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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:46 | Votes:108

posted by martyb on Friday May 29 2015, @11:16PM   Printer-friendly
from the bias-removal-or-indoctrination? dept.

When the desired behavior is performed, a sound is played. When the test subjects reach deep sleep, that same sound is played repeatedly. Subjects were then more likely to perform the desired behavior.

The article, "Unlearning implicit social biases during sleep" appears in the journal Science; an abstract and full report are available.


[Original Submission - Ed.]

posted by CoolHand on Friday May 29 2015, @09:49PM   Printer-friendly
from the getting-all-they-can-give dept.

Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht, aka the "Dread Pirate Roberts," has been sentenced to life in prison on multiple charges by a federal judge in Manhattan. The charges he faced carried a minimum sentence of 20 years, but he received the maximum sentence of life in prison for "engaging in a continuing criminal enterprise" (The Kingpin Statute):

Ross Ulbricht, the man behind illegal online drug emporium Silk Road, was sentenced to life in prison on Friday by Judge Katherine Forrest of Manhattan's US district court for the southern district of New York. Before the sentencing the parents of the victims of drug overdoses addressed the court. Ulbricht broke down in tears. "I never wanted that to happen," he said. "I wish I could go back and convince myself to take a different path." Ulbrict was handed five sentences one of 20 year, one of 15 years, one of five and two of life. All are to be served concurrently.

Ulbrict, 31, begged the judge to "leave a light at the end of the tunnel" ahead of his sentence. "I know you must take away my middle years, but please leave me my old age," he wrote to Forrest this week. Prosecutors wrote Forrest a 16-page letter requesting the opposite: "[A] lengthy sentence, one substantially above the mandatory minimum is appropriate in this case."

Forrest rejected arguments that Silk Road had reduced harm among drug users by taking illegal activities off the street. "No drug dealer from the Bronx has ever made this argument to the court. It's a privileged argument and it's an argument made by one of the privileged," she said.

Also at Ars Technica, Wired, and The Verge. Ulbricht faces additional charges in Maryland over an alleged murder-for-hire plot.


[Original Submission - Ed.]

posted by martyb on Friday May 29 2015, @08:49PM   Printer-friendly
from the amnesiac-neuromorphic-chips-rejoice dept.

Engineers have produced an alloy that springs back into shape even after it is bent more than 10 million times. "Memory shape alloys" like this have many potential uses, but present incarnations are prone to wearing out. The new material - made from nickel, titanium and copper - shatters previous records and is so resilient it could be useful in artificial heart valves, aircraft components or a new generation of solid-state refrigerators. The work appears in Science Magazine.

Memory alloys are already used in some situations, including surgical operations. A stent, for example, might be squashed into a small space and then spring into its designed shape to prop open a blood vessel. But the alloys have never entirely fulfilled their promise and entered the world of "high cycle fatigue" applications.

http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-32886000


[Original Submission - Ed.]

posted by martyb on Friday May 29 2015, @07:12PM   Printer-friendly
from the where-did-I-put-my-car-keys dept.

The latest research shows memories "lost" to amnesia aren't gone forever; they're just not accessible

Mice certainly aren't men, but they can teach us a lot about memories. And in the latest experiments, mice are helping to resolve a long-simmering debate about what happens to "lost" memories. Are they wiped out permanently, or are they still there, but just somehow out of reach?

Researchers in the lab of Susumu Tonegawa at the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT conducted a series of studies using the latest light-based brain tracking techniques to show that memories in certain forms of amnesia aren't erased, but remain intact and potentially retrievable. Their findings, published Thursday in the journal Science , are based on experiments in mice, but they could have real implications for humans, too.

http://time.com/3899789/lost-memories-retrieved/


[Original Submission - Ed.]

posted by martyb on Friday May 29 2015, @05:47PM   Printer-friendly
from the merger-mania dept.

The Orange County Register reports

Irvine chipmaker Broadcom Corp. will be purchased by Singapore-based Avago Technologies Ltd. for $37 billion, making the deal the biggest technology acquisition ever.

The two companies said they expected the deal to produce $750 million in savings over the first 18 months of their union. The new company will take Broadcom's name, Avago's CEO, Hock Tan, will retain his leading role in the newly combined enterprise.

[...] The purchase of Broadcom, the biggest maker of Wi-Fi chips for short-range connections in mobile devices, will create the world's sixth-largest chipmaker in terms of revenue. The deal is the latest in a round of consolidation in the $300 billion industry as the rising costs of production and design push manufacturers to combine.

[...] Broadcom is closing its unit that makes modem chips for mobile phones. That is reducing losses and expenses in a business that failed to gain significant market share from Qualcomm Inc.

Have any Soylentils had dealings with Avago which indicate that (notoriously closed) Broadcom will now become more open?


[Editor's Comment: Original Submission]

posted by janrinok on Friday May 29 2015, @03:35PM   Printer-friendly
from the preach-to-the-choir dept.

United Nations Special Rapporteur David Kaye has written that encryption is necessary for freedom of expression and privacy:

No restrictions may be imposed on the right to hold opinions without interference; [...] opinions, however held online, result in surveillance or harassment, encryption and anonymity may provide necessary privacy. Restrictions on such security tools may interfere with the ability of individuals to hold opinions.

Interference may also include such efforts as targeted surveillance, distributed denial of service attacks, and online and offline intimidation, criminalization and harassment. Targeted digital interference harasses individuals and civil society organizations for the opinions they hold in many formats. Encryption and anonymity enable individuals to avoid or mitigate such harassment.

Efforts to restrict encryption and anonymity also tend to be quick reactions to terrorism, even when the attackers themselves are not alleged to have used encryption or anonymity to plan or carry out an attack. Moreover, even where the restriction is arguably in pursuit of a legitimate interest, many laws and policies regularly do not meet the standards of necessity and proportionality and have broad, deleterious effects on the ability of all individuals to exercise freely their rights to privacy and freedom of opinion and expression. [...] Outright prohibitions on the individual use of encryption technology disproportionately restrict the freedom of expression, because they deprive all online users in a particular jurisdiction of the right to carve out private space for opinion and expression, without any particular claim of the use of encryption for unlawful ends.

States should promote strong encryption and anonymity. National laws should recognize that individuals are free to protect the privacy of their digital communications by using encryption technology and tools that allow anonymity online. [...] States should not restrict encryption and anonymity, which facilitate and often enable the rights to freedom of opinion and expression. Blanket prohibitions fail to be necessary and proportionate. States should avoid all measures that weaken the security that individuals may enjoy online, such as backdoors, weak encryption standards and key escrows.

The report hits on many digital liberty topics, shaming Russia, China, and South Africa for online "real-name" policies, calling compulsory SIM card registration "well beyond any legitimate government interest," calling for access to Tor, proxies, and VPNs to be "protected and promoted," and asserting that data retention "of all users has inevitably resulted in the State having everyone's digital footprint."

By contrast, newly appointed U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch has become the latest Obama administration official to express "concerns" over encryption hampering anti-terrorism and law enforcement efforts.


[Editor's Comment: Original Submission]

posted by janrinok on Friday May 29 2015, @01:56PM   Printer-friendly
from the all-charged-up dept.

Chemists at the Waterloo University have discovered the key reaction that takes place in sodium-air batteries that could pave the way for development of the so-called holy grail of electrochemical energy storage.

Unlike the traditional solid-state battery design, a metal-oxygen battery uses a gas cathode that takes oxygen and combines it with a metal such as sodium or lithium to form a metal oxide, storing electrons in the process. Applying an electric current reverses the reaction and reverts the metal to its original form.

In the case of the sodium-oxygen cell, the proton phase catalyst transfers the newly formed sodium superoxide (NaO2) entities to solution where they nucleate into well-defined nanocrystals to grow the discharge product as micron-sized cubes. The dimensions of the initially formed NaO2 are critical; theoretical calculations from a group at MIT has separately shown that NaO2 is energetically preferred over sodium peroxide, Na2O2 at the nanoscale. When the battery is recharged, these NaO2 cubes readily dissociate, with the reverse reaction facilitated once again by the proton phase catalyst.

Chemistry says that the proton phase catalyst could work similarly with lithium-oxygen. However, the lithium superoxide (LiO2) entities are too unstable and convert immediately to lithium peroxide (Li2O2). Once Li2O2 forms, the catalyst cannot facilitate the reverse reaction, as the forward and reverse reactions are no longer the same. So, in order to achieve progress on lithium-oxygen systems, researchers need to find an additional redox mediator to charge the cell efficiently.

Another battery technology "only a few years from the market"?


[Editor's Comment: Original Submission]

posted by cmn32480 on Friday May 29 2015, @12:15PM   Printer-friendly
from the are-you-horny-baby? dept.

A startup company called Pembient is developing a process to synthesize rhino horns. Their aim is to mass produce fakes that are indistinguishable from real horns, and hence destroy the profit motive for killing wild rhinos.

The plan begins with using modified yeast cells to produce a substance called keratin, the main component of the horn. Various trace elements found in natural horns are added in, as well as genuine rhino DNA. From these materials, a 3D printer is then used to recreate the complex structure of the horn. The only things that are missing, are the trace elements of pollutants that have made their way into the real rhino horn over time. This makes the synthetic horn more pure than the real one.

Some wildlife groups are very skeptical of the plan.

Pembient's concept, which another company – Rhinoceros Horn LLC – is also pursuing a version of, has raised the hackles of conservation groups from the World Wildlife Foundation to the wildlife monitoring network Traffic. It panders to consumers' behaviour rather than trying to change it, which could set back efforts to educate, they say. "There is general horror at the idea," says Cathy Dean, international director of the UK-based charity Save the Rhino, which earlier this month issued a joint statement with the International Rhino Foundation opposing the synthetic horn. Dean adds that ersatz horn is unlikely to dent the market – if people can afford the real thing they are going to buy it – and rebukes the company for failing properly to consult conservation professionals on the idea first.

posted by cmn32480 on Friday May 29 2015, @10:26AM   Printer-friendly
from the i-wanna-text-it-to-all-my-apple-loving-friends dept.

iOS bug causes crash when rendering certain text string

Ars Technica reports on a bug in iOS that can cause iPhones to reboot. This bug also seems to affect OS X under certain situations and extends beyond text messages on iOS. The trigger is trying to render the string in question.

A similar rendering bug for Apple has occurred previously that was also covered by Ars Technica

Microsoft has also fallen victim to font rendering bugs in the past:

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/security/ms13-060.aspx
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/security/ms10-063.aspx
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/security/ms14-036.aspx

iOS bug can cause text message to crash iPhones

I'm not a fan of iOS or Apple, in fact I find their interfaces so incredibly frustrating that I refuse to use their products, so I find this particularly amusing:

A newly discovered and potentially worrisome iOS bug has been causing Phones to crash and automatically reboot when a certain string of characters is received via the Messages app. The string in question, which consists of both English and Arabic characters, was first brought to light via a Reddit thread before being corroborated by MacRumors late on Wednesday evening.

"Sending the string of characters to an iPhone results in an immediate respring, causing an iPhone to crash and quickly reboot," the report notes. "From there, if the Messages app was opened at a list view, the Messages app crashes automatically when you try to open it. If it was opened to the conversation where you received the message, the app will open, but attempting to go to another conversation causes Messages to crash."

Read more here.

posted by CoolHand on Friday May 29 2015, @08:42AM   Printer-friendly
from the sailing-away dept.

Covered at Sen is the news that a software glitch is causing problems for the Light Sail project launched by the Planetary Society

The privately funded Planetary Society, a California-based space exploration advocacy group, has not been in communication with its LightSail since Friday, two days after it hitched a ride to orbit aboard an Atlas 5 rocket carrying the U.S. Air Force’s X-37B robotic mini shuttle.

This is also covered at the Planetary Society blog:

It is now believed that a vulnerability in the software controlling the main avionics board halted spacecraft operations, leaving a reboot as the only remedy to continue the mission. When that occurs, the team will likely initiate a manual sail deployment as soon as possible.
...
The manufacturer of the avionics board corrected this glitch in later software revisions. But alas, LightSail’s software version doesn’t include the update.

The team are hoping for a reboot to bring the device back to life, either from a ground transmission or charged particle glitch, although attempts to reboot from the ground look to have failed to date.

Cal Poly is automating the reboot command transmission to be sent every few ground station passes, on the hope that one command sneaks through (we don't send the command on every pass because a successful reboot triggers a waiting period before beacon transmissions begin). But as of right now, we can’t do much except wait, hoping a charged particle smacks the spacecraft in just the right way to cause a reboot. LightSail is capable of remaining in orbit about six months in its CubeSat form.

Additional background on the project is available in a previous SN article, and ongoing updates at the mission control page for the LightSail project.


[Editor's Comment: Original Submission]

posted by CoolHand on Friday May 29 2015, @06:05AM   Printer-friendly
from the could-you-please-speak-in-english dept.

Racial stereotypes and expectations can impact the way we communicate and understand others, according to UBC research. The new study, published in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, highlights how non-verbal "social cues" - such as photographs of Chinese Canadians - can affect how we comprehend speech.

"This research brings to light our internal biases, and the role of experience and stereotypes, in how we listen to and hear each other," says Molly Babel, the paper's lead author and an assistant professor with UBC's Department of Linguistics.

One of the study's tasks involved participants from the UBC community transcribing pre-recorded sentences amid background static. The sentences were recorded by 12 native speakers of Canadian English. Half of the speakers self-identified as White, and the other half self-identified as Chinese. All speakers were born and raised in Richmond, B.C., which is south of Vancouver.

The pre-recorded sentences were accompanied by either black and white photos of the speakers, or by an image of three crosses. Overall, listeners found the Chinese Canadians more difficult to understand than the White Canadians - but only when they were made aware that the speaker was Chinese Canadian due to the photo prompt.

Participants were also asked to rate the strength of the accents of the speakers. They were asked to listen to two sentences from each speaker - one accompanied by the speaker's photo, the other by an image of crosses. "Once participants were aware that they were listening to a White Canadian, suddenly the candidate was perceived as having less of a foreign accent and sounding more like a native speaker of Canadian English," says Babel.

"It tells us as listeners that we need to be sensitive about the stereotypes that we carry," notes Jamie Russell, the study's co-author who was an undergraduate honours student in UBC's Department of Linguistics during the project.

http://phys.org/news/2015-05-racial-stereotypes-impact.html

[Abstract]: http://scitation.aip.org/content/asa/journal/jasa/137/5/10.1121/1.4919317

[Source]: http://news.ubc.ca/2015/05/26/how-racial-stereotypes-impact-the-way-we-communicate/


[Editor's Comment: Original Submission]

posted by juggs on Friday May 29 2015, @04:18AM   Printer-friendly
from the random-thoughts dept.

This is a topic that comes up all too often in comments, lambasting editors or praising them.

As it stands, editorial is a black box, they accept submissions, fettle them, then they appear as stories. Recently, the Original Submission link appeared on stories so you can see what went in and what appeared out of that black box, yet still the complaints come.

Just how much transparency is necessary? (This is an open question not rhetorical)

I like to believe that SoylentNews is the people that form it as a community, and the editing should reflect that.

Should we adopt some version control for subs so everyone can see who edited what through the pipeline that goes from sub to front page?

Thoughts on a postcard please.

posted by janrinok on Friday May 29 2015, @03:41AM   Printer-friendly
from the it-will-never-work dept.

Ian Austen has an interesting interview in the NYT with the Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff, authors of "Losing the Signal: The Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of BlackBerry," that offers details about the emotional and business turmoil surrounding the collapse of the once-dominant smartphone maker's fall into near market obscurity. Most interesting is BlackBerry's initial reaction to the iPhone. "It was an interesting contrast to the team at Google, which was working on smartphones at the time. Google seemed to realize immediately that the world had changed and scrapped its keyboard plans. At BlackBerry, they sort of dismissed the need to do anything about it in the short term," says McNish. "One thing that they misunderstood is how the game had changed when AT&T announced its deal with Apple," added Silcoff. "BlackBerry had built its whole business model on offering carriers products that worked efficiently on their networks. The first thing Mike Lazaridis said when he saw an iPhone at home is that this will never work, the network can't sustain it. What they misunderstood is that the consumer demand would make carriers invest in their networks."

"One of the big reveals for us in the book was the enormous power wielded by carriers in the smartphone race," says McNish. "In the wake of Apple's ascendency, carriers have seen their clout and economic value significantly diminished as customers spend more of their smartphone money on Apple phones, apps and other content than they do on carrier bills. It is one of the greatest wealth transfers in our generation."


[Editor's Comment: Original Submission]

posted by janrinok on Friday May 29 2015, @12:45AM   Printer-friendly
from the where-did-he-learn-to-do-that? dept.

Ten days after the International New York Times published Fake Diplomas, Real Cash: Pakistani Company Axact Reaps Millions, The BBC reports that Axact's CEO, Shoaib Ahmed Shaikh and four other executives have been arrested. According to today's NY Times article, "'[they] were initially charged with fraud, forgery and illegal electronic money transfers', law enforcement officials said. The charges were later expanded to include money laundering and violating Pakistan's electronic crimes act."

Axact CEO Shaikh had initially denied the charges, but after hours of questioning he led investigators to a building next to Axact's headquarters. "Inside they found a room filled with blank certificates bearing the letterheads of dozens of fake universities and high schools operated by Axact under names like Bay View, Cambell State, Oxdell and Nixon." Apparently this has been bringing several millions of dollars a month of revenue into Axact, a company that has claimed until now to be Pakistan's largest software export company.

Axact was also on the cusp of launching a new media giant, Bol. Bol has hired several leading journalists at three to four times normal salaries. According to the linked BBC article, there is some speculation that the Axact scandal gained additional traction at this moment due to rival networks wanting to stop Bol from providing competition.


[Editor's Comment: Original Submission]

posted by CoolHand on Thursday May 28 2015, @10:48PM   Printer-friendly
from the fine-line dept.

Farhad Manjoo writes in the NYT that with over one billion devices sold in 2014 Android is the most popular operating system in the world by far, but that doesn't mean it's a financial success for Google. Apple vacuumed up nearly 90 percent of the profits in the smartphone business which prompts a troubling question for Android and for Google: How will the search company — or anyone else, for that matter — ever make much money from Android. First the good news: The fact that Google does not charge for Android, and that few phone manufacturers are extracting much of a profit from Android devices, means that much of the globe now enjoys decent smartphones and online services for low prices. But while Google makes most of its revenue from advertising, Android has so far been an ad dud compared with Apple's iOS, whose users tend to have more money and spend a lot more time on their phones (and are, thus, more valuable to advertisers). Because Google pays billions to Apple to make its search engine the default search provider for iOS devices, the company collects much more from ads placed on Apple devices than from ads on Android devices.

The final threat for Google's Android may be the most pernicious: What if a significant number of the people who adopted Android as their first smartphone move on to something else as they become power users? In Apple's last two earnings calls, Tim Cook reported that the "majority" of those who switched to iPhone had owned a smartphone running Android. Apple has not specified the rate of switching, but a survey found that 16 percent of people who bought the latest iPhones previously owned Android devices; in China, that rate was 29 percent. For Google, this may not be terrible news in the short run. If Google already makes more from ads on iOS than Android, growth in iOS might actually be good for Google's bottom line. Still, in the long run, the rise of Android switching sets up a terrible path for Google — losing the high-end of the smartphone market to the iPhone, while the low end is under greater threat from noncooperative Android players like Cyanogen which has a chance to snag as many as 1 billion handsets. Android has always been a tricky strategy concludes Manjoo; now, after finding huge success, it seems only to be getting even trickier.


[Editor's Comment: Original Submission]

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