUN CEO, Scott McNealy was to become the Obama administration's Open Source Technology adviser. Currently, however, a search for Scott on the whitehouse.gov website yields zero results. Searching a bit more — I found that Scott is currently working on CurriWiki, a kind of wikipedia for school curriculum. So my question is what happened? Did some lobbyist block the appointment? Did Scott decide his other activities were more important? Scott, if you are out there — please tell us what happened. There are many people working in government IT, such as myself, who were really excited about the possibilities of an expanded role for open source software in government, and are now wondering what went wrong.
Programming

Submission + - "Proof of Concept" for Ajax without JavaScript (jonathanscorner.com)

Submitted by JonathansCorner.com
JonathansCorner.com writes: Even if Ajax was backronymed to "Asynchronous JavaScript and XML", it works with JSON substituted for XML. Here's a proof of concept that JavaScript/VBScript are not strictly necessary either. The technique, besides being used standalone, may be useful to provide a better "graceful degradation" for Ajax applications used by clients with scripting turned off.
Role Playing (Games)

Submission + - Can a Video Game Solve Hunger, Disease and Poverty (hplusmagazine.com)

Submitted by destinyland
destinyland writes: Dr. Jane McGonigal of the RAND corporation's Institute for the Future has created a game described as "a crash course in changing the world." Developed for the World Bank's "capacity development" branch, "EVOKE" has already gathered more than 10,000 potential solutions from participants including executives from Procter & Gamble and Kraft. "She takes threats to human existence — global food shortage, fuel wars, pandemic, refugee crisis, and upended democracy — and asks the gaming public to collaborate on how to avoid these all too possible futures." And by completing its 10 missions, you too can become a World Bank Institute certified EVOKE social innovator. (The game designer's web site lays out her ambitious philosophy. "Reality is broken," but "game designers can fix it.")
Music

Submission + - Is the line-in jack on the verge of extinction? 2

Submitted by SlashD0tter
SlashD0tter writes: Many older sound cards were shipped with line-out, microphone-in, and a line-in jacks. For years I've used such a line-in jack on an old Windows 2000 dinosaur desktop that I bought in 2000 (600 Mhz PIII) to capture the stereo audio signal from an old Technics receiver. I've used this arrangement to recover the audio from a slew of old vinyl LPs and even a few cassettes using some simple audio manipulating software from a small shop in Australia.

I've noticed only recently, unfortunately, that all of the four laptops I've bought since then have omitted a line-in jack, forcing me to continue keeping this old desktop on life support. I've looked around for USB sound cards that include a line-in jack, but I haven't been too impressed by the selection.

Is the line-in jack doomed to extinction, possibly due to lobbying from vested interests, or are there better thinking-outside-the-box alternatives available?

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