Comment "Big if true" (Score 1) 41
... says the scientist whose experiment didn't provide evidence that it's true.
Comment No. (Score 2) 198
I work for a database company. 100% of our customers use Linux. Our computers? Only Mac and Windows are supported. Linux? You're on your own.
A few percent of the engineers do it, though.
Comment Re:Garbage headline (Score 1) 142
Came here for this. Thank you for pointing it out first.
Comment Re:frist (Score 1) 529
:%s/\ \ /\ /g
Problem solved.
Problem solved.
Julian Assage Taunts US Government For Forcing Wikileaks To Invest In Bitcoin (facebook.com) 195
Saturday's tweet from Julian Assange says it all:
"My deepest thanks to the US government, Senator McCain and Senator Lieberman for pushing Visa, MasterCard, PayPal, AmEx, Moneybookers, et al, into erecting an illegal banking blockade against @WikiLeaks starting in 2010. It caused us to invest in Bitcoin -- with > 50000% return."
Assange's tweet was accompanied by a graph showing the massive spike in the price of bitcoin -- though most of that growth occurred in the last year.
Assange's tweet was accompanied by a graph showing the massive spike in the price of bitcoin -- though most of that growth occurred in the last year.
Submission + - Why is Microsoft monitoring how long you use Windows 10? (betanews.com)
Mark Wilson writes: The various privacy concerns surrounding Windows 10 have received a lot of coverage in the media, but it seems that there are ever more secrets coming to light. The Threshold 2 Update did nothing to curtail privacy invasion, and the latest Windows 10 installation figures show that Microsoft is also monitoring how long people are using the operating system.
This might seem like a slightly strange statistic for Microsoft to keep track of, but the company knows how long, collectively, Windows 10 has been running on computers around the world. To have reached this figure (11 billion hours in December, apparently) Microsoft must have been logging individuals' usage times. Intrigued, we contacted Microsoft to find out what on earth is going on.
This might seem like a slightly strange statistic for Microsoft to keep track of, but the company knows how long, collectively, Windows 10 has been running on computers around the world. To have reached this figure (11 billion hours in December, apparently) Microsoft must have been logging individuals' usage times. Intrigued, we contacted Microsoft to find out what on earth is going on.
Beats Music To Shut Down November 30 (fortune.com) 61
UnknowingFool writes: After November 30, Beats Music subscriptions will be cancelled and no longer work, according to Apple. Subscribers can use Apple Music, which has many of the same features. This shutdown was not unexpected when Apple purchased Beats last year for $3 billion, as Apple has a history of buying companies for various reasons other the products. Many former companies have been absorbed into Apple in one form or another in this manner: the technology of Fingerworks peripherals was the start of multi-touch for iPhones; PA Semi and Intrinsity personnel were the core of Apple's internal chip design teams; and AuthenTec made biometric technology that became the backbone of Touch ID.
Comment Re:Chapel Hill/ Carrboro North Carolina (Score 1) 654
Agreed. I sometimes drive my car into Times Square on a Sunday morning, because it's more convenient than the train for my family, and we have a thing every week. There are parking spots available (for a few hours) right outside of $20-$25 an hour market-rate private parking lots. It's ridiculous, but I'll keep doing it while it's free.
I'm not sure we'd need to make public transit free, though, if we're planning to eliminate free/subsidized parking. That might be enough to effect change all on its own.
Google Asks Android Developers To Show Sensitivity To Disasters and Atrocity 96
Mark Wilson writes: Today Google revealed an updated version of its Google Play Developer Program Policies. There aren't actually all that many changes or additions, but those that are present are quite interesting. Google is clamping down on the problem of impersonation, making it clearer that it is not permissible to mislead users by imitating other apps, making false claims, or suggesting endorsements that do not exist. One of the more intriguing changes to the document sees Google calling on developers to show sensitivity to evens such as natural disasters, war, and death. Any apps or other content that attempt to benefit by exploiting such events are explicitly banned.
Comment Re:Prime Scalia - "Words no longer having meaning" (Score 5, Insightful) 591
Viewing these words as a mistake is the simplest interpretation of the law. The other option is to re-interpret lots of other sections, and change the law to be at odds with how the people writing it meant for it to be interpreted.
The writers of the law clearly wanted to establish state exchanges for any state that wanted them, and a federal exchange for any state that didn't want to roll its own, and that all of these exchanges do the same thing. This might not be apparent in that little snippet, but it's very much apparent in the text of the law itself.
It's not as though the SCOTUS majority is pulling meaning out of nowhere for just this passage. Quite the contrary, they'd have had to re-interpret a lot of text to infer that the law was written so as to exclude subsidies for the federal exchange.
Comment Re:Game the System (Score 2) 150
Legit.
Especially given the culture of "it's only wrong if you get caught" attitude towards breaking rules that pervades so many of our high schools and trickles up into college and the work force with every graduation, and then gets reinforced with every performance evaluation or annual bonus.
Comment Re: Politicans who forget who voted for them... (Score 1) 121
The mind blowing thing is that even though the money follows the winner (everyone loves to back a winner!) the politicians give their loyalty away for contributions, as if those contributions ensured their victory, rather than the other way around.
Comment Re:no grad school (Score 4, Insightful) 385
+1
Source: I spent 7 years of my life getting a Ph.D. in physics. By the time I got the Ph.D., the only reason left I had for finishing was because I'd started.
A Master's in physics, though, that's legit. You're still having fun, and still learning a lot.
Prison Program Aims To Turn Criminals Into Coders 305
Press2ToContinue writes with news that San Quentin, a notorious California prison, has started a program to teach a class of inmates to write code. The first class will last for six months, and the inmates are learning about programming for eight hours a day. The hope is to give them the skills to find a good job after they leave prison, which in turn would reduce their chances of recidivism. Since the state's Dept. of Corrections prohibits internet access, the class only "pretends" to be online — they can't use internet-based resources, and nobody on the outside can see or use the software they create. One of the class's backers said, 'Almost every week there's epiphanies. And most of the guys in here, they've never touched a computer before. They are progressing beyond our expectations."
DARPA Delving Into the Black Art of Super Secure Software Obfuscation 124
coondoggie writes Given enough computer power, desire, brains, and luck, the security of most systems can be broken. But there are cryptographic and algorithmic security techniques, ideas and concepts out there that add a level of algorithmic mystification that could be built into programs that would make them close to unbreakable. That's what the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) wants for a new program called "Safeware." From DARPA: “The goal of the SafeWare research effort is to drive fundamental advances in the theory of program obfuscation and to develop highly efficient and widely applicable program obfuscation methods with mathematically proven security properties.”
