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What was highest label on your first car speedometer?

  • 80 mph
  • 88 mph
  • 100 mph
  • 120 mph
  • 150 mph
  • it was in kph like civilized countries use you insensitive clod
  • Other (please specify in comments)

[ Results | Polls ]
Comments:47 | Votes:110

posted by takyon on Saturday April 29 2017, @11:14PM   Printer-friendly
from the flatlander-handheld dept.

Kotaku reports that:

[...] Nintendo announced the New 2DS XL, a sleek $150 piece of hardware that is essentially a New 3DS XL without 3D. This is an iteration on 2013's 2DS, a cheaper model that also ditched the 3D but felt uncomfortable and lacked the convenient clamshell design of other models.

The new model is planned to be available in July in the United States, at around $150.

takyon: Is glasses-free 3D dead?

Nintendo 3DS was released in Japan on February 26, 2011 and worldwide the following month. The price was cut by $80 on July 28, 2011.


Original Submission

posted by martyb on Saturday April 29 2017, @09:38PM   Printer-friendly
from the download-it-now dept.

Softpedia News reports that version 2.02 of the GRUB boot loader has been released. Among the many new features are support for LZ4 compression on ZFS, 64-bit ext2, XFS v5, Morse code output and a modem-like output through the PC speaker, Xen paravirtualisation, TrueCrypt ISOs, Apple fat binaries on non-Apple hardware, and 16-bit mode on non-x86 hardware.

Further information:
NEWS file

Related stories:
Windows 8 Update Erases Grub, Enables Secure Boot
Press Backspace 28 times: Pwn Unlucky Linux Systems Running GRUB


Original Submission

posted by martyb on Saturday April 29 2017, @08:05PM   Printer-friendly
from the do-no-harm dept.

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/04/10-million-settlement-over-alleged-misconduct-boston-heart-stem-cell-lab

A research misconduct investigation of a prominent stem cell lab by the Harvard University–affiliated Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH) in Boston has led to a massive settlement with the U.S. government over allegations of fraudulently obtained federal grants. As Retraction Watch reports, BWH and its parent health care system have agreed to pay $10 million to resolve allegations that former BWH cardiac stem cell scientist Piero Anversa and former lab members Annarosa Leri and Jan Kajstura relied on manipulated and fabricated data in grant applications submitted to the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH).

A statement from the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Massachusetts released today notes that it was BWH itself that shared the allegations against Anversa's lab with the government. The hospital had been conducting its own probe into the Anversa lab since at least 2014, when a retraction published in the journal Circulation revealed the ongoing investigation. The hospital has not yet released any findings.


Original Submission

posted by martyb on Saturday April 29 2017, @06:32PM   Printer-friendly
from the 3-laws-of-car-botics dept.

Several tech companies have submitted comments to the California DMV, seeking changes to the current self-driving car policies:

The companies [Apple, Alphabet's Waymo, Tesla] -- along with dozens of other organizations like Lyft, Uber, Ford and Toyota -- submitted comments to the Department of Motor Vehicles, which were then posted online. The suggestions range the gamut from deciding when a driver should have to take control of the autonomous vehicle to recommending paying customers be allowed to ride in self-driving cars.

[...] Apple -- in its letter signed by Steve Kenner, its director of product integrity -- said it's "investing heavily in the study of machine learning and automation, and is excited about the potential of automated systems in many areas, including transportation." It wants to see changes to three California policies related to "disengagement reporting," definitions, and testing without safety drivers.

One of Apple's criticisms focused on current and proposed disengagement reporting requirements, which explain when a driver has to take control of the self-driving car. Apple said the metric isn't transparent enough to make consumers comfortable with the technology. The company believes the correct metric for evaluating automated vehicles should include data on successfully prevented crashes and traffic rule violations.

Also at AppleInsider.


Original Submission

posted by on Saturday April 29 2017, @04:59PM   Printer-friendly
from the cue-Black-Sabbath-song dept.

British inventor Richard Browning lifted off from the shore of Vancouver Harbor on Thursday in a personal flight suit that inspired references to comic superhero 'Iron Man.'

Using thrusters attached to his arms and back, Browning flew in a circle and hovered a short distance from the ground, captivating attendees at a prestigious TED Conference.

The personal flight suit is capable of propeling wearers much higher and faster, according to its creators.

"The hypothesis was that the human mind and body, if properly augmented, could achieve some pretty cool stuff," the extreme athlete and engineer said at the gathering a short time earlier.

Browning told of experimenting with various numbers and arrays of essentially miniature jet engines on his limbs.

Along the way, he said, there were more than a few crashes to the ground.

"The whole journey was about trying and failing, and learning from that," Browning said.

The first reasonably stable, six-second flight with the gear inspired his team to press on.

His startup, Gravity, formally debuted about a month ago with an early-version suit called Daedalus.


Original Submission

posted by on Saturday April 29 2017, @03:26PM   Printer-friendly
from the trolling-is-illegal-now dept.

An ICE hotline set up to allow reports of crimes committed by "criminal aliens" has had a close encounter with trolls:

The administration set up the Victims of Immigration Crime Engagement (VOICE) Office on Wednesday, in accordance with President Trump's executive order in January. The office, folded within the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency, aims to "assist victims of crimes committed by criminal aliens," according to the Department of Homeland Security.

"Alien" is a term used by the federal government to describe individuals who are not American citizens but who reside on U.S. soil. [...] Despite the line's intended purpose, callers have been reporting a range of abnormal activity.

1-855-48-VOICE to report all your encounters w/ illegal martians, rude Sasquatch, unleashed Texas Blue Hounds, Springheel Jack. Goblin army.

— Kathleen Dennis (@chelseabmw) April 27, 2017

ICE denounced the calls, saying such actions hurt victims of real crimes. Callers have even mentioned spotting "muggle-borns," a term from the "Harry Potter" book series referring to magical characters with non-magical parents.

Also at The Atlantic and CNN. Victims of Immigration Crime Engagement (VOICE) Office.


Original Submission

posted by martyb on Saturday April 29 2017, @01:57PM   Printer-friendly
from the CARDiac-surgery dept.

On Wednesday, large chunks of network traffic belonging to MasterCard, Visa, and more than two dozen other financial services companies were briefly routed through a Russian government-controlled telecom under unexplained circumstances that renew lingering questions about the trust and reliability of some of the most sensitive Internet communications.

Anomalies in the border gateway protocol—which routes large-scale amounts of traffic among Internet backbones, ISPs, and other large networks—are common and usually the result of human error. While it's possible Wednesday's five- to seven-minute hijack of 36 large network blocks may also have been inadvertent, the high concentration of technology and financial services companies affected made the incident "curious" to engineers at network monitoring service BGPmon. What's more, the way some of the affected networks were redirected indicated their underlying prefixes had been manually inserted into BGP tables, most likely by someone at Rostelecom, the Russian government-controlled telecom that improperly announced ownership of the blocks.

If you did nothing wrong and have nothing to hide, then you have nothing to fear. In Soviet Russia.


Original Submission

posted by martyb on Saturday April 29 2017, @12:24PM   Printer-friendly
from the where's-Tony-Orlando? dept.

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2017-125

NASA's Dawn spacecraft is preparing to observe Ceres on April 29 from an "opposition" position, directly between the dwarf planet's mysterious Occator Crater and the sun. This unique geometry may yield new insights about the bright material in the center of the crater.

While preparing for this observation, one of Dawn's two remaining reaction wheels stopped functioning on April 23. By electrically changing the speed at which these gyroscope-like devices spin, Dawn controls its orientation in the zero-gravity, frictionless conditions of space.

The team discovered the situation during a scheduled communications session on April 24, diagnosed the problem, and returned the spacecraft to its standard flight configuration, still with hydrazine control, on April 25. The failure occurred after Dawn completed its five-hour segment of ion thrusting on April 22 to adjust its orbit, but before the shorter maneuver scheduled for April 23-24. The orbit will still allow Dawn to perform its opposition measurements. The reaction wheel's malfunctioning will not significantly impact the rest of the extended mission at Ceres.

Dawn completed its prime mission in June 2016, and is now in an extended mission. It has been studying Ceres for more than two years, and before that, the spacecraft orbited giant asteroid Vesta, sending back valuable data and images. Dawn launched in 2007.

Ceres and Vesta.


Original Submission

posted by martyb on Saturday April 29 2017, @10:51AM   Printer-friendly
from the don't-hack-anybody-who-is-really-good-at-search dept.

Google and Facebook have confirmed that they were the victims of a major phishing scam:

Last month, the Department of Justice charged a Lithuanian man for fraud, aggravated identity theft, and money laundering after documents revealed he scammed two major tech companies for over $100 million by masquerading as a Taiwanese electronics manufacturer. A Fortune report this week identified those two affected companies as Facebook and Google.

Both companies confirmed to Fortune that their employees were victims of the phishing scam, where the perpetrator — 48-year-old Evaldas Rimasauskas — forged email addresses, invoices, and contracts to swindle Facebook and Google into paying for electronic supplies. The payments were deposited into bank accounts in Latvia, Cyprus, Hong Kong, Slovenia, Hungary, and Lithuania.

From the March 21st DoJ press release, which didn't name the two companies:

Acting U.S. Attorney Joon H. Kim said: "From half a world away, Evaldas Rimasauskas allegedly targeted multinational internet companies and tricked their agents and employees into wiring over $100 million to overseas bank accounts under his control. This case should serve as a wake-up call to all companies – even the most sophisticated – that they too can be victims of phishing attacks by cyber criminals. And this arrest should serve as a warning to all cyber criminals that we will work to track them down, wherever they are, to hold them accountable..."

Also at BBC.


Original Submission

posted by on Saturday April 29 2017, @09:17AM   Printer-friendly
from the the-code-that-wouldn't-die dept.

Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard

We reached out to Daniel Döderlein, CEO of Auka, who has experience with working with banks on technological solutions such as mobile payments. According to him, COBOL-based systems still function properly but they're faced with a more human problem.

This extremely critical part of the economic infrastructure of the planet is run on a very old piece of technology — which in itself is fine — if it weren't for the fact that the people servicing that technology are a dying race.

And Döderlein literally means dying. Despite the fact that three trillion dollars run through COBOL systems every single day they are mostly maintained by retired programming veterans. There are almost no new COBOL programmers available so as retirees start passing away, then so does the maintenance for software written in the ancient programming language.

And here I thought everyone knew banking software should be written in PHP, javascript, or a combination of the two.

Source: https://thenextweb.com/finance/2017/04/25/banks-should-let-ancient-programming-language-cobol-die/


Original Submission

posted by martyb on Saturday April 29 2017, @07:44AM   Printer-friendly
from the diskus dept.

Western Digital is shipping 12 TB helium-filled hard disk drives containing eight 1.5 TB platters:

Western Digital on Wednesday announced that it had begun to ship its HGST Ultrastar He12 hard drives with 12 TB of capacity. The HDDs are the first drives to employ eight platters, so the fact that Western Digital is now shipping them is important not only for its datacenter customers who need massive storage capacities, but also because the drive represents a significant step forward from a technology point of view.

The HGST Ultrastar He12 is based on Western Digital's fourth-generation HelioSeal technology, which uses eight perpendicular magnetic recording platters with 1.5 TB capacity each. To add the eighth platter, Western Digital had to redesign internal components of its HDDs (including arms and heads) significantly. In addition, the company increased areal density of the platters, which improved the sequential read/write performance of the new hard drives. In particular, Western Digital claims that the HGST Ultrastar He12 has a sustained transfer rate of 255 MB/s, an average latency of 4.16 ms, as well as an average seek time of around 8 ms.

Previously: Western Digital Announces 12-14 TB Hard Drives and an 8 TB SSD
Seagate's 12 TB HDDs Are in Use, and 16 TB is Planned for 2018


Original Submission

posted by on Saturday April 29 2017, @06:11AM   Printer-friendly
from the one-big-happy-family dept.

Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard

Libreboot has now officially applied to rejoin GNU, which it left in September. According to Leah Rowe, the "initial responses from GNU's leadership seems positive."

Last week we reported that after reorganization, Libreboot was considering rejoining GNU and was seeking input from its community to determine the amount of support it had for such a move. From reading the comments posted both on our article on FOSS Force and on Libreboot's website, it comes as no surprise that the project's core members feel they have the necessary consesus to proceed.

Last night, FOSS Force received an email — sent jointly to us and Phoronix — letting us know of the decision.

Source: http://fossforce.com/2017/04/libreboot-applies-rejoin-gnu/


Original Submission

posted by Fnord666 on Saturday April 29 2017, @05:28AM   Printer-friendly
from the where-to-draw-the-line dept.

Officials in Xinjiang will deny benefits to children with certain Islamic or Islam-related names:

Many couples fret over choosing the perfect name for their newborn, but for Muslims in western China that decision has now become even more fraught: pick the wrong name and your child will be denied education and government benefits.

Officials in the western region of Xinjiang, home to roughly half of China's 23 million Muslims, have released a list of banned baby names amid an ongoing crackdown on religion, according to a report by US-funded Radio Free Asia.

Names such as Islam, Quran, Saddam and Mecca, as well as references to the star and crescent moon symbol, are all unacceptable to the ruling Communist party and children with those names will be denied household registration, a crucial document that grants access to social services, healthcare and education.

Muhammad, Jihad, Medina, Mujahid, Arafat, Imam, Hajj, and Yultuzay are also banned.

Also at NYT. Reuters story about other restrictions that went into effect on April 1st.

Related: West Facing 'Payback' for Colonialism, says China's State-run Paper
China's Xi Jinping Negotiates $46bn Superhighway to Pakistan
Facebook's Zuckerberg Meets With China's Propaganda Chief, Social Media Mocks Facebook Block


Original Submission

posted by on Saturday April 29 2017, @04:38AM   Printer-friendly
from the not-for-the-dumpy dept.

CNNMoney reports on the introduction of the new Echo Look, which features a

[...] camera that lets you take full-body photos and videos to collect and compare outfits. Echo Look does everything the Amazon Echo speaker does -- like read the news and weather -- but it can now tell you what to wear.

[...] It is powered by both machine-learning technology and human opinion. An Amazon spokesperson said the automated results consider "fit, color, styling, seasons and current trends."

The new device is, according to the company's product page, "available exclusively by invitation."

Additional coverage:

Related stories:
News Anchor Sets Off Alexa Devices Around San Diego Ordering Unwanted Dollhouses
Police Seek Amazon Echo Data in Murder Case
Is Alexa AI In Your Future?
Amazon Said to Plan Music-Streaming Service for its Echo Speaker


Original Submission

posted by Fnord666 on Saturday April 29 2017, @03:07AM   Printer-friendly
from the but-is-it-a-kiddie-script dept.

Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard

NSA's DoublePulsar backdoor can now be remotely uninstalled from any infected Windows machine, thanks to the updated detection script provided by security firm Countercept.

"The SMB version [of the script] also supports the remote uninstall of the implant for remediation, which was helped by knowledge of the opcode mechanism reversed by @zerosum0x0," the company explained.

It's good to note, though, that using it to "clean" machines you don't own is not advised, as it's technically against the law in most countries to tamper with other people's computers. Still, it can come in hand to administrators that are tasked with checking and securing a considerable number of systems.

Also, it's good to remember that removing the backdoor is as easy as restarting the infected machine, although that won't prevent it from being infected again in the same way as before. Installing the patch provided by Microsoft in March will help.

Source: https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2017/04/26/doublepulsar-backdoor-removal/


Original Submission

posted by Fnord666 on Saturday April 29 2017, @01:36AM   Printer-friendly
from the what-could-possibly-go-wrong dept.

Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard

Google says it has new ways to combat its so-called fake-news problem in search results.

Over the last few months, Google, along with Facebook and other digital platforms, has struggled to keep hoaxes and fake news stories from appearing in search.

The examples were pretty unsettling, including Holocaust denials, a claim that President Barack Obama was running for a third term, and a wide range of other conspiracy theories.

On Tuesday, Google will have new feedback tools in its search results so users can flag content that appears to be false or misleading. (Facebook launched similar tools earlier this year, along with tips to help you spot fake news.) This will help teach Google's search algorithms to weed out hoaxes and, in theory, keep them buried in search results.

Google also says its algorithms have now been trained to demote "low quality" content based on signals like whether the information comes from an "authoritative" page.

I can't see how this can do anything but fail spectacularly. You?

Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/google-launches-new-search-tools-to-combat-fake-news-2017-4


Original Submission