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White House Reportedly Dismissing Key Healthcare.gov Contractor 284

Posted by Soulskill from the assigning-blame dept.
Nerval's Lobster writes "Months after a problem-riddled rollout of the Healthcare.gov Website, the White House is dismissing a key contractor, CGI Federal, that built much of the portal, according to The Washington Post. The newspaper suggested the federal government is on the verge of signing a new contract with a replacement, Accenture, which has some experience in building online health-insurance portals on the state level. 'We are in discussions with potential clients all the time but it is not appropriate to discuss with the media contracts we may or may not be discussing,' an Accenture spokesperson is quoted as saying. Unnamed sources 'familiar with the matter' informed the Post of CGI Federal's dismissal, and suggested that it has much to do with continuing anger over the botched introduction of Healthcare.gov, as well as the pace of continuing repairs to the Website. As their contract is due to expire anyway at the end of February, government officials reportedly decided that it was the perfect time to pull the plug with a minimum of legal ramifications."

Comment Re:They needed research for this? (Score 2) 288

by kryps (#43384517) Attached to: Researcher Evan Booth: How To Weaponize Tax-Free Airport Goods

I think it's you that's watched too many movies--booze does not burn all that well. While splashing alcohol in 1 person's face and lighting it might, possibly, incapacitate that person, it is not any way to incapacitate the entire flight crew and all the other passengers. The end result would be an attacker struggling to not suffocate, because it is actually very hard to breathe when hog-tied, and especially with one or more knees in your back.

You can not "incapacitate the entire flight crew and all the other passengers" with knives either. But planes have been hijacked with knives before.

Comment Re:There are four things that make Android laggy (Score 2) 226

by kryps (#42570543) Attached to: The Android Lag Fix That Really Wasn't

There are lots of other issues. Two examples:

A) The Dalvik JIT is stone-age technology compared to modern JITs. We are not even talking about profile-guided optimization like the HotSpot VM does. No, it does not even inline getters or setters,

B) The GPU acceleration layer sucks even worse than you think. For example it requires the app to emit display lists for all graphical objects without allowing you to clip those objects first. That means if you have a huge number of objects (say an editor with thousands of lines of text) all have to be created and passed to the rendering layer.
Biotech

Artificial DNA Replicates and 'Evolves' 126

Posted by Soulskill from the cylons-were-created-by-man dept.
ananyo writes "Scientists have demonstrated that several lab-made variants of DNA can store and transmit information much like the genuine article. DNA is made up of nucleic acid bases — labelled A, C, G and T — on a backbone made of phosphates and the sugar deoxyribose. The artificial polymers, dubbed XNAs, carry the normal genetic 'alphabet' on a backbone made using different sugars. The researchers engineered enzymes that transcribed DNA into the various XNAs, then back into new DNA strands. Faithful genetic transmission over successive DNA-to-XNA cycles allowed researchers to select for only those XNAs that attached to certain target proteins from a pool of random samples — a process akin to evolution over multiple generations (abstract). The research confirms for the first time that replication, heredity and evolution can take place in artificial DNA-like molecules."
Bug

Computer Glitch Leaves Some Australians Without Cash 195

Posted by timothy from the cascading-promises dept.
An anonymous reader writes "National Australia Bank payments to customers were again delayed today after a computer glitch yesterday morning due to a corrupted file in its mainframe computer. Upset consumers are now demanding compensation for any fees for late mortgage and credit card payments, overdrawn accounts or bounced direct debits charged by any institutions as a result of the mess."
Debian

FreeNAS Switching From FreeBSD To Debian Linux 206

Posted by Soulskill from the changing-horses dept.
dnaumov writes "FreeNAS, a popular, free NAS solution, is moving away from using FreeBSD as its underlying core OS and switching to Debian Linux. Version 0.8 of FreeNAS as well as all further releases are going to be based on Linux, while the FreeBSD-based 0.7 branch of FreeNAS is going into maintenance-only mode, according to main developer Volker Theile. A discussion about the switch, including comments from the developers, can be found on the FreeNAS SourceForge discussion forum. Some users applaud the change, which promises improved hardware compatibility, while others voice concerns regarding the future of their existing setups and lack of ZFS support in Linux."

Submission + - Mininova removes all 'infringing' torrents (torrentfreak.com)

Submitted by Pabugs
Pabugs writes: I woke up this morning to cruise the Mininova movies category to find the torrents were removed and the line at the top stating 'From now on, only Content Distribution torrents are allowed' — Could it be that 'The Man" is gaining a foothold in the piracy battle? — I guess we'll have to wait and see, in the meantime, I'm a little less thankful on this Thanksgiving knowing that Corporate interests are now crushing my movie habits — Mininova was one of the few places I could find movies that most rental places won't carry and being forced into purchasing a crappy film for preview @ $9.99 isn't worth it to me.

Submission + - FreeBSD 8.0 Released 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 8 stable release. Some of the highlights: Xen DomU support, network stack virtualization, stack-smashing protection, TTY layer rewrite, much improved ZFS v13, a new USB stack, multicast updates including IGMPv3, vimage — a new virtualization container, Fedora 10 Linux binary compatibility to run Linux software such as Flash 10 and others, trusted BSD MAC (Mandatory Access Control), and rewritten NFS client/server introducing NFSv4. Inclusion of improved device mmap() extensions will allow the technical implementation of a 64-bit Nvidia display driver for the x86-64 platform. The GNOME desktop environment has been upgraded to 2.26.3, KDE to 4.3.1, and Firefox to 3.5.5.

There is also an in-depth look at the new features and major architectural changes in FreeBSD 8.0, including a screenshot tour, upgrade instructions are posted here.

You can grab the latest version from FreeBSD from the mirrors (main ftp server) or via BitTorrent. Please consider making a donation and help us to spread the word by tweeting and blogging about the drive and release.
Privacy

Blu-ray Update Sent To User Via Credit Card Records 526

Posted by CmdrTaco from the allright-that's-just-plain-scary dept.
wmoyes writes "Back in September I ran into a Best Buy store to buy a Samsung BD-P2550 Blu-ray player. I didn't give the clerk my name, telephone number, or address, just my debit card. The player has sat happily in my living room without ever being networked or registered. Today I was shocked to find a package waiting for me at home from Best Buy — inside was a firmware update CD for the player. I used to think Windows Update was scary, but Samsung's update service tracked me to my house using the mag stripe from my bank card. Has this happened to any other Blu-ray owners?" Or is there a simpler explanation?
Robotics

Scientists Add Emotions To Robotic Head 124

Posted by timothy from the real-doll-upgrade dept.
DeviceGuru writes "Claiming that service-class robots will one day be pervasive, researchers at the University of the West of England's Bristol Robotics Laboratory (BRL) have begun investigating ways to make robots seem more human. As part of a project to enhance robot/human relationships, BRL has created a robotic head that can exhibit emotions, based on both verbal and non-verbal cues. Check out the videos in the article — especially the slightly creepy one in which the robot contemplates its purpose and its relationship to its environment."

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