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AnonTechie writes:

President Barack Obama says the United States needs to bring its schools into the 21st century when it comes to technology.

Obama says less than 40 percent of public schools have high-speed Internet in their classrooms. He says that's not good for the country where the Internet was invented.

Obama commented Wednesday as he opened a White House conference with school superintendents and other educators from across the country who are helping their schools and school districts transition to digital learning.

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory/obama-us-bring-schools-21st-century-27025796

This has to be compared with a survey conducted in 2013 which showed that 30% of Americans do not have broadband access at home, although the majority of these are aged 50+ where the desire to have access diminishes as people get older. Furthermore, some of those from this group do have access to 3G and 4G LTE so are not entirely without access to modern communications.

[Ed's Comment: Not wishing to ignite yet another flame war regarding the adoption of systemd, I hesitated before publishing this story. However, although it is not an formal survey, it might still reflect the views of the greater linux user community rather than those who frequent this particular site. There is no need to restate the arguments seen over the last few weeks - they are well known and understood - but the survey might have a point.]

Konomi writes:

http://q5sys.sh has recenlty conducted a survey finding many Linux users may be in favour of systemd:

Although the author questions the results could this be an indication that we're really seeing a vocal minority who don't want systemd while the silent majority either do or simply don't care? Poll results and the original blog post.

hemocyanin writes that Linux still owns supercomputing:

For years, Linux has dominated supercomputing. The November 2014 Top 500 supercomputer ranking found 485 out of the world's fastest 500 computers running Linux. That's 97 percent for those of you without a calculator at hand.

I became a little curious about what distro supercomputers run, and ran across a distro targeted directly at them: Rocks. The fastest supercomputer in the world today, Tianhe-2, runs a distro called Kylin which interestingly, used to be based on FreeBSD but is now Linux-based.

[Ed's note: See our earlier story: Top-500 Supercomputer Race Goes Cold.]

AnonTechie writes to tell us of the Spooky alignment of quasars across billions of light-years:

Quasars are galaxies with very active supermassive black holes at their centres. These black holes are surrounded by spinning discs of extremely hot material that is often spewed out in long jets along their axes of rotation. Quasars can shine more brightly than all the stars in the rest of their host galaxies put together.

A team led by Damien Hutsemékers from the University of Liège in Belgium used the FORS instrument on the VLT to study 93 quasars that were known to form huge groupings spread over billions of light-years, seen at a time when the Universe was about one third of its current age.

"The first odd thing we noticed was that some of the quasars' rotation axes were aligned with each other—despite the fact that these quasars are separated by billions of light-years," said Hutsemékers.

The team then went further and looked to see if the rotation axes were linked, not just to each other, but also to the structure of the Universe on large scales at that time.

[Source]: http://www.eso.org/public/news/eso1438/

[Paper]: http://www.eso.org/public/archives/releases/sciencepapers/eso1438/eso1438a.pdf

Hugh Pickens writes:

Christina Nunez reports in National Geographic that in the past four years, at least 29 coal-fired plants in 10 states have switched to natural gas or biomass while another 54 units, mostly in the US Northeast and Midwest, are slated to be converted over the next nine years. By switching to natural gas, plant operators can take advantage of a relatively cheap and plentiful US supply. The change can also help them meet proposed federal rules to limit heat-trapping carbon dioxide emissions from power plants, given that electricity generation from natural gas emits about half as much carbon as electricity from coal does.

But not everyone is happy with the conversions. The Dunkirk plant in western New York, slated for conversion to natural gas, is the focus of a lawsuit by environmental groups that say the $150 million repowering will force the state's energy consumers to pay for an unnecessary facility. "What we're concerned about is that the Dunkirk proceeding is setting a really, really bad precedent where we're going to keep these old, outdated, polluting plants on life support for political reasons," says Christopher Amato. Dunkirk's operator, NRG, wanted to mothball the plant in 2012, saying it was not economical to run. The utility, National Grid, said shutting it down could make local power supplies less reliable, a problem that could be fixed by boosting transmission capacity—at a lower cost than repowering Dunkirk. Meanwhile the citizens of Dunkirk are happy the plant is staying open. “We couldn’t let it happen. We would lose our tax base, we would lose our jobs, we would lose our future,” said State Sen. Catharine M. Young. “This agreement saves us. It gives us a foundation on which to build our economy. It gives us hope. This is our community’s Christmas miracle!”

jbWolf writes:

There are some really neat looking videos on the NASA website showing how carbon dioxide moves throughout the earth's atmosphere.

Scientists have made ground-based measurements of carbon dioxide for decades and in July NASA launched the Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2) satellite to make global, space-based carbon observations. But the simulation — the product of a new computer model that is among the highest-resolution ever created — is the first to show in such fine detail how carbon dioxide actually moves through the atmosphere.

The main article has a video that shows a world wide view over the year 2006. It runs about 3 minutes. Close-ups on a month's time scale can be found here and each of the 3 videos run about 30 seconds.

The main article mentions that CO2 concentrations reached 400 ppm (parts per million) for the first time in the Spring of 2014. Before the industrial revolution, it was about 270 ppm. The sub article mentions that the videos show 375 (dark blue) to 395 (light purple) ppm.

Gordon Shure writes:

Human rights charity Amnesty International has released a tool to detect and remove known government spyware programs. Describing the software as being the first to offer such a service, Amnesty commissioned the tool from prominent German computer security researcher and open source advocate Claudio Guarnieri, aka 'nex'. Acknowledging that the only sure way to prevent governments surveillance of huge dragnets of people is official legislation, Marek Marczynski of Amnesty nevertheless called the tool ( available here ) a useful countermeasure versus spooks. According to the app's instructions, it operates similarly to conventional malware or virus removal programs, though systems must be disconnected from the Internet prior to Detekt scanning.

tonyPick writes:

Spaceflight Now is reporting that The Philae lander found organic molecules on comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko .

Also at The Guardian, The BBC, and Universe Today.

buswolley writes:

I just side-loaded Android Lollipop and I found that one of the additions is Google Fit, a Google fitness tracking app. Similarly, Apple and Microsoft have launched such apps and devices. There are also numerous third party apps on the various mobile platforms. These apps are great for motivation, organization, and for learning more about yourself through data mining. I'm a big believer in big data about myself, but only when that data is owned by myself.

However, I am finding it extremely difficult finding an app that allows me to do these things, but not let the app company or other parties have that data to mine or sell.

I'd like an app that can track movement/location, steps, in which I can log calories, build plans, and export the data to csv for personal data analysis, but stores this data locally or in a cloud with encryption.

Is there such an app? While in my phd program, there is no possible way for me to have the time to build this for myself.

AnonTechie writes with an article from ExtremeTech:

According to Earth’s dedicated team of satellite observers—astronomers that spend their nights watching orbiting satellites through telescopes and reporting on their movements—Russia is developing a satellite that can chase down other satellites. Obviously, such an ability could be used for the forces of good, such as repairing or refueling other spacecraft—but the rest of the world is worried that Russia might be looking to disable other satellites, or to get close enough that it can take photos of classified designs or eavesdrop on communications.

Back in December 2013, Russia launched a trio of Rodnik military communications satellites, and a fourth unknown object, on board a Rokot/Briz-KM rocket. At the time, Russia didn’t acknowledge the presence of the fourth object—known only as Kosmos 2499—but for obvious reasons launches are very closely watched by foreign governments and civilian satellite observers. The US military originally thought it was just a piece of debris, but one independent observer—Robert Christy—had seen this “debris” fire its engines to carry out some maneuvers. Eventually, in May 2014 Russia told the United Nations that there had actually been four satellites on board the rocket—though it still declined to say what that fourth satellite was actually doing.

[Additional Coverage]: http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-30097643

tonyPick writes:

IEEE Spectrum has an article on the necessary technologies for renewable energy to reverse climate change.

This article is particularly noteworthy, as it's written by Ross Koningstein and David Fork, two of the engineers on Google's RE<C, which ran from 2007 to 2011, and reviews some of the data they worked with and the conclusions they came to, which have interesting implications for the viability of renewable energy programs.

At the start of RE<C, we had shared the attitude of many stalwart environmentalists: We felt that with steady improvements to today’s renewable energy technologies, our society could stave off catastrophic climate change.

However after reviewing the work done and the data available they come to some interesting conclusions:

Those calculations cast our work at Google’s RE<C program in a sobering new light. Suppose for a moment that it had achieved the most extraordinary success possible, and that we had found cheap renewable energy technologies that could gradually replace all the world’s coal plants—a situation roughly equivalent to the energy innovation study’s best-case scenario. Even if that dream had come to pass, it still wouldn’t have solved climate change.

A good article with some hard numbers, and interesting conclusions for how to handle the realities of the energy market which essentially pushes for a change in the approach to renewable energy research.

AnonTechie writes with an article from Ars Technica:

One aspect of planetary formation has remained enigmatic. Observations of young star systems indicate that it usually takes less than five million years for the star’s planets to form—perhaps much less. For that to happen, there must be a really efficient mechanism to bring mass into the protoplanetary disk in which the planets form. Gravity alone doesn’t account for it happening so quickly.

Theoretical explanations abound for the fast accretion of material, some of which involve its interactions with a solar system's magnetic field. Until now, there’s been no way to test these models or determine the role of a magnetic field. By examining a meteorite, however, researchers found indications that the magnetic field in the early Solar System was sufficient to account for the short accretion time.

The researchers studied a meteorite called Semarkona - a space rock that crashed in northern India in 1940, which was filled with olivine-bearing chondrules. Chondrules are round grains that form as molten droplets but later accrete into the meteoroid they’re found in.

[Additional Coverage]: http://www.newsledge.com/one-meteorite-tells-us-solar-system-formed-11229

[Abstract]: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/early/2014/11/12/science.1258022

[Source]: https://newsoffice.mit.edu/2014/strong-magnetic-field-early-solar-system-1113

G-forze and itn write:

Finnish software maker Jolla, founded by laid-off Nokia employees, has revealed a crowd sourcing campaign for a tablet computer. The Indiegogo campaign had a goal of $380,000 which was reached within a few hours, prompting Jolla to add more devices (at a slightly higher price).

The tablet will be running the as-of-yet unreleased Sailfish OS 2, and have technical specifications rivaling the iPad Mini 3 and the Google Nexus 9, but at about half the price.

Estimated delivery is in May 2015. The campaign goal of $380,000 was reached in just a couple of hours and the campaign will run for 21 more days.

Some hardware specifications:
1.8 GHz Quad-Core Intel
2 GB RAM
32GB EMMC ROM + SD slot
7.85" 2048x1536 IPS display (330 ppi, rivaling iPad Mini 3)
WiFi only
4300 mAh battery, considerably smaller capacity than competitors

dlb writes:

According to WIRED, a lot of people are about to have a level of encryption that, I imagine, will not please the NSA, CIA, FBI and other three-lettered spooks. As stated in the article:

WIRED goes on to report that Tuesday, 18 November 2014, Whatsapp announced...

Nope, the Folks in the Cloaks can't be too happy about this at all.

radu writes with an article from Phoronix covering a different Whatsapp story:

The FreeBSD has received their largest ever single donation: $1,000,000 USD.

The FreeBSD Foundation received the million dollar gift from Jan Koum, the CEO and co-founder of the WhatsApp messaging application that was acquired by Facebook earlier this year.

They put it another way, I think he's sick of systemd...

Serp Kannella the Odious writes:

In a Baltimore trial courtroom on Monday, a local judge threatened to hold a police detective in contempt of court for refusing to disclose how police located a 16-year-old robbery suspect’s phone.

But rather than disclose the possible use of a Stingray*, also known as a cell site simulator, Detective John L. Haley cited a non-disclosure agreement, likely with a federal law enforcement agency (such as the FBI) and/or the Harris Corporation, since the company is one of the dominant manufacturers of such devices. Stingrays can be used to determine a phone’s location, and they can also intercept calls and text messages.

Baltimore Circuit Judge Barry G. Williams retorted, "You don't have a non-disclosure agreement with the court," according to the Baltimore Sun.

* [Submitter's Note: Surely there's a joke about fishing expeditions to be had there.]