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Bringin' Home the Bacon writes:

Pornography, though prevalent in the modern world, still isn't the sort of thing one expects to see while waiting in traffic behind a cop car. That's especially true at the busiest downtown intersection of a wealthy Chicago suburb like Wheaton, Illinois (and by extension Fapp Circle) best known for being the home of an evangelical Christian college once attended by Billy Graham.

A citizen's angry complaint led to an internal forensic examination of the squad car's computer, and "25 pictures depicting nudity and/or graphic sexual activity" were subsequently found in unallocated hard drive space—suggesting that they had been deleted but not actually purged from the disk. This pattern of activity was so extensive that the Burr Ridge forensic analyst wrote, "The sheer volume of information discovered was too voluminous to include in this report. This report is a mere sample of the conduct and violations of Officer T. Sommerfield."

Technology didn't suddenly make porn in the patrol car possible, but it did make it far easier to access. Thanks to the Internet, the distance between idea and action has collapsed almost to nothing. Ruining your life, which used to take serious effort, can now be accomplished with one simple misclick, as with the Connecticut soccer coach who accidentally sent a smartphone video of himself masturbating to several members of his high school girls' soccer team, lost his job, and now faces criminal charges.

Officer Sommerfield's story shows just how the Internet's ease of access to pornography affected someone already suffering from other issues.

Big Bad Bhavneet writes with an article from Yahoo!:

An Indian bride walked out of her wedding ceremony after the groom failed to solve a simple math problem, police said Friday.

The bride tested the groom on his math skills and when he got the sum wrong, she walked out. The question she asked: How much is 15 plus six? His reply: 17.

[...] "The groom's family kept us in the dark about his poor education," said Mohar Singh, the bride's father. "Even a first grader can answer this."

[...] Most marriages in India are arranged by the families of the bride and groom. Except for brief meetings, the couple rarely gets to know each other before the nuptials.

Have any of my fellow SN readers rejected somebody or have been rejected from a relationship for lack of math skills? Comments and stories are welcome!

frojack writes:

Softpedia reports that Greg Kroah-Hartman officially announced the ninth Long Term Maintenance (aka Long Term Support) release of the Linux kernel 3.18 a few days ago, on March 7.

"Long Term" in the Linux world means that these kernels will be supported for two years. LTS kernels are important because they are often chosen for embedded devices (routers etc), as well as distros that focus on long lives, because LTS kernels represent islands of stability in a sea of near constant change. The designation is only bestowed on a few kernels, and generally signifies the end of development on that version.

3.18.9 isn't the latest kernel out there. Linux kernel 3.19.1 is already in development.

Kroah-Hartman said "All users of the 3.18 kernel series must upgrade." (The general advice is to wait till your Distro does that for you.) Most interpret Greg's pronouncement to mean this kernel will be be the only kernel maintained out the 3.18 line.

Linux kernel 3.18.9 includes updates for the ARM, ARM64, MIPS, PowerPC, s390, ARC, and x86 architectures, as well as numerous updated and new drivers for USB, Xen, SCSI, Wireless, etc. In addition, it also fixes some issues with the Btrfs, NFS, XFS, OCFS2, and JFFS2 file systems, and adds networking and sound enhancements.

ticho writes:

nodontdie.net runs an interview with Al Lowe, the guy who made Leisure Suit Larry games for Sierra. Interesting things are being talked about.

tonyPick writes:

Hackaday has an in-depth piece on the legal fight between Arduino (LLC) and Arduino (SRL), over the Arduino name and direction.

Although the Arduino has been in development since 2005, the company Arduino LLC was originally founded in 2009 by Gianluca Martino, Massimo Banzi, David Cuartielles, David Mellis and Tom Igoe, and runs arduino.cc.

Martino also founded the company "Smart Projects" as a manufacturer for Arduino hardware.

In 2014 Martino sold his shares in "Smart Projects", and Federico Musto was appointed CEO. At around this time the company changed name to Arduino SRL and registered the domain arduino.org.

This did not go down well, and lawsuits are in flight.

The story of the legal battle between the two companies had been featured in an earlier hackaday article, and there's alternative coverage at zdnet and I Programmer

Google is shutting down Google Code

darkfeline writes:

Remember that recent post about Google projects that you wish were still around? Time to add another one to the list. If you weren't prudent in selecting the host for your open source project, now is the time to consider the costs of the poor choices you make.

The details of the shutdown process: The open source project hosting service will no longer be accepting new project submissions as of today, will no longer be accepting updates to existing projects from August 24, and will be closed entirely on January 25, 2016.

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/03/google-to-close-google-code-open-source-project-hosting/

Google to close Google Code open source project hosting.

AnonTechie writes:

Google Code is to join the long list of Google projects that have been consigned to the dustbin of history. The open source project hosting service will no longer be accepting new project submissions as of today, will no longer be accepting updates to existing projects from August 24, and will be closed entirely on January 25, 2016.

A few recent actions by the company in the past months may have been harbingers of the closure. In December, Google moved its libphonenumber project for parsing phone numbers from Google Code to GitHub. Last month, the company released a new library for building distributed applications named grpc, and this too used GitHub, not Google Code.

For actively maintained projects, there should be ample time to migrate to alternative platforms. Exporting to GitHub is probably easiest, as Google has an export-to-GitHub tool. SourceForge has an import-from-Google Code feature, and there are also standalone tools for migrating to Bitbucket.

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/03/google-to-close-google-code-open-source-project-hosting/

[Source]: http://google-opensource.blogspot.in/2015/03/farewell-to-google-code.html

dx3bydt3 writes:

Silicon-rich nanometer scale particles have been detected by Cassini’s Cosmic Dust Analyser in ice plumes of Saturn's moon Enceladus. The presence of these minerals suggests that the water in the plumes interacted with rock at the core of Enceladus.

From the ESA website:

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Today (14 March) is the day the world celebrates π. http://www.piday.org/

ticho writes:

Russian inventors have contributed generously to the development of global scientific thought. Many of their inventions have literally transformed the world, enabling us to enjoy such blessings of civilisation as aircraft, cars, computers and television. RIR (Russia & India Report) presents a dozen of such revolutionary innovations that have become an integral part of modern existence. They include:

• Caterpillar-tracked vehicles.
• Video tape recorder.
• Radio.
• Solar cell.
• Yoghurt.
• Synthetic Rubber.

[Story expansion by the Editor] It is possible that some of the claims are contentious but, if you wish to challenge them please cite evidence to support your claims. And please ensure that you have read TFA before bursting into print - the article acknowledges what was happening in the West but explains why things are viewed differently elsewhere in the world. I know from personal experience that some Russians claim that Alexander Popov, a physicist, invented everything that isn't already proven to be invented by another Russian but conversely, Russian scientists have been working hard for centuries and many things were 'discovered' or 'invented' in more that one place and at roughly the same time.

Hugh Pickens writes:

True Angelenos don't even bother to look up when one of the LAPD's 17 helicopters rattles their windows searching for a car-jacked Camry or an assault suspect hiding under a jacaranda but few doubt that more bad guys would get away without the nation's largest police helicopter fleet to help chase them. Now the LA Times reports that data shows that LA's helicopters are stopping crimes before they happen. Tapping into the data-driven policing trend, the department uses heat maps, technology and years of statistics to identify crime "hot spots." Pilots then use their downtime to fly over them, on the theory that would-be criminals tend to rethink their nefarious plans when there's "ghetto birds," as Ice Cube calls them, hovering overhead. Months of data show that the number of serious crimes reported in the LAPD's Newton Division in South L.A. fell during weeks when the helicopters conducted more flights. During the week of Sept. 13, when the helicopter unit flew over Newton 65 times, the division recorded 90 crimes. A week later, the number of flights dropped to 40 and the number of reported crimes skyrocketed to 136, with rises seen among almost all types of crime, including burglary, car theft and thefts from vehicles. "It's extremely cutting edge," says Capt. Gary Walters, who heads the LAPD's air support unit. "It's different. It's nothing that we've ever done before with this specificity."

But Professor Geoffrey Alpert. a policing expert who has studied the use of police helicopters in Miami and Baltimore, says the choppers can deter crime in the short-term but criminals will likely return when they're not around (PDF). "You are deterring the criminals but you aren't getting rid of them and their intent. Those criminals could strike in a different time and place," says Alpert. "I mean that’s the whole thing about random patrol. You see a police car and it’s the same thing. You hide, he goes around the block and you go back to your breaking and entering.”

GungnirSniper writes:

In a press release, the Endocrine Society notes a new study which shows that "men with borderline testosterone levels have higher rates of depression and depressive symptoms than the general population." The study of 200 adult men between the ages of 22 and 77 had levels of testosterone between 200 and 350 nanograms per deciliter. According to a table based on a 1996 study the average for a 35-44 year old male is 668 ng/dl and declines with age to an average of 376 ng/dl for men 85-100.

In the newer study, the men with borderline low testosterone had depressive symptoms or a diagnosis of depression, and/or use of an antidepressant. Their rates were significantly higher than the general population, 56% of men with borderline low testosterone versus 15-22% among a sample of primary care patients.

The population also had a high prevalence of overweight (39%), obesity (40%) and physical inactivity; other than walking, 51% of the men did not engage in regular exercise. The most common symptoms reported were erectile dysfunction (78%), low libido (69%) and low energy (52%).

This would seem to indicate men with depression should get their testosterone levels checked, especially if they have some of the above symptoms.

We previously discussed bisphenol-A (BPA) exposure and its link to Autism Spectrum as well as its estradiol-like effects which may lower testosterone.

AnonTechie writes:

An open-source computing system you command with your voice like Apple's Siri is designed to spark a new generation of "intelligent personal assistants" for wearables and other devices. It could also lead to much-needed advancements in the datacenter infrastructure to support them.

Sirius, built by University of Michigan engineering researchers, is similar to Siri, Microsoft Cortana and Google Now—robust applications that accept voice instructions and questions, interpret them and answer in spoken words.

Sirius even uses many of the same "fancy algorithms," said Jason Mars, U-M assistant professor of computer science and engineering and co-director of Clarity Lab where Sirius was developed. But unlike its expensive and locked-down commercial counterparts, Sirius is free and can be customized.

http://phys.org/news/2015-03-siri-open-source-digital.html

[Paper]: http://jasonmars.org/wp-content/papercite-data/pdf/hauswald15asplos.pdf

[Source]: http://ns.umich.edu/new/multimedia/videos/22734-build-your-own-siri-an-open-source-digital-assistant

Hugh Pickens writes:

What do science fiction classics like Asimov's Foundation Trilogy, Bradbury's Martian Chronicles, Van Vogt's Voyage of the Space Beagle, Simak's City, and Sturgeon's More Than Human have in common? Each of them is a "fix-up" - a novel constructed out of short stories that were previously published on their own. "This used to be one standard way to write a science fiction novel—publish a series of stories that all take place in the same world, and then knit them together into a book," says Charlie Jane Anders. "Sometimes a great deal of revision happened, to turn the separate stories into a single narrative and make sure all the threads joined up. Sometimes, the stories remain pretty separate but there are links between them."

The Golden Age science fiction publishing market was heavily geared towards magazines and short stories. And then suddenly, there was this huge demand for tons of novels. According to Andrew Liptak this left many science fiction authors caught in a hard place: Many had come to depend on the large number of magazines on the market that would pay them for their work, and as readership declined, so too did the places in which to publish original fiction. The result was an innovative solution: repackage a number of preexisting short stories by adding to or rewriting portions of them to work together as a single story. There's also something kind of beautiful about a novel in stories says Anders. You get more narrative "payoff" with a collection of stories that also forms a single continuous meta-story than you do with a single over-arching novel—because each story has its own conclusion, and yet the story builds towards a bigger resolution. Fix-ups are a good, representative example of the transition that the publishing industry faced at the time, and how its authors adapted concludes Liptak. "It’s a lesson that’s well-worth looking closely at, as the entire publishing industry faces new technological challenges and disruptions from the likes of self-publishing and micro-press platforms."

Geezer writes:

Fortune Magazine is running an article that references a study by the Princeton-based Education Testing Service indicating that American Millenials, despite their vaunted social media expertise and tech gadget mastery, are actually far less employable that their European and Asian counterparts. Have we made modern life so easy that we're dumbing ourselves down into Idiocracy, or is the education system failing to fill society's needs?

AnonTechie writes:

Magnetic reconnection could be the Universe's favorite way to make things explode. It operates anywhere magnetic fields pervade space—which is to say almost everywhere. In the cores of galaxies, magnetic reconnection sparks explosions visible billions of light-years away. On the sun, it causes solar flares as powerful as a million atomic bombs. At Earth, it powers magnetic storms and auroras. It's ubiquitous. The problem is, researchers can't explain it.

The basics are clear enough. Magnetic lines of force cross, cancel, reconnect and—Bang! Magnetic energy is unleashed, with charged-particles flying off near the speed of light. But how? How does the simple act of criss-crossing magnetic field lines trigger such a ferocious explosion?

http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2015/10mar_mms/

[Also Covered By]: http://phys.org/news/2015-03-nasa-magnetic-explosions.html