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Papas Fritas writes:

"Jeremy Rifkin writes in the NYT that the inherent dynamism of competitive markets is bringing down costs so far that many goods and services are becoming nearly free, abundant, and no longer subject to market forces and while economists have always welcomed a reduction in marginal cost, they never anticipated the possibility of a technological revolution that might bring those costs to near zero. The first inkling of this paradox at the heart of capitalism came in 1999 when Napster enabled millions of people to share music without paying the producers and artists, wreaking havoc on the music industry. Similar phenomena went on to severely disrupt the newspaper and book publishing industries. The huge reduction in marginal cost is now beginning to reshape energy, manufacturing and education. "Although the fixed costs of solar and wind technology are somewhat pricey, the cost of capturing each unit of [renewable] energy beyond that is low (PDF)," says Rifkin. As for manufacturing "thousands of hobbyists are already making their own products using 3-D printers, open-source software and recycled plastic as feedstock, at near zero marginal cost" and more than six million students are enrolled in "free massive open online courses, the content of which is distributed at near zero marginal cost."

But nowhere is the zero marginal cost phenomenon having more impact than the labor market, where workerless factories and offices, virtual retailing and automated logistics and transport networks are becoming more prevalent. What this means according to Rifkin is that new employment opportunities will lie in the collaborative commons in fields that tend to be nonprofit and strengthen social infrastructure like health care, aiding the poor, environmental restoration, child care, care for the elderly, and the promotion of the arts and recreation. "As for the capitalist system, it is likely to remain with us far into the future, albeit in a more streamlined role, primarily as an aggregator of network services and solutions, allowing it to thrive as a powerful niche player in the coming era. We are, however, entering a world partly beyond markets, where we are learning how to live together in an increasingly interdependent, collaborative, global commons.""

An anonymous coward writes:

"An interesting article about the shift in open source from idealistic to pragmatic. The author compares the relative obscurity of FOSS software such as MediaGoblin and KDE's MakePlayLive co-op to commercial software. The article then goes on to discuss the split between FOSS's goal to provide freedom to users and to provide high-quality software. Also mentioned is the split between commercial and non-commercial FOSS."

mrbluze writes:

"Columbia Tribune / AP reports of Police agencies' reluctance to divulge details about the Stingray cell-phone interception device, whose use has increased since a Supreme Court decision to prevent the use of GPS tracking devices without a warrant. The Stingray is reported to be a suitcase-sized device that pretends to be a mobile phone tower, tricking a cell phone to connect to it instead of the cellphone company's tower, but details on how this works are not revealed.

In one of the rare court cases involving the device, the FBI acknowledged in 2011 that so-called cell site simulator technology affects innocent users in the area where it's operated, not just a suspect police are seeking.

A December 2013 investigation by USA Today found roughly 1 in 4 law enforcement agencies it surveyed had performed tower dumps, and slightly fewer owned a Stingray.

However, a report by GlobalResearch.ca gives much greater detail, including photographs of the device:

When a suspect makes a phone call, the StingRay tricks the cell into sending its signal back to the police, thus preventing the signal from traveling back to the suspect's wireless carrier. But not only does StingRay track the targeted cell phone, it also extracts data off potentially thousands of other cell phone users in the area.

Although manufactured by a Germany and Britain-based firm, the StingRay devices are sold in the US by the Harris Corporation, an international telecommunications equipment company. It gets between $60,000 and $175,000 for each Stingray it sells to US law enforcement agencies."

cosurgi writes:

"Neil Turok, a South African physicist, and the Director of Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, argues that recently published results from BICEP2 need more confirmation by independent experiments."

The original Soylent News story went out on the 14 March, and referred to these BICEP2 papers.

el_oscuro writes:

"In a bizarre twist to the usual failed government IT projects, the Washington Post reports:

Deep in an underground mine in Boyers, Pa., amid 28,000 file cabinets, government workers process the retirement files of federal employees. On paper. By hand. In 2014. This is one of the weirdest workplaces in the U.S. government both for where it is and for what it does. Here, inside the caverns of an old Pennsylvania limestone mine, there are 600 employees of the Office of Personnel Management. Their task is nothing top-secret. It is to process the retirement papers of the government's own workers. But that system has a spectacular flaw. It still must be done entirely by hand, and almost entirely on paper.

'The need for automation was clear in 1981,' said James W. Morrison Jr., who oversaw the retirement-processing system under President Ronald Reagan. In a telephone interview this year, Morrison recalled his horror upon learning that the system was all run on paper: 'After a year, I thought, God, my reputation will be ruined if we don't fix this.'"

ancientt writes:

"Ars is carrying the story that 'IBM announced that it would be using Watson, the system that famously wiped the floor with human Jeopardy champions, to tackle a somewhat more significant problem: choosing treatments for cancer. In the process, the company hopes to help usher in the promised era of personalized medicine.'"

omoc writes:

"From the SPON article:

"The American government conducted a major intelligence offensive against China, with targets including the Chinese government and networking company Huawei, according to documents from former NSA worker Edward Snowden that have been viewed by SPIEGEL. Among the American intelligence service's targets were former Chinese President Hu Jintao, the Chinese Trade Ministry, banks, as well as telecommunications companies. But the NSA made a special effort to target Huawei.

According to a top secret NSA presentation, NSA workers not only succeeded in accessing the email archive, but also the secret source code of individual Huwaei products."

n1 writes:

"U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder announced a criminal wire fraud charge against Toyota for defrauding consumers by issuing misleading statements about safety issues in Toyota and Lexus vehicles.

On the same day, The Department of Justice also announced a deferred prosecution agreement with Toyota under which the automotive company accepts a $1.2bn penalty and admits that it misled U.S. consumers by concealing and making deceptive statements about two safety issues affecting its vehicles, each regarding unintended acceleration. If Toyota conforms to all the terms of the agreement, the government will defer prosecution on the information for three years and then seek to dismiss the charge."

juggs writes:

"The BBC have picked up on a recent paper published in the journal Science that casts doubt on a major part of the case for the Moon having once held abundant water.

The abstract of the paper:

Recent discoveries of water-rich lunar apatite are more consistent with the hydrous magmas of Earth than the otherwise volatile-depleted rocks of the Moon. Paradoxically, however, this requires H-rich minerals to form in rocks that are otherwise nearly anhydrous. We modeled existing data from the literature, finding that nominally anhydrous minerals do not sufficiently fractionate H from F and Cl to generate H-rich apatite. Hydrous apatites are explained as the products of apatite-induced low magmatic fluorine which increases the H/F ratio in melt and apatite. Mare basalts may contain hydrogen-rich apatite, but lunar magmas were most likely poor in hydrogen, in agreement with the volatile depletion that is both observed in lunar rocks and required for canonical giant impact models of the formation of the Moon.

Sadly the paper itself is paywalled on the Science website, however the BBC article is relatively in-depth and has direct input from the paper's authors, so it makes for an interesting read."

n1 writes:

"Promising developments in the fight against cancer have come out of Sweden this week. "Cancer experts at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm said they had been able to reverse the growth of brain tumours in mice by giving them a substance called Vacquinol-1, which can be taken in tablet form.". Vacquinol-1 initiates a process known as vacuolization, which the cells absorb substances and are then forced into "overdrive" and subsequently explode, the cancerous cells die as a result.

Mice have had the human variation of glioblastoma cells implanted. Over the course of the study in which Vacquinol-1 was ingested by the mice for five days, six out of eight mice were alive after 80 days. The lifespan in the control group was just 30 days."

n1 writes:

"The NSA targets System Administrators and 'probable administrators' to gain access to the systems and networks they work on, The Intercept reveals. The document obtained by Edward Snowden informs us that the NSA does not only seek access for surveillance on specific targets, but detailed information in regards to customer lists, business correspondence and even "pictures of cats in funny poses with amusing captions".

There is no suggestion that these operations make any safeguards for American citizens in what many would describe as an unconstitutional surveillance program. The Author of one of the leaked document describes how he accomplishes his work, "Just pull those selectors, queue them up for QUANTUM, and proceed with the pwnage"."

Papas Fritas writes:

"Measles is spreading in upper Manhattan and the Bronx, according to public health authorities in New York as about 16 cases have turned up, including two that involved contagion in doctors' offices. Outbreaks have also been reported in the Boston area, San Francisco and Los Angeles. Now the LA Times reports that the first signs of a backlash against anti-vaccination falsehoods emerged last week, when that noted scientific authority and spokesmodel Jenny McCarthy, who has been spreading anti-vaccination drivel for years, got wasted by the Internet community when she left herself open to a reaction.

On Thursday, McCarthy asked a question of her fans on Twitter to see what they'd say. What she got was a dose of the reality she helped spawn. The question: "What is the most important personality trait you look for in a mate? Reply using #JennyAsks".

Just when you think that Internet commentary is nothing more than a wretched hive of scum and villainy, a light shines through so strongly it can help restore your optimism about people says Phil Plait as McCarthy received hundreds of replies including "They vaccinate their kids," "Someone who vaccinates, b/c I'd want our kids to survive," "Someone who respects that science isn't on some secret malicious crusade to screw us over and that vaccinations save lives," "What qualities do I look for in a mate? Science literacy and critical thinking skills," and "Ideal mate accepts scientific consensus & considers the elderly, infants & immune compromised b4 spreading baseless hysteria." McCarthy responded with a tweet saying "Thank you to all the haters who tweet my name. You make my Q SCORE higher and higher. It's because of you I continue to work. Thank you! : )" However, she did not address the substance of the tweets directed at her that her advocacy on behalf of the anti-vaccine movement has contributed to a dramatic rise in vaccine-preventable illnesses."

Meanwhile, Appalbarry writes: (somewhat tongue in cheek):

"Jenny McCarthy's anti-vaccination brigades are 'cheering the news' that British Columbia is in the midst of a growing measles outbreak.

In less than a month the number of infected individuals climbed from zero to over one hundred, surely a small price to pay to avoid the (mumble mumble) scourge of MMR-caused autism! (In fact the outbreak originated in the Netherlands, but there is no apparent linkage between wooden shoes and autism either.)"

Scareb writes:

"Hot on the heels of the Netflix deal with Comcast, Reuters reports in a news item that the language between content providers and content deliverers is also heating up.

As many here are probably already familiar with, Netflix believes that carriers should pay for the interconnects that keep their traffic flowing while AT&T believes that Netflix is trying to 'get a free lunch :

'While in the short term Netflix will in cases reluctantly pay large to ensure a high quality member experience, we will continue to fight for the internet the world needs and deserves,' wrote Netflix Chief Executive Reed Hastings. AT&T's senior executive vice president for external and legislative affairs, Jim Cicconi, rebutted with the following, 'As we all know, there is no free lunch, and there's also no cost-free delivery of streaming movies. Someone has to pay that cost'"

An anonymous coward writes:

"ChipWhisperer: An Open-Source Platform for Hardware Embedded Security Research. (PDF)

Partial quote from 1st page (1/18):

'This paper introduces a complete side channel analysis toolbox inclusive of the analog capture hardware, target device, capture software, and analysis software. The highly modular design allows use of the hardware and software with a variety of existing systems. The hardware uses a synchronous capture method which greatly reduces the required sample rate, while also reducing the data storage requirement and improving synchronization of traces. The synchronous nature of the hardware lends itself to fault injection, and a module to generate glitches of programmable width is also provided. The entire design (hardware and software) is open-source, and maintained in a publicly available repository. Several long example capture traces are provided for researchers looking to evaluate standard cryptographic implementations.'"

[Ed's Note: If you haven't already got a PDF reader built-in to your browser, the submitter suggests the following link: http://view.samurajdata.se/. I do not take any responsibility for this software.]

janrinok writes:

"Breaking news: The BBC is reporting that Russian troops have begun storming the Belbek airbase in the Crimea. From the article:

Earlier, several hundred unarmed protesters seized a Ukrainian naval base at Novofedorivka, western Crimea.

Pro-Russian militia have also been seizing Ukrainian navy ships.

The BBC's Ian Pannell, in Crimea, says the Ukrainian troops on the peninsula feel beleaguered and abandoned by their commanders in Ukraine.

On Friday, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a law formalising Russia's takeover of Crimea from Ukraine, despite fresh sanctions from the EU and the US.

In Belbek, two armoured personnel carriers burst through the wall of the base followed by Russian troops firing weapons in the air.

An ambulance was then seen entering the base amid reports that at least one person was injured. The Ukrainian soldiers were later gathered at the base main square in front of the heavily armed Russian troops.

The storming followed an ultimatum by the Russians to surrender.

"