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Hugh Pickens writes:

Pat Garofalo writes in an op-ed in US News & World Report that with the recent drop in oil prices, there's something policymakers can do that will offset at least some of the negative effects of the currently low prices, while also removing a constant thorn in the side of American transportation and infrastructure policy: Raise the gas tax. The current 18.4 cent per gallon [federal] gas tax has not been raised since 1993, making it about 11 cents per gallon today, in constant dollars. Plus, as fuel efficiency has gotten better and Americans have started driving less, the tax has naturally raised less revenue anyway. And that's a problem because the tax fills the Highway Trust Fund, which is, not to put too fine a point on it, broke so that in recent years Congress has had to patch it time and time again to fill the gap. According to the Tax Policy Center's Howard Gleckman, if Congress doesn't make a move, "it will fumble one of those rare opportunities when the economic and policy stars align almost perfectly." The increase can be phased in slowly, a few cents per month, perhaps, so that the price of gas doesn't jump overnight. When prices eventually do creep back up thanks to economic factors, hopefully the tax will hardly be noticed.

Consumers are already starting to buy the sort of gas-guzzling vehicles, including Hummers, that had been going out of style as gas prices rose; that's bad for both the environment and consumers, because gas prices are inevitably going to increase again. According to data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, taxes last year, even before the current drop in prices, made up 12 percent of the cost of a gallon of gasoline, down from 28 percent in 2000. And compared to other developed countries, US gas taxes are pretty much a joke. While we're at it, an even better idea, as a recent report from the Urban Institute makes clear, would be indexing the gas tax to inflation (pdf), so this problem doesn't consistently arise. "The status quo simply isn't sustainable, from an infrastructure or environmental perspective," concludes Garofalo. "So raise the gas tax now; someday down the line, it will look like a brilliant move."

tt1616195 writes:

One of the most powerful and easily understood explanations of why the NSA's massive surveillance over-reach threatens the integrity and security of regular, law-abiding Americans is the story of how the FBI tried to use its cache of surveillance to silence Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The National Archives has just released an uncensored copy of the letter, "You Are Done," that was sent to King. The New York Times has an analysis from the researcher who uncovered the letter that puts the story into both historical and modern context.

An image of the original letter does not seem to be available on the National Archives web site, so here is a paywall-free copy hosted at Gawker.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

I have a pretty solid connection that has been sitting unused most of the time I'm not home. So I started thinking it would be a good deed to keep seeding torrent files of interesting projects. I already have a Raspberry Pi that's always on (since its my local DNS/DHCP server) so it was just a matter of installing a torrent daemon with a web interface.

My question is, what torrents would the SN community advise me to seed? Of course, I'm talking about content which does not infringe copyright terms. So far I am seeding ISO images for Linux Mint (Cinnamon and Mate), Xubuntu 14.04 and NOOBs (for the RaspberryPi) but I'm thinking there is a lot of other cool stuff that deserves more seeding. Do you know any?

gewg_ writes:

Softpedia reports

Valve tasked LunarG with improving the Intel drivers [for Linux], which are lagging a little bit behind the competition, at least in terms of graphics. Some of the latest Intel processors are pretty powerful and you would expect them to be able to perform much better, at least as well as on Windows, but there was a problem.

The guys from LunarG worked on a piece of software called GlassyMesa, which drastically improved Intel's shader compiler stack. They also made a number of improvements in the past few months, but none of these changes was reflected in the driver's performance. This led them to believe that there had to be a bottleneck somewhere along the line.

"We started to suspect there was a bigger bottleneck masking the improvements, and sure enough we were able to generate a test program that showed a huge performance issue with how the hardware samplers were working as compared to the OpenGL driver running under windows. Something was slowing down the samplers on Linux, and we were determined to find out what," wrote the devs on their blog.

They did all sorts of testing, but they don't have access to the way the hardware is set up. Therefore, they sent the test program to Intel and the engineers found the problem and corrected it. As you can imagine, the people at Intel didn't say anything about what they actually corrected.

In any case, LunarG also published some of the improvements they saw, and one of them is a 20% increase in game framerate.

• Left4Dead2 with frames that have hordes of zombies we've seen an increase of 17-25%
• Counter-Strike GO: 16-20%
• Lightsmark increased on a GT2 by 60% (HD4600) 4770

A kernel patch is required to make all these improvements available to users. It's not clear whether it will be available in Linux kernel 3.18 or 3.19, but it's coming. It also means that the kernel patch will be backported to the SteamOS kernel as well.

Rashek writes:

During the opening keynote of AWS re:Invent 2014 Amazon's SVP Andy Jassy unveiled a new service, dubbed Amazon Aurora, arguing that traditional database software isn't serving customers' needs in a cloud-centric world.

Aurora is MySQL-compatible and, it is claimed, can providing 5x the performance of MySQL for 1/10 the price of Oracle. There are no up-front costs to start using Aurora, and running it on one of AWS's R3 large instances costs $0.29 per hour on a pay-as-you-go basis.

Is this another 'cloud' hype story, or have Amazon actually identified a niche in the market for their new product?

AnonTechie writes:

Why Hyping Cyber Threats is Counterproductive
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2014/11/why_hyping_cybe.html

For many austerity-hit Western countries, the defence budget has been a prime target for significant cuts. Nowhere has this been more apparent than in the United States. Yet one element of the Pentagon’s budget continues to grow: cyber. High-profile security breaches at the corporate level and reports of cyber-espionage at the national level seemingly justify the vast sums involved in ensuring cyber-security. However, Robert M Lee and Thomas Rid argue that ‘cyber-angst’ is damaging – and self-serving. In this article, they list thirteen reasons why such cyber-security hype is counterproductive.

[Paper]: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/03071847.2014.969932

AnonTechie writes:

Officials with the Nokia Sensing X Challenge have announced the second grand prize winner in their competition—DNA Medicine Institute (DMI) has won for its cutting edge medical testing device, the rHEALTH X. The team has received $525,000 in prize money and an enormous amount of publicity and prestige.

The Reusable Handheld Electrolyte and Lab Technology for Humans (rHEALTH) X is a portable handheld device that can currently conduct up to 22 lab tests (up to the FDA gold standard) from a single drop of blood. In accepting the award, representatives with DMI said that while winning the prize is great, their real objective is to bring modern medicine to the billions of people who currently have little access to medical care.

The lab tests done by the X run the gamut, from tox screening, to looking for signals in the blood that indicate diseases, to discovering the presence of viruses, such as flu or Ebola. To allow for testing with such a small device, the researchers developed new technology to test blood samples–it relies on nanotechnology and optics. The testing surface is seeded with many nano-sized test strips, each of which mix with and soak up material found in the blood. Each strip is then lined up and passed in front of a laser which is used to determine what material is in it. Findings are stored and displayed, allowing non-medically trained people to make their own diagnoses. The device also comes with a Bluetooth enabled patch to be applied to the skin which can provide respiration, heart rate etc. to a person on their smartphone.

http://phys.org/news/2014-11-dmi-nokia-handheld-medical-device.html

[More Info]: http://sensing.xprize.org/press-release/dmi-wins-nokia-sensing-xchallenge-sensor-runs-hundreds-of-lab-tests-single

AnonTechie writes:

A United Nations commission is meeting in Geneva, Switzerland today to begin discussions on placing controls on the development of weapons systems that can target and kill without the intervention of humans, the New York Times reports. The discussions come a year after a UN Human Rights Council report called for a ban (pdf) on “Lethal autonomous robotics” and as some scientists express concerns that artificially intelligent weapons could potentially make the wrong decisions about who to kill.

SpaceX and Tesla founder Elon Musk recently called artificial intelligence potentially more dangerous than nuclear weapons.

Peter Asaro, the cofounder of the International Committee for Robot Arms Control (ICRAC), told the Times, “Our concern is with how the targets are determined, and more importantly, who determines them—are these human-designated targets? Or are these systems automatically deciding what is a target?”

Intelligent weapons systems are intended to reduce the risk to both innocent bystanders and friendly troops, focusing their lethality on carefully—albeit artificially—chosen targets. The technology in development now could allow unmanned aircraft and missile systems to avoid and evade detection, identify a specific target from among a clutter of others, and destroy it without communicating with the humans who launched them.

AnonTechie writes:

Sometimes a “good enough” military technology can achieve victory over better military technologies. Such a fact probably gave very little comfort to the five-man crews of U.S. Sherman tanks who faced an uphill battle against more powerful German tanks during World War II. British tank crews gave Sherman tanks the unflattering nickname “Ronson” — a grim reference to the Ronson cigarette lighter’s ad slogan “lights first every time” and the unfortunate fact that Sherman tanks often burned after taking just one hit. But that did not stop the U.S. from supplying tens of thousands of Sherman tanks to U.S., British, Canadian and other Allied forces, tipping the scales against the smaller numbers of elite German tanks on World War II battlefields.

The armchair historian debate over the Sherman’s war legacy could blaze up once more with the new war film “Fury”, starring actor Brad Pitt as a U.S. tank commander leading a five-man Sherman crew deep within Germany in the closing days of World War II. Some historians and military history enthusiasts still scoff at the capabilities of Sherman tanks when compared with the German Panther and Tiger tanks that carried both more armor and more firepower. But the U.S. strategy of mass-producing a reliable tank in large numbers should not be underestimated, according to the book “Armored Thunderbolt: The U.S. Army Sherman in World War II” by Steven Zaloga, a military historian and senior analyst at the Teal Group Corporation. The tale of the Sherman tank’s road to victory represents a history lesson with implications for the future of warfare.

“In battle, quantity has a quality all its own,” Zaloga writes. “Warfare in the industrial age requires a careful balance between quality and quantity.”

“Overwhelming adversaries through greater numbers is a viable strategy for technology competition, and was used successfully by the United States in World War II,” writes Paul Scharre, a fellow at CNAS, in a preview for the new report titled “Robotics on the Battlefield Part II: The Coming Swarm.” ( http://www.cnas.org/sites/default/files/publications-pdf/CNAS_TheComingSwarm_Scharre.pdf )

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/lovesick-cyborg/2014/10/16/good-enough-us-tanks-won-wwii/#5465

AnonTechie writes with an article from ScienceDaily:

The "surfactant" chemicals found in samples of fracking fluid collected in five states were no more toxic than substances commonly found in homes, according to a first-of-its-kind analysis by researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder.

Fracking fluid is largely composed of water and sand, but oil and gas companies also add a variety of other chemicals, including anti-bacterial agents, corrosion inhibitors and surfactants. Surfactants reduce the surface tension between water and oil, allowing for more oil to be extracted from porous rock underground.

In a new study published in the journal Analytical Chemistry, the research team identified the surfactants found in fracking fluid samples from Colorado, Louisiana, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Texas. The results showed that the chemicals found in the fluid samples were also commonly found in everyday products, from toothpaste to laxatives to detergent to ice cream.

[Abstract]: http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/ac502163k

[Source]: http://www.colorado.edu/news/releases/2014/11/12/major-class-fracking-chemicals-no-more-toxic-common-household-substances

DECbot writes:

Whether you're running systemd happily or begrudgingly, it's best if you disable systemd-resolved as your DNS resolver for the time being. Reported today at seclists is a new DNS cache poisoning bug in systemd-resolved.

At its simplest, an attacker triggers a query to a domain he controls via SMTP or SSH-login. Upon receipt of the question, he can just add any answer he wants to have cached to the legit answer he provides for the query, e.g. providing two answer RR's: One for the question asked and one for a question that has never been asked - even if the DNS server is not authoritative for this domain.

Systemd-resolved accepts both answers and caches them. There are no reports as to the affected versions or how widespread the problem may be. Comments over at Hacker News suggests that it might not be widespread, most users would still be running the backported 208-stable while the DNS resolver was committed in 213 and considered fairly complete in 216, but that is if they enabled systemd-resolved in /etc/nsswitch.config.

gewg_ writes:

El Reg reports:

The vulnerability (CVE-2014-6332) rated a critical score of 9.3 in all versions of Windows and was described as a rare "unicorn-like" bug in Internet Explorer-dependent code that opens avenues for man in the middle attacks.

The bug bypasses Redmond's lauded Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit along with Enhanced Protected Mode sandbox in the flagship browser and was patched today some six months after it was reported, [IBM security expert Robert] Freeman said.

"This complex vulnerability is a rare, 'unicorn-like' bug [that can be used by an attacker for drive-by attacks to reliably run code remotely and take over the user's machine," Freeman said.

"In this case, the buggy code is at least 19 years old and has been remotely exploitable for the past 18 years

"In some respects, this vulnerability has been sitting in plain sight for a long time despite many other bugs being discovered and patched in the same Windows library (OleAut32)."

An Anonymous Coward and Kunasou writes with an article from Ars Technica:

Earlier this year, Microsoft open sourced a big chunk of .NET, publishing its new compiler, Roslyn, and many .NET libraries under the Apache license. Today, the company took that same open sourcing effort a great deal further. Microsoft announced that its full server .NET stack, including the just-in-time compiler and runtime and the core class libraries that all .NET software depends on, will all be open sourced.

The code will be hosted on GitHub and published under a permissive MIT-style license.

With this release, Microsoft wants to make sure that the .NET stack is fully functional and production quality on both Linux and OS X. The company is working with the Mono community to make sure that this platform is "enterprise-ready."

Not sure I'd want a port of .NET but perhaps we'll see some improvements to WINE with this available codebase.

Additionally, Microsoft announced a partnership with Xamarin for Visual Studio 2015 with support for iOS, Android and Windows, allowing to use one tool for all. This will impact Xamarin tools as well, making easier to install them from Visual Studio.

tonyPick writes:

Mentalfloss has a collection of chemical reaction videos, with explanations of the processes involved.

Each minute, a whopping 100 hours worth of videos are uploaded to YouTube—and a small, yet endlessly fascinating number of those are chemical reaction videos. To explain what exactly is happening in some of these videos we reached out to an expert at the American Chemical Society, John M. Malin, Ph.D, to let us in on some of these awesome chemistry secrets.

This has some overlap with the content from the previous story on burning NH4Cr2O7 With HgSCN, together with a bunch of additional experiments.

AnonTechie writes:

The story of the British Army on the Western Front during the First World War is waiting to be discovered in 1.5 million pages of unit war diaries. We need your help to reveal the stories of those who fought in the global conflict that shaped the world we live in today.

Become a Citizen Historian and help Imperial War Museums and The National Archives reveal the story of the British Army on the Western Front during the First World War.

http://www.operationwardiary.org/#/