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AnonTechie writes:

It happens quickly-more quickly than you, being human, can fully process. A front tire blows, and your autonomous SUV swerves. But rather than veering left, into the opposing lane of traffic, the robotic vehicle steers right. Brakes engage, the system tries to correct itself, but there's too much momentum. Like a cornball stunt in a bad action movie, you are over the cliff, in free fall. Your robot, the one you paid good money for, has chosen to kill you. Better that, its collision-response algorithms decided, than a high-speed, head-on collision with a smaller, non-robotic compact. There were two people in that car, to your one. The math couldn't be simpler. This, roughly speaking, is the problem presented by Patrick Lin, an associate philosophy professor and director of the Ethics + Emerging Sciences Group at California Polytechnic State University. In a recent opinion piece for Wired, Lin explored one of the most disturbing questions in robot ethics: If a crash is unavoidable, should an autonomous car choose who it slams into?

kaszz writes:

You probably felt the pain from graphic drivers in open source operating systems at some point. The game and graphics programmer Rich Geldreich has written a blog post about the quality of the OpenGL drivers from the three largest graphic card manufacturers. The blog post is written using anonymous titles (Vendor A: Nvidia; Vendor B: AMD; Vendor C: Intel), the landscape for game development using OpenGL is described. Vendor A keep everything under tight wraps and concentrates heavily on performance. Vendor B has the most flaky drivers but they also have good technical know-how on OpenGL but are understaffed. Vendor C is generous both openness about API specifications and in number of developers. They have just the few recent years started to take graphics seriously. But it will be few years before their drivers up to market standards.

The conclusion is that using OpenGL is extremely difficult and without the blessings from these vendors. It's nearly impossible to ship a major gaming title. The comment section in the blog hints that the state of open source graphics drivers on smartphones is even worse. The Dolphin Emulator team offers another view where NVidia fairs better, Mesa is good, Intel is good but slow, AMD is buggy, ARM/Mali is a horrible mess but the LIMA project offers a feature hope, Qualcomm/Adreno is a horror but Freedreno offers hope, PowerVR..hello? There is a project called Open Graphics Project (OGP) that utilizes FPGAs to implement 3D graphics fully independently. However the catch is that they use an FPGA model that is large enough to only be supported the very expensive version of the development tool. A board with a lesser FPGA(s) could be a solution.

lhsi writes:

The BBC reports:

A top EU court has ruled Google must amend some search results at the request of ordinary people in a test of the so-called "right to be forgotten".

The European Union Court of Justice said links to "irrelevant" and outdated data should be erased on request.

Leebert writes:

A year ago, astronaut Chris Hadfield recorded his version of David Bowie's "Space Oddity" aboard the International Space Station, thus creating the first music video recorded in space. Unfortunately, it seems that he only had permission to distribute the video for one year, and thus it is being removed from YouTube today.

Angry Jesus and kaszz write:

VESA has announced that the upcoming DisplayPort 1.2a specification will include 'Adaptive-Sync' as a mandatory feature. Adaptive-Sync, like Nvidia's proprietary G-Sync, is a mechanism for variable framerates. Instead of a fixed framerate like 60hz, adaptive-sync lets the video card push out a new frame to the monitor as soon as it is ready or wait indefinitely if there have been no changes to the displayed image. This eliminates tearing in video games and can also reduce power consumption.

Now, if only they would come up with a system to do partial screen updates so that, instead of sending the entire screen's worth of data across the wire, only the parts that change would be transmitted. That might not help gaming and full-screen video, but it would enable anyone who works with mostly static images, which is pretty much everyone else, to use super high-resolution monitors without bleeding-edge high-bandwidth interconnects. I want my 8K 50" monitor.

kaszz notes:

To make use of this capability you will need a DP v1.2a capable video card, cable and a monitor. The monitors are expected to ship at the end of this year. Unlike G-Sync, a DP v1.2a monitor shouldn't carry any additional cost. This feature was possible once flat panels were present so the question can be asked why it took such a long time to enable this.

Appalbarry writes:

If you're one of the millions of people who rely on Google products for e-mail, contacts, calendar and other things, you should jump over to Geek.com. They have what are claimed to be screenshots for a "new" Gmail that apparently aims to attach the mail client more firmly into the Google+ universe.

What strikes me immediately is that 95% of the screen is white space. For me at least that is useless more text equals more information, and more white space equals less text density.

Dammit Google that's why we can never have nice things! You just wind up breaking them!

So the question of the day becomes, what desktop e-mail (and calendar, and contacts) clients are people using these days? And why?

(Bonus points if you can make them sync with my Blackberry and yes I run Linux.)

AnonTechie writes:

The U.S. Department of Justice wants new authority to hack and search remote computers during investigations, saying the new rules (Giant pdf) are needed because of complex criminal schemes sometimes using millions of machines spread across the country. Digital rights groups say the request from the DOJ for authority to search computers outside the district where an investigation is based raises concerns about Internet security and Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures. "By expanding federal law enforcement's power to secretly exploit 'zero-day' vulnerabilities in software and Internet platforms, the proposal threatens to weaken Internet security for all of us," Nathan Freed Wessler, a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, said by email.

gewg_ writes:

On Thursday, May 15, hundreds will rally outside the Federal Communications Commission's headquarters in Washington, D.C., to protest Chairman Wheeler's proposal that has the potential to stop the flow of a free and open Internet. On this same day, thousands of activists, organizations and companies will take action online to save the Internet.

The press release specifies that there are activities slated to begin prior to the FCC's May 15 meeting and following adjournment of the subsequent press conference.

Appalbarry writes:

As reported in The Guardian, and on the blogger's own site, British writer Michael Abberton tweeted a link to a fake and/or satirical advertisement for the right wing UKIP party.

Not too long after he was "visited by two Cambridgeshire police officers on Saturday. He was told he had not committed any crimes, but was asked to delete some of his tweets, particularly a retweet of a faked poster giving 10 reasons to vote for Ukip, such as scrapping paid maternity leave and raising income tax for the poorest 88% of Britons."

All of this is strange enough on it's own, but be sure to check the comment stream on his blog, where any number of Anons claim that he made up the entire story, despite the police having already confirmed it!

Anonymous Coward writes:

I currently work at a very small startup with about 8 people on staff total. My position is to manage all the technology we use, from the server and website, to the physical phone systems and network.

Lately, I have noticed some odd behaviors from the two top dogs in the office. They started by asking me about how our network is managed, and access to the router. Then a memo went around asking all employees to create a list of all logins associated with our company. This means logins to our website, emails, phones and computers. This didn't seem off the wall to me as it is company property, but what came next got me a bit more alarmed. They requested access to the database information, and server logins. After letting them know that the access to the server was already posted and that all of this information could be reset from there, they still wanted a list of all user accounts for the databases, and their passwords as well as any ssh users I had created.

Added with the fact that the CEO has been distant and in and out of meetings away from the office, I have started to get a bit worried for my job. Needless to say I have started to get a resume together to be safe, but I am curious how any other members of the community have read the signs of an impending firing.

Angry Jesus writes:

Swiss Public Television reports that the surrealist painter and Science Fiction Hall of Fame honoree H.R. Giger, creator of the Alien design used in Ridley Scott's 1980 movie as well as numerous other works of art and design, has died at the age of 74 due to injuries sustained in a fall.

LaminatorX writes:

Slate is running a story on the great text editor divide, The Oldest Rivalry in Computing. It's interesting to see it describe the situation to a general audience, rather than to a technical one.

From the article:

These two wizened programs are as close to equally matched enemies as any two programs have ever been. If you know a programmer who uses one of them, there's a good chance that she hates the other. I've stuck with Emacs for most of my career; my wife prefers to use Vim, a popular Vi clone that stands for "VI iMproved." We don't talk about it, lest we become casualties of the so-called Editor War.

So where do your preferences lie, and why? What editors do you think get overlooked in the shadows of these titans? When does an IDE make more sense? Sound-off!

lhsi writes:

UK Conservatives want to give MI5 more internet spying powers.

The Intelligence and Security Committee, the parliamentary body which scrutinises the services, has been told by MI5 that in the six months up to the murder there were "a number of incidents" where Adebolajo signalled his intent on the Internet.

However, the clues were not obtained until after his death because the information was held by Internet service providers in the US. Officials have claimed that the US legal system made it difficult to obtain the information.

With a general election next year, UK Conservatives want to give MI5 more powers to spy on internet users. There is a push to include it in their manifesto as their coalition partner, the Liberal Democrats, previously vetoed the "snoopers charter" bill.

AnonTechie writes:

Rare byproduct of marine bacteria kills cancer cells by snipping their DNA:

Yale University researchers have determined how a scarce molecule produced by marine bacteria can kill cancer cells, paving the way for the development of new, low-dose chemotherapies.

The molecule, lomaiviticin A, was previously shown to be lethal to cultured human cancer cells, but the mechanism of its operation remained unsolved for well over a decade. In a series of experiments, Yale scientists Seth Herzon, Peter Glazer, and colleagues show that the molecule nicks, cleaves, and ultimately destroys cancer cells' DNA, preventing replication.

"DNA is one of the primary targets of anticancer agents, and cleavage of both DNA chains is the most potent form of DNA damage," said Herzon, professor of chemistry. "But few anticancer agents are able to directly cleave DNA. The discovery that lomaiviticin A is capable of this suggests it could be very useful as a novel chemotherapy, possibly at low doses."

The abstract and paper can be found here.

A reader called jackb_guppy writes:

From Windows.com:

While we believe the majority of people have received the update, we recognize that not all have. Having our customers running their devices with the latest updates is super important to us. And we're committed to helping ensure their safety. As a result, we've decided to extend the requirement for our consumer customers to update their devices to the Windows 8.1 Update in order to receive security updates another 30 days to June 10th.

Maybe by the time of the release, they can fix the date math... It is 28 day extension, not 30 :-)

Angry Jesus writes:

We all know that python is slower than compiled languages like C. But what can you do about it? Jake VanderPlas, director of research in the physical sciences for the university of Washington's eScience institute, digs into python's internals to explain how it works and what program design choices you can make to use python efficiently.