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Whoever writes:

On refreshing my user page on /., I just received a pop-up informing me that I need a new modem. I don't really need a new modem — it is just that Comcast would like to use my house as a wireless POP, providing WiFi service to anyone with a Comcast login.

Since I have wifi in my house, I have zero interest in providing a location from which Comcast can provide wireless service to all and sundry, so the pop-up was a little annoying.

Nevertheless, the wider issue is Comcast deploying technologies to monitor and modify http: requests on the fly?

Have other Comcast users here seen this?

azrael writes:

Science Daily is reporting on work from Cardiff University researchers to pick up the faint ripples of black hole collisions millions of years ago, known as gravitational waves

When two detectors are switched on in the US next year, the Cardiff team hope their research will help scientists pick up the faint ripples of black hole collisions millions of years ago, known as gravitational waves.

The Cardiff team, which includes postdoctoral researchers, PhD students, and collaborators from universities in Europe and the United States, will work with scientists across the world as they attempt to unravel the origins of the Universe.

See also: http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/news/articles/cardiff-scientists-help-unlock-secrets-of-the-universe-13794.html

tt0077355 writes:

For over a decade, as evidence mounted that Big Pharma influence can lead to all sorts of stupid decisions and harmful outcomes, regulators and medical societies have been reigning in the amazing ways pharmaceutical companiesmarket to doctors.

Nearly gone are the days when drug reps would parade around exam rooms with fancy new pill bottles, when doctors would be flown to Hawaii for medical conferences, and when pens and pads emblazoned with industry logos would be spread around hospitals and clinics.

But, according to a new article in the New England Journal of Medicine, the pharmaceutical industry has simply moved out of clinic and into digital world for much more covert and insidious forms of marketing.

Vox has a summary.

While doctors report that visits from sales representatives have fallen from 77 percent in 2008 to 55 percent last year, drug companies have invested about a quarter of their marketing dollars into digital technologies.

"We do know from traditional marketing tools that their impact can be harmful," said article lead author Dr. Christopher Manz, who works at the department of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. "But this digital marketing today has much more breadth and depth than the previous kinds of marketing. Now it's like having a sales rep in the exam room with you."

gewg_ writes:

via Hack A Day Extreme Repair of a Burnt PCB, xsdb had a catastrophic failure of a printed circuit board in a commercial product and he restored the unit to operation. Burned FR4 is conductive, so any repair requires cutting out that bit. Replacing that void is quite the trick, requiring great patience.

[xsdb] had a real problem. His JBL L8400P 600 watt subwoofer went up in flames – literally. Four of the large capacitors on the board had bulged and leaked. The electrolyte then caused a short in the mains AC section of the board, resulting in a flare up. Thankfully the flames were contained to the amplifier board. [xsdb's] house, possessions, and subwoofer enclosure were all safe. The amplifier board however, had seen better days. Most of us would have cut our losses and bought a new setup. Not [xsdb] he took on the most extreme PCB repair we’ve seen in a long time.

If you ever have a gadget with a similar failure, built by a company that is out of business or otherwise not easily irreplaceable, this guy's effort is worth bookmarking.

Hugh Pickens writes:

Patrick McGeehan writes in the NYT that the image of a pair of window washers clinging to a scaffold dangling outside the 68th floor of 1 World Trade Center have left many wondering why robots can't rub soapy water on glass and wipe it off with a squeegee relieving humans of the risk of injury, or death, from a plunge to the sidewalk? The simple answer, several experts say, is that washing windows is something that machines still cannot do as well as people can. “Building are starting to look like huge sculptures in the sky,” says Craig Caulkins. “A robot can’t maneuver to get around those curves to get into the facets of the building." According to Caulkins robotic cleaning systems tend to leave dirt in the corners of the glass walls that are designed to provide panoramic views from high floors. “If you are a fastidious owner wanting clean, clean windows so you can take advantage of that very expensive view that you bought, the last thing you want to see is that gray area around the rim of the window."

Another reason for the sparse use of robots is that buildings require a lot more maintenance than just window cleaning. Equipment is needed to lower people to repair facades and broken windows, like the one that rescue workers had to cut through with diamond cutters to rescue the window washers. For many years, being a window cleaner in Manhattan was regarded as one of the most dangerous occupations in the world: by 1932, an average of one in every two hundred window cleaners in New York was killed each year.  Now all new union window cleaners now take two hundred and sixteen hours of classroom instruction, three thousand hours of accredited time with an employer and their union makes sure workers follow rigorous safety protocols. In all, there are about 700 scaffolds for window washing on buildings in New York City, says union representative Gerard McEneaney. His members are willing to do the work because it pays well: as much $26.89 an hour plus benefits. Many of the window cleaners are immigrants from South America. “They’re fearless guys, fearless workers."

Whoever writes:

"The US Marshals Service is running cell tower spoofers on small planes. These devices are called "dirtboxes". The devices are made by Boeing Co. and can collect information from tens of thousands of cellphones in a single flight. When asked about the program, the US Justice department could neither confirm nor deny the reports."

Also covered at Ars Technica , which refers to a report published in The Wall Street Journal .

tonyPick writes:

The journal Nature has a story on new information obtained by re-processing Voyager2 data.

This reprocessing has uncovered an unusual and unexpected rotational pattern in the atmosphere, which could give clues on the internal structure of the planet.

The story is also covered at Universe Today, and University of Arizona News.

There is a vast amount of raw data publicly available from NASA's National Space Science Data Center, and from the UAnews link:

gewg_ writes:

Martin Brinkmann at gHacks reports

Electrolysis [(a.k.a. e10s a.k.a. multi-process Firefox)] has been in development for a long time but has been prioritized only recently by Mozilla (again) after not being in focus for some time.

[...]The core idea behind the new architecture is to separate web content from the core Firefox process. The two main advantages of doing so are security and performance.

Security benefits from potential sandboxing of web contents and separation of processes, and performance mainly from the browser UI not being affected by web contents.

[...]The Are We e10s yet website lists popular browser add-ons and whether or not they are compatible with e10s yet. If you browse the list of add-ons on that page you will notice that many add-ons are not yet compatible.

Mozilla made the decision to enable e10s for Firefox Nightly versions by default with [the November 7] update. This does not mean that the last phase of development has begun and that stable users will get the feature in three release cycles, however.

[...]users can disable e10s

Hartree writes:

The European Commission has confirmed that it is abolishing the position of Chief Science Advisor to the EU President.

Anne Glover, the current advisor had become controversial in some quarters over her pro-GMO stance. For example, Glover had stated that "Opposition to GM, and the benefits it can bring, is a form of madness I don’t understand."

A number of European Green groups (Greenpeace, among others) have argued that the post was too independent and unaccountable. They stated in a letter to incoming EU President Jean-Claude Juncker calling for the post to be abolished, that "The post of CSA is fundamentally problematic as it concentrates too much influence in one person…".

In response, letters from science organizations were sent to Juncker, calling for the post not to be abolished. Among others this included one from Sense About Science stating “we cannot stress strongly enough our objection to any attempt to undermine the integrity and independence of scientific advice received at the highest level of the European Commission.”

martyb writes:

Found at sciencedaily.com is news about a new theory of quantum mechanics that presumes not only that parallel worlds exist, but also that their mutual interaction is what gives rise to all quantum effects observed in nature.

The theory, first published by Professor Bill Poirier (of Texas Tech University) four years ago, has recently attracted attention from the foundational physics community, leading to an invited Commentary in the physics journal, Physical Review X.

According to Poirier's theory, quantum reality is not wave-like at all, but is composed of multiple, classical-like worlds. In each of these worlds, every object has very definite physical attributes, such as position and momentum. Within a given world, objects interact with each other classically. All quantum effects, on the other hand, manifest as interactions between "nearby" parallel worlds.

The idea of many worlds is not new. In 1957, Hugh Everett III published what is now called the "Many Worlds" interpretation of quantum mechanics. "But in Everett's theory, the worlds are not well defined," according to Poirier, "because the underlying mathematics is that of the standard wave-based quantum theory."

In contrast, in Poirier's "Many Interacting Worlds" theory, the worlds are built into the mathematics right from the start.

The above is a followup on Scientists propose existence and interaction of parallel worlds: Many Interacting Worlds theory challenges foundations of quantum science.

See also Quantum Phenomena Modelled by Interactions between Many Classical Worlds (abstract) and http://arxiv.org/pdf/1402.6144v2.pdf (pdf)

Please note that quantum mechanics is well beyond me, but it seems as if this development has garnered considerable attention and I would appreciate someone more knowledgeable providing their perspective and insight to this theory.

gewg_ writes:

Network World reports:

A new version of LibreOffice's Calc program has broken many spreadsheets, users say, and a perceived unwillingness by developers to address the problem has sparked an ill-tempered argument.

The problem has to do with a new method of sorting reference cells that diverges from the method used in both previous versions of Calc and in most other spreadsheets that was included in a recent version of the software. The result is that some users, apparently, are seeing formulas return incorrect results in their spreadsheets, leading to data loss.

Potential problems with new sorting method, which is active by default in versions 4.3 and 4.2.7 of the software, were first noticed in July, but it was eventually included in the stable release of LibreOffice 4.2.7 on October 30.

Some users said years-old spreadsheets suddenly stopped working. One complained that she had to restore spreadsheets from a backup and start using an older version of Microsoft Excel--not a solution likely to appeal to many FOSS enthusiasts.

[...]the issue has been corrected--the older sort function will be enabled by default in future versions

This is news mainly because of the dev team's limp response to user reports of brokenness.
The article has details on that.

gewg_ writes:

Information Today reports

Sage, the free and open source analog to Wolfram Research's Mathematica, is now SageMathCloud . Thanks to collaboration with Google's cloud services, Sage is now in a position to draw more mathematicians to its community.

In a blog announcement of the collaboration, Google throws down a gauntlet against claims of ownership of mathematical truths by the likes of Wolfram:

Modern mathematics research is distinguished by its openness. The notion of "mathematical truth" depends on theorems being published with proof, letting the reader understand how new results build on the old, all the way down to basic mathematical axioms and definitions. These new results become tools to aid further progress.

[...]Wolfram (like Google) is a for-profit enterprise (Mathematica’s prices are here), and as such, it is keen to protect its software and even its software’s calculations. Wolfram holds the position that because the information generated by its software is novel, the results of its calculations may be subject to copyright by Wolfram.

[...]Marshall Hampton, associate professor in the department of mathematics and statistics at the University of Minnesota-Duluth, is an advocate of open math who uses R in his bioinformatics work. He says, "I use the free, open-source program/environment Sage in all of my work; I encourage you to try it and contribute to it if you can." R is [a separate program that is also distributed as] part of Sage, and "Sage includes many independent open projects that I find helpful, such as Gfan and Biopython. The typesetting language LaTeX is another open tool I use daily." Hampton expresses a critical view of the idea that Wolfram or anyone else can copyright math: "I think any claim of copyright on a calculation is pretty ridiculous."

[...]new open-licensed and open source languages have quickly gained ground. Julia, SALOME, ScicosLab, X10, Scilab, Chapel, Gmsh, Fortress, and FreeMat are all available under GNU-compatible licensing.

[Ed's note: updated to clarify that R is a separate application that Sage has chosen to include.]

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?