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Arthur T. Knackerbracket writes with an article from Phys.org:

Bring on the night, say National Park visitors in new study

Natural wonders like tumbling waterfalls, jutting rock faces and banks of wildflowers have long drawn visitors to America's national parks and inspired efforts to protect their beauty.

According to a study published Sept. 4 in Park Science, visitors also value and seek to protect a different kind of threatened natural resource in the parks: dark nighttime skies.

Almost 90 percent of visitors to Maine's Acadia National Park interviewed for the study agreed or strongly agreed with the statements, "Viewing the night sky is important to me" and "The National Park Service should work to protect the ability of visitors to see the night sky."

Acadia National Park will hold its annual Night Skies Festival Sept. 10 through 14 this year.

According to the study, led by Robert Manning of the University of Vermont, 99 percent of the world's skies suffer from light pollution and two-thirds of Americans can't see the Milky Way from their homes.

Most light threatening the National Parks comes from development, the study says. Light from cities or towns can reach parks from as far away as 250 miles.

"It's a typical story," Manning says. "We begin to value things as they disappear. Fortunately, darkness in a renewable resource and we can we can do things to restore it in the parks."

In addition to gauging the value to park visitors of a dark nighttime sky, the study also provides data to park managers at Acadia - and by extension, other parks - enabling them to develop visitor-driven plans for setting light pollution targets.

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AnonTechie writes:

It sounds like something out of a Terminator movie. Chemical engineers at the University of Michigan have developed a plastic that instantly heals itself when it’s cracked by a bullet or other projectile.

Zavada and his lab mates had been working on self-healing materials for medical uses—surgical adhesives that could be used instead of stitches, for instance. But when they heard that a team at NASA's Langley Research Center was working on similar technology to try to quickly heal holes in space suits and outer space habitats, they switched gears. The University of Michigan engineers joined forces with NASA to create a material that solidifies once it is exposed to the atmosphere. “Once we started working with NASA, we decided we might be able to use the action of oxygen leaking to drive that reaction,” Zavada says.

Their goal was to create a material that could heal itself almost instantaneously, because, in space, a rip in a space suit or breach of a space station wall can be deadly.

Zavada and his advisor, Tim Scott, came up with a solution. They sandwiched tributylborane, a chemical that quickly hardens when it’s exposed to oxygen, between two layers of plastic. When one or both of the plastic sheets was punctured, the tributylborane immediately started hardening, covering the hole.

[Video]: https://youtu.be/JVWFvKxrcLg

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Arthur T. Knackerbracket writes:

A team of Caltech researchers that has spent years searching for the earliest objects in the universe now reports the detection of what may be the most distant galaxy ever found. In an article published August 28, 2015 in Astrophysical Journal Letters, Adi Zitrin, a NASA Hubble postdoctoral scholar in astronomy, and Richard Ellis—who recently retired after 15 years on the Caltech faculty and is now a professor of astrophysics at University College, London—describe evidence for a galaxy called EGS8p7 that is more than 13.2 billion years old. The universe itself is about 13.8 billion years old.

[...] "The surprising aspect about the present discovery is that we have detected this Lyman-alpha line in an apparently faint galaxy at a redshift of 8.68, corresponding to a time when the universe should be full of absorbing hydrogen clouds," Ellis says. Prior to their discovery, the farthest detected galaxy had a redshift of 7.73.

One possible reason the object may be visible despite the hydrogen-absorbing clouds, the researchers say, is that hydrogen reionization did not occur in a uniform manner. "Evidence from several observations indicate that the reionization process probably is patchy," Zitrin says. "Some objects are so bright that they form a bubble of ionized hydrogen. But the process is not coherent in all directions."

"The galaxy we have observed, EGS8p7, which is unusually luminous, may be powered by a population of unusually hot stars, and it may have special properties that enabled it to create a large bubble of ionized hydrogen much earlier than is possible for more typical galaxies at these times," says Sirio Belli, a Caltech graduate student who worked on the project.

"We are currently calculating more thoroughly the exact chances of finding this galaxy and seeing this emission from it, and to understand whether we need to revise the timeline of the reionization, which is one of the major key questions to answer in our understanding of the evolution of the universe," Zitrin says.

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HughPickens.com writes:

Matt McGrath writes at BBC that Bhutan, the strongly Buddhist country where up to three-quarters of the population follow the religion, is the only country in the world considered a role model by the Climate Action Tracking organization. Bhutan has put forward the concept of "Gross National Happiness", that represents a commitment to building an economy that would serve Bhutan's culture based on Buddhist spiritual values instead of western material development gauged by gross domestic product (GDP). Bhutan's Constitution mandates its territory to be at least 60% covered by forest – the vast carbon sink a boon for its balancing of humanity and nature. Right now over 70% is under trees, and so great are the forests, that the country absorbs far more carbon than its 750,000 population can produce. As well as inhaling all that CO2, the Bhutanese are pushing out large amounts of electricity to India, generated by hydropower from their fast flowing rivers. The prime minister says that their waters hold the potential to offset 100 million tonnes of Indian emissions every year. That's around a fifth of Britain's current annual outpourings.

Bhutan has embraced electric vehicles and the government envisages the capital city Thimpu, as a "clean-electric" city with green taxis for its 100,000 citizens - Bold plans for a city that at present doesn't have any traffic lights! "We see ourselves on the one hand being able to use electric cars for our own purposes, to protect our environment, to improve our economy, but also to show in a small measure that sustainable transport works and that electric vehicles are a reality," says Tshering Tobgay. ""In Bhutan the distances are short, electricity is very cheap and because of the mountains you can't drive exceedingly fast, so all these combined to provide us with the opportunity for the investment."

According to Dr Marcia Rocha, it's not just a question of Bhutan being spectacularly endowed with natural advantages. "I think they are a country that culturally are very connected to nature, in every document that they submit it's there, it's just a very important focus of their politics." "We may be small, our impact not huge, but we always try many conservation projects," says Kinlay Dorjee, mayor of capital Thimphu. However the modest Bhutanese Prime Minister rejects the idea that his country is the leader of the climate pack. "I feel that calling Bhutan a role model is not appropriate, every country has their own sets of challenges and their own sets opportunities."

Original Submission

Arthur T. Knackerbracket writes in with this information from The Register :

Linux Foundation project director Konstantin Ryabitsev has publicly-released the penguinistas' internal hardening requirements to help sysadmins and other paranoid tech bods and system administrators secure their workstations.

The baseline hardening recommendations are designed that balance security and convenience for its many remote admins, rather than a full-blown security document.

The document is designed to be adapted to individual admins' requirements, and contains explanations justifying security paranoia.

Severity levels range from low to critical, and escalate to "paranoid" for those willing to operate in blacked-out faraday cages under more inconvenient but secure conditions.

"We use this set of guidelines to ensure that a sys admin's system passes core security requirements in order to reduce the risk of it becoming an attack vector against the rest of our infrastructure," Ryabitsev explains.

"You may read this document and think it is way too paranoid, while someone else may think this barely scratches the surface.

"Security is just like driving on the highway - anyone going slower than you is an idiot, while anyone driving faster than you is a crazy person."

Ryabitsev is a web and Linux security geek who manages Linux Foundation-hosted collaborative projects. He says the guidelines should be adjusted if they are out of step with organisational risk appetites.

Original Submission

Arthur T. Knackerbracket writes in wiht a story from IT World:

Reddit user demian87 recently posted a letter from Comcast notifying him or her of a new Comcast internet access pricing plan being trialed in Fort Lauderdale, the Keys, and Miami, Florida. According to this letter, Comcast will set a limit beginning on October 1 of 300 GB per household per month. Customers who exceed this limit will have to pay $10 for every additional 50 GB needed after that, or sign up for an unlimited data plan for an additional $30 per month.

Comcast spokesman Charlie Douglas confirmed that the letter is authentic, along with the company's new unlimited pricing plan. Douglas explained that "the company has trialed three other pricing plans since 2012 when Comcast had a static limit of 250 GB per month."

In a related development reported by the New York Times, Comcast will campaign to win over the quintessential cord-cutter class with new TV services designed to entice them into subscribing to its internet access service. Comcast will begin offering a $15-a-month TV service called Stream that includes broadcast networks and HBO for its internet customers. The new service will be available in Boston, Chicago, and Seattle later this year and across the company's coverage areas in the United States in 2016.

Stream looks similar to the Aereo service that carried over-the-air (OTA) television on top of the internet, but should perform even better because it operates on Comcast's managed network. Aereo lost a court battle to ABC and was forced to shut down, but not before proving that consumers would pay for crystal-clear OTA television delivered over the internet rather than get poor reception with an antenna. Stream improves upon Aereo by bundling a really cheap HBO subscription.

This story, "How Comcast is changing tactics in response to cord cutters" was originally published by Network World.

The article goes on to explore the usage of the majority of Comcast's customers and the expected usage of an average household that has cut the cord on TV service in favor of using only streaming services.

Original Submission

fliptop writes:

Over at the Harvard Business Review there's speculation that the paradigm of people working full-time for a single employer has outlived its usefulness:

Our vision is straightforward: most people will become independent contractors who have the flexibility to work part-time for several organizations at the same time, or do a series of short full-time gigs with different companies over the course of a year. Companies will maintain only a minimal full-time staff of executives, key managers, and professionals and bring in the rest of the required talent as needed in a targeted, flexible, and deliberate way.

There are two reasons such a flexible work system is now plausible. The first is societal values. Work-life balance and family-friendly scheduling are much more important to today's workers, and companies are increasingly willing to accommodate them. The second is technology. Advances in the last five years have greatly improved the ease with which people can work and collaborate remotely and companies and contract workers can find each other.

The opinion piece goes on to list how workers, employers and society in general will benefit from this shift. What seems to be missing is speculation on the down sides, both to employers and contractors. Originally spotted on The Eponymous Pickle.

Original Submission

"exec" writes:

Andy Cox, engineering lead for Facebook's aviation team, appears in a promotional video discussing the technology behind the company's first full-scale drone, which it plans to use to provide internet access in remote parts of the world. Code-named 'Aquila', the solar-powered drone will be able to fly without landing for three months at a time, using a laser to beam data to a base station on the ground

The Guardian article has the accompanying video.

Original Submission

fliptop writes:

Bruce Schneier commented about a new tool China is using to orchestrate a DoS attack on GreatFire.org, an organization dedicated to resisting China's censorship. From the abstract:

We present a technical analysis of the attack and what it reveals about the Great Cannon's working, underscoring that in essence it constitutes a selective nation-state Man-in-the-Middle attack tool. Although sharing some code similarities and network locations with the Great Firewall, the Great Cannon is a distinct tool, designed to compromise foreign visitors to Chinese sites. We identify the Great Cannon's operational behavior, localize it in the network topology, verify its distinctive side-channel, and attribute the system as likely operated by the Chinese government. We also discuss the substantial policy implications raised by its use, including the potential imposition on any user whose browser might visit (even inadvertently) a Chinese web site.

Full research paper is found here. Some interesting tidbits:

The operational deployment of the GC represents a significant escalation in state-level information control: the normalization of the widespread use of an attack tool to enforce censorship by weaponizing users. Specifically, the GC manipulates the traffic of "bystander" systems outside China, silently programming their browsers to create a massive DDoS attack. While in this case employed for a highly visible attack, the GC clearly has the capability for use in a manner similar to the NSA's QUANTUM system, affording China the opportunity to deliver exploits targeting any foreign computer that communicates with any China-based website not fully protected by HTTPS.

[...] We find compelling evidence that the Chinese government operates the GC. In recent public statements, China deflected questions regarding whether they were behind the attack, instead emphasizing that China often finds itself a victim of cyber attacks A subsequent Chinese news article, containing an explicit denial and a denouncement of our initial public report as false, was itself later censored within China.

[...] What is the Great Cannon's role? Our observations indicate that the GC's design does not reflect technology well-suited for performing traffic censorship. Its operation only examines the first data packet of a given connection and it only examines traffic with targeted IP addresses, which provides a weak censorship mechanism compared to the GFW. More generally, the GC's design does not, in practice, enable it to censor any traffic not already censorable by the GFW. Thus, the evidence indicates that the GC's role is to inject traffic under specific targeted circumstances, not to censor traffic.

Original Submission

The LA Times reports:

Additional coverage has been seen in Forbes magazine of the original bill and the significantly different amended bill. Most of the differences include the removal of the provisions that would require the person whose property is being overflown to actually prove that there was some intent to invade their privacy.

The second blog post (on the amended bill) goes into some detail as to Amazon's proposal for a high speed transit zone in the 200ft-400ft range. The Federal Aviation Administration requires any structure that goes above 200 feet to be marked with lights, etc, as an obstruction to aviation.

Is it possible that the removal of the provisions that would require proof of intent will allow for baseless lawsuits, and be the precursor to the outright outlawing of drones in California?

Another thought in this, is this law being driven by the celebrities in their quest to prevent the paparazzi from invading their private lives?

Original Submission

Hairyfeet writes:

Want a free Chromebook? All you have to do is take a Linux course offered by the Linux Foundation and its yours. The offer is from Sept first to the thirtieth so if you want a Dell Chromebook with a 1.4Ghz CPU and 4GB of RAM for free? Best grab one ASAP.

Keep in mind when siging up for these courses, while the Chromebooks are free, the courses most certainly are not. According to the Class Schedule posted on the Linux Foundation site, prices range from $0 (Introduction to Linux) to $2500 and up for most everything else.

Promotion Eligibility:

This promotion is available to anyone who purchases either a scheduled or elearning Linux Foundation training course between September 1, 2015 and September 30, 2015.

The following purchases are not eligible for this promotion:

• Free courses (such as the edX LFS101x course)
• The India-only LFS201/LFCS Bundle
• Corporate training
• Linux Foundation Events
• Discounted instances of LFS201 Essentials of System Administration and related bundles

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Most of us have heard of the Unity game engine, and until a couple of weeks ago we were restricted to using OSX or Microsoft Windows for development: on 26 August, an experimental build was released for Linux.

It is still a work in progress and there are a number of issues, including (the extremely inconvenient) not being able to drag between windows within Unity. I've also had crashes every time I try to add a component through the button, but it works through the drop-down menu.

One less reason to use Microsoft Windows - my partition has been deleted.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Cool. Calm. And oh, so calculated. That's how a chimpanzee living in the Royal Burgers' Zoo in the Netherlands set out to swat an aerial drone that was filming her group. In an article in the journal Primates² published by Springer, Jan van Hooff and Bas Lukkenaar explain it as yet another example of chimpanzees' make-do attitude to using whatever is on hand as tools.

The incident happened earlier this year, on 10 April, when a Dutch television crew was filming at the zoo in Arnhem. The idea was to use a drone to film the chimpanzees in their compound from different close-up angles. The drone already caught the chimpanzees' attention during a practice run. Some grabbed willow twigs off the ground, while four animals took these along when they climbed up scaffolding where the drone was hovering. This behavior is not frequently observed among these chimps.

Filming started when the next drone flew over. It zoomed in on two chimpanzees, the females Tushi and Raimee. They were still seated on the scaffolding holding on to twigs that were about 180 cm (ca. six feet) long. Tushi made two long sweeps with hers -- the second was successful in downing the drone and ultimately broke it. Before and during the strike, she grimaced. Although her face was tense and her teeth were bared, she showed no signs of fear. This suggests that she quite deliberately and forcefully struck at the drone, rather than fearfully or reflexively.

Fascinating. Evidence that drones do indeed provoke a response in the monkey ape brain, which could explain the drone antipathy felt by many humans. But what is it, a response to hovering insects or predatory birds?

Original Submission

Appalbarry writes:

Our home just gained a shiny new HP laptop, which was immediately upgraded to Windows 10.

Much of the last tweny-four hours has been consumed by two tasks: making it print to an HP printer networked to our router, and moving email from Windows Live Mail on an XP box to the same program on the W10 machine.

If I run into a Linux problem (or even Android) I can usually visit a forum or other resource and get an answer in a few minutes. With Windows I'm Googling madly and chasing many more dead ends than useful answers.

And yes, that not surprisingly includes Microsoft's own sites.

So Soylentils, what are your go-to places for good-quality Windows 10 information?

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Florida State University's (FSU's) discovery has to do with replacing what is usually 4-5 layers with a single layer of inexpensive combo-organic/inorganic material that can glow red, green or blue (or all three together for white LEDs) and can be deposited at room temperature rather than at the high temperatures needed by other processes.

"LED researchers have only been using these new materials for about three years, even though its been used for solar panels for quite some time," professor of Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering at FSU, Zhibin Yu, told EE Times. "Other groups are working on it for LEDs, but they need several layers of materials making it expensive to process. We are first published group to use a single layer."

"Our new new device structure requires just mixing the organic polymer with the active inorganics, instead of using complicated structures with many layers," Yu told us, "therefore making the process inexpensive and highly manufacturable."

Beyond lowering home electricity costs, cheaper LEDs can make vertical farming more practical by supplementing daylighting.

Original Submission