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HughPickens.com writes:

For more than a half century, it has been an article of faith that science would not get funded if government did not do it, and economic growth would not happen if science did not get funded by the taxpayer. Now Matt Ridley writes in The Wall Street Journal that when you examine the history of innovation, you find, again and again, that scientific breakthroughs are the effect, not the cause, of technological change. "It is no accident that astronomy blossomed in the wake of the age of exploration," says Ridley. "The steam engine owed almost nothing to the science of thermodynamics, but the science of thermodynamics owed almost everything to the steam engine. The discovery of the structure of DNA depended heavily on X-ray crystallography of biological molecules, a technique developed in the wool industry to try to improve textiles." According to Ridley technological advances are driven by practical men who tinkered until they had better machines; abstract scientific rumination is the last thing they do.

It follows that there is less need for government to fund science: Industry will do this itself. Having made innovations, it will then pay for research into the principles behind them. Having invented the steam engine, it will pay for thermodynamics. After all, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the U.S. and Britain made huge contributions to science with negligible public funding, while Germany and France, with hefty public funding, achieved no greater results either in science or in economics. To most people, the argument for public funding of science rests on a list of the discoveries made with public funds, from the Internet (defense science in the U.S.) to the Higgs boson (particle physics at CERN in Switzerland). But that is highly misleading. Given that government has funded science munificently from its huge tax take, it would be odd if it had not found out something. This tells us nothing about what would have been discovered by alternative funding arrangements. "Governments cannot dictate either discovery or invention," concludes Ridley. "They can only make sure that they don't hinder it. Innovation emerges unbidden from the way that human beings freely interact if allowed. Deep scientific insights are the fruits that fall from the tree of technological change."

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Phoenix666 writes:

Samsung Electronics has reported a jump in profit for the last quarter even as competition in the smartphone market remained intense.

The company reported sales of 51.7 trillion won (US$45.1 billion) for the quarter, up 9 percent from the same period a year earlier, and net profit of 5.5 trillion won, up 29 percent, Samsung announced Thursday in Korea.

The higher sales came largely from strong demand for Samsung's chips and flat-panel displays, which account for more than a third of its total business, while profits were helped by the weak Korean won.

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Phoenix666 writes:

The US Department of Defense has announced that Northrup Grumman will be supplying its next generation of Long Range Strike Bomber (LRSB) to replace the aging B-52 and B-2 fleets.

"Over the past century, no nation has used air power to accomplish its global reach -- to compress time and space -- like the United States," said Defense Secretary Ash Carter

"Building this bomber is a strategic investment in the next 50 years, and represents our aggressive commitment to a strong and balanced force. It demonstrates our commitment to our allies and our determination to potential adversaries, making it crystal clear that the United States will continue to retain the ability to project power throughout the globe long into the future."

The first prototypes of the new bomber won't take to the skies until 2025 at the earliest, and is unlikely to be operational for years after that. But it's going to be packed with the latest technology to shield it from ever-smarter missiles and other weapons systems.
...
Like the B-2, it will be using radar-absorbing materials and high-tech weapons. Directed-energy anti-missile technology has been touted for the aircraft by some analysts, as has the ability to carry electronic payloads that could disrupt enemy computer systems.

Yes, Ye Children of Slashdot, this one will have frickin' laser beams.

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martyb writes:

How do we decide? From "Trust your head or your gut? How we decide depends on experience":

Whether we make everyday decisions based on our gut or our reason has little to do with what kind of a decision maker we are. Instead, the content of the decision plays a big role, as does whether we are knowledgeable in the particular subject. These were the results of a study by researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin and the University of Basel.

As the study shows, we tend to decide on clothing, restaurants, and choice of partners intuitively, whereas our decisions in areas such as medicine, electronics, and holidays are apt to be knowledge-based. "For that reason it's inaccurate to speak of rational or intuitive decision makers, as is often done"... Instead, people prefer one or the other type of decision based on the topic in question. This is entirely independent of sex; the assumption that women are more likely than men to make gut decisions was not confirmed.

The full report appears in the Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition as "Domain-specific preferences for intuition and deliberation in decision making" with doi:10.1016/j.jarmac.2015.07.

Meta: how will an editor decide whether or not to run this story?

Editor's Note: I decided to run it via reason, and a little intuition about what the community will want to read, and what won't get me too much gruff in the comments.

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mendax writes:

The New York Times has a story about how the Harvard Law School is doing what almost no library has ever done before in order to prepare for the digital age. It's painful for me as a book lover to read this story but it's all for a good cause:

[I]n a digital-age sacrifice intended to serve grand intentions, the Harvard librarians are slicing off the spines of all but the rarest volumes and feeding some 40 million pages through a high-speed scanner. They are taking this once unthinkable step to create a complete, searchable database of American case law that will be offered free on the Internet, allowing instant retrieval of vital records that usually must be paid for. [...]

For many years now, bookcases of legal tomes in law offices have been mostly for show. Rather than spending days poring over book indexes and footnoted citations, as law clerks and associates did in earlier times, researchers find what they need on the Internet in minutes. But that nearly always comes at a price. [...]

Legal groups spend anywhere from thousands of dollars a year, for a small office, to millions, for a giant firm, using commercial services like Westlaw and LexisNexis to find cases and trace doctrinal strands. [...]

Complete state results will become publicly available this fall for California and New York, and the entire library will be online in 2017, said Daniel Lewis, chief executive and co-founder of Ravel Law, a commercial start-up in California that has teamed up with Harvard Law for the project. The cases will be available at www.ravellaw.com. Ravel is paying millions of dollars to support the scanning. The cases will be accessible in a searchable format and, along with the texts, they will be presented with visual maps developed by the company, which graphically show the evolution through cases of a judicial concept and how each key decision is cited in others.

While this sounds like this is just another way to make money from public domain legal documents and court opinions (and it is), there is an important distinction:

Under the agreement with Harvard, the entire underlying database, not just limited search results, will be shared with nonprofit organizations and scholars that wish to develop specialized applications. Ravel and Harvard will withhold the database from other commercial groups for eight years. After that, it will be available to anyone for any purpose....

So, geeks such as myself who have some modicum of legal training have some time to put on their thinking caps and find ways of making money out of this information. For everyone else, this could be a way of evening out the playing field in court cases, when the Davids goes after Goliath

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Bob Lutz, car-guy-to-the-max, former VP of GM and Chrysler, with time at BMW before that, wrote this recent article --
    http://www.roadandtrack.com/car-culture/a26859/bob-lutz-tesla/

The opening paragraph is gloomy:

and the prognosis goes downhill from there mentioning competition from Audi, the lack of enough dealers to attract more buyers and other problems.

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Sometime recently, something in our setup (or in the bitpay API) changed and left us unable to receive notifications of bitcoin payments. The bad news is the payments still went through but the subscriptions were not rewarded on SoylentNews. We realized the error and credited the accounts (there were only 4 such cases) giving extra subscription time to make up for the error.

Bitcoin subscriptions are temporarily disabled until we can work out exactly what happened and avoid it in the future.

Thank you, and our apologies for any inconvenience.

~mrcoolbp and TheMightyBuzzard

canopic jug writes:

Joanna Rutkowska's blog points to recent paper on a survey of the various problems and attacks presented against the x86 platform over the last 10 years. The paper does not present new exploits but does cover: the BIOS (UEFI) and booting; peripherals; the Intel Management Engine; and several other aspects of x86 insecurity. Some of the problems appear insurmountable as described.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Global online freedom declined for a fifth consecutive year as more governments stepped up electronic surveillance and clamped down on dissidents using blogs or social media, a survey showed Wednesday.

The annual report by non-government watchdog Freedom House said the setbacks were especially noticeable in the Middle East, reversing gains seen in the Arab Spring.

Freedom House found declines in online freedom of expression in 32 of the 65 countries assessed since June 2014, with "notable declines" in Libya, France and Ukraine.

The researchers found 61 percent of the world's population lives in countries where criticism of the government, military or ruling family has been subject to censorship.

And 58 percent live in countries where bloggers or others were jailed for sharing content online on political, social and religious issues, according to the "Freedom on the Net 2015" report.

CISA (Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act) in the USA and TPP (Trans=Pacific Partnership) globally will likely continue the trend.

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Apple Doesn't Want You Weighing Things With Your iPhone Just Yet

"exec" writes in with a story from The Verge :

Can you turn an iPhone 6S into a working digital scale? The answer, apparently, is yes, but Apple doesn't want you to right now.

In an interesting post on Medium, developer Ryan McLeod explains how he and his friends built a digital scale app for the new iPhones by taking advantage of Apple's new pressure sensitivity feature, 3D Touch. The company only uses 3D Touch for a few functions — adjusting how quickly you scrub through music and video, for example, or quickly accessing app shortcuts from the home screen — but McLeod says he was inspired by all the "creative workarounds" on the App Store to hijack it for something else.

-- submitted from IRC

Apple Sales, Profit Surge On iPhone Strength

Phoenix666 writes:

Apple logged another healthy rise in sales and profits for its most recent quarter on the strength of record iPhone sales and strong results for Macs.

The company's revenue rose 22 percent from a year earlier to $51.5 billion in the fiscal fourth quarter ended Sept. 26. Sales of iPhones reached a fourth-quarter record, and the company said it sold more Macs than ever. Sixty-two percent of revenue came from outside the U.S., and revenue in China nearly doubled.

The company's profit grew even more strongly than sales, up 31 percent to $11.1 billion, or $1.96 per share. For the full year, Apple made $53.4 billion.

Both sales and profit beat the consensus forecast of analyst polled by Thomson Reuters.

What will Apple do with its mounting pile of cash?

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Phoenix666 writes:

The fact that the tuataras don't have penises makes them a useful study organism because it allows scientists to ask whether the lizards' ancestors had penises and lost them, or never had them to begin with. Now, according to new research published today in Biology Letters, the last common ancestor of all the amniotes did, in fact, have an erectable phallus, and that the modern diversity is the result of evolutionary tweaks over time (not the separate evolution of different phalluses).

Overheard at a cocktail party:

'So, what do you do?'
'I study lizard penises.'

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

"Read the terms and conditions" is good advice for anybody, but especially if you're participating in a hackathon. Otherwise, as participants in a Telstra hackathon are finding, you might be giving up more than you intend.

Lifx engineer Jack Chen – @chendo on Twitter – has noticed that the terms in the carrier's Internet of Things challenge seem to go beyond what people might expect if they're not paying attention.

The contract (PDF) that challenge participants have to sign contains a clause which seems to the non-lawyer to go far beyond what someone might develop for the hackathon itself.

The document seems to plant Telstra's flag in a participant's development work not just during the challenge, but for the following 18 months.

For any "New IP" (as the contract puts it) developed in that period, the participant agrees to:

• Give Telstra a first right of refusal
• Negotiate with Telstra about possible licensing
• Not offer the IP to anyone else without Telstra having had the first refusal
• If someone else is interested, give Telstra a chance to make a matching offer
• Not give anyone else an exclusive on the IP until after Telstra's said "no".

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Zinho writes:

Archaic words are making a comeback, thanks to hipsters' love of all things old. The Washington Post's wonkblog has an article examining how hipsters may be bringing back vintage language, and the effects it is having on modern culture. This may be a passing fad, as hipsters themselves are now making jokes about bespoke water; if they're not careful the charming anachronism may go mainstream and become unfit for hipster irony.

BTW, this submission was inspired by a comment thread here about craft/artisanal beers. Apparently, the old words are not just re-entering the hipsters' language but getting co-opted by marketers hoping to woo the hipster pocketbook. Some linguistic shift may result.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

A team of physicists led by Caltech's David Hsieh has discovered an unusual form of matter—not a conventional metal, insulator, or magnet, for example, but something entirely different. This phase, characterized by an unusual ordering of electrons, offers possibilities for new electronic device functionalities and could hold the solution to a long-standing mystery in condensed matter physics having to do with high-temperature superconductivity—the ability for some materials to conduct electricity without resistance, even at "high" temperatures approaching -100 degrees Celsius.

"The discovery of this phase was completely unexpected and not based on any prior theoretical prediction," says Hsieh, an assistant professor of physics, who previously was on a team that discovered another form of matter called a topological insulator. "The whole field of electronic materials is driven by the discovery of new phases, which provide the playgrounds in which to search for new macroscopic physical properties."

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

New research shows that the loss of large animals has had strong effects on ecosystem functions, and that reintroducing large animal faunas may restore biodiverse ecosystems.

Rewilding is gaining a lot of interest as an alternative conservation and land management approach in recent years, but remains controversial. It is increasingly clear that Earth harbored rich faunas of large animals -- such as elephants, wild horses and big cats -- pretty much everywhere, but that these have starkly declined with the spread of humans across the world -- a decline that continues in many areas.

A range of studies now show that these losses have had strong effects on ecosystem functions, and a prominent strain of rewilding, trophic rewilding, focuses on restoring large animal faunas and their top-down food-web effects to promote self-regulating biodiverse ecosystems.

Science for a wilder Anthropocene: Synthesis and future directions for trophic rewilding research (full PDF)

takyon: Pleistocene Park: Return of the Mammoth's Ecosystem (2005)

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

In Maryland, a balloon from JLENS (Joint Land Attack Cruise Missile Defense Elevated Netted Sensor System) broke loose from its tether. The balloon eventually descended to the ground, but its dragging cable caused an electrical outage affecting 30,000 or 35,000 people. The Secretary of Defense promised to catch the balloon and fly it again.

Coverage can be found from a multitude of sources:

• Washington Post
• USA Today
• Baltimore Sun
• NBC

The Energy Education Council offers safety tips for helium balloons.

We previously covered JLENS in September with: JLENS Balloons Still Not Warning US of Cruise Missiles which has more background on the system.

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