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Submission + - Build An Open-Source Electric Car In One Hour, For $4,000 1

Submitted by joe5
joe5 writes: Like what Elon Musk has done building an electric car and want to go all Etsy and build your own? That's apparently now possible now thanks to the OSVehicle Tabby — dubbed the first "Open source vehicle" (memo: it may be cool, but it ain't the first). The OSV guys are taking pre-orders for the Tabby starter kit, with both the two-seater or four-seater configurations going for €500. Then you click to add options (Note: seats is an "option" so that's the level of luxury you are dealing with here) When the transactions complete, OSV sends the parts to your home and you can download the plans and start building. Since the Tabby is open source, OSVehicle will also look to a community of owners and tinkerers for suggestions and recommendations.

Submission + - Judge Says You Can Warn Others About Speed Traps

Submitted by cartechboy
cartechboy writes: Speeding is against the law, and yes, even going 5 mph over the speed limit is breaking the law. But everyone does it, right? You do it, your friends do it, heck, your grandmother does it. But what about when you see a cop? Some cops are ticketing people for notifying fellow motorists about speed traps. In Florida, Ryan Kintner simply flashed his high-beams to warning oncoming cars that there was a cop ahead. He was given a ticket for doing so. He went to court to fight the ticket, and a judge ruled that flashing lights are the equivalent of free speech, thus he had every right to flash his lights to warn oncoming cars. So what have we learned here? Basically, if you are a good Samaritan, flash your lights and warn oncoming traffic of speed traps, because this is America ,and we are allowed freedom of speech.

Submission + - Is Verizon Already Slowing Netflix Down? (davesblog.com)

Submitted by hondo77
hondo77 writes: From Dave's Blog: "I’ve since tested this almost every day for the last couple of weeks. During the day – the bandwidth is normal to AWS. However, after 4pm or so – things get slow. In my personal opinion, this is Verizon waging war against Netflix. Unfortunately, a lot of infrastructure is hosted on AWS. That means a lot of services are going to be impacted by this."

Submission + - Weird Asteroid Itokawa Has a Dual Personality (discovery.com)

Submitted by astroengine
astroengine writes: We care about how asteroids are made, in large part because if one were aiming to smash into us, we’d like to know what we can do about it. The structure of asteroids is also a matter of scientific curiosity, as it tells us a bit about the formation and evolution in our solar system. That is why it is so exciting that the most recent very delicate observations of asteroid 25143 Itokawa reveal some of its secrets. 25143 Itokawa is a relatively small near-Earth asteroid that was visited by the Japanese Habayusa spacecraft in 2005. It has also been monitored by Stephen Lowry of the University of Kent and his colleagues over a twelve year span with the 3.58 meter New Technology Telescope in La Silla, Chile. In that time span, Itokawa has made five near approaches to Earth. And what did they find? The asteroid is composed of two lobes of different densities, suggesting that Itokawa is in fact a merged binary.

Submission + - Should Everybody Learn to Code?

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: In July, the Association for Computing Machinery announced it was partnering with Code.org, with ACM contributing funding and its Director of Public Policy to Code.org in a push to 'ensure that every K-12 student in the US has the opportunity to study computer science.' Interestingly, joining others questioning the conventional Presidential wisdom that everybody-must-get-code is the Communications of the ACM, which asks in its February issue, Should Everybody Learn to Code? By the way, Code.org is bringing its Hour of Code show to the UK in March. The new National Curriculum for England that is to be taught in all primary and secondary schools beginning in September includes a new emphasis on Computer Science curricula, said to have been sparked by a speech given by Google Chairman Eric Schmidt in 2011.

Submission + - Oracle broadens legal fight against third-party Solaris support providers (computerworld.com.au) 1

Submitted by angry tapir
angry tapir writes: Oracle is continuing its legal battle against third-party software support providers it alleges are performing such services in a manner that violates its intellectual property. Last week, Oracle sued StratisCom, a Georgia company that offers customers support for Oracle's Solaris OS, claiming it had "misappropriated and distributed copyright, proprietary software code, along with the login credentials necessary to download this code from Oracle's password-protected websites."

Submission + - Hackers Steal Law Enforcement Documents from Microsoft (securityweek.com)

Submitted by wiredmikey
wiredmikey writes: Microsoft on Friday said that attackers breached the email accounts of a “select number” of employees, and obtained access to documents associated with law enforcement inquiries. According to the company, a number of Microsoft employees were targeted with attacks aiming to compromise both email and social media accounts

“..We have learned that there was unauthorized access to certain employee email accounts, and information contained in those accounts could be disclosed,” said Adrienne Hall, General Manager at Microsoft's Trustworthy Computing Group. “It appears that documents associated with law enforcement inquiries were stolen,” Hall said.

Targeted attacks like this are not uncommon, especially for an organization like Microsoft. What’s interesting about this is that the incident was significant enough to disclose, indicating that a fair number of documents could have been exposed, or that the company fears some documents will make their way to the public if released by the attackers—which may be the case if this was a “hacktivist” attack.

Submission + - Great Firewall of UK blocks game patch because of substring matches

Submitted by Sockatume
Sockatume writes: Remember the fun of spurious substring matches, AKA the Scunthorpe problem? The UK's advanced "intelligent" internet filters do. Supposedly the country's great new filtering regime has been blocking a patch for League of Legends because some of the filenames within it include the substring "sex". Add one to the list of embarrassing failures for the nation's new mosaic of opt-out censorship systems, which have proven themselves incapable of distinguishing between abusive sites and sites for abuse victims, or sites for pornography versus sites for sexual and gender minorities.

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: How Can Nintendo Recover? (slashdot.org)

Submitted by Nerval's Lobster
Nerval's Lobster writes: Nintendo’s revenue and profits are tumbling faster than Mario into a bottomless pit. Company executives recently suggested the next-generation Wii U console would sell 2.8 million units between April 2013 and March 2014—significantly below the 9 million units predicted in previous estimates. Contrast that with Sony’s PlayStation 4 and Microsoft’s Xbox One, which sold 4.2 million and 3 million units, respectively, in their first six weeks of release. In lowering its hardware and software estimates, Nintendo also expects to take a loss by the end of its fiscal year in March. Nintendo’s attempt to carve a niche for itself as an ecosystem for casual gamers has also run into a massive obstacle in the form of smartphones and tablets, which quickly developed into popular gaming platforms. Nintendo is reportedly considering a “new business model,” according to Bloomberg , with its CEO telling a gathering of reporters in Osaka: “Given the expansion of smart devices, we are naturally studying how smart devices can be used to grow the game-player business. It’s not as simple as enabling Mario to move on a smartphone.” While Nintendo could probably made some good money off legacy gamers by bringing its (much loved) portfolio of older titles to iOS, Android, and other platforms, that move to mobile might further weaken its hardware sales. So what do you think? If you were in charge of Nintendo, how would you turn it around?

Submission + - Intel Dev: GTK's Biggest Problem, And What Qt Does Better

Submitted by Freshly Exhumed
Freshly Exhumed writes: Phoronix has an article about how Dirk Hohndel of Intel's Open-Source Technology Center has stirred the hornet's nest with a talk at Australia's Linux.Conf.Au (MP4 file) about what he views as the biggest problem with the GTK: he finds dealing with upstream GTK/GNOME developers to be tough, with frequent abuse and flame-wars, with accusations from the developers that "you're doing it wrong." Conversely, he found the Qt development community to be quite the opposite: willing to engage and help, with plenty of application developer documentation and fewer communication problems than with their GTK counterparts.

Submission + - International Space Station life extended (nytimes.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Times reports "Instead of splashing into the Pacific Ocean in 2020 as planned, the International Space Station will continue circling Earth for at least an additional four years, NASA announced on Wednesday. The cost of operating the station, about $3 billion a year, could then be devoted to the moon program.

However, it always seemed unlikely that the station, which was built at a cost of $100 billion and completed just three years ago, would be discarded that soon, and when the Obama administration announced it wanted to cancel the moon program, it gave the first extension, stretching the life of the station to 2020."

Submission + - IDC: PC shipments decline worse than forecast, no recovery expected (zdnet.com)

Submitted by symbolset
symbolset writes: Zach Whittaker over at ZDNet covers an IDC report. In it the 2013 9.7% forecast decline in PC shipments is advanced to 10.1%. Further, IDC's longer-term forecast turns quite grim: contracting 23% from 2012 levels by 2017.

There is also a projection of future Windows tablet sales, and a statement that total Windows tablet sales for 2013 are expected to be "less than 7.5 million units".

Submission + - SC13: GPUs would make terrific network monitors (networkworld.com)

Submitted by alphadogg
alphadogg writes: A network researcher at the U.S. Department of Energy's Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory has found a potential new use for graphics processing units — capturing data about network traffic in real time. GPU-based network monitors could be uniquely qualified to keep pace with all the traffic flowing through networks running at 10Gbps or more, said Fermilab's Wenji Wu. Wenji presented his work as part of a poster series of new research at the SC 2013 supercomputing conference this week in Denver.

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