By BeauHD from
Slashdot's happy-anniversary department:
An anonymous reader writes: Presidential hopefuls Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz have joined six other Senators in pushing the new Restoring Internet Freedom Act, which would dismantle the rules, walk-back the FCC's Title II reclassification of ISPs as common carriers, and prevent the FCC from trying to pass net neutrality rules in the future. In a statement posted to the Rubio website, the Presidential hopeful states the new law is necessary because the FCC's "burdensome" net neutrality rules are destroying innovation, diversity, and network investment. "Through burdensome regulations and tight control like the net neutrality rule, the government only hinders accessibility and the diversity of content," said Rubio. "Consumers should be driving the market, and we can help by encouraging innovation, incentivizing investment, and promoting the competitive environment this industry needs."
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By BeauHD from
Slashdot's spare-some-change department:
schwit1 writes: For outrageous executive earnings, don't look to Wall Street -- look to academia. High pay for CEOs attracts annual attention and recitations about the immorality of capitalism, but when the focus is on average CEO pay, they make less than half the annual earnings of college presidents, according to CBS News. The average CEO earns $176,840 annually, an amount that would make a university president into a pauper. In academia, college presidents earn $377,261 annually. Americans outraged and indebted by high college costs will be quick to draw the parallel between a college president's pay and their tuition bill. Correlation, though, doesn't imply causation. College presidents aren't always the highest-paid college employees -- athletic coaches often earn more. Regardless, college presidents "are well into the 99th percentile of compensation for wage earners in the United States," Peter L. Hinrichs and Anne Chen noted for the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland.
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By BeauHD from
Slashdot's weaponized-software department:
John McAfee, American computer programmer and contributing editor of Business Insider, explains how the NSA's back door has given every U.S. secret to its enemies. He begins by mentioning the importance of software, specifically meta- software, which contains a high level set of principles designed to help a nation survive in a cyberwar. Such software must not contain any back doors under any circumstances, otherwise it can and may very likely allow perceived enemies of the U.S. to have access to top-secret information. For example, the Chinese used the NSA's back door to hack the Defense Department last year and steal 5.6 million fingerprints of critical personnel. "Whatever gains the NSA has made through the use of their back door, it cannot possibly counterbalance the harm done to our nation by everyone else's use of that same back door." McAfee believes the U.S. has failed to grasp the subtle implications of technology and, as a result, is 20 years behind the Chinese, and by association, the Russians as well.
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By BeauHD from
Slashdot's nanobots department:
schwit1 writes: The Pentagon is attempting what was, until recently, an impossible technological feat -- developing a high-bandwidth neural interface that would allow people to beam data from their minds to external devices and back. That's right -- a brain modem. One that could allow a soldier to, for example, control a drone with his mind. On Feb. 8, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) -- the US military's fringe-science wing -- announced the first successful tests, on animal subjects, of a tiny sensor that travels through blood vessels, lodges in the brain and records neural activity. The so-called "stentrode," a combination stent and electrode, is the size of a paperclip and flexible. The tiny, injectable machine -- the invention of neurologist Tom Oxley and his team at the University of Melbourne in Australia -- could help researchers solve one of the most vexing problems with the brain modem: how to insert a transmitter into the brain without also drilling a hole in the user's head, a risky procedure under any circumstances.
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By BeauHD from
Slashdot's industrial-age-to-the-information-age department:
StewBeans writes: At Evanta's recent CIO Executive Summit in Washington, D.C., two Enterprisers took the stage to discuss how CIOs can influence the future of business at the "tipping point" of technology and innovation today. David Bray, CIO of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission, began the talk: "2013 was the year there was the same number of network devices on the face of the planet as there were humans -- seven billion network devices on the face of the planet, seven billion humans. Now 2015, just two years later, we're at 14 billion network devices on the face of the planet." This set the stage for a conversation on the future of technology that touched on everything from Moore's Law to the consumerization of technology, global connectivity, and mass personalization. Bray and co-presenter Lee Congdon, CIO of Red Hat, shared their predictions and insights into how all businesses will need to evolve and adapt to a future in which they have less control.
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By BeauHD from
Slashdot's look-at-the-numbers department:
walterbyrd writes: IBM is very particular in hiring for the hot new skills where IBM is expanding like machine learning, big data, mobile, and security. However, even with adding 70,000 people to their payroll in 2015, IBM actually ended the year with a slightly lower headcount than when it started, according to a SEC filing. IBM is always very careful when talking about its global headcount, which has been going through major shifts for years. It won't say how many people it lays off each year, or how old they are or in what areas they work. It only talks only about "resource actions" or "workforce rebalancing" in terms of the total amount of money it spends on them. It spent $587 million on such things in 2015 (and nearly $1.5 billion in 2014), it said.
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By BeauHD from
Slashdot's neural-networking department:
schwit1 writes: Here's a tricky task. Pick a photograph from the web at random. Now try to work out where it was taken using only the image itself. If the image shows a famous building or landmark, such as the Eiffel Tower or Niagara Falls, the task is straightforward. But the job becomes significantly harder when the image lacks specific location cues or is taken indoors or shows a pet or food or some other detail. Nevertheless, humans are surprisingly good at this task. To help, they bring to bear all kinds of knowledge about the world such as the type and language of signs on display, the types of vegetation, architectural styles, the direction of traffic, and so on. Humans spend a lifetime picking up these kinds of geolocation cues. So it's easy to think that machines would struggle with this task. And indeed, they have. Today, that changes thanks to the work of Tobias Weyand, a computer vision specialist at Google, and a couple of pals. These guys have trained a deep-learning machine to work out the location of almost any photo using only the pixels it contains.
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By BeauHD from
Slashdot's show-no-mercy department:
An anonymous reader writes: After researchers discovered that SHA-1 can be decrypted, Mozilla, together with Microsoft and Google, said they will no longer "trust" SHA-1-based certificates issued after January 1, 2016, and later stop supporting any type of SHA-1 certificates after June 30, 2016, or January 1, 2017. The foundation went back on its word this week, when Symantec begged Mozilla to allow it to issue nine new certificates for one of its clients, Worldpay PLC, which forgot to request these certificates before January 1. Symantec got what it wanted. Fortunately, other companies like Microsoft, Apple, or Google didn't cave under the pressure.
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