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Phoenix666 writes:

Instructions to sleep for a second almost never result in precisely one second’s sleep. Bob Schmidt walks us through the mechanics of why.

Suppose you are walking down the hallway of your office, and a Summer Intern (SI) intercepts you and asks, “If I put a line of code in my program that simply reads sleep(10) , how long will my program sleep? ¹

You look at the harried SI and reply, “It depends,” and you continue on your way.

The SI rushes to catch up with you, and asks, “It depends on what?”

And you answer, “That, too, depends,” as you continue walking.

At this point our young SI is frantic (and in immediate danger of going bald). “Stop talking in riddles, grey hair! I’m in real need of help here.”

Your stroll has taken you to the entrance of the break room, so you grab your interlocutor, duck inside, grab two cups of your favourite caffeinated beverage, and sit down.

“It depends,” you say, “on many things, so let’s start with first things first.”

First things first

To understand what’s going on ‘under the hood’ when a sleep() is executed, it helps to know a little about how CPUs work, and that means knowing something about CPU clocks, interrupts, and schedulers. The former two are hardware concepts; the latter is a software concept.

It's a decent peek under the hood for folks who usually treat such things as blackbox.

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Phoenix666 writes:

Ford announced that it would be investing some $4.5 billion over the next five years toward its goal of building better "electrified vehicle solutions" and bringing electrification to 40% of its vehicle lineup by 2020. Seeing as transportation is a key climate issue, it's only fitting to learn about Ford's sharpened focus on EVs as a solution. According to the company, it will be adding 13 new electrified vehicles to its portfolio by 2020, which could offer more options for the potential EV customers who aren't currently able to drive electric, either because of price or driving range or size.

The most significant news in the near future of Ford's electric vehicle lineup is the rollout of the new Focus Electric next year, which will feature a 100-mile range and a DC fast-charging system that is claimed to give the vehicle an 80% charge in 30 minutes, a full two hours faster than the current model. No announcement was made about the price of the new Focus Electric, but based on last year's model prices, it would be somewhere in the neighborhood of $30,000. That's not exactly an entry-level car purchase, but it's a lot more affordable than a Tesla at the moment, and if a pure EV fits your driving habits, it could slash your fuel bills for years and be a cleaner transport option than a fuel-efficient gas car.

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takyon writes:

Square Enix has angered fans of the Final Fantasy series by announcing that the Final Fantasy VII Remake will be released in episodic installments (archive.is):

It seems that Square Enix has unleashed a torrent of anger over the episodic nature [archive.is] of Final Fantasy VII Remake, so much so that producer Yoshinori Kitase has had to step in.

In a new blog post over on their site, Kitase has done his best to give his take on the situation. As he says, "One thing that we wanted to be clear about during this weekend to accompany the new trailer was the scale of this project. We wanted to tell you this now and not in the future so that you'd share our vision for what we want to deliver. The biggest reason why we haven't done a remake until now is because it's a massive undertaking to reconstruct Final Fantasy VII from the ground up with the current technology. Producing a proper HD remake of Final Fantasy VII that maintains the same feeling of density of the original would result in a volume of content that couldn't possibly fit into one installment."

"We've seen everyone's comments and reactions to the news that Final Fantasy VII Remake will be a multi-part series and many have speculated correctly as to the reason why we have made this decision. If we were to try to fit everything from the original into one remake installment, we would have to cut various parts and create a condensed version of Final Fantasy VII. We knew none of you would have wanted that."

The thing here though is that this is not really a remake of the original PSone game, this is a whole new and different game. In that sense, building the old game's narrative and setting would indeed become a huge undertaking with this new functional approach.

The argument here is that nobody asked Square Enix to change the game like this in the first place.

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oaklandwatch writes:

Wednesday Google hosted a special edition of their annual "Demo Day" event featuring 11 early-stage startup companies founded by women from eight different countries. More than 450 women from 40 different counties applied for a spot, and the winner of the competition was Bridgit, a fast-growing Canadian company which provides a mobile communications platform for construction teams. Online voters also awarded the "Game Changer" title to KiChing, a startup that's actively addressing Mexico's unique e-commerce challenges. But all of the startups at Wednesday's event were already actively raising series-A funding, and "We aim to help connect them to mentors, access to capital, and shine a spotlight on their efforts," said Mary Grove, the director of Google for Entrepreneurs, addressing the Demo Day audience in San Francisco.

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takyon writes:

NASA's Brian Muirhead has speculated about the best way to construct a "Death Star" or other weaponized space station:

The best way to build a Death Star is to construct one out of an already-existing asteroid, says Brian Muirhead, chief engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "It could provide the metals," he says. "You have organic compounds, you have water—all the building blocks you would need to build your family Death Star."

And Muirhead knows a thing or two about asteroids. He's actually working on NASA's Asteroid Redirect Mission, which will land on an asteroid, collect a piece, and then place it in orbit around the moon. A crewed mission will then go collect samples from that chunk while it's in orbit. (OK, so it's not quite building a Death Star, but it's still pretty cool.)

The Wired article includes a video.

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HughPickens.com writes:

With the imminent release of the new Star Wars film, The Force Awakens, many theatergoers are re-watching the original movies to reacquaint themselves with those stories from a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. This time, however, they may find themselves surprised by how much the film's characters and themes echo the current War On Terror. According to Jonathon Last, in the Star Wars films (not the Expanded Universe) the Empire is good and is engaged in a fight for the survival of its regime against a violent group of rebels who are committed to its destruction. Now an interesting article on the Star Wars films at Decider takes the re-interpretation a step further, arguing that the films are actually the story of the radicalization of Luke Skywalker. From introducing Luke to us in A New Hope (as a simple farm boy gazing into the Tatooine sunset), to his eventual transformation into the radicalized insurgent of Return of the Jedi (as one who sets his own father's corpse on fire and celebrates the successful bombing of the Death Star), each film in the original trilogy is another step in Luke's descent into terrorism.

According to the article Luke Skywalker is just the kind of isolated disaffected young man that terror recruiters seek out. Obi Wan — a religious fanatic with a history of looking for young boys to recruit and teach an extreme interpretation of the Force — tells Luke he must abandon his family and join him, going so far as telling a shocking lie that the Empire killed Luke's father, hoping to inspire Luke to a life of jihad. In The Empire Strikes Back, Luke is ordered to travel overseas to receive training and religious instruction from Yoda, an extremist cleric who runs a Jedi madrasa on Dagobah. Yoda's push to radicalize Luke, rob him of an identity, and instill obedience are apparent when at various points he instructs Luke to "Clear your mind of questions," "Unlearn what you have learned" and, most grimly, "Do, or do not, there is no try." Armed with new combat training and cloaked in a hardline religious fervor, Luke leaves Dagobah, impatient to put his terror training to use.Finally in Return of the Jedi, we see a darker, hardened Luke, fittingly dressed in black and eager to use violence as a tool to enforce the twisted "judge, jury, executioner" value system of the Jedi. "With Darth Vader the final casualty of Luke's jihad, Obi-Wan and Yoda have succeeded in catching yet another young man in their web of Jedi extremism," concludes the article. "Star Wars is clearly a cautionary tale of the dangers of radicalization, and how even a seemingly harmless young man who kept to himself on Tattooine can become the terrorist next door."

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takyon writes:

Gene therapy along with radiotherapy has been used to modify cancer cells in order to make them susceptible to the immune system:

A new gene therapy technique is able to modify prostate cancer cells so that a patient's body attacks and kills them, US scientists have discovered. The technique causes the tumour cells in the body to self-destruct, giving it the name 'suicide gene therapy'. Their research found a 20% improvement in survival in patients with prostate cancer five years after treatment. A cancer expert said more research was needed to judge its effectiveness. Prostate cancer is the most common cancer in men in the UK with more than 41,000 diagnosed each year.

The study, led by researchers from Houston Methodist Hospital in Texas, appears to show that this 'suicide gene therapy', when combined with radiotherapy, could be a promising treatment for prostate cancer in the future. The technique involves the cancer cells being genetically modified so that they signal a patient's immune system to attack them. Usually, the body does not recognise cancer cells as the enemy because they have evolved from normal healthy cells. Unlike an infection, which the body reacts against, the immune system does not react to kill off the offending cancer cells. Using a virus to carry the gene therapy into the tumour cells, the result is that the cells self-destruct, alerting the patient's immune system that it is time to launch a massive attack.

In two groups of 62 patients, one group received the gene therapy twice and the other group - who all had more aggressive prostate cancer - received the treatment three times. Both groups also received radiotherapy. Survival rates after five years were 97% and 94%. Although there was no control group in this study, the researchers said the results showed a five to 20% improvement on previous studies of prostate cancer treatment. And cancer biopsy tests performed two years after the trial were found to be negative in 83% and 79% of the patients in the two groups.

Dr Brian Butler, from Houston Methodist Hospital in Texas, said it could change the way that cancer is treated. "We may be able to inject the agent straight into the tumour and let the body kill the cancer cells. "Once the immune system has knowledge of the bad tumour cells, if they pop up again, the body will know to kill them."

Long-term outcome of a phase II trial using immunomodulatory in situ gene therapy in combination with intensity-modulated radiotherapy with or without hormonal therapy in the treatment of prostate cancer

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"gewg_" writes:

The Inquisitr reports:

On [December 7], Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders won the readers' poll for TIME's Person of the Year, which was conducted online.

The 74-year-old Senator won by [a] landslide, beating out other world-renowned leaders like Russian President Vladimir Putin, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, and even U.S. President Barack Obama.

[...] Bernie Sanders won [with] more than 10 percent of the total online votes, while his closest contender, Malala Yousafzai, a young Pakistani activist that fights for the education rights of girls in her country, only got 5.2 percent of the votes.

Aside from beating the U.S. president in the online poll, Bernie Sanders also overran his toughest competitors: Donald Trump (1.8%) and Hillary Clinton (1.4%).

[...] No U.S. presidential candidate has ever won the Person of the Year award prior to the results of the election. However, the fact that Sanders topped the poll is testament that there are still people who will choose to go for someone with whom they share similar views as opposed to someone who is "popular". [Submitter's quote marks; see "Nate Silver", below]

But while Sanders' cause may be noble, which is mostly likely why he earned the top spot in the Person of the Year online poll, it wasn't enough for him to take home the prize. Reportedly, Sanders' name was taken out of the short list from which the editors of TIME [were] supposed to make their choice for Person of the Year.

[...] TIME released the names of the eight finalists for the annual award on [December 8] [...] Sanders and his runner-up Yousafzai were not included in the list of finalists. The finalists included Putin, Trump, Rouhani, former Olympian and transgender Caitlyn Jenner, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Uber CEO Travis Kalanick, Black Lives Matter activists, and Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi, leader of jihadist group Islamic State.

On [December 9], TIME announced the winner during NBC's Today show. Angela Merkel was the unanimous choice of the TIME editors, making her the second individual woman to ever win the award.

The editors second choice was Trump.

This complete disregard for the readers' poll is hardly unprecendented, as demonstrated by the results from 2006:
Hugo Chavez wins "Person of the Year" poll; Time magazine ignores result

Unsurprising to many, AlterNet reports that Trump's presence in corporate media's coverage of the presidential contest is wildly disproportionate to his acceptance by USAian voters.

Trump's true level of support, [according to phenomenally accurate pollster Nate Silver, is] 6 percent to 8 percent of the electorate--or roughly "the same share of people who think the Apollo moon landings were faked", the pollster said.

Previous: Bernie Sanders Leads TIME Magazine's Person of the Year Readers' Poll

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"exec" writes in via IRC with this article from The Guardian :

A burglary suspect fleeing police dogs and a helicopter in Florida wades into a dark lake and disappears. Three weeks later his remains are found inside an alligator.

Was he killed by police?

It is an extreme example of the difficulty faced with increasing frequency by data scientists working on a new US government count of deaths in interactions with police – a count that appears likely to soar beyond all previous attempts, now that the issue has reached the highest levels of both protest and power.

As esoteric as the task may seem, the objective is deadly serious: to measure the true dimensions of an epidemic of lethal violence committed by police across the country on often unarmed civilians. A majority of the victims, such as Chicago teenager Laquan McDonald, die in police gunfire. Others, such as the New York father Eric Garner, may die in a banned chokehold or, like the Baltimore 25-year-old Freddie Gray whose death is currently being prosecuted, from injuries in a police vehicle.

At the start of 2015, the Guardian launched The Counted, a public-service project tallying and shedding light on such cases, which has reached a tally of 1,068 so far. Last week, the Federal Bureau of Investigation revealed plans for a similar counting effort, after grossly misrepresenting the problem in eight previous years with annual figures averaging 423.

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carguy writes:

It looks like the PHBs are trying to figure out how to monetize a low latency car-car (and car-highway) data network before it is even deployed. Here's a cutting from a recent editorial in Automotive Engineering (Society of Automotive Engineers, SAE), discussing 5.9-GHz dedicated short range communications (DSRC).

And GM appears to have already patented V2V and V2X adverts.

Knowing GM, this is probably a defensive patent, to plant a stake in the ground in case a patent troll comes along.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Astronomers have detected a giant storm on the surface of a low mass L-dwarf star:

Astronomers have discovered what appears to be a tiny star with a giant, cloudy storm, using data from NASA's Spitzer and Kepler space telescopes. The dark storm is akin to Jupiter's Great Red Spot: a persistent, raging storm larger than Earth.

"The star is the size of Jupiter, and its storm is the size of Jupiter's Great Red Spot," said John Gizis of the University of Delaware, Newark. "We know this newfound storm has lasted at least two years, and probably longer." Gizis is the lead author of a new study appearing in The Astrophysical Journal.

While planets have been known to have cloudy storms, this is the best evidence yet for a star that has one. The star, referred to as W1906+40, belongs to a thermally cool class of objects called L-dwarfs. Some L-dwarfs are considered stars because they fuse atoms and generate light, as our sun does, while others, called brown dwarfs, are known as "failed stars" for their lack of atomic fusion.

[...] Spitzer has observed other cloudy brown dwarfs before, finding evidence for short-lived storms lasting hours and perhaps days.

In the new study, the astronomers were able to study changes in the atmosphere of W1906+40 for two years. The L-dwarf had initially been discovered by NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer in 2011. Later, Gizis and his team realized that this object happened to be located in the same area of the sky where NASA's Kepler mission had been staring at stars for years to hunt for planets.

WISEP J190648.47+401106.8, also known as W1906+40.

Kepler Monitoring of an L Dwarf II. Clouds with Multiyear Lifetimes

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takyon writes:

TorrentFreak reports on WebTorrent, a project using BitTorrent and WebRTC to transport files:

WebTorrent is a project launched by Feross Aboukhadijeh, a Stanford University graduate who has already booked quite a few successes in his career. After graduating he founded PeerCDN, a P2P-assisted content delivery network, which was sold to Yahoo at the end of 2013. Feross then focused on WebTorrent, convinced that it could revolutionize how the web works today.

"I felt that the idea of 'people-powered websites' – websites that are hosted by the visitors who use them – was too revolutionary to keep locked up as proprietary software, and I wanted to do more to push the idea forward," he tells TF. "Imagine a video site like YouTube, where visitors help to host the site's content. The more people that use a WebTorrent-powered website, the faster and more resilient it becomes."

[...] "WebTorrent is the first torrent client built for the web. It's written completely in JavaScript – the language of the web – and uses WebRTC for true peer-to-peer transport. No browser plugin, extension, or installation is required," Feross tells TF.

Over the past two years WebTorrent has matured into a project that's slowly starting to win over several major tech companies. Netflix, for example, contacted Feross to discuss his technology which they may use to stream their videos. A few months ago Netflix specifically mentioned WebTorrent in a job application, which shows that the video giant is serious about P2P-assisted delivery.

[More After the Break]

takyon writes:

Facebook's offices in Hamburg, Germany have been attacked by a group of unknown assailants:

Vandals have damaged a building housing Facebook's offices in Hamburg, smashing glass, throwing paint and spraying "Facebook dislike" on a wall, police in the northern German city said on Sunday. The overnight attack on the social networking group was carried out by a group of 15-20 people wearing black clothes and hoods, police said in a statement. An investigation had been launched.

A Facebook spokesman said nobody was injured in the incident. He said he could not immediately comment on the possible motive for the act of vandalism.

The European head of Facebook is under investigation in Germany over the social network's alleged failure to remove racist hate speech. The investigation was announced last month as German politicians and celebrities voiced concern about the rise of anti-foreigner comments in German on Facebook and other social media as the country struggles to cope with a refugee influx. Martin Ott, Facebook's managing director for northern, central and eastern Europe based in Hamburg, may be held responsible for the social platform's failure to remove hate speech, a spokeswoman for the prosecution said last month.

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

The United Kingdom is holding a consultation as to when a provision of the Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Act 2013 should take effect. Copyright in works of artistic craftsmanship—utilitarian objects (even if mass-produced) which are deemed artistic—shall be extended. Currently, the copyright lasts for 25 years after an item is first offered for sale; the new term will be for the life of the creator, then another 70 years. This means that some works which are now in the public domain will become copyrighted. Publishers of derivative works of such items, for example a book or film in which a work of artistic craftsmanship was photographed, will be obliged to obtain permissions, except for uses which fall under fair dealing.

The provisions may come into effect as soon as 2016, or as late as five years hence, depending on the outcome of the consultation.

• Ars Technica
• Boing Boing
• dezeen.com

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takyon writes:

VentureBeat reports on one of the user suggestions that have been made for HoloLens (an augmented reality headset) app development:

One of the more interesting parts of the Microsoft's HoloLens augmented reality initiative is the way Microsoft is listening to the public to direct some of its early-stage app development for the platform, through the Share Your Idea website launched earlier this month.

One of the top three ideas on the site, based on votes, is called Cortana in Person. Cortana, of course, is Microsoft's personal digital assistant that plays a starring role in Windows 10. She's a Siri competitor that, as gamers will know, was derived from the Cortana artificial intelligence character in the Halo series of games.

"Hologram of Cortana from Halo who you can talk to and interact with," forum user LookItsKris wrote in his description of the idea for Cortana in Person. "Works in the same way as Cortana on desktop/phone. Get answers to questions etc. Maybe ask a question on HoloLens and answers come through on phone? Possibilities are endless."

"Dude, that would be so awesome. A real-life Cortana," commenter H4rmonicAn4rchy wrote. "Who wouldn't want that?!"

Because Microsoft will actually build the top three ideas from the site, there is a chance that Microsoft will bring the idea to life for HoloLens, whose $3,000 development kits will be shipping in the first quarter of 2016.

The Cortana digital assisstant has been launched for iOS and Android devices, although some features will be limited compared to the Windows versions.

Previously: Microsoft Giving $500,000 to Academia to Develop HoloLens Apps
Microsoft Announces Surface Pro 4, Surface Book, and HoloLens Dev Edition

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