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lhsi links us to an article:

Scientists have named a new species of horned dinosaur (ceratopsian) based on fossils collected from Montana in the United States and Alberta, Canada. Mercuriceratops (mer-cure-E-sare-ah-tops) gemini was approximately 6 meters (20 feet) long and weighed more than 2 tons. It lived about 77 million years ago during the Late Cretaceous Period. Research describing the new species is published online in the journal Naturwissenschaften.

Mercuriceratops (Mercuri + ceratops) means "Mercury horned-face," referring to the wing-like ornamentation on its head that resembles the wings on the helmet of the Roman god, Mercury. The name "gemini" refers to the almost identical twin specimens found in north central Montana and the UNESCO World Heritage Site, Dinosaur Provincial Park, in Alberta, Canada. Mercuriceratops had a parrot-like beak and probably had two long brow horns above its eyes. It was a plant-eating dinosaur.

kaszz writes:

US Hospitals will now mine your credit card data and use algorithms that may result in a call from your doctor if you've let your gym membership lapse, made a habit of ordering out for fast food or begin shopping at plus-sized stores. Because some hospitals are starting to use detailed consumer data to create profiles on current and potential patients to identify those most likely to get sick, so the hospitals can intervene before they do.

Acxiom Corp. (ACXM) and LexisNexis are two of the largest data brokers who collect such information on individuals. They say their data are supposed to be used only for marketing, not for medical purposes or to be included in medical records. Both sell to health insurers, but say it's to help those companies offer better services to members. Credit card usage may now affect health care premiums.

AnonTechie writes:

The next story comes from Australia, where a self-described pastafarian went about mocking the rules set up for firearm ID pictures by wearing a colander on his head. Guy Albon convinced the photographer that he was a member of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster so that he could wear the colander - a symbol of the satirical religious movement whose members refer to themselves as Pastafarians. The 30-year-old said he exploited a law that allows headgear to be worn in photos.

'The law stipulates you can have something on your head,' he said. 'You have to have your entire face uncovered and if the headgear is being worn it has to have some religious significance. I thought 'I've got this one in the bag - it was an absolute scream.'

Officers came to his home, where they seized two handguns and two rifles and ordered him to see a psychiatrist. According to Mr Albon, the psychiatrist immediately declared him as sane and 'laughed it off'.

AnonTechie writes:

Not sure how many people here are into Amateur Astronomy. This is a neat project if it works as advertised.

Amateur astronomers worried that Big Astronomy would render them obsolete can relax: the kinds of techniques used to create huge virtual telescopes are now being applied to the huge collections of astro-pics published on the Internet. As keen astronomy-watchers know, the effective aperture of telescopes can be expanded by linking multiple instruments in different parts of the world. In radio-astronomy, this is the principle behind the Square Kilometer Array, and the same techniques can be applied to optical telescopes.

What's different about the proposal in this paper at Arxiv is that its authors, led by Dustin Lang of Carnegie Mellon University (along with David Hogg of New York University and Bernhard Scholkopf of the Max Planck Institute in Germany) is that they want to correlate and combine the vast store of astronomy images that amateurs publish on the Internet.

Example image here

The top row shows some of the input images Lang used to create the final composite. The final tone-mapped consensus image, bottom right, shows debris from the galactic cataclysm that isn't visible in any of the individual source images.

This is a question for the GNU/Linux users in the Soylent community.

Linux is being used in some areas of my company, and having knowledge of it would be beneficial to my employment. While some commands are familiar from previous dabbling with Linux (ps -ef, top, su), I never really obtained a good understanding of how to manage an installation of it on my PC. It would be really helpful to get a solid base understanding of how to manage a Linux system. My criteria for learning include understanding the directory structure and why things need to go in the places they are in. Other than purchasing a copy of Running Linux, or going through a Linux from Scratch install; what does the community think is the best way for a newbie to go from a cursory understanding of Linux to real in-depth knowledge these days (Classes, RTFM, forums)? It would be great to be have this knowledge should an opportunity present itself in the future.

Thank you for your input.

kc99 writes:

The death of software patents in the United States has been greatly exaggerated. In a memo to Patent Examiners, the United States Patent And Trademark Office (USPTO) has released preliminary examination guidelines in view of the U.S. Supreme Court's recent opinion in Alice v. CLS Bank. The guidelines, which have been provided in a post on the patent blog Patently-O [PDF], specify that:

Alice Corp. neither creates a per se excluded category of subject matter, such as software or business methods, nor imposes any special requirements for eligibility of software or business methods.

The memo notes that "the basic inquiries to determine subject matter eligibility remain the same" and guide Examiners that they must "first determine whether the claim is directed to one of the four statutory categories of invention, i.e., process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter. If the claim does not fall within one of the categories, reject the claim as being directed to non-statutory subject matter". Then, "if the claim does fall within one of the statutory categories, determine whether the claim is directed to a judicial exception (i.e., law of nature, natural phenomenon, and abstract idea) using Part I of [a] two-part analysis... and, if so, determine whether the claim is a patent-eligible application of an exception using Part 2 [of the two-part analysis]".

More details of the proposed analysis are provided in the guidelines linked to above.

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Subscription can either be bought, or gifted to anyone. From the feedback we got, $20 USD per year (approximately $1.66 USD per month) would roughly be the right "sweet spot" for people.

AnonTechie writes:

Most people will bury a time capsule, but a group of brilliant young minds will surely find something more exciting to do with it like sending it off to Mars. That's exactly what a team of students from MIT, Duke University, Stanford University and the University of Connecticut plan to do. They're encoding a digital time capsule with audio clips, videos, photos and messages to send to the red planet on a Cubesat-based spacecraft. But, that's just a small part of what they're trying to accomplish (even if the project's called Time Capsule to Mars): they're also using the opportunity to try out a number of new technologies for space travel. After all, in the words of mission director Emily Briere, the project aims "to remind people we go to space to push forward humanity".

Project Website: http://www.timecapsuletomars.com/

AnonTechie writes:

Events in Iraq seem to have taken US by surprise, despite the fact that the NSA is totally unencumbered, both legally and politically, in the intelligence it can gather there. Even if the seeming surprise is an illusion, even if the NSA anticipated the fall of cities to Islamic militants, knowing didn't stop it. That isn't a knock on the NSA. It's a statement about the limits of signals intelligence. The NSA didn't stop the underwear bomber or the Times Square bomber or the shoe bomber either. That's not a knock on the NSA. They can't know everything. And if they could, that would be a lot more dangerous than terrorism.

An analysis of 225 terrorism cases inside the United States since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks has concluded that the bulk collection of phone records by the National Security Agency "has had no discernible impact on preventing acts of terrorism".

An anonymous coward writes:

The Supreme Court has unanimously decided that police will require warrants in order to conduct searches of cell phones. The decision comes with strong language that recognizes the fact that cell phones carry extensive personal and private data.

John Roberts, the Chief Justice, said that "... a cell phone search would typically expose to the government far more than the most exhaustive search of a house: A phone not only contains in digital form many sensitive records previously found in the home; it also contains a broad array of private information never found in a home in any form". He also said the ruling will make things more difficult for police, but that that was a price worth paying, saying "privacy comes at a cost".

The EFF calls this a groundbreaking decision. Lots of coverage is available, including articles in the Washington Post and NY Times.

AnonTechie writes:

From The New York Times Bits blog:

Before a valuable employee quits a job, how does a company make sure a bit of his or her magic stays behind?

Some companies try to capture it on video, by recording lectures given by some of their best employees. The knowledge can then be shared more easily with new workers for years to come. And even if these star employees are not leaving, recording them can help share their expertise an engineer's guidance on how a custom piece of software works, say, or a salesperson's insight into how best to work with certain customers with a much broader audience inside a company. Making these video presentations useful is the tricky part. A company in Seattle, Panopto, has developed a service to help clients capture video presentations. It won't transform presenters into thespians, but it does make their lectures more digestible.

I wonder if employees would get a similar benefit from recording their employers...

lhsi writes:

A recent apology was made by the BBC after it accidentally sent out test data to a large number of subscribers to their News app.

Does anyone have any interesting/amusing stories of test data accidentally being used outside of testing?

Eponymous Coward writes:

Over the last year, there's been a lot of writing about Edward Snowden. Most people have discussed either the question of (a) whether domestic NSA surveillance in the US is appropriate and whether it is breaking US law, or (b) the purely political consequences of international surveillance. There's been relatively little discussion of whether there is a problem in principle with international surveillance, and most of what there has been has concerned the question of whether or not privacy is a universal human right. But the recent Der Spiegel revelations combined with some earlier material points to a narrower but very troubling set of problems for liberal democracies.

Cross national cooperation between intelligence services has exploded post-September 11. This cooperation is not only outside the public space but, very often, isn't well known to politicians either. Such cooperation in turn means that intelligence services are in practice able to evade national controls on the things that they do or do not do, directly weakening democracy.

Rune of Doom writes:

Only two years after its launch, one of Russia's early warning satellites has been officially declared non-operational. With the loss of Cosmos-2479 Russia no longer has any early warning satellites in geo-synchronoous orbit. The two remaining early warning satellites are in HEO, and provide much more limited coverage.

Russia does have two older types of missile detection satellites in highly elliptical orbits, meaning that location relative to the Earth often changes. In order to provide constant coverage with these types of satellites, Russia would need to maintain six of them in space at any given moment. As a result, Moscow can now only monitor U.S. missile launches for three hours a day.

AnonTechie writes:

New Scientist reports:

Current disarmament treaties limit the number of nuclear warheads that a country has deployed and ready to use. Future treaties may also place limits on stored ones, but a country could mock up a fake storage center and destroy its missiles for show while keeping its real stockpiles intact.

Radiation scans can verify that a non-deployed warhead is genuine, but would also reveal secret details, making nations unwilling to consent. "An expert can look at the radiation signature and essentially reverse engineer the design," says Alexander Glaser of Princeton University. For a way to verify that a warhead marked for destruction is real without spilling a state's secrets, Glaser and his colleagues turned to a mathematical method that can prove something is true without revealing why it's true.

Cryptographers dreamed up such "zero-knowledge proofs" in the 1980s. To understand how they work, imagine two cups holding the same number of marbles, x. To prove to someone that both contain x marbles, you first create two buckets, each with 100-minus-x marbles: these are called "inverses" of the cups. A verifier then mixes each original cup with a randomly chosen bucket: if, and only if, the two cups really were the same will the marbles in each of the final, mixed buckets consistently total 100. Yet the verifier never finds out what x was. (http://www.boazbarak.org/Papers/nuclear-zk.pdf)[PDF]

kaszz and Hugh Pickens both write:

Businessman, philanthropist and musician Yank Barry and the Global Village Champions Foundation are suing four Wikipedia editors for defamation, claiming they have maliciously conspired to keep Barry's Wikipedia biography unduly negative. The Daily Dot article includes a copy of the legal brief and quotes Barry as saying,"My page was so ridiculously false and made be sound like a terrible person and people believed it causing deals to fall through", says Barry. "I finally had enough".

In the case filed in Ventura County's Superior Court Barry says Richard Fife, Nate Gertler, Ethan Urbanik, and John Nagle conspired to tarnish his name. The case focuses on VitaPro foods which Barry founded in the late 1980s to create textured vegetable protein aimed at cutting down on worldwide meat consumption. All was going well until the mid-1990s, when Barry was convicted of a kickback scheme involving VitaPro and Texas prisons. At the time Associated Press said that Barry was convicted of bribery, money laundering and conspiracy. However Barry was acquitted in 2005.

One editor "Ganbarreh" states that editor Richard Fife "made a clear statement about his agenda to maintain defamatory material on the subject's page in order to cause financial harm and threaten the subjects' livelihood". Fife admits that it wasn't his "finest wikipedia moment" and that his edit was intended to "prepare for large amounts of edits biased towards the positive to the article". Barry, a philanthropist and member of the legendary band The Kingsmen of "Louie, Louie" fame, says that he tried to resolve many of the issues with his page diplomatically but was ultimately forced to take legal action. The lawsuit says that the Wikipedia editors removed "truthful and verifiable content from the Wikipedia pages pertaining to plaintiffs with the intent and purpose to downplay, minimize, attack or criticize favorable content about the plaintiffs."

Hugh Pickens writes:

Lucian Constantin writes at PC World that with the increasing number of 64-bit systems, experts say the incentive is growing for attackers to invest in methods of bypassing defenses like the PatchGuard kernel patching protection and the digital signature enforcement for drivers. "These protections have certainly increased the cost to build and deploy rootkits on 64-bit platforms," say McAfee researchers but roadblocks set in place by 64-bit systems now appear to be "mere speed bumps for well-organized attackers", who have already found ways to gain entry at the kernel level."

The Secure Boot feature of the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) the BIOS replacement in newer computers-was designed specifically to prevent the installation of bootkits. It works by checking that the boot code inside the MBR is on a pre-approved whitelist and is digitally signed before executing it. However, over the past year security researchers have found several vulnerabilities in UEFI implementations used by many computer manufacturers that can be exploited from inside the OS to disable Secure Boot. Mitre security researcher Corey Kallenberg estimates that Secure Boot can be bypassed on about half of the computers that have the feature enabled. According to Kallenberg, OEMs have started to pay a lot more attention to BIOS security research and have started to react over the past year. "I think we're finally at a place where you'll see OEMs take this more seriously."

freetown writes:

The BBC reports on a pilot project called SkyTran, a kind of two person monorail.

Two-person vehicles will be suspended from elevated magnetic tracks, as an alternative transport method to congested roads, the firm promised.

The system should be up and running by the end of 2015. The firm hopes the test track will prove that the technology works and lead to a commercial version of the network.

The plan is to allow passengers to order a vehicle on their smartphone to meet them at a specific station and then head directly to their destination.

While the technology looks interesting, I'm not sure about the long term commercial prospects of this project.