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takyon writes:

Tesla has received 325,000 preorders in the first week for its Model 3 electric car. The starting price of the car is $35,000, and preorders cost $1,000. However, those preorders are refundable, and the company has faced delays for previous vehicles, leading to skepticism about the company's ambitions:

Especially at a time when the automobile seems to be slouching toward commodification, the sight of Tesla fans lining up at stores across the world hoping to put down deposits on a car they had never seen before was nothing short of mind-blowing. But as stunning as this feat of stunt salesmanship was, it was just that: Tesla has not actually sold any Model 3s and there are a wide range of reasons for believing that these pre-order eggs will not hatch into the chickens that Tesla is already counting. In fact, there are reasons to suggest that the entire pre-order play is all a gambit designed to boost the company's stock ahead of a much-needed return to capital markets.

The article goes on to point out Tesla's troubles in China, where speculators placed huge amounts of orders and inflated the actual demand.

takyon writes:

Astrophysicists from the Physics Institute at the University of Bern have calculated upper and lower limits for the size, temperature, and luminosity of the hypothetical icy giant known as "Planet Nine":

In their paper accepted by the journal "Astronomy & Astrophysics" the scientists conclude that a planet with the projected mass equal to 10 Earth masses has a present-day radius of 3.7 Earth radii. Its temperature is minus 226 degrees Celsius or 47 Kelvin. "This means that the planet's emission is dominated by the cooling of its core, otherwise the temperature would only be 10 Kelvin," explains Esther Linder: "Its intrinsic power is about 1000 times bigger than its absorbed power." Therefore, the reflected sunlight contributes only a minor part to the total radiation that could be detected. This also means that the planet is much brighter in the infrared than in the visual. "With our study candidate Planet 9 is now more than a simple point mass, it takes shape having physical properties," says Christoph Mordasini.

The researchers also checked if their results explain why planet 9 hasn't been detected by telescopes so far. They calculated the brightness of smaller and bigger planets on various orbits. They conclude that the sky surveys performed in the past had only a small chance to detect an object with a mass of 20 Earth masses or less, especially if it is near the farthest point of its orbit around the Sun. But NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer may have spotted a planet with a mass equal to 50 Earth masses or more. "This puts an interesting upper mass limit for the planet," Esther Linder explains. According to the scientists, future telescopes like the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope under construction near Cerro Tololo in Chile or dedicated surveys should be able to find or rule out candidate Planet 9. "That is an exciting perspective," says Christoph Mordasini.

Evolution and magnitudes of candidate planet nine (open, DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361/201628350) and arXiv link

Previously: Closing in on Planet Nine

Original Submission

butthurt writes:

Network World interviewed H. D. Moore, one of the founders of the Open Source Vulnerability Database (OSVDB) and creator of the Metasploit Framework. The closing of the OSVDB project was announced in a blog post (archived copy) during the first week of April.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Linus Torvalds: The mind behind Linux (transcript)

In a rare interview with TED Curator Chris Anderson, Torvalds discusses with remarkable openness the personality traits that prompted his unique philosophy of work, engineering and life. "I am not a visionary, I'm an engineer," Torvalds says. "I'm perfectly happy with all the people who are walking around and just staring at the clouds ... but I'm looking at the ground, and I want to fix the pothole that's right in front of me before I fall in."

Related: Linus Torvalds on 25 Years of Linux

Original Submission

c0lo writes:

Australian Broadcast Corporation reports on the "signs of our time", like health insurance's reliance on gadgets to assess a healthy life style, privacy issues, and trust/security:

In a perfect world, we'd all walk 10,000 steps a day. But if you find looking at your fitness tracker a bit depressing, these US artists may have a solution. Unfit Bits is a satirical project, prompted by a recent push for insurance customers to share their health data. It offers creative ways to "spoof" your stats - without taking a step.

Tega Brain is a New York-based artist and data engineer who, together with Surya Mattu, developed Unfit Bits.

"Unfit Bits is a project that presents solutions and ways that you might be able to spoof your fitness data," Ms Brain said.

"So you might be able to create or fabricate a fitness dataset that makes it look like you are much more active than maybe you are."

On the Unfit Bits website you can find a bunch of innovative — and comic — ways to fake your fitness data, such as attaching your fitness tracker to a dog or a metronome.

[...] But as funny as watching a video of an office worker spin her fitness device on a power drill is, there's also a serious side to the Unfit Bits project.

[Continues...]

Phoenix666 writes:

An ancient site in Laos, known as the Plain of Jars, is finally beginning to give up its secrets, as the first major excavation effort since the 1930s digs into its mysteries.

Strewn over hundreds of square miles in central Laos, thousands of ceramic jars ranging from three to nine feet in height pepper the landscape, scattered in clusters of anywhere between one and 400 individual pieces.

[...] And while the specific function of these jars is still to be determined, those involved in the most recent work have their theories.

One such theory is that the pots were actually used for decomposition, as lead researcher Dougald O'Reilly of Australian National University in Canberra explained in a statement.

The professor hypothesized that once the process was complete, the bones would then be buried nearby. But whatever the details, he is now convinced that the jars "were used for the disposal of the dead."

Wikipedia says, "[Grave sites] are one of the chief sources of information on prehistoric cultures, and numerous archaeological cultures are defined by their burial customs."

What does it say about ancient cultures in Laos that they put their dead in big stone jars?

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Technology companies routinely build sprawling data centers to store all the baby pictures, financial transactions, funny cat videos and email messages its users hoard.

But a new technique developed by University of Washington and Microsoft researchers could shrink the space needed to store digital data that today would fill a Walmart supercenter down to the size of a sugar cube.

The team of computer scientists and electrical engineers has detailed one of the first complete systems to encode, store and retrieve digital data using DNA molecules, which can store information millions of times more compactly than current archival technologies.

In one experiment outlined in a paper presented in April at the ACM International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems, the team successfully encoded digital data from four image files into the nucleotide sequences of synthetic DNA snippets.

More significantly, they were also able to reverse that process -- retrieving the correct sequences from a larger pool of DNA and reconstructing the images without losing a single byte of information.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

When a dying star goes supernova, material sprays out into space. If this stellar burst of energy happens close enough, radioactive debris can rain down onto Earth.

This material could hold clues into mysteries of our own corner of space. So two research teams, in new studies both published Wednesday in the journal Nature, looked at deposits of the radioactive isotope iron-60 – essentially cosmic bread crumbs.

One team used the data in a model to determine when and where two recent, in cosmic terms, supernovae occurred. And their work could help unravel the mystery of the Local Bubble, a mass of hot gas that enshrouds our solar system.

Recent near-Earth supernovae probed by global deposition of interstellar radioactive ⁶⁰Fe (DOI: 10.1038/nature17196)

The locations of recent supernovae near the Sun from modelling ⁶⁰Fe transport (DOI: 10.1038/nature17424)

Original Submission

FrogBlast writes:

SpaceX's Falcon 9 booster for the Dragon spacecraft has successfully landed on a barge for the first time. The experimental landing was not the primary goal of the mission, which is taking supplies and experiments (including the Bigelow inflatable module) to the International Space Station. Ars Technica covered the launch, and a live stream was available on YouTube.

Ars Technica . YouTube Stream. Ars Technica's story about the Bigelow module, for the curious.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Some Tuesday morning listeners of KIFT, a Top 40 radio station located in Breckenridge, Colorado, were treated to a radically different programming menu than they were used to. Instead of the normal fare from Taylor Swift, The Chainsmokers, or other pop stars, a hack by an unknown party caused one of the station's signals to broadcast a sexually explicit podcast related to the erotic attraction to furry characters. The unauthorized broadcast lasted for about 90 minutes.

KIFT wasn't the only station to be hit by the hack. On the same day, Livingston, Texas-based country music station KXAX also broadcast raunchy furry-themed audio. And according to an article posted Wednesday by radio industry news site RadioInsight.com, the unauthorized broadcasts from a hobbyist group called FurCast were also forced on an unnamed station in Denver and an unidentified national syndicator.

takyon: It's always a good time to remember this incident.

Original Submission

Celestial writes:

The battle over the Brave web browser has begun. A group of seventeen newspaper publishers (including Dow Jones, the Washington Post, and the New York Times), have sent and co-signed a "cease and desist" letter to the company behind the Brave web browser, (headed by Brendan Eich, former CEO of Mozilla and developer of JavaScript).

... the 17 newspaper-publishing companies that cosigned the cease and desist letter [PDF] sent to Eich on Thursday say that this business model is "blatantly illegal" because they claim Brave is profiting from the "$5 billion" a year the industry spends on funding journalism.

The publishers argue that Brave's advertising-replacement plan would constitute copyright infringement, a violation of the publishers' terms of use, unfair competition, unauthorized access to their sites, and a breach of contract.

The letter compares Brave's business model to a company simply stealing their articles and pasting them on their own websites for profit.

For those that don't recall the announcement of the Brave web browser:

Brendan Eich's new browser, Brave, announced its launch early this year. The browser — available on iOS, Android, OS X, Windows, and Linux — has ad-blocking software baked into it, which blocks all ads by default and replaces them with its own ads that it says load quicker and "protect data sovereignty [and] anonymity" of users by blocking tracking pixels and cookies.

With Brave, publishers get around 55% of revenues: 15% go to Brave, 15% go to the partner that serves the ads, and 10% to 15% goes back to the user, who can choose to make bitcoin donations to their favorite publishers in order to get an ad-free experience on their websites...

Previous Coverage: Former Mozilla CEO Launches Brave, a Privacy Oriented Browser

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

US researchers are launching studies on Mexico's red-crowned parrot — a species that has been adapting so well to living in cities in California and Texas after escaping from the pet trade that the population may now rival that in its native country.

The research comes amid debate over whether some of the birds flew across the border into Texas and should be listed under the Endangered Species Act.

Parrots in U.S. urban areas are just starting to draw attention from scientists because of their intelligence, resourcefulness and ability to adapt. There is also a growing realization that the city dwellers may offer a population that could help save certain species from extinction.

Red-crowned parrots aren't alone. In Brooklyn, for example, there are large colonies of monk parrots, some of whom enjoy pizza.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Scientists embarked on a study of sperm whales to understand whether Herman Melville's tale of a whale that sunk a ship by ramming it with its massive forehead is truly fact or fiction.
...

Based on mechanics — the research team included a bioengineer — the team decided that a sperm whale can ram an object more than twice its size without any ill effects whatsoever. The "junk" portion of the forehead can safely absorb and distribute the stress of impact, Milafel Dacanay reported for Tech Times. 

But researchers also wonder if sperm whales get their large foreheads from their mammal origins. Their fellow mammal cousins, with rams being one example, are famous for more observable instances of ramming, often fighting over mates — suggesting that Captain Ahab and his real-life fellows may have been victims of a sexual competition mechanism gone awry. 

So...Moby Dick liked the cut of the Pequod's jib?

Architecture of the sperm whale forehead facilitates ramming combat (open, DOI: 10.7717/peerj.1895)

Original Submission

Justin Case writes:

Two outspoken privacy activists were awakened at 6:15 a.m. by a team of six detectives from the Seattle Police Department, who demanded passwords to access the couple's computers, saying they were investigating child abuse imagery.

Police obtained a warrant after tracing the illegal imagery to the couple's home IP address, but police also knew they host an exit node for the Tor network.

The police department acknowledged that no child porn was found, no assets were seized, and no arrests were made. But the couple reported being "petrified" and felt "violated" anyway [ed: the couple consented to the search and gave up passwords].

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Facebook Inc. is working to combat a decline in people sharing original, personal content, the fuel that helps power the money machine at the heart of its social network, according to people familiar with the matter.

Overall sharing has remained "strong," according to Facebook. However, people have been less willing to post updates about their lives as their lists of friends grow, the people said.

Instead, Facebook's 1.6 billion users are posting more news and information from other websites. As Facebook ages, users may have more than a decade's worth of acquaintances added as friends. People may not always feel comfortable checking into a local bar or sharing an anecdote from their lives, knowing these updates may not be relevant to all their connections.

[...] Original sharing of personal stories -- rather than posts about public information like news articles -- dropped 21 percent year over year as of mid-2015, The Information, a tech news site, reported Wednesday. Facebook said in a statement that "the overall level of sharing has remained not only strong, but similar to levels in prior years."

Maybe it's not how much you share, but how you share and in what setting.

Original Submission