Know any kids aged 8 to 13? Keep them occupied this summer and help them enhance their digital skills with the help of Apple and Microsoft. Read more…
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Send Your Kids to Free Apple or Microsoft Workshops This Summer
An anonymous reader writes “Edwin Vargas, a detective with the New York City Police Department, was arrested on Tuesday for computer hacking crimes. According to the complaint unsealed in Manhattan federal court, between March 2011 and October 2012, Vargas, an NYPD detective assigned to a precinct in the Bronx, hired an e-mail hacking service to obtain log-in credentials, such as the password and username, for certain e-mail accounts. In total, he purchased access to at least 43 personal e-mail accounts belonging to 30 different individuals, including at least 19 who are affiliated with the NYPD.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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NYPD Detective Accused of Hiring Email Hackers
New submitter imlepid writes “The Oxford English Dictionary is currently undergoing a complete overhaul which includes a reexamination of the 300,000+ entries and citations for those entries. Understandably for a work which is over 150 years old, some of the sources have become hard to find. One such example is a book titled ‘Meanderings of Memory’ by Nightlark, which is cited 49 times in the OED, including for some rare words. The OED’s editorial team has appealed to the public, ‘Have you seen a copy of this book?'” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Help the OED Find a Lost Book
Today, at an event in New York, GE announced that it will open up “thousands” of patents from its library of some 20,000 to inventors using Quirky’s crowdsourced product development platform. That means that if you’re bright enough, you can use a GE patent to invent something. GE will still collect royalties on your brain power, but they promise not to sue you. More »
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GE Is Freeing Up ‘Thousands’ Patents to Fuel Your Imagination
Your chances of being split open sternum to sphincter for a medical procedure are quickly declining (whew) thanks to the advent of endoscopic surgery and robotic surgical platforms like the DaVinci , though even these revolutionary procedures have their limitations. But thanks to a team of Stanford researchers, size is no longer one of them. More »
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This Hair’s-Width Endoscope Will Revolutionize Micro-Surgery
With the Linux 3.8 merge over, the Intel Linux graphics developers are looking toward 3.9. From a weblog entry by one of them: “Let’s first look at bit at the drm core changes: The headline item this time around is the reworked kernel modeset locking. Finally the kernel doesn’t stall for a few frames while probing outputs in the background! … For general robustness of our GEM implementation we’ve clarified the various gpu reset state transitions. This should prevent applications from crashing while a gpu reset is going on due to the kernel leaking that transitory state to userspace. Ville Syrjälä also started to fix up our handling of pageflips across gpu hangs so that compositors no longer get stuck after a reset. Unfortunately not all of his patches made it into 3.9. Somewhat related is Mika Kuoppala’s work to fix bugs across the seqnqo wrap-around. And to make sure that those bugs won’t pop up again he also added some testing infrastructure. ” The thing I am most looking forward to is the gen4 relocation regression finally being fixed. No more GPU hangs when under heavy I/O load (the bane of my existence for a while now). The bug report is a good read if you think hunting for a tricky bug is fun. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Lots of Changes for Intel Graphics Coming in Linux 3.9
Fancy yourself an artist? Well if you’re in need of a medium, you could always opt for “pizza.” A new website called “Paint Your Pizza” lets you turn horrendously impressionist MSPaint-inspired masterworks into theoretically delicious pizzas for the sophisticated stomach. More »
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Paint Your Pizza Lets You Design Deliciously Ugly Made-To-Order Pizzas On the Web
You can already pay to promote your own Facebook posts, and now you can cough up the cash to promote the content your friends are posting, too. More »
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Facebook Now Lets You Pay To Promote Your Friends’ Posts
judgecorp writes “Britain is considering switching off air traffic control radar systems and using “passive radar” instead. A two year feasibility study will consider using a network of ground stations which monitor broadcast TV signals and measure echoes from aircraft to determine their location and velocity. The system is not a new idea — early radar experiments used BBC shortwave transmitters as a signal source before antenna technology produced a transceiver suitable for radar — but could now be better than conventional radar thanks to new antenna designs and signal processing techniques. It will also save money and energy by eliminating transmitters — and release spectrum for 5G services.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Britain Could Switch Off Airport Radar and Release 5G Spectrum
Google’s philanthropic arm, Google Giving , has awarded a grant to the Raspberry Pi Foundation to fund 15,000 U.K. schoolchildren to get their very own Raspberry Pi micro computer to learn to code . The size of the Google Giving grant has not been disclosed but the Foundation describes it as “generous”, and the Model B Pi, which the kids will be getting, retails for $35 — so taken at face retail value the grant is worth $525,000. Announcing the award in a blog post today, the Foundation revealed Google’s chairman Eric Schmidt spent the morning with Raspberry Pi founder Eben Upton at a local school in Cambridge, U.K. teaching kids about coding — and doubtless geeking out over the details of building a $35 micro computer . The Foundation said it will be working with Google and six U.K. educational partners to “find the kids who we think will benefit from having their very own Raspberry Pi”. The six partners are CoderDojo , Code Club , Computing at Schools , Generating Genius , Teach First and OCR . As well as helping the Foundation identify the lucky kids who will get free Pi, they will also be providing additional help and support. For example, OCR will be creating 15,000 free teaching and learning packs to go with the Raspberry Pis. The Foundation added: We’re absolutely made up over the news; this is a brilliant way for us to find kids all over the country whose aptitude for computing can now be explored properly. We believe that access to tools is a fundamental necessity in finding out who you are and what you’re good at. We want those tools to be within everybody’s grasp, right from the start. The really good sign is that industry has a visible commitment now to trying to solve the problem of CS education in the UK. Grants like this show us that companies like Google aren’t prepared to wait for government or someone else to fix the problems we’re all discussing, but want to help tackle them themselves. We’re incredibly grateful for their help in something that we, like them, think is of vital importance. We think they deserve an enormous amount of credit for helping some of our future engineers and scientists find a way to a career they’re going to love. More than one million Raspberry Pis have been sold since launch , although it’s not clear how many of those have gone to kids — as the Pi has been especially popular among the enthusiast adult maker community.
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Google Giving Grant Worth $525,000 To Fund Free Raspberry Pi For 15,000 U.K. Schoolkids