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"gewg_" writes:

David Akadjian notes at AlterNet

Did Ayn Rand send Christmas cards? According to Scott McConnell's 100 Voices: An Oral History of Ayn Rand, she did indeed. Unfortunately, none are included in McConnell's 656 page book. Fortunately, with a little help from the Ayn Rand Archives*, we are able to present to you this exclusive, never-before-seen collection of Ayn Rand favorites.

*The representative from the Ayn Rand Archives called me a looter and screamed something unintelligible, so some Christmas cards may be fictionalized representations of actual Ayn Rand Christmas cards.

Some examples of the 21 images and the accompanying quotes:

Image: An innkeeper turning away a man and his wife.
"What I am fighting is the idea that charity is a moral duty and a primary value." --Ayn Rand

Image: Salvation Army bell ringer
"Capitalism and altruism are incompatible; they are philosophical opposites; they
cannot co-exist in the same man or in the same society." --Ayn Rand

"The Christmas trees, the winking lights, the glittering colors provide the city with a spectacular display which only 'commercial greed' could afford us." --Ayn Rand

"Money is the barometer of a society's virtue." --Ayn Rand

Hugh Pickens writes:

Jorge Lopez writes that as a cat lover he's always wanted an automatic cat litter box and finally found one called the CatGenie, a fully automated self-washing litter box connected to water, electricity and the sewer that cleans itself with water and soap. "It’s the Rolls Royce of cat litter boxes, a hefty device that scoops, cleans, and disposes of the waste all on it’s own. It’s completely automated, even senses when a cat poops and cleans up afterwards." But there's trouble in paradise. "Life with the CatGenie was great, but not quite perfect," writes Lopez after discovering that CatGenie uses a smart cartridge that is only available from the manufacturer. "I found that the “Smart” in SmartCartridge is that it has an RFID chip inside of it to keep track of how much solution it has, and once it runs out, well, you can't refill. I honestly did not believe this and tore one of the cartridges apart, and there it was, looking back at me, a tiny chip holding up it’s little metal finger." Fortunately there are some amazing people helping the CatGenie community who have released products like the custom firmware CatGenious and CartridgeGenius which allows you to use whatever solution you want. "The cost savings is great, but isn't the biggest driver for me, it’s mainly the principle that I don't own the device I paid for, and I'm really tired of having cat litter everything in my home."

Magic Oddball writes:

Every Christmas Eve since 1956, staff at North American Aerospace Defense Command have put on a bit of a show for the nation’s kids by purportedly tracking Santa as he travels in his sleigh and posting official announcements through the media appropriate for the times: radio weather updates, television news, and now the Web. It’s about as incongruous a project as one could imagine for a Cold War-era defense system for detecting incoming attacks and launching potentially-nuclear weapons, and until recently, only a handful of people knew how it came about.

This year, that changed as a trio of siblings contacted NPR’s StoryCorps to tell the tale of how the Continental Air Defense Command Center’s red phone was turned into a Santa Hotline:

“Only a four-star general at the Pentagon and my dad had the number. This was the ’50s, this was the Cold War, and he would have been the first one to know if there was an attack on the United States.” The red phone rang one day in December 1955, and Col. Shoup answered it. “And then there was a small voice that just asked, ‘Is this Santa Claus?’ ”

His children remember Shoup as straight-laced and disciplined, and he was annoyed and upset by the call and thought it was a joke — but then, Terri says, the little voice started crying.

“And Dad realized that it wasn’t a joke,” her sister says. “So he talked to him, ho-ho-ho’d and asked if he had been a good boy and, ‘May I talk to your mother?’ And the mother got on and said, ‘You haven’t seen the paper yet? There’s a phone number to call Santa. It’s in the Sears ad.’ ”

The rest is an amusing, surprisingly heart-warming story that doesn’t even edge near the treacly ‘entertainment’ that tends to take over at this time of year, much to their credit. It also left me thinking: society back then was far stricter, it was believed that the nation could come under nuclear attack at any minute, yet even the the most crucial defense leader and team was able to retain their sense of humor, humanity, and stay genuinely cool under pressure — so why is it that now they appear to have completely lost those traits in our less endangered, more relaxed era?

"gewg_" writes:

Amanda Marcotte notes at AlterNet

We may object to using the holiday as an excuse to push overtly religious songs and prayers on kids in public schools, but the Christmas holiday, despite its religious origins, is accepted by most atheists as a secular holiday and many of us enjoy it as much as the Christians do. In fact, I'd argue there are many advantages to being an atheist, when it comes to celebrating the holidays.

1. Travel flexibility
2. No Christmas mass
3. Sex
4. Creative decorating (a Nativity scene with superhero action figures)
5. Wrapping paper
6. Give me the loot!
7. No praying before the meal
8. "Happy holidays!"
9. Better music. (You can fully admit that "All I Want For Christmas Is You" by Mariah Carey is the best Christmas song, full stop)
10. Better movies

I disagree with her best song selection. The obvious choice is "Five Pound Box Of Money" (Pearl Bailey, 1958).

"gewg_" writes:

Krita is a GPL'd graphics editor with raster, vector, filter, programmatic, group, and file-backed layers. It is based on KDE/Qt and is a part of the Calligra Suite.

Krita.org announces

From January 1st, KO GmbH will no longer be involved with Krita. Until now, the Krita maintainer, Boudewijn Rempt, was employed at KO GmbH. KO GmbH publishes Krita Gemini on Steam and provided commercial support for Krita to VFX studios and artists. While there was growth in the business, it was never enough to keep KO GmbH solvent.

From this point on, the Krita Foundation will support the Krita Studio users. The foundation will provide CentOS and Ubuntu LTS builds, as well as bug fixes and engaging in custom development projects.

New releases of Krita on Steam will also be provided by the Krita Foundation. Proceeds from Steam sales will go directly to the Krita Foundation (minus Valve's cut of course).

tt0264464 writes:

Sarah Meiklejohn, a lecturer at UCL, and an expert on computer security and crypto-currencies was recently part of an academic research team that studied pseudo-anonymity in bitcoin. In particular, they used transaction data to compare “potential” anonymity to the “actual” anonymity achieved by users. A bitcoin user can use many different public keys, but careful research led to a few heuristics that allowed them to cluster addresses belonging to the same user.

Full Story at Orielly.com

"gewg_" writes:

Member of the European Parliament Julia Reda blogs

Security and liberty don't have to be opposites. I want the European Union to focus its energy and funds on projects that increase both the safety and the autonomy of its people at the same time. At my proposal, next year's EU budget will include a step in that direction:
€1 million of the EU's €40 million pilot project fund will be spent towards open source software security.

The European Union's interoperability page says

The European Parliament is funding a security audit of the free and open source solutions used by the Parliament and the European Commission. Last Wednesday, the EP allocated €1 million for the audit project, to be carried out by the EC Directorate General for Informatics (DIGIT). The project should also come up with best practices for code review and quality assessments of free software and open standards funded by the EU.

sigma writes:

Engadget: http://www.engadget.com/2014/12/23/rockstar-sells-patents-ends-lawsuits/

The patent holding group Rockstar was formed in 2011 by Apple, BlackBerry, Ericsson, Microsoft and Sony to keep crucial intellectual property out of Google's hands, and eventually sue Android's partners in order to restrict competition.

Rockstar has sold all of its commonly held patents, and will drop the lawsuits that it still had left, including those leveled against HTC, LG and Samsung. The patents, which cost $4.5 billion, were sold to clearinghouse RPX for $900 million.

Blackmoore writes:

IFL Science - New Diagnostic Platform Can Detect Over 1,000 Pathogens In Just 6 Hours

An innovative new diagnostic platform that is capable of detecting more than 1,000 disease-causing organisms in just six hours has just been approved for use in Europe, potentially paving the way for a transformation in the manner in which diseases are diagnosed. The revolutionary new system is now being put through its paces in the US in the hope that it will be given the FDA’s seal of approval within the next few years.

Identifying the agent responsible for an infection or disease is not always easy, especially when the symptoms could indicate a number of different pathogens. This means that sometimes a variety of different specimens need to be taken, such as tubes of blood, swabs or urine samples, all of which then need to be subjected to different tests. But if the microbe, such as a virus or bacterium, is not on the list of suspects, doctors are unlikely to identify it because many tests are very specific. This means that the diagnostic process can be slow, causing delays in targeted treatment and consequently doctors are often forced to use blanket therapies, such as broad spectrum antibiotics, when time is limited.

But this could be set to change with the advent of IRIDICA, the brainchild of four researchers based at Isis Pharmaceuticals. After spending several years working on developing new antimicrobial compounds, they wondered whether they could apply the concepts they had come up with for drug discovery to the field of diagnostics.

"gewg_" writes:

You may have heard Cheech and Chong telling about a freak who lived in the projects, hired midgets, and used magic dust. Recently, Stephen Larsen, PhD, Psychology Professor Emeritus at SUNY Ulster, talked to Thom Hartmann as he had before about myths from northern Europe which parallel Clement Moore's narrative of a jolly old elf.

[... a]Norwegian and Scandinavian [sic] shaman had figured out [...] there was a certain type of mushroom [...] a deadly, deadly mushroom. But reindeer can eat it and their livers metabolize the toxin, break it down, and render it harmless without changing the hallucinogen. And so the shaman would cultivate areas where these particular mushrooms grew, [and] these mushrooms have little red caps with white spots all over them, and encourage the reindeer to go eat them. And then they would follow the reindeer around, and wherever they found yellow snow they would gather up the snow and make that into a magic brew and drink that stuff and suddenly they're seeing little guys and flying reindeer.

So, that's how he can make it around the globe in 24 hours and how he can see you while you're sleeping (which is kinda creepy if you think about it).

Symbolic Studies has more on this.

Blackmoore writes:

Dealbook/NYT : Neglected Server Provided Entry for JPMorgan Hackers

The computer breach at JPMorgan Chase this summer—the largest intrusion of an American bank to date—might have been thwarted if the bank had installed a simple security fix to an overlooked server in its vast network, said people who have been briefed on internal and outside investigations into the attack.

Most big banks use a double authentication scheme, known as two-factor authentication, which requires a second one-time password to gain access to a protected system. But JPMorgan’s security team had apparently neglected to upgrade one of its network servers with the dual password scheme, the people briefed on the matter said. That left the bank vulnerable to intrusion.

Blackmoore writes:

Found in Wired: Mathematicians Make a Major Discovery About Prime Numbers

Now, mathematicians have made the first substantial progress in 76 years on the reverse question: How far apart can consecutive primes be? The average spacing between primes approaches infinity as you travel up the number line, but in any finite list of numbers, the biggest prime gap could be much larger than the average. No one has been able to establish how large these gaps can be.

“It’s a very obvious question, one of the first you might ever ask about primes,” said Andrew Granville, a number theorist at the University of Montreal. “But the answer has been more or less stuck for almost 80 years.”

Erdős’ conjecture is based on a bizarre-looking bound for large prime gaps devised in 1938 by the Scottish mathematician Robert Alexander Rankin. For big enough numbers X, Rankin showed, the largest prime gap below X is at least:

(1/3) (logX log logX log log log logX) / (log log log X)2

Many mathematicians believe that the true size of large prime gaps is probably considerably larger — more on the order of (log X)², an idea first put forth by the Swedish mathematician Harald Cramér in 1936. Gaps of size (log X)² are what would occur if the prime numbers behaved like a collection of random numbers, which in many respects they appear to do.

[Paul] Erdős made a more modest conjecture: It should be possible, he said, to replace the 1/3 in Rankin’s formula by as large a number as you like, provided you go out far enough along the number line. That would mean that prime gaps can get much larger than in Rankin’s formula, though still smaller than in Cramér’s.

The two new proofs of Erdős’ conjecture are both based on a simple way to construct large prime gaps. A large prime gap is the same thing as a long list of non-prime, or “composite,” numbers between two prime numbers. Here’s one easy way to construct a list of, say, 100 composite numbers in a row: Start with the numbers 2, 3, 4, … , 101, and add to each of these the number 101 factorial (the product of the first 101 numbers, written 101!). The list then becomes 101! + 2, 101! + 3, 101! + 4, … , 101! + 101. Since 101! is divisible by all the numbers from 2 to 101, each of the numbers in the new list is composite: 101! + 2 is divisible by 2, 101! + 3 is divisible by 3, and so on. “All the proofs about large prime gaps use only slight variations on this high school construction,” said James Maynard of Oxford, who wrote the second of the two papers.

lhsi writes:

A study (full text) has found that bias as a result of missing or partially reported harm related outcomes is high in reviews of randomised controlled trials and non-randomised studies published. The researchers conclude that studies should not be excluded from reviews because of having ”no relevant outcome data,” as the outcome data may be missing as a direct result of selective outcome reporting.

Hugh Pickens writes:

Duane D. Stanford reports at Bloomberg that Coca-Cola's Atlanta Headquarters is the latest big campany to ditch its old-style voice mail, which requires users to push buttons to scroll through messages and listen to them one at a time. The change went into effect this month, and a standard outgoing message now throws up an electronic stiff arm, telling callers to try later or use “an alternative method” to contact the person. Techies have predicted the death of voice mail for years as smartphones co-opt much of the office work once performed by telephones and desktop computers. Younger employees who came of age texting while largely ignoring voice mail are bringing that habit into the workforce. “People north of 40 are schizophrenic about voice mail,” says Michael Schrage. “People under 35 scarcely ever use it.” Companies are increasingly combining telephone, e-mail, text and video systems into unified Internet-based systems that eliminate overlap. “Many people in many corporations simply don’t have the time or desire to spend 25 minutes plowing through a stack of 15 to 25 voice mails at the end or beginning of the day,” says Schrage, In 2012, Vonage reported its year-over-year voicemail volumes dropped 8%. More revealing, the number of people bothering to retrieve those messages plummeted 14%. More and more personal and corporate voicemail boxes now warn callers that their messages are rarely retrieved and that they’re better off sending emails or texts. "The truly productive have effectively abandoned voicemail, preferring to visually track who’s called them on their mobiles," concludes Schrage. "A communications medium that was once essential has become as clunky and irrelevant as Microsoft DOS and carbon paper."

dlb writes:

Devuan and I got off to a bad start. The first link I clicked to their site was flagged by Firefox as possibly malicious. Continuing to their home page brought me to what would have been considered campy even in the 90s. I suspected a scam, or at least rank amateurism, and figured a short life for the project.

They recently released an "update on the progress of the Devuan.org," and I took a second look, especially at their finances.

The finances of the Devuan project are administered by the Dyne.org foundation, an international organization based in Amsterdam.

Dyne.org commits to financial transparency and will publish financial reports for this project, keeping them updated every year.

Their current financial report for 2014 is available as a pdf download.

Surprisingly, with all the anti-systemd trolling out there that they could cash in on, they're instead taking the high road.

We must not become acquainted to the fact that systemd discussions are swarmed by trolls fostering aggressive behaviour and personalized attacks of sorts. With the Devuan project and its early Debianfork declaration we did our best to avoid such dynamics, to bring forward a constructive discussion and action plan to respond to the systemd avalanche with technical analyses and solutions.

We kindly ask the community gathering around Devuan to take us seriously on this and avoid aggressive behaviour. Everyone should use extra attention when engaging criticism and in any case avoid any personalization, but stick to facts.

Their open professionalism is impressive. We could be seeing the birth of the next major player in Linux.