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cubancigar11 writes:

Daniel Stenberg lets the world know that cURL, the little command line utility that lets you download stuff off the internet via HTTP along with a bunch of other protocols, has turned 17 today (March 20). Considering that it is also available to all of us for use in our programs as a nifty little library called 'libcurl', and that PHP, the most common web development language depends on libcurl for handling HTTP requests, we can be happy that cURL exists. I personally cannot count the number of times it has saved me and the machines I administer.

Fluffeh writes:

The results of a new poll published today in Iceland indicates that the Pirate Party has just become the country's most popular political party. According to the results, almost a quarter of all citizens would vote Pirate today. The Pirates have snatched the lead from the Independence Party, who led during the last poll with 25.5% but have now dropped to 23.4%. While that is a slim lead of just 0.5%, it is a lead nonetheless, and the gap between the Pirates and other parties is even more pronounced.

"I didn't really expect this to happen within a decade of the first party founding. That's kind of cool. No actually, it's bloody awesome." says Rick Falkvinge, the political evangelist for the global pirate movement, in a comment on Reddit about the news of the Pirate Party in Iceland.

It was only a few weeks ago we reported that the Pirate Party was rated as being 3rd in popularity in Iceland

Phoenix666 writes:

David Graben, the 2015 winner of the Bafta (British Academy of Film and Television Arts) Fellowship predicts a "Golden Age of Gaming":

Graben cites the strength of the Internet to connect Indy Games directly to gamers as a prime reason for an efflorescence of gaming, but it seems like he's missing many others, such as the increasing uptake of VR, telerobotics, haptic feedback, and improved AI, among others. A person could also add in aspects of gamification intruding "serious" activity because of its ability to engage, motivate, and instruct.

What do SN gamers think, are we on the cusp of a reinvention of gaming, or are we returning to the past through the casual games that seem to rule the mobile platforms that have come to dominate gaming in recent years?

AnonTechie writes:

A team of chemists working at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, at Cambridge in the UK believes they have solved the mystery of how it was possible for life to begin on Earth over four billion years ago. In their paper published in the journal Nature Chemistry, the team describes how they were able to map reactions that produced two and three-carbon sugars, amino acids, ribonucleotides and glycerol—the material necessary for metabolism and for creating the building blocks of proteins and ribonucleic acid molecules and also for allowing for the creation of lipids that form cell membranes.

Scientists have debated for years the various possibilities that could have led to life evolving on Earth, and the arguments have only grown more heated in recent years as many have suggested that it did not happen here it all, instead, it was brought to us from comets or some other celestial body. Most of the recent debate has found scientists in one of three chicken-or-the-egg first camps: RNA world advocates, metabolism-first supporters and those who believe that cell membranes must have developed first.

http://phys.org/news/2015-03-chemists-riddle-life-began-earth.html

[Abstract]: http://www.nature.com/nchem/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nchem.2202.html

Phoenix666 writes:

Good news, Everyone! The BBC reports the moon's lava tubes would be stable enough to house human bases safely:

The underground volcanic structures have previously been proposed as ideal sites for human settlements.
Scientists have now assessed how stable these features might be, and found that tubes of 1km in size and bigger would be structurally sound.
They could protect against the challenges posed by the lunar environment.
Details of the work were presented at the 46th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC) in Texas.

The article mentioned nothing, however, about contingency plans for encounters with Moon Nazis.

Hugh Pickens writes:

Natalie Kitroeff writes at Bloomberg that a new study says the secret to Silicon Valley’s triumph as the global capital of innovation may lie in a quirk of California’s employment law that prohibits the legal enforcement of non-compete clauses.

Unlike most states, California prohibits enforcement of non-compete clauses that force people who leave jobs to wait for a predetermined period before taking positions at rival companies. That puts California in the ideal position to rob other regions of their most prized inventors, “Policymakers who sanction the use of non-competes could be inadvertently creating regional disadvantage as far as retention of knowledge workers is concerned,” wrote the authors of the study "Regional disadvantage? Employee non-compete agreements and brain drain" (PDF). "Regions that choose to enforce employee non-compete agreements may therefore be subjecting themselves to a domestic brain drain not unlike that described in the literature on international emigration out of less developed countries."

The study, which looked at the behavior of people who had registered at least two patents from 1975 to 2005, focused on Michigan, which in 1985 reversed its long-standing prohibition of non-compete agreements. The authors found that after Michigan changed the rules, the rate of emigration among inventors was twice as a high as it was in states where non-competes remained illegal. Even worse for Michigan, its most talented inventors were also the most likely to flee. "Firms are going to be willing to relocate someone who is really good, as opposed to someone who is average," says Lee Fleming. For the inventors, it makes sense to take a risk on a place such as California, where they have more freedom. "If the job they relocate for doesn’t work out, then they can walk across the street because there are no non-competes

kaszz writes:

The Lunar and Planetary Science Conference announced on 2015-03-16 that a 198 km wide crater has been found on the moon using the GRAIL spacecraft that uses gravitational field mapping. This enabled the discovery of craters below the surface. It's been named the Earhart crater. Nice gravitational photos can be found in the links.

TLA writes:

A 32 yard (29m) long brick tunnel built in 1793 in Crich, Derbyshire (UK), as part of the Butterley Gangroad (a horse-drawn cargo railway), has been given special status normally reserved for such structures as Stonehenge.

The line, which transported limestone from a nearby quarry to an ironwork factory, was almost completely obliterated in 1977 when the tunnel was sealed by the then owner to build a rockery. In January 2013, work began to excavate the tunnel after it was rediscovered during a paperchase followed by ground penetrating RADAR survey. By May the tunnel was again exposed and able to be properly inspected and laser scanned to produce a computer 3D wireframe model of the interior. It pre-dates a 1795 tunnel on the Peak Forest Tramway, also in Derbyshire, by two years and was thought of as the world’s oldest."We know that the Butterley Gangroad railway was operating in 1793 – because that is documented," said project manager Trevor Griffin, of the Derbyshire Archaeological Society. The tunnel's condition was described as fair considering it had been sealed for over thirty years.

An iron bridge carrying a live passenger line at Crawshaw Woods, West Yorkshire, between Micklefield and Leeds, has also been given Grade II listed status.

Historical context: http://www.forgottenrelics.co.uk/tunnels/gallery/fritchley.html

Special note: there is a lot of buried, forgotten and neglected railway (and other) heritage in England. This is but one small example, albeit a very special one.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

AMD has released the programming guide for their Mantle graphics API [PDF], all 435 pages of it. The recently announced Vulkan standard is very closely based on AMD Mantle, so this is also informative when it comes to the direction Vulkan will take.

This is unlikely to be of major interest to many of our community but, to those wanting to write software using Mantle or Vulkan graphics, it will be a valuable asset.

Phoenix666 writes:

Europe has World's Fastest Mobile Internet, According to OpenSignal:

A new study by wireless network tracking service OpenSignal found that Spain has the fastest 4G LTE networks in the world, with download speeds of 18 Mbps on average. Denmark, Finland and South Korea tied for second place with speeds of 17 Mbps. The U.S., with speeds of just 7 Mbps, ranked 26th out of the 29 countries measured.

It would be interesting to see studies on the effect higher mobile throughput has on productivity, as in, do people use that higher bandwidth to waste more time, be more productive, or is it a wash?

prospectacle writes:

The National Archives [USA] are asking for volunteers to transcribe thousands of pages of declassified CIA documents. To assist, you have to log in to the National Archives Catalog. The endeavour is part of Sunshine Week which is an open-government initiative, started by a group of newspaper editors, to educate people about the importance of government transparency and the dangers of excessive state secrecy.

You can browse some of the raw documents here.

Hugh Pickens writes:

Joe Nocera writes in The New York Times that a forthcoming biography “Becoming Steve Jobs,” is leading readers to re-evaluate the “stagnant stereotypes” of Jobs that have only grown stronger after his death. According to the stereotypes, “Steve was a genius with a flair for design,” whose powers of persuasion were such that he could convince people that the sun rose in the west and set in the east. On the other hand, he was also “a pompous jerk,” who humiliated employees and “disregarded everyone else in his single-minded pursuit of perfection.”

It is Schlender’s and Tetzeli’s contention that Jobs was a far more complex and interesting man than the stereotype, and a good part of their book is an attempt to craft a more rounded portrait. According to Nocera the callow, impetuous, arrogant youth who co-founded Apple was very different from the mature and thoughtful man who returned to his struggling creation and turned it into a company that made breathtaking products while becoming the dominant technology company of our time.

How did a young man so reckless and arrogant that he was exiled from the company he founded become the most effective visionary business leader of our time, ultimately transforming the daily life of billions of people? For Schlender and Tetzeli, the crucial period was the most overlooked part of Jobs’s career: The years from 1985 to 1997, when he was in exile from Apple and running NeXT. Equally important, Jobs also owned Pixar, the animation studio he bought from George Lucas. It took years before Pixar came out with its first full-length movie, “Toy Story.” During that time, Jobs saw how Ed Catmull, Pixar’s president, managed the company’s creative talent. Catmull taught Jobs how to manage employees.

"When Jobs returned to Apple, he was more patient — with people and with products. His charisma still drew people to him, but he no longer drove them away with his abrasive behavior and impossible demands. He had also learned that his ideas weren’t always the right ones, and he needed to listen to others." Perhaps the most important example of this was the App Store. Jobs had initially opposed allowing outside developers to build apps for the iPhone, but he did a quick about-face once he realized he was wrong. "Jobs has long been hailed as one of the great creative minds of modern business," concludes Nocera. "He was [also] a great manager. You can’t build a great company if you aren’t one."

Fluffeh writes:

When it arrives later in the year, Microsoft are going to gift free upgrades of Windows 10 not only to those who purchased Windows 7 and Windows 8, but also to those who pirated them. "We are upgrading all qualified PCs, genuine and non-genuine, to Windows 10," Myerson told Reuters. "The plan is to 're-engage' with the hundreds of millions of users of Windows in China." he said. The move is an unprecedented attempt by Microsoft to get legitimate versions of its software onto the machines of the hundreds of millions of Windows users in China. Recent studies show that three-quarters of all PC software is not properly licensed there.

TorrentFreak later stated that Microsoft have updated the statement to include ALL folk who are running pirated versions of the software, not only those in China. Techreport.com have also published confirmation of this claim, saying "it looks like Microsoft is ready to offer just about everyone a free copy of Windows 10".

"gewg_" writes:

Live Science reports

Low vaccination rates are likely responsible for the large measles outbreak that began at Disneyland in California last December, a new analysis suggests.

The researchers estimated that the MMR (measles, mumps, and rubella) vaccination rate among the people who were exposed to measles in that outbreak may be as low as 50 percent, and is likely no higher than 86 percent. Since the beginning of this year, 127 cases of measles in the United States have been linked to the Disneyland outbreak, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

"While researchers have certainly speculated that low vaccine rates might be to blame for the 2015 Disneyland measles outbreak, our study confirms this suspicion in a scientifically rigorous way," said study author Maimuna Majumder, a research fellow at Boston Children's Hospital.

Because measles is such a highly contagious virus, vaccination rates of 96 percent to 99 percent are necessary to prevent outbreaks, Majumder said.

[...]In the analysis, which was published online [on Monday (March 16)] in the journal JAMA Pediatrics, the researchers created a mathematical model using data from both the official measles case counts collected by the California Department of Public Health during the outbreak and media-reported case counts. By using these two data sources, researchers were able to capture the transmission of the virus as the measles outbreak spread beyond California.

[...]Dr. William Schaffner, a professor of infectious diseases at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine [...] said that the measles vaccine is so effective that it had eliminated measles from the entire Western Hemisphere--which was considered a public health triumph.

Related: Most US Pediatricians Have Banned the Kids of Anti-Vaxxers

Phoenix666 writes with a TreeHugger report:

A major factor contributing to global climate change is the emissions from transporting food from where it's grown to far way where people eat it. The agriculture industry is also the largest consumer of water worldwide. Not only is the practice not sustainable, but trends suggest that by 2050, 2.5 billion more people will live on the planet, 80 percent of them will live in cities and 70 percent more food will be required.

That means that not only will more people need more food, but the vast majority will be living away from rural agricultural centers. The current agricultural model of large food miles just won't cut it.

But what if we could grow our food within or just outside our cities? Obviously, there isn't space in cities for large sprawling farms, but a new idea being led by LED manufacturers proves that food can be grown vertically in warehouses using the bulbs requiring less water and very little energy.

One of these in every neighborhood that you could walk to would make a big difference in the carbon footprint of agriculture and food transportation. Would they help make arcologies and urbmons a reality?