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An Anonymous Coward writes:

Can entropy be reversed? mused Isaac Asimov in his short-short story The Last Question . Less cosmically, folks logged on the Internet probably wonder the same about online trolls. While the term "troll" could refer to any number of abuses, real or imagined, on online or old media forums, the New York Times recently ran a pair of stories (warning: possible paywall) about trolls in the sense of foaming vitriol and/or harrassment perpetrated by mostly anonymous commentators. Quentin Hardy thinks some of it can be traced to the world of gaming, which offered participants a safe space to engage in arguably anti-social behavior such as "griefing", the practice of ganging up on a hapless victim for no obvious competitive reason. Hardy quotes entrepreneur Anil Dash, a critic of GamerGate:

Had this behavior been confined to the games themselves, it would have attracted little outside attention. Unfortunately, says Hardy, it didn't.

Mike Isaac reports on Imzy, a site started by ex-Redditor Dan McComas last September; it's another attempt to improve on Reddit, in part by blocking or discouraging trolls, racists and haters. Unlike several other failed Reddit competitors mentioned in the piece, Imzy's approach is to build membership gradually, having some communities that require invitations to participate, and enforcing rules banning indecent posts or abusive behavior. Imzy encourages "tipping" (paying other users for uploading useful content, or moderating); the site plans to make money by taking a cut of the tips. It sounds promising, but Ning co-founder Gina Bianchini gave Isaac a dose of reality:

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mendax writes:

In a bit of good news for the Obama administration (and most Americans), the U.S. D.C Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the FCC's Open Internet Order rules:

High-speed internet service can be defined as a utility, a federal court has ruled, a decision clearing the way for more rigorous policing of broadband providers and greater protections for web users.

The court's decision upholds the F.C.C. on the declaration of broadband as a utility, the most significant aspect of the rules. That has broad-reaching implications for web and telecommunications companies and signals a shift in the government's view of broadband as a service that should be equally accessible to all Americans, rather than a luxury that does not need close government supervision.

The court's opinion can be found here.

takyon: Also at Tom's Hardware. Alternate link for the Appeals Court decision.

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n1 writes:

Paris doesn't want your dirty old car polluting its streets anymore. So starting July 1, Paris will ban cars registered before 1997 from entering the city center on weekdays between the hours of 8 a.m. and 8 p.m.

The tough ban on heavy-polluting cars, which were made before current emissions requirements were adopted, will get even tougher: In 2020, pre-1997 cars will be banned from the city entirely, and the weekday restrictions will be applied to cars made before 2011. All cars will need windshield stickers showing the vehicle's age, and violators face a fine of up to 35 euros (about $35). That fine will more than double, to 78 euros, starting in 2017.

Source: MarketWatch

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frojack writes:

ScienceNews reports on a story which is paywalled at Nature which suggests that our gut microbes induce weight gain.

The process goes something like this:

The Nature paper views this chain reaction as additional targets of opportunity in the fight against obesity. Disrupting any portion of this sequence could break the cycle. The study so far has been limited to lab rats and mice.

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"exec" writes:

Wikileaks co-founder Julian Assange warns more information will be published about Hillary Clinton, enough to indict her if the US government is courageous enough to do so, in what he predicts will be "a very big year" for the whistleblowing website.

Expressing concerns in an ITV interview about the Democratic presidential candidate, who he claims is monitoring him, Assange described Republican presumptive nominee Donald Trump as an "unpredictable phenomenon", but predictably, given their divergent political views, didn't say if he preferred the billionaire to be president.

Source: RT

-- submitted from IRC

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Phoenix666 writes:

For the first time, a new class of magnetic materials, called topological magnon (or magnetic wave) insulators, was revealed. This novel material can conduct magnetic waves (spin waves) along their edges, without conduction through the bulk material.

This novel material has possible applications to the field of spintronics, where spin currents could be exploited for energy-efficient technologies and information storage applications.

Electrons have two fundamental properties, charge and spin, generating such phenomena as electricity, magnetism, thermal conductivity, and superconductivity in materials. Materials with topological properties have novel charge or spin excitations on their surfaces or other boundaries. Such materials are of great interest for applications in renewable energy production and high-performance computers. Recently several classes of materials with different topological properties have been theoretically predicted and a few of them validated experimentally.

Wouldn't quantum computing trump all other forms, including photonics and spintronics?

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n1 writes:

A court in Qatar has convicted a Dutch woman of having sex outside marriage after she told police she was raped.

The 22-year-old was handed a suspended sentence and fined $824 (£580). She will also be deported. Her lawyer said her drink had been spiked at a Doha hotel in March and she had woken up in a stranger's flat, where she realised she had been raped.

Her alleged attacker, who said the sex was consensual, was sentenced to 100 lashes for having sex outside marriage. He will be given a further 40 lashes for consuming alcohol.

The woman has been detained since making the allegation three months ago, but her case only came to light over the weekend when her family decided to go public.

[...] The case of the Dutch woman raises further questions about how the Qatari authorities will deal with the thousands of Western tourists expected to travel to the country for the 2022 Fifa World Cup, many of whom may be unfamiliar with its laws.

Source: BBC News

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The Mighty Buzzard writes:

So, the Islamic Terrorist Opens Fire on Florida Nightclub; 50 Killed, 53 Wounded story is up over 400 comments and loading slower than hell. We finally managed to find ourselves a limit to comments under the current code. There's a fix going to be coming in the upcoming site update but for now there are two workarounds; take your pick.

1. Change your comment view mode to Nested or Flat.
2. Change Comment Limit under Preferences to five to ten.

The latter solution gives you 5-10 root level comments and all their children not 5-10 comments total. It also allows you to keep using the javascript expand/collapse buttons if you were.

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Phoenix666 writes:

Millions of Dish TV subscribers lost access to one or more channels Sunday night because of a fight over how much the satellite TV company should pay for the channels.

Channel owner Tribune Media Co. says its local stations, like CBS, CW and Fox, reach more than 5 million Dish subscribers in dozens of cities across the country. The WGN national cable channel, which Tribune says has 7 million Dish subscribers, also went dark.

Dish says it's offering free antennas so customers can watch the local stations until the companies work it out.

Cable and satellite TV companies like Dish Network Corp. and Comcast pay station owners like Tribune and entertainment companies like Disney for channels. Fights over how much to pay are common as costs have risen. Those costs are passed down to consumers on their cable bills.

Distantly delivered entertainment can always be taken away, but turning your own kids into performing monkeys is forever.

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HughPickens.com writes:

The Associated Press reports that the grisly death of Colin Nathaniel Scott who left a boardwalk and fell into a high-temperature, acidic spring in Yellowstone National Park offers a sobering reminder that visitors need to follow park rules. Scott and his sister had traveled about 225 yards off the boardwalk when he slipped and fell into the hot spring in the Norris Geyser Basin.

Officials said the two had left the boardwalk to get closer to some of the basin's thermal features. After Scott's sister reported the fall, rangers navigated over the highly fragile crust of the geyser basin to try to recover his body but halted the effort "due to the extreme nature and futility of it all," says Charissa Reid. The death occurred in one of the hottest and most volatile areas of Yellowstone, where boiling water flows just beneath a thin rock crust and water temperatures there can reach 199 degrees, the boiling point for water at the park's high elevation.

"It's sort of dumb, if I could be so blunt, to walk off the boardwalks not knowing what you're doing," says geologist Kenneth Sims. "They're scofflaws, essentially, who look around and then head off the boardwalk." At least 22 people are known to have died from hot spring-related injuries in and around Yellowstone since 1890, park officials say. "This tragic event must remind all of us to follow the regulations and stay on boardwalks," says Yellowstone Supt. Dan Wenk. Scott's body will not be recovered. "Recovery efforts have been terminated in part because we have not been able to locate any remains, unfortunately," says Morgan Warthin.

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

Apple, like practically every mega-corporation, wants to know as much as possible about its customers. But it's also marketed itself as Silicon Valley's privacy champion, one that—unlike so many of its advertising-driven competitors—wants to know as little as possible about you. So perhaps it's no surprise that the company has now publicly boasted about its work in an obscure branch of mathematics that deals with exactly that paradox.

[...] Differential privacy, translated from Apple-speak, is the statistical science of trying to learn as much as possible about a group while learning as little as possible about any individual in it. With differential privacy, Apple can collect and store its users' data in a format that lets it glean useful notions about what people do, say, like and want. But it can't extract anything about a single, specific one of those people that might represent a privacy violation. And neither, in theory, could hackers or intelligence agencies.

[...] An example is the technique in which a survey asks if the respondent has ever, say, broken a law. But first, the survey asks them to flip a coin. If the result is tails, they should answer honestly. If the result is heads, they're instructed to flip the coin again and then answer "yes" for heads or "no" for tails. The resulting random noise can be subtracted from the results with a bit of algebra, and every respondent is protected from punishment if they admitted to lawbreaking

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Phoenix666 writes:

Regular exercise in middle age is the best lifestyle change a person can make to prevent cognitive decline in their later years, a 20-year study finds.

Abnormalities in brain tissue begin several decades before the onset of cognitive decline, but little is known about the lifestyle factors that might slow the onset of decline in middle age.

As the incidence of Alzheimer's disease diagnosis doubles every five years after 65, most longitudinal studies examining risk factors and cognitive disease are with adults who are over the age of 60 or 70.

The new study, published in the American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry, tracked 387 Australian women from the Women's Healthy Aging Project for two decades. The women were aged 45-55 when the study began in 1992.

The key recommendation of the study is to do some kind of exercise, do it regularly, and to start now.

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Snow writes:

Sometime around July 10th, Bitcoin's block reward will decrease from 25 bitcoin awarded per block, to 12.5 bitcoin. In the last 30 days, bitcoin has increased in price from $450USD to it's current price of around $700USD, an increase of about 50%. Bitcoin's current market cap is now exceeding 10 Billion dollars, making it more valuable than Twitter.

Speculation on what is causing this raise ranges from currency controls in China and the devaluing of the Yuan, to speculation over the halving, to theories that 'Big Business' is finally starting to buy into Bitcoin. Regardless of the reasons, Bitcoin has been on a bull run since August of 2015. Many are calling for a new all time high in the coming days or weeks.

Bitcoin used to be infamous for it's volatility after previous run ups in April and November of 2013 saw the price of bitcoin go from $15USD to $250USD then back to $80USD in the span of a couple months. Later that same year, Bitcoin saw further action taking it to it's all time high of $1100USD. Then Mt. Gox happened, and bitcoin went on a two year bear run that it is now showing recovering from.

What do you Soylentils think of Bitcoin? Any HODLers here? Anyone care to make any predictions on the future of bitcoin?

I, personally remember seeing the very first bitcoin article on 'the other site' and thinking it was a complete joke and it would never take off. I was wrong about that. (I was also wrong about the iPod, and iPad too, so my track record is pretty bad...)

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Phoenix666 writes:

Making faster, more powerful electronics requires smaller but still uniform connections, or junctions, between different materials. For the first time, researchers created extremely small, 5-nanometer-wide junctions, which were made in a specific pattern using two different planar, or flat, semiconductors. The simple process to create these two-dimensional junctions involved selective exposure of the semiconductor to laser-vaporized material and could be extended to other systems.

Controllably creating patterned semiconductor junctions in thin planar materials could enable ultrathin microelectronics for numerous applications such as in smartphones, next-generation solar cells, and lighting.

Junctions of two-dimensional (2D) semiconductors could enable next-generation photovoltaics, lighting, and electronics. For example, current electronics rely on 10-nanometer-wide junctions between different semiconductors in three-dimensional (3D) crystals. Controllable synthetic methods are needed to create narrow junctions between different 2D materials. Now, researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory have developed a process for creating these junctions between different 2D semiconductors in arbitrary patterns using standard electron beam lithography techniques.

Patterned arrays of lateral heterojunctions within monolayer two-dimensional semiconductors (DOI: 10.1038/ncomms8749)

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Phoenix666 writes:

Researchers have a plan to link together chunks of synthetic DNA, making a researcher-created human genome that can control a cell in a lab dish. This, the 25 researchers advocating it in an open-access Science paper say, will be called Human Genome Project-Write. That's in contrast with the first HGP, completed in stages earlier in this century, which they call Human Genome Project-Read. Find a list of the "stepping stone" projects the researchers are proposing at GEN.

The paper is in a way an outcome of the "secret" meeting about synthesizing whole genomes held at Harvard a few weeks ago. The meeting got unsecret quickly, making a splash in the mainstream media. In The Conversation, Harvard grad student Jeff Bessen tried to explain why the meeting was secret. Essentially Science's fault, he implied. According to the very high-profile George Church, a host of the meeting and an author of the paper, the editors had asked for a revision that took account of the "ethical, social, and legal components of synthesizing genomes." That made it impossible for the paper to appear at the time of the meeting, and secrecy was required because of the journal's embargo policy.

The published paper spends exactly one sentence on ethical, social, and legal issues.

As the not-quite-secret meeting was taking place, Stanford synthetic biologist Drew Endy and Northwestern bioethicist Laura Zoloth blasted it in a post in COSMOS, saying, "When the first people at the table mostly have significant and direct material interests in proceeding, everyone, not just those in the room, risk out-of-control competition between public and private interests, ethical conflicts of interest, and temptations to manipulate human subject consent."

One of these confabs holds greater menace for mankind. Which?

Related:
Project to Synthesise Genes Mooted
Genome Project-Write To Attempt Synthesis of Human Genomes

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