Submission + - A letter from Hans Reiser (kernel.org) 2
alanw writes: Hans Reiser (imprisoned for the murder of his wife) has written a letter, asking it to be published to Slashdot.
Lawmakers Slam Apple for 'Censorship' of Apps at China's Behest (bloomberg.com) 55
U.S. lawmakers from both parties slammed Apple and Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook last week for "censorship of apps" at the "behest of the Chinese government." From a report: Senators Ted Cruz, Ron Wyden, Tom Cotton, Marco Rubio and Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Mike Gallagher and Tom Malinowski expressed concern about the removal of an app that let Hong Kong protesters track police movement in the city. "Apple's decisions last week to accommodate the Chinese government by taking down HKmaps is deeply concerning," they wrote in a letter to Cook, urging Apple to "reverse course, to demonstrate that Apple puts values above market access, and to stand with the brave men and women fighting for basic rights and dignity in Hong Kong." Apple didn't respond to a request for comment on Friday.
Apple removed the HKmap.live app from the App Store in China and Hong Hong earlier this month, saying it violated local laws. The company also said it received "credible information" from Hong Kong authorities indicating the software was being used "maliciously" to attack police. The decision, and the reasoning, was questioned widely. Cook, in a recent memo to Apple employees, said that "national and international debates will outlive us all, and, while important, they do not govern the facts."
Apple removed the HKmap.live app from the App Store in China and Hong Hong earlier this month, saying it violated local laws. The company also said it received "credible information" from Hong Kong authorities indicating the software was being used "maliciously" to attack police. The decision, and the reasoning, was questioned widely. Cook, in a recent memo to Apple employees, said that "national and international debates will outlive us all, and, while important, they do not govern the facts."
Forced Arbitration Isn't 'Forced' Because No One Has To Buy Service, Says AT&T (arstechnica.com) 342
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: AT&T is denying that its contracts include "forced arbitration" clauses, even though customers must agree to the clauses in order to obtain Internet or TV service. "At the outset, no AT&T customer is ever 'forced' to agree to arbitration," AT&T Executive VP Tim McKone wrote in a letter to U.S. senators. "Customers accept their contracts with AT&T freely and voluntarily; no one 'forces' them to obtain AT&T wireless service, DirecTV programming, or other products and services." AT&T was responding to concerns raised by Sens. Al Franken (D-Minn.), Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), and Edward Markey (D-Mass.), who previously alleged that AT&T's use of forced arbitration clauses has helped the company charge higher prices than the ones it advertises to customers. While AT&T is correct that no one is forced to sign up for AT&T service, there are numerous areas of the country where AT&T is the only viable option for wired home Internet service. Even in wireless, where there's more competition, AT&T rivals Verizon and Sprint use mandatory arbitration clauses, so signing up with another carrier won't necessarily let customers avoid arbitration. One exception is T-Mobile, which offers a way to opt out of arbitration. The terms of service for AT&T Internet and DirecTV require customers to "agree to arbitrate all disputes and claims" against AT&T. Class actions and trials by jury are prohibited, although individual cases in small claims courts are allowed. AT&T doesn't offer any way to opt out of the arbitration/small claims provision, so the only other option is not buying service from AT&T.
Submission + - Smoking mothers may alter the DNA of their children (sciencemag.org)
sciencehabit writes: Pregnant women who smoke don’t just harm the health of their baby—they may actually impair their child’s DNA, according to new research. A genetic analysis shows that the children of mothers who smoke harbor far more chemical modifications of their genome--known as epigenetic changes--than kids of non-smoking mothers. Many of these are on genes tied to addiction and fetal development. The finding may explain why the children of smokers continue to suffer health complications later in life.
Comment Re:Small Connectors (Score 1) 408
It's much easier to construct a HD-SDI cable which is only one conductor and shield, maintains its 75 ohm impedance (impedance discontinuities cause signal reflections and inter-symbol interference), and has low loss (larger diameter and air or foam dielectric).
Comment Re:Companies are obsessed with VPNs (Score 1) 212
Install Cygwin, it will give you much of the features of eXceed for free, including an Xserver, a local xterm client to connect to your Linux box, and ssh.
Comment Re:Innovative (Score 3, Insightful) 244
Sorry, but it works nothing like you describe.
It is true that there is only one pair of wires involved. Phones (Plain Old Telephone Services P.O.T.S) achieve full duplex with a simple analog circuit called a hybrid. Until the 1980's most phones had no active electronics in them. The hybrid was a specialized transformer which by arrangement of the coils' polarities, the much stronger sending signal is subtracted from the receiving signal in the handset. The subtraction is purposely designed not to be perfect so there is some 'sidetone' left over to give you feedback on how loud to talk.
In modern phones the hybrid is composed of a SLIC (subscriber line interface circuit), basically amplifiers which can do the subtraction operation.
Outside of the phone, both sending and receiving signals share the same pair, just moving in opposite directions.
It sound like this research team just developed a similar hybrid circuit for RF.
Scientists Identify Head of France's King Henry IV 64
JThaddeus writes "The Associated Press reports that 'After nine months of tests, researchers in France have identified the head of France's King Henry IV.' Henry was assassinated in 1610, and his head has been missing. His body was dug up and decapitated during the French Revolution. Researchers found features similar to those in royal portraits, and radiocarbon dating confirms that the head dates to the 17th Century. Interestingly, 'Perfumers on the team used their professionally trained noses to identify specific embalming substances in the mouth used to hide nasty odors.' The results have been published an online medical journal."
RIP, SunSolve 100
Kymermosst writes "Today marks the last day that SunSolve will be available. Oracle sent the final pre-deployment details today for the retirement of SunSolve and the transition to its replacement, My Oracle Support Release 5.2, which begins tomorrow. People who work with Sun's hardware and software have long used SunSolve as a central location for specifications, patches, and documentation."
Need Help Salvaging Data From an Old Xenix System 325
Milo_Mindbender writes "I've recently gotten ahold of an old Altos 586 Xenix system (a late '80s Microsoft flavor of Unix) that has one of the first multi-user BBS systems in the US on it, and I want to salvage the historical BBS posts off it. I'm wondering if anyone remembers what format Xenix used on the 10MB (yes MB) IDE hard drive and if it can still be read on a modern Linux system. This system is quite old, has no removable media or ethernet and just barely works. The only other way to get data off is a slow serial port. I've got a controller that should work with the disk, but don't want to tear this old machine apart without some hope that it will work. Anyone know?"
Simpler "Hello World" Demonstrated In C 582
An anonymous reader writes "Wondering where all that bloat comes from, causing even the classic 'Hello world' to weigh in at 11 KB? An MIT programmer decided to make a Linux C program so simple, she could explain every byte of the assembly. She found that gcc was including libc even when you don't ask for it. The blog shows how to compile a much simpler 'Hello world,' using no libraries at all. This takes me back to the days of programming bare-metal on DOS!"
The LHC Is Back Online 123
medea and several other readers noted that the LHC came back online early this morning. Here is the tweet from CERN announcing the milestone. As we discussed a few weeks ago, CERN plans to run the LHC at half power or less through 2011.
