Roberto Abraham Scaruffi

Wednesday 28 May 2014


 
 
  
From the they'll-throw-you-in-a-cell department
An anonymous reader writes "Computer science professor Daniel Lemire explains why spreadsheets shouldn't be used for important work, especially where dedicated software could do a better job. His post comes in response to evaluations of a new...
 
From the information-wants-to-be-free-and-private department
Bruce66423 writes: "Ebon Moglen Gives a comprehensive explanation of how the NSA's surveillance operations are a threat to a functioning democracy, and why there is a need for real change. There are interesting parallels to the Roman Empires: 'The...
 
From the beacon-of-tolerance-and-privacy department
wiredmikey (1824622) writes "An Iranian judge has summoned Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg to answer allegations that his company's apps have breached people's privacy, it was reported Tuesday. The court in Fars province ordered that...
 
From the pizza-and-mountain-dew-considered-harmful department
theodp (442580) writes "Among the speakers at last week's National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT) Summit was Chelsea Clinton, who spoke fondly of the Commodore she received as a kid on Christmas Day in 1987. During the...
 
From the what-if-that-cat-was-your-mother department
mikejuk (1801200) writes "A recent paper, 'Intriguing properties of neural networks,' by Christian Szegedy, Wojciech Zaremba, Ilya Sutskever, Joan Bruna, Dumitru Erhan, Ian Goodfellow and Rob Fergus, a team that includes authors from Google's deep...
 
From the just-give-up department
Via the HTTP working group list comes a post from Poul-Henning Kamp proposing that HTTP 2.0 (as it exists now) never be released after the plan of adopting Google's SPDY protocol with minor changes revealed flaws that SPDY/HTTP 2.0 will not...
 
From the searching-is-now-a-crime department
First time accepted submitter S37Rigor Mortis (1601271) writes "Torrentz.eu, the largest torrent search engine on the Internet, has had its domain name suspended following a request from the Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit in the UK. The...
 
From the going-for-a-billion department
Bismillah (993337) writes "Once again, after the Red Flag Linux effort that petered out this year, China is considering Linux to sort out its pressing Windows XP issue. The Windows 8 ban by China's government procurement agency and promises of...
 
From the frequently-transpose-black-and-yellow-bile department
Rambo Tribble (1273454) writes "A group of researchers publishing in the Journal of the American Osteopathic Association found that 90% of the Wikipedia articles they sampled contained errors regarding common medical conditions. Unsurprisingly,...
 
From the just-make-sure-not-to-use-organic-litter department
mdsolar (1045926) writes with news of nuclear plants across the U.S. dealing with the consequences of the failure of Yucca Mountain. From the article: "The steel and concrete containers used to store the waste on-site were envisioned as only a...
 
From the or-else department
M-Saunders (706738) writes "It might sound daunting, but kernel hacking isn't a mysterious black art reserved for the geekiest of programmers. With a bit of background knowledge, anyone with a grounding in C can implement a new kernel module and...
   
From the barking-up-the-wrong-tree department
Today marked the launch of Watch Dogs, a highly-anticipated action-adventure game from Ubisoft. Early reviews for the game are fairly good, but not without complaints. Eurogamer said, 'Combat encounters also draw inspiration from existing games,...
 
From the just-happy-to-see-you department
oztechmuse (2323576) writes "Samsung has just released an updated version of its health software for the Samsung Galaxy S5 that measures stress levels. Using the heart rate sensor on the back of the phone, the S5 will calculate a measure of stress...
 
From the don't-break-the-circle department
A limitation of current (affordable) 3D printers is their use of open loop controllers and stepper motors which limits reliability (drove the motor too quickly and skipped a step? Your model is ruined) and precision (~300 steps per revolution). A...