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tonyPick writes:

gigwise has a transcript of the 2014 John Peel Lecture, delivered this time by Iggy Pop.

The Lecture is named after legendary UK Music presenter John Peel, who died in 2004, and the BBC has the talk available for download.

And (for those of you under 20) Iggy Pop is the former frontman of Influential band the Stooges, and a massively successful solo artist.

It's a great talk, and worth the time to read it all.

There's also a much shorter Guardian Summary available.

cafebabe writes:

A while back, the BBC News reported that:

Often it's so innocent. It might even be relevant initially. A quick Wikipedia fact-check, perhaps. But before long you've been sucked into the wormhole. Link after link, page after page. When you finally snap out of it you've lost a precious hour and you're reading about the intricacies of 16th Century Prussian politics. If this sounds familiar, you're not alone.

"We're really entering the golden age of procrastination," says Dr Piers Steel, who has conducted surveys and written The Procrastination Equation. "One in four [people] would describe themselves as a chronic procrastinator, [while] over half the population would describe themselves as frequent," he says. "In the last 40 years there's been about a 300-400% growth in chronic procrastination," which is when it becomes particularly self-defeating, Steel explains. UK smartphone users check their phone 221 times a day on average, a recent survey found. Checking emails and social media cost 36% of respondents more than an hour each day in productivity, another survey found.

The article gives some extreme measures to stop procrastination including Victor Hugo's valet hiding clothes or Greek orator Demosthenes shaving one side of his face to discourage any outdoors procrastination. Software to discourage procrastination is also mentioned.

lhsi writes:

http://www.bmj.com/content/349/bmj.g5452

The UK government has been considering different policy options to regulate the price of alcohol in England and Wales. Increasing the price of alcohol has been shown to be effective in reducing both consumption levels and harms, and minimum pricing policies reduce total alcohol consumption, shift consumption away from high strength beverages, and reduce alcohol related admissions to hospital. Also considered was a “ban on below cost selling,” which would target drinks that are sold so cheaply that their price is below the cost of production and retail.

A study has looked into both options and found that minimum pricing would have a significantly greater effect.

The findings suggest that the effects of a ban on below cost selling would be small: a −0.08% change in consumption and a central estimate for the reduction in deaths of just 14 per year at full effect. We have compared this with the minimum unit price policy originally proposed by the prime minister in the government’s alcohol strategy and find that such a policy would have an estimated 40-50-fold greater effect than a ban on below cost selling.

The proportion of the market affected by the two policies differs hugely, with just 0.7% of all alcohol units sold likely to be affected under a ban on below cost selling compared with 23.2% of units for a 45p minimum unit price

Below cost selling would save an estimated 14 deaths and 500 admissions to hospital annually, compared with 624 deaths and 23 700 admissions for a 45p minimum unit price

Hugh Pickens writes:

Bloomberg reports that Canadians have come up with an all-Canadian route to get oil-sands crude from Alberta to a refinery in Saint John, New Brunswick that will give Canada access, via supertanker, to the same Louisiana and Texas refineries Keystone was meant to supply. The pipeline, built by Energy East, will cost $10.7 billion and could be up and running by 2018. Its 4,600-kilometer path, taking advantage of a vast length of existing and underused natural gas pipeline, would wend through six provinces and four time zones. "It would be Keystone on steroids, more than twice as long and carrying a third more crude," writes Bloomberg. "And if you’re a fed-up Canadian, like Prime Minister Stephen Harper, there’s a bonus: Obama can’t do a single thing about it." So confident is TransCanada Corp., the chief backer of both Keystone and Energy East, of success that Alex Pourbaix, the executive in charge, spoke of the cross-Canada line as virtually a done deal. “With one project,” Energy East will give Alberta’s oil sands not only an outlet to “eastern Canadian markets but to global markets,” says Pourbaix. “And we’ve done so at scale, with a 1.1 million barrel per day pipeline, which will go a long way to removing the specter of those big differentials for many years to come.”

The pipeline will also prove a blow to environmentalists who have made central to the anti-Keystone arguments the concept that if Keystone can be stopped, most of that polluting heavy crude will stay in the ground. With 168 billion proven barrels of oil, though, Canada’s oil sands represent the third-largest oil reserves in the world, and that oil is likely to find its way to shore one way or another. “It’s always been clear that denying it or slowing Keystone wasn’t going to stop the flow of Canadian oil,” says Michael Levi. What Energy East means for the Keystone XL pipeline remains to be seen. “Maybe this will be a wake up call to President Obama and U.S. policymakers to say ‘Hmmm we’re going to get shut out of not just the energy, but all those jobs that are going to go into building that pipeline. Now they are all going to go into Canada," says Aaron Task. “This is all about ‘You snooze, you lose.’”

Thexalon writes:

The New York Times has coverage on the phenomenon of Developer Bootcamps, that claim to do in a matter of a couple of months what used to take at least a couple of years for an associate's degree. These cram courses are apparently getting about a 75% job placement rate.

Have any Soylentils either gone through these programs, or worked with others who have? If so, what are your experiences?

JNCF writes:

Defense One reports:

The United States should be conducting more disruptive cyber attacks against nations like Russia, according to Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Mich., chairman of the House Intelligence Committee.

“I don’t think we are using all of our cyber-capability to disrupt” actors in Russia targeting U.S. interests, he said at The Washington Post’s cybersecurity summit on Thursday.

[...]

But Rep. Rogers cautioned that the private sector networks, which comprise 85 percent of the networks in the United States, are “not prepared to handle” even present-day hacks from nation states, much less a coordinated retaliatory back and forth of extremely sophisticated attacks, the sort of volleying that might be characterized as cyber war.

“If your [chief intelligence officer] says he’s ready for what’s coming, find a new CIO,” he said.

frojack writes:

ArsTechnica as well as many other sites are reporting that 7 million older Dropbox accounts have been leaked, and posted on line.

Dropbox says these were leaked by "other services" (third parties that Dropbox users have authorized to use their Dropbox account).
So far, no word on what that "other service" may have been.

Dropbox is aware of what was posted, and have expired all of the passwords on these accounts.

This points out once again the risks of signing up for a secure cloud account and then authorizing other applications to use that account such as for backup or upload of images.

Dropbox relies heavily on SSL to protect data in transit, it does not encrypt data in your computer or device before sending it. This is just ONE of the reasons why Edward Snowden said just days ago to Get rid of Dropbox.

There are reports of yet another SSL flaw about to be revealed.

Update: Here is a blog summary and full report (pdf) of the vulnerability. In essence, an attacker can perform a man-in-the-middle attack on the network connection and force a TLS connection to downgrade to SSL 3.0 — "an obsolete and insecure protocol." See also: CVE-2014-3566.

The Mighty Buzzard writes:

John Timmer over at Ars Technica has for us this little tidbit. Apparently offshore oil rigs are, hands down, the most productive fisheries on the planet.

To measure the productivity, they relied on an annual survey performed with a remotely operated vehicle. Different sites were visited for at least five years, some as many as 15, with fish abundance and species assessed visually. Total biomass was also estimated from this data, and the change in biomass between years was then normalized to the area of seafloor covered by the survey.

The numbers were staggering. The most productive places in the scientific literature (a reef in Tahiti and an estuary in Louisiana) saw annual productivity of about 75 grams for each square meter. The lowest of the oil rigs came in at 105 grams per square meter per year, and the highest as nearly 900. The authors were even being conservative by not including any fish more than a couple of meters from the structure, which ignores the entire water column enclosed by the rig's legs.

gewg_ writes:

Martin Brinkmann at gHacks gives several tips

Udemy is an online learning platform that brings together students and instructors from all over the world. Some courses are available for free while others are paid courses that may cost several hundred Dollars.

You do need to create a free account to use some of the site's functionality, for instance to sign up for free courses.

Video courses consist of a fixed number of recorded lectures that students can watch as often as they like. Courses may also include labs in which students need to complete tasks on their own.

Supplementary materials may be provided as well, and there is a discussion platform that students can use to discuss lessons or ask questions.

How good are those courses? There is no definitive answer to that question as it depends largely on the course itself. There are however certain methods that you can use to find out about a course before you subscribe to it or pay money for it.

Among Martin's tips is this gem:

Third-party sites offer coupons for Udemy courses. A deal on DroidLife for example [convinced me to] sign up for several Android development courses for $39 in total (instead of $503). While I would not have signed up for all courses, it was cheaper than the courses that I was interested in. You find other deals such as The JavaScript Bundle, MySQL5, or iOS 8 to name a few. You can save hundreds of Dollars if you search for these deals or coupons.

gewg_ writes:

Center for American Progress reports:

The future of fungus-free crops may depend not on fungicides, but on a few fuzzy insects, if a method used by Australian researchers can be successfully replicated.

The researchers are using bees as "flying doctors"[1] to deliver a biological control agent that prevents a debilitating fungus to the blossoms of the cherry trees they pollinate. The agent - which contains spores of another fungus that prevents brown rot, a blight that's prevalent among cherries and other stone fruit - is sprinkled into dispensers on the front of the bees' hives. The spores cling to the bees when they leave the hive, and then rub off on the flowers the bees land on to gather nectar and pollen.

[...]"The bees deliver control on target, every day," [Katja Hogendoorn, project leader for the bees-as-fungus-fighters project] said.[2] "There is no spray drift or run-off into the environment, less use of heavy equipment, water, labor and fuel."

[...]In the past, chemicals have been used to try to curb the mold, but the pesticides are only effective if sprayed onto flowers that are already open. Since flowers on a strawberry plant don't all open at once, the pesticide has to be applied repeatedly in order to be truly effective. Bees, on the other hand, can carry the mold-preventing fungus to the open flowers they visit over time, making them an efficient and environmentally-friendly way to prevent the mold.

[...]One-third of all food and beverages consumed in the U.S. are dependent on some sort of pollination, according to the USDA, and major crops such as almonds and squash depend heavily on bees for pollination.[...]Bee hives have even been used in parts of Africa to keep elephants from getting into crops: when farmers placed beehives around their fields, the elephants steered clear.

[1] What an ugly page without their background image. Designer fail.
[2] Don't you just hate pages that auto-refresh needlessly?

freetown writes:

Scientists at the Nanyang Technology University claim to have developed ultra-fast charging batteries that can be recharged up to 70% in two minutes and have a lifespan of 20 years. No figures on charge cycles, no information on over-charging and whatever else you might fancy except for the use a new gel material made from the use of titanium oxide.

tt1748207 writes:

Over the telephone, in jail and online, a new digital bounty is being harvested: the human voice.

Businesses and governments around the world increasingly are turning to voice biometrics, or voiceprints, to pay pensions, collect taxes, track criminals and replace passwords.

"We sometimes call it the invisible biometric," said Mike Goldgof, an executive at Madrid-based AGNITiO, one of about 10 leading companies in the field.

Those companies have helped enter more than 65 million voiceprints into corporate and government databases, according to Associated Press interviews with dozens of industry representatives and records requests in the United States, Europe and elsewhere.

Recently, the FBI claims to have identified the masked man in an ISIS beheading video known as 'Jihadi John' based on voiceprint analysis. It remains to be seen if they actually got it right, although we may never know since they have declined to identify him publicly.

Leebert writes:

The Register has an article about an SSL 3.0 vulnerability which is set to be released shortly. It appears that the vulnerability is currently embargoed to allow vendors to coordinate patches. El Reg is inferring from this embargo that the vulnerability will be one of some significance, à la Heartbleed.

The article is exceptionally light on details or substance, and it's not even entirely clear as to when this vulnerability will be announced: The URL says "nasty_ssl_30_vulnerability_to_drop_tomorrow", but the article is dated today (October 14) and the wording seems to imply the details will be released at around noon PDT (19:00 UTC) today.

Perhaps if and when this submission finds its way to the front page, there will be more details available and an update will be warranted.

frojack writes:

It is been widely reported that the CDC is circling the wagons and backing away from their confident predictions of days ago that Ebola would be easily managed in US hospitals. The near cockiness that Dr. Thomas Frieden, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention exhibited upon the first news Thomas Eric Duncan's infection has dramatically tempered in the face of news media coverage of a nurses infection, and a meeting with President Obama.

Other sources indicate that Frieden also stated that there might be more health care workers infected at the Dallas hospital, and he urged the public to brace for more bad news:

This represents a dramatic change in focus, and and a backing away from earlier statements that "virtually any hospital in the country that can do isolation can do isolation for Ebola", and that "U.S. hospitals know how to stop the spread of Ebola, even though it is difficult."

Some of the medical elite are also breaking rank with the CDC Director. Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said in an interview with ABC that officials should consider sending Ebola patients only to a few "containment" hospitals. "We haven't provided caregivers with a national training program. We haven't provided them with the necessary experts that have actually worked in hospitals with Ebola," said Dr. Gavin McGregor-Skinner of Penn State University.

Still others are complaining that there is no central authority for response to deadly outbreaks.

The finger pointing is just starting, and there appears to be a long convoy of buses on the horizon, more than enough to throw everyone under.

tonyPick writes:

From SpaceNews is a report that Europe is planning to allow terrestrial transmission in the C Band spectrum.

The C Band is portion of the RF spectrum used by a variety of satellite communication systems worlwide, and although definitions vary slightly between various organizations:

However there are real concerns that allowing operation of terrestrial service, such as broadband wireless access, in this range will cause interference.

Although the frequencies and places have change this appears to be a similar issue to the whole Lightsquared saga, played out in Europe.