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Phoenix666 writes:

The time has come for a philosophical change in the way the American legal system, government and private business view innovations created by private citizens, a University of Kansas professor argues in a new law review article. "Citizen innovators" have the legal right to develop new and better technologies without fear of interference from overregulation and excessive intellectual property. The "right to innovate" flows from the U.S. Constitution, the common law, federal laws called "organic statutes" and presidential executive orders.

Andrew Torrance, Earl B. Shurtz Research Professor at KU School of Law and visiting scientist at the MIT Sloan School of Management, and his colleague, Eric von Hippel, T. Wilson Professor of Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management, have co-authored "The Right to Innovate," a Michigan State Law Review article that offers three approaches to protecting "citizen innovators" and their right to engage in noncommercial innovation to satisfy their own needs and to share their innovations freely for the betterment of society.

Technology has greatly leveled the playing field of innovation. Whereas private companies and government were formerly believed to create almost all new products and technologies, von Hippel's pioneering economic research on "user innovation" has revealed that private citizens can, and do, also produce new medicines, medical devices, software, automotive improvements, educational methods and myriad other useful inventions in their own homes. As long as they are not endangering anyone or profiting from their work, their innovative activities are largely beyond the jurisdiction of regulatory agencies and intellectual property owners, the authors argue.

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Phoenix666 writes:

For decades, metrologists have strived to retire ‘Le Grand K’ — the platinum and iridium cylinder that for 126 years has defined the kilogram from a high-security vault outside Paris. Now it looks as if they at last have the data needed to replace the cylinder with a definition based on mathematical constants.

The breakthrough comes in time for the kilo­gram to be included in a broader redefinition of units — including the ampere, mole and kelvin — scheduled for 2018. And this week, the International Committee for Weights and Measures (CIPM) will meet in Paris to thrash out the next steps.

“It is an exciting time,” says David Newell, a physicist at the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Gaithersburg, Maryland. “It is the culmination of intense, prolonged efforts worldwide.”

[...] In 2011, the CIPM formally agreed to express the kilogram in terms of Planck’s constant, which relates a particle’s energy to its frequency, and, through E = mc2, to its mass. This means first setting the Planck value using experiments based on the current reference kilogram, and then using that value to define the kilogram. The CIPM’s committee on mass recommends that three independent measurements of Planck’s constant agree, and that two of them use different methods.

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fliptop writes:

Apple is looking at nearly $900 million in damages after a U.S. jury found they used technology owned by University of Wisconsin (UW) without permission in chips found in many of their most popular devices:

The jury was considering whether Apple's A7, A8 and A8X processors, found in the iPhone 5s, 6 and 6 Plus, as well as several versions of the iPad, violate the patent.

Cupertino, California-based Apple denied any infringement and argued the patent is invalid, according to court papers. Apple previously tried to convince the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to review the patent's validity, but in April the agency rejected the bid.

According to a recent ruling by U.S. District Judge William Conley, who is presiding over the case, Apple could be liable for up to $862.4 million in damages.

To determine how much Apple owes, the trial will now proceed in three phases: liability, damages, and finally, whether Apple infringed the patent willfully, which could lead to enhanced penalties.

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fliptop writes:

In what may come as no surprise, the OECD reports the U.S. also has the fattest kids and tops the charts in poor teen health:

In the obesity chapter, the United States is put at No. 1, ahead of 33 other nations, despite years of work by the Obama administration, the First Lady and the Agriculture Department, which has been pulling sugar and salt out of school lunches.

The report shows that obesity in America has jumped since 2000 and that 35 percent of the nation is overweight. For comparison, 4 percent of Japanese and 25 percent of Canadians are obese.

The U.S. also tops the list of teens report in poor health, at 22 percent.

Worse, the U.S. soars over every other country in the number of obese and overweight children, at a whopping 38 percent. The next worse country is Canada, with a combined obese and overweight child population at below 25 percent.

The report also states the U.S. is among the nations with underperforming students, is second in murders and assaults, and is full of workaholics.

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Phoenix666 writes:

This really wasn't in the script. All conquering, "disruptive" Silicon Valley companies were more powerful than any nation state, we were told, and governments and nations would submit to their norms. But now the dam that Max Schrems cracked last week has burst open as European companies seek to nail down local alternatives to Google, Dropbox and other Californian over-the-top players.

They don't have much choice, says Rafe Laguna, the open source veteran at Open Xchange.

What the Schrems vs Facebook decision in the European Court means, Laguna argues, is that any data protection guarantee that a US company makes in Europe is worthless, and so any business processing a European individual's data on US servers exposes them to lawsuits they can't win.

"Suppose I'm a German business, and I get an agreement from Google, which says everything is good, and I put that into my file. When a customer sues me, I go to court and find that agreement isn't worth a dime. Google cannot guarantee what they're guaranteeing.

"This takedown of Safe Harbor will be remembered as a historical event. It'll be patched, but it'll be a bad patch. The real patch is you do business with a trusted supplier operating in a country whose laws you trust. And that doesn't mean the over-the-top big boys from California," says Laguna.

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Phoenix666 writes:

The last wolf in the UK was shot centuries ago, but now a "rewilding" process could see them return to Scotland. Adam Weymouth hiked across the Scottish Highlands in the footsteps of this lost species.

In Glen Feshie there stand Scots Pines more than 300 years old, and in their youth they may have been marked by wolves. It is beguiling to think that now, camped beneath them, boiling up water for morning coffee.

Last year I walked 200 miles across the Highlands to see how those that lived there would feel about the reintroduction of the wolf. The wolf's population has quadrupled in Europe since 1970, and the fact that they remain extinct in Britain is increasingly anomalous.

With the return of the beaver, the success of the wild cat, a growing call for the return of the lynx, as well as an EU directive obliging governments to consider the reintroduction of extinct species, could it be time for the wolf's return? David Attenborough thinks so. Yet 250 years since their eradication, the animal is still capable of inciting powerful feelings.

Taming Nature has been one of mankind's enduring quests. As a boy I was taught to fear and respect Nature as a member of a species at a disadvantage. Do we really want to go back?

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SanityCheck writes:

This article talks about the newest addition to the Iraqi Air Force, a drone. Surely this is unremarkable piece of equipment, we seen it before right? Except upon closer inspection (or by reading TFA, which is less likely) you quickly realize it is not in fact the U.S. made Predator drone, but a Chinese CH-4. The CH-4 is far from a cheap knock-off, but instead is claimed to be superior in every way to the U.S. drone. It sports such revolutionary additions as longer wing-span, bigger payload, and of course "upside down tail thingy."

Is this a story of every increasing proliferation of armed drones around the world, the willingness of some nations to export advance hardware anywhere, or simply a piece about military/industrial espionage? You be the judge.

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Phoenix666 writes:

U.S. prices for the world's 20 top-selling medicines are, on average, three times higher than in Britain, according to an analysis carried out for Reuters.

The finding underscores a transatlantic gulf between the price of treatments for a range of diseases and follows demands for lower drug costs in America from industry critics such as Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.

The 20 medicines, which together accounted for 15 percent of global pharmaceuticals spending in 2014, are a major source of profits for companies including AbbVie (ABBV.N), AstraZeneca (AZN.L), Merck (MRK.N), Pfizer (PFE.N) and Roche (ROG.VX).

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"exec" writes:

Microsoft has issued a cumulative patch for a set of critical flaws affecting all supported versions of its Windows operating system, to protect against remote code execution flaw in its Internet Explorer web browser.

In its most recent monthly security bulletin, Microsoft revealed all supported versions of Windows after Vista - including the latest, Windows 10 - would need to apply the cumulative update.

Microsoft advised that flaws exist in how IE handles objects in memory, which if exploited, could allow an attacker to gain the same access rights as the user into their machine.

To exploit the flaw, an attacker would need to take advantage of compromised websites and websites that "accept or host user-provided content or advertisements", Microsoft said.

"The most severe of the vulnerabilities could allow remote code execution if a user views a specially crafted webpage using Internet Explorer," it advised.

Microsoft Windows server software was also susceptible to the flaws, but less so thanks to its enhanced security mode.

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HughPickens.com writes:

Beginning in 2009, the Kepler Space Telescope began looking at approximately 150,000 stars for signs of objects orbiting with some recognizable pattern in an attempt to find exo-planets. Now Ross Anderson writes in The Atlantic that scientists who search for extraterrestrial civilizations are scrambling to get a closer look at KIC 8462852, a star that undergoes irregularly shaped, aperiodic dips in flux down to below the 20% level that can last for between 5 and 80 days.

"We'd never seen anything like this star," says Tabetha Boyajian. "It was really weird. We thought it might be bad data or movement on the spacecraft, but everything checked out." Dips in the light emitted by stars are often shadows cast by transiting planets especially when they repeat, periodically, as you'd expect if they were caused by orbiting objects. Boyajian, a Yale Postdoc who oversees Planet Hunters, recently published a paper describing KIC 8462852's bizarre light pattern and explores a number of scenarios that might explain the pattern—instrument defects; the shrapnel from an asteroid belt pileup; an impact of planetary scale, like the one that created our moon.

SETI researchers have long suggested that we might be able to detect distant extraterrestrial civilizations, by looking for enormous technological artifacts orbiting other stars. Jason Wright says the unusual star's light pattern is consistent with a "swarm of megastructures," perhaps stellar-light collectors, technology designed to catch energy from the star. "When [Boyajian] showed me the data, I was fascinated by how crazy it looked," says Wright. "Aliens should always be the very last hypothesis you consider, but this looked like something you would expect an alien civilization to build." Boyajian is now working with Wright and Andrew Siemion on a proposal to point a massive radio dish at the unusual star, to see if it emits radio waves at frequencies associated with technological activity.

If they see a sizable amount of radio waves, they'll follow up with the Very Large Array (VLA) in New Mexico, which may be able to say whether the radio waves were emitted by a technological source, like those that waft out into the universe from Earth's network of radio stations. "In the meantime, Boyajian, Siemion, Wright, the citizen scientists, and the rest of us, will have to content ourselves with longing looks at the sky," says Anderson, "where maybe, just maybe, someone is looking back, and seeing the sun dim ever so slightly, every 365 days."

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AnonTechie writes:

The most recent jobs numbers masked a dark story. Unemployment held steady at 5.1%, but only 59.2% of Americans have a job. The difference is the unemployment rate only counts people who don't have a job and are actively looking for one. The labour force participation rate is perhaps a more accurate gauge of the economy. It includes people who've given up, don't want to, or can't work, and it fell to 62.4% last quarter. Labor force participation has fallen steadily since the start of the recession, and years into the recovery, shows no sign of turning around. It hasn't been that low since 1977, and back then it was still common for women to be homemakers. The low labor force participation rate got Fed watchers talking that maybe an interest rate hike in December will be too soon.

Fed policy, of course, isn't a magic cure-all for a sick labor market. If lots of people are out of the labor force because they are retired or can't find work because their skills aren't useful, low interest rates won't do them much good. Whether or not low rates are still warranted depends on why so many Americans aren't in the labor force anymore.

The President's Council of Economic Advisers estimates half of the decline (pdf) since the recession's start can be blamed on an aging population.

http://qz.com/516023/if-nearly-40-of-americans-arent-working-what-are-they-doing/

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"exec" writes:

A revolutionary plan to build a 20 kilometre high inflatable structure to propel spacecraft into the atmosphere has been announced by Canadian company Thoth Technology. Jim Drury reports.

http://www.reuters.com/video/2015/09/02/20-km-high-space-elevator-tower-planned?videoId=365468510

The ThothX Tower could cut mission fuel costs by 30 percent. The tower will be built of reinforced inflatable sections, while a hollow middle would allow an elevator car to bring the rocket to the top. Thoth says it could also be used for communications, to generate wind energy, and even tourism. SOUNDBITE (English) IAN TOMASZEWSKI, SPACE SYSTEMS SPECIALIST AT THOTH TECHNOLOGY, SAYING: "There's a lot of opportunities for the structure. Tourism is one. You'd have a great sight of the earth at 20 kilometres up, you'd see about 1,000 kilometres in any direction."

Thoth has a US patent for the tower, which will be more than 20 times higher than any other man-made structure. It plans to build a working prototype within five years. The company is also part of NASA's mission to land on the asteroid Bennu. They're testing this Lidar remote sensing equipment, developed in Canada, to go on board, exposing it to space-like conditions in their thermal vacuum chamber.

See our August 2015 story: Patent Awarded for Space Elevator.

Original Submission

"exec" writes:

To many who live in Europe, TV antennae have never gone away. In many places, outside of the big cities, almost every home has an outdoor antenna. They have cable too, but nobody is paying to have their existing antenna taken down. But to many in the US, it seems that they are again discovering the outdoor or indoor antenna. They aren't usually rabbit ears, but the signal receivers are popular again.

The number of homes in the U.S. that get network TV over the air and don't have cable or satellite service has gone up about 17 percent in the last five years, according to the media research company Nielsen.

That has surprised Jim Petty, who works as a volunteer to maintain the TV broadcast infrastructure in the Laramie area as part of the Laramie Plains Antenna TV Association. He says back in the mid-2000s, he was ready to shut his operation down.

"There was that whole era of inevitability — everything is just gonna go to Wi-Fi, or cable, or satellite," Petty said. "These things [antennas] will be pointless, and we should just stop doing it now."

But then, free over-the-airwaves TV got a face-lift.

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takyon writes:

Aurous, a recently-launched music player application created by developer Andrew Sampson in Florida, has been sued by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). The application sources pirated music from Russian site Pleer and may include BitTorrent integration in the future, should the developer prevail against legal challenges:

The RIAA also references several comments the developer made in the media before the official launch, confirming that Aurous will be used to pirate music. After the debut of the alpha release, Aurous allegedly provided technical assistance to pirate specific tracks.

In addition, the complaint also mentions Sampson's torrent search engine Strike, which he released earlier this year. "As a stand-alone search engine, Strike Search finds infringing content on BitTorrent but needs to be used with other software and services in order to download the content onto users' computers," the RIAA notes.

The complaint lists a total 20 popular tracks that are freely available through Aurous. This means that Sampson faces up to $3 million in statutory damages if the case goes to trial.

Finally, the RIAA requests a broad preliminary injunction which would prevent domain registrars, domain registries, hosting companies, advertisers and other third-party outfits from doing business with the site.

However, in comments posted to Twitter tonight, Sampson seems unfazed. "Don't worry, we're not going anywhere, empty lawsuits aren't going to stop the innovation of the next best media player," he said. "Hey @RIAA @UMG and everyone else, we challenge every CEO to an arm wrestling competition, we win you drop your empty suit."

Popcorn Time is/was a streaming BitTorrent client that has been the latest and most-discussed bane to the film and television industries.

Complaint [PDF]

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Phoenix666 writes:

This is the big problem in science that no one is talking about: even an honest person is a master of self-deception. Our brains evolved long ago on the African savannah, where jumping to plausible conclusions about the location of ripe fruit or the presence of a predator was a matter of survival. But a smart strategy for evading lions does not necessarily translate well to a modern laboratory, where tenure may be riding on the analysis of terabytes of multidimensional data. In today's environment, our talent for jumping to conclusions makes it all too easy to find false patterns in randomness, to ignore alternative explanations for a result or to accept 'reasonable' outcomes without question — that is, to ceaselessly lead ourselves astray without realizing it.

Failure to understand our own biases has helped to create a crisis of confidence about the reproducibility of published results, says statistician John Ioannidis, co-director of the Meta-Research Innovation Center at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. The issue goes well beyond cases of fraud. Earlier this year, a large project that attempted to replicate 100 psychology studies managed to reproduce only slightly more than one-third. In 2012, researchers at biotechnology firm Amgen in Thousand Oaks, California, reported that they could replicate only 6 out of 53 landmark studies in oncology and haematology. And in 2009, Ioannidis and his colleagues described how they had been able to fully reproduce only 2 out of 18 microarray-based gene-expression studies.

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Phoenix666 writes:

Boeing has released a video of its groundbreaking microlattice metal, which is "the world's lightest material," scientists say.

Microlattice is a 3D open-cellular polymer structure made out of small hollow metallic tubes, and represents a criss-cross diagonal pattern with small open spaces.
...
Another example of the substance's potential functions given by Sophia Yang, research scientist at HRL Laboratories, was the egg drop challenge: if you wrapped an egg in microlattice and dropped it from the 25th floor, you could easily win a bet as the substance would "absorb the force that the egg feels" and remain intact.

The microlattice was initially created in 2011, with the researchers saying that it is 100 times lighter than Styrofoam.

Original Submission