SoylentNews

freesword writes:

The Guardian reports on efforts being made on one of the Netherlands' northernmost islands, Texel (pronounced Tessel), to produce salt tolerant crops. The project is the work of Marc van Rijsselberghe's Salt Farm Texel, which began testing saline crops in 2010 with both field experiments and lab experiments with the help of researchers from VU University Amsterdam (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam - the literal translation of which is "Free [as in liberated] University Amsterdam").

The project beat 560 competitors from 90 countries to win the prestigious USAid grand challenge award for its salt-tolerant potato.

“The world’s water is 89% salinated, 50% of agricultural land is threatened by salt water, and there are millions of people living in salt-contaminated areas. So it’s not hard to see we have a slight problem,” said van Rijsselberghe. “Up until now everyone has been concentrating on how to turn the salt water into fresh water; we are looking at what nature has already provided us with.”

Some of the Texel seed potatoes are already on their way to Pakistan where 4.2 million hectares of land is salt affected and farmers are often forced to use brackish groundwater to water their crops, which reduces yields and the quality of the crops.

According to Dutch team, there is no risk of overdosing on salt when eating crops fed by sea water. The salt is mostly retained in the leaves of the plant.

AnonTechie writes regarding TechCrunch story:

The natural reaction of many citizens, companies and governments is to try to get their data out of the United States and out of the hands of American companies. The idea is a seductive one, even for Americans. Offshoring money has been a popular strategy for tax avoidance. Why not offshore data to a foreign company?

This offshoring of data to avoid surveillance is not just an idle notion. As a privacy lawyer with experience in the intelligence community and the Obama White House, technology companies have asked me how they might pursue such a strategy. It turns out that shifting user data abroad or into the hands of foreign companies is a very poor way to combat American surveillance.

The Justice Department may put a lot of pressure on Swiss banks, but it doesn’t hack into offshore accounts to recover ill-gotten gains. By contrast, intelligence agencies are not known for scrupulously observing the laws of foreign countries in which they operate, even when (as in the United States) they are subject to a system of domestic legal oversight.

NSA directors have stated quite openly their desire to collect everything American law permits. However, what the law allows the NSA to do varies starkly depending on where data is collected. Under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the rules that apply to data collected from a switch, wire, or server in the United States are stricter than the safeguards that apply to data collected overseas.

"crutchy" writes:

From a Wired article:

The unspoken reality is that the U.S. patent system creates a market so constricted by high transaction costs and legal risks that it excludes the vast majority of small and mid-sized businesses and prevents literally 95 percent of all patented discoveries from ever being put to use to create new products and services, new jobs, and new economic growth.

Even the most dramatic estimates of the social cost of abusive patent litigation range in the low tens of billions of dollars. But according to a new study by the distinguished economists Robert Litan of the Brookings Institution and Hal Singer of the Progressive Policy Institute—a study I [Jay Walker] helped to fund—liberating patent licensing from its litigation-focused costs and risks would enable tens of thousands of currently-dormant inventions to be commercialized and conservatively add up to $200 billion a year in increased output to the U.S. economy. That’s at least ten times bigger than the litigation problem, and directly impacts job creation.

d2xdt2 writes:

Many people consider HTML as spam by definition, as HTML hides the actual message that was sent. HTML have often been miss used for sending malicious links and even JavaScript. Many HTML emails are very poorly written, because they include tables to style pictures and many other things tables shouldn't be used for. This adds to the size of the message often by many KB. The proposal is for DarkMail to use Standardized MarkDown as the default styling language. DarkMail is created by the PGP author and LavaBit.

frojack writes:

Sanskrit scholars from Mumbai University had no sooner elbowed their way into the 102nd Indian Science Congress than they started making waves.

Claims of Ancient Indian "40 engine" airplanes, radar, and ancient surgery techniques flooded the Congress, sparking outrage by the science community.

Maharishi Bharadwaj spoke 7,000 years ago of "the existence of aeroplanes which travel from one country to another, from one continent to another and from one planet to another. He mentioned 97 reference books for aviation." "History merely notes that the Wright brothers first flew in 1904," according to the presenter; Captain Anand J Bodas. The Maharishi also spoke of the "huge" aeroplanes which flew in ancient India. "The basic structure was of 60 by 60 feet and in some cases, over 200 feet. They were jumbo planes." "The ancient planes had 40 small engines."

The session stirred up controversy even ahead of the conference, when Dr Ram Prasad Gandhiraman, a scientist with the Nasa's Ames Research Centre in California, filed an online petition demanding that the session be cancelled because it fused science with mythology. Gandhiraman also protested that "Giving a scientific platform for a pseudo-science talk is worse than a systematic attack that has been carried out by politically powerful pseudo-science propagandists in the recent past."

According to the Times of India the Sanskrit scholars are serious in their claims, and had exerted considerable political pressure to be included in the congress:

The topic on ancient sciences was incorporated in the Science Congress for the first time on the insistence of Sanskrit scholars, said Gauri Mahulikar, head of the Sanskrit Department, Mumbai University. "We believed that Sanskrit also had a huge science repository and it should be brought before the scientists. They should be open minded and not have an orthodox outlook to this literature. This is just a thought, it should be followed by a debate and then experimentation. We cannot do research as we are not scientists. That is why we appeal to the science fraternity to take this knowledge forward," said Mahulikar.

How a small group from the School of Arts, Language, and literature muscled in on a 102 year old Science Conference is anybody's guess. And all this time, people we thought we had problems keeping creationists out of science classes.

martyb writes:

Found this story at Science Daily: Not All Obese People Develop Metabolic Problems Linked To Excess Weight.

New research demonstrates that obesity does not always go hand in hand with metabolic changes in the body that can lead to diabetes, heart disease and stroke.

In a study at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, researchers found that a subset of obese people do not have common metabolic abnormalities associated with obesity, such as insulin resistance, abnormal blood lipids (high triglycerides and low HDL cholesterol), high blood pressure and excess liver fat.

In addition, obese people who didn't have these metabolic problems when the study began did not develop them even after they gained more weight.

The findings are published Jan. 2 in The Journal of Clinical Investigation.

Full journal article is available.

Given the increasingly sedentary lifestyle of many people today, I found it interesting that metabolic impact varied among the obese. Do be aware, however, that there are contrasting studies on the effects of obesity. Consider, for example, these articles which were published in November of 2013:

• Metabolically Healthy Obesity Does Not Guarantee Clean Bill of Health
• Overweight, Obese Are Risks for Heart Disease Regardless of Metabolic Syndrome

I hope that research like this might pave the way so that we may some day find a way to mitigate some of the deleterious effects of obesity.

"gewg_" writes:

The Center for American Progress reports

In response to growing tensions between the New York Police Department and [Mayor Bill de Blasio], police unions encouraged officers last week to not make arrests "unless absolutely necessary"

[...]Last week, the police went a step further [than turning their backs on the mayor] and stopped arresting New Yorkers for small crimes or ticketing people for minor offenses like parking violations, carrying open containers of alcohol, or public urination.

As a result of what the New York Post is calling a "virtual work stoppage," tickets and summonses for minor offenses have plummeted by 94 percent and overall arrests have fallen 66 percent.

[...]the decline in arrests could save New Yorkers money. The city residents who are normally hit with tickets for minor violations tend to be low income individuals who are forced to pay up a hefty portion of their paychecks.

The city began following the broken-windows style of policing in the early 1980s, a strategy championed by NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton which focuses on eliminating low-level crime to prevent more violent offenses in the city's neighborhoods. But a report earlier this year(PDF) by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in Manhattan found that the NYPD's practice of arresting more people for minor offenses since 1980 has disproportionately affected young black and Latino men.

Hugh Pickens writes:

Glenn Greenwald reports at The Intercept that the identity of the Sony hackers is still unknown even as numerous security experts loudly note how sparse and unconvincing the available evidence is against North Korea. But that didn't stop President Obama, announcing in his December 19 press conference that: “We can confirm that North Korea engaged in this attack," and vowing that "we will respond. . . . We cannot have a society in which some dictator some place can start imposing censorship here in the United States.” Yet according to Greenwald, none of the expert skepticism has made its way into countless media accounts of the Sony hack. "Time and again, many journalists mindlessly regurgitated the U.S. Government’s accusation against North Korea without a shred of doubt, blindly assuming it to be true, and then discussing, often demanding, strong retaliation. Coverage of the episode was largely driven by the long-standing, central tenet of the establishment U.S. media: government assertions are to be treated as Truth."

Greenwald says that this kind of reflexive embrace of government claims is journalistically inexcusable in all cases, for reasons that should be self-evident. But in this case, it’s truly dangerous. "At this point - eleven years after the run-up to the Iraq War and 50 years after the Gulf of Tonkin fraud - any minimally sentient American knows full well that their government lies frequently. Any journalist understands full well that assuming government claims to be true, with no evidence, is the primary means by which U.S. media outlets become tools of government propaganda," concludes Greenwald adding that many journalists benefit in all sorts of ways by dutifully performing this role. "At this point, journalists who mindlessly repeat government claims like this are guilty of many things; ignorance of what they are doing is definitely not one of them."

joekiser writes:

Over at The Verge:

Many users rely on VPNs — virtual private networks — or custom DNS settings to stealthily access Netflix as though they were in other regions. But Netflix may have started closing some of those loopholes. Torrent Freak reports that, in the past few weeks, popular VPN services like TorGuard have started seeing a spike in errors when users try to access Netflix.

Netflix has responded to Engadget about the issue:

Update: Netflix tells us that there's been "no change" in the way it handles VPNs, so you shouldn't have to worry about the company getting tough any time soon. With that said, these blocking errors started showing up in the past few weeks, so it's not clear what would have prompted them.

Hugh Pickens writes:

Alina Simone writes in the NYT that her mother received a ransom note on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving.“Your files are encrypted,” it announced. “To get the key to decrypt files you have to pay 500 USD.” If she failed to pay within a week, the price would go up to $1,000. After that, her decryption key would be destroyed and any chance of accessing the 5,726 files on her PC — all of her data would be lost forever. "By the time my mom called to ask for my help, it was already Day 6 and the clock was ticking," writes Simone. "My father had already spent all week trying to convince her that losing six months of files wasn’t the end of the world (she had last backed up her computer in May). It was pointless to argue with her. She had thought through all of her options; she wanted to pay." Simone found that it appears to be technologically impossible for anyone to decrypt your files once CryptoWall 2.0 has locked them and so she eventually helped her mother through the process of making a cash deposit to the Bitcoin “wallet” provided by her ransomers and she was able to decrypt her files. “From what we can tell, they almost always honor what they say because they want word to get around that they’re trustworthy criminals who’ll give you your files back," says Chester Wisniewski.

The peddlers of ransomware are clearly businesspeople who have skillfully tested the market with prices as low as $100 and as high as $800,000, which the city of Detroit refused to pay. They are appropriating all the tools of e-commerce and their operations are part of “a very mature, well-oiled capitalist machine" says Wisniewski. “I think they like the idea they don’t have to pretend they’re not criminals. By using the fact that they’re criminals to scare you, it’s just a lot easier on them.”

martyb writes:

Did you make a New Year's resolution about getting organized? Of all the places where disorder would seem to reign supreme, restaurants have developed a system for keeping order among the chaos:

The system that makes kitchens go is called mise-en-place, or, literally, "put in place." It's a French phrase that means to gather and arrange the ingredients and tools needed for cooking.

But for many culinary professionals, the phrase connotes something deeper. Some cooks call it their religion. It helps them coordinate vast amounts of labor and material, and transforms the lives of its practitioners through focus and self-discipline.

[...]

At Esca, an Italian restaurant in Manhattan's theater district, sous-chef Greg Barr describes what is perhaps the central tenet of mise-en-place: working clean. "It's like a very ... Zen-like thing," he says. "All my knives are clean. Clean cutting board. Clear space to work. Clear mind."

[...]

Across town at Telepan, chef and owner Bill Telepan explains another principle of mise-en-place: slow down to speed up. "I always say, 'Look, I'd rather you take an extra minute or two and slow up service to get it right.' Because the one minute behind you are now is going to become six minutes behind because we're going to have to redo the plate."

I started my working career in a kitchen where I saw these principles in action. I took these principles to heart and can attest that it makes a world of difference in how I go about my day. When I have things organized and things in their proper place, I can get things done quickly and efficiently — almost effortlessly. It's terribly frustrating for me when I have to deal with co-workers who just drop things wherever-they-feel-like-it. I end up wasting more time cleaning up after them and trying to locate things than the actual task at hand would require.

My greatest challenge is that when I encounter a new situation or thing, it takes me a while to figure out where it should belong — where to fit it in with the rest of the already-organized things. How do you Soylentils keep your things organized? Or if you don't organize things, how do you deal with the chaos?

tonyPick writes:

Over at Hackernews is a link to a discussion on how the Intel Management Engine (ME) is preventing screenshots, by bypassing the host CPU.

This links to a blog posting on the Intel ME in response to Rosyna Keller's twitter posting about being unable to take screenshots from Netflix (The Rosyna of the article title).

The core of the technical detail is taken from Igor Skochinsky's presentation on the ME (PDF Link) . The article raises the questions over the position of the ME in the system and the security implications of the ME subverting the host machine hardware outside of the main processor:

Given that the ME sits in a position where it can configure the chipset and operate on the PCI bus, there are some serious security implications here I wish I could mitigate. Among them is the ability of the ME to run arbitrary code on the host CPU via option ROMs or presenting a disk-drive to boot from. Also among those abilities is the possibility to perform DMA to access host CPU memory. And another one is the ability to configure and use PCI devices present in the system (such as the ethernet card).

"gewg_" writes:

SlashGear reports

Crouton was always the best method for getting a Linux distro on your Chromebook, but required you to swap back and forth between the two [OSes], which is fussy if you just want to do something on a distro like Ubuntu quickly. Now, Crouton is available via an extension, which lets you run two [OSes] side-by-side.

[...]Handy for more demanding multitasking, the side-by-side [OSes] still ask that you have some heftier hardware, so be careful about which Chromebook you try this with. If you've got an older model, this one might slow you down to an unusable state. Google isn't recommending any hardware configuration for the new extension to run with, but it's easy to see where problems may occur.

Again, this is a step for the bold, so unless you're comfortable with running scripts and side-loading a Linux distro, think of this as the future for Chrome OS multitasking.

[...]Via: Google+

An Anonymous Coward writes:

As we head into 2015, it's hard to think of any technical skill set less relevant than Y2K - the identification and fixing of computer systems and applications that used two decimal digits rather than four to store the year component of each date. As you may recall, the discovery of the problem (or perhaps, that the deadline to fix it was finally approaching) in the late '90s led to media hysteria and dire warnings about a world full of computers simultaneously losing their bearings, like HAL in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey. An artist has assembled a memorial to the crisis, in the form of a web site presenting photos of dozens of books dealing with Y2K from various perspectives.

This site could be seen as mindless diversion, but also as a digest of reaction likely to repeat itself in a subsequent "crisis", albeit with different media next time (blogging, for one, had yet to be invented).

AnonTechie writes:

A group of Swiss artists recently set a bot free on the darknet ( http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/dec/05/software-bot-darknet-shopping-spree-random-shopper ), allowing it to purchase whatever it could with Bitcoins. Among other weird things it bought were a few ecstasy pills and a fake Hungarian passport. Now an attorney asks whether the artists could be arrested under the law as it currently stands.

University of Washington law professor Ryan Calo, who studies the legal implications of robotics, has a piece on Forbes about a thought experiment he did last year on this topic. At the time, he was just musing about what would happen if a robot bought something illegal online and mailed it to its owner as a surprise. ( http://www.forbes.com/sites/ryancalo/2014/12/23/a-robot-really-committed-a-crime-now-what/ )

http://io9.com/if-your-robot-buys-illegal-drugs-have-you-committed-a-1677183776