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An Anonymous Coward writes:

This just in from the front lines of the War on the Unusual:

University of Pennsylvania economics professor Guido Menzio was solving a set of differential equations on a plane departing the Philadelphia airport when the woman next to him surreptitiously passed a note to a flight attendant telling them she thought he was a terrorist because of the strange things he was writing on a pad of paper. The plane returned to the gate where he was questioned. At least this time the pilot had enough sense not to kick him off the flight.

Remember folks, if you see something say something!

Original Submission

Pyra, the Successor of the OpenPandora Handheld is One Step Closer to Production.

Anonymous Coward or just a Lazy Bastard? writes:

For those of you who don't know what either of them is, the TL;DR follows:
- Pyra is a Linux-based handheld computer equipped with a keyboard and gaming controls.
- It is an open and modular design which can be easily disassembled and upgraded.
- The official OS is Debian based.

It bears repeating that this is a handheld, not a notebook.
Fans of the Nokia N900 and of the clamshell Sharp Zaurus models now finally have a modern replacement.
There are two main variations: one with the phone hardware, one without.
The phone hardware goes on the mainboard so you have to take that into account right upfront.

Oh, and yes, it's expensive. There's also nothing like it.
I remember paying just as much for my Zaurus and the support was not even remotely comparable with what OpenPandora received.
Before anybody points out it is 2016, bear in mind this is mostly the work of a small group of enthusiasts who intend to stick around for a while. Kickstarter and the like are not really a good comparison either.

Expectations being set, warnings given, you can read more here:
    https://pyra-handheld.com/boards/pages/pyra/

[Continues...]

takyon writes:

Apple Inc.'s dismal earnings announcement shows why it badly needs to rethink its innovation model and leadership.

Its last breakthrough innovation was the iPhone — which was released in 2007. Since then, Apple has simply been tweaking its componentry, adding faster processors and more advanced sensors, and playing with its size — making it bigger in the iPad and smaller in the Apple Watch.

Chief Executive Tim Cook is probably one of the most competent operations executives in the industry but is clearly not a technology visionary. Apple needs another Steve Jobs to reinvent itself; otherwise it will join the ranks of HP and Compaq.

That Steve Jobs may be Elon Musk — who has proven to be the greatest visionary of our times.

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/apple-should-buy-tesla-and-make-elon-musk-ceo-2016-05-02

Original Submission

butthurt writes:

After pleading guilty to money laundering, Arthur Budovsky has received the maximum sentence of 20 years' imprisonment, has been ordered to forfeit $122 million, and has been fined $500,000 by the U.S. district court for the Southern District of New York, in New York City's Manhattan borough. Mr. Budovsky is a co-founder, and is the owner, of the Costa Rica-based, electronic funds transfer service Liberty Reserve S.A. After starting the company, Mr. Budovsky had renounced his U.S. citizenship and had become a citizen of Costa Rica.

Liberty Reserve was seized by the U.S. government and shut down in 2013; charges against it are pending. Defendants Vladimir Kats (co-founder of Liberty Reserve) and Azzeddine El Amine are scheduled to be sentenced by the same judge on 13 May. Two defendants are still at large. Two others, Maxim Chukharev and Mark Marmilev, were earlier sentenced to three years' and five years' imprisonment, respectively. The case is U.S. v. Kats et al, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York, No. 13-cr-00368.

coverage:

• Sky News
• The Hindu
• Bloomberg via The Business Times
• LawFuel
• New York Post
• TechWorm
• KABC-AM
• MoreLaw
• The Daily Star
• Wall Street Journal

Original Submission

-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

We previously discussed an earlier version of the Ubuntu Touch OS as installed on an older tablet.

Jack Wallen, via TechRepublic, now answers questions he has received on the new mobile/desktop OS, now available pre-installed on the mobile hardware of their partner, Bq.

Ubuntu Touch on the M10 tablet is surprisingly fantastic, especially when used in desktop mode. Canonical has something very special on their hands, but that doesn't mean there isn't room for serious improvement. [...]

Can you install WINE on the Ubuntu tablet?

Simply put, no.

[If you install the terminal app, then get apt-get, then mount the system read-write, then use apt-get as you would on the desktop, you can install WINE] but doing so will disable updates. [Not recommended] [...]

[Continues...]

butthurt writes:

The AP via CBC reports, and CNBC also reports, that the Lesedi La Rona diamond is to be auctioned by Sotheby's in London in June. At 1111* or 1109 carats (around 222 g) it is the second-heaviest diamond discovered, after the Cullinan diamond which had a mass of 3106.75 carats or 621.350 g. The stone was mined in Botswana last November and belongs to the Canada-based Lucara Diamond Corporation.

* according to an earlier report in the Wall Street Journal (semi-paywalled)

Previous coverage: Three Huge Diamonds Found in Botswana

[It was the use of advanced X-Ray Transmission processing that allowed this diamond to be detected and recovered — older approaches would have resulted in the diamond being crushed amid the rubble removed from the pit. Current estimates place the stone's value on the order of $50 million. -Ed.]

Original Submission

HughPickens.com writes:

James B. Stewart writes at The New York Times that the average user spends over fifty minutes each day on Facebook, Instagram and Messenger platforms. That's more time than people spend reading (19 minutes); participating in sports or exercise (17 minutes); or social events (four minutes). It's almost as much time as people spend eating and drinking (1.07 hours). "When you really think about it, 50 minutes is a tremendous amount of time — it's huge," says Ken Sena. But time has become the holy grail of digital media and Facebook wants more of yours. Time is the best measure of engagement, and engagement correlates with advertising effectiveness. Time also increases the supply of impressions that Facebook can sell, which brings in more revenue (a 52 percent increase last quarter to $5.4 billion). And time enables Facebook to learn more about its users — their habits and interests — and thus better target its ads. The result is a powerful network effect that competitors will be hard pressed to match.

But fifty minutes isn't enough. Facebook is busy cooking up ways to get us to spend even more time on the platform, building a real-time news tool that could kill Twitter, testing shopping products that could take on Amazon, and making its own YouTube.. A crucial initiative is improving its News Feed, tailoring it more precisely to the needs and interests of its users, based on how long people spend reading particular posts. For people who demonstrate a preference for video, more video will appear near the top of their news feed. The more time people spend on Facebook, the more data they will generate about themselves, and the better the company will get at the task. "The time people spend on our site is a good measure of whether we're delivering value to them.," says Jessie Baker. "The better we do at providing what people most want to see, the more likely they are to return to the app and spend time."

Original Submission

takyon writes:

An online "open source intelligence" group has released a report implicating Russia in the downing of Malaysia Airlines flight 17 in July 2014:

Russian officials are trying to discredit a new report that implicates the Russian military in the shoot-down of Malaysia Airlines flight 17. Nearly two years ago, that attack in the skies over eastern Ukraine killed 298 people.

The latest report comes from a U.K.-based organization called Bellingcat, which bills itself as a group of citizen investigative journalists. Much of their work is done by volunteers, who sift through open source information on the web, using social media and satellite imagery. The group was launched with a crowd-funding campaign, and says it now receives a grant from Google.

[...] "We discovered quite quickly that the soldiers there were using a lot of social media, posting photographs of each other, posting photographs of the base," Higgins says.

The photographs included pictures of their equipment, such as their Buk missile launchers. The launcher that was believed to have shot down the Malaysian airliner had an identification number that was partly worn away, but the researchers were able to pick out other unique characteristics. They included a dent in the side of the launcher and even the pattern formed by soot around the exhaust pipe.

Original Submission

Open4D writes:

Seven lucky ways that gambling changed maths is an article that recently appeared in the Guardian. "Gambling is the vice that helped make the modern world. Here mathematician Adam Kucharski explains how casinos and card games inspired many ideas that are now fundamental to science."

The contribution of gambling is not a surprise when you think about it. But it's interesting to learn about some of the details.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/05/gene-therapy-halts-rare-brain-disease-young-boys

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Linux Mint 18 will no longer provide separate, codec-free installation media for OEM and magazine distribution. Instead, the distribution will ship without multimedia support while making it easy for users to acquire media codecs during the initial installation of the operating system. "OEM installation disks and NoCodec images will no longer be released. Instead, similar to other distributions, images will ship without codecs and will support both traditional and OEM installations. This will reduce our release cycle to 4 separate events and the production and testing of 12 ISO images. Multimedia codecs can be installed easily: From the welcome screen, by clicking on "Multimedia Codecs", or from the main menu, by clicking on "Menu"->"Sound and Video"->"Install Multimedia Codecs", or during the installation process, by clicking a checkbox option." Additional information on the upcoming release of Linux Mint 18 can be found in the project's monthly newsletter.[1]

# http://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=showheadline&story=401

[1] http://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=3026

Original Submission

Well, not really. What actually happened is that the Powers That Be (UK's Natural Environment Research Council) decided to run an experiment in participatory democracy, then discarded the experimental data that they didn't like.

Still, an undersea drone is pretty damn cool, so I'm not too bitter.

Previously: Meet The U.K.'s Cutting-Edge Research Vessel ... Boaty McBoatface?

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

From Reuters:

A raging Canadian wildfire grew explosively on Saturday as hot, dry winds pushed the blaze across the energy heartland of Alberta and threatened to burn close to an oil sands project.

The fire that has already prompted the evacuation of all 88,000 people who lived in the city of Fort McMurray was set to double in size on Saturday, the seventh day of what is expected to be the costliest natural disaster in Canada's history.

Provincial officials praised evacuees for their patience and, in a sign of how long the crisis could drag on, said the cities of Calgary and Edmonton, many hundreds of miles to the south, were the best place to receive longer-term support such as medical care and emergency payments.

Firefighting officials said the inferno, propelled northeast towards neighboring Saskatchewan by high winds and fueled by tinder-dry forests, was set to double in size to 300,000 hectares (740,000 acres) - almost twice the size of Houston - by the end of Saturday.

In a news story that I heard on the radio earlier today (Saturday, May 6), it is said that the cloud of soot is visible from space, and has drifted as far south as Florida.

Great googly moogly, that's a big fire.

Original Submission

butthurt writes:

Hackaday featured the work of "Simplified," a craftsperson who moved from building incandescent bulbs and gas discharge lamps to making vacuum diodes and triodes, and an audio amplifier designed around them.

In a 2014 article the site set forth procedures for making what it calls "artisanal vacuum tubes."

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Elise Worthington and the ICIJ reports via ABC news Australia that John Doe, released a manifesto expressing desire to assist law enforcement, but also stating:

"Until governments codify legal protections for whistleblowers into law, enforcement agencies will simply have to depend on their own resources or ongoing global media coverage for documents."

John Doe has a lot more to say in the maifesto, uploaded by the ABC over at documentcloud.org in this link to the txt version of statement.

takyon: Don't worry submitter, it's a story. The Panama Papers leaker has offered to aid law enforcement in cracking down on money laundering and tax evasion if granted immunity. Also at DW, Washington Post, Vice.

Original Submission