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AnonTechie writes with news of a story appearing in The Conversation:

It’s frequently claimed that copyright law should be made more restrictive and copyright terms extended in order to provide an incentive for content creators.

But with growing use of works put into the public domain or released under free and permissive licenses such as Creative Commons or the GPL and its derivatives, it’s possible to argue the opposite — that freely-available works also generate value.

Public domain works — those that exist without restriction on use either because their copyright term has expired or because they fall outside of the scope of copyright protection — create significant economic benefits, according to research my colleagues and I have conducted, now published in a report for the UK government’s Intellectual Property Office. ( https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/copyright-and-the-value-of-the-public-domain )

Hugh Pickens writes:

Bill Davidow and Michael S. Malone write in The Wall Street Journal that recent rains have barely made a dent in California's enduring drought, now in its fourth year so it's time to solve the state’s water problem with radical solutions, and they can begin with “virtual water.” This concept describes water that is used to produce food or other commodities, such as cotton. According to Davidow and Malone, when those commodities are shipped out of state, virtual water is exported. Today California exports about six trillion gallons of virtual water, or about 500 gallons per resident a day. How can this happen amid drought? The problem is mis-pricing. If water were priced properly, it is a safe bet that farmers would waste far less of it, and the effects of California’s drought—its worst in recorded history—would not be so severe. "A free market would raise the price of water, reflecting its scarcity, and lead to a reduction in the export of virtual water," say Davidow and Malone. "A long history of local politics, complicated regulation and seemingly arbitrary controls on distribution have led to gross inefficiency."

For example, producing almonds is highly profitable when water is cheap but almond trees are thirsty, and almond production uses about 10% of California’s total water supply. The thing is, nuts use a whole lot of water: it takes about a gallon of water to grow one almond, and nearly five gallons to produce a walnut. "Suppose an almond farmer could sell real water to any buyer, regardless of county boundaries, at market prices—many hundreds of dollars per acre-foot—if he agreed to cut his usage in half, say, by drawing only two acre-feet, instead of four, from his wells," say the authors. "He might have to curtail all or part of his almond orchard and grow more water-efficient crops. But he also might make enough money selling his water to make that decision worthwhile." Using a similar strategy across its agricultural industry, California might be able to reverse the economic logic that has driven farmers to plant more water-intensive crops. "This would take creative thinking, something California is known for, and trust in the power of free markets," conclude the authors adding that "almost anything would be better, and fairer, than the current contradictory and self-defeating regulations."

janrinok writes:

I'm sure that you would like to join with us in welcoming three new editors to the team. They will be coming online sometime during the next few days. They are:

• NotSanguine
• cmn32480
• CoolHand

The new additions bring the editorial team to a healthier size, which will enable us to achieve and maintain the standards that we believe the community deserves.

Hugh Pickens writes:

The atom bomb — leveler of Hiroshima and instant killer of some 80,000 people — is just a pale cousin compared to the hydrogen bomb, another product of American ingenuity, that easily packs the punch of a thousand Hiroshimas. That is why Washington has for decades done everything in its power to keep the details of its design out of the public domain. Now William J. Broad reports in the NYT that Kenneth W. Ford has defied a federal order to cut material from his new book that the government says teems with thermonuclear secrets. Ford says he included the disputed material because it had already been disclosed elsewhere and helped him paint a fuller picture of an important chapter of American history. But after he volunteered the manuscript for a security review, federal officials told him to remove about 10 percent of the text, or roughly 5,000 words. “They wanted to eviscerate the book,” says Ford. “My first thought was, ‘This is so ridiculous I won’t even respond.’ ” For instance, the federal agency wanted him to strike a reference to the size of the first hydrogen test device — its base was seven feet wide and 20 feet high. Dr. Ford responded that public photographs of the device, with men, jeeps and a forklift nearby, gave a scale of comparison that clearly revealed its overall dimensions.

Though difficult to make, hydrogen bombs are attractive to nations and militaries because their fuel is relatively cheap. Inside a thick metal casing, the weapon relies on a small atom bomb that works like a match to ignite the hydrogen fuel. Today, Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States are the only declared members of the thermonuclear club, each possessing hundreds or thousands of hydrogen bombs. Military experts suspect that Israel has dozens of hydrogen bombs. India, Pakistan and North Korea are seen as interested in acquiring the potent weapon. The big secret the book discusses is thermal equilibrium, the discovery that the temperature of the hydrogen fuel and the radiation could match each other during the explosion (PDF). World Scientific, a publisher in Singapore, recently made Dr. Ford’s book public in electronic form, with print versions to follow. Ford remains convinced the book “contains nothing whatsoever whose dissemination could, by any stretch of the imagination, damage the United States or help a country that is trying to build a hydrogen bomb.” “Were I to follow all — or even most — of your suggestions,” says Ford, “it would destroy the book.”

An Anonymous Coward writes:

A bug in SE Linux[*], http://seclists.org/oss-sec/2015/q1/1011 has been identified. The bug is considered difficult to exploit but, potentially, is a serious risk. So far, the bug is known to exist in Red Hat, Fedora 21 and Ubuntu (version unspecified) but could be extant in other versions too. An exploit has already found its way onto github and is discussed in a blog dated 25 Mar 2015 which links to the github page.

[*] Security-Enhanced Linux (SE Linux) is a Linux kernel security module that provides a mechanism for supporting access control security policies, including United States Department of Defense–style mandatory access controls (MAC).

Phoenix666 writes:

The Age of the Cyborg is nearly upon us:

The primary goal of technology should be to improve our lives in some way. So far that has seen us embrace computers, the Internet, smartphones and most recently wearable gadgets. However, many are predicting that the future will not see us hold or wear technology, but have it directly implanted into our bodies.

Already, the transhumanism movement is seeing technology implants gain greater acceptance, but many still feel uneasy about the ethics involved when we attempt to improve our bodies artificially. In response to the advances made in body modification technology, we’ve looked at five high-profile examples below.

When I read about the first transhumanists in the 80's I was a little repulsed, but increasingly I'm thinking there are a lot of great reasons to get cybernetic implants, even more so if you're an early adopter. Why wouldn't you want to have abilities that give you an edge, especially if they were invisible to the naked eye? Yes, on the one hand they're inside your body, but on the other hand they're just tools, and humans have always used tools to gain advantage. I could see having an implanted taser for self-defense, or embedded communication technology that can't be confiscated. Farther afield, why not medical implants that can dispense high clotting factors to previously mortal wounds to prevent bleeding out? Or a backup artificial heart that kicks in should your natural heart give out?

What modifications would other Soylentil cyborgs choose?

iWantToKeepAnon writes:

Destin Sandlin (of SmarterEveryDay) posted a video interview "How To Fly A Spaceship To The Space Station" with Station Cmdr Scott Kelly in the Soyuz simulator. Kelly's mission will last for almost one year and will help NASA understand more about putting a man on Mars. Scott's twin brother Mark, a retired astronaut, will be studied on the ground as a scientific control while his brother is in space.

After Scott's interview is an interview with astronaut Reid Wiseman. Reid describes what is required to rendezvous and dock with the ISS; including Hohmann Transfers, correction burns, phasing, turn manoeuvres, and proximity operations.

tonyPick writes:

Universe Today has an article on using astronomical images captured on glass plates which date back to the 19th century to study the change in stars and galaxies over the past 130 years.

“The images captured on these plates remain incredibly valuable to science, representing a century of data on stars and galaxies that can never be replaced,” writes astronomer Michael Shara, who is Curator in the Department of Astrophysics at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, who discussed the plates and their significance in a new episode of AMNH’s video series, “Shelf Life.”

The history of the plates, and the effort to digitise the images and use them to generate data, are discussed at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) Shelf Life page, and links data sets and volunteer efforts to transcribe the associated astronomy logbooks from Harvard's "Digital Access to a Sky Century @ Harvard" (DASCH) Project.

TLA writes:

SRI International, a Menlo Park, California-based biosciences research house, today announced an exclusive license of Iris on the Move® (IOM) technologies to Samsung for use in Samsung mobile products. Additionally SRI has entered into a supply agreement to start production and sales of the IOM technology-embedded Samsung mobile products for B2B applications. The initial product for this supply agreement will be a customized Samsung Galaxy Tab Pro 8.4 tablet with a built-in IOM iris module.

The product will be introduced in the SIA New Product Showcase at ISC West 2015 (the largest security industry trade show in the U.S.) and offered worldwide through SRI partners and resellers. This new model will provide fast, easy-to-use, and accurate biometric identity management solutions to its users. Tests have shown this purely iris-based solution to be more than 1,000 times more accurate than published fingerprint data.

More here.

Phoenix666 writes:

A new plastic waste recycler can convert failed 3D projects or scraps into new filament to use in your 3D printer:

3-D printers are getting cheaper and faster – this week the company CarbonD announced a 3-D printer that the company claims is 25 times faster than the average starting at around $2,500; meanwhile the Xyz home-oriented printer can be had for about $500.

As with regular printers, however, so with the 3-D versions – supplies are another story. The spools of plastic "ink" used in 3-D printers are not so cheap – about $30 a spool – and depending on what the printer is printing, could end up as nothing more than an expensive blob of waste plastic.

Three students at the University of British Columbia – Dennon Oosterman, Alex Kay, and David Joyce – have come up with a way to reduce the waste as well as the cost of 3-D printing. The three have designed an instant plastic recycling machine for home and small-business 3-D printers. The unique feature of this consumer-oriented extruder is that it has a built-in function to grind and pound plastic waste – like pieces of the lids from coffee cups – into small pellets. The machine, called a ProtoCycler, accepts ABS and PLA plastic waste, though each batch of waste for making into new "ink" filaments must come from the same type of plastic.

The ProtoCycler can then extrude new plastic filaments from the pellets at a rate of 5 to 10 feet per minute. That's faster than traditional extruders. The ProtoCycler machine also uses less energy than typical plastic filament-producing equipment, so it is more efficient. Colors will be able to be added to the filaments.

Hugh Pickens writes:

Carrie Arnold reports at National Geographic that on a nighttime walk through Reserva Las Gralarias in Ecuador in 2009, Katherine Krynak spotted a well-camouflaged, marble-size amphibian that was covered in spines. The next day, Krynak pulled the frog from the cup and set it on a smooth white sheet of plastic for Tim to photograph. It wasn't "punk "--it was smooth-skinned. She assumed that, much to her dismay, she must have picked up the wrong frog. "I then put the frog back in the cup and added some moss," says Krynak. "The spines came back... we simply couldn't believe our eyes, our frog changed skin texture! I put the frog back on the smooth white background. Its skin became smooth."

Krynak didn't find another punk rocker frog until 2009, three years after the first sighting. The second animal was covered in thorny spines, like the first, but they had disappeared when she took a closer look. The team then took photos of the shape-shifting frog every ten seconds for several minutes, watching the spines form and then slowly disappear. It's unclear how the frog forms these spines so quickly, or what they're actually made of. The discovery of a variable species poses challenges to amphibian taxonomists and field biologists, who have traditionally used skin texture and presence/absence of tubercles as important discrete traits in diagnosing and identifying species. The discovery illustrates the importance of describing the behavior of new species, and bolsters the argument for preserving amphibian habitats, says Krynak. "Amphibians are declining so rapidly that scientists are oftentimes describing new species from museum specimens because the animals have already gone extinct in the wild, and very recently."

Hugh Pickens writes:

Rachel Sussman has an interesting article at Nautilus about her nine year quest to find and photograph the oldest living things in the world. To qualify for inclusion, each organism must have gone through at least 2,000 years of continuous life as an individual. "I selected 2,000 years as my minimum age specifically to draw attention to the gentleman’s agreement of what “year zero” means. In other words, 2000 years serves both as an all-too-human start date, as well as the baseline age of my subjects," writes Sussman, an American fine art photographer. "The requirement of endurance on an individual level was an important consideration, because we all innately relate to the idea of self. This was a purposeful anthropomorphization that would further imbue the organisms with a reflective quality in which we could glimpse ourselves." Sussman went searching for 5,500-year-old moss in Antarctica, a 2,000-year-old brain coral in Tobago, an 80,000-year-old Aspen colony in Utah, a 2,000-year-old primitive Welwitschia in Namibia, and a 43,600-year-old shrub in Tasmania that’s the last of its kind on the planet, to name a few.

Sussman writes that one of her primary goals was to create a little jolt of recognition at the shallowness of human timekeeping and the blink that is a human lifespan. "Does our understanding of time have to be tethered to our physiological experience of it? writes Sussman. "The more we embrace long-term thinking, the more ethical our decision-making becomes." Sussman says that the dialogue with environmental conservation is a perfect example of the importance of blending art, science, and long-term thinking. "We hear these things like carbon-dioxide levels are rising. You hear "400 parts per million," and it doesn't really register what that means. But when you can look at this organism and say, "Wow, this spruce tree has been living on this mountainside for 9,500 years and, in the past 50, got this spindly trunk in the center because it got warmer at the top of this mountainside," there's something that's a very literal depiction of climate change happening right in front of you. It's observable. So I hope that that's going to be a way that people can connect to that as an issue."

Marand writes:

As reported by The Register :

Subjects given the virtual nose staved off simulation sickness longer than their noseless counterparts in a variety of simulations, including a sickness-inducing roller coaster ride. The original source provides more information, including a finding that test subjects didn't notice the virtual nose during testing, even displaying skepticism over its presence when told about it later during post-testing debriefings.

Phoenix666 writes:

Wired reports the LHC is back to full strength after running at half power for years to prevent another accident like that which took it down in 2008:

In the fall of 2008, CERN’s high-energy physicists ran into a problem. A faulty electronic connection at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland—the biggest, baddest, most powerful particle accelerator ever built—caused a couple of magnets to overheat and melt, triggering an explosion of pressurized helium gas. The accident, which happened just nine days after the LHC turned on for the first time, led to months of delays. “It was pretty depressing when we broke the accelerator,” says Aaron Dominguez, a physicist at the University of Nebraska. “That was not a good day.”

Eventually, engineers fixed the LHC, and in 2012, physicists used it to do what the accelerator was always supposed to: Find the elusive subatomic particle called the Higgs boson. It worked, earning much fanfare and a Nobel Prize. But to prevent another accident, CERN’s engineers had run the LHC at only half its designed capability. Now, after a two-year hiatus in which engineers upgraded the accelerator to prevent such magnetic meltdowns, the LHC is set to smash protons together harder than ever—the way it was intended. “It’s like having a new accelerator, really,” Dominguez says. The increased power will mean more violent collisions that might create bigger, even rarer particles...

protons will finally begin slamming together, hopefully creating particles that physicists have only theorized to exist. At first, the collisions will be at 13 TeV. Only later, once engineers get a better feel for how the machine works, will they boost it to its maximum of 14 TeV. And higher energies mean more particles. The first run produced 500,000 Higgs bosons, but detectors only identified a few hundred of them for physicists to study. With more collisions, the LHC should create 10 times as many Higgs bosons. More data could be the key to discovering all kinds of new physics. The Higgs, for example, might be responsible for dark energy, the force that’s causing the expansion of the universe to accelerate.

I for one am looking forward to the flying cars and invisibility powers this will finally bring us.

mendax writes:

Here is a story for the computer history buffs. El Reg is reporting that Ken Shirriff, a programmer better known for work on Arduino, got access to a 50-year-old IBM 1401 mainframe in the collection of the Computer History Museum and programmed it to produce a Mandelbrot fractal, printing it out on a line printer. Even though the computer has a Fortran compiler, he wrote the program in assembly language.

While this is not exactly an amazing feat of software engineering in anyone's book, it is an object lesson in how difficult (and how fun) it was to program the ancient mainframes of our fathers' and grandfathers' times.

Mr. Shirriff's story and lots of pictures can be found on his blog.