Tag: twitter

Britain Shuts Off 750,000 Streetlights With No Impact On Crime Or Crashes

Flash Modin writes: English cities are hard up for cash as the national government dolls out cuts. And in response, the country’s councils — local governing bodies — have slashed costs by turning off an estimated 750, 000 streetlights. Fans of the night sky and reduced energy usage are happy, but the move has also sparked a national debate. The Automobile Association claims six people have died as a direct result of dimming the lights. But a new study released Wednesday looked at 14 years of data from 63 local authorities across England and Wales and found that residents’ chances of being attacked, robbed, or struck by a car were no worse on the darker streets. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

View article:
Britain Shuts Off 750,000 Streetlights With No Impact On Crime Or Crashes

Windows 10 App For Xbox One Could Render Steam Machines Useless

SlappingOysters writes: The release of Windows 10 has brought with it the Xbox app — a portal through which you can stream anything happening on your Xbox One to your Surface or desktop. Finder is reporting that the love will go the other way, too, with a PC app coming to the Xbox One allowing you to stream your desktop to your console. But where does this leave the coming Steam Machines? This analysis shows how such an app could undermine the Steam Machines’ market position. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

See more here:
Windows 10 App For Xbox One Could Render Steam Machines Useless

Voyager’s Golden Record For Aliens Now Available On SoundCloud

An anonymous reader writes: For years you’ve been able to listen to the sounds recorded on the golden records carried by the twin Voyager spacecraft online but NASA just made it a bit easier. The orginization just uploaded the recordings to SoundCloud. Now you can listen to a continuous stream of clips instead of clicking back and forth to hear the different tracks. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

See the original article here:
Voyager’s Golden Record For Aliens Now Available On SoundCloud

Tomb, a Successor To TrueCrypt For Linux Geeks

jaromil writes: Last day we released Tomb version 2.1 with improvements to stability, documentation and translations. Tomb is just a ZSh script wrapping around cryptsetup, gpg and other tools to facilitate the creation and management of LUKS encrypted volumes with features like key separation, steganography, off-line search, QRcode paper backups etc. In designing Tomb we struggle for minimalism and readability, convinced that the increasing complexity of personal technology is the root of many vulnerabilities the world is witnessing today — and this approach turns out to be very successful, judging from the wide adoption, appreciation and contributions our project has received especially after the demise of TrueCrypt. As maintainer of the software I wonder what Slashdot readers think about what we are doing, how we are doing it and more in general about the need for simplicity in secure systems, a debate I perceive as transversal to many other GNU/Linux/BSD projects and their evolution. Given the increasing responsibility in maintaining such a software, considering the human-interface side of things is an easy to reach surface of attack, I can certainly use some advice and criticism. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

View post:
Tomb, a Successor To TrueCrypt For Linux Geeks

Experiment: Installing Windows 10 On a 7-Year-Old Acer Aspire One

jones_supa writes: Windows 10 will launch in less than a week and it is supposed to work flawlessly on devices already powered by Windows 7 and Windows 8.1, as Microsoft struggled to keep system requirements unchanged to make sure that everything runs smoothly. Device drivers all the way back to Windows Vista platform (WDDM 1.0) are supported. Softpedia performed a practical test to see how Windows 10 can run on a 7-year-old Acer Aspire One netbook powered by Intel Atom N450 processor clocked at 1.66 GHz, 1 GB of RAM, and a 320 GB mechanical hard disk. The result is surprising to say the least, as installation not only went impressively fast, but the operating system itself also works fast. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

See the original article here:
Experiment: Installing Windows 10 On a 7-Year-Old Acer Aspire One

How Pentaquarks May Lead To the Discovery of New Fundamental Physics

StartsWithABang writes: Over 100 years ago, Rutherford’s gold foil experiment discovered the atomic nucleus. At higher energies, we can split that nucleus apart into protons and neutrons, and at still higher ones, into individual quarks and gluons. But these quarks and gluons can combine in amazing ways: not just into mesons and baryons, but into exotic states like tetraquarks, pentaquarks and even glueballs. As the LHC brings these states from theory to reality, here’s what we’re poised to learn, and probe, by pushing the limits of quantum chromodynamics. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

More:
How Pentaquarks May Lead To the Discovery of New Fundamental Physics

This Is What a Monstrous 18-Foot Long Millennium Falcon Toy Looks Like

A few days ago it was revealed that Hot Toys was building a sixth-scale toy version of the Millennium Falcon that would match the size of the company’s incredibly detailed 12-inch figures. And today we already have our first peek at the monstrous creation on display at the Ani-Com and Games convention in Hong Kong. Read more…

Continued here:
This Is What a Monstrous 18-Foot Long Millennium Falcon Toy Looks Like

Genetic Access Control Code Uses 23andMe DNA Data For Internet Racism

rjmarvin writes: A GitHub project is using the 23andMe API for genetic decoding to act as a way to bar users from entering websites based on their genetic data — race and ancestry. “Stumbling around GitHub, I came across this bit of code: Genetic Access Control. Now, budding young racist coders can check out your 23andMe page before they allow you into their website! Seriously, this code uses the 23andMe API to pull genetic info, then runs access control on the user based on the results. Just why you decide not to let someone into your site is up to you, but it can be based on any aspect of the 23andMe API. This is literally the code to automate racism.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

See more here:
Genetic Access Control Code Uses 23andMe DNA Data For Internet Racism