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What was highest label on your first car speedometer?

  • 80 mph
  • 88 mph
  • 100 mph
  • 120 mph
  • 150 mph
  • it was in kph like civilized countries use you insensitive clod
  • Other (please specify in comments)

[ Results | Polls ]
Comments:46 | Votes:100

posted by martyb on Wednesday October 07 2015, @10:53PM   Printer-friendly
from the throw-not-before-swine dept.

Last night Larry Wall unveiled the first development release of Perl 6, joking that now a top priority was fixing bugs that could be mistaken for features. The new language features meta-programming -- the ability to define new bits of syntax on your own to extend the language, and even new infix operators. Larry also previewed what one reviewer called "exotic and new" features, including the sequence operator and new control structures like "react" and "gather and take" lists. "We don't want their language to run out of steam," Larry told the audience. "It might be a 30- or 40-year language. I think it's good enough."

[Ed Note: For those who might not be aware, SoylentNews is written in Perl.]


Original Submission

posted by n1 on Wednesday October 07 2015, @09:27PM   Printer-friendly
from the knowing-how-to-pick-a-winner dept.

Joe Drape and Jacqueline Williams report at The New York Times that a major scandal is erupting in the multibillion-dollar industry of fantasy sports, the online and unregulated business in which an estimated 57 million people participate where players assemble their fantasy teams with real athletes. Two major fantasy companies were forced to release statements defending their businesses' integrity after what amounted to allegations of insider trading, that employees were placing bets using information not generally available to the public. "It is absolutely akin to insider trading. It gives that person a distinct edge in a contest," says Daniel Wallach. "It could imperil this nascent industry unless real, immediate and meaningful safeguards are put in place."

In FanDuel's $5 million "NFL Sunday Million" contest this week, DraftKings employee Ethan Haskell placed second and won $350,000 with his lineup that had a mix of big-name players owned by a high number of users. Haskell had access to DraftKings ownership data meaning that he may have seen which NFL players had been selected by DraftKings users, and by how many users. In light of this scandal, DraftKings and FanDuel have, for now, banned their employees from playing on each other's sites. Many in the highly regulated casino industry insist daily fantasy sports leagues are gambling sites and shouldn't be treated any differently than traditional sports betting and, as a result, should be regulated and Chris Grove says this may be a watershed moment for a sector that has resisted regulation but now may need it to prove its legitimacy. "You have information that is valuable and should be tightly restricted," says Grove. "There are people outside of the company that place value on that information. Is there any internal controls? Any audit process? The inability of the industry to produce a clear and compelling answer to these questions to anyone's satisfaction is why it needs to be regulated."


Original Submission

posted by n1 on Wednesday October 07 2015, @08:05PM   Printer-friendly
from the needs-more-selfies dept.

Not news, but rather cool. The Project Apollo Archive has recently released a large collection of Apollo mission photography onto flickr which features:

new high-resolution, unprocessed versions of Apollo Hasselblad photography scanned by NASA's Johnson Space Center

The Albums, arranged by mission are worth viewing.

The original project website features additional information on the image collections.


Original Submission

posted by n1 on Wednesday October 07 2015, @06:50PM   Printer-friendly
from the a-billion-dollars-to-whoever-reinvents-the-wheel dept.

Evernote, makers of the note-taking web app of the same name, is going through a rough patch. As the company's pre-IPO valuation hit $1 billion in 2012, Phil Libin, its CEO, became accustomed to giving interviews dispensing advice on how to create a cool company with a freemium business model and a great corporate culture.

Then came some serious problems, as recounted in a story in BusinessInsider. Recent releases of Evernote's flagship product have been buggy, with new features that were apparently shipped before they were ready. "Complementary" products and services acquired by the company haven't panned out, and critics have suggested that management took its eye off the core business. Meanwhile, revenue from the company's freemium business model hasn't been keeping pace with its growing costs; although some 150 million people use Evernote today, product revenues (as of last year) were estimated by TechCrunch to be just $36 million. This year has brought layoffs, office closings, elimination of some audacious employee perks, and cancellation of the company's developer confererence. Libin resigned as CEO in July, replaced by ex-Googler Chris O'Neill.

So is freemium still a viable business model for a Silicon Valley "unicorn" ($1 billion-plus valuation) pushing a SaaS (as opposed to, let's say, a relational database, or programming language compiler plus IDE)? Or are too many of its target users just too cheap to make it viable?


Original Submission

posted by n1 on Wednesday October 07 2015, @05:11PM   Printer-friendly
from the nice-lab,-be-a-shame-if-funding-got-cut dept.

The Christian Science Monitor carried a fine article (Apr this year, but current for a long time) on how the super-rich buy their way out from criticism. In brief: donations not only to politicians but to NGO-es as well. Which leads the CSM worry that we are letting the democracy succumb to money. Some excerpts:

Other sources of funding are drying up. Research grants are waning. Funds for social services of churches and community groups are growing scarce. Legislatures are cutting back university funding. Appropriations for public television, the arts, museums, and libraries are being slashed

[...] So the presidents of universities, congregations, and think tanks, other nonprofits are now kissing wealthy posteriors as never before.

But that money often comes with strings.

When Comcast, for example, finances a nonprofit like the International Center for Law and Economics, the Center supports Comcast's proposed merger with Time Warner.

When the Charles Koch Foundation pledges $1.5 million to Florida State University's economics department, it stipulates that a Koch-appointed advisory committee will select professors and undertake annual evaluations.

The Koch brothers now fund 350 programs at over 250 colleges and universities across America. You can bet that funding doesn't underwrite research on inequality and environmental justice.

[...] A few weeks ago dozens of climate scientists and environmental groups asked that museums of science and natural history "cut all ties" with fossil fuel companies and philanthropists like the Koch brothers.

"When some of the biggest contributors to climate change and funders of misinformation on climate science sponsor exhibitions ... they undermine public confidence in the validity of the institutions responsible for transmitting scientific knowledge," their statement said.

[...] Our democracy is directly threatened when the rich buy off politicians.

But no less dangerous is the quieter and more insidious buy-off of institutions democracy depends on to research, investigate, expose, and mobilize action against what is occurring.


Original Submission

posted by n1 on Wednesday October 07 2015, @03:51PM   Printer-friendly
from the freedom-ends-here dept.

Ars published a story:

Major Internet service providers have seemingly given up on the argument that net neutrality rules violate their First Amendment rights. But one small ISP is continuing its fight against the Federal Communications Commission, claiming that it should be allowed to favor some Internet content over others because doing so qualifies for freedom of speech protection.

"With prioritization, broadband providers convey a message by 'favor[ing]' certain speech—that prioritized content is superior—because it is delivered faster," Alamo Broadband argued in a brief filed yesterday as part of the broadband industry's lawsuit against the FCC.

The article notes that other ISP's seem to have given up on this argument, but Alamo Broadband continues to make the argument, but the FCC continues to argue that ISPs do not have the right to edit the Internet.


Original Submission

posted by cmn32480 on Wednesday October 07 2015, @02:21PM   Printer-friendly
from the the-future-is-here dept.

A driverless lorry developed by Daimler has been tested on a public road for the first time, in Germany.

At the push of a button, the vehicle's "highway pilot" helped it avoid other road users via a radar and camera sensing system.

The company reiterated the requirement that a human driver be present and focused on the road at all times.

Earlier in the year, Daimler had expressed its desire to carry out such a test by the end of 2015.

"As soon as we are on the highway, we will start the autonomous driving mode," said Daimler executive Wolfgang Bernhard as he steered the Mercedes-Benz Actros truck towards a busy stretch of motorway in Baden-Wurttemberg last week.


Original Submission

posted by janrinok on Wednesday October 07 2015, @01:02PM   Printer-friendly
from the but-that-won't-stop-them dept.

The release of yet more of Edward Snowden's leaked files reveals the still-astonishing scale and breadth of government surveillance after more than a year of revelations. These recent papers revealed by Wikileaks discuss a programme within Britain's GCHQ known as "Karma Police", in which the intelligence agency gathered more than 1.1 trillion pieces of information on UK citizens between August 2007 and March 2009.

Spurred on by the expansion of intercept warrants under the Terrorism Act 2006, this information is users' internet metadata – details of phone calls, email messages and browser connections that includes passwords, contacts, phone numbers, email addresses, and folders used to organise emails, but not the actual content of messages or emails.

Metadata can help identify people of interest, build profiles, and assist with decisions to start or escalate surveillance of individuals. All this information can be collected often at a fraction of the cost of doing this through traditional methods. In other words, metadata is not insignificant – and this is precisely why governments are so committed to collecting and processing it. However, bulk metadata collection – where information is collected from everyone whether a "person of interest" or not – is rightly a source of deep anxiety from both security and human rights perspectives.


Original Submission

posted by janrinok on Wednesday October 07 2015, @11:36AM   Printer-friendly

An interdisciplinary team of researchers has built the first prototype of a miniature particle accelerator that uses terahertz radiation instead of radio frequency structures. A single accelerator module is just 1.5 centimetres long and one millimetre thick. The terahertz technology holds the promise of miniaturising the entire set-up by at least a factor of 100, as the scientists surrounding DESY's Franz Kärtner from the Center for Free-Electron Laser Science (CFEL) point out.

They are presenting their prototype, that was set up in Kärtner's lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the U.S., in the journal Nature Communications. The authors see numerous applications for terahertz accelerators, in materials science, medicine and particle physics, as well as in building X-ray lasers. CFEL is a cooperation between DESY, the University of Hamburg and the Max Planck Society.

"This is not a particularly large acceleration, but the experiment demonstrates that the principle does work in practice," explains co-author Arya Fallahi of CFEL, who did the theoretical calculations. "The theory indicates that we should be able to achieve an accelerating gradient of up to one gigavolt per metre." This is more than ten times what can be achieved with the best conventional accelerator modules available today. Plasma accelerator technology, which is also at an experimental stage right now, promises to produce even higher accelerations, however it also requires significantly more powerful lasers than those needed for terahertz accelerators.

There is an abstract available.

What would you do with a desktop particle accelerator?


Original Submission

posted by janrinok on Wednesday October 07 2015, @10:19AM   Printer-friendly
from the that-explains-my-brain dept.

A single neuron in a normal adult brain likely has more than a thousand genetic mutations that are not present in the cells that surround it, according to new research from Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) scientists. The majority of these mutations appear to arise while genes are in active use, after brain development is complete.

"We found that the genes that the brain uses most of all are the genes that are most fragile and most likely to be mutated," says Christopher Walsh, an HHMI investigator at Boston Children's Hospital who led the research. Walsh, Peter Park, a computational biologist at Harvard Medical School, and their colleagues reported their findings in the October 2, 2015, issue of the journal Science.

Ahhh, so that's where molecular computing went. It's us.


Original Submission

posted by janrinok on Wednesday October 07 2015, @08:37AM   Printer-friendly
from the not-the-brightest-of-the-bunch dept.

A Florida cop has been fired for repeatedly using an electroshock weapon on a shoplifting suspect who was inside a residence with hands raised. The officer's police report said the suspect "refused to show his hands," according to local media.

Police authorities in Zephyrhills, Florida announced the firing of 10-year veteran officer Tim Claussen on Friday. The footage of Claussen tasering Lester Brown, who complained of shoulder aches and dizziness after he was arrested, was captured on the video camera attached to the officer's Taser.

"Come outside now, or you're about to get tased," Claussen said on the video. "This is the last time." Suddenly, Brown is shocked, and shortly afterward he's seen falling to the ground in the footage. According to the city attorney's office, "the deployment of the Taser was unjustified."


Original Submission

posted by janrinok on Wednesday October 07 2015, @07:13AM   Printer-friendly
from the coming-to-a-desktop-near-you dept.

The significant advance, by a team at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Sydney appears in the international journal Nature.

"What we have is a game changer," said team leader Andrew Dzurak, Scientia Professor and Director of the Australian National Fabrication Facility at UNSW.

"We've demonstrated a two-qubit logic gate -- the central building block of a quantum computer -- and, significantly, done it in silicon. Because we use essentially the same device technology as existing computer chips, we believe it will be much easier to manufacture a full-scale processor chip than for any of the leading designs, which rely on more exotic technologies.
...
The advance represents the final physical component needed to realise the promise of super-powerful silicon quantum computers, which harness the science of the very small -- the strange behaviour of subatomic particles -- to solve computing challenges that are beyond the reach of even today's fastest supercomputers.


Original Submission

posted by janrinok on Wednesday October 07 2015, @05:36AM   Printer-friendly
from the justified-recognition dept.

Takaaki Kajita of Japan and Arthur McDonald of Canada won the Nobel Prize in physics on Tuesday for the discovery of neutrino oscillations. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said the two researchers had made key contributions to experiments showing that neutrinos change identities. Neutrinos are particles that whiz through the universe at nearly the speed of light. They are created in nuclear reactions, such as in the sun and the stars, or in nuclear power plants.

"The discovery has changed our understanding of the innermost workings of matter and can prove crucial to our view of the universe," the academy said. Kajita, 56, is director of the Institute for Cosmic Ray Research and professor at the University of Tokyo. McDonald, 72, is a professor emeritus at Queen's University in Kingston, Canada.

http://phys.org/news/2015-10-kajita-mcdonald-nobel-physics-prize.html

In medicine, the prize is split in half with one half going to William Campbell and Satoshi Ōmura for their work on avermectin, a drug that kills roundworms that cause blindness and deformities, and the other half going to Youyou Tu for work on artemisinin, a drug that kills the parasite that causes malaria.

[Also Covered By]: The Guardian‎, New York Times, ABC News, CNN


Original Submission

posted by janrinok on Wednesday October 07 2015, @04:03AM   Printer-friendly
from the to-infinity-and-beyond dept.

Space startup Moon Express has signed a contract with Rocket Lab to help carry out three lunar missions starting in 2017. Described as the first private contract between two companies to carry out a lunar landing, the agreement will see Rocket Lab provide launch services using its Electron rocket system for the Moon Express MX-1 lunar lander as part of Moon Express's attempt win the Google Lunar Xprize.

The contract stipulates that Rocket Lab will provide services for two launches of the MX-1 lander in 2017 and a third at a date yet to be determined. These will be conducted from either Rocket Lab's New Zealand facilities or an American launch site. The Moon Express MX-1 lander is a scalable 600 kg (1,320 lb) spacecraft that can be sent to the Moon either directly or using low-energy trajectories. Its purpose is not only to conduct scientific missions, but also to deliver commercial payloads to the lunar surface at lower costs.

Life imitates art.


Original Submission

posted by janrinok on Wednesday October 07 2015, @02:36AM   Printer-friendly
from the back-to-the-drawing-board dept.

The European Court of Justice has just ruled that the Safe Harbour agreement, which is used by American startups to transfer data between the US and Europe, is invalid. As a result, companies such as Facebook and Twitter may now need to host European user data in Europe, rather than hosting it in the US and transferring it over.

This is a brushed up Google translation of nu.nl (http://www.nu.nl/internet/4139196/europees-hof-zet-streep-privacyverdrag-met-vs.html).

In the meantime this news is also coming through in English: http://www.ft.com/fastft/402791/eu-court-deals-blow-amazon-facebook-with-safe-harbour-ruling and http://uk.businessinsider.com/european-court-of-justice-safe-harbor-ruling-2015-10.

The European Court on Tuesday scrapped the so-called Safe Harbour treaty, which regulated the storage of European personal data in the United States.

Under the treaty enabled Internet companies like Facebook are allowed to store the data of Europeans in the US. However, the Court finds that the data in that country are inadequately protected and that therefore the treaty is invalid.

The ruling also made clear that, regardless of the European convention, it should have been possible for national regulators like the Dutch Data Protection Authority to prevent data from being sent to servers in the US. The Court follows with its judgment the recently expressed opinion of Advocate General Yves Bot.

The judgment has been done in a case between the Austrian student Max Schrems and Facebook. Schrems wanted the Irish privacy watchdog to investigate data protection in the United States, but because of the Safe Harbor treaty, the Irish watchdog refused to launch an investigation. Schrems also noted disclosures of whistleblower Edward Snowden in this case. NSA documents from Snowden showed that the intelligence agencies harvest private data from internet users on a large scale. According to Schrems this was a reason to keep European data from being processed in the US.

In the ruling, the Court points to a message from the European Commission to the European Parliament, in which the large-scale collection of private data by the US is named "unacceptable". In view of this communication, the Commission should immediately suspend the treaty.


Original Submission #1Original Submission #2

posted by cmn32480 on Wednesday October 07 2015, @01:01AM   Printer-friendly
from the people-really-can't-tell dept.

CBC Television has just issued an apology of sorts, explaining that an obscene headline that appeared above one their stories when posted on Facebook wasn't what the Canadian broadcaster had written.

Over the weekend, CBC News was the subject of a widespread Facebook hoax. A story on the CBC News website about Conservative Leader Stephen Harper's visit to Newfoundland and Labrador appeared in the news feeds of many Canadians accompanied by a vulgar headline. ... When users clicked the fake Facebook headline, they were directed to an authentic CBC News story with the headline "Stephen Harper faces little warmth in Newfoundland."

So how did the headline end up on Facebook? ... Facebook allows users to change both the headline and summary text accompanying a story and post it to his or her wall. Friends can then share the story with the altered headline.

It's not just edited headlines that can damage a company's reputation. Last month a relative of mine began posting some seriously racist "jokes" to his Facebook feed. Those images wound up landing above and beside advertisements for major retailers and some of our largest banks.

Even if you assume that most people will understand that the advertiser has nothing to do with the content beside their ad, it's still likely that it somehow damages your corporate image to be associated with such dreck.

Are we heading for a day when major advertisers will start insisting that social media companies insulate them from offensive content? Or do they just not care any more?


Original Submission