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Comment We introduced a bit more info to reduce clashes (Score 1) 383

by lUomino (#42782057) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Name Conflicts In Automatically Generated Email Addresses?
We went with <last<cohort year><first initial>[<number>]@domain.tld

where

<cohort year> is the two-digit year of expected graduation (I won't be here in 100 years!)
<number> (starting with 2) is used only if disambiguation is needed (in only a few percent of the cases)
Government

Submission + - Cash-Strapped States Burdened by Expensive Data Security Breaches (darkreading.com)

Submitted by
CowboyRobot
CowboyRobot writes: "As budgets are pinched by reduced tax collection, many U.S. states are facing a possibility of not being able to handle the ever-increasing number of data breaches. 70% of state chief information security officers (CISOs) reported a data breach this year, each of which can cost up to $5M in some states. "82 percent of the state CISOs point to phishing and pharming as the top threats to their agencies, a threat they say will continue in 2013, followed by social engineering, increasingly sophisticated malware threats, and mobile devices." The full 2012 Deloitte-National Association of State Chief Information Officers (NASCIO) Cybersecurity Study is available here (PDF)"
Apple

Submission + - The Apple II turns 35 today (time.com)

Submitted by
harrymcc
harrymcc writes: "35 years ago this week, at San Francisco's first West Coast Computer Faire, a tiny startup named Apple II demonstrated its new personal computer, the Apple II. It was the company's first blockbuster product — the most important PC of its time, and, just maybe, the most important PC ever released, period. Over at TIME.com, I've paid tribute to this landmark machine on its birthday."
Medicine

Submission + - SPAM: Intelligence Gene Identified

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The world’s largest brain study to date, with a team of more than 200 scientists from 100 institutions worldwide collaborated to map the human genes that boost or sabotage the brain’s resistance to a variety of mental illnesses and Alzheimer’s disease.

The study also uncoverd new genes that may explain individual differences in brain size and intelligence.
Link to Original Source

Submission + - VA court to review "official" email rules (washingtonpost.com)

Submitted by imac.usr
imac.usr writes: The Virginia Supreme Court will hear arguments today on a case brought by a Fairfax County resident alleging that the county's school board members violated the state's Freedom of Information Act. The suit alleges that board members colluded to close an elementary school in the county through rapid exchange of emails with each other. The state's FOIA rules stipulate that such exchanges can not constitute "virtually simultaneous interaction" and that any assemblage of three or more members constitutes a formal meeting which must be announced. The article notes similar suits are popping up across the country, highlighting one of the difficulties governments face in balancing communication with transparency.
Crime

Submission + - NYTimes says Cybercrime Risk Vastly Overstated (nytimes.com)

Submitted by retroworks
retroworks writes: Dinei Florencio and Cormac Herley write that cybercrime, like unrestricted fishing, depleted gullible and unprotected users, producing diminishing returns (over-phishing?). They argue that the statistics on the extent of losses from cybercrime are flawed because there is never an under-estimation (or gain) reported. Do they underestimate the number of suckers gaining internet access born every minute? Or has cybercrime become the "shark attack" that gets reported more often than it occurs?
Education

Submission + - Armenia Makes Chess Compulsary in Schools

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "AFP News reports that chess will become a required subject in primary schools in Armenia where children from the age of six will learn chess as a separate subject on the curriculum for two hours a week. The lessons which start later this year will "foster schoolchildren's intellectual development" and teach them to "think flexibly and wisely" says Arman Aivazian, an official at the Ministry of Education. President Serzh Sarkisian, an enthusiastic supporter of the game, has committed around $1.5 million to the scheme in a move to turn the country of 3.2 million people into a global force in the games says Aivazian. "Teaching chess in schools will create a solid basis for the country to become a chess superpower." Armenia's national team won gold at the biennial International Chess Olympiad in both 2006 and 2008, and the country's top player Levon Aronian is currently ranked number three in the world."
Security

Submission + - Is your antivirus made by the Chinese gov't? (the-diplomat.com)

Submitted by guanxi
guanxi writes: Huawei, a large Chinese telecom and IT company with close ties to the Chinese military has faced obstacles doing business in other countries, because governments are concerned about giving Huawei access to critical infrastructure. That hasn't stopped them completely, though. Huawei Symantec is a joint venture with one of the world's largest IT security companies which sells security products in the U.S. And the Chinese government is not alone. Would the Chinese or other governments take the opportunity to create back doors into western IT networks? Wouldn't they be crazy not to?
Idle

Submission + - Why Beer Skunks: Trans-Iso-Alpha Acids (scientificamerican.com)

Submitted by
erfnet
erfnet writes: "The Technical University of Munich, along with a German beer-maker, have kindly published a "Comprehensive Sensomics Analysis of Hop-Derived Bitter Compounds During Storage of Beer" http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/jf104392y They determined 56 hop-derived sensometabolites which contribute to bitter taste during storage, increasing with time and temperature. If we had only had this information during our College days, we could have been even geekier! "Duuuuude, it's not skunked, it's suffering from 'proton-catalyzed cyclization of trans-iso-a-acids'." ."

Submission + - Temporary changes to brain could speed up learning (scienceblog.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: In an advance that could help the treatment of learning impairments, strokes, tinnitus and chronic pain, UT Dallas researchers have found that stiumlating nerves in the brain accelerates learning in laboratory tests. When the juice was turned off, researchers monitoring brain activity in rats found that brain responses eventually returned to their pre-stimulation state — but the animals kept the ability to perform their newly learned tasks.

Submission + - The end of the "Age of Speed" (wsj.com)

Submitted by
DesScorp
DesScorp writes: ""The human race is slowing down", begins an article in the Wall Street Journal that laments the state of man's quest of aerial speed: we're going backwards. With the end of the Space Shuttle program, man is losing it's fastest carrier of human beings (only single use moonshot rockets were faster). "The shuttles' retirement follows the grounding over recent years of other ultrafast people carriers, including the supersonic Concorde and the speedier SR-71 Blackbird spy plane. With nothing ready to replace them, our species is decelerating—perhaps for the first time in history", the article notes. Astronauts are interviewed, and their sadness and dissapointment is apparent. In the 60's and 70's, it was assumed that Mach 2+ airline travel would one day be cheap and commonplace. And now it seems that we, and our children, will fly no faster than our grandparents did in 707's. The last major attempt at faster commerical air travel... Boeing's Sonic Cruiser... was abandoned and replaced with the Dreamliner, an airliner designed from the ground up for fuel efficiency."
Classic Games (Games)

Pac-Man's Ghost Behavior Algorithms 194

Posted by Soulskill from the i-hate-the-pink-one dept.
An anonymous reader writes "This article has a very interesting description of the algorithms behind the ghosts in Pac-Man. I had no idea about most of this information, but that's probably because it's difficult to study the ghosts when I die every 30 seconds. Quoting: 'The ghosts are always in one of three possible modes: Chase, Scatter, or Frightened. The "normal" mode with the ghosts pursuing Pac-Man is Chase, and this is the one that they spend most of their time in. While in Chase mode, all of the ghosts use Pac-Man's position as a factor in selecting their target tile, though it is more significant to some ghosts than others. In Scatter mode, each ghost has a fixed target tile, each of which is located just outside a different corner of the maze. This causes the four ghosts to disperse to the corners whenever they are in this mode. Frightened mode is unique because the ghosts do not have a specific target tile while in this mode. Instead, they pseudorandomly decide which turns to make at every intersection.'"
Space

X-37B Robotic Space Plane Returns To Earth 55

Posted by Soulskill from the down-to-earth dept.
Kozar_The_Malignant writes "The secretive X-37B robotic space plane has returned to Earth after a seven-month mission. This was the vehicle's first flight. Looking like a cross between a Predator Drone and the Space Shuttle, it landed at Vandenberg AFB in California, which was to have been the military's shuttle launch facility. Speculation is that the X-37B is an orbital spy platform."
NASA

NASA Delays Discovery's Final Launch To February 62

Posted by Soulskill from the hope-you-brought-a-blanket,-keith dept.
Velcroman1 writes "NASA has postponed the launch of space shuttle Discovery's final mission to no earlier than early February — the latest in a long string of delays that have kept the spacecraft grounded for more than a month. Discovery is now slated to launch no earlier than Feb. 3, with the delay allowing NASA engineers more time to analyze why small cracks developed in the shuttle's huge external fuel tank. The cracks have since been repaired, but NASA wants to make sure similar issues don't pose a future concern."
Image

British Pizza Chain To Install Cones of Silence 122

Posted by samzenpus from the sound-of-silence dept.
itwbennett writes "British pizza chain Pizza Express is installing iPod docks and soundproof domes in booths of their new iPizzeria stores. 'The idea is that you can plug in your iPod and play whatever music you like without disturbing other diners,' says blogger Peter Smith. 'But I'm sure it'd work for talking about government secrets and other spy stuff, too.'"

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