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mrbluze writes

"Soon it won't be worth going outside anymore.

Gizmodo reports of a drone with lasers designed for home defence., a fairly unromantic-looking household drone, a hexacopter with video and two-way audio interaction and remote controlled Taser dart gun rated at 80kV. It is designed to detect, intercept and disable would-be intruders onto your property, but of course it could be used for a plethora of other less savoury purposes.

The creators, Chaotic Moon are also planning an EMP equipped drone to knock out other spy drones."

An anonymous coward writes:

"The BBC is reporting that doctors have used gene therapy to modify T-cells of 12 patients with HIV to help protect the T-cells from the virus.

When patients were taken off their medication for four weeks, the number of unprotected T-cells still in the body fell dramatically, whereas the modified T-cells seemed to be protected and could still be found in the blood several months later. The trial was designed to test only the safety and feasibility of the method, not whether it could replace drug treatment in the long term."

Update: The staff is in conversation with the buyer right now. More to follow, but at this point it looks to be a benevolent benefactor from the community. More to follow as we get it.

SoylentNews community:

As you know, there is not a lot of information available right now. Barrabas reports that he has sold the Soylentnews.org and associated domain names, and successfully transferred them, but neither the buyer's name nor the terms of that sale have been disclosed. As spokesperson for the staff of the site during this time, we would like everyone to know the following:

Our current backup plan is to revert to the li694-22.members.linode.com where the site is actually hosted. If we need to go there for any reason, we will try to notify the site in advance. If it has to go down or we are forced down, we'll be there. We will rebuild the database with some downtime and work from there.

We will send out a mass email to all users from the database informing them of this step should we need to do so.

We do not plan to implement this yet. We (the staff) did not advocate the buyout, but will try and work with the buyer if possible. We do not know the terms on which the domain name was sold.

We the staff will still operate the site, in its current condition on linode, until the community can vote on a new name. Depending on the buyer, we hope we can consider keeping the name the same as an option.

Until we know more information, we would like everyone to remain calm, collected, and civil, while we sort through these issues. Thank you

~mattie_p

Papas Fritas writes:

"Bill Palmer, an Airbus A330 captain for a major airline, and author of the book 'Understanding Air France 447.' has an interesting read at CNN on why there have been so few clues about the fate of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, beginning with the lack of a distress call. According to Palmer the lack of a distress call is not particularly perplexing. 'An aviator's priorities are to maintain control of the airplane above all else. An emergency could easily consume 100% of a crew's efforts. To an airline pilot, the absence of radio calls to personnel on the ground that could do little to help the immediate situation is no surprise.'

Reports of a possible course reversal observed on radar could be the result of intentional crew actions but not necessarily says Palmer. During Air France 447's 3-1/2 minute descent to the Atlantic Ocean, it too changed its heading by more than 180 degrees, but it was an unintentional side effect as the crew struggled to gain control of the airplane. The Malaysian flight's last telemetry data, as reported by flightaware.com, shows the airplane at 35,000 feet. Even with a dual engine failure, a Boeing 777 is capable of gliding about 120 miles from that altitude yielding a search area roughly the size of Pennsylvania, with few clues within that area where remains of the aircraft might be. "This investigation may face many parallels to Air France 447, an Airbus A330 that crashed in an area beyond radar coverage in the ocean north of Brazil in June 2009. Like the Air France plane, the Malaysia Airlines aircraft was a state-of-the-art, fly-by-wire airplane (a Boeing 777) with an excellent safety record," says Palmer. 'We will know the truth of what happened when the aircraft is found and the recorders and wreckage are analyzed. In the meantime, speculation is often inaccurate and unproductive.'"

c0lo writes:

"ABC Australia reports that 3 years after the Fukushima disaster, hundreds of Fukushima evacuees will return home for the first time. The government is saying it's safe, but most of the evacuees don't want to go back.

In the centre of the hillside town of Tamura is a temporary housing centre for Fukushima's evacuees. About 370 have been living in small demountables since the Fukushima disaster three years ago. The residents here will be the first to be allowed to return to their homes around the crippled nuclear plant. But they're not excited by the prospect. Reuters publishes a report showing what effect the fear of radiation has had over the counties in the Fukushima neighborhood: 'Some of the smallest children in Koriyama, a short drive from the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant, barely know what it's like to play outside fear of radiation has kept them in doors for much of their short lives. Even if the strict safety limits for outdoor activity set after multiple meltdowns have now been eased, parental worries and ingrained habit mean many children still stay inside. And the impact is now starting to show, with children experiencing falling strength, lack of coordination, some cannot even ride a bicycle, and emotional issues like shorter tempers, officials and educators say.'

The loss of nuclear power has meant importing extra oil, coal and gas and that has hurt the Japan economy. The government of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is setting its sights on restarting some of the country's 48 mothballed reactors, amid protests of thousands in Tokyo. The silver lining of the cloud, Japan may be seeing an opportunity in Fukushima cleanup: 'There is decommissioning business here beyond Fukushima and it's a worldwide business," said Lake Barrett, a former U.S. nuclear regulator. "I think it's an exciting new area, Japan can be a world leader again.'

Japan created the government-funded International Research Institute for Nuclear Decommissioning, or IRID, last year. It brings together nuclear plant operators, construction companies and organizations of nuclear experts to promote research and development of nuclear decommissioning technologies. Japanese companies including Toshiba Corp., Mitsubishi Heavy Industries and Hitachi have been developing robots that can monitor radiation, decontaminate, remove contaminated debris or repair damage, and some of them have been mobilized at the plant."

nobbis writes:

"Researchers at Georgetown University have developed a blood test to predict Alzheimer's disease. They claim the test can predict development of Alzheimer's or mild dementia within 3 years with 90% accuracy.

A report by the World Health Organization predicts the number of people living with Dementia to double by 2030 from its current value of 35.6 million."

Update: 10 March 2014 20:20 UTC. Follow here for the latest.

Update: 10 March 2014 19:10 UTC.

At this point Barrabas reports he is exchanging email with the buyer but refuses to say anything. Until we hear from them, we have to hope for the best but plan for the worst. If this link goes down, please go to the linode site where we will regroup. We will use that link as a fallback if necessary.

Update: 10 March 2014 18:30 UTC.

Barrabas reports in IRC he has received funds for the site and has sold the domain name. The terms of this sale, as well as its buyer, have not been disclosed. We await additional information. If you have information on this, please contact us at admin @ soylentnews . org

Update: 10 March 2014 16:30 UTC.

Due to NCommander's personal involvement with the situation he is recusing himself from negotiations. I (Mattie_p) am currently working with the staff to figure out how to address this incident. We have posted a poll which is available and should show up shortly on the front page.

Original text:

We've been held hostage by John:

Working with NCommander
Am I The Bad Guy

Right now, I can't write a coherent response properly (I'm writing this from a Mac Store right now as some sort of response was necessary). Despite John's offer, we never used the Linode's he purchased for hosting slash, and the two services (forums and wiki) that were hosted on them were migrated. I had hoped that this would have been a private issue between me and John, to be handed by email with a proper agreement, but the site itself is now at risk.

Right now, I'm organizing a response with out staff now, but I won't be home for several hours so MrBluze is currently handling the crisis. He can hand off to mattie_p when he returns, or myself when I have proper net access again. John's offer does not reflect myself or any of the staff here, nor does he have what he says he has. The web server, dev server (fusion forge), and database were always hosted on Linode's on my personal account. John DID have access to the Linode account which was revoked when he left staff, but to my knowledge never had the root password or shell accounts on any of the boxes. That access was revoked. It is possible he has a copy of the database, I do not know for sure. He does not at this moment have access to any of the hardware powering the site. He does however control the DNS register and can possibly yank the site from under us. If that happens, I can send a mass email to every user account to inform them of what happened, and where we are now. We supposedly have until Friday until John drops everything in the trash unless someone pays him $2000 USD. As per the posts, I was willing to pay him, but I had some issue with the expenses as written (my emails are genuine, as is the email I received from John), but I'm currently in Asia, and have no practical way to send him a check until I return to the continental United States on Sunday; I informed John of this on IRC originally.

We're currently in scramble mode to try and organize a new name, and getting migrated as soon as possible. I was serious when I said I was done with the drama but it appears John isn't. I'm personally sorry to have to inflict this on the community, and if you wish to leave us, I shall not blame you in the slightest.

nobbis writes:

"From 'A Tolkienist's Perspective Blog' : a two part article part 1 part 2 about the military structure in Mordor. There is a hierarchy chart if you want a summary.

Was the rapid collapse of the military following the destruction of the ring indicative of the fragility of this structure , and its susceptibility to a decapitation strike ? Would a flatter hierarchy or something similar to the Imperial Military or Starfleet have been more resilient?"

mrbluze writes:

"RT quotes the words of Julian Assange at the South by Southwest conference on Saturday.

'The ability to surveil everyone on the planet is almost there, and arguably will be there in a few years,' said Assange. 'And that's led to a huge transfer of power from the people who are surveilled upon to those who control the surveillance complex. It's an interesting postmodern version of power.'

This heralds the imminent realization of the goals of the Total Information Awareness program of the U.S. Government, officially commenced in the early 2000's but conceptualized in the 1960's. The underlying reasoning behind this program is pre-emptive policing.

Before Wikileaks exposures, 'we weren't actually living in the world, we were living in some fictitious representation of the world,' Assange noted. The surveillance of the Internet is 'the penetration of our civilian society. It means that there has been a militarization of our civilian space. A military occupation of the Internet, our civilian space, is a very serious one.'"

regift_of_the_gods writes:

"The results from the 2013 holiday season through January are leaking in, and they look grim: not great for Sony, bad for Microsoft, terrible for Nintendo. The PS4 seems to be outselling the Xbox One but both are far behind their respective sales totals of 2006/2007, when they faced off with the previous generation of consoles. An anonymous developer quoted in the TechCrunch piece notes: 'There are 2+ year old GPUs that outperform these boxes, and even budget GPUs releasing now in the $150 range outclass these machines... This means whilst the casuals are moving to mobile/web, the high end enthusiasts are moving to PC where games are better looking. The traditional consoles are caught in a pincer movement.'

Sony has just completed a round of layoffs at its Santa Monica game studio. Meanwhile, the future of Xbox within Microsoft remains cloudy, with the departure of CEO Steve Ballmer and the ascension of Stephen Elop as head of the Devices and Services group, which includes the Nokia/Lumia handsets and the Surface tablet as well as Xbox. There are rumors that Microsoft is negotiating to sell the Xbox division to Amazon, which seems to be trying to enter the game platform industry. Elop wrote the (in)famous 'burning platform' memo when he was CEO at Nokia, as a prelude to abandoning the Symbian and MeeGo operating systems in favor of Windows Phone; he also stated last year that he would consider divesting Xbox and Bing if he was named CEO."

An Anonymous Coward writes:

"Hidden for 100 years, the astonishing photos by 16-year-old soldier shows how his brothers-in-arms would forever be haunted by the spectre of defeat

...taken by Walter Kleinfeldt who joined a German gun crew in 1915 and fought at the Somme aged just 16. As his haunting pictures, taken with a Contessa camera, make all too clear, life in the trenches was a harrowing experience. The images provide an insight into the epic machinery of war – and capture the darkest moments of battle, with bodies strewn among the rubble.

(Mail Online)"

AnonTechie writes:

"For those of you who remember Gopher, Minitel, and Compuserve, the article is an interesting reminder of what once was, and for those born more recently a chance to read about a time before 'http' and 'www' had any meaning."

From an article by phys,org,

Twenty-five years ago, the World Wide Web was just an idea in a technical paper from an obscure, young computer scientist at a European physics lab. That idea from Tim Berners-Lee at the CERN lab in Switzerland, outlining a way to easily access files on linked computers, paved the way for a global phenomenon that has touched the lives of billions of people. He presented the paper on March 12, 1989, which history has marked as the birthday of the Web. But the idea was so bold, it almost didn't happen.

Papas Fritas writes:

"Ian O'Neill writes in Discovery Magazine that despite NASA's best efforts to track it down, there is no evidence for the existence of Planet X. This hypothetical world that may or may not be orbiting the sun beyond the orbit of Pluto has inspired many a doomsday theory. In the run-up to the much anticipated "Mayan Doomsday" of December 21, 2012, the marauding Planet X was scheduled to make a inner-solar system dash, sparking gravitational mayhem and triggering civilization-ending solar flares.

But in spite of the doomsday nonsense, the hunt for "Planet X" actually has roots in real science. In the mid- to late-19th Century, astronomers were tracking the gravitational perturbations of the gas giant planets in an effort to track down an undiscovered world in the outermost reaches of the solar system. This hypothetical massive planet was dubbed "Planet X." However, this fascinating trail ended with the discovery of tiny Pluto in 1930. The idea that the sun may have a stellar partner has also been investigated, perhaps there's a brown dwarf going unnoticed out there. Nicknamed "Nemesis," this binary partner could be evading detection. One strong piece of evidence laid in the discovery of the "Kuiper Cliff," a sudden drop-off of Kuiper Belt objects in the region just beyond Pluto. Could the Cliff be caused by a previously overlooked world? Also, geological record has suggested there's a regularity to mass extinctions on Earth linked to comet impacts. Could a distant orbiting body be perturbing comets, sending them our way on a cyclical basis?

However, the Center for Exoplanets and Habitable Worlds at Penn State University has analyzed data from NASA's Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), a space telescope that carried out a detailed infrared survey of the entire sky from 2010 to 2011. If something big is lurking out there, WISE would easily have spotted it. According to a NASA news release, "no object the size of Saturn or larger exists out to a distance of 10,000 astronomical units (AU), and no object larger than Jupiter exists out to 26,000 AU. One astronomical unit equals 93 million miles. Earth is 1 AU, and Pluto about 40 AU, from the sun." Observations by WISE have also ruled out the Planet X Comet Perturbation theory.

lhsi writes:

"The British Pregnancy Advisory Service has been fined £200,000 (€241,000; $334,500) for a data breach.

A hacker had threatened to reveal the names of 10,000 people who had contacted the service, after accessing unsecured data using a website vulnerability, the BBC reports.

David Smith, deputy commissioner and director of data protection at the ICO (the Information Commissioner's Office), said:

"Data protection is critical and getting it right requires vigilance. The British Pregnancy Advice Service didn't realise their website was storing this information, didn't realise how long it was being retained for and didn't realise the website wasn't being kept sufficiently secure.

But ignorance is no excuse. It is especially unforgivable when the organisation is handing information as sensitive as that held by the BPAS."

The BPAS has said they believe the fine is out of proportion and they plan to appeal."

AnonTechie writes:

"Thinking there could be life on one of Jupiter's moons, NASA scientists are working on a plan to send robots to begin studying it. Jim Green, NASA's planetary science chief, said there's no reason to think there isn't life on Europa, the sixth-closest moon to the planet Jupiter and the sixth-largest moon in the solar system. And he can't wait to find out. NASA administrator Charles Bolden said this week that the space agency's 2015 proposed budget includes funding for a robotic mission to Europa. Green noted that NASA hopes to launch the first of a series of robotic missions to Europa in the mid 2020s.

The report explains: "In December, the Hubble Space Telescope spotted a huge water plume emanating from the south pole of Europa. Green said it wasn't a small geyser like Old Faithful in Yellowstone National Park, which shoots up 90 to 180 feet in the air.

The geyser coming off Europa shoots up more than 124 miles."