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:44 | Votes:96

posted by LaminatorX on Friday February 27 2015, @10:55PM   Printer-friendly
from the follow-the-money dept.

From the MEGA blog:

"PayPal has ceased processing MEGA customer payments effective immediately.

MEGA is aware of a report published by NetNames (partially funded from the MPAA supported Digital Citizens Alliance) that incorrectly claims MEGA's business to not be a legitimate cloud storage service. MEGA is aware that Senator Leahy (Vermont, Chair Senate Judiciary Committee) then pressured Visa and MasterCard to cease providing payment services to the companies named in that report.

Visa and MasterCard then pressured PayPal to cease providing payment services to MEGA."

posted by LaminatorX on Friday February 27 2015, @09:36PM   Printer-friendly
from the time-to-get-plotted dept.

Spotted on Hackaday is this neat clock project which writes the time on a whiteboard.

This device runs on a PIC16F1454 microcontroller. The code for the project is available on GitHub. The micro is also connected to a 433MHz receiver. This allows a PC to keep track of the time, instead of having to include a real-time clock in the circuit.

There's also a link to a similar clock plotter project.

posted by LaminatorX on Friday February 27 2015, @07:53PM   Printer-friendly
from the beep-you! dept.

Verizon is just so mad at the Federal Communications Commission today that a normal press release wouldn't do. After all, Verizon issues so many press releases denouncing the FCC for trying to regulate telecommunications that today's vote on net neutrality required a special one to make sure it would be remembered. So Verizon wrote it in Morse code and set the date as "1934" to make the point that the FCC is taking us backward in time. Verizon sent out the press release in this e-mail: http://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/verizon-morse-code.png

Despite this protest, Verizon hasn't been shy about using Title II to its benefit. The company was already a Title II carrier for its wireline telephone and mobile voice networks, and used the benefits of its Title II status to help build its fiber network, which carries phone, TV, and Internet service.

Of course, this is the same Verizon that in 2012 claimed that net neutrality violates its First and Fifth Amendment rights. That happened after Verizon sued to overturn the FCC's 2010 net neutrality rules, which relied on authority granted to the FCC by Congress in both 1934 and 1996. (Verizon won that case, leading directly to today's FCC decision.)

http://arstechnica.com/business/2015/02/verizon-issues-furious-response-to-fcc-in-morse-code-dated-1934/

posted by azrael on Friday February 27 2015, @07:07PM   Printer-friendly
from the another-one-beamed-up dept.

The BBC reports Leonard Nimoy's death by end-stage chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. The actor, famous for playing the role of Mr Spock in the long-running sci-fi series, passed away at his Bel Air home on Friday Feb 27th.

This is reported far and wide, including The New York Times , and Volkskrant .

fritsd: I'll never forget Spitting Image's mangling of his words: "To be, or not to be.. isn't that quite logical, captain?"

infodragon: The iconic Vulcan will be missed!

posted by LaminatorX on Friday February 27 2015, @05:47PM   Printer-friendly
from the Do-we-still-have-leper-colonies? dept.

The Center for American Progress reports

According to a national analysis conducted by an employee at the Vermont-based Physicians Computer Company (PCC), the majority of U.S. pediatricians will turn away patients who refuse to vaccinate their children. The findings come on the heels of California's ongoing measles outbreak, which has renewed a broader dialogue over vaccine policy, making doctors' approach to the issue a national concern.

Chip Hart, the company's Director of Strategic marketing and principal author of the study, discovered that 54 percent of the nearly 500 practices surveyed have some vaccine requirement, and will refuse treatment to parents who don't comply.

[...]Hart [mailed] his survey out to roughly 5,000 pediatricians across the country, of which 497 responded.

[...]Considering the fact that waiting rooms are particularly high-risk environments for disease transmission, especially very contagious diseases like measles, some doctors have started refusing to accept anti-vaccine patients.

[...]among the practices that made the switch to a vaccine requirement, 58 percent lost a few patients. But 61 percent of practices received a positive reaction from the patients who remained, while only 2 percent noted a negative reaction.

Perhaps the most provocative finding involves parents' response to doctors taking a stand. Of the practices that switched to a vaccine requirement, 68 percent reported that some new families opted to comply, and 17 percent answered that many new families permitted their children be vaccinated.

posted by LaminatorX on Friday February 27 2015, @03:10PM   Printer-friendly
from the billions-and-billions-of-stars dept.

Astronomers have identified a mammoth black hole weighing as much as 12 billion suns.

It's not the biggest black hole ever found, but it's astonishingly young. The giant appears to have swelled to its enormous size only 875 million years after the big bang, when the universe was just 6 percent of its current age. That's a surprise, astronomers report Wednesday in the journal Nature, because giant black holes are thought to grow relatively slowly by vacuuming up gas and even stars that venture too close."

Don't you think it odd that 875 million years after the big bang could be called "astonishingly young?"

posted by janrinok on Friday February 27 2015, @01:18PM   Printer-friendly
from the we-knew-we-were-right dept.

Today we stand proud, fellow Soylentils. Two stories have been received to explain why:

Slashdot.org switches accounts to Classic-like interface

It now appears that Slashdot has now completely changed its interface to the new "beta" interface - which looks almost the same as the "old" interface. Users can no longer view the non-beta classic site, which is being reported by users all around the site.

The only official news on the matter is in the form of a journal entry.

Does this mean it's time to go after our original mission and let them know we're here?

"Beta" Delenda est!

Remember Slashdot? Remember Beta? This blog post might be tagged "sudden outbreak of common sense," if it wasn't well over a year too late:

...effective today, we've jettisoned the Slashdot Beta platform out the side portal. [...] After heavily experimenting on the Beta platform and splitting traffic between Classic and Beta, we've made some decisions about which platform changes ultimately make sense: starting today, we're unifying users back on our Classic platform.

A raft of minor changes came along with this announcement. Still no comment, though, on whether those users are a "community" or an "audience."

And frankly, that's why soylentnews is better.

posted by n1 on Friday February 27 2015, @11:41AM   Printer-friendly
from the staying-out-of-the-kitchen dept.

Climate change deniers have often claimed that heating from carbon dioxide has never been "proven" but rather only seen in the lab or models.

Here is one more blow to the deniers. For the first time ever, global warming from anthropogenic carbon dioxide production has been demonstrated in nature. This just a day after this study measured a huge increase in sea level rise in the northern US over just 2 years.

Will this evidence finally silence the deniers and motivate policy makers into action?

posted by n1 on Friday February 27 2015, @10:04AM   Printer-friendly
from the what-will-they-transplant-next dept.

Michelle Star writes at C/net that Surgeon Sergio Canavero, director of the Turin Advanced Neuromodulation Group in Italy, believes he has developed a technique to remove the head from a non-functioning body and transplant it onto the healthy body. According to Canavero's paper published in Surgical Neurology International, first, both the transplant head and the donor body need to be cooled in order to slow cell death. Then, the neck of both would be cut and the major blood vessels linked with tubes. Finally, the spinal cords would be severed, with as clean a cut as possible. Joining the spinal cords, with the tightly packed nerves inside, is key. The plan involves flushing the area with polyethylene glycol, followed by several hours of injections of the same, a chemical that encourages the fat in cell membranes to mesh. The blood vessels, muscles and skin would then be sutured and the patient would be induced into a coma for several weeks to keep them from moving around; meanwhile, electrodes would stimulate the spine with electricity in an attempt to strengthen the new nerve connections.

Head transplants have been tried before. In 1970, Robert White led a team at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, US, that tried to transplant the head of one monkey on to the body of another. The surgeons stopped short of a full spinal cord transfer, so the monkey could not move its body. Despite Canavero’s enthusiasm, many surgeons and neuroscientists believe massive technical hurdles push full body transplants into the distant future. The starkest problem is that no one knows how to reconnect spinal nerves and make them work again. “This is such an overwhelming project, the possibility of it happening is very unlikely,” says Harry Goldsmith.

AnonTechie writes:

This experimental study has confirmed a method to avoid cerebral ischemia during the surgery and solved an important part of the problem of how to accomplish long-term survival after transplantation and preservation of the donor brain stem.

http://gizmodo.com/the-crazy-science-behind-a-proposed-human-head-transpla-1688014257

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/06/head-transplant-italian-neuroscientist_n_3533391.html

[Abstract]: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/cns.12341/abstract

posted by janrinok on Friday February 27 2015, @08:38AM   Printer-friendly
from the let-your-mind-go dept.

As the title states, what would you, personally, consider to be the most amazing technological breakthroughs if they were a) fully researched & ready for action and b) commercially available - this year - at a decent price-point?

Would it be a brand new single-core x86 or x64 CPU that crunches data/runs compiled code 10 - 30 times faster than, say, a current Core i7 or Xeon CPU can (perhaps a 3 dimensional chip of some description)? Or a hyper-advanced 3D graphics card that can really deliver "Hollywood-movie level photoreal realtime 3D graphics", with a visual fidelity virtually indistinguishable from what we see in the real world when we are out and about? Would it be a smartphone that can go 90 - 120 days without recharging and easily survive being run over by a fully loaded SUV? Or a smart software technology that takes older 3D games and "upgrades them graphically" to look just like current GFX quality games? Would it be resolution-independent digital images or video that scale to look razor-sharp on screen resolutions ranging from 640 x 480 to, say 16K or 32K? Would it be a small attachable motor + battery that let you bicycle to work in 1/3rd the time and only need recharging once a month? A production car with a brand new type of gearbox that gives you 500+ gear settings to choose from? A lightweight beverage mug that heats the beverage in it in 5 seconds? A word processor that can take a 250 word article summary and AI-magically expand it to 2,500 words with perfect quality writing/grammar/terminology, and also making logical sense? A t-shirt or pair of jeans that automagically clean themselves of any dirt when you run some current through the fabric? A smartphone that lets you, an English speaker in Boston, speak with a French speaker in Paris in realtime, with flawless simultaneous translation both ways and each person's voice sounding completely natural/authentic despite language translation? Perhaps a digital pocket camera that is also a high-def 3D scanner and lets you create accurate 3D models of anything - from plants to buildings to people - as simply as snapping a casual photo of it?

Now use your own imaginations, Soylentils. What would you, personally, consider to be an AMAZING technological breakthrough that you could - in an ideal world - BUY today (not in 15 - 20 years time). Thanks for participating, everybody!

posted by janrinok on Friday February 27 2015, @05:32AM   Printer-friendly
from the but-it-was-there-only-a-few-minutes-ago dept.

Anna North writes in the NYT that a report released last week by the National Research Council calls for research into reversing climate change through a process called albedo modification: reflecting sunlight away from earth by, for instance, spraying aerosols into the atmosphere. But such a process could, some say, change the appearance of the sky — and that in turn could affect everything from our physical health to the way we see ourselves. “You’d get whiter skies. People wouldn’t have blue skies any more.” says Alan Robock. “Astronomers wouldn’t be happy, because you’d have a cloud up there permanently. It’d be hard to see the Milky Way any more.”

According to Dacher Keltner, a psychology professor at the University of California, losing the night sky would have big consequences. “When you go outside, and you walk in a beautiful setting, and you just feel not only uplifted but you just feel stronger. There’s clearly a neurophysiological basis for that," says Keltner adding that looking up at a starry sky provides “almost a prototypical awe experience,” an opportunity to feel “that you are small and modest and part of something vast.” If we lose the night sky “we lose something precious and sacred.” “We’re finding in our lab that the experience of awe gets you to feel connected to something larger than yourself, see the humanity in other people,” says Paul K. Piff. “In many ways it’s kind of an antidote to narcissism.” And the sky is one of the few sources of that experience that’s available to almost everybody: “Not everyone has access to the ocean or giant trees, or the Grand Canyon, but we certainly all live beneath the night sky.”

Alan Robock says one possible upside of adding aerosols could be beautiful red and yellow sunsets as “the yellow and red colors reflect off the bottom of this cloud.” Robock recommends more research into albedo modification: “If people ever are tempted to do this, I want them to have a lot of information about what the potential benefits and risks would be so they can make an informed decision. Dr. Abdalati says that deploying something like albedo modification is a last-ditch effort adding that “we’ve gotten ourselves into a climate mess. The fact that we’re even talking about these kinds of things is indicative of that.”

posted by janrinok on Friday February 27 2015, @02:47AM   Printer-friendly
from the as-only-schneier-can dept.

Recently, Google's Eric Schmidt presented the lunchtime keynote speech at the CATO institute's Surveillance Conference. This talk contained the absolute, and somewhat puffed-up, assertion "the safest place to keep [your private information] is in Google".

In his most recent Forbes article, now on his own security blog, Schneier examines and disects that claim. Unsurprisingly (but it's nice to see it spelt out in such clear terms by someone as respected as Bruce) he highlights a cloud in Google's silver lining, namely that "[Eric Schmidt] wants Google to be the safest place for your data as long as you don't mind the fact that Google has access to your data.". He's not picking on Google, continuing "Facebook wants the same thing: to protect your data from everyone except Facebook.", and also mentioning the recent Lenovo Superfish case too.

In Google and Facebook's case the old adage "if you're not paying for the service, you're the product" is relevant, and, quoting Whitfield Diffie, Bruce explains "we give lots of companies access to our data because it makes our lives easier", which implies that it will never stop, as we'll always want our lives to be made easier, on which both Whitfield and Bruce concur: "Like Diffie, I'm not sure there is any practical alternative."

So is that it - are we destined to always potentially be snooped on by everyone who performs any service for us? Is that really the hole that we've dug ourselves into? If so, the problem will only get worse, not better, IMHO. Or is there any tunnel with a light at the end of it?

posted by n1 on Thursday February 26 2015, @11:53PM   Printer-friendly
from the no-love-for-ciri dept.

Online dating proved to be a rote, tedious process. I would click around aimlessly for a few hours after a long day spent grading. When I actually did stumble across a woman I liked, she usually hadn’t been online for months, had a full mailbox, or would simply ignore my message.

Whenever I came to him with a particularly sticky physics problem, my adviser Mike was fond of saying: “Getting a PhD in physics doesn’t mean anything, really. Ultimately what you’re doing here is earning a degree in quantitative problem solving. Any kind of problem.” With that spirit and a notebook, I did what any physicist would do. I fired up MATLAB, and started building my model.

My model visualized online dating as a series of Bernoulli trials, a type of randomized experiment where two people’s first impressions of each other could be modeled via a pair of biased coin flips. Only if both parties land on heads (ie “you’re hot!”) do they go out.'

posted by n1 on Thursday February 26 2015, @10:39PM   Printer-friendly
from the echo-chamber-awards dept.

We had another article that suggested that the Oscars do more harm than good, which reminded me of this one. Namely, that the voters who decide on the animation awards might be woefully unfit for making such decisions.

The article states it best:

Imagine a world where the most high-profile animation awards were selected by individuals who had neither working knowledge nor appreciation of the animation art form.

In this world, a voter would pick the best animated short based solely on whether the film contained a dog in it or not.

In this world, a voter would identify the Irish film Song of the Sea and the Japanese film The Tale of The Princess Kaguya as “Chinese fuckin’ things,” not watch either film, and still cast a vote for the best animated feature of the year.

In this world, a voter would give a visual effects award to a film not because the film’s vfx met a certain standard of achievement, but “just to kind of recognize it.”

Keep in mind that this is just a informal survey of seven voters, but perhaps it indicates a larger problem?

posted by janrinok on Thursday February 26 2015, @09:01PM   Printer-friendly
from the what-say-you? dept.

In a vote on the morning of Thursday, February 26, the FCC has approved Net Neutrality.

In a story on Ars Technica (http://arstechnica.com/business/2015/02/fcc-votes-for-net-neutrality-a-ban-on-paid-fast-lanes-and-title-ii/) the FCC has voted to approve Net Neutrality and reclassify fixed and mobile broadband services under Title II as telecommunications services. As expected, the vote was along party lines.

It is expected that Verizon, AT&T, Comcast and others will sue to overturn the decision.

What say you Soylentils, is the reclassification of these services under Title II a good thing?