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MorbidBBQ writes:

The Air Force has confirmed it will be ready to support a Thursday afternoon launch of a classified national security satellite from Cape Canaveral.

The mission first rolled to the Launch Complex 41 pad on March 24. That same day, an electrical short at the eastern range caused a small fire. The fire disabled Air Force tracking radar which enables the destruction of a rocket if it veers off course.

mendax writes:

The New York Times published an article telling many of us what we already knew from the Target payment card system breach, this being hackers are gaining access to systems through "software controlling all kinds of services a company needs".

Hackers in the recent Target payment card breach gained access to the retailer's records through its heating and cooling system. In other cases, hackers have used printers, thermostats and videoconferencing equipment.

patric91 writes:

ScienceDaily.com is reporting on research from Oregon State University (OSU) showing that the electrodes for supercapacitors can be created from common cellulose, from trees, that has the potential to offer much greater cost efficiency and also hints at a method to be examined for the production of other high-tech materials. From the article:

OSU chemists have found that cellulose -- the most abundant organic polymer on Earth and a key component of trees -- can be heated in a furnace in the presence of ammonia, and turned into the building blocks for supercapacitors.

These supercapacitors are extraordinary, high-power energy devices with a wide range of industrial applications, in everything from electronics to automobiles and aviation. But widespread use of them has been held back primarily by cost and the difficulty of producing high-quality carbon electrodes.

The new approach just discovered at Oregon State can produce nitrogen-doped, nanoporous carbon membranes -- the electrodes of a supercapacitor -- at low cost, quickly, in an environmentally benign process. The only byproduct is methane, which could be used immediately as a fuel or for other purposes.

Papas Fritas writes:

Sunday's return of Season 4 of Game of Thrones reminds us that you may have encountered a Stannis Baratheon or Daenerys Targaryen in the workplace as psychologist Elizabeth Neal and executive coach Iain Crossing provide an analysis of the management styles of the Westeros power-grabbers and what they should do to become more effective leaders.

For example, Stannis Baratheon is a blustering leader with powerful allies the kind of person that could be found in junior management or senior operational roles in a family-run or semi-government business with no dedicated HR resources and weak governance. "Stannis has a strong work ethic and is likely to be respected by his subordinates however his need and greed for power allows him to be influenced contrary to his principles," says Crossing. "There certainly are qualities that are promising but there would need to be professional development." Joffrey Baratheon is emotionally unstable, antisocial, immature, unreliable, reckless and irresponsible says Neal, and displays a pattern of pervasive distrust and suspiciousness of others while his narcissism indicates that he is too insecure to change. When facing a Joffrey in the workplace, your best bet is to lodge "complaints with HR and try get him moved on," says Crossing.

Finally there is the one character in Game of Thrones at the top of her game who would make it as a corporate executive just as she is Daenerys Targaryen. The 'mother of dragons' is collaborative and resourceful, a fast learner and highly adaptable to change. According to Neal, Targaryen leads with compassion and "an appropriate amount of maternal instinct while remaining unswayed by emotion." Daenerys is also a risk-taker who has strong beliefs about right and wrong and takes it upon herself to champion her ideals of social justice. "I can't fault her leadership style," says Neal. "That's the kind of leader I would respond to well, personally."

[Editors Note: Author has informed us this writeup has been cross submitted.]

prospectacle writes:

"Mochi" is a user interface language/library that was intended for use on a (now abandoned) version of webOS for phones and tablets. It has now been released as open source under the Apache 2.0 Licence.

From the announcement:

While we don't have any immediate plans to resume our Mochi work, we would be thrilled to see the community pick up where we left off.

The code is available on git, and a wiki is starting to take shape.

If only all abandonware were open-sourced, what a rich world it would be.

lhsi writes:

A poll asked Americans whether they knew where Ukraine was and whether the USA should intervene. The further away the respondent thought it was on a map compared to where it actually is, the more likely they were to support intervention.

Accuracy varies across demographic groups. In general, younger Americans tended to provide more accurate responses than their older counterparts: 27 percent of 18-24 year olds correctly identified Ukraine, compared with 14 percent of 65+ year-olds. Men tended to do better than women, with 20 percent of men correctly identifying Ukraine and 13 percent of women. Interestingly, members of military households were no more likely to correctly locate Ukraine (16.1 percent correct) than members of non-military households (16 percent correct), but self-identified independents (29 percent correct) outperformed both Democrats (14 percent correct) and Republicans (15 percent correct).

wantkitteh writes:

An advisory (link: https://www.openssl.org/news/secadv_20140407.txt ) has been released concerning an implementation bug in several versions of the widely used OpenSSL software.

"A missing bounds check in the handling of the TLS heartbeat extension can be used to reveal up to 64k of memory to a connected client or server. Only 1.0.1 and 1.0.2-beta releases of OpenSSL are affected including 1.0.1f and 1.0.2-beta1."

The advisory states that 1.0.1 users can resolve the issue by upgrading to 1.0.1g or recompiling using the -DOPENSSL_NO_HEARTBEATS switch. Users of 1.0.2 will need to wait for the next beta release to get this closed.

This website (link: http://heartbleed.com/ ) has been created to spread accurate details of the bug, which was determined to have been seen in releases of OpenSSL dating back to December 2011. Many websites and services are affected, including Mojang's decision to completely shut down the account authentication servers for Minecraft while the patch is being put in place.

Yog-Yogguth writes:

On the 8th of April 2014 the highest court of the EU, the Court of Justice (ECJ), has declared the EU Data Retention Directive invalid as reported by several sources including Reuters.

The court's statement is available from their site as "Judgment of the Court of Justice in Joined Cases C-293/12, C-594/12 Digital Rights Ireland" in PDF (size: 170 KB), and is available in several languages.

From the the ECJ press release:

The Court of Justice declares the Data Retention Directive to be invalid

It entails a wide-ranging and particularly serious interference with the fundamental rights to respect for private life and to the protection of personal data, without that interference being limited to what is strictly necessary

Angry Jesus writes:

About a month ago a study (abstract) was published about how a father's age affects the psychiatric health of his children. Due to a misleading press release about the study's results, it was widely reported that children born to father over 45 years of age were 3.5 times more likely to have autism, 13 times more likely to have ADHD, 2 times more likely to have a psychotic disorder, 25 times more likely to have bipolar disorder, and 2.5 times more likely to have suicidal behavior or a substance abuse problem.

But statistical analysis is hard and non-intuitive, particularly for people who aren't expert statisticians. It turns out that the real-life rates of psychiatric problems are significantly less, putting this most recent study's results in line with those of previous related studies.

Blackmoore informs us:

Ben Casselman at FiveThirtyEight has an article about the US economy discussing the recovery from the recent recession. It appears the job market still leaves a lot to be desired.

Labor Secretary: Long-term Unemployment Keeps Me up at Night

The plodding recovery in the U.S. job market isn't doing much to help the long-term unemployed. No matter whose numbers that you want to look at the recovery from the Great recession has been anaemic. The Long-term unemployed and the number of people dropped from the unemployment numbers as "no longer looking" have been creeping higher and higher, while job growth is painfully slow, and wages are stagnant if not dipping below the 2008 level.

But is it the same in the technology field? Both hardware and software seem to be doing reasonably well worldwide - certainly there has been no fall in the demand for smartphones which is expected to continue well into 2017, despite the significant fall in the demand for desktops. Laptops are still selling reasonably well in Europe. Is the problem that all the manufacturing is now done in the Far East, and software is subcontracted to the Indian sub-continent? Many of us work in the tech industry - what are your experiences? Do they follow the forecasts or have you seen an improvement during the last 12 months or so? Does it make you ask the question Is This as good as it gets?

Non Sequor writes:

Ezra Klein at Vox has an article on how politics makes us stupid. Research has shown that when political beliefs come into play, increased intelligence and availability of information may only improve our ability to persuade people who already agree with us, at the expense of correctly interpreting the information. How does democracy move forward when informed debate can't resolve disputes involving clashing values and priorities?

mendax writes:

Yes, our friends beat us to it already but it still it worth noting that today is the 50th anniversary of the initial release of the IBM System/360 series of mainframes, perhaps the a revolution in computer technology only surpassed by the PC revolution of the 1980's. El Reg has a fantastic article commemorating the event.

But there is more! In 2004, the Computer History Museum hosted a talk featuring, among others, Fred Brooks, one of the leads of the IBM 360 development team and the author of The Mythical Man Month . The talk is nearly two hours long but well worth watching. Despite its age, nearly everything said is still relevant today.

lhsi writes:

Virtual reality exposure therapy (VRET) has been shown to be effective in treatment of anxiety disorders. A recent proof-of-concept pilot study aimed at examining levels of the sense of presence and anxiety during exposure to virtual environments, which involved social interaction with virtual humans and using different virtual reality displays.

"The findings suggest that virtual social interactions can be successfully applied in VRET to enhance sense of presence and anxiety. Furthermore, our results indicate that one-screen projection-based displays can successfully activate levels of anxiety in social virtual environments. The outcome can prove helpful in using low-cost projection-based virtual reality environments for treating individuals with social phobia."

fliptop writes:

I just received an email from Dyn.com, explaining that their free hostname program will be ending in 30 days. An excerpt from the email:

For the last 15 years, all of us at Dyn have taken pride in offering you and millions of others a free version of our Dynamic DNS Pro product. What was originally a product built for a small group of users has blossomed into an exciting technology used around the world.

That is why with mixed emotions we are notifying you that in 30 days, we will be ending our free hostname program. This change in the business will allow us to invest in our customer support teams, Internet infrastructure, and platform security so that we can continue to strive to deliver an exceptional customer experience for our paying customers.

Any users of their free service considering an upgrade to the paid VIP account? If not, will you migrate to another free dynamic DNS service?

prospectacle writes:

The city of Leamington, Ontario is going to require all of its registered voters to cast online votes in its October Municipal elections. The reasons given are cost, convenience, accessibility, and being environmentally friendly.

The company responsible for the technology behind the poll, "Scytl", said in a media release it ensures "security and full anonymity for its voters," with savings on election costs. On the one hand, no voting system (paper or otherwise) is 100% secure or immune from multiple voting, lost ballots, fraudulent ballots, etc. On the other hand some are more vulnerable than others.

What would it take for you to trust an online voting system? It seems that, at a minimum, the software and hardware specifications and source-code should be open for anyone to scrutinise.