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What was highest label on your first car speedometer?

  • 80 mph
  • 88 mph
  • 100 mph
  • 120 mph
  • 150 mph
  • it was in kph like civilized countries use you insensitive clod
  • Other (please specify in comments)

[ Results | Polls ]
Comments:48 | Votes:108

posted by janrinok on Wednesday April 23 2014, @11:35PM   Printer-friendly
from the wanted-one-inactive-individual-to-watch-something-eventually-fall dept.

Two contributors, Adrian Harvey and wirelessduck report, on a long-running experiment that has taken 84 years for someone to observe:

The pitch drop experiment at the University of Queensland has finally been observed producing a drop. Widely considered the world's longest running experiment, it was started 83 years ago in 1927. It was designed to show that even some solid-seeming substances like pitch will flow like a liquid given sufficient time. The flow is about an order of magnitude slower than the continental drift of the ground it's on! The experiment has produced drops before, but only when no one was watching. The last drop in 2000 even had a WebCam set up to watch it but the power went out just when the drop fell.

The pitch has dropped - again. This time, the glimpse of a falling blob of tar, also called pitch, represents the first result for the world's longest-running experiment. Sadly however, the glimpse comes too late for a former custodian, who watched over the experiment for more than half a century and died a year ago. Up-and-running since 1930, the experiment is based at the University of Queensland in Australia and seeks to capture blobs of pitch as they drip down, agonisingly slowly, from their parent bulk.

[Editor's Note: The discrepancy in the dates between the two articles is as they were reported. Obviously, at least 1 is incorrect, but the TFS does not change source material]

posted by NCommander on Wednesday April 23 2014, @10:00PM   Printer-friendly
from the apt-get-install-democracy dept.
I wanted to get feedback on how the community feels about our current name vote. There have been some concerns that we've had relatively small percentage (~10 percent) of members register to vote, and wanted to see if there was something more fundamental going on. As it is currently setup, here's how things are
  • You had to be registered by April 12th to have been included in the name vote; if you received a ballot for submission, you should have gotten ranking ballot
  • We haven't retroactively added in additional users, though it hasn't been clear that there was a hard cutoff
  • The submission phase went until the 19th, and the vote for the name will continue until the 27th
  • The current system is email only (but we are looking at getting something integrated into the website implemented for future votes)

I want to hear your feedback below from everyone. Based on what we get back, we'll roll improvements into future votes, or if need be, reset the vote and do it again; I know a lot of you are active here or at least more involved, so the relatively low turnout is a warning canary for me. Leave your comments below, and expect another story in a few days to see how we're using your comments.

posted by janrinok on Wednesday April 23 2014, @09:39PM   Printer-friendly

CNN reports that the Supreme Court of the US (SCOTUS) by a vote of 6 - 2 has upheld a Michigan law banning the use of racial criteria in college admissions, finding that a lower court did not have the authority to set aside the measure approved in a 2006 referendum supported by 58% of voters. "This case is not about how the debate about racial preferences should be resolved. It is about who may resolve it," wrote Justice Anthony Kennedy. "Michigan voters used the initiative system to bypass public officials who were deemed not responsive to the concerns of a majority of the voters with respect to a policy of granting race-based preferences that raises difficult and delicate issues." Kennedy's core opinion in the Michigan case seems to exalt referenda as a kind of direct democracy that the courts should be particularly reluctant to disturb. This might be a problem for same-sex marriage opponents if a future Supreme Court challenge involves a state law or constitutional amendment enacted by voters. Justice Sonia Sotomayor reacted sharply in disagreeing with the decision in a 58 page dissent. "For members of historically marginalized groups, which rely on the federal courts to protect their constitutional rights, the decision can hardly bolster hope for a vision of democracy (PDF) that preserves for all the right to participate meaningfully and equally in self-government."

The decision was the latest step in a legal and political battle over whether state colleges can use race and gender as a factor in choosing what students to admit. Michigan has said minority enrollment at its flagship university, the University of Michigan, has not gone down since the measure was passed. Civil rights groups dispute those figures and say other states have seen fewer African-American and Hispanic students attending highly competitive schools, especially in graduate level fields like law, medicine, and science. "Today's decision turns back our nation's commitment to racial equality and equal treatment under the law by sanctioning separate and unequal political processes that put undue burdens on students," National Education Association President Dennis Van Roekel said in a statement. "The Supreme Court has made it harder to advocate and, ultimately, achieve equal educational opportunity."

posted by Woods on Wednesday April 23 2014, @08:13PM   Printer-friendly
from the it-only-works-in-movies dept.

NBC reports that as miraculous as it was that a 16-year-old California boy was able to hitch a ride from San Jose to Hawaii and survive, it isn't the first time a wheel-well stowaway has lived to tell about it.

An article from NPR states:

The FAA says that since 1947 there have been 105 people who have tried to surreptitiously travel in plane landing gear world-wide on 94 flights with a survival rate of about 25 percent. But the agency adds that the actual numbers are probably higher, as some survivors may have escaped unnoticed, and bodies could fall into the ocean undetected. Except for the occasional happy ending, hiding in the landing gear of a aircraft as it soars miles above the Earth is generally a losing proposition.

According to a study titled "Survival at High Altitudes: Wheel-Well Passengers" (PDF) by FAA/Wright State University:

At 20,000 feet the temperature experienced by a stowaway would be -13 F, at 30,000 it would be -45 in the wheel well and at 40,000 feet, it can plunge to a deadly -85 F. "You're dealing with an incredibly harsh environment," says aviation and security expert Anthony Roman. "Temperatures can reach -50 F, and oxygen levels there are barely sustainable for life." Even if a strong-bodied individual is lucky enough to stand the cold and the lack of oxygen, there's still the issue of falling out of the plane. "It's almost impossible not to get thrown out when the gear opens," says Roman.

So how do the lucky one-in-four survive? The answer, surprisingly, is that a few factors of human physiology are at play: As the aircraft climbs, the body enters a state of hypoxia-that is, it lacks oxygen-and the person passes out. At the same time, the frigid temperatures cause a state of hypothermia, which preserves the nervous system. "It's similar to a young kid who falls to the bottom of an icy lake," says Roman "And two hours later he survives, because he was so cold."

posted by janrinok on Wednesday April 23 2014, @06:47PM   Printer-friendly
from the they-want-know-everything-about-everybody dept.

Computer scientists have developed a new face recognition algorithm called GaussianFace which outperforms humans for the first time in challenging real-world conditions. The algorithm normalize each face into 150 x 120 pixels by transforming it based on five features: the position of both eyes, the nose and the two corners of the mouth. The accuracy is 98.52% compared to human accuracy at 97.53%. There's a database at umass.edu that captures much of the face variation by labeling faces in the wild which have 13 000 faces of almost 6000 public figures collected from web.

posted by janrinok on Wednesday April 23 2014, @05:19PM   Printer-friendly
from the social-media-at-its-finest dept.

A BBC story reports that the New York Police Department attempted to improve their image by asking the public to tweet photos of themselves with an officer. The response was a lot of images of potential police aggression.

posted by janrinok on Wednesday April 23 2014, @03:49PM   Printer-friendly
from the blame-Canada dept.

Americans (especially the poorly educated and those without travel experience) like to thump their chests and shout "We're Number One" a lot - despite their country ranking poorly in basic quality of life measures e.g. behind Costa Rica and Slovenia in life expectancy and behind Cuba and Croatia in infant mortality rates.

Well, another one has slipped their grasp. An article in Castanet references an analysis by NYTimes [paywalled] which notes that the country with the highest median income (the point where the area under the curve to the right and the area to the left are equal) used to be the USA but that Canada has now taken the lead.

Significant factors for this slip include US CxOs making bucketloads of money and US corporations being increasingly parsimonious with people who actually perform the labor.

posted by janrinok on Wednesday April 23 2014, @02:08PM   Printer-friendly
from the back-up-again dept.

People have been having trouble accessing a certain news site, formerly run by nerds for about the past 12 hours. Reports from at least 50 people verify this, so it is not just you.

What better place to discuss the great /. outtage of 2014! Does anyone have news on what actually happened? That site does not appear to have an explanation forthcoming.

[Editors's Note: at 14:02 UTC the site was back up again and appeared to be working as normal. We have had our own problems with outages in few months since our inception so I will not take any personal pleasure in their technical hiccup. We will have to see if our readership went up at the same time as /. was offline.]

posted by janrinok on Wednesday April 23 2014, @12:36PM   Printer-friendly
from the introducing-more-bugs-than-it-cures? dept.

Ars Technica has a story about the effort of some OpenBSD developers to clean up the OpenSSL codebase as part of a fork they've named LibreSSL. From the article:

The decision to fork OpenSSL is bound to be controversial given that OpenSSL powers hundreds of thousands of Web servers. When asked why he wanted to start over instead of helping to make OpenSSL better, de Raadt said the existing code is too much of a mess. "Our group removed half of the OpenSSL source tree in a week. It was discarded leftovers," de Raadt told Ars in an e-mail. "The Open Source model depends [on] people being able to read the code. It depends on clarity. That is not a clear code base, because their community does not appear to care about clarity. Obviously, when such cruft builds up, there is a cultural gap. I did not make this decision... in our larger development group, it made itself."

When asked what he meant by OpenSSL containing "discarded leftovers," de Raadt said there were "Thousands of lines of VMS support. Thousands of lines of ancient WIN32 support. Nowadays, Windows has POSIX-like APIs and does not need something special for sockets. Thousands of lines of FIPS support, which downgrade ciphers almost automatically." There were also "thousands of lines of APIs that the OpenSSL group intended to deprecate 12 years or so ago and [are] still left alone."

De Raadt told ZDNet that his team has removed 90,000 lines of C code. "Even after all those changes, the codebase is still API compatible," he said. "Our entire ports tree (8,700 applications) continue to compile and work after all these changes."

posted by janrinok on Wednesday April 23 2014, @10:54AM   Printer-friendly
from the honesty-the-best-policy dept.

A YouGov poll has found that by two to one, British people say it was good, not bad, for society that newspapers reported the materials given to them by Edward Snowden. From the article:

On Tuesday The Guardian and US newspaper The Washington Post were jointly awarded the Pulitzer Prize - the biggest prize in US journalism - for their reporting on NSA surveillance. Edward Snowden, the former CIA contractor who famously leaked a trove of documents to newspapers detailing US and even UK government surveillance activities, immediately called the award a "vindication" even as a US congressman called the decision a "disgrace." In the UK, former defence secretary Liam Fox called Snowden a "self-publicising narcissist" who committed treason.

posted by n1 on Wednesday April 23 2014, @09:28AM   Printer-friendly
from the checksum-did-not-match dept.

It has been discovered that Microsoft OneDrive for Business has been altering files being uploaded by users, injecting additional data into the files.

So what this means is that people who use OneDrive for Business or SharePoint need to be very careful with what they sync with it, especially those handling third party data due to confidentiality issues. For example, if an employee needs to transfer confidential files that absolutely must not be touched between its laptop and PC and decides to do so through a synced folder in OneDrive for Business, those files will end up being inadvertently modified without the user's knowledge. This could have severe consequences if let's say a file is used as evidence in a court case. How do you prove that the company did not intentionally modify it?

posted by n1 on Wednesday April 23 2014, @07:22AM   Printer-friendly
from the drone-wars-coming-soon dept.

The FAA has announced that its first of six drone tests site is operational. FAA boasts that they're ahead of schedule, but is facing criticism about being late to the game and losing the drone battle.

Now, EquuSearch, a Texas-based organization that builds and flies drones to search for missing people in the US, has filed a lawsuit has petitioned the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit to set aside the FAA's order to halt its use of drones.

posted by n1 on Wednesday April 23 2014, @05:20AM   Printer-friendly
from the who-can-you-trust-now dept.

Ars Technica has an article on investigations performed by Science magazine and the Ottawa Citizen.

Peer-reviewed scientific papers are the gold standard for research. Although the review system has its limitations, it ostensibly ensures that some qualified individuals have looked over the science of the paper and found that it's solid. But lately there have been a number of cases that raise questions about just how reliable at least some of that research is.

The first issue was highlighted by a couple of sting operations performed by Science magazine and the Ottawa Citizen. In both cases, a staff writer made up some obviously incoherent research. In the Citizen's example, the writer randomly merged plagiarized material from previously published papers in geology and hematology. The sting paper's graphs came out of a separate paper on Mars, while its references came from one on wine chemistry. Neither the named author nor the institution he ostensibly worked at existed.

Unfortunately, by attempting to highlight the problem of lax review procedures, some computer scientists may have exacerbated the problem. Suspecting that some reviewers weren't doing a thorough job on some conference papers, they put together a random gibberish paper generator for anyone who wanted to test whether reviewers were paying attention. Unfortunately, that software has since been used to get 120 pieces of gibberish published.

posted by n1 on Wednesday April 23 2014, @03:47AM   Printer-friendly
from the getting-lost-in-space dept.

Phil Plait, writer of the Bad Astronomy blog on Slate recently reminded us all that you do not need giant telescopes, computer controlled auto-tracking rigs, or satellites to take great pictures of the sky.

From the article:

Armed with just a camera, a tripod, and a little foreknowledge, astronomer Bill Longo took this image from his observatory outside Toronto. It's a stack of eight 30-second exposures for a total of four minutes using a Canon T3 camera and a 6.5mm lens.

It shows the night sky facing west, with the bright winter stars of Auriga and Gemini setting, with the amazingly bright planet Jupiter punctuating the twins' belly. And that bright streak seemingly bisecting Jupiter? Why, that's just the International Space Station moving across the sky, its 100-meter length reflecting sunlight down to Earth.

And if you look very carefully, just under the ISS trail is a much fainter one: That's the SpaceX Dragon capsule chasing down the station. This picture was taken on April 19, 2014, just hours before the private spaceship met up with ISS and was successfully grappled to its berthing point.

How often do you look up into space and see something amazing?

posted by janrinok on Wednesday April 23 2014, @02:15AM   Printer-friendly
from the sometimes-I-despair dept.

NewsOK reports that the Oklahoma legislature has passed a bill that allows regulated utilities to apply to the Oklahoma Corporation Commission to charge a higher base rate to customers who generate solar and wind energy and send their excess power back into the grid reversing a 1977 law that forbade utilities to charge extra to solar users. "Renewable energy fed back into the grid is ultimately doing utility companies a service," says John Aziz. "Solar generates in the daytime, when demand for electricity is highest, thereby alleviating pressure during peak demand."

The state's major electric utilities backed the bill but couldn't provide figures on how much customers already using distributed generation are getting subsidized by other customers. Oklahoma Gas and Electric Co. and Public Service Co. of Oklahoma have about 1.3 million electric customers in the state. They have about 500 customers using distributed generation. Kathleen O'Shea, OG&E spokeswoman, said few distributed generation customers want to sever their ties to the grid. "If there's something wrong with their panel or it's really cloudy, they need our electricity, and it's going to be there for them," O'Shea said. "We just want to make sure they're paying their fair amount of that maintenance cost." The prospect of widespread adoption of rooftop solar worries many utilities. A report last year by the industry's research group, the Edison Electric Institute, warns of the risks posed by rooftop solar (PDF). "When customers have the opportunity to reduce their use of a product or find another provider of such service, utility earnings growth is threatened," the report said. "As this threat to growth becomes more evident, investors will become less attracted to investments in the utility sector."

posted by janrinok on Wednesday April 23 2014, @12:35AM   Printer-friendly
from the a-robot-told-me-so-it-must-be-true dept.

We all know the story. The moment that computers with their lightning-quick processing power and interlinked systems gain sentience - it's judgment day. But would that really happen? Here are some psychological reasons why digital super-intelligence isn't going to be evil intelligence.