The Guy Who Unknowingly ‘Live-Blogged’ the Bin Laden Raid

netbuzz (955038) writes “Three years ago today, software consultant Sohaib Athar was working on his laptop at home in Pakistan when he tweeted: ‘Helicopter hovering above Abbottabad at 1AM (is a rare event).’ And then: ‘A huge window-shaking bang here in Abbottabad Cantt. I hope it’s not the start of something nasty :-S.’ It was for Osama bin Laden. Today Athar says, ‘People do bring it up every now and then.'” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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The Guy Who Unknowingly ‘Live-Blogged’ the Bin Laden Raid

HealthCare.gov Back-End Status: See You In September

theodp writes: “The consumer-facing parts of the Obamacare website may now work (most of the time) for people buying insurance, writes Politico, but beneath the surface, HealthCare.gov is still missing massive, critical pieces that are essential for key functions such as accurately paying insurers — and the deadline for finishing them keeps slipping. Without a fully built and operational system, federal officials can’t determine how many of the 8 million Obamacare sign-ups announced last week will have actually paid their premiums. The Obama administration earlier this month indicated that insurers will continue to be paid through an ‘interim’ accounting process — pretty much a spreadsheet and some informed estimates — until at least September, when what is being called ‘the mother of all reconciliations’ will be conducted, which some fear could reveal the need for a massive correction and rate adjustments. Still, Oregon decided Friday to switch to Healthcare.gov from its own nothing-wrong-that-$78-million-couldn’t-fix Cover Oregon online healthcare exchange.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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HealthCare.gov Back-End Status: See You In September

Closing Surgical Incisions With a Paintbrush and Nanoparticles

New submitter BiancaM (3582365) writes “A group of chemists has shown the power of nanoparticles for closing and healing surgical wounds [abstract]. Using no more than a paintbrush they are able to close surgical openings as well as classical techniques such as sutures. However in fragile deep tissues such as liver even more remarkable results were found- normally fatal damage to internal organs is repaired in seconds using a nanoparticle glue. The results show that closing after surgery can be faster and simpler using nanomaterials to glue wounds shut.” For something between the above linked abstract and the research paper, there’s this write-up at PhysOrg, and a video of the technique in action. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Closing Surgical Incisions With a Paintbrush and Nanoparticles

Apache OpenOffice Reaches 100 Million Downloads. Now What?

We’re thankfully long past the days when an emailed Word document was useless without a copy of Microsoft Word, and that’s in large part thanks to the success of the OpenOffice family of word processors. “Family, ” because the OpenOffice name has been attached to several branches of a codebase that’s gone through some serious evolution over the years, starting from its roots in closed-source StarOffice, acquired and open-sourced by Sun to become OpenOffice.org. The same software has led (via some hamfisted moves by Oracle after its acquisition of Sun) to the also-excellent LibreOffice. OpenOffice.org’s direct descendant is Apache OpenOffice, and an anonymous reader writes with this excellent news from that project: “The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of more than 170 Open Source projects and initiatives, announced today that Apache OpenOffice has been downloaded 100 million times. Over 100 million downloads, over 750 extensions, over 2, 800 templates. But what does the community at Apache need to do to get the next 100 million?” If you want to play along, you can get the latest version of OpenOffice from SourceForge (Slashdot’s corporate cousin). I wonder how many government offices — the U.S. Federal government has long been Microsoft’s biggest customer — couldn’t get along just fine with an open source word processor, even considering all the proprietary-format documents they’re stuck with for now. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Apache OpenOffice Reaches 100 Million Downloads. Now What?

Samsung Claims Breakthrough In Graphene Chip Design

jfruh (300774) writes “Graphene, a carbon-based crystalline lattice that is extremely strong, lightweight, and an excellent conductor of electricity and heat, is coveted as a potential base for semiconductor chip design, and Samsung, working with the Sungkyungkwan University School of Advanced Materials Science and Engineering, has claimed a big jump towards that goal. With IBM also making progress in this realm, the days of silicon could actually be numbered.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Samsung Claims Breakthrough In Graphene Chip Design

CryptoPhone Sales Jump To 100,000+, Even at $3500

An anonymous reader writes “Since Edward Snowden started making NSA files public last year, GSMK has seen a jump in sales. There are more than 100, 000 CryptoPhones in use today. How secure they really are will be determined in the future. But I’m sure that some government agencies, not just in the U.S., are very interested in getting a list of users.” For the price the company’s charging for a modified Galaxy S3, it had better be as secure as they claim; otherwise, the free and open source RedPhone from Moxie Marlinspike’s Whisper Systems seems like something to think about first. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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CryptoPhone Sales Jump To 100,000+, Even at $3500

8.2 Earthquake Off the Coast of Chile, Tsunami Triggered

An 8.2-magnitude earthquake has struck roughly 60km off the cost of Chile. Its depth was approximately 20.1km. A tsunami has been generated, and evacuations have been ordered along the coast near the strike. Tsunami warnings were also issued for Peru and Ecuador. According to the Associated Press, “Coastal residents of northern Chile evacuated calmly as waves measuring almost 2 meters (6 1/2 feet) struck ahead of a tsunami that was expected to come ashore later. … Chile’s emergency service reported some roads blocked by landslides caused by the quake, but said no injuries had been reported so far.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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8.2 Earthquake Off the Coast of Chile, Tsunami Triggered

NSA Confirms It Has Been Searching US Citizens’ Data Without a Warrant

Charliemopps writes: “According to Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, ‘There have been queries, using U.S. person identifiers, of communications lawfully acquired to obtain foreign intelligence targeting non-U.S. persons reasonably believed to be located outside the United States. These queries were performed pursuant to minimization procedures approved by the Fisa court and consistent with the statute and the fourth amendment.’ Basically, if you communicated with someone that is ‘reasonably believed’ to be a terrorist, you’ve lost constitutional protection against searches without a warrant, according to the NSA.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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NSA Confirms It Has Been Searching US Citizens’ Data Without a Warrant

Homeopathic Remedies Recalled For Containing Real Medicine

ananyo (2519492) writes “The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has recalled homeopathic remedies made by a company called Terra-Medica because they may contain actual medicine — possibly penicillin or derivatives of the antibiotic.” Diluted enough times with pure water, though, maybe these traces would be even more powerful. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Homeopathic Remedies Recalled For Containing Real Medicine

NVIDIA Unveils Next Gen Pascal GPU With Stacked 3D DRAM and GeForce GTX Titan Z

MojoKid (1002251) writes “NVIDIA’s 2014 GTC (GPU Technology Conference) kicked off today in San Jose California, with NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang offering up a healthy dose of new information on next generation NVIDIA GPU technologies. Two new NVIDIA innovations will be employed in their next-gen GPU technology, now know by its code named ‘Pascal.” First, there’s a new serial interconnect known as NVLink for GPU-to-CPU and GPU-to-GPU communication. Though details were sparse, apparently NVLink is a serial interconnect that employs differential signaling with embedded clock and it allows for unified memory architectures and eventually cache coherency. It’s similar to PCI Express in terms of command set and programming model but NVLink will offer a massive 5 — 12X boost in bandwidth up to 80GB/sec. The second technology to power NVIDIA’s forthcoming Pascal GPU is 3D stacked DRAM technology.The technique employs through-silicon vias that allow the ability to stack DRAM die on top of each other and thus provide much more density in the same PCB footprint for the DRAM package. Jen-Hsun also used his opening keynote to show off NVIDIA’s most powerful graphics card to date, the absolutely monstrous GeForce GTX Titan Z. The upcoming GeForce GTX Titan Z is powered by a pair of GK110 GPUs, the same chips that power the GeForce GTX Titan Black and GTX 780 Ti. All told, the card features 5, 760 CUDA cores (2, 880 per GPU) and 12GB of frame buffer memory—6GB per GPU. NVIDIA also said that the Titan Z’s GPUs are tuned to run at the same clock speed, and feature dynamic power balancing so neither GPU creates a performance bottleneck.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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NVIDIA Unveils Next Gen Pascal GPU With Stacked 3D DRAM and GeForce GTX Titan Z