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Submission + - Elementary School Bans Students From Touching Each Other (ctvnews.ca)

Submitted by theshowmecanuck
theshowmecanuck writes: From the 'Think Of The Children' Department: OK, so this isn't a tech article. But it is about something that is so messed up I just had to post it. A school in British Columbia (the province that now even California can call flakey) has just banned elementary school students from touching each other during recess. You know, one of those times for play and more importantly learning how to socialize (which itself includes touching). CTV News reports: "A ban on touching during recess at a B.C. elementary school has shocked parents, who call the new no-touch policy "ridiculous." For most kids, recess is a chance to run around and goof-off with their friends, but a new ban on touching at a school in Aldergrove could put a damper on playtime. School administrators at Coghlan Fundamental Elementary School in B.C. have banned kindergarten students from touching each other during recess."

Submission + - Google Bots Doing SQL Injection Attacks (sucuri.net)

Submitted by ccguy
ccguy writes: It seems that while Google could really care less about your site and has no real interest in hacking you, their automated bots can be used to do the heavy lifting for an attacker.

In this scenario, the bot was crawling Site A. Site A had a number of links embedded that had the SQLi requests to the target site, Site B. Google Bot then went about its business crawling pages and following links like a good boy, and in the process followed the links on Site A to Site B, and began to inadvertently attack Site B.

Submission + - High-gain patch antennas boost Wi-Fi capacity for Georgia Tech (networkworld.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: To boost its Wi-Fi capacity in packed lecture halls, Georgia Institute of Technology gave up trying to cram in more access points, with conventional omni-directional antennas, and juggle power settings and channel plans. Instead, it turned to new high-gain directional antennas. Ventev’s new TerraWave High-Density Ceiling Mount Antenna, which looks almost exactly like the bottom half of a small pizza box, focuses the Wi-Fi signal from the ceiling mounted Cisco access point in a precise cone-shaped pattern, covering part of the lecture hall floor. Instead of the flakey, laggy connections, about which professors had been complaining, users now consistently get up to 144Mbps (if they have 802.11n client radios). “Overall, the system performed much better" with the new antennas, says William Lawrence, IT project manager principal with the university’s academic and research technologies group. “And there was a much more even distribution of clients across the room’s access points.”

Submission + - The Memo That Spawned Microsoft Research (xconomy.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: In 1991, Microsoft executive Nathan Myhrvold wrote a 21-page memo to Bill Gates, laying out a plan to create what would become Microsoft Research. Here is the previously unpublished memo and some analysis, along with the original slides that Myhrvold used to pitch the idea to Microsoft’s top brass. With the future of Microsoft now in question, it’s interesting to see how forward-thinking the company was 20 years ago. It even foresaw how pitfalls in tech transfer, organizational structure, and product R&D could make it fall behind future competitors---who would turn out to be Google, Apple, and Amazon in search, mobile devices, and cloud computing.

Submission + - The Next Big Fiber Showdown: Austin (slashdot.org)

Submitted by Nerval's Lobster
Nerval's Lobster writes: Google might have big plans to wire America with high-speed broadband, but at least one carrier isn’t willing to let Google Fiber have a free run: AT&T has announced that it will deploy a “100 percent fiber” network in Austin, Texas, capable of delivering speeds of up to 1GB per second. That location is auspicious, given how Google’s already decided to make Austin the next city to receive Google Fiber. Whereas Google plans on connecting Austin households to its network in mid-2014, however, AT&T promises to start deploying its own high-speed solution in December. But there’s a few significant catches. First, AT&T’s service will initially roll out to “tens of thousands of customer locations throughout Austin” (according to a press release), which is a mere fraction of the city’s 842,592 residents; second, AT&T has offered no roadmap for expanding beyond that initial base; and third, despite promises that the service will roll out in December, the carrier has yet to choose the initial neighborhoods for its expansion. Could this be a case of a carrier freaking out about a new company's potential to disrupt its longtime business?

Comment Re:Someone is getting paid for this? (Score 1) 90

Here is a solution. Have a robot with really nice tits and/or a revealing crotchtorial bulge. A big ugly bulls-eye would be at the top. The eye contact hits that registered at the bull-eye would score service. The other "hits" might cause a jiggle or perhaps an escort service phone number (advertising revenue) on the display screen near where the belly button should be. To weed out the casual non-sexual on-lookers out there, perhaps the screen could flash a display which looks to be an error message with some FORTRAN code or something.

Comment Re: What is PCB? (Score 1) 67

by stargrazer (#44912943) Attached to: PCBs Cause Birds To Sing a Different Tune

While I was aware of polychlorinated biphenyls, I'd never actually heard of them called "PCBs" before. To me, that acronym always means "Printed Circuit Board".

But, it does seem to just be my own ignorance. Wikipedia redirect "PCBs" to "Polychlorinated Biphenyl" and shows images of warning signs that also use that acronym. (note that "PCB" on Wikipedia however is a disambiguation page, with "Printed Circuit Board" as the top entry)

In the early 90s the term referring to a circuit board was changed to Printed Wire Assembly, or PWA, at least in some segments of the electronics industry I worked in.

I think the association with polychlorinated biphenyls was the reason, as the movement of production of these items offshore was in full swing and to a lesser extent manufacturers didn't want their customers opening up products and seeing they were full of parts labelled "PCB".

Comment Re:Two words: dumb customers (Score 1) 549

by stargrazer (#41800239) Attached to: Why Can't Industry Design an Affordable Hearing Aid?

Don't be too surprised about German companies happy to milk the American public. Fresenius is all over here providing $3K a shot twice-a-week dialysis services using their own equipment and their own disposables. I imagine the company uses the salaries, rent and lawsuits as a direct write-off against US taxes while making mint selling themselves supplies.

I've seen commercials from litigious lawyer firms capitalizing on the mistakes made by this industry, but I doubt most of the patients/clients have much of a leg (actually, any legs at all) to stand up with in court as they all pretty much end up dead sooner or later.

It's said the only worse job for a nurse or technician is working in a child oncology ward.
Science

Submission + - Researchers Conquer "LED Droop" (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: Tiny and efficient, light-emitting diodes (LEDs) are supposed to be the bright future of illumination. But they perform best at only low power, enough for a flashlight or the screen of your cellphone. If you increase the current enough for them to light a room like an old-fashioned incandescent bulb, their vaunted efficiency nosedives. It's called LED droop, and it's a real drag on the industry. Now, researchers have found a way to grow more efficient LEDs that get more kick from the same amount of current—especially in the hard-to-manufacture green and blue parts of the spectrum.
Mars

Submission + - Bouncing Sands of Mars Blow in the Wind (discovery.com)

Submitted by
astroengine
astroengine writes: "New analysis of high-resolution images of Mars, taken by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera aboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, show sand dunes in an area known as Nili Patera are shifting as fast as some dunes on Earth — despite a dearth of high-speed winds. Scientists suspect it takes a big wind to get sand particles airborne, but once launched from the surface, they bounce around with ease, thanks to the planet's thin atmosphere and low gravity. "It's kind of like playing golf on the moon — (the sand) goes really high and far compared to what it does on Earth. When it lands it can pick up really large speeds — even with low wind speeds — and splash a whole bunch of other particles to keep the process going," Jasper Kok, with the Earth and Atmospheric Sciences department at Cornell University, told Discovery News. This research has strong implications for the understanding of erosion processes on the Red Planet's surface and for future astronauts getting caught in a Martian sandstorm, presumably."
Privacy

Submission + - UK Government Backtracks on Black Box Snooping (slashdot.org)

Submitted by
judgecorp
judgecorp writes: "On the day the so-called snooper's charter was included in proposed UK legislation, as part of the Queen's Speech, it has emerged that the government is already backtracking on the controversial idea of making ISPs install black boxes to collect traffic and pass it to the authorities. The bill is not yet in a draft form, and TechWeek has learnt there is a lot of maneouvring behind the scenes,"

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