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CoolHand writes:

We previously covered Valve offering paid mods in the Steam Workshop. Now, Valve (and Bethesda) have realized that the way they were attempting to implement payment for modders (and themselves) could not stand alongside the current model, at least with the goodwill of the community.

From the article:

We've done this because it's clear we didn't understand exactly what we were doing. We've been shipping many features over the years aimed at allowing community creators to receive a share of the rewards, and in the past, they've been received well. It's obvious now that this case is different.

We understand our own game's communities pretty well, but stepping into an established, years old modding community in Skyrim was probably not the right place to start iterating. We think this made us miss the mark pretty badly, even though we believe there's a useful feature somewhere here.

Hopefully they do get a fully-baked donation system implemented (or some other method that makes sense).

AnonTechie writes:

Many M-16s, the conventional wisdom goes, entered Syria after militants seized thousands of them from Iraq’s struggling security forces, which in turn had received the guns — along with armored vehicles, howitzers and warehouses’ worth of other equipment — from the Pentagon before American troops left the country in 2011. The militants’ abrupt possession of former American matériel was part of the battlefield turnabout last summer that led Julian E. Barnes, a Wall Street Journal correspondent, to tweet a proposed name for the Pentagon’s anti-militant bombing campaign: Operation Hey That’s My Humvee. And yet by this year, for all the attention the captured weapons had received, M-16s were seemingly uncommon in Syria. The expected large quantities had eluded researchers.

The investigator urged his host, a local security official, to rush after the Kurd and ask if he would allow the rifle to be photographed and its origins ascertained. Soon the investigator (who works for Conflict Armament Research, a private arms-tracking organization in Britain, and who asked that his name be withheld for safety reasons) found a surprise within his surprise. The rifle, which its current owner said had been captured from the Islamic State last year, was not an M-16. It was a Chinese CQ, an M-16 knockoff that resembles its predecessor but has a starkly different arms-trafficking history.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/27/magazine/where-the-islamic-state-gets-its-weapons.html

takyon writes:

Six writers have withdrawn from the PEN American Center's annual gala in protest over the organization's decision to give its Freedom of Expression Courage Award to the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, which was attacked on January 7th:

The writers who have withdrawn from the event are Peter Carey, Michael Ondaatje, Francine Prose, Teju Cole, Rachel Kushner and Taiye Selasi, The New York Times reports. [...] Kushner, in an email to The Times, said she was withdrawing from the May 5 PEN gala because she was uncomfortable with Charlie Hebdo's "cultural intolerance" and promotion of "a kind of forced secular view." Those views, The Times added, were echoed by the other writers who pulled out of the event. Carey told The Times that PEN, in its decision, was going beyond its role of protecting freedom of expression." A hideous crime was committed, but was it a freedom-of-speech issue for PEN America to be self-righteous about?" he said in an email to the newspaper. Novelist Salman Rushdie, a past president of PEN who spent years in hiding because of a fatwa over his novel The Satanic Verses, criticized the writers for pulling out, saying while Carey and Ondaatje were old friends of his, they are "horribly wrong."

Glenn Greenwald has written about the controversy over at The Intercept, which is hosting letters and comments written by Deborah Eisenberg and Teju Cole. Greenwald notes:

Though the core documents are lengthy, this argument is really worth following because it highlights how ideals of free speech, and the Charlie Hebdo attack itself, were crassly exploited by governments around the world to promote all sorts of agendas having nothing to do with free expression. Indeed, some of the most repressive regimes on the planet sent officials to participate in the Paris “Free Speech” rally, and France itself began almost immediately arresting and prosecuting people for expressing unpopular, verboten political viewpoints and then undertaking a series of official censorship acts, including the blocking of websites disliked by its government. The French government perpetrated these acts of censorship, and continues to do so, with almost no objections from those who flamboyantly paraded around as free speech fanatics during Charlie Hebdo Week.

"gewg_" writes:

El Reg reports

With digital reaching its audience targets, the government set a 2017 date for the death of analogue FM radio in [Norway].

[...]However, the Norwegian Local Radio Association disputes the communications ministry's figure, pointing instead to Norwegian Government Statistical Bureau data that "listening to DAB radio is presently limited to 19% on a daily basis."

In an e-mail sent to Vulture South [El Reg's Australian operation], the association says the Minister of Culture's announcement swept up DVB-T and Internet radio to claim that "digital listening" had hit the 50 per cent target that triggers an FM switch-off.

The association also notes that an all-DAB nation would provide a lot less service to motoring tourists without digital radios in their cars. "This proposed change means that most visitors will not be able to listen to national channels or public radio for emergency alerts, traffic or other important information", the group said in a media release e-mailed to El Reg. It claims that a focus on large broadcasters would leave FM investments by community radio stranded.

The local broadcasters are backed by the Progress Party, a partner in the coalition government in Norway, [as well as by] the Greens.

Related: Norway to be First Nation to Switch Off National Analog FM Stations

takyon writes:

Reuters has revealed 18 of the 19 official complainants forming the basis of the European Union's anti-trust case against Google. Yelp's public policy director Luther Lowe told Reuters that "It's been clear from our meetings that U.S.-based companies have helped lead the charge by providing substantive evidence of Google's harm to consumers." The Register has this handy list:

• BDZV, an organization of German newspaper publishers
• Ejustice, a French legal search engine
• Elfvoetbal, a Dutch football (soccer) news site
• Euro-Cities, a German provider of city maps
• Expedia, a US travel site
• Foundem, a UK price comparison site
• Hot-map, a German mapping firm
• ICOMP, a UK-based organization for online businesses
• Microsoft
• Nextag, a US price comparison site
• nnpt.it, an Italian online news aggregator
• Odigeo, a group of travel sites headquartered in Spain
• Streetmap, a UK road mapping service
• TripAdvisor, a US travel site
• VDZ, a German magazine publishers association
• VfT, a German business listing site
• Visual-Meta, a German lifestyle shopping aggregator
• Yelp, a US business rating and comparison site
• An anonymous complainant

[More after the Break]

Phoenix666 writes:

The benighted Los Angeles River, long an eyesore of trash and water treatment plant outflow, is set to be landscaped as a linear park à la the High Line Park in New York.

Today the river is slated for an overhaul, backed by officials including LA mayor Eric Garcetti and even President Obama. Last spring the Corps agreed to remove concrete along 11 miles of the river. In its place: sloping green terraces and wetlands, cafés, and bike paths. (The city is buying former industrial sites for use as parkland.)

But the river will still be a kind of mirage, a trick of human engineering. The floodplain is a major US city. Almost half the flow during the dry season comes from treatment plants. Much of the rest is urban slobber, runoff from Angelenos washing cars or watering lawns. "It's hard to understand how artificial the river really is," says Lewis MacAdams, godfather of the movement and cofounder of Friends of the Los Angeles River.

This isn't a restoration project. Transforming the river is a grand exercise in modern ecosystem manipulation. What Los Angeles is building is more like a monument to rivers—artificial, in perfect LA style, but constructed on ecological principles. A once-hostile environment will be terraformed into a hub of human activity. "This is the beginning of a golden time for the LA River," MacAdams says. "You can almost taste it." Then he reconsiders. "Well, that's not really the word you'd want to use."

The High Line Park in Manhattan has revitalized the West Side, from the Meat Packing District to Hell's Kitchen. New restaurants, businesses, office buildings, and residential high rises have sprung up along its length, and walking along it is lovely, with excellent views of the Hudson River and the Manhattan skyline. Perhaps this park can do the same for Los Angeles.

takyon writes:

The World Health Organization (WHO) has published a statement calling for public disclosure of all clinical trial results:

Before any clinical trial is initiated (at any Phase) its details are to be registered in a publicly available, free to access, searchable clinical trial registry complying with WHO's international agreed standards. The clinical trial registry entry should be made before the first subject receives the first medical intervention in the trial.

All clinical trial registry sites are to be updated as necessary to include final enrolment numbers achieved, and the date of actual study completion (defined as the last data collection timepoint for the last subject for the primary outcome measure). If clinical trials are terminated, their status is to be updated to note the termination, and to report the numbers enrolled up to the point of termination.

It is noted that several journals allow open access publication of clinical trial findings. Some journals have an explicit policy of supporting publication of negative trials. These 12 month and 24 month timeframes represent the longest possible acceptable timeframe for reporting and shorter timeframes are strongly encouraged. It should be possible in most instances for reporting to occur in shorter timeframes.

Unreported clinical trials conducted in the past are to be disclosed in a publicly available, free to access, searchable clinical trial registry. In addition it is desirable that unreported clinical trials are published in a peer reviewed journal.

The benefit of sharing research data and the facilitation of research through greater access to primary datasets is a principle which WHO sees as important. This statement is not directed towards sharing of primary data. However WHO is actively engaged with multiple initiatives related to data sharing, and supports sharing of health research datasets whenever appropriate. WHO will continue to engage with partners in support of an enabling environment to allow data sharing to maximise the value of health research data.

Pharmaceutical companies and researchers have brushed away "negative" results in the past. In the case of Tamiflu, the UK government stockpiled £424 million worth of the drug before learning of negative results hidden by F. Hoffmann-La Roche AGM. AllTrials has published reactions from "campaigns, doctors, patients and consumer groups" to the statement. PLOS Medicine has also published a rationale of the WHO's new position.

"gewg_" writes:

The Center for American Progress reports:

Obama is famously low key. That's why on the hit Comedy Central show "Key & Peele", Keegan-Michael Key plays "Luther, President Obama's anger translator". The [annual White House Correspondents' Association dinner], however, is a rare place where the President can cut loose--as long as he uses humor.

In a hilarious admission that he has been too low key to convey the moral outrage justified by humanity's myopic march toward self-destruction--and by the brazen denial of climate science by many conservatives--Obama brought out "Luther" to express that outrage. And then, in an ingenious twist, Obama became so outraged that he didn't need Luther and in fact Luther himself couldn't take the genuinely angry Obama, who says of denial, "What kind of stupid, shortsighted, irresponsible, bull-"

Here's a video of the event.

takyon writes:

The US Office of Naval Research (ONR) has been showing off its Low-Cost UAV Swarming Technology (LOCUST) that will "throw massive swarms of networked aircraft into the skies to search for the enemy."

Vice has published an interview with Lee Mastroianni, Technical Manager on the LOCUST project:

Are the drones designed to carry weapons or for reconnaissance?
They could be for reconnaissance; they could be weaponized. If you look at the LOCUST video we put online, I used a sample mission... you have a simultaneous strike where weaponized UAVs take [all their targets] out at the same time.

And do they operate in a kamikaze sort of way? They fly into the target and explode?
The UAVs would be the weapon as opposed to a Predator [UAV], which launches other weapons. These are one-way missions.

Once they're in the air, how are they controlled?
That's the second big piece of the demonstration—autonomous control. Once launched, I don't need to talk to the UAVs. They understand what the mission is. They're talking to one another. You want to know what's it up to. You want to control it. You need to. But it isn't a UAV pilot flying it like a remote control aircraft.

Vice also interviewed Stephan Sonnenberg, a Clinical Supervising Attorney and Lecturer in Law at Stanford University:

takyon writes:

Imagination Technologies is making a MIPS CPU design called MIPSfpga available for academic use:

Is it open source? Not completely. For academic users the license is simple: you can use it as you wish, but you cannot put it into silicon. If you modify it, you must talk to us first if you wish to patent the changes. In summary, universities can go as deep as they like under the hood.

Now that the MIPSfpga initiative is public, let me tell you what is available and what is coming:

• The getting started package includes the MIPS microAptiv CPU and all the other elements you need to get started. This includes a detailed guide that enables you to check the CPU is running on the FPGA and that you can program and debug it. The guide gives examples for the Terasic DE2-115 (Altera FPGA) platform and the Digilent Nexys4 DDR (Xilinx FPGA) platforms, although we are sure users will port it to many other platforms.
• Soon after the launch package, we will offer MIPSfpga Fundamentals – a complete set of teaching materials using the CPU.
• Then later MIPSfpga Advanced teaching materials will take things to a deeper level.

The Register reports that "While ARM and Intel dominate the chip market, the MIPS third option is still a significant player in the industry... Former rival and co-founder and CTO of ARC, Rick Clucas, told El Reg: 'It will potentially give MIPS something to beat ARM with'." AnandTech also has coverage of the announcement as well as some context for the move. Imagination has released new PowerVR GPUs and development boards in recent months in order to compete with ARM SoCs. The company imagines its GPUs being used in "entry-level mobile devices, embedded computers, and high-end wearables."

chewbacon writes:

I pulled my telescope out of storage the other day and set it up. The family and I had a great time with it. It is a relatively cheap telescope with a hand held controller and it tracks objects once you align it to a couple of stars.

When I was a kid, it was challenging to be interested with out the computer guidance, so I'd like to make it easier for them to stay interested. Being a number of years old, I think it is standing on its last leg as the controller is acting flaky and the motors seem to get lost when turning to an object. So I'm asking the nerds out there: who makes a decent telescope today? Where should I shop for one? I'd like something with similar features that I have now. Computer guidance and tracking is the must-have. Perhaps GPS. I would like to spend less than $600, but I'm open to more expensive options.

Phoenix666 writes:

A team from the Vancouver Cancer Center presented findings at the European Society for Radiotherapy and Oncology that patients being treated with radioactive "seeds" (chunks of metal) and 3D printed "shields" survive twice as long as those undergoing conventional therapy.

Prostate cancer is the most common cancer affecting men, developing primarily in those over the age of 50. In 2012 there were 1.1 million reported cases with 307,000 deaths worldwide, and any improvement in treatment is bound to improve many lives. Brachytherapy is a highly cost-effective method, even though it requires long training and much experience to produce consistent results, according to James Morris, who led the Vancouver study.

Even with brachytherapy, though, there is room for improvement. Because the tumor is close to the radiation source, the dosage used is lower and thus the side-effects for healthy tissue aren't as bad. Still, implanted seeds release radiation in all directions.

A simple solution to minimize side-effects has been developed by researchers at Louisiana Tech University and University of Mississippi Medical Center. They created customizable 3D-printed shields for the low-dose-rate radioactive seeds used in prostate brachytherapy. The shields were made using a combination of plastic-forming raw material and barium sulphate, a chemical that is compatible with the human body's innards but also effective in stopping radiation.

This Brachytherapy gives those diagnosed with prostate cancer another option, for everyone else there's lycopene for prevention.

takyon writes:

City College of New York researchers have manipulated the polarization of a laser beam to create shapes that could boost data transmission rates:

Using special devices called "q-plates," the researchers manipulated a laser beam's polarization into novel shapes some of which Milione referred to as "radial" and "azimuthal." "While light's polarization (linear and circular) is used for many modern technologies, such as, 3D television, its shape is often left untouched," he said.

The researchers showed that each shape could carry an additional data stream. While the researchers used only four shapes, in principal, the number that can be used is unlimited. "The amount of data that can be transmitted on a single laser beam can be scaled to terabits or even petabits," said Alfano. "This technology is potentially compatible with building to building communication in NYC or even between Google data centers."

The research is published in Optics Letters [abstract].

Phoenix666 writes:

A researcher at University of California San Francisco has created an adaptive game with inputs from EEGs and fMRIs to enhance cognition in study participants:

The first step is to identify the target—the different facets of our cognitive capabilities and the underlying neural systems that drive them. These include attention, working memory and goal management. Gazzaley and his team measure these functions using fMRI and EEG. "We can gather biomarkers so we can see if we're having the impact we're looking for."

The second step focuses on taking advantage of the neuroplasticity of the brain to try and modify its functions. The chosen tool for achieving this is video games—"they are an immersive engaging interactive way of changing behaviour. Something happens in the brain when playing. The video game records in real time and adapts itself as well as giving feedback," explains Gazzaley. That goes back to your brain and creates the desired closed loop.

Finally, the team focuses on enhancing the effects by using high-resolution neural feedback to modify the game going forward. The team is using the Unity gaming engine to collate the data garnered from this.

One game the team has already created, Neuroracer, has already shown that 12 hours of gaming a week among 60- to 80-year-olds dramatically improves their ability to multitask, beyond the abilities of a 20-year-old playing the game for the first time. They are now carrying out a three-year study, to see how the game can be used as a diagnostics tool.

Gamification has been trying to devise ways to mimic the immersive quality of gaming in more training- and productive settings. Is biofeedback the missing link?

AnonTechie writes:

How does your salary compare with this survey ?

2015 Salaries: Staff and Entry-level Positions: http://www.computerworld.com/salarysurvey/breakdown/2015/joblevel/3

2015 Salaries: Middle IT Management: http://www.computerworld.com/salarysurvey/breakdown/2015/joblevel/4

2015 Salaries: Senior IT Management: http://www.computerworld.com/salarysurvey/breakdown/2015/joblevel/5

http://www.computerworld.com/category/salarysurvey2015

Also, here is a Dice 2015 salary survey also showing nice upward trends for the tech field.