Roberto Abraham Scaruffi

Monday 29 July 2013


 
 
  
From the people-love-submissive-robots department
An anonymous reader writes with this interesting snippet about the state of mobile tech in China: "Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook believes that 'over the arc of time' China is a huge opportunity for his pathbreaking company. But time looks to be...
 
From the you-wait-until-its-gmo-coffee-or-nothing-at-all department
biobricks writes "A New York Times story says the Florida orange crop is threatened by an incurable disease and traces the efforts of one company to insert a spinach gene in orange trees to fend it off. Not clear if consumers will go for it...
 
From the well-if-you'd-like-my-opinion-gentleman department
First time accepted submitter MetalliQaZ writes "Last week, Dr. Joseph Bonneau learned that he had won the NSA's first annual "Science of Security (SoS) Competition." The competition, which aims to honor the best 'scientific papers about national...
 
From the climate-change-without-leaving-the-room department
knorthern knight writes "Most major weather services (US NWS, Britain's Met Office, etc) have their own supercomputers, and their own weather models. But there are some models which are used globally. A new paper has been published, comparing...
 
From the ways-of-knowing department
c0d3g33k writes "Prompted by the addition of new security features in Android 4.3 that limit the effectiveness of elevated privileges, Steve Kondik wonders which uses really require full root. Most common activities that prompt owners to root...
 
From the just-ask-at-the-casino-what-works department
Velcroman1 writes "Retailers are experimenting with a variety of new ways to track you, so that when you pick up a shirt, you might get a message about the matching shorts. Or pick up golf shoes at a sports store and you see a discount for a new...
 
From the but-from-here-it-could-collapse-and-repeat department
CaptSlaq writes "According to the current imagery, it looks like Randal Munroe has finished the story he was telling with the Time series. The long running series that has spanned over 3000 images and spawned multiple methods of viewing and...
 
From the my-current-dentist-has-been-nice-so-far department
According to a report at Ars Technica, a dentist named Stacy Makhnevich, who billed herself as "the Classical Singer Dentist of New York," threatened patients who wrote bad Yelp reviews with lawsuits, along the same lines as the online dental...
 
From the driving-on-the-wrong-side-would-work-too department
An anonymous reader writes "The High Court — England's highest civil court — has temporarily banned the publication of a scientific paper that would reveal the details of a zero day vulnerability in vehicle immobilisers and, crucially,...
 
From the novelization-of-wargames-is-all-you-need department
An anonymous reader writes "We are teaching an introductory class in computer science for high school students. We have the technical aspects of the course covered, there is a lot of information on the internet on designing that aspect of the...
 
From the now-go-help-charlie-get-off-the-mta department
Daniel_Stuckey writes "The U.K.'s Max Roberts, a mapmaker and critic, has created a map that sees this problem and then solves it by adopting a similar distortion strategy to the MTA map, but to a far greater degree. The map heads in the direction...
 
From the worth-it-at-any-price department
MarkWhittington writes "According to a July 26, 2013 story in Space News, NASA Deputy Administrator Lori Garver mused about what appeared to be a change to the space agency's asteroid snatching mission at the NewSpace 2013 conference. Apparently...
 
From the rounding-sideways department
theodp writes "As noted earlier, Microsoft is tackling the CS education crisis with a popularity contest that will award $100K in donations to five technology education nonprofits that help make kids technically literate. Hopefully, the nonprofits...
 
From the ok-time-for-your-voight-kampff department
kkleiner writes "An artistic robotic system named e-David has been developed that produces paintings that appear to be created by humans. Using an iterative process of brush strokes and image comparison, e-David's assembly line welder arm can...
 
From the dude-this-costs-$35 department
Via Engadget comes the news that Google's latest (and quickly sold-out) toy, the Chromecast, may soon be hacked out of one-trick-pony status; just a few days after it came out, the folks at GTV Hacker have successfully turned their attention to...