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An Anonymous Coward writes:

http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/07/22/487107922/virginia-court-overturns-order-that-restored-voting-rights-to-felons

Original Submission

fork(2) writes:

Smithsonian covers the legendary Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium and it's killer game "The Oregon Trail."

Never heard of MECC? It went hand in hand with Apple Computer Inc. in its earliest days. Steve Jobs said as much in a 1995 interview with the Smithsonian Institution: "One of the things that built Apple II's was schools buying Apple II's." Apple II's loaded with MECC games.

Minnesota was a Midwestern Silicon Valley by the early 1970s. The State of Minnesota threw huge funds to entice computer programmers to Minneapolis and Saint Paul when it created MECC in 1973. From 1978 to 1999, MECC, together with Apple, competed against private software companies to turn American children into a nation of computer-savvy early adopters and make computer class as much a part of American schooling as math and English.

"MECC's goal was on putting a computer in the hands of every K-12 student in Minnesota," says Dale LaFrenz, MECC co-founder and CEO from 1985 to 1996. "We already had all schools in Minnesota running teletypewriters hooked to a huge UNIVAC [mainframe]." The UNIVAC was installed in a climate-controlled room at MECC headquarters. Up to 435 users across Minnesota could access it at one time from anywhere that had a telephone line.

Once MECC had this system, it needed a game.

[...] When MECC hired Rawitsch [Don Rawitsch, one of the authors/programmers of the game] in 1974, the game had been a dormant pile of papers for three years. MECC set him to work resurrecting the game, and as he did, he added new features. He read diaries of Oregon Trail pioneers for ideas on new events to include, such as pegging the likelihood of certain events to certain locations.

[...] "MECC went to Apple very early on and cut a deal for five Apple II's," says LaFrenz. "We launched The Oregon Trail for proof of concept, tested with Minnesota schools and had a positive evaluation." From there, MECC put out a solicitation for a hardware company to supply the computers. A dozen or so manufacturers answered, among them Radio Shack, IBM, Atari, Commodore and Apple. Apple was an industry lightweight, but Steve Jobs had parallel ideas about computer education.

"[The partnership] worked," LaFrenz says. "MECC became Apple's largest dealer and sold to all the Minnesota schools. MECC and Apple were always in sync, including a grand plan to 'save the world by putting computing power in the hands of every kid in America.' Humility did not run in the veins of Steve [Wozniak] and Steve [Jobs]."

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard

There are so many factors to consider when choosing where to buy a home—average home price, proximity to work, and obviously the odds of surviving a zombie apocalypse. That's why Estately Real Estate Search mapped out which states are the safest to live in if an army of the undead were to suddenly rise from their graves in search of brains to eat. To do this, we ranked each U.S. state from 1-50 using the following five criteria, and then averaged the results to create our final ranking.

• Fewest people per square mile
• Gun owners per capita
• Percentage who are cremated instead of buried
• Percentage of population that is physically active
• Interest in the zombie media genre

Source: http://blog.estately.com/2016/07/does-your-state-have-what-it-takes-to-survive-a-zombie-apocalypse/

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.aclu.org/blog/speak-freely/mohamedou-ould-slahis-long-nightmare-guantanamo-finally-coming-end

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohamedou_Ould_Slahi

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

You'll soon be able to drop your phone from selfie level worry-free with a little help from Corning. The glass company presented the fifth iteration of its super-resistant Gorilla Glass at an event at its offices in Palo Alto, California.

[...]

The previous version of the glass could survive a drop at about pocket level or below on a rough surface, but with 63 percent of drops occurring between waist and shoulder height, according to Corning, the goal was to increase the total fall distance that a Gorilla Glass-topped phone could withstand.

Gorilla Glass 5 promises to brush off drops of up to 1.6 meters (5 feet, 2 inches) based on Corning's tests, making it almost four times more resistant than regular, unstrengthened glass, the company says.

About 4.5 billion of the world's phones use Gorilla Glass on their displays, and you'll find the topper expanding beyond these pocket-size devices. This year, Ford announced that the 2016 GT model will have Gorilla Glass windshields. Some ATMs will even sport an antimicrobial version of Gorilla Glass on their displays.

Original Submission

"exec" writes of the following story:

AMD emerged as a serious threat to Intel in servers more than a decade ago, but after a series of missteps and bad chips, the company's server business is hanging on by a thread.

Now, AMD is rebooting its server chip business with the upcoming Zen CPU, which will also be used in PCs. AMD is getting creative with Zen and considering merging the CPU with a high-performance GPU to create a mega-chip for high-performance tasks.

"It's fair to say we do believe we can combine a high-performance CPU with the high-performance GPU," AMD CEO Lisa Su said during an earnings call on Thursday.

Su's comment was in response to a question on whether AMD would ultimately combine its Zen CPU with a GPU based on the upcoming Vega architecture into one big chip for enterprise servers and supercomputing.

"Obviously, it'll come in time," Su said. "It's an area where combining the two technologies makes a lot of sense."

It wouldn't be the first time AMD has built a mega-chip. It has already combined full-featured CPUs and GPUs on made-to-order chips for the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 gaming consoles. The 5-billion transistor Xbox One chip uses an eight-core AMD CPU code-named Jaguar and a Radeon graphics processor.

GPUs are being used as co-processors in some of the world's fastest computers for tasks like weather modeling, economic forecasting, and weapons design. They are also used by Google in data centers for deep learning tasks. Nvidia has cornered the supercomputing space while AMD has struggled with its FirePro high-performance GPUs.

But AMD's integrated mega-chip would be unique. Nvidia has high-performance GPUs but lacks a CPU. Intel's CPUs dominate servers, but it does not offer a GPU. Some supercomputers combine Nvidia GPUs with CPUs from Intel or AMD.

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

Knowledge Troll writes:

The Automotive Information Sharing and Analysis Center has published an executive summary of their Automotive Cybersecurity Best Practices.

From the summary

Unfortunately the public executive overview is somewhat content free and refers to NIST documents on security practices but something is better than nothing. It's been six years since the publication of Experimental Security Analysis of a Modern Automobile and five years since Comprehensive Experimental Analyses of Automotive Attack Surfaces . In those research papers compsci students splay open the control system of a car through standard security analysis techniques such as fuzzing. My favorite technique they used was to install custom software into the QNX powered OnStar device then use it to bridge between the body bus and the bus that handles the engines, brakes, steering, etc. Very clever indeed.

How does the community feel about the poorly secured two ton (metric or imperial, you pick) rolling robot that the modern vehicle has become?

Original Submission

We just learned that our VM provider, Linode, had to perform some emergency reboots. Three of our servers have already been taken care of, but more are still to come. This led to our site being unavailable for a period of approximately an hour. Here is the reboot schedule:

Identified - Linode has received a Xen Security Advisory (XSA) that requires us to perform updates to our legacy Xen host servers. In order to apply the updates, hosts and the Linodes running on them must be rebooted. The XSAs will be publicly released by the Xen project team on July 26th. We must complete this maintenance before then.

Here's the schedule and status:

We apologize for any inconvenience.

[Update: It appears the second round of reboots has completed successfully, and, thanks to the advance notice, the site stayed up throughout. We anticipate that the site will still continue to operate normally through the last-scheduled reboot. Many thanks for your understanding and patience.]

[Update #2: We are taking advantage of a free offer from Linode, our hosting provider, to convert our VPSs (Virtual Private Servers) from Xen to KVM. The rebooting was required to repair a Xen vulnerability. As a bonus, the Xen to KVM conversion gives us a free upgrade to twice as much memory. The additional memory will provide much-needed additional headroom on our servers and possibly provide a performance improvement. Thanks to our redundancy, the changes should not be noticeable when we reboot/upgrade, except for the IRC and e-mail servers as they are single-hosted.]

[Update #3: Thanks to the tireless efforts of paulej72 well into the wee hours of this morning with able assistance by audioguy in straightening out some IP issues as well as Deucalion and TheMightyBuzzard providing guidance and support, all but two of our Xen servers have been upgraded to KVM. This free upgrade doubled the amount of memory available to our VMs, giving us some much-needed headroom. That leaves beryllium (IRC and email) and boron (DNS, Hesiod name service) as the two servers that have not been upgraded yet. Date/time is TBD.]

[Update #4: Boron will be reconfigured shortly, and then Bberyllium after that. Plan on an hour or two, though, obviously, we'll try to keep the downtime to a minimum!]

[Update #5: Boron's second upgrade for the ram sat in the queue for several hours, so Beryllium had to wait until paulej72 got up and finished it this morning (0830 EDT)]

"exec" writes:

Ars Technica reports that Cyanogen Inc. reportedly fires OS development arm, switches to apps:

Cyanogen Inc. seems to be in trouble. A report from Android Police cites "several sources" that say the three-year-old Android software house will be laying off 20 percent of its workforce. One source said the company would "pivot" to "apps" and away from OS development.

"Cyanogen" branding can be confusing, so here's a quick glossary before we get started:

• Cyanogen—A person. Steve Kondik. The guy that originally started CyanogenMod.
• CyanogenMod—A free, open source, OS heavily based on Android and compatible with hundreds of devices. Anyone can download and flash the OS to a compatible device.
• Cyanogen OS—A for-profit OS that OEMs can purchase and ship on devices. It's the CyanogenMod codebase with some proprietary features on top and update support from Cyanogen Inc.
• Cyanogen Inc.—A for-profit company that aims to sell Cyanogen OS to OEMs. Formed with key members from the open-source project.
• Cyanogen Mods—Cyanogen Inc.'s proprietary app platform for Cyanogen OS.

The Android Police report says "roughly 30 out of the 136 people Cyanogen Inc. employs" are being cut, and that the layoffs "most heavily impact the open source arm" of the company.  Android Police goes on to say that CyanogenMod development by Cyanogen Inc "may be eliminated entirely." The community could continue to develop CyanogenMod, but it seems many of the core CyanogenMod developers at the company will no longer be paid to work on CyanogenMod.

The story reports that, after a long executive retreat for Cyanogen Inc.'s company leaders, layoffs were conducted without advance notice.Imagine coming in to work to discover that a generic human resources meeting had been added to your schedule the night before — and in the meeting find out your were being laid off.

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

Officials told residents of a small Colorado community [Hugo, CO] not to drink or shower in tap water Thursday because one of the town's wells may have been contaminated with THC, marijuana's intoxicating chemical.

[...] Investigators found signs that one of Hugo's five wells had been tampered with, but they hadn't determined whether someone deliberately tainted the water.

Hugo prohibits marijuana cultivation, product manufacturing, testing facilities and retail marijuana stores, although those activities are legal elsewhere in the state.

Peter Perrone, owner of a marijuana testing facility in the Denver area, expressed doubt that THC could be in the water. The chemical isn't water-soluble, he told The Denver Post.

It's unlikely that consuming pot-tainted water would cause lasting health effects, said Mark Salley, a spokesman for the state Department of Public Health and Environment.

http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/colorado-town-s-water-may-be-tainted-marijuana-chemical-thc-n614731

Original Submission

-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

Tom's Guide reports

Blu R1 HD Review: Great for $50, with a Catch

The good

• Superaffordable
• Sleek design
• Bright [5-inch, 1280 x 720] display
• Good battery life

The bad

• Amazon ads are annoying
• Blurry camera
• Has trouble with graphic-intensive apps

[...] This budget Android device can be had for as low as $49 unlocked, but that price is only available for Amazon Prime members who are willing to look at all kinds of Amazon offers and promotions every time they open the lock screen.

[...] Packing a quad-core, 1.3-GHz MediaTek 6735 ARM Cortex processor with [1 GB] of RAM, the Blu R1 HD is powerful enough for basic tasks, but not great for resource-intensive apps. It never slowed me down during my day-to-day activities, whether I was checking messages, jumping between apps, or watching videos on YouTube or Amazon Video.

However, it's not ideal for the highest-end games in the Play Store. The gory, graphically intense action of Mortal Kombat X was playable but noticeably chuggy on the R1. The game also took quite a while to load, but, to be fair, I wasn't expecting stellar gaming performance from a $50 device.

[...] If you'd rather not succumb to your Amazon overlords, the ad-free version of the phone starts at $99 for the 8GB/1GB model, and costs $109 for the 16GB/2GB model.

[...] One big caveat: [For] carriers, it only works with AT&T and T-Mobile.

Original Submission

Knowledge Troll writes:

I for one welcome our new donut and chicken carrying flying robotic overlords. It has only been a few months since the FAA stopped requiring distinct approval of each commercial sUAS (small unmanned aerial system) flight. Current regulations still require a waiver for a remotely operated flying machine that exceeds the visual range of the pilot and the story does not mention if the flight was autonomous or not. Aerial surveys and inspections that would otherwise require people to climb towers, poles, or other structures are also under way. The FAA is lagging and taking their time but there is some progress.

The story also fails to mention if the chicken sandwich was any good or the coffee was hot.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

http://news.vanderbilt.edu/2016/07/super-eruptions-may-give-only-a-years-warning-before-they-blow/

Super-eruptions – volcanic events large enough to devastate the entire planet – give only about a year's warning before they blow. That is the conclusion of a new microscopic analysis of quartz crystals in pumice taken from the Bishop Tuff in eastern California, which is the site of the super-eruption that formed the Long Valley Caldera 760,000 years ago.

[...] "The evolution of a giant, super-eruption-feeding magma body is characterized by events taking place at a variety of time scales," said Gualda. Tens of thousands of years are needed to prime the crust to generate sufficient eruptible magma. Once established, these melt-rich, giant magma bodies are unstable features that last for only centuries to few millennia. "Now we have shown that the onset of the process of decompression, which releases the gas bubbles that power the eruption, starts less than a year before eruption."

Gualda and Sutton analyzed dozens of small quartz crystals from the Bishop Tuff. Previous investigations of quartz crystals from several super-eruptions, including Long Valley, have noted that they have distinctive surface rims. These studies concluded that the rims formed in less than a century before eruption. [...] "Maximum rim growth times span from approximately 1 minute to 35 years, with a median of approximately 4 days. More than 70 percent of rim growth times are less than 1 year, showing that quartz rims have mostly grown in the days to months prior to eruption... . Growth took place under conditions of high supersaturation suggesting that rim growth marks the onset of decompression and the transition from pre-eruptive to syn-eruptive conditions," the paper summarized.

The Year Leading to a Supereruption (open, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0159200)

Original Submission

takyon writes:

http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2016/07/21/486471339/how-wild-birds-team-up-with-humans-to-guide-them-to-honey

An African bird called the greater honeyguide is famous for leading people to honey, and a new study shows that the birds listen for certain human calls to figure out who wants to play follow-the-leader.

The finding underscores the unique relationship that exists between humans and this wild bird.

"They're definitely not domesticated, and they're in no way coerced," says Claire Spottiswoode of the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom. "And they're not taught in any conventional way as well. Humans are not deliberately going out there and training honeyguides."

She first heard of the honeyguide as an 11-year-old child in Cape Town, South Africa, where she went to a meeting of her local bird club and heard a lecture from the pioneer of honeyguide studies, a scientist named H.A. Isack.

In 1989, he published a rigorous analysis in the journal Science showing that the legends about the honeyguide were true: The birds will flutter in front of people, tweet, and fly from tree to tree to guide hunters to bees' nests that are hidden inside the trunks of hollow trees.

"By following honeyguides, human honey hunters can really increase their rate of finding bees' nests," says Spottiswoode.

An abstract is available; full article is paywalled.

Original Submission

butthurt writes:

Dutch News reports that six patients developed eye infections last year, after surgeries at a Utrecht teaching hospital. Four of them have each lost the sight in one eye, are suing, and have been offered a settlement, without accepting responsibility. A statement from the hospital said:

'A number of factors could have increased the risk of infection for these patients.'

[...] Jasper Keizer, who represents one of the patients, said the hospital is being much too vague. 'They should be giving more clarity about the factors which may have led to the infection,' he said. 'And if they don't, we will ask the courts to force the hospital to prove it is not responsible.'

Original Submission