All in all, the look is good but there are some minor tweeks the new slashdot could use:
1. Not enough contrast in the links in stories for them to be easily visible. That makes a big difference to old guys with deteriotating eyesight (like me).
2. No way for a story submitter to attach a link or email address to his username when he/she submits a story.
3. The story box is too small when making a story submission and makes it difficult to submit stories from an ipad.
4. When I look at popular in the firehose, I don't see the colors indicating their popularity anymore. This was really useful.
5. Please bring back the story rejected/accepted page that used to show up when you submitted a story.
6. The good - that you have retained the ability from the classic view to look at stories nested, flat, back to front etc.
"A close look at the actual files and accompanying documentation, however, suggest that it's not a simple case of copy and paste. The infringing files are found in a compressed archive in a third-party component supplied by SONiVOX, a member of Google's Open Handset Alliance (OHA). SONiVOX, which was previously called Sonic, develops an Embedded Audio Synthesis (EAS) framework and accompanying Java API wrappers which it markets as audioINSIDE."
It's not clear how the zip file got included in the AOSP, but it's obvious that it wasn't intended to be there and isn't actually used by Android in any capacity. Android is using SONiVOX's EAS code, but doesn't use or need the MMAPI wrapper. This incident is very clearly not a case of Android stealing code from Sun or J2ME. It's a handful of test cases from an unrelated and publicly available Sun reference implementation that got uploaded by accident to AOSP in a zip archive supplied by a third party. It's a tacky mistake, but it's hardly serious or damaging. At worst, it warrants a takedown notice. It's certainly not a smoking gun as one might assume when viewing the code out of context.
An investigation by the Wall Street Journal of 101 popular smartphone "apps"--games and other software applications for iPhone and Android phones--shows that 56 transmitt the phone's unique device ID to other companies without users' awareness or consent. Forty-seven apps transmitt the phone's location in some way. Five send age, gender and other personal details to outsiders. "In the world of mobile, there is no anonymity," says Michael Becker of the Mobile Marketing Association. A cellphone is "always with us. It's always on." Smartphone users are all but powerless to limit the tracking. With few exceptions, app users can't "opt out" of phone tracking, as is possible, in limited form, on regular computers. Both Apple and Google say they protect users by requiring apps to obtain permission before revealing certain kinds of information, such as location but the investigation found that these rules can be skirted. For example, one iPhone app, Pumpkin Maker (a pumpkin-carving game), transmits location to an ad network without asking permission. Apple declines to comment on whether the app violates its rules.
Actually at the time this story was submitted to Slashdot and posted to the front page, the rods had not been located.
The story was updated after the rods were found but Fox didn't mention that they had changed the story, given the story a different headline, and kept the whole story at the same URL. Normally when a story changed this substantially, the news organization publishes a new story, or at least notes that the story has been updated or corrected.
Here is the cached version of the story and the headline at the time it was submitted as a story to Slashdot.
FedEx Searching for Radioactive Shipment That Vanished Between N.D. and Tenn.
By Diane Macedo
Published November 26, 2010
| FoxNews.com
MEMPHIS, Tenn. - FedEx reports that a shipment of radioactive rods used in medical equipment has vanished while being sent from North Dakota to Tennessee.
FedEx spokeswoman Sandra Munoz says the rods, which are used for quality control in CT scans, were being returned to their manufacturer in Knoxville, Tenn., from a hospital in Fargo, N.D. Three shipments left the hospital earlier this week, but only two arrived at their destination.
"We're looking for that third one," Munoz told FoxNews.com.
Based on tracking information, FedEx is focusing its search in the Tennessee area, Munoz said, but as a normal precaution the company alerted all of its stations "in the event that it got way late and went to another station by accident."
The rods are incased in a metal container called a pig that Munoz says is roughly 10 inches tall and weighs about 20 pounds.
"As long as people do not try to open the metal container they will not be exposed to any remaining radiation," she said.
But Fox News Medical Contributor Dr. Marc Siegel says if someone does open the container it could pose some serious health risks.
"I don't believe it has the degree of radiation that, if it were opened, your skin would suddenly slop off. But the concern would be, if this got opened inadvertently and someone didn't know what it was and then was repeatedly exposed to it over several days, it could cause a problem with radiation poisoning," Siegel said. "The people that use this equipment in a hospital use protective shielding with it."
The lesson here, he says, is that active medical material must always be transported in a way that ensures that the general public cannot get access to it.
"Medical devices should not be FedEx'ed. They should be sent under a special service," Siegel said. "There are courier services and several other ways to do that without getting into the general pool. I think that was a mistake that's not generally the way medical supplies are sent.
"If FedEx wants to be involved in transporting medical materials, it should be completely separate and with all kinds of checks and balances so this can't happen," he added.
Munoz says FedEx follows a series of regulations when transporting objects like the rods in this shipment. This was no exception.
"There are regulations on how this type of equipment has to be packaged, the quantities that can be shipped, and we were all within the regulatory requirements," she said.
It is now being called an engineering failure not a power failure.
"According to the official, engineers believe that a launch control center computer (LCC), responsible for a package of five missiles, began to "ping" out of sequence, resulting in a surge of "noise" through the system. The LCCs interrogate each missile in sequence, so if they begin to send signals out when they're not supposed to, receivers on the missiles themselves will notice this and send out error codes.
Since LCCs ping out of sequence on occasion, missileers tried quick fixes. But as more and more missiles began to display error settings, they decided to take off-line all five LCCs that the malfunctioning center was connected to. That left 50 missiles in the dark. The missileers then restarted one of the LCCs, which began to normally interrogate the missile transceiver. Three other LCCs were successfully restarted. The suspect LCC remains off-line. "
I have a lousy memory so over the past fiteen years, I have set up a series of about 20 Filemaker databases where I keep all the information that I don't want to lose. The strength of Filemaker for me is that it is easy to set up and that the database allows full text searches. Each database is set up using a template that automatically puts in the creation date and time and the modification date and time.
For example, when I started surfing the net in 1996, I set up a Filemaker database for all the interesting web sites I might want to come back to that includes the URL and a text description of the database. Over the years I have about 7,000 entries in the database. What is interesting is to go back and see what sorts of sites I was visiting say in 1998.
Whenever I see an interesting article with information that I may want to access again, I just copy all the text into another database along with the URL of the information. That database now has about 40,000 entries since I started keeping it in 1999.
I have another database that I started keeping in 1992 with all the phone calls that I make and receive and another database. That was very useful to me when I was a project manager and had to keep track of about twenty subcontractors and my agreements with them on what deliverables I would get from them and when they were due.
I have another database that I just call text where I edit text files for emails I send, or slashdot posts like this one before I post them. That one has about 30,000 entries so far.
I even have a database that I keep of slashdot stories that I have submitted and which ones have been accepted. Periodically I do a dump of that database to my web site.
There are stories, generally op-eds, "think pieces," and commissioned pieces with original research that appear on the NY Times and no where else.
As an example, I submitted a story yesterday about Isaac Newton on new historical research that explains why he spent thirty years of his life working on alchemy.
That story is only on the Times and no where else.
AP reports that Congress has passed a bill that extends the life of the space shuttle program for a year, extends the life of the International Space Station from 2015 to 2020, and backs President Barack Obama's intent to use commercial carriers to lift humans into near-Earth space while dismantling the Constellation program under which former President George W. Bush sought to return astronauts to the moon. Obama, in pushing for the end of the Constellation program, said it was implausible under current budget restraints and that NASA was siphoning off funds from other programs. Obama told NASA workers at Cape Canaveral in April that he was committed to manned space flight and envisioned sending astronauts to near-Earth asteroids in the near future as a prelude to trips to Mars in the coming decades. Obama's plan has met resistance from the space industry, former astronauts and lawmakers who say it is risky to put too much reliance on commercial flights while NASA develops a next-generation heavy-lift rocket to carry people to those asteroids and Mars.
Slashdot Mirror
All in all, the look is good but there are some minor tweeks the new slashdot could use:
1. Not enough contrast in the links in stories for them to be easily visible. That makes a big difference to old guys with deteriotating eyesight (like me).
2. No way for a story submitter to attach a link or email address to his username when he/she submits a story.
3. The story box is too small when making a story submission and makes it difficult to submit stories from an ipad.
4. When I look at popular in the firehose, I don't see the colors indicating their popularity anymore. This was really useful.
5. Please bring back the story rejected/accepted page that used to show up when you submitted a story.
6. The good - that you have retained the ability from the classic view to look at stories nested, flat, back to front etc.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leet
"A close look at the actual files and accompanying documentation, however, suggest that it's not a simple case of copy and paste. The infringing files are found in a compressed archive in a third-party component supplied by SONiVOX, a member of Google's Open Handset Alliance (OHA). SONiVOX, which was previously called Sonic, develops an Embedded Audio Synthesis (EAS) framework and accompanying Java API wrappers which it markets as audioINSIDE."
It's not clear how the zip file got included in the AOSP, but it's obvious that it wasn't intended to be there and isn't actually used by Android in any capacity. Android is using SONiVOX's EAS code, but doesn't use or need the MMAPI wrapper. This incident is very clearly not a case of Android stealing code from Sun or J2ME. It's a handful of test cases from an unrelated and publicly available Sun reference implementation that got uploaded by accident to AOSP in a zip archive supplied by a third party. It's a tacky mistake, but it's hardly serious or damaging. At worst, it warrants a takedown notice. It's certainly not a smoking gun as one might assume when viewing the code out of context.
An investigation by the Wall Street Journal of 101 popular smartphone "apps"--games and other software applications for iPhone and Android phones--shows that 56 transmitt the phone's unique device ID to other companies without users' awareness or consent. Forty-seven apps transmitt the phone's location in some way. Five send age, gender and other personal details to outsiders. "In the world of mobile, there is no anonymity," says Michael Becker of the Mobile Marketing Association. A cellphone is "always with us. It's always on." Smartphone users are all but powerless to limit the tracking. With few exceptions, app users can't "opt out" of phone tracking, as is possible, in limited form, on regular computers. Both Apple and Google say they protect users by requiring apps to obtain permission before revealing certain kinds of information, such as location but the investigation found that these rules can be skirted. For example, one iPhone app, Pumpkin Maker (a pumpkin-carving game), transmits location to an ad network without asking permission. Apple declines to comment on whether the app violates its rules.
With Better Sharing of Intel Comes Danger
Actually at the time this story was submitted to Slashdot and posted to the front page, the rods had not been located.
The story was updated after the rods were found but Fox didn't mention that they had changed the story, given the story a different headline, and kept the whole story at the same URL. Normally when a story changed this substantially, the news organization publishes a new story, or at least notes that the story has been updated or corrected.
Here is the cached version of the story and the headline at the time it was submitted as a story to Slashdot.
http://cc.bingj.com/cache.aspx?q=radioactive+rods+fox+news&d=1094018597270&mkt=en-US&setlang=en-US&w=d977f9e4,d2527ef2
FedEx Searching for Radioactive Shipment That Vanished Between N.D. and Tenn.
Actually at the time this story was submitted, the rods had not been located.
The story was updated on the Fox News Site after the rods were found but they kept the original URL.
Here is the cached version of the story at the time it was submitted as a story to Slashdot.
http://cc.bingj.com/cache.aspx?q=radioactive+rods+fox+news&d=1094018597270&mkt=en-US&setlang=en-US&w=d977f9e4,d2527ef2
FedEx Searching for Radioactive Shipment That Vanished Between N.D. and Tenn.
By Diane Macedo
Published November 26, 2010
| FoxNews.com
MEMPHIS, Tenn. - FedEx reports that a shipment of radioactive rods used in medical equipment has vanished while being sent from North Dakota to Tennessee.
FedEx spokeswoman Sandra Munoz says the rods, which are used for quality control in CT scans, were being returned to their manufacturer in Knoxville, Tenn., from a hospital in Fargo, N.D. Three shipments left the hospital earlier this week, but only two arrived at their destination.
"We're looking for that third one," Munoz told FoxNews.com.
Based on tracking information, FedEx is focusing its search in the Tennessee area, Munoz said, but as a normal precaution the company alerted all of its stations "in the event that it got way late and went to another station by accident."
The rods are incased in a metal container called a pig that Munoz says is roughly 10 inches tall and weighs about 20 pounds.
"As long as people do not try to open the metal container they will not be exposed to any remaining radiation," she said.
But Fox News Medical Contributor Dr. Marc Siegel says if someone does open the container it could pose some serious health risks.
"I don't believe it has the degree of radiation that, if it were opened, your skin would suddenly slop off. But the concern would be, if this got opened inadvertently and someone didn't know what it was and then was repeatedly exposed to it over several days, it could cause a problem with radiation poisoning," Siegel said. "The people that use this equipment in a hospital use protective shielding with it."
The lesson here, he says, is that active medical material must always be transported in a way that ensures that the general public cannot get access to it.
"Medical devices should not be FedEx'ed. They should be sent under a special service," Siegel said. "There are courier services and several other ways to do that without getting into the general pool. I think that was a mistake that's not generally the way medical supplies are sent.
"If FedEx wants to be involved in transporting medical materials, it should be completely separate and with all kinds of checks and balances so this can't happen," he added.
Munoz says FedEx follows a series of regulations when transporting objects like the rods in this shipment. This was no exception.
"There are regulations on how this type of equipment has to be packaged, the quantities that can be shipped, and we were all within the regulatory requirements," she said.
It's a transistor radio.
It is now being called an engineering failure not a power failure.
"According to the official, engineers believe that a launch control center computer (LCC), responsible for a package of five missiles, began to "ping" out of sequence, resulting in a surge of "noise" through the system. The LCCs interrogate each missile in sequence, so if they begin to send signals out when they're not supposed to, receivers on the missiles themselves will notice this and send out error codes.
Since LCCs ping out of sequence on occasion, missileers tried quick fixes. But as more and more missiles began to display error settings, they decided to take off-line all five LCCs that the malfunctioning center was connected to. That left 50 missiles in the dark. The missileers then restarted one of the LCCs, which began to normally interrogate the missile transceiver. Three other LCCs were successfully restarted. The suspect LCC remains off-line. "
The missiles were offline for about an hour.
I have a lousy memory so over the past fiteen years, I have set up a series of about 20 Filemaker databases where I keep all the information that I don't want to lose. The strength of Filemaker for me is that it is easy to set up and that the database allows full text searches. Each database is set up using a template that automatically puts in the creation date and time and the modification date and time.
For example, when I started surfing the net in 1996, I set up a Filemaker database for all the interesting web sites I might want to come back to that includes the URL and a text description of the database. Over the years I have about 7,000 entries in the database. What is interesting is to go back and see what sorts of sites I was visiting say in 1998.
Whenever I see an interesting article with information that I may want to access again, I just copy all the text into another database along with the URL of the information. That database now has about 40,000 entries since I started keeping it in 1999.
I have another database that I started keeping in 1992 with all the phone calls that I make and receive and another database. That was very useful to me when I was a project manager and had to keep track of about twenty subcontractors and my agreements with them on what deliverables I would get from them and when they were due.
I have another database that I just call text where I edit text files for emails I send, or slashdot posts like this one before I post them. That one has about 30,000 entries so far.
I even have a database that I keep of slashdot stories that I have submitted and which ones have been accepted. Periodically I do a dump of that database to my web site.
I like to write non-fiction, and if I'm working on an article, then I have a web site set up where I can use a personal Wikipedia to keep track of references and footnotes like this one I have been working on for a while of Stanley Ann Dunham, the mother of President Obama, who grew up in my hometown of Ponca City or this one on the Pioneer Woman Models that I recently had accepted for publication in Oklahoma Magazine.
I don't recommend this methodology for everyone, but it works for me.
There are stories, generally op-eds, "think pieces," and commissioned pieces with original research that appear on the NY Times and no where else.
As an example, I submitted a story yesterday about Isaac Newton on new historical research that explains why he spent thirty years of his life working on alchemy.
That story is only on the Times and no where else.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/12/science/12newton.html
Take a look at my submission. I think it's a good story and based on my experience, one that slashdot normally would have accepted.
http://slashdot.org/submission/1354636/Isaac-Newton-Alchemist
Show me where you can find that story anyplace else on the web.
AP reports that Congress has passed a bill that extends the life of the space shuttle program for a year, extends the life of the International Space Station from 2015 to 2020, and backs President Barack Obama's intent to use commercial carriers to lift humans into near-Earth space while dismantling the Constellation program under which former President George W. Bush sought to return astronauts to the moon. Obama, in pushing for the end of the Constellation program, said it was implausible under current budget restraints and that NASA was siphoning off funds from other programs. Obama told NASA workers at Cape Canaveral in April that he was committed to manned space flight and envisioned sending astronauts to near-Earth asteroids in the near future as a prelude to trips to Mars in the coming decades. Obama's plan has met resistance from the space industry, former astronauts and lawmakers who say it is risky to put too much reliance on commercial flights while NASA develops a next-generation heavy-lift rocket to carry people to those asteroids and Mars.
His name is Jack Vaughn.
He was a prize fighter, a diplomat, and the second Director of the Peace Corps.
Read a very interesting story about his life at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Vaughn
Happy Birthday, Jack, from RPCVs around the world.