By timothy from
Slashdot's they-like-contagious-ideas department:
Vaccination rates across the U.S. don't neatly correlate with religiosity or wealth; Wired reports that one conspicuous pocket of low vaccination rates, according to California's state database of daycare records, is a place where you might not expect it: Silicon Valley — specifically, the daycare centers at some large tech companies.
A WIRED investigation shows that some children attending day care facilities affiliated with prominent Silicon Valley companies have not been completely vaccinated against preventable infectious diseases. At least, that’s according to a giant database from the California Department of Public Health, which tracks the vaccination rates at day care facilities and preschools in the state. We selected more than 20 large technology and health companies in the Bay Area and researched their day care offerings. Of 12 day care facilities affiliated with tech companies, six—that’s half—have below-average vaccination rates, according to the state’s data. ... And those six have a level of measles vaccination that does not provide the “herd immunity” critical to the spread of the disease. Now, this data has limitations—most critically, it might not be current. But it also suggests an incursion of anti-science, anti-vaccine thinking in one of the smartest regions on Earth.Read Replies (0)
By timothy from
Slashdot's don't-you-have-enough-friends-already? department:
According to the EFF's Deep LInks,
Through a request under South Carolina’s Freedom of Information Act, EFF found that, over the last three years, prison officials have brought more than 400 hundred disciplinary cases for "social networking" — almost always for using Facebook. The offenses come with heavy penalties, such as years in solitary confinement and deprivation of virtually all privileges, including visitation and telephone access. In 16 cases, inmates were sentenced to more than a decade in what’s called disciplinary detention, with at least one inmate receiving more than 37 years in isolation. ... The sentences are so long because SCDC issues a separate Level 1 violation for each day that an inmate accesses a social network. An inmate who posts five status updates over five days, would receive five separate Level 1 violations, while an inmate who posted 100 updates in one day would receive only one. In other words, if a South Carolina inmate caused a riot, took three hostages, murdered them, stole their clothes, and then escaped, he could still wind up with fewer Level 1 offenses than an inmate who updated Facebook every day for two weeks.Read Replies (0)
By timothy from
Slashdot's not-big-and-fancy department:
New submitter
cyranix writes "You may never have to reboot your Linux machine ever again, even for kernel patching," and excerpts from the long (and nicely human-readable) description of newly merged kernel code that does what Ksplice has for quite a while (namely, offer live updating for Linux systems, no downtime required), but without
Oracle's control.
It provides a basic infrastructure for function "live patching" (i.e. code
redirection), including API for kernel modules containing the actual
patches, and API/ABI for userspace to be able to operate on the patches
(look up what patches are applied, enable/disable them, etc). It's
relatively simple and minimalistic, as it's making use of existing kernel
infrastructure (namely ftrace) as much as possible. It's also
self-contained, in a sense that it doesn't hook itself in any other kernel
subsystem (it doesn't even touch any other code). It's now implemented for
x86 only as a reference architecture, but support for powerpc, s390 and
arm is already in the works (adding arch-specific support basically boils
down to teaching ftrace about regs-saving).Read Replies (0)
By timothy from
Slashdot's not-as-catchy department:
Edsger
Dijkstra famously opined in 1968 on the
danger of Goto statements. New submitter
Mei Nagappan writes with a mellower view, nearly 50 years later:
By qualitatively and quantitatively analyzing a statistically valid random sample from almost 2 million C files and 11K+ projects, we find that developers limit themselves to using goto appropriately in most cases, and not in an unrestricted manner like Dijkstra feared, thus suggesting that goto does not appear to be harmful in practice.(Here's
the preprint linked from above abstract.)
Read Replies (0)
By timothy from
Slashdot's lurking-beneath-the-surface department:
An anonymous reader writes
"In this month's Patch Tuesday, Microsoft has released nine security bulletins to address 56 unique vulnerabilities in Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Office, Internet Explorer, and Microsoft Server software. Of the nine security bulletins, three are rated Critical in severity, and among these three is one that addresses a years-old design flaw that can be exploited remotely to grant attackers administrator-level privileges to the targeted machine or device. An attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could take complete control of an affected system. An attacker could then install programs; view, change, or delete data; or create new accounts with full user rights."Reader
jones_supa writes, though, that the most recent patch rollout came with a bug of its own, since corrected: the company apparently
botched a rollup update for Visual Studio 2010 Tools for Office Runtime: "There is an issue with
KB3001652: many users are reporting that it is locking up their machines while trying to install it. It does not seem that this patch is doing any other damage though, such as bricking the operating system. These days Microsoft appears to be reacting quickly to this kind of news as it looks like the patch has already been pulled from Windows Update."
Read Replies (0)