SoylentNews

takyon writes:

The BBC and The New York Times report that pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and diagnostics companies are demanding more money and/or new economic models to incentivize the development of new antibiotics:

In a declaration that is being released on Thursday at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, the companies say that governments must work with companies to fight the problem of antimicrobial resistance, in which many germs are no longer killed by common antibiotics and in some cases even by last-ditch options, turning once-treatable infections into life-threatening events. The signers of the declaration include such big pharmaceutical companies as AstraZeneca, GlaxoSmithKline, Johnson & Johnson, Merck and Pfizer as well as some smaller biotech companies and some generic manufacturers in India.

[...] "We support the increasing recognition that the value assigned to antibiotics and diagnostics often does not reflect the benefits they bring to society, nor the investment required for their creation," the document says. It calls for "prompt reimbursement" at prices that reflect such value. But it also says that other "transformational commercial models" might be needed to spur development and also to cut down on unnecessary use of antibiotics, which contributes to the development of antimicrobial resistance. One idea is to have governments or a global organization pay a drug company a big lump sum when an antibiotic is developed. That could reduce the need for pharmaceutical companies to promote their products to spur sales.

The Wall Street Journal adds:

Jim O'Neill, the former Goldman Sachs economist who is running a review on antimicrobial resistance for the U.K. government, called the declaration a "major step forward" in establishing a global response to the threat of drug resistance. "I'm really impressed that such a wide range of companies have been able to agree on a common set of principles and commitments across these important issues," he said. "This is a level of consensus that we have not previously seen from the industry on this topic."

The group said it would review and update the declaration every two years "to reflect progress and changing priorities," and invited other companies to add their signatures to the declaration.

Declaration by the Pharmaceutical, Biotechnology and Diagnostics Industries on Combating Antimicrobial Resistance (PDF)

Companion article linked by the BBC: Impact of antibiotic restrictions: the pharmaceutical perspective (DOI: 10.1111/j.1469-0691.2006.01528.x)

Original Submission

Former Mozilla CEO Launches Brave, a New Adblock Browser

Celestial writes:

Brave Software, a new startup by Brendan Eich (creator of the JavaScript programming language and former CEO of Mozilla), unveiled the new Brave browser today for Windows, Mac OS X, Android, and iOS. The Brave browser is currently in beta, based on Chromium, and aims to block most advertisements, while still potentially making money for publishers.

Brave will block all non-native ads, trackers, analytics scripts and impression-tracking pixels. However, the browser will eventually insert advertisements of its own, but which Brendan Eich claims to be unintrusive, with no persistent user id or highly re-identifiable cookie. The aim of Brave isn't to create a list of approved advertisers, or to aggressively pursue ad dollars: "We hope our users will form a valuable enough audience that our browser-side anonymous targeting will get ads from the buy side organically. We don't want to play games."

Beyond privacy protection, Eich promises Brave's browser will come with a speed boost: It loads pages two to four times faster than other smartphone browsers and 1.4 times faster than other browsers for personal computers.

[Continues...]

Phoenix666 writes:

I've noticed a trend lately. Rather than replacing a router when it literally stops working, I've needed to act earlier—swapping in new gear because an old router could no longer keep up with increasing Internet speeds available in the area. (Note, I am duly thankful for this problem.) As the latest example, a whole bunch of Netgear ProSafe 318G routers failed me for the last time as small businesses have upgraded from 1.5-9mbps traditional T1 connections to 50mbps coax (cable).

Yes, coax—not fiber. Even coax has proved too much for the old ProSafe series. These devices didn't just fail to keep up, they fell flat on their faces. Frequently, the old routers dropped speed test results from 9mbps with the old connection to 3mbps or less with the 50mbps connection. Obviously, that doesn't fly.

These days, the answer increasingly seems to be wireless routers. These tend to be long on slick-looking plastic and brightly colored Web interfaces but short on technical features and reliability. What's a mercenary sysadmin to do? Well, at its core, anything with two physical network interfaces can be a router. And today, there are lots and lots of relatively fast, inexpensive, and (super important!) fully solid-state generic boxes out there.

So, the time had finally come. Faced with aging hardware and new consumer offerings that didn't meet my needs, I decided to build my own router. And if today's morphing connectivity landscape leaves you in a similar position, it turns out that both the building and the build are quite fast.

[The story contains two parts and contains comparison data on throughput in multiple scenarios. -Ed.]

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Drivers are only too familiar with phantom traffic jams: those occasions when you slow to a complete standstill, which frustratingly appear to have no concrete cause. In fact, they do have a cause – just not an obvious one. Thanks to decades of scientific research, we now have theories that not only explain why jams happen but point to ways of preventing them.

Experiments on traffic flow date back to 1933 – just 25 years after Ford's Model T went on sale. American traffic engineer Bruce Greenshields took a movie camera out to a section of highway to record how many cars passed along it, and how long it took them.
...
For traffic, it was mathematicians James Lighthill and Gerald Whitham who came up with a theory to predict the properties of a highway. Inspired by "theories of the flow about supersonic projectiles and of flood movement in rivers", it used the physics of kinematic waves, treating traffic like particles in a liquid.

The theory introduced the idea of shock waves in traffic. In places where cars slow up or accelerate, a traffic wave ripples back down the road. Waves, they said, were "likely to occur on any stretch of road where the traffic is denser in front and less dense behind."
...
In other words, traffic jams needn't be caused by a broken down vehicle or an accident. Just as, under the right conditions, a speck of dust can cause water vapor to condense into liquid in a cloud, the actions of a single driver could cause a jam.

MIT traffic researcher Prof Berthold Horn explains: "Suppose that you introduce a perturbation by just braking really hard for a moment, then that will propagate upstream and increase in amplitude as it goes away from you. It's kind of a chaotic system. It has positive feedback, and some little perturbation can get it going."

Horn has developed an algorithm that could smooth out traffic jams, technology permitting. If cars could sense the distance to other cars both ahead and behind them, they could keep an even distance between the two. A simulation shows the algorithm taking effect after the traffic first bunches up:

Interesting article worth reading in full, complete with illustrative animations.

Original Submission

AndyTheAbsurd writes:

http://www.cnbc.com/2016/01/19/stolen-uber-accounts-worth-more-than-stolen-credit-cards.html

This is why I only use Lyft.

Original Submission

e_armadillo writes:

I saw this a few days ago, and am surprised it hasn't been linked on Soylent.

The Information Technology & Innovation Foundation (ITIF) has awarded Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, and Bill Gates, among others, the second annual ITIF Luddite award. This is due to the tone of their warnings regarding AI during 2015. Details on CNET:

Musk "is the antithesis of a Luddite, but I do think he's giving aid and comfort to the Luddite community," said Rob Atkinson, president of the Washington, DC-based think tank. Musk, Hawking and AI experts say "this is the largest existential threat to humanity. That's not a very winning message if you want to get AI funding out of Congress to the National Science Foundation," Atkinson said.

[...] Last January, [Musk and Hawking] signed an open letter issued by the Future of Life Institute pledging that advancements in the field wouldn't grow beyond humanity's control. In July, they signed another letter urging a ban on autonomous weapons that "select and engage targets without human intervention." The Future of Life Institute researches ways to reduce the potential risks of artificial intelligence running amok. It was founded by mathematicians and computer science experts, including Jaan Tallinn, a co-founder of Skype, and MIT professor Max Tegmark.

Gates last year said he and Musk are on the same page. "I agree with Elon Musk and some others on this and don't understand why some people are not concerned," he said in a Reddit AskMeAnything thread.

What are the thoughts of Soylentils? Deserved? or no?

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

The UK government's official voice encryption protocol, around which it is hoping to build an ecosystem of products, has a massive backdoor that would enable the security services to intercept and listen to all past and present calls, a researcher has discovered.

Dr Steven Murdoch of University College London has posted an extensive blog post digging into the MIKEY-SAKKE spec in which he concludes that it has been specifically designed to "allow undetectable and unauditable mass surveillance."

He notes that in the "vast majority of cases" the protocol would be "actively harmful for security."

Murdoch uses the EFF's scorecard as a way of measuring the security of MIKEY-SAKKE, and concludes that it only manages to meet one of the four key elements for protocol design, namely that it provides end-to-end encryption.

And yet, the GCHQ and NSA go unpilloried...

Original Submission

AnonTechie writes:

Disruptive labor market changes, including the rise of robots and artificial intelligence, will result in a net loss of 5.1 million jobs over the next five years in 15 leading countries, according to an analysis published in Davos on Monday. The projection by the World Economic Forum (WEF), which is holding its annual meeting in the Swiss ski resort this week, assumes a total loss of 7.1 million jobs, offset by a gain of 2 million new positions.

The 15 economies covered by the survey account for approximately 65 percent of the world's total workforce. The assessment highlights the challenges posed by modern technologies that are automating and making redundant multiple human tasks, from manufacturing to healthcare.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/robot-job-replacement_569cf3b3e4b0778f46f9f9b3

[Also Covered By]:
ENGADGET

CNN Money

The full report [PDF], titled "The Future of Jobs," is available here.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Over my whole programming experience, I've gone back and forth on the question of object-oriented programming, yay or nay. In this last year, though, I've finally settled conclusively in the nay column, and this is my attempt to articulate exactly why.
...
Object-Oriented Programming is supposed to help us manage state and model problems in terms of familiar objects, but it turns out to be really, really easy to put behaviors in the wrong objects and thereby produce Frankenstein entities that make no natural sense. We quickly end up with unnecessarily complicated and confusing code that actually exacerbates the proliferation of state and promiscuous state sharing (e.g. a Message wants to send itself, so now a Message needs a reference to a Connection object that it otherwise wouldn't need).
...
For years, I took it on authority that Object-Oriented Programming was The Right Way to code, even though I had the constant sense that every class and method I wrote was creating problems for myself down the line, that every possible object decomposition was at best arguable and would eventually need restructuring. Fitting every problem into the mold of classes felt like playing a fool's game with no right answers.

Now that I've stopped chasing the chimera of 'proper' object decomposition, I'm much happier and more productive. Of course, in procedural programming, there is no one way to properly decompose a solution either. But with procedural programming, I no longer feel like I'm adding a layer of structure that provides no benefits yet adds complications and confusion to my code.

Do you agree?

Original Submission

New Info From MS to Prevent Windows 10 Installation on Your Domain.

cmn32480 writes:

I know that many here simply don't care about Windows. Fortunately or not, some of us are tied to it for our livelihood, and it is the vehicle by which we keep a roof over our heads and food in our stomachs.

In a not very surprising statement, Microsoft has announced via their Technet Blog that they are expanding the un-requested installation of Windows 10 onto PC's that are domain connected.

The response to Windows 10 has been incredible with over 200 million devices running Windows 10 around the world. A portion of that excitement is due to our popular free upgrade offer on qualified Windows 7 and 8.1 devices running Windows Home and Pro editions.

Many consumers have taken advantage of this offer thanks to an easy-to-use app called "Get Windows 10". This app introduces users to Windows 10, checks their PC for compatibility with Windows 10, and notifies the user when their PC is ready to upgrade. The Get Windows 10 app has been a popular method for consumers to quickly and easily upgrade to Windows 10.

Somebody drank a little too much Kool-aid before writing this blog post.

MS released a knowledge base article on January 13, 2016, that tells how to prevent installation via both Group Policy and via registry key.

I also note that there are still no instructions from MS on how to turn off the telemetry and phoning home of the new operating system.

Phoenix666 writes:

Recently countries with great renewable energy resources have made impressive achievements in clean energy generation. Last year, Costa Rica met 99 percent of its energy demand with a mix of renewable energy and Scotland's wind turbines generated the equivalent electricity of 97% of its households' energy needs, though what was consumed was still a mix of renewables and fossil fuels.

Now, Denmark says it has hit a world record for the amount of wind energy consumed in a year with 42.1 percent of the country's energy needs being met by wind power according to the state-owned energy company Energinet.

The Scandinavian country says that although more wind energy was added to the grid last year, the major gain was because of a windier year than usual that kept the turbines spinning and cranking out electricity year round. Denmark was already getting a significant chunk of electricity from wind power with 2014 seeing 39.1 percent of their energy needs being met by wind.

These rising numbers are getting the country closer to its goal of having 50 percent of its energy demand satisfied by wind power by 2020.

Too bad there's no wind in the United States, or they could do something like this too.

Original Submission

AndyTheAbsurd writes:

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jan/20/google-says-isis-must-be-locked-out-of-the-open-web

takyon: In related news, the briefing document for the recent summit between White House officials and Internet companies has been posted online.

Original Submission

AndyTheAbsurd writes:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/head-transplant-has-been-successfully-done-on-a-monkey-maverick-neurosurgeon-sergio-canavero-claims-a6822361.html

takyon: Coverage at New Scientist with a "graphic content warning".

Previously: First Human Head Transplant Could Happen in Two Years
Complete Head Transplant or Complete Publicity Stunt

Original Submission

bziman writes:

Researchers at CalTech have found evidence of what they refer to as a real ninth planet in our solar system.

Caltech researchers, Batygin and Brown, have found evidence of a giant planet tracing a bizarre, highly elongated orbit in the outer solar system. The object, which the researchers have nicknamed Planet Nine, has a mass about 10 times that of Earth and orbits about 20 times farther from the sun on average than does Neptune (which orbits the sun at an average distance of 2.8 billion miles). In fact, it would take this new planet between 10,000 and 20,000 years to make just one full orbit around the sun.

I'm old enough that Pluto is still a planet for me, but finding a new planet in the solar system would be really cool. I wonder if it is really there, and if so, who will be the first to locate it directly.

takyon: Coverage at Nature.

Evidence for a distant giant planet in the solar system (open, DOI: 10.3847/0004-6256/151/2/22)

Original Submission

AndyTheAbsurd writes:

http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_29404805/new-intel-chip-designed-foil-hackers

The usual caveats of "biometrics are bad for authentication purposes" apply - fortunately, it looks like many other options are available.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

The Navy is launching a carrier strike group to be powered partly by biofuel, calling it a milestone toward easing the military's reliance on foreign oil.

The maritime branch is touting the warships as the centerpiece of its "Great Green Fleet." Most of the group's ships will be run for now on a mix made up of 90 percent petroleum and only 10 percent biofuels, though that could change in the future. The Navy originally aimed for the ratio to be 50/50.

Meanwhile, critics, including environmentalists, say biofuel production is too costly and on a large scale may do more harm than good.

Navy Secretary Ray Mabus and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack were scheduled on Wednesday to inspect the ships before they set sail off San Diego. They are headed up by the nuclear-powered USS John C. Stennis supercarrier.

Mabus said going green is not just about reducing the Navy's carbon footprint.

"In 2010, we were losing too many Marines in convoys carrying fossil fuels to outposts in Afghanistan, and the prohibitive cost of oil was requiring us to stop training at home in order to keep steaming abroad, a dangerous and unsustainable scenario," he said in a statement.

The Navy is aiming to draw half its power from alternative energy sources by 2020 so ships can refuel less, stay out at sea longer and no longer be at the mercy of fluctuating oil prices and oil-producing nations, which may not all have U.S. interests in mind, Mabus said. The federal government has invested more than $500 million into drop-in biofuels, which can be used without reconfiguring engines.

Original Submission