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takyon writes:

McDonald's profits have spiked following a shift to serving breakfast all day long among other changes:

McDonald's profits jumped by 35% in the first three months of the year, boosted by the continued popularity of its all-day breakfast and cut-price offers in the US. The world's biggest restaurant chain saw net income of $1.1bn (£763m), against $811.5 last year. [...] The company's chief executive Steve Easterbrook joined just over a year ago and announced a turnaround programme. This included extending breakfasts beyond 10:30am in the US, in response to customer demand, and simplifying restaurant operations.

Meanwhile, the company is running full-page advertisements in Israel after the country's health minister called for a boycott of McDonald's, and is testing a bigger Big Mac in Ohio and Dallas locations.

But not everything is all rosy under the golden arches. A TIME article reported: Teen Arrested for Felony Robbery After Filling McDonald’s Water Cup With Soda. A local news report provided these details about the incident at a Springdale, Arkansas McDonald's:

The manager told police 3 people went through the drive thru and asked for 3 large waters. Those 3 parked, went into the restaurant, dumped out the water and then filled the cups with soda, the manager told police.

The manager asked the 3 people to return the soda. Two of them did, but one did not, the manager told police.

Then, the manager stood behind the suspect's car and tried to stop them from leaving, according to the report, but the car reversed and hit the manager. The manager tried to get the keys out of the ignition and was hit on the hand and then by the vehicle again, the manager told police.

The police filed a single charge against the teen: felony robbery.

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Phoenix666 writes:

Honda revealed the new Clarity Fuel Cell at last year's Tokyo Motor Show and began sales in Japan on March 10, delivering the very first one to the Japanese Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry later that month. It plans to launch the model in select UK, Denmark and California markets later this year. The car's 174-hp motor is capable of pushing it up to around 466 miles (750 km) on the Japanese JC08 drive cycle (estimated 300-mile+ US EPA rating) per hydrogen fill-up thanks to its new power-dense fuel cell stack. Refueling takes three to five minutes, according to Honda.

While intriguing from a technological standpoint, fuel cell cars are still a young technology with lack of an accompanying hydrogen fueling infrastructure, so they're not exactly a large-volume cash cow for auto manufacturers. To give the Clarity more legs, Honda will launch the electric and plug-in hybrid versions in the US in 2017. The expansion will also give Honda more flexibility in responding to any changes in the market or infrastructure, the automaker explains.

Honda has had EV versions of some of its models for a few years now, but they haven't been widely available. "Select markets" makes it sound like that's not going to change with these models.

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"exec" writes:

The continued calls for the U.S. Congress to ban effective encryption despite the current computer security crisis in which data breaches are regular news is dangerous, shortsighted, and destined to harm all Americans. The two most effective tools that we have capable of helping prevent data breaches are encryption and reducing the attack surface of computer systems that handle sensitive or private data. Under the proposed legal framework, both will be sacrificed for a false sense of safety.

The latest installment of Congressional hearings was held by the Energy and Commerce Committee on April 19, 2016, and was titled Deciphering the Debate Over Encryption: Industry and Law Enforcement Perspectives. The calls for Congress to ban effective encryption are repeated with little variance from the past. Some Members of Congress are expressing frustration that the debate is repeating itself without law enforcement suggesting any particular middle ground that would be workable for the tech community. But what is most chilling is that those in law enforcement continue to demand exceptional access despite years of back and forth and the parade of high profile data breaches both within government and the private sector. We’re losing the cybersecurity battle and the government is calling for a ban on one of the most effective tools that computer science has at its disposal.

Source: The Rietta Blog

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

n1 writes:

El Reg reports:

Hopes that reform to the US government's mass surveillance infrastructure would yield real results have been dealt a blow after the opinion of a public advocate to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) was rejected.

Amy Jeffress was asked to give her opinion on the FBI searching in the vast PRISM database for details on US citizens. She declared that it was unconstitutional since it broke the Fourth Amendment (unreasonable searches).

Her opinion was rejected [PDF], however, by FISC judge Thomas Hogan and the practice will be allowed to continue.

Under the terms of the public advocate, Jeffress is not allowed to appeal the decision so she will not have an opportunity to pick apart the court's counterarguments.

[...] Hogan disagreed with that assessment however, saying that there was no statutory requirement that PRISM data only be used for foreign intelligence, and that the US government was required to retain any data that may be evidence of a crime. He then argued that as a result, it didn't make sense for the US government to be required to retain information on a crime and then not be able to search that database.

[...] To make matters worse, we do not have the full text of Jeffress' argument – just Hogan's summary of it within his legal opinion. That opinion is also redacted. And the opinion itself is five months old. It was delivered in November 2015 but only published by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) late Tuesday. Publication of redacted, old opinions was also made on the DNI's Tumblr account rather than its own website at dni.gov, and the opinions of the FISC court have yet to appear on the FISC website either.

takyon: Secret Court Takes Another Bite Out of the Fourth Amendment

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RamiK writes in with some news that became:

IBM's Power9 processor, due to arrive in the second half of next year, will have 24 cores, double that of today's Power8 chips... .

Meanwhile, Google has gone public with its Power work – confirming it has ported many of its big-name web services to the architecture, and that rebuilding its stack for non-Intel gear is a simple switch flip.

There was a lot announced at [the April 7] OpenPower Summit in San Jose, California. Here's what went down... .

[...] The Power9 will be a 14nm high-performance FinFET product fabbed by Global Foundries. It is directly attached to DDR4 RAM, talks PCIe gen-4 and NVLink 2.0 to peripherals and Nvidia GPUs, and can chuck data at accelerators at 25Gbps.

[...] The Power9 is due to arrive in 2017, and be the brains in the US Department of Energy's Summit and Sierra supercomputers.

Summit's peak performance should be 300 peta-FLOPs, thrashing China's leading 55 PFLOPS Tianhe-2, but a good chunk of the American system's performance will come from the Nvidia Volta GPUs rather than the Power9s.

There's lots more; read the rest at: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/04/07/open_power_summit_power9/

takyon: A more recent article: Power9 Will Bring Competition To Datacenter Compute

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Reuters reports:

Germany's Angela Merkel agreed on Friday to allow prosecutors to pursue a case against a German comedian who mocked Turkey's President Tayyip Erdogan, prompting accusations that she had failed to protect free speech and dividing her ruling coalition.

Erdogan had demanded that Germany press charges against Jan Boehmermann after he recited a poem about the Turkish leader in a show on German public broadcaster ZDF on March 31, suggesting he hits girls, watches child pornography and engages in bestiality.

A section of the German criminal code prohibits insults against foreign leaders but leaves it to the government to decide whether to authorize prosecutors to pursue such case

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Reuters reports:

Bangladesh's central bank was vulnerable to hackers because it did not have a firewall and used second-hand, $10 switches to network computers connected to the SWIFT global payment network, an investigator into one of the world's biggest cyber heists said.

The shortcomings made it easier for hackers to break into the system earlier this year and attempt to siphon off nearly $1 billion using the bank's SWIFT credentials, said Mohammad Shah Alam, head of the Forensic Training Institute of the Bangladesh police's criminal investigation department.

"It could be difficult to hack if there was a firewall," Alam said in an interview.

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

U.S. Uncut reports:

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Whoever writes:

London, UK based ad technology company Oriel has published a claim that ad blockers break web applications in ways other than merely not displaying ads. They show examples such as airline sites that will not allow check-in because of the effects of an ad blocker. The original report is here. The CEO of Oriel is quoted saying that he discovered this accidentally when attempting to check into a flight, which shows that he routinely uses an ad-blocker, and raises the question: why would the CEO of an ad technology company use an ad blocker?

Original Submission

"exec" writes:

BBC reports:

The LHC is not just the world's most powerful particle accelerator, it could also be its biggest rain meter, scientists say.

They are investigating tiny changes in the length of the collider's 27km-circumference ring, which occur on a daily and a seasonal basis.

[...] "My hypothesis is that in winter there's a lot more water in the ground, and even snow sitting on the ground. So, basically, this mass pulls on the ring. And when that extra mass melts away and evaporates away in summer - the ring stretches a bit," said Rolf Hut from Delft University of Technology, Netherlands. If that's true, you could use the LHC to study precipitation and other aspects of hydrology - not just the secrets of the Universe.

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

"exec" writes:

The Flint water crisis has become a criminal case, with two state regulators and a city employee charged with official misconduct, evidence-tampering and other offenses over the lead contamination that alarmed the country and brought cries of racism.

For nearly 18 months, the poor, majority-black city of 100,000 used the Flint River for tap water as a way to save money — a decision made by a state-appointed emergency manager — while a new pipeline was under construction. But the water wasn't treated to control corrosion. The result: Lead was released from aging pipes and fixtures as water flowed into homes and businesses.

"This is a road back to restoring faith and confidence in all Michigan families in their government," state Attorney General Bill Schuette said Wednesday in announcing the first charges to come out of the disaster, blamed on a series of bad decisions by bureaucrats and political leaders.

He warned there will be more charges — "That I can guarantee" — and added: "No one is off the table."

Gov. Rick Snyder didn't acknowledge the problem until last fall, when tests revealed high levels of lead in children, in whom the heavy metal can cause low IQs and behavioral problems.

Source: bigstory.ap.org

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

HughPickens.com writes:

There's good news for aging Americans who may have damaged their hearing by attending one too many rock concerts when they were young as Andrew Pollack writes at the NYT that the consumer electronics industry is encroaching on the hearing aid business, offering products that are far less expensive and available without the involvement of audiologists or other professionals. The new devices are forcing a re-examination of the entire system for providing hearing aids, which critics say is too costly and cumbersome, hindering access to devices vital for the growing legions of older Americans. “The audiology profession is obviously scared, for good reason, right now,” says Abram Bailey.

Hearing aids cost an average of nearly $2,400 each, or close to $5,000 a pair, according to a White House advisory group and Medicare does not pay for them, nor do most insurers. By contrast, the consumer devices are not regulated and sell for a few hundred dollars apiece, at most. Hearing aid manufacturers say that diagnosing and treating hearing loss are too complex for consumers to do using consumer devices, without the aid of a professional. But sound amplifiers have been around for years and they are growing in sophistication, taking advantage of signal processing chips developed for phones, Bluetooth headsets and computers. The devices include the Smart Listening System from Soundhawk, which sells at $400 for a single ear; the Bean from Etymotic Research, at $300; the CS50+ from Sound World Solutions at $350; and the Crystal Ear from NeutronicEar, at $545. “To me it was a reasonable investment to experiment with,” says Ira Dolich, 81, who bought the Soundhawk device, which he can adjust by himself using his smartphone. “I’ve been pretty pleased with it."

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Rolling Stone reports that the American pop musician Prince (born Prince Rogers Nelson) has died in Minnesota.

Prince, the legendary and innovative musician and actor, has died at age 57. A rep for the singer confirmed his death to the Associated Press .

"Carver County Sheriff Jim Olson reports that on April 21st, 2016, at about 9:43 am, sheriff's deputies responded to a medical call at Paisley Park Studios in Chanhassen," the sheriff's office wrote in a statement. "When deputies and medical personnel arrived, they found an unresponsive adult male in the elevator. First responders attempted to provide lifesaving CPR, but were unable to revive the victim. He was pronounced deceased at 10:07 am.

"The Carver County Sheriff’s Office, with the assistance of the Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office and The Midwest Medical Examiner’s Office, are continuing to investigate the circumstances surrounding his death." Star Tribune reports that the medical examiner has scheduled an autopsy for Friday.

A week ago, the singer was hospitalized after his private plane made an emergency landing after a show in Moline, Illinois. Varying reports said he was suffering dehydration and was getting over the flu. He was released after three hours and flew to Minneapolis, where he was recovering at home. He'd canceled some dates of his "Piano and a Microphone" tour in early April because of the flu, TMZ previously reported.

The New York Times has a well-written piece, Prince, an Artist Who Defied Genre, Is Dead at 57 that starts:

Prince, the songwriter, singer, producer, one-man studio band and consummate showman, died on Thursday at his home, Paisley Park, in Chanhassen, Minn. He was 57.

[...] Prince was a man bursting with music — a wildly prolific songwriter, a virtuoso on guitars, keyboards and drums and a master architect of funk, rock, R&B and pop, even as his music defied genres. In a career that lasted from the late 1970s until his solo “Piano & a Microphone” tour this year, he was acclaimed as a sex symbol, a musical prodigy and an artist who shaped his career his way, often battling with accepted music-business practices.

Wikipedia has a page about him.

For those who may have missed it (or would like to relive it), the NFL channel on YouTube has commentary and video of Prince's half-time performance.

[Ed. note] I paid little interest to his music for many years. Could not see what all the fuss was about him. Then I saw his performance in 2007 during the Super Bowl XLI half-time show — I was blown away by his commanding stage presence. With an audience in excess of 90 million, performed on a temporary stage, in the [not-quite-purple] rain, and he sang and played with utter confidence. Ever since, I've listened much more closely to his music and am discovering how very talented a musician, singer, and songwriter he was.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

A Norwegian judge has ruled that Anders Behring Breivik's human rights were violated by the use of solitary confinement:

The court upheld his claim that some of his treatment amounted to "inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment". After the judgement, Breivik's lawyer, Oystein Storrvik, called for his solitary confinement to be repealed.

Breivik, a right-wing extremist, killed 69 people at a summer camp for young centre-left political activists on the island of Utoeya in July 2011. Earlier that day, he set off a car bomb in the capital, Oslo, killing eight people.

In her ruling, judge Helen Andenaes Sekulic said the right not to be subjected to inhuman treatment represented "a fundamental value in a democratic society" and also applied to "terrorists and killers". Breivik had challenged the government over his solitary confinement, which saw him kept alone in his cell for 22 to 23 hours a day, denied contact with other inmates and only communicating with prison staff through a thick glass barrier.

[Ed. addition] This seems apropos: http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/29591.html:

The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.

H. L. Mencken
US editor (1880 - 1956)

Original Submission

Phoenix666 submitted a story something like this:

Using a new optical magnetic metamaterial claimed to have revolutionary properties, physicists from the Australian National University (ANU) and the University of California Berkeley (UC Berkeley) have produced a prototype device that could be used in super-efficient thermophotovoltaic cells. These cells do not need direct sunlight to generate electricity, but instead absorb infrared radiation to convert to electric current and, unlike conventional photovoltaic cells, can do so even in the dark.

[...] With the new metamaterial... the incredibly strong interactions of the material with the magnetic component of light means that the dispersion characteristics take on a hyperbolic form – that is, a much more intense distribution pattern – and results in a directional, coherent and polarized thermal emission. In other words, it glows brightly and unusually when heated by infrared radiation.

The result of all this nanoscale topological manipulation means that the magnetic hyperbolic dispersion occurring in the metamaterial can be tuned to specific frequencies and intensities so that it may aid in vastly increasing thermal transfer efficiencies when paired as an emitter with thermophotovoltaic cells.

"Thermophotovoltaic cells have the potential to be much more efficient than solar cells," says Dr Sergey Kruk from the ANU Research School of Physics and Engineering. "Our metamaterial overcomes several obstacles and could help to unlock the potential of thermophotovoltaic cells

See also: Nanomaterial to drive new generation of solar cells.

The results of this research have been published in the journal Nature Communications .

Original Submission