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darkfeline writes:

In a new game of whack-a-mole, Ars Technica is reporting that Grooveshark is live once again, despite the seizure of the Grooveshark.io

Just a few days after illegal music-streaming service Grooveshark apologized and shut down, a mysterious person identified only as "Shark" reconstituted the site at Grooveshark.io.

In response, the major record labels appear to have obtained a temporary restraining order wresting away that domain name. According to Torrentfreak, the labels filed a lawsuit under seal in New York federal court. The site reports that US District Judge Deborah Batts issued a seizure order "directed at the site’s operators, hosting providers, and domain registrar NameCheap."

[...] Meanwhile, a true game of whac-a-mole appears to have begun, with the team behind the new Grooveshark telling Torrentfreak that they have simply moved their website to grooveshark.vc.

"The harder you come at us, the stronger we’ll fight, and now after this hit we’re more determined than ever to keep Grooveshark alive and kicking," the site's anonymous operator said.

cmn32480 writes:

In a not so serious interview (video) from the International Space Station on space.com, Italian astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti gives a sit through of how to use the most private of facilities on the ISS.

The biggest complaint from the folks on the ISS is that the fan used for sucking the poo and the pee into the containers provided is too loud, and everybody knows when you are going.

Howard Wolowicz would be proud.

AnonTechie writes:

Multiple mobile operators in Europe plan to block advertising on their networks, with one of them planning to target Google's ad network to force the company to give up a cut of its ad revenue, according to a report yesterday in the Financial Times.

"An executive at a European carrier confirmed that it and several of its peers are planning to start blocking adverts this year," the newspaper reported. "The executive said that the carrier will initially launch an advertising-free service for customers on an opt-in basis. But it is also considering a more radical idea that it calls 'the bomb', which would apply across its entire network of millions of subscribers at once. The idea is to specifically target Google, blocking advertising on its websites in an attempt to force the company into giving up a cut of its revenues."

Blocking ads "just for an hour or a day" might be enough to bring Google to the negotiating table, the executive told the newspaper.

http://arstechnica.com/business/2015/05/eu-carriers-plan-to-block-ads-demand-money-from-google/

"gewg_" writes:

The Center for American Progress reports:

African Americans, a group plagued by significantly high rates of obesity, heart disease, hypertension, diabetes, and other physical ailments. A recent study suggests the answer may lie in the diets of their counterparts across the Atlantic Ocean in the rural parts of the Motherland.

In a study conducted at the University of Pittsburgh, 20 African Americans and 20 South Africans switched diets for two weeks. In this time, the Africans consumed traditional American food--meat and cheese high in fat content--while African Americans took on a traditional African diet--high in fiber and low in fat, with plenty of vegetables, beans, and cornmeal, with little meat.

After the exchange, researchers performed colonoscopies on both groups and found that those in the African diet group increased the production of butyrate, a fatty acid proven to protect against colon cancer. Members of the American diet group, on the other hand, developed changes in their gut that scientists say precede the development of cancerous cells.

[...]"we used biomarkers and looked at the proliferation rate that has been tied to cancer," Dr. Stephen J. O'Keefe, the lead researcher, told ThinkProgress. "We were astounded by the gravity and the magnitude of the changes [which] happened within two weeks."

Appalbarry writes:

As reported in The Economist, scientists at the University of London have analyzed fifty years of pop music, and have used statistical techniques to identify three musical "revolutions" of lasting impact.

These revolutions do all correspond with times musical critics would have said change was happening (classic rock, new wave, and hip-hop respectively), but this analysis suggests other apparent novelties, such as the punk of the 1970s, were not the revolutions that their fans might like to believe.

From the article (well worth reading):

They used Last.fm, a music-streaming service, to collect 30-second clips from 17,094 songs (86% of the total) that were (on the Billboard) chart between 1960 and 2010. Then they attacked each clip with sonic analysis and statistics.

They found that they could extract what they describe as “topics” from the music. These were coherent harmonic and timbral themes which were either present in or absent from a clip. Harmonic topics, of which there were eight, captured classes of chord change, or their absence (eg, “dominant 7th-chord changes” and “major chords without changes”). Timbral topics, of which there were also eight, were things like “drums, aggressive, percussive” and “female voice, melodic, vocal.”

The comment thread below the article is also highly recommended, and the dismissal of punk is certainly egregious.

The evolution of popular music: USA 1960–2010, published by the Royal Society, is found here.

martyb and "gewg_" writes:

The verdict is in for the Boston Marathon bomber, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, and the jury has recommended a death sentence.

The jury only needed 14 hours to reach its verdict on the 17 counts where he could be sentenced to death, and found for the death penalty for six of those. The only other choice for sentencing on those charges would have been life in prison. The attack killed 3 people and injured 264 people. It was the worst attack on US soil since the attack on 9/11.

AlterNet reports:

Their only other option was life without the possibility of release in America's toughest "super-max" prison in Colorado, which some have dubbed the "Alcatraz of the Rockies".

[...] "'No remorse, no apology'. Those are the words of a terrorist convinced he has done the right thing", US assistant attorney Steven Mellin said.

[...] Judge George O'Toole will now formally sentence Tsarnaev at a hearing expected to be held later in the year.

[...] The verdict in the federal case came despite widespread local opposition to capital punishment in Massachusetts, a largely Democratic state that abolished the death penalty in 1947.

Prominent survivors, including the parents of the youngest victim Martin Richard, had also opposed the death penalty on the grounds that years of prospective appeals would dredge up their agony.

[...] Since the federal death penalty was reinstated in 1988, only 79 people have been sentenced to die and only three have been executed, says the Death Penalty Information Center. Three other death verdicts were turned into life sentences after new trials were granted.

tonyPick writes:

An bizarre story spotted at Lowering The Bar on a paternity case in New Jersey involving a set of twins where the judge ruled that the father of one twin was not the father of the other, following DNA evidence.

In what is said to be only the third such paternity case in the U.S., a New Jersey judge ruled that a man identified as "A.S." had to pay child support for one twin but not the other, because he was not that twin's father. How is that possible? I'm sure A.S. had the same question

[...] Basically, this can happen if, in the course of about a week, one blessed event occurs, the female ovulates again, and then she has a second romantic partner who also hits the target. Scientists refer to it as "heteropaternal superfecundation" but it is known informally as Have None of These People Ever Heard of Birth Control Syndrome.

Original story at NJ.com.

CortoMaltese writes:

According to The Cryptosphere, An email server belonging to the National Security Agency that was outsourced to telecommunications company Qwest was compromised by a Swedish hacker with the handle "DⒶʀKᙡiNɢ ಠ_ರೃ" who described his exploit in a pastebin, apparently the vulnerability is attributed to outdated SSL and SSH protocols, to this moment no content stored in the email server has been released.

Pirate Party activist Raymond Johansen reported that post describing the hack had been censored on various social media sites, including Facebook and LinkedIn.

AnonTechie writes:

The world's poor could benefit from a system that is blanketing half Earth's surface with a signal that provides free access to Wikipedia and other useful websites.

What do you get if you cross a satellite TV receiver with the Internet? According to startup Outernet, a way to bring billions more people the benefit of online information.

By renting communications satellites, Outernet is currently blanketing about half Earth's surface with a signal that transmits data including much of Wikipedia, open-source software, health resources from the Centers for Disease Control, and international news coverage. Cheap devices based on regular satellite TV receivers store the data that the signal gradually transfers and create a local Wi-Fi network to let nearby computers, phones, or tablets access the downloaded content.

Outernet is putting together the first 100 prototypes of those devices, code-named "Pillars," and starting to test them in the field. One is up and running in a village in western Kenya. Another is in the Dominican Republic, and a third will soon be installed at a Detroit anarchist community attempting to live off the grid. Outernet's current signal broadcasts about 200 megabytes of data over the course of a day, making it possible to update content such as daily news and weather forecasts periodically. It covers North and Central America, all of sub-Saharan Africa, Europe, and parts of Asia and the Middle East.

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/537411/startup-beams-the-webs-most-important-content-from-space-free/

Hugh Pickens writes:

Stephanie Strom writes in the NYT that deadly avian flu viruses have affected more than 33 million turkeys, chickens and ducks since December and while farmers in Asia and elsewhere have had to grapple with avian flu epidemics, farmers in the United States have never confronted a health crisis among livestock like this one. Almost every day brings confirmation by the Agriculture Department that at least another hundred thousand or so birds must be destroyed; some days, the number exceeds several million.

Mounds and mounds of carcasses have piled up in vast barns in the northwestern corner of Iowa, where farmers and officials have been appealing for help to deal with disposal of such a vast number of flocks. Workers wearing masks and protective gear have scrambled to clear the barns, but it is a painstaking process. In these close-knit towns that include many descendants of the area’s original Dutch settlers, some farmers have resorted to burying dead birds in hurriedly dug trenches on their own land, while officials weighed using landfills and mobile incinerators. Federal lawmakers from Iowa called on the Agriculture Department to do more to help farmers with the culling and disposal of birds. The federal agency has made tens of millions of dollars available for assistance, and noted that it is deploying hundreds of staff members, including 85 in Iowa.

Iowa, where one in every five eggs consumed in the country is laid, has been the hardest hit: More than 40 percent of its egg-laying hens are dead or dying. Many are in this region, where barns house up to half a million birds in cages stacked to the rafters. The high density of these egg farms helps to explain why the flu, which can kill 90 percent or more of a flock within 48 hours, is decimating more birds in Iowa than in other states. “It’s important that we get that done fairly soon and we need landfills to be reasonable in terms of the charges they’re assessing and willing to take these birds,” says US Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack. “But at some point in time we’ve basically got to get rid of these birds because otherwise we’re going to begin to have some other issues in terms of odor and flies and things of that nature that people are obviously not going to want to deal with.”

kaszz writes:

Using the ImageNet object classification benchmark, Baidu’s Minwa supercomputer scanned more than 1 million images and taught itself to sort them into about 1000 categories and achieved an image identification error rate of just 4.58 percent, beating humans, Microsoft and Google. Baidu's Minwa scored 95.42%, Google's system scored a 95.2%, and Microsoft's, a 95.06%, Baidu said.

“Our company is now leading the race in computer intelligence,” said Ren Wu, a Baidu scientist working on the project. “I think this is the fastest supercomputer dedicated to deep learning,” he said. “We have great power in our hands—much greater than our competitors.

A paper released Monday [May 11, 2015] is intended to provide a taste of what Minwa’s extra oomph can do. It describes how the supercomputer was used to train a neural network that set a new record on a standard benchmark for image-recognition software. The ImageNet Classification Challenge, as it is called, involves training software on a collection of 1.5 million labeled images in 1,000 different categories, and then asking that software to use what it learned to label 100,000 images it has not seen before.

kaszz writes:

Baseline hardware requirements to run the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset have been determined. They recommend a NVIDIA GTX 970 / AMD Radeon R9 290 equivalent or greater GPU, an Intel i5-4590 equivalent or greater CPU, 8 GB RAM, 2x USB 3.0 ports and "HDMI 1.3 video output supporting a 297 MHz clock via a direct output architecture."

Oculus chief architect Atman Binstock explains: "On the raw rendering costs: a traditional [1920×1080] game at 60 Hz requires 124 million shaded pixels per second. In contrast, the Rift runs at 2160×1200 at 90 Hz split over dual displays, consuming 233 million pixels per second. At the default eye-target scale, the Rift's rendering requirements go much higher: around 400 million shaded pixels per second. This means that by raw rendering costs alone, a VR game will require approximately 3x the GPU power of 1080p rendering." He also points out that PC graphics can afford a fluctuating frame rate — it doesn't matter too much if it bounces between 30-60 fps. The Rift has no such luxury, however.

The last requirement is more onerous: Microsoft Windows 7 SP1 or newer. Binstock says their development for OS X and Linux has been "paused" so they can focus on delivering content for Microsoft Windows. They have no timeline for going back to the less popular platforms.

Are there any good alternatives that make use of a more open GPU (say, from Intel) from a VR manufacturer that provides proper support for FOSS platforms? Even better would be if the RAM requirement were lower, and something other than USB were used, perhaps Ethernet. And an alternative to HDMI that doesn't require a 10,000 US$ fee per manufacturer, regardless if you make 10 circuits or 100,000.

Tom's Hardware and Anandtech.

kaszz writes:

A team of microbiologists from the Delft University of Technology claims to have invented "bioconcrete" — concrete that heals cracks and breaks using bacteria. The goal was to find a type of bacteria that could live inside concrete and also produce small amount of limestone that could re-seal cracks. This is a difficult prospect because concrete is quite dry and strongly alkaline. The bacteria needed to be able to stay alive for years in those conditions before being activated by water. The bacteria also need a food source — simply adding sugar to concrete will make it weak. The scientists used calcium lactate instead, adding biodegradable capsules of it to the concrete mix. "When cracks eventually begin to form in the concrete, water enters and open the capsules. The bacteria then germinate, multiply and feed on the lactate, and in doing so they combine the calcium with carbonate ions to form calcite, or limestone, which closes up the cracks."

One thing that is left out of the articles mentioned above is the amount of time needed for a given crack to "heal" closed.

"gewg_" writes:

Wegmans is a family-owned grocery store chain. NYTimes noted it can actually claim a "cult following".

The Center for American Progress reports

It manages to have a huge selection while offering prices that can compete with Walmart, but that it does it while treating its employees well.

The perks start with pay, which for hourly store employees is a little more than $33,000 a year on average. By contrast, Walmart has admitted that more than half of its employees make less than $25,000 a year.

[...]but that's not what makes the company famous for employee satisfaction, landing it on Fortune's 100 Best Companies to Work For list every year since the list began. It also offers generous benefits. It pays about 85 percent of the costs of health care coverage, including dental, for its full-time employees and offers insurance to part-time workers who put in 30 hours a week. It offers 401(k) plans with a salary match of up to 3 percent of an employee's contribution.

And it has a scholarship program[...]

Wegmans also offers more work/life balance than most retail jobs.[...]

These benefits aren't just altruistic. The company generates $7.1 billion in revenue and is profitable. "When you think about employees first, the bottom line is better," the company's vice-president for human resources has said. The company boasts a 5 percent turnover rate among full-time employees, compared to a 27 percent[paywall] rate for the industry. That comes with a cost, as it often eats up about 20 percent of a worker's salary to replace him.

hubie writes:

2015 is being celebrated as the International Year of Light. As part of that celebration, the international society for optics and photonics (SPIE) is sponsoring a photo contest "to raise awareness about the International Year of Light and Light-based Technologies and the vital role that light and light-based technologies play in daily life." There is an online exhibition of light-themed photography (note: it seems to present the photos in a random order, so don't comment that you like "the third one", for instance). You can also vote for your favorite, and if you are inclined to give them your email address, you'll be entered to win a GoPro camera (contest runs through 15 August).