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takyon writes:

EFF and Mozilla's Let's Encrypt certificate authority has issued its two millionth certificate, about two months after issuing its one millionth certificate:

Earlier today, the Let's Encrypt certificate authority issued its two millionth certificate, less than two months after the millionth certificate. As we noted when the millionth certificate was issued, each certificate can cover several web sites, so the certificates Let's Encrypt has issued are already protecting millions and millions of sites.

This rapid adoption has already made Let's Encrypt one of the world's largest public certificate authorities by number of certificates issued, and almost all of them are protecting domains that never supported HTTPS before. The Internet needs to migrate away from the insecure HTTP protocol, and we're very pleased to be helping to make that possible.

Is this news? Has it fixed the issues you raised in the comments two months ago?

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for AndyTheAbsurd

For many, Amazon is the go-to place to buy video games. Now, the company is using that influence to incentivise Prime by requiring a subscription for select game orders. As VideoGamer reports, this applies to top titles such as FIFA 16, Far Cry Primal and Battlefield Hardline on both the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One in the UK. Similar restrictions are also live in the US -- we've spotted the Amazon Prime label on Grand Theft Auto V , for instance. The requirement is only in place, however, if you want the order to be fulfilled by Amazon. At the moment, you can sidestep the problem by selecting a third-party merchant on the site instead.

These are big, popular games. When asked about the decision, the company told VideoGamer: "One of the many benefits of Amazon Prime is access to exclusive selection on a number of great products. Customers who are not Prime members can sign-up for a 30-day free trial of Amazon Prime, or they can purchase those items from a Marketplace seller." Amazon has taken a similar approach with other forms of media -- in the UK, for instance, you need a Prime subscription to buy Spectre on DVD.

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2016/04/22/amazon-prime-game-restriction/

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Volvo has doubled down on electrification. It previously stated intentions of offering plug-in hybrid variants of every model, and it's been following through with the likes of the new S90 sedan and V90 wagon. It only plans to get more aggressive with electrification in the coming years, announcing this week that it hopes to sell up to one million electrified vehicles (all-electric and plug-in hybrid models), in total, by 2025. It will work toward that goal by creating two plug-in variants of every model and introducing its first fully electric car in 2019.
 

Volvo has already laid the groundwork for an aggressive rollout of hybrids and electrics, developing the Scalable Product Architecture (SPA) and Compact Modular Architecture (CMA), both of which can incorporate hybrid or all-electric powertrains. It plans to begin introducing at least one new chargeable vehicle each year, including an all-electric car in 2019.

It's nothing more than a press release, but it's another major brand signaling EVs will feature significantly in its future.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

A new fabrication technique can make speedy transistors on a flexible plastic substrate:

Engineers fabricate high-performance transistors with wireless capabilities using a radical fabrication method based on huge rolls of flexible plastic. "We don't want to make them the way the semiconductor industry does now."

A team headed by University of Wisconsin—Madison engineers has fabricated a flexible transistor that operates at a record 38 gigahertz, but may be able to operate at 110 gigahertz. The process could allow manufacturers to easily and cheaply fabricate high-performance transistors with wireless capabilities, using a radical fabrication method based on huge rolls of flexible plastic. The new transistor can also transmit data or transfer power wirelessly, which could unlock advances in a whole host of applications ranging from wearable electronics to sensors.

Fast Flexible Transistors with a Nanotrench Structure (open, DOI: 10.1038/srep24771)

Original Submission

HughPickens.com writes:

Patrick Egan and Megan Mullin write in The New York Times that for a vast majority of Americans, the weather is becoming more pleasant as over the past four decades, winter temperatures have risen substantially throughout the United States, but summers have not become markedly more uncomfortable. Although warming during this period has been considerable, it has not been evenly distributed across seasons. Virtually all Americans have experienced a rise in January maximum daily temperatures — an increase of 1.04 degrees Fahrenheit per decade on average — while changes in daily maximum temperatures in July have been much more variable across counties, rising by an average of just 0.13 degrees Fahrenheit per decade over all. Moreover, summer humidity has declined during this period. As a result, most people's experiences with daily weather since the time that they first heard about climate change have generally been positive. "By our calculations, the mild winters now regularly experienced in New York City make its weather nearly as pleasant as that of Virginia Beach back in the 1970s." And when winters are mild and summers are tolerable, people don't have a huge reason to care about climate change. That's because people's use their daily experiences of the weather — not infrequent experiences of extreme weather events — to form opinions about the climate, according to Mullin.

Perhaps that's why Americans are reacting to global warming with a collective shrug. In a poll taken in January, after the country's warmest December on record, the Pew Research Center found that climate change ranked close to last on a list of the public's policy priorities. "Our new findings suggest that the weather changes caused by global warming cannot be relied on to spur the public to demand policies that address the problem. By the time the weather changes for the worse later in this century, it may be too late," write Egan and Mullin. Under all likely scenarios, seasonal trends are projected to eventually reverse: Future warming in the United States will be more severe in summer than in winter. Should greenhouse gas emissions proceed unabated, we estimate that 88 percent of Americans will be exposed to less pleasant weather at the end of this century than they are today. "When we do discuss temperatures, we should acknowledge the temporarily pleasant side effects of global warming. But then we should stress that these agreeable conditions will one day vanish — like ice on a warm winter day."

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Vox:

For 17 years, cicadas do very little. They hang out in the ground, sucking sugar out of tree roots. Then, after this absurdly long hibernation, they emerge from the ground, sprout wings, make a ton of noise, have sex, and die within a few weeks. Their orphan progeny will then return to the ground and will live the next 17 years in silence.

Over the next several weeks, billions of mid-Atlantic cicadas will hear the call of spring and emerge from their cozy bunkers. This year's group is known as Brood V, and they were born in 1999 during the spring the first Star Wars prequel bewildered moviegoers.
...
Cicadas appear every year on the East Coast, though every year it's a different 17-year crew that wakes up (Note: There are some 13-year broods of cicadas in the Southeast, too.) Emerging in these humongous yearly batches is likely an evolutionary strategy. There are so many cicadas, all at once, that predators (like birds or small mammals) can't make a meaningful dent in their numbers.
...
This year, it's Brood V's turn (shown in purple). The brood mainly lives in Ohio and West Virginia, with some members spilling over to Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia.

Enjoy them.

Original Submission

n1 writes:

The Telegraph reports:

An eminent professor is thought to have taken her own life just days after police raided her home searching for a 'suicide kit' consisting of imported drugs.

Professor Avril Henry, 82, left behind a note in which she criticised the "illogical, cruel British law which says suicide is legal" but made it a criminal offence for anybody to help her kill herself.

Campaigners accused authorities of doing "everything they could to make her last days on this earth a misery".

The importation of the drugs had been flagged up by Interpol who in turn tipped off local police in Devon. It is understood they broke down Prof Henry's door and searched her home but found either none or only part of the drugs' batch.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

AMD's first quarter results are out, and the company did report a loss, but results were better than last year:

Looking at the overall quarter, AMD had revenues of $832 million, which is down a significant 19% from last year. But the good news for AMD is that their gross margin is up to 32%, an increase over last quarter and having it come back to the same level as a year ago. AMD reported an operating loss of $68 million for the quarter, which is an improvement over the $137 million loss last year.

AMD predicted 15% revenue growth for the second quarter, and its shares surged 52%:

AMD also announced an x86 and SoC licensing agreement with Tianjin Haiguang Advanced Technology Investment Co., Ltd that will make the company at least $293 million:

However what those products will be remains to be seen. While AMD is announcing the formation of the joint venture, their participation, and what they stand to gain, any actual product announcements are the responsibility of the joint venture. What AMD is emphasizing at this time is that this is a joint venture for high performance processors, that it is designed to complement AMD's existing server efforts, and that the SoCs will be leading-edge products. Just what a high performance processor is – and whether that means a multicore-heavy design or something using fewer, higher performing cores – will definitely be a burning question between now and the joint venture's own product announcements. Overall, at this point what AMD is describing does not sound like the joint venture will simply be developing cheaper, lower performing processors for the Chinese market.

AMD's Zen CPUs and Polaris GPUs will be out this year, and its K12 ARM server chips are expected next year.

Original Submission

lcall writes:

Emacs org-mode is very powerful tool for personal knowledge management, but can be hard to learn, makes it hard to have the same content (notes) referenced in more than one place, and can be awkward for the hands. Finding other tools inadequate for various reasons, I wrote OneModel to meet my own needs, and made it available. If you touch-type, it is extremely fast for to-do lists and notes of all kinds, and I generate the project web site from part of its data. It is much easier to learn and faster to navigate than emacs, and you can have the same content in as many places as desired, without duplication.

But it wants to be more: It uses an internal structure that has big future ideas for knowledge management, like embedding code within groups of entities, or linking across OneModel instances, so you can choose to share data from your personal organizer, or subscribe to (or copy) data from other instances: like a wikipedia but where the internal knowledge is structured so can be used for computation, rich queries etc. Imagine asking a system: what villages in history had economic improvements in a 4-year period, all external conditions being equal, and what do those cases all have in common?--that is the long-term vision of the system. The vision and internal structure are intended as be a prototype of a platform to manage all mankind's knowledge as a usefully computable whole.

The web site has a few screen shots (remember it's an ugly prototype but works well! -- I have my calendar/life notes/todos/contacts etc in it now) and a demo system to play with without installing anything.

(It is written in scala, using a simple/approachable coding style that should be readable by most programmers with just minutes of scala knowledge--I hope--and uses postgresql for the data.)

I frankly don't mind if someone else takes the ideas and does a better job with them: we can do better than managing mankind's knowledge in the form of huge sophisticated piles of words: words are not the real knowledge but a superstrate over it, and they are hard to compute well. Feedback welcome.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Plans for Project M were announced by Shell last year and the car is described as a "total rethink" of Gordon Murray's 2010 T.25 city car. Indeed, it was designed in partnership with auto designer Murray, whose other work includes Formula One cars and the McLaren F1.

[...] The concept car is powered by [a] three cylinder 660-cc petrol engine, whose components were also selected to help reduce friction. The engine produces 43 bhp and 64 Nm of torque, as well as a top speed of 156 km/h (97 mph) – limited to 145 km/h (90 mph) – and acceleration from 0-100 km/h (0-62 mph) in 15.8 secs.

An oil company announces a fuel-efficient, gas-powered car on a day when two other major car makers announce they're moving away from gas-engines entirely.

Original Submission

n1 writes:

At USC, researchers are studying how to train the next generation of negotiators — and doing so will require teaching machines how to convincingly lie.

Using training programs called virtual humans, computer scientists want to help tomorrow's leaders realize when the person sitting across from them is bluffing their way to a better deal. Virtual humans already exist to train users in leadership and communication skills; someday soon, they could be a normal part of a business education.

Jonathan Gratch, director of the Virtual Humans Research team at the USC Institute for Creative Technologies, will present a conference paper in May outlining one of the challenges for building successful negotiation programs.

[...] In a study Gratch led, participants were fooled into accepting worse deals when their computer opponent expressed disappointment.

Gratch and his colleagues recruited 75 study participants from Amazon's Mechanical Turk, asking them to negotiate over baskets of fruit. The computer would claim to want all the fruit — though in reality it only cared about certain kinds. When the participants gave in and split the fruit evenly, the computer would begrudgingly accept, saying, "I'm not happy, but I want to be fair."

That "concession" tricked the human participants into thinking the computer was giving up more than it really was.

"People tend to believe we're fighting over the same things, so you're inclined to believe the fixed-pie lie," Gratch said. "With this technique, if you realize early on that you can grow the pie, you can pretend that it's fixed to make your opponent believe they got half of the pie."

Source: University of Southern California

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://techpinions.com/is-firefox-search-worth-375myear-to-a-yahoo-buyer/45144

http://www.itworld.com/article/3060108/internet/yahoos-firefox-deal-risks-dropping-into-the-red.html#tk.rss_all?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter

As the search deal between Yahoo and Firefox is not standing on the winning side seen in profit numbers as it seems lately, a possible Yahoo buyer could have less interest in sponsoring Firefox as it is a very expensive contract.

If there would be a chance for a possible buyer to cancel the contract, Mozilla suddenly would be without main sponsor.

Original Submission

Blightbow writes:

The root nameservers play an extremely important role on the internet, providing the topmost level of the public facing DNS hierarchy. Without them, the internet as most consumers know it simply ceases to function.

On April 13, nameserver operators across the globe noticed something strange: the nameserver clusters comprising g.root-servers.net ("G-root") ceased responding to UDP queries for a period of nine hours. While it isn't unheard of for a cluster of servers receiving Anycast traffic for a root node to become unreachable, this event was fairly unusual in that there was a total outage of UDP for G-root observed across the world.

G-root is operated by the US Department of Defense. Thus far, they have only issued the following public statement:

It should be noted that this was a non-event from the perspective of DNS servers worldwide, as the remaining letters of the root nameserver alphabet soup were still available to answer queries.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Uber is settling class action lawsuits with drivers in two states, who will remain as independent contractors rather than employees:

Uber drivers will stay independent contractors, not employees, in California and Massachusetts, just as the ride-booking company had maintained they were. Uber is settling class action lawsuits by drivers in the two states for a maximum of $100 million.

In a statement, the company says it will pay the plaintiffs $84 million, plus another $16 million if Uber goes public and within a year increases in value by one and a half times over its worth in December. The deal allows Uber to keep labor costs low because it doesn't have to pay independent workers the same kind of wages, expenses and benefits as employees.

In a claim last year brought by an Uber driver, the California Labor Commissioner ruled the driver was an employee. Although the commissioner's ruling was specific to the claim and not precedent-setting, it gave plaintiffs some ammunition and Uber more incentive to negotiate. Still, Uber has been able to keep this aspect of its business model in place.

Related:

California: Uber Driver is an Employee
Uber Drivers Granted Class-Action Status in California
Cab Medallion Owners Sue NYC, Blame Uber for Ruining Business
Uber: Cartel or Company? Court Rulings Diverge
Uber to Pay $10 Million to Settle California Lawsuit Over Safety Claims and Airport Surcharges

Original Submission

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.

Original Submission