Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

Log In

Log In

Create Account  |  Retrieve Password


Site News

Join our Folding@Home team:
Main F@H site
Our team page


Funding Goal
For 6-month period:
2022-07-01 to 2022-12-31
(All amounts are estimated)
Base Goal:
$3500.00

Currently:
$438.92

12.5%

Covers transactions:
2022-07-02 10:17:28 ..
2022-10-05 12:33:58 UTC
(SPIDs: [1838..1866])
Last Update:
2022-10-05 14:04:11 UTC --fnord666

Support us: Subscribe Here
and buy SoylentNews Swag


We always have a place for talented people, visit the Get Involved section on the wiki to see how you can make SoylentNews better.

What was highest label on your first car speedometer?

  • 80 mph
  • 88 mph
  • 100 mph
  • 120 mph
  • 150 mph
  • it was in kph like civilized countries use you insensitive clod
  • Other (please specify in comments)

[ Results | Polls ]
Comments:47 | Votes:110

posted by azrael on Wednesday October 22 2014, @11:13PM   Printer-friendly
from the clawing-the-rights-back-one-by-one dept.

Ars has a story that has civil liberties implications galore. The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to hear another Fourth Amendment privacy case, this one related to a Los Angeles ordinance which requires hotels to surrender guest registries to the police upon request without a warrant. From the article:

The justices agreed Monday to hear Los Angeles' appeal of a lower court that ruled 7-4 that the law—meant to combat prostitution, gambling, and even terrorism—was unconstitutional. The law (PDF) requires hotels to provide the information—including guests' credit card number, home address, driver's license information, and vehicle license number—at a moment's notice. Several dozen cities, from Atlanta to Seattle, have similar ordinances. [...]

The appeal is the third high-profile Fourth Amendment case the justices have taken in three years.

In 2012, the justices ruled that authorities generally need search warrants when they affix GPS devices to a vehicle. And earlier this year, the Supreme Court said that the authorities need warrants to peek into the mobile phones of suspects they arrest.

In the latest case, Los Angeles motel owners sued, claiming that the law was a violation of their rights. The 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with the motel owners in December and said the only documents they must disclose include a hotel's proprietary pricing and occupancy information.

What I find disappointed and depressing about the city of Los Angeles's arguments in this case is this sentence quoted from their petition:

"These laws expressly help police investigate crimes such as prostitution and gambling, capture dangerous fugitives and even authorize federal law enforcement to examine these registers, an authorization which can be vital in the immediate aftermath of a homeland terrorist attack." [emphasis added]

The government yet again brings out the terrorism boogeyman as an excuse to decimate our civil liberties.

Surely the outcome of this case must have some effect upon the pending cases against the NSA regarding its telephone metadata collection activities. In the past, a court has said that a search warrant is not necessary to obtain business records such as cellphone logs, although more recently another court has said that that warrantless collection of cell tower data is unconstitutional. The metadata the NSA was collecting and a hotel register are business records. Stay tuned to this channel, folks. This will be an interesting case to watch.

posted by azrael on Wednesday October 22 2014, @09:43PM   Printer-friendly
from the sole-lundy-fastnet-irishsea dept.

The next iPhones were announced and sold out (just as Apple planned), the fanbois lined up, camped out, and stopped mocking big phones.

A couple people noticed it came equipped with a barometer. Yawn. Android had them for years, nobody cares.

Well one guy does care. He is Cliff Mass, of the Weather Blog. Why is Cliff so excited:

Because they offer the chance to get a extraordinary density of pressure observations, which provides the potential to describe small scale atmospheric structures. Structures we need to know about if we are to predict key weather features like strong thunderstorms.

To forecast fine-scale weather features (like thunderstorms), you need a fine-scale description of the atmosphere, and the current observational network is often insufficient. We need millions of observations per hour over the U.S. to do the job.

But collecting pressure with current meteorological technology is too expensive, and too sparsely deployed. Even throwing in the rather capable but utterly ignored personal weather stations, there just isn't enough density to allow fine grained forecasts or alerts.

Cliff Mass notes that Android, and soon iPhone, pressure readings are being collected by PressureNet an open source from a project by Cumulonimbus available on GitHub. These anonymous readings from Android devices are collected, and provided to weather researchers. An iPhone app is in the works.

The app is free for Android users, and the iPhone version is under development.

There are other barometer apps available, but none of them do anything other than provide you with a barometer reading, or graph, which, unless you are something of a weather geek, (or prone to weather induced headaches), serve only a marginal interest. Pressurenet can run quietly with no user intervention, or it can feed your geek with regional readings in a zoom-able map. The battery usage is low, and you can launch it and forget it on your barometer equipped phone.

posted by azrael on Wednesday October 22 2014, @08:03PM   Printer-friendly
from the super-human-evolution dept.

The region of genome that is associated with autism contains a genetic variation that evolved relatively recently (Abstract) in human history - in the last 250,000 years.

Human geneticists have discovered that a region of the genome associated with autism contains genetic variation that evolved in the last 250,000 years, after the divergence of humans from ancient hominids, and likely plays an important role in disease.

Researchers at the University of Washington analyzed the genomes of 2,551 humans, 86 apes, one Neanderthal, and one Denisovan. They closely examined a region of human chromosome 16 known as 16p11.2, a region prone to genetic changes in which segments of DNA are deleted or duplicated, one of the most common genetic causes of autism, schizophrenia, and other conditions. The geneticists found that certain segments of DNA in this region are repeated a variable number of times in different people and may also be associated with disease.

To trace the origins of this variation, the researchers collaborated with colleagues at the University of Lausanne and the University of Bari to sequence and analyze corresponding regions of ape genomes.

“When we compared the genomes of apes and humans, we found that the humans had evolved complex structural changes at 16p11.2 associated with deletions and duplications that often result in autism. The findings suggest that these changes emerged relatively recently and are unique to humans,” explained study author Xander Nuttle, BS, BSE, a graduate student in the Department of Genome Sciences at the University of Washington School of Medicine.

posted by azrael on Wednesday October 22 2014, @06:51PM   Printer-friendly
from the retrospective dept.

Modern-day Renaissance man Nick Szabo de-constructs the first phase of the Industrial Revolution which occurred roughly between 1750 and 1830. Szabo organizes his short essay around the theme of inventions improving trade routes and supply paths to mines and farms; along the way, he points out a couple analogies to the Internet age.

Horse-drawn carriages and wagons had been in use in north-western Europe since the Middle Ages. During the early years of the Industrial Revolution, this mode of transportation was optimized through improvements to wheels, tires, shock absorption, and roads. It then became economically feasible to build out canals and navigate rivers to haul the cargo long distances, with horses used most heavily for "the last mile", e.g. transport of materials and goods from mines and farms.

Efficient bulk transportation is needed all the way between the iron mine, the coal mine, and the smelter. Because the cost per mile of water transport was so much smaller than the costs of land transport, this “last few miles to the mine” problem usually played a dominant role in transportation economics, somewhat analogous to the “last mile” problem in modern cable networks.

"Metcalfe's Law" - the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of users - also came into play, as inventions and improvements to land transportation spurred investment in sea transport, and vice versa.

Metcalfe noticed Szabo's essay.

Bob Metcalfe ‏@BobMetcalfe

Nick Szabo on Metcalfe's Law (one of my favorites) and nothing less than the Industrial Revolution

The first paragraph of the essay contains several links to past essays Szabo has written on related subjects.

posted by n1 on Wednesday October 22 2014, @05:59PM   Printer-friendly

Several news outlets are reporting shots fired at Parliament Hill in Ottawa, Canada, the seat of the national government. There have been three confirmed shooting incidents, one at The National War Memorial, another within parliament itself and a third at a nearby shopping centre.

One ceremonial guard on site has been reportedly shot and killed. Reports say the gunman moved into the building itself, and has been killed by police. Most government officials have been evacuated.

  • 1 shooter dead, 1 still believed at large in downtown Ottawa.
  • Police searching cars leaving Ottawa trying to go to Quebec.
  • Report of additional shots fired near Chateau Laurier Hotel, east of Parliament Hill.
  • Police going door to door in downtown core; downtown schools in lockdown.
  • All three main party leaders, Harper, Mulcair and Trudeau, reported safe.

Parliament Hill came under attack today after a man with a rifle shot a soldier standing guard at the National War Memorial in downtown Ottawa, before seizing a car and driving to the doors of Parliament Hill's Centre Block nearby.

MPs and other witnesses reported several shots fired inside Parliament, and a gunman has been confirmed dead inside the building, shot by the House of Commons Sergeant-at-Arms, according to MPs' eyewitness accounts.

A tragedy for the soldier killed -- but all I can think of right now is "great, now what security-theatre overreaction will we have to suffer through to close this barn door?"

posted by azrael on Wednesday October 22 2014, @05:11PM   Printer-friendly
from the stop-throwing-good-money-after-bad dept.

The European Union's interoperability page reports:

The Dutch government must increase its use of open source software, recommends the country's parliament. It wants to make open standards mandatory and use open source when equal to or better than proprietary solutions for all [Information and Communications Technology] projects over 5 million euro.

The government must enforce compliance with its existing policy on open source software and open standards, the parliament recommends in its final report on failures of government ICT projects. Enforcing the 'comply or explain' policy is to become a [task] for a new agency, overseeing all government ICT projects.

"The government has already agreed to opt for open source and open standards, wherever possible. Only, in practice, this happens too little. This has to change - open source and open standards can result in major cost savings, but they also open the door to dissenting voices", the parliament writes. Such criticism is to be encouraged, and one of the ways to achieve this is to use open source, enabling outsiders to think along.

[...]The parliament wants the government to report the savings it realises by using open source. This is to become part of the annual business reports of the government.

[...]The Dutch government has been encouraging the use of open source and open standards for over ten years. There was an action plan, two government programmes, a board, an expert forum and a report by the Court of Audit, the committee's report summarises. "Recent years, however, have been pretty quiet."

Robert Pogson put a finer point on this:

The Netherlands, alone, has seen billions of Euros squandered each year due to failed ICT projects. It is so easy to sign a cheque and hope problems will disappear, but that abstraction allows a lot of waste such as paying for permission to run computers the government owns outright.

By using FLOSS, a huge slice of costs is eliminated. Better management will take care of the rest, but opening ICT projects to competition surely reduces costs and promotes local businesses boosting GDP and tax-revenue.

ICT that is a revenue generator rather than a cost is the pot of gold for governments everywhere. ICT should not be a conveyor-belt of money flowing to M$ and "partners". That's not the purpose. Finding, modifying, creating, and distributing information as efficiently as possible is the only valid justification for money spend on ICT.

posted by azrael on Wednesday October 22 2014, @03:47PM   Printer-friendly
from the questionable-ethics-still-gets-you-a-golden-parachute dept.

KTLA TV reports:

Beleaguered Los Angeles Unified School District Supt. John Deasy announced [October 16] that he had tendered his resignation. Deasy would stay on with the district on a special assignment through the end of the year, according to a join[sic] statement from the superintendent and the school district. [...] As part of the severance agreement, he would receive about 60 days' pay, which would equal about $60,000, according to the paper.

Deasy, 53, has led the nation's second-largest school district for 3.5 years. During that time, he has faced much scrutiny and criticism, particularly over a technology program that he pushed for which would have spent more than $1 billion to provide an iPad to every student, teacher and administrator at LAUSD schools.

The program was suspended in August after it was discovered that Deasy and his top deputy had ties to Apple executives and the company that was providing the curriculum for the iPads.

He also came under fire after a new student information system called MiSIS malfunctioned upon making its debut at the start of the school year. The $130 million program was blamed for scheduling blunders that left some district students without classes for weeks, according to the Times.

The Los Angeles Daily News has other details on Deasy's tenure including:

The headwinds for Deasy [...] grew heavier with two developments this summer: the revelation that Deasy and former right-hand man Jaime Aquino had talked about the iPads project with executives from Apple and the software firm Pearson before bidding had officially begun, raising the possibility of favoritism; [there were also] glitches in the district's new MiSiS student record-keeping system.

You may remember that, within days of receiving them, the kids had hacked past the school district's restrictions on the devices.

Related: Los Angeles Schools Halve Email Retention after Scandal

posted by n1 on Wednesday October 22 2014, @02:04PM   Printer-friendly
from the head-meets-desk dept.

The Initfinder General (uselessd author) discusses why the systemd debate is so heated. He points fingers at both sides and the story has little to do with who's correct, but everything to to with why no one can agree at all.

[...] I saw the same systemd debate unfold again. I’ve seen it countless times already, and there was virtually no variation from the archetypal formula. You have two ardent and vocal sides, roughly classified into an opponent/proponent dichotomy, neither of which have anything enlightening to say and both with their own unique set of misunderstandings that have memetically mutated into independent ideas that poison virtually every debate of this nature.

Read on for a look at the fuel behind everyone's favorite flamewar.

posted by azrael on Wednesday October 22 2014, @12:39PM   Printer-friendly
from the keep-your-dongles-safe dept.

Google, along with the FIDO Alliance is set to launch a USB dongle which will be used to authenticate a user and grant access to a Google account.

Technology Review has this summary:

The small USB stick provides added protection for a Google account. Once a key is associated with your account, you’ll be prompted to insert the device into a computer each time you enter a password to log in - or, if you prefer, once a month on computers you use frequently. Touching a button on the security key triggers a cryptographic exchange with Google’s login systems that verifies the key’s identity.

A more verbose summary can be found directly on the FIDO website as well as CNN.

This key, which I found on Amazon for US $7-$18, seems to be a cheaper solution to the RSA cards and requires less typing.

What is old is new again. I wonder how hard it would be to clone one of these sticks from an infected public computer? And how it would fare going through the laundry?

posted by n1 on Wednesday October 22 2014, @10:58AM   Printer-friendly
from the facebook-charged-with-obstruction-of-justice dept.

CNNMoney reports that Facebook has sent a letter to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration demanding that agents stop impersonating users on the social network. "The DEA's deceptive actions... threaten the integrity of our community," Facebook chief security officer Joe Sullivan wrote to DEA head Michele Leonhart. "Using Facebook to impersonate others abuses that trust and makes people feel less safe and secure when using our service."

Facebook's letter comes on the heels of reports that the DEA impersonated a young woman on Facebook to communicate with suspected criminals, and the Department of Justice argued that they had the right to do so. Facebook contends that their terms and Community Standards - which the DEA agent had to acknowledge and agree to when registering for a Facebook account - expressly prohibit the creation and use of fake accounts. "Isn't this the definition of identity theft?" says Privacy researcher Runa Sandvik. The DEA has declined to comment and referred all questions to the Justice Department, which has not returned CNNMoney's calls.

posted by Blackmoore on Wednesday October 22 2014, @09:17AM   Printer-friendly
from the hypocritical-or-just-confused-by-the-survey dept.

Citing a Pew Research survey as well as other sources, Priceonomics reports – with nice charts – that the younger an American is, the more likely is to not have or feel a religious affiliation.

81% of all Americans aged 30 and older, and 88% of American septugenarians (aged 70 and older), identify as Christian. Young Americans, on the other hand, are pretty singularly secular in comparison. Only 68% of adults under 30 identified as Christian. 25% of adults under 30 didn’t affiliate with any religion whatsoever.

Is this just because people tend to get more religious as they get older, or is religion actually on the decline with younger people? According to Pew, today’s young adults reject organized religion at a significantly higher rate than generations before them at their age: In the late 1970s, 13% of Baby Boomers had no religious affiliation; by the late 1990s, 20% of Generation X-ers had no religious affiliation.

TFA also cites a study (PDF warning) which shows that the loss of religiousness started to accelerate during '90-ies:

The GSS has asked adults the following question for forty years: “What is your religious preference? Is it Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, some other religion, or no religion?” The percentage answering “no religion” was 18 percent two years earlier in 2010, 14 percent in 2000, and 8 percent in 1990. The upward trend in the “no religion” choice is very broad. While some types of Americans identify with an organized religion less than others, Americans in almost every demographic group increasingly claim “no religion” since the trend began to accelerate in 1990. Preferring no religion is not atheism which is still very rare; in 2012, just 3 percent of Americans said they did not believe in God.

Unfortunately, the things appear to me "as clear as mud"; The Atlantic find something interesting in the same data:

There's a curious set of numbers in Pew's new survey about faith and politics.

Seventy-two percent of Americans think religion is losing its influence on public life, while 48 percent think houses of worship should express their views on social and political issues. Since 2010, both of these numbers have grown by at least five percentage points, and they're accompanied by another interesting data point: 41 percent of Americans say there has been "too little expression of religious faith by political leaders," up from 37 percent in 2010.

So, Soylenters, what is your take on it?

posted by n1 on Wednesday October 22 2014, @06:58AM   Printer-friendly
from the $394-per-mm-of-air dept.

Ever wish you could have a hoverboard like in Back to the Future II? Now you can... kind of.

The story I ran across this morning was short on technical details, but the hoverboard will only work above a conductive surface and its battery only lasts seven minutes, apparently using magnetism.

"Our engineering team has been amazing, rapidly iterating on design after design. In fact, this our 18th prototype, and we continue to make advances week after week," says the company’s Kickstarter campaign.

"The magic behind the hoverboard lies in its four disc-shaped hover engines. These create a special magnetic field which literally pushes against itself, generating the lift which levitates our board off the ground."

A pledge of $10,000 will get you one of the first production boards. Expected delivery is October 2015.

posted by n1 on Wednesday October 22 2014, @05:13AM   Printer-friendly
from the shake-it-like-a-polaroid-picture dept.

Examination of Mimas, the closest of Saturn's regular moons, has shown that it has a subtle wobble that is a greater surface displacement than expected. Researchers suggest that it means that the icy surface of the moon hides either a rugby-ball shaped rocky core, or a sub-surface ocean.

Using instruments aboard the Cassini spacecraft to measure the wobbles of Mimas, the closest of Saturn’s regular moons, a Cornell University astronomer publishing in Science, Oct. 17, has inferred that this small moon’s icy surface cloaks either a rugby ball-shaped rocky core or a sloshing sub-surface ocean.

“After carefully examining Mimas, we found it librates – that is, it subtly wobbles – around the moon’s polar axis,” Radwan Tajeddine, Cornell research associate in astronomy and lead author of the article. “In physical terms, the back-and-forth wobble should produce about 3 kilometers of surface displacement. Instead we observed an unexpected 6 kilometers of surface displacement,” he said.

“We’re very excited about this measurement because it may indicate much about the satellite’s insides. Nature is essentially allowing us to do the same thing that a child does when she shakes a wrapped gift in hopes of figuring out what’s hidden inside,” Tajeddine said.

The astronomy team used a technique called stereo-photogrammetry to interpret images taken by the Cassini Imaging Science Subsystem to measure the libration. In this technique, astronomers employ Cassini photographs of Mimas taken at different times and from various vantage points to build precise 3-D computer models of the locations of hundreds of surface reference points. From these, the researchers determined the moon’s shape and were able to notice that the satellite didn’t rotate smoothly but rocked back and forth a bit as well.

Abstract: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/346/6207/322

posted by n1 on Wednesday October 22 2014, @03:51AM   Printer-friendly
from the coffee++ dept.

Don Brushett has an informative piece over at phys.org on the taste vs. smell of coffee.

Most of what we taste we actually smell. The only sensations that we pick up in our mouth are sweet, sour, bitter, umami and salty. Without its smell, coffee would have only a sour or bitter taste due to the organic acids. Try it with your next cup of coffee – hold your nose as you take your first sip.

The rich satisfying sensation of coffee is almost entirely due to the volatile compounds produced when we roast coffee beans.

The compounds that are formed in the roasting process are very similar to any other compound that is formed in the cooking process. The smell of baking bread is from compounds produced when a sugar reacts with a protein in what is called a Maillard reaction.

coffee++

posted by n1 on Wednesday October 22 2014, @02:18AM   Printer-friendly
from the never-going-to-keep-me-down dept.

The BBC are reporting that a paralysed man has been able to walk again after a transplant of cells from his nose into his spine.

Darek Fidyka, who was paralysed from the chest down in a knife attack in 2010, can now walk using a frame.

The treatment, a world first, was carried out by surgeons in Poland in collaboration with scientists in London.

Details of the research are published in the journal Cell Transplantation.

Of further interest is the indication that those involved in the research do not seek to profit from it:

Prof Geoff Raisman said: "It would be my proudest boast if I could say that no patient had had to pay one penny for any of the information we have found."

[The Nicholls Spinal Injury Foundation] said if there were any patents arising, it would acquire them so as to make the technique freely available.

posted by n1 on Wednesday October 22 2014, @12:55AM   Printer-friendly
from the you-get-what-you-pay-for dept.

GlobalFoundries Inc. has agreed to acquire International Business Machines Corp.'s microelectronics division. Under the terms of the agreement, GlobalFoundries will become "the exclusive server processor semiconductor technology provider [to IBM] for 22 nanometer (nm), 14nm and 10nm semiconductors for the next 10 years."

From Marketplace:

The largest contract chip maker, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, quadrupled its capital spending in the last five years from $2.5 billion to $10 billion. If you are a company like IBM you have to look at those numbers and ask yourself, does it make sense to take a loss in chip making when you could just buy them from someone else?

IBM's answer as of today is no, it doesn't.

From AnandTech:

By divesting themselves of their semiconductor manufacturing business, IBM is cutting loose a business that is losing them money, but it is also a necessary step to enable the consolidation of manufacturing rather than a dissolution of the business entirely. Though in better shape than IBM's business, GlobalFoundries has their own struggles with technology and volume, so taking on IBM's business will allow the two businesses to be consolidated and ideally a larger, stronger semiconductor manufacturer to emerge.

Overall then, the deal sees GlobalFoundries taking on everything related to semiconductor manufacturing from IBM except for IBM's semiconductor R&D division, which IBM will hold on to.

GlobalFoundries spun out of AMD in 2009. IBM had been negotiating the transfer of its chipmaking division for some time, and has already sold off its PC and x86 server businesses to Lenovo. IBM has attempted to bolster its Power chips by licensing the architecture through the ARM-like OpenPower Consortium. Earlier this month, IBM announced Power8 servers that would incorporate Nvidia GPU acceleration.