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Ethanol-fueled writes:

Emacs vs. vi; PC vs. Mac; Windows vs. Linux; Sony vs. Nintendo. Holy wars of technological preference have been nothing new since the adolescence of computing technology, and are often the subject of many a debate here.

However, a recent argument between two roommates about the superiority of Apple vs. Android technologies has taken a bloody turn worthy of a bromance movie sequence:

As they tussled in a parking lot, the men allegedly struck and jabbed each other with broken beer bottles. Mendez and Ecevo suffered minor wounds during the fight and were transported to a local hospital for treatment of cuts and bruises.

Which raises the question - How close have you all come to violence during a technological argument?

Coverage also at Gizmodo and BGR.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Two clinical trials for cancer were recently halted for the best possible reason; the drugs worked so well that it would be unethical to continue. One trial was for melanoma and the other was for lung cancer, but the drug-target was the same: Programmed cell death protein 1 (PD-1).

PD-1 is a protein that inhibits responses from T cells. Cancer often takes advantage of the PD-1 pathway to prevent a productive immune response that would otherwise kill the cancer. The drugs in both the clinical trials are antibodies that bind to PD-1, thus preventing cancer-mediated inhibition of the immune response. As this is a general mechanism that cancer uses to evade the immune system, it will likely be effective at treating other forms of cancer besides melanoma and lung cancer. Also, since the drugs are targeting T cells and not the cancer directly, resistance will not develop as easily.

http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2015/04/17/stopped_for_efficacy_again.php
http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2015/03/24/the_best_way_to_halt_a_clinical_trial.php
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programmed_cell_death_1

We looked around briefly and also found:

http://www.fda.gov/NewsEvents/Newsroom/PressAnnouncements/ucm412802.htm
http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/03/24/us-merck-melanoma-idUSKBN0MK1FO20150324

"gewg_" writes:

The US Department of Education reports

The U.S. Department of Education took additional steps [April 14] to protect students and taxpayers and crack down on abuses within the for-profit sector by continuing its enforcement actions against Corinthian Colleges Inc. After a comprehensive review, the U.S. Department of Education has confirmed cases of misrepresentation of job placement rates to current and prospective students in Corinthian's Heald College system. The Department found 947 misstated placement rates and informed the company it is being fined about $30 million.

Specifically, the Department has determined that Heald College's inaccurate or incomplete disclosures were misleading to students; that they overstated the employment prospects of graduates of Heald's programs; and that current and prospective students of Heald could have relied upon that information as they were choosing whether to attend the school. Heald College provided the Department and its accreditors this inaccurate information as well.

The Department has also notified Corinthian it intends to deny Corinthian's pending applications to continue to participate in the Title IV federal student aid programs at its Heald Salinas and Stockton locations. Corinthian has 14 days to respond to the Department's notice, after which the Department will issue its final decision. Moreover, the Department has determined that Heald College is no longer allowed to enroll students and must prepare to help its current students either complete their education or continue it elsewhere.

The "Corinthian 15" debt strikers of February became the Corinthian 100 in late March with students refusing to pay back loans made under fraudulent conditions. Nine states' attorneys general agree that the bad loans should be forgiven.

Cable News Network notes

"Corinthian took advantage of students who were trying to build a better life for themselves and their families" said Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey.

[...]Tuition and fees for some of its programs cost more than five times those at other public colleges, according to the [Consumer Financial Protection Bureau]. A bachelor's degree cost up to $75,000 and an associate's was as much as $43,000.

Corinthian was so expensive that many students needed to take out both federal loans and private loans to cover the cost. The college offered its own private loans, which came with interest rates sometimes twice as high as federal loans.

Related:
Federal Crackdown On For-Profit Colleges Claims Its First Victory
Update: Corinthian Colleges Will Sell Half its Campuses to Nonprofit Loan Servicer

Phoenix666 writes:

Airbus has been working on making the economics of the A380 even better for airlines who buy it: pack 11 seats into a row:

Airbus has found a way to make flying economy even worse. That’s quite a feat, given how crummy the experience is these days. The trick, it turns out, is eliminating one the few remaining saving graces of air travel: better than even odds you won’t be squeezed into a middle seat. Generally, you’ve got a two in three chance of landing an aisle or a window.

But now, airlines flying the Airbus A380, the largest commercial jet on the planet, can reduce those odds. The European plane maker announced this week that it will offer a 3-5-3 cabin configuration, creating rows with 11 seats.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again, the future of civilized air travel lies with airships.

AnonTechie writes:

Any attempts to engineer the climate are likely to result in "different" climate change, rather than its elimination, new results suggest. Prof Ken Caldeira, of Stanford University, presented research at a major conference on the climate risks and impacts of geoengineering. These techniques have been hailed by some as a quick fix for climate change.

But the impacts of geoengineering on oceans, the water cycle and land environments are hotly debated. They have been discussed at a meeting this week of 12,000 scientists in Vienna. Researchers are familiar with the global cooling effects of volcanic eruptions, seen both historically and even back into the deep past of the rock record. With this in mind, some here at the European Geosciences Union General Assembly ( http://www.egu2015.eu ) have been discussing the possible worldwide consequences of pumping sulphate aerosols into the stratosphere to attempt to reflect sunlight back into space and cool the planet.

http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-32334528

An Anonymous Coward writes with the news that Hawaiian Cab Companies Offer to Retrain Uber Drivers:

[On April 7th,] Hawaii legislators voted to take Senate Bill 1280 into conference as the final weeks of the 2015 legislative session approach. SB 1280 seeks to regulate Transportation Network Companies by appropriating funds to the state Public Utilities Commission for the purpose of regulating Transportation Network Companies (TNCs) and their drivers. The bill would also mandate that TNCs register as businesses with the Department of Commerce and Consumer Affairs. It would also establish insurance requirements and qualifications for ride-hailing drivers.

“Drivers shouldn't feel like they can't make a living or make part-time money transporting passengers,” said Dale Evans, President of Charley's Taxi. Evans also said “Our company will happily help any Uber driver who wants to keep driving legally as a Taxi driver. We'll assist them with following the necessary steps to get licensed, get the correct equipment and have the proper insurance. Nobody should lose out on their ability to earn money because of SB1280.

Phoenix666 writes:

When civil war broke out in Syria, scientist Ahmed Amri immediately thought to rescue the seed bank that sat in cold storage in Aleppo:

Specifically, 141,000 packets of them sitting in cold storage 19 miles south of Aleppo. They included ancient varieties of wheat and durum dating back nearly to the dawn of agriculture in the Fertile Crescent, and one of the world’s largest collections of lentil, barley, and faba bean varieties—crops that feed millions of people worldwide every day. If these seeds were decimated, humanity could lose precious genetic resources developed over hundreds, or in some cases thousands, of years. And suddenly, with the outbreak of violence, their destruction seemed imminent.

It's rare that people consider stores of human knowledge more precious than their own lives. What knowledge would Soylentils sacrifice their own lives to save?

fliptop writes:

Two stories regarding chipmaker AMD in the news today. First, they missed their Q1 earnings target, after reporting losses of $180 million, or $0.23/share:

Revenue landed at $1.03 billion, down 26 percent on the year-ago quarter (statement) ...Non-GAAP earnings were a loss of 9 cents per share ...Wall Street was expecting a loss of 5 cents per share on revenue on $1.05 billion.

"Under the backdrop of a challenging PC environment, we are focused on improving our near-term financial results and delivering a stronger second half of the year based on completing our work to rebalance channel inventories and shipping strong new products," [said AMD chief executive Lisa Su].

Secondly, AMD is withdrawing from the high-density server business, reversing a strategy that began 3 years ago with the acquisition of SeaMicro:

AMD paid $334 million to buy SeaMicro, which developed a new type of high-density server aimed at large-scale cloud and Internet service providers ...The purchase was made under former CEO Rory Read, and has now been reversed by Lisa Su, who took over the CEO job last October ...AMD said the move is part of its effort to "simplify and sharpen" its investment focus. As a result, it is taking a charge of $75 million.

AMD still sees growth potential in the server market, but not from selling complete systems. It's returned its focus to x86 chips and to the development of its first ARM server processor, code-named Seattle.

"gewg_" writes:

Paul Schreiber blogs about the tech behind the websites of presidential candidates. "So, you want to run a country. Can you hire someone who can run a website? ...Here's how the (declared) candidates' sites fare." There's a table comparing 4 candidates' sites based on HTTPS, URL permutations, IPv6, SSL rating, and other related qualities. Schreiber mentions that he will "update this as more candidates declare or sites change."

From the blog comments

HillaryClinton.com was using IIS (and no https) until Sunday morning, when they switched over.

Hugh Pickens writes:

Aaron Kinney writes in the San Jose Mercury News that scientists have captured the first clear images of the USS Independence, a radioactivity-polluted World War II aircraft carrier that rests on the ocean floor 30 miles off the coast of Half Moon Bay. The Independence saw combat at Wake Island and other decisive battles against Japan in 1944 and 1945 and was later blasted with radiation in two South Pacific nuclear tests. Assigned as a target vessel for the Operation Crossroads atomic bomb tests, she was placed within one-half-mile of ground zero and was engulfed in a fireball and heavily damaged during the 1946 nuclear weapons tests at Bikini Atoll. The veteran ship did not sink, however (though her funnels and island were crumpled by the blast), and after taking part in another explosion on 25 July, the highly radioactive hull was later taken to Pearl Harbor and San Francisco for further tests and was finally scuttled off the coast of San Francisco, California, on 29 January 1951. "This ship is an evocative artifact of the dawn of the atomic age, when we began to learn the nature of the genie we'd uncorked from the bottle," says James Delgado. "It speaks to the 'Greatest Generation' -- people's fathers, grandfathers, uncles and brothers who served on these ships, who flew off those decks and what they did to turn the tide in the Pacific war."

Delgado says he doesn't know how many drums of radioactive material are buried within the ship -- perhaps a few hundred. But he is doubtful that they pose any health or environmental risk. The barrels were filled with concrete and sealed in the ship's engine and boiler rooms, which were protected by thick walls of steel. The carrier itself was clearly "hot" when it went down and and it was packed full of fresh fission products and other radiological waste at the time it sank. The Independence was scuttled in what is now the Gulf of the Farallones sanctuary, a haven for wildlife, from white sharks to elephant seals and whales. Despite its history as a dumping ground Richard Charter says the radioactive waste is a relic of a dark age before the environmental movement took hold. "It's just one of those things that humans rather stupidly did in the past that we can't retroactively fix."

Phoenix666 writes:

Residents have been using Dahl Hith, a water-filled cave outside Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, to cool off for years. They have also left graffiti on the cave walls. Now that smartphones have multiplied and people have used them to upload videos of their excursions to YouTube, researchers have started using the writing as reference points to track the water table in the region:

They use the writing as reference points to estimate the position of the water table.

Some of these scribbles have dates in them; and some of the videos themselves incorporate time information.

All of this data has allowed the team to reconstruct past conditions in Dahl Hith.

"Since smartphones have become so popular and deliver quite good video quality - such data becomes useable. A few years ago, some people would have criticised it as 'grey data', and said 'you shouldn't use it'. But since there is no other data, you need to be creative," said Nils Michelsen, from the Institute for Applied Geosciences, TU Darmstadt, Germany.

He has been presenting his team's work at the European Geosciences Union (EGU) General Assembly in Vienna, Austria.

The cave study is another example in what is becoming a significant trend - the trawling of social media for scientifically valuable information.

It's a creative use of the medium, and unexpected. It's slightly reminiscent, too, of the fellow a few years back who mined Facebook to discern migration patterns and interest regions in the United States. Are there other, unexpected externalities of social media or mobile technology Soylentils have come across?

Phoenix666 writes:

A NY Times columnist had his car stolen by kids who were possibly using a repeater to rebroadcast his key fob:

Keyless entry systems typically only communicate with their remote fobs over the distance of a few feet, but he thinks that the gadget is capable of extending this range, fooling the car into thinking that the remote is within range even though it was actually in Bilton's House, about 50 feet away. He arrived at this theory after he consulted with Boris Danev, a Swiss-based security expert:

"It's a bit like a loudspeaker, so when you say hello over it, people who are 100 meters away can hear the word, 'hello,'" Mr. Danev said. "You can buy these devices anywhere for under $100." He said some of the lower-range devices cost as little as $17 and can be bought online on sites like eBay, Amazon and Craigslist.

Sounds creative and easy. Maybe those clubs aren't so silly after all.

Phoronix reports that version 0.6 of GNU Hurd has been released. Before getting too excited about GNU Hurd, it's still bound to x86 32-bit and doesn't offer any compelling new features.

GNU Hurd 0.6 has "numerous cleanups and stylistic fixes" to the code-base, the message dispatching code in Hurd servers is now better, there's support for protected payloads of GNU March 1.5+, libz/libz2 are used as the decompressors to replace gz/bz2, the native fakeroot has improved, the performance of the integer hashing library has improved, and the init server has been split into the start-up server and a SysVinit-style program. The procfs and random translators were also merged.

More details on the new GNU Hurd release can be found via the 0.6 release announcement issued by Thomas Schwinge.

takyon writes:

WikiLeaks has published "The Sony Archives," a searchable database containing 30,287 documents and 173,132 emails leaked from Sony Pictures Entertainment (SPE). The WikiLeaks press release portrays the archive as newsworthy and in the public interest:

WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Julian Assange said: "This archive shows the inner workings of an influential multinational corporation. It is newsworthy and at the centre of a geo-political conflict. It belongs in the public domain. WikiLeaks will ensure it stays there."

Sony is a member of the MPAA and a strong lobbyist on issues around internet policy, piracy, trade agreements and copyright issues. The emails show the back and forth on lobbying and political efforts, not only with the MPAA but with politicians directly. In November 2013 WikiLeaks published a secret draft of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) IP Chapter. The Sony Archives show SPE's internal reactions, including discussing the impact with Michael Froman, the US Trade Representative. It also references the case against Megaupload and the extradition of its founder Kim DotCom from New Zealand as part of SPE's war on piracy.

The connections and alignments between Sony Pictures Entertainment and the US Democratic Party are detailed through the archives, including SPE's CEO Lynton attending dinner with President Obama at Martha's Vineyard and Sony employees being part of fundraising dinners for the Democratic Party. There are emails setting up a collective within the corporation to get around the 5,000 USD limit on corporate campaign donations to give 50,000 USD to get the Democratic New York Governor Andrew Cuomo elected as "Thanks to Governor Cuomo, we have a great production incentive environment in NY and a strong piracy advocate that’s actually done more than talk about our problems."

Sony Pictures Entertainment CEO Michael Lynton is on the board of trustees of RAND Corporation, an organisation specialising in research and development for the United States military and intelligence sector. The Sony Archives show the flow of contacts and information between these two major US industries, whether it is RAND wanting to invite George Clooney and Kevin Spacey to events, or Lynton offering contact to Valerie Jarrett (a close advisor to Obama) or RAND desiring a partnership with IMAX for digital archiving. With this close tie to the military-industrial complex it is no surprise that Sony reached out to RAND for advice regarding its North Korea film The Interview. RAND provided an analyst specialised in North Korea and suggested Sony reach out to the State Department and the NSA regarding North Korea's complaints about the upcoming film. The Sony documents also show Sony being in possession of a brochure for an NSA-evaluated online cloud security set-up called INTEGRITY.

Additional coverage at BBC and LA Times. Sony has condemned the document dump:

"The attackers used the dissemination of stolen information to try to harm SPE and its employees, and now WikiLeaks regrettably is assisting them in that effort," said a Sony Pictures spokesperson in a statement. "We vehemently disagree with WikiLeaks' assertion that this material belongs in the public domain and will continue to fight for the safety, security, and privacy of our company and its more than 6,000 employees."

takyon writes:

Wired has a profile of "Real Vegan Cheese", a product emerging from Counter Culture Labs in Oakland, California. The DIY/biotech lab is using genetically modified yeast cells to produce 11 proteins normally found in cow's milk, which can then be used to create synthetic cheese.

The genetic engineering approach to cheese has been enabled by the rapidly falling cost of DNA synthesis. It now costs less than $0.25 per base pair to obtain a custom DNA sequence which can be delivered by mail. Why make vegan cheese using yeast? Cheesemaking is an artisanal process with centuries of history and one of the earliest examples of human-directed microbiology. Existing plant-based vegan cheeses can't reproduce the casein proteins needed to achieve a passable cheese. However, Real Vegan Cheese will not use animal fat or lactose.

The process is not limited to bovine cheese:

When I visit the lab, I discover the cheese team includes a biologist, a bioethicist, a retired clinical psychologist, an accountant, and a former Apple marketer. "This to me is a natural extension of computer culture," says Maria Chavez, the ex-Apple employee and a leader of the vegan cheese project. "What is bigger to hack than our bodies and our environment? It's one of the last big frontiers. The possibilities are exciting."

The possibilities include not just vegan cow cheese, but, well, vegan human cheese. The same basic process for synthesizing cow's milk applies to milk from any other mammal. You just need different genes. Cheese made from engineered human breast milk may not sound like a top seller at the deli counter. But the team says it can serve a practical purpose: Human milk cheese could offer an option to people who have allergies to non-human dairy products. (Chavez said the group has put its experiments with human milk on hold due to Food and Drug Administration concerns about possible autoimmune reactions.)

The team is also attempting to create a narwhal cheese, after achieving the stretch goal on Indiegogo. The recipe and experiments involved will be released as "open source"; the DNA sequence(s) will be submitted to iGEM's Registry of Standard Biological Parts.

Critics of synthetic foods worry about the use of GMOs and the lightly regulated nature of biotechnology labs and hackerspaces. The Real Vegan Cheese team notes that the cheese itself isn't a GMO, only the yeast is. Other recent forays into synthetic food include Muufri's synthetic milk, and Evolva's vanilla/vanillin and saffron substitutes.