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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:45 | Votes:98

posted by janrinok on Sunday March 01 2015, @11:27PM   Printer-friendly
from the ..it's-always-who-you-know dept.

Two former high-level managers at Microsoft have sued the company, claiming their terminations were in retaliation for raising questions about a well-connected subordinate's expense reports. The subordinate, who is not named in the complaint, allegedly submitted expenses in excess of $22,000 while entertaining Microsoft business partners at South Korean "hostesses bars".

The complaint (embedded in the GeekWire story) provides details. Eric Engstrom and Ted Stockwell both worked for Microsoft throughout the 1990's (the complaint credits Engstrom as being one of the three inventors of the DirectX API), left the company in 1998 or 1999, and returned in 2008 to work in Microsoft's Online Services Division, which was headed by Qi Lu. Engstrom was hired to lead Bing Mobile Program Management; Engstrom hired Stockwell to run a new organization called Bing Mobile International.

Engstrom and Stockwell allegedly created the blueprint for the "Bing as a Platform" (BaaP) initiative within Microsoft in 2010. Shortly thereafter, the unnamed employee ("John Doe") was loaned to Stockwell's fledgling organization by Harry Shum, EVP of Technology and Research; Doe was known to have personal connections to an important Microsoft business partner in Korea. John Doe's expense reports from Korea were submitted to Stockwell for approval.

More down the page...

From the complaint:

Stockwell soon realized that the expense reports Doe had filed were an entire order of magnitude greater than what Stockwell initially understood. Stockwell notified Engstrom, his manager, about the size of the expenses he had approved and told him that he believed Doe was “expensing hostess bars” and potentially prostitution.

The suspicions about the expense reports were reported to Microsoft Human Resources, as well as to Engstrom's superior. An internal investigation was initiated, but an HR representative asked Stockwell to drop the complaint against Doe and to raise his performance rating. Stockwell effectively declined to do so.

Microsoft retained John Doe. The company raised Doe’s performance rating without Stockwell or Engstrom’s involvement, which is a significant departure from company practice. It also permitted Doe to transfer out of the division. Stockwell was told that Harry Shum had stepped in to dismiss the charges against Doe.

Management of the Bing as a Platform initiative that Engstrom and Stockwell developed was taken away from the pair. Following their removal from the initiative they developed, their former managers released and publicly touted the immense potential of Bing as a Platform. Qi Lu, the President of the Online Services Division, was quoted in the press as saying, “Bing as a platform presents the universal platform.”

Both Engstrom and Stockwell received poor ratings in subsequent annual performances reviews, and both were essentially demoted and given lesser responsibilities. In addition, Engstrom was demoted from Level 70 to Level 69.

In 2012, Engstrom and Stockwell started another initiative within Microsoft, codenamed "Brazil", which was an attempt to compete with Amazon in the eCommerce space. According to the complaint, the project was killed by David Ku, a key lieutenant of Qi Lu's (both came to Microsoft from Yahoo!). Engstrom and Stockwell were both terminated in December 2013, along with the few remaining members of their team.

posted by janrinok on Sunday March 01 2015, @08:29PM   Printer-friendly
from the be-careful-where-you-sit dept.

Reported at Techradar is the news that swedish flat-pack furniture company Ikea will incorporate wireless charging into some new product ranges.

Starting April, Ikea will begin to roll out a new series of furniture including bedside tablets, desks and lamps that will double up as charging spots using the Qi standard.

The Qi Charging standard is a publicly available standard for charging via electromagnetic induction (up to 5W), and claims to be "the most widely deployed wireless power standard".

Additional coverage available at The Telegraph and International Business Times. A press release is also available at CNBC.

posted by LaminatorX on Sunday March 01 2015, @06:11PM   Printer-friendly
from the Eat-Pray-Love dept.

[Submitted via IRC]

Many of you will know about Markov chains. Named after Andrey Markov, [they] are mathematical systems that hop from one "state" (a situation or set of values) to another. For example, if you made a Markov chain model of a baby's behavior, you might include "playing," "eating", "sleeping," and "crying" as states, which together with other behaviors could form a 'state space': a list of all possible states. In addition, on top of the state space, a Markov chain tells you the probability of hopping, or "transitioning," from one state to any other state---e.g., the chance that a baby currently playing will fall asleep in the next five minutes without crying first.

Victor Powell and Lewis Lehe have produced a 'visual explanation' of how to produce Markov chains showing how they are used in a variety of disciplines; they are useful to computer scientists and engineers and many others. As they point out:

In the hands of meteorologists, ecologists, computer scientists, financial engineers and other people who need to model big phenomena, Markov chains can get to be quite large and powerful.

If you've not seen Markov chains in use before, or perhaps your knowledge is just a little rusty, then take a look at the link and see it they can be of any use to you.

posted by LaminatorX on Sunday March 01 2015, @03:03PM   Printer-friendly
from the Whatever-happened-to-three-way-redundant-connectivity? dept.

Someone knocked out much of Arizona's Internet using detailed knowledge of the location of a single crtitical data line, some digging equipment, and a hacksaw. Freebeacon.com has the story:

Cellphone, Internet, and telephone services across half of Arizona went dark on Wednesday after vandals sliced a sensitive fiber optic cable

In addition to the question of "why?", this event also highlights the fragility of modern US infrastructure and the consequences of such fragility for both private individuals and government agencies alike.

posted by janrinok on Sunday March 01 2015, @09:18AM   Printer-friendly
from the why-else-would-they-hide-it? dept.

WaPo signals one - of the many - provisions which should cause concern in the Transpacific Partnership treaty.

The United States is in the final stages of negotiating the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a massive free-trade agreement with Mexico, Canada, Japan, Singapore and seven other countries. Who will benefit from the TPP? American workers? Consumers? Small businesses? Taxpayers? Or the biggest multinational corporations in the world?

...

One strong hint is buried in the fine print of the closely guarded draft. The provision, an increasingly common feature of trade agreements, is called “Investor-State Dispute Settlement,” or ISDS. The name may sound mild, but don’t be fooled. ISDS would allow foreign companies to challenge U.S. laws — and potentially to pick up huge payouts from taxpayers — without ever stepping foot in a U.S. court.

--- more after the break ---

Here’s how it would work. Imagine that the United States bans a toxic chemical that is often added to gasoline because of its health and environmental consequences. If a foreign company that makes the toxic chemical opposes the law, it would normally have to challenge it in a U.S. court. But with ISDS, the company could skip the U.S. courts and go before an international panel of arbitrators. If the company won, the ruling couldn’t be challenged in U.S. courts, and the arbitration panel could require American taxpayers to cough up millions — and even billions — of dollars in damages.

If that seems shocking, buckle your seat belt. ISDS could lead to gigantic fines, but it wouldn’t employ independent judges. Instead, highly paid corporate lawyers would go back and forth between representing corporations one day and sitting in judgment the next. Maybe that makes sense in an arbitration between two corporations, but not in cases between corporations and governments. If you’re a lawyer looking to maintain or attract high-paying corporate clients, how likely are you to rule against those corporations when it’s your turn in the judge’s seat?

If the tilt toward giant corporations wasn’t clear enough, consider who would get to use this special court: only international investors, which are, by and large, big corporations. So if a Vietnamese company with U.S. operations wanted to challenge an increase in the U.S. minimum wage, it could use ISDS. But if an American labor union believed Vietnam was allowing Vietnamese companies to pay slave wages in violation of trade commitments, the union would have to make its case in the Vietnamese courts.

posted by janrinok on Sunday March 01 2015, @06:02AM   Printer-friendly
from the it-just-is dept.

Tia Ghose of LiveScience writes:

If a new theory turns out to be true, the universe was never a singularity or an infinitely small and infinitely dense point of matter. In fact, the universe may have no beginning at all.

At issue is that the two most dominant theories of physics, quantum mechanics and general relativity, can't be reconciled.

The new equations are just one way to reconcile quantum mechanics and general relativity. For instance, a part of string theory known as string gas cosmology predicts that the universe once had a long-lasting static phase, while other theories predict there was once a cosmic "bounce," where the universe first contracted until it reached a very small size, then began expanding, Brandenberg said.

posted by janrinok on Sunday March 01 2015, @03:09AM   Printer-friendly
from the Russian-democracy-in-action dept.

The Guardian (and pretty much every other news outlet on the web) is reporting that Boris Nemtsov, former deputy Russian Prime Minister and critic of President Vladimir Putin has been killed in a drive-by shooting near the Kremlin, sustaining four gunshot wounds to the chest and dying at the scene. Nemtsov was due to lead a major opposition rally on Sunday. A spokesman for Putin has stated that the President will take personal control of the investigation into the killing, claiming it was "a pure provocation." A police spokesman has stated that a manhunt is under way.

Nemtsov was first deputy Prime Minister during Boris Yeltsin's presidency between March 1997 and April 1998. He wrote a number of reports linking Putin to corruption, spoke out against government inefficiency, criticized the Kremlin's policy towards Ukraine, and asserted that billions of dollars earmarked for spending on the Winter Olympics in his home town of Sochi had been embezzled. Several hours prior to his death, he promoted Sunday's opposition rally in Moscow on Ekho Moskvy radio. When he asked Alexei Venediktov, the editor-in-chief of the station, if he had any concerns regarding his appearance, Venediktov tweeted "It wasn’t me who needed to be scared."

While it's been a decade since a Russian opposition politician has been murdered in the capital, there has been no shortage of tactics used to suppress dissent against Putin's regime. Another organiser of the upcoming rally, Alexei Navalny, was jailed on 19 February for 15 days after handing out leaflets in public promoting the rally. Navalny was previously convicted of defrauding two firms of 30million roubles ($462k US) and given a suspended sentence in December, a move that critics say was an attempt to stifle political dissent.

posted by janrinok on Saturday February 28 2015, @11:59PM   Printer-friendly
from the the-earth-has-a-gas-problem dept.

Remember that story about the Siberian mystery crater last June? Turns out there are six more and, as Siberian Times reports, there could be dozens of others which popped out recently enough to allow satellite comparisons between before and after.

Respected Moscow scientist Professor Vasily Bogoyavlensky has called for 'urgent' investigation of the new phenomenon amid safety fears.

Until now, only three large craters were known about in northern Russia with several scientific sources speculating last year that heating from above the surface due to unusually warm climatic conditions, and from below, due to geological fault lines, led to a huge release of gas hydrates, so causing the formation of these craters in Arctic regions.

Two of the newly-discovered large craters - also known as funnels to scientists - have turned into lakes, revealed Professor Bogoyavlensky, deputy director of the Moscow-based Oil and Gas Research Institute, part of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

Examination using satellite images has helped Russian experts understand that the craters are more widespread than was first realised, with one large hole surrounded by as many as 20 mini-craters, The Siberian Times can reveal.

-- more after the break ---

Professor Bogoyavlensky told The Siberian Times: 'One of the most interesting objects here is the crater that we mark as B2, located 10 kilometres to the south of Bovanenkovo. On the satellite image you can see that it is one big lake surrounded by more than 20 small craters filled with water.

'Studying the satellite images we found out that initially there were no craters nor a lake. Some craters appeared, then more. Then, I suppose that the craters filled with water and turned to several lakes, then merged into one large lake, 50 by 100 metres in diameter.

[...]

Not only the new craters constantly forming on Yamal show that the process of gas emission is ongoing actively.

Professor Bogoyavlensky shows the picture of one of the Yamal lakes, taken by him from the helicopter and points on the whitish haze on its surface.

He commented: 'This haze that you see on the surface shows that gas seeps that go from the bottom of the lake to the surface. We call this process 'degassing'.

To appease your apocalyptic taste over the weekend, have a refresher in: clathrate gun hypothesis, limnic eruption (with Lake Nyos disaster and the management of Lake Kivu), other gas discharges like mazuku (CO2 discharge - with the Mammoth Mountain one which kills lots of trees by CO2 suffocation and killed three members of the ski patrol in 2006)

posted by janrinok on Saturday February 28 2015, @09:55PM   Printer-friendly
from the ssshh-'they'-will-hear-you dept.

In the field of cryptography, a secretly planted “backdoor” that allows eavesdropping on communications is usually a subject of paranoia and dread. But that doesn’t mean cryptographers don’t appreciate the art of skilled cyphersabotage. Now one group of crypto experts has published an appraisal of different methods of weakening crypto systems, and the lesson is that some backdoors are clearly better than others—in stealth, deniability, and even in protecting the victims’ privacy from spies other than the backdoor’s creator.

In a paper titled “Surreptitiously Weakening Cryptographic Systems,” well-known cryptographer and author Bruce Schneier and researchers from the Universities of Wisconsin and Washington take the spy’s view to the problem of crypto design: What kind of built-in backdoor surveillance works best ?

http://www.wired.com/2015/02/sabotage-encryption-software-get-caught/

[Paper]: http://www.scribd.com/doc/257059894/Surreptitiously-Weakening-Cryptographic-Systems

posted by LaminatorX on Saturday February 28 2015, @07:51PM   Printer-friendly
from the Do-mine-eyes-deceive-me? dept.

Color scientists already have a word for it: Dressgate. Now the Washington Post reports that a puzzling thing happened on Thursday night consuming millions — perhaps tens of millions — across the planet and trending on Twitter ahead of even Jihadi John’s identification. The problem was this: Roughly three-fourths of people swore that this dress was white and gold, according to BuzzFeed polling but everyone else said it's dress was blue. Others said the dress could actually change colors. So what's going on? According to the NYT our eyes are able to assign fixed colors to objects under widely different lighting conditions. This ability is called color constancy. But the photograph doesn’t give many clues about the ambient light in the room. Is the background bright and the dress in shadow? Or is the whole room bright and all the colors are washed out? If you think the dress is in shadow, your brain may remove the blue cast and perceive the dress as being white and gold. If you think the dress is being washed out by bright light, your brain may perceive the dress as a darker blue and black.

According to Beau Lotto, the brain is doing something remarkable and that's why people are so fascinated by this dress. “It’s entertaining two realities that are mutually exclusive. It’s seeing one reality, but knowing there’s another reality. So you’re becoming an observer of yourself. You’re having tremendous insight into what it is to be human. And that’s the basis of imagination.” As usual xkcd has the final word.

posted by LaminatorX on Saturday February 28 2015, @05:49PM   Printer-friendly
from the paging-Doctor-Freeman dept.

Ars Technica reports:

For decades after Linux's early '90s debut, even the hardest of hardcore boosters for the open source operating system had to admit that it couldn't really compete in one important area of software: gaming.

Now, more than a year into the SteamOS era (measuring from that beta launch), the nascent Linux gaming community is cautiously optimistic about the promise of a viable PC gaming market that doesn't rely on a Microsoft OS. Despite technical and business problems that continue to get in the way, Valve has already transformed gaming on Linux from "practically nothing" to "definitely something" and could be on the verge of making it much more than that.

For those already running Linux on their main machines, though, finally having significant gaming options on their platform of choice will continue to be a happy side effect of Valve's still-developing push into this new market. "I do know that in the absolute worst case, the chicken-and-egg problem is solved," Gordon said. "You get people to a platform with games, but games won't come until people are on a platform. Valve being there has clearly given developers the faith to stick their toes in the water right away."

Linux gaming has come a long way. I have a couple hundred games on Steam than run under Linux. (Well, most of them ;) Here's to the next era being freedom oriented from it's foundations. Oculus selling out to FB was a blow, but I think Steam will do it right if only because they have thrown their hat into SteamOS.

"Steam is bringing the best games and user-generated content to exciting new destinations. At GDC 2015, we’ll be giving demos of the refined Steam Controller, new living room devices, and a previously-unannounced SteamVR hardware system."

http://store.steampowered.com/universe/

http://steamcommunity.com/app/250820

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2015/02/23/steamvr-announced/

And because it's related, interesting and open source.

http://osvr.com/

posted by martyb on Saturday February 28 2015, @03:21PM   Printer-friendly
from the not-very-useful—-they'll-just-chill-out dept.

We had two submissions on non-water-based life forms; the study and images are available at: https://cornell.box.com/azotosome

The search for extra-terrestrial life focuses quite heavily on the presence of liquid water. That's because all life on earth depends on water, using it as a medium for all cells, and an ingredient for many biological processes.

Is life without water possible? A chemical engineer and others at Cornell University devised a hypothetical model for life that could instead use liquid methane as its medium, opening more possibilities for simple life on Titan and on other cold moons and planets.

A new type of methane-based, oxygen-free life form that can metabolize and reproduce similar to life on Earth has been modeled by a team of Cornell University researchers.

http://phys.org/news/2015-02-life-saturn-moon-titan.html

posted by janrinok on Saturday February 28 2015, @01:28PM   Printer-friendly
from the with-great-power-comes-great-responsibility dept.

The main reason why the U.S. military can promote global peace is because of the aura of invincibility it gained in World War II, because of the end of the Cold War, and because of its overwhelming military spending and technological advantage. But an aura of invincibility is a dangerous thing. And unfortunately, there are signs of rot.

Today, the U.S. military has fallen under the Bureaucracy Rule. The U.S. has no great power rivals, and thank God for that. Iraq and Afghanistan have not caused an identity crisis for the U.S. military because many senior commanders view these as "freakshow" wars — counterinsurgency wars, not the kind of "real" wars that militaries fight.

What are the signs that an organization has become a bureaucracy?

The first is excessive PowerPoint. Every organization should ban PowerPoint ( http://theweek.com/audio/442552/ban-powerpoint ). But it has become particularly endemic in the military ( http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/27/world/27powerpoint.html?_r=0 ).

The fact that the new Defense secretary has banned PowerPoint from some senior briefings is a step in the right direction ( http://www.forbes.com/sites/pascalemmanuelgobry/2015/02/23/the-war-on-powerpoint-in-the-military-continues/ ).

posted by janrinok on Saturday February 28 2015, @11:24AM   Printer-friendly
from the learning-something-new-every-day dept.

Common Dreams reports

Public schools are outperforming charter schools in Minnesota, in some cases "dramatically," according to a new analysis by the state's Star-Tribune newspaper.

In addition, many charter schools fail to adequately support minority students, close examination of the data revealed.

[...]Education analyst Diane Ravitch notes: "Minnesota was the home of the charter movement, which began with high expectations as a progressive experiment but has turned into a favorite mechanism in many states to promote privatization of public education and to generate profits for charter corporations like Imagine, Charter Schools USA, and K12. Today, charter advocates claim that their privately managed charters will 'save low-income students from failing public schools,' but the Minnesota experience suggests that charters face the same challenges as public schools, which is magnified by high teacher turnover in charter schools."

The findings back up a report (PDF) put out last fall by the Institute on Metropolitan Opportunity at the University of Minnesota Law School, which examined the success and failures of the charter school system in Chicago, Illinois.

That study concluded:

Sadly, the [charter] schools, which on average score lower that the Chicago public schools, have not improved the Chicago school system, but perhaps made it even weaker.

Further, charters, which are even more likely to be single-race schools than the already hyper-segregated Chicago school system, have not increased interracial contact, an often-stated goal of charter systems.

Finally, the fact that Chicago charters use expulsion far more often that public schools deserves further study. In the end, it is unlikely that the Chicago charter school experience provides a model for improving urban education in other big city school districts.

posted by janrinok on Saturday February 28 2015, @09:33AM   Printer-friendly
from the nothing-changes dept.

Despite notable differences in appearance and governance, ancient human settlements functioned in much the same way as modern cities, according to new findings by researchers at the Santa Fe Institute and the University of Colorado Boulder.

Previous research has shown that as modern cities grow in population, so do their efficiencies and productivity. A city's population outpaces its development of urban infrastructure, for example, and its production of goods and services outpaces its population. What's more, these patterns exhibit a surprising degree of mathematical regularity and predictability, a phenomenon called "urban scaling."

But has this always been the case?

http://phys.org/news/2015-02-ancient-modern-cities.html

[Related]: http://www.santafe.edu/news/item/human-social-universals/

[Abstract]: http://www.santafe.edu/research/working-papers/abstract/3f8afbc22a66c776600bfe31f1d01149/

[Working Paper]: http://www.santafe.edu/media/workingpapers/14-11-041.pdf