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takyon writes:

Electronic cigarettes that heat propylene glycol and glycerol, with or without nicotine and flavours, have been found to be safe based on a new meta-analysis of studies:

An update to the Cochrane review on electronic cigarettes [DOI: 10.1002/14651858.CD010216.pub3] [DX] has restated the findings of the initial research, which was completed two years ago. It found that e-cigarettes are potentially a valuable smoking cessation aid, although there was not enough evidence to conclude that they helped people quit smoking confidently.

The updated review now also includes observational data from an additional 11 studies which found no serious side-effects from using e-cigs for up to two years. Aside from throat and mouth irritation, which commonly dissipated over time, the review's co-author, Jamie Hartmann-Boyce, said "in the short to medium term, we didn't find any evidence that they were associated with any serious side-effects."

Evidence from two trials found that e-cigarettes helped smokers to quit in the long term, but "the small number of trials, low event rates and wide confidence intervals around the estimates" meant that the researchers could not conclude with confidence that e-cigs helped smokers quit more than other cessation aids.

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Phoenix666 writes:

In a recent column in Voice of San Diego, Alexander Bakst, a computer science student at U.C. San Diego, said that while he and his peers would love to work in the city, "I'm positive that they all will leave."

The reason? It's not so much the gap in pay relative to Bay Area employers, though that is a factor, as it is the location of many of San Diego's tech companies, Mr. Bakst wrote.

Most of San Diego's tech jobs are in parts of the city — such as North County or Sorrento Valley — that they consider too far from downtown, San Diego's cultural epicenter and millennial stamping ground.

Some fresh graduates say they have little interest in living or working in the industrial park atmosphere of Sorrento Valley, where less costly rents have exerted a strong pull on tech companies ever since Qualcomm set up shop there in 1985.

One column from one millennial, but does that sentiment track with other Soylentils? Is a suburban office park environment enough reason to decamp for another city?

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-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

TechDirt reports:

Prenda Law's Paul Hansmeier, infamous for constantly scheming about ways to use the judicial process to [shake down] people for money and pompously overstating his own position (e.g., "welcome to the big leagues") has now lost his license to practice law.[PDF] The order from the Minnesota Supreme Court rather matter-of-factly lays out the claims against Hansmeier (amazingly, he seems to get off lightly given how much other stuff he did):

Hansmeier committed misconduct in the first matter by bringing a lawsuit for the sole purpose of conducting discovery to find the identity of others against whom claims could be made, making misrepresentations to the tribunal, filing articles of termination for a corporation that contained false statements. failing to comply with discovery requests, failing to pay attorney fees assessed against him, and transferring funds out of his law firm in order to avoid paying sanctions. In a second matter, Hansmeier committed misconduct by participating in the initiation of a lawsuit without a basis in law and fact, making false and misleading statements to the court, failing to pay attorney fees assessed against him by the court, and submitting to the court a financial statement that was false, misleading, and deceptive. In a third matter, Hansmeier committed misconduct by bringing a frivolous action for an improper purpose. And in a fourth matter, Hansmeier committed misconduct by testifying falsely during a deposition, bringing a frivolous claim, and perpetrating a fraud upon the court.

[...] Respondent Paul Robert Hansmeier is indefinitely suspended from the practice of law, effective 14 days from the date of this order, with no right to petition for reinstatement for 4 years from the effective date of his suspension.

Of course, when we last checked in with Hansmeier he was aggressively filing questionable ADA lawsuits, basically shaking down small retail stores for any possible violation of the ADA he could find.

[...] Hansmeier has now had his assets liquidated in bankruptcy and his law license taken away. What's next? Well, last we'd heard, it sounded like criminal charges were getting closer, so perhaps he has that to look forward to as well.

Previous copyright trolling, etc. by Prenda.

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.lawfareblog.com/someone-learning-how-take-down-internet

Over the past year or two, someone has been probing the defenses of the companies that run critical pieces of the Internet. These probes take the form of precisely calibrated attacks designed to determine exactly how well these companies can defend themselves, and what would be required to take them down. We don't know who is doing this, but it feels like a large a large nation state. China and Russia would be my first guesses.

Sounds like as good a reason as any to develop a more distributed internet. Fight fire with fire - When the attacks are distributed denial of service on centralized systems, the solution is decentralization and distributed delivery of service (P2P).

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takyon writes:

Scientists have discovered evidence of tool use in a species of crow that is extinct in the wild:

A bird so rare that it is now extinct in the wild has joined a clever animal elite - the Hawaiian crow naturally uses tools to reach food. The bird now joins just one other corvid - the New Caledonian crow - in this exclusive evolutionary niche. Dr Christian Rutz from St Andrews University described his realisation that the bird might be an undiscovered tool user as a "eureka moment". He and his team published their findings in the journal Nature [DOI: 10.1038/nature19103] [DX].

[...] According to zoo president Douglas Myers, this study marks an important milestone for the recovery programme. "The discovery that 'alalā naturally use tools is of great significance," he said, "especially at this critical stage of our recovery efforts, as it provides completely unexpected insights into the species' ecological needs." That task consisted of logs with holes and crevices that were baited with food that was just out of a bill's reach. "They were able to pick up sticks from the aviary," said Dr Rutz, "and of all the birds we tested, 93% used [the sticks as] tools. This suggests this is a species-wide skill. "They were incredibly dextrous in the way that they handled the sticks, shortened them when they were too long, and discarded them if they were not happy with them."

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-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

We've previously mentioned Eric Hameleers AKA alienbob AKA Alien BOB and his run-Slackware-from-removable-media project. He even created an account here to comment on our story about that. (His sole activity here, so far.)

He now blogs

I am being laid off by my employer, IBM. Jobs in the Netherlands move to lower-wage countries like Poland and India, while IBM changes course towards a "cognitive" future in which there is less interest in the traditionally skilled technical IT jobs.

Unparalleled (because forced) job cuts in the Netherlands are the result of that change of focus. Almost 10% of the IBMNL work force is sent away in a "re-balancing" operation and I am out of a job per November 1st.

[...] As long as I still work for IBM (seven weeks), I have access to Safari Books Online where I can freely access and use the available course materials which prepare for the RHCE exam. This will of course affect the time I can spend on Slackware. I commonly spend nearly every after-work hour on packaging, scripting, and assisting people online and via email. That stops now.

[...] I also cannot promise that--when I have found a new job--that I will be able to provide the levels of support that you may have gotten used to.

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takyon writes:

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-monsanto-m-a-bayer-deal-idUSKCN11K128

German drugs and crop chemicals company Bayer has won over U.S. seeds firm Monsanto with an improved takeover offer of $66 billion including debt, ending months of wrangling after increasing its bid for a third time. The $128 a share deal announced on Wednesday, up from Bayer's previous offer of $127.50 a share, is the biggest of the year so far and the largest cash bid on record.

The transaction will create a company commanding more than a quarter of the combined world market for seeds and pesticides in a fast-consolidating farm supplies industry. However, competition authorities are likely to scrutinize the tie-up closely, and some of Bayer's own shareholders have been critical of a takeover plan which they say is too expensive and risks neglecting the company's pharmaceutical business.

"Bayer's competitors are merging, so not doing this deal would mean having a competitive disadvantage," said Markus Manns, a fund manager at Union Investment, one of Bayer's top 12 investors, according to ThomsonReuters data.

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martyb writes:

China is scheduled to launch a space station into orbit in less than an hour. According to Ars Technica:

China will take its next step toward a large space station on Thursday, when it intends to launch the Tiangong-2 laboratory into orbit. The 8.5-ton, 10.4-meter-long facility will launch from the Jiuquan launch center in the Gobi Desert, aboard a Long March 2-F rocket. The launch is set for 10:04am ET (14:04pm UTC) Thursday, and live video is available.

This space station, "Heavenly Palace 2," will be China's second after it launched the similarly sized Tiangong-1 laboratory in 2011. Following this week's launch, China plans to send two taikonauts to Tiangong-2 in four to six weeks aboard a Shenzhou-11 spacecraft. They will live there for about a month, testing out the lab's life support systems and performing scientific research. According to China's official news service, Xinhua, those experiments will involve areas of medicine, physics, and biology, as well as quantum key transmission, space atomic clock, and solar storm research.

China has plans within the next decade to send up an even larger space station. This, on top of plans to establish a moon colony, as well.

Also at Spaceflight Now.

[Update] The launch was a success — coverage at: phys.org and Nature.

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butthurt writes:

Current Biology has an article (open access, DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2016.08.049) about the extent of wilderness areas around the world (except Antarctica). The authors found a decrease of 9.6% in the extent of those areas in the 2010s, as compared to the early 1990s.

For 3 of the 14 biomes (kinds of ecosystems)—"Tropical and Subtropical Coniferous Forests, Mangroves, and Tropical and Subtropical Dry Broadleaf Forests"—there remain no contiguous areas of at least 10,000 km², say the authors. However, such large contiguous areas do comprise 82.3% of all wild lands.

They note that

and recommend legal protection for wild lands as part of efforts against emission of carbon dioxide.

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takyon writes:

The management of Norwegian Air have reiterated a promise to deliver $69 trans-Atlantic flights using the new Boeing 737 MAX 8 airliner, starting sometime in 2017:

According to Norwegian Air chief commercial officer Thomas Ramdahl, his airline is awaiting the aircraft needed for the $69 flights. That's because the first of the 100 Boeing 737 MAX 8 airliners Norwegian Air ordered to operate those flights won't be ready for delivery until 2017. The Boeing 737 Max 8 is expected to enter service with launch partner Southwest Airlines during the third quarter of 2017. However, Boeing told Bloomberg's Julie Johnson and Mary Schlangenstein that the planes could be ready for delivery as early as March.

Ramdahl told Business Insider that his airline plans to make an announcement around November or December of this year with firm details of the $69 fares. "I can promise you that you will see trans-Atlantic flights on the 737Max next year," Ramdahl told us in an interview last week. "And that's when you will see the $69 fares."

The 737 MAX 8 features new fuel-efficient CFM LEAP-1B engines, upgraded avionics, and aerodynamics. As as result, the new jet offers airlines the range and performance to operate trans-Atlantic service with the lower cost of a narrow-body jet.

Found at NBF, which mentions other variants of the 737 MAX.

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

SRI International, the Silicon Valley research lab where Apple's virtual assistant Siri was born, is working on a new generation of virtual assistants that respond to users' emotions.

As artificial-intelligence systems such as those from Amazon, Google, and Facebook increasingly pervade our lives, there is an ever greater need for the machines to understand not only the words we speak, but what we mean as well—and emotional cues can be valuable here (see "AI's Language Problem").

"[Humans] change our behavior in reaction to how whoever we are talking to is feeling or what we think they're thinking," says William Mark, who leads SRI International's Information and Computing Sciences Division. "We want systems to be able to do the same thing."

[...] The system is designed to identify emotional state based on a variety of cues, including typing patterns, speech tone, facial expressions, and body movements.

SenSay could, for example, add intelligence to a pharmacy phone assistant. It might be able to tell from a patient's pattern of speech if he or she were becoming confused, then slow down.

The machine-learning-based technology is trained on different scenarios, depending on how it will be used. The new virtual assistants can also monitor for specific words that give away a person's mental state.

It works via text, over the phone, or in person. If someone pauses as he or she types, it could indicate confusion. In person, the system uses a camera and computer vision to pick up on facial characteristics, gaze direction, body position, gestures, and other physical signals of how a person is feeling.

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"exec" writes:

The City of Key West, Fla., put out a call for help to find the owner of a most unusual illegally parked vehicle -- a replica of a car from The Flintstones. Image.

http://www.upi.com/Odd_News/2016/05/27/Real-life-version-of-Fred-Flintstones-car-found-illegally-parked-in-Florida/7101464351204/

The City of Key West, Fla., put out a call for help to find the owner of a most unusual illegally parked vehicle -- a replica of a car from The Flintstones.

The city said in a Facebook post that a Stone Age vehicle resembling that driven by Fred Flintstone and company in the classic cartoon series (and live-action films) was found illegally parked without anyone around to claim the unique piece of property.

"This Flintstone car is in front of 828 Emma Street. It is illegally parked in the public right of way. It's been red tagged, but the City would really like to find the owner before we have to take it away. The owner has not yet come forward. Please, if you know whose it is, let them know. Please help us find the owner of this ride... QUICKLY!" the post said.

The post yielded several tongue-in-cheek comments recommending city officials look up Fred Flintstone and buddy Barney Rubble in the local telephone directory or "check with Mr. Slate at the rock quarry."

Even the official Facebook account for The Flintstones got in on the action, commenting: "Sorry about that! - Fred Flintstone."

The city later updated the post to say the vehicle's owner had been identified.

-- submitted from IRC

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

Edward Snowden is asking the US president to pardon him based on the morality of his action.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/sep/13/edward-snowden-why-barack-obama-should-grant-me-a-pardon

Well, here is a completely opposite view from the other side, so to speak:

http://observer.com/2016/09/were-losing-the-war-against-terrorism/

"Since 9/11, NSA has been the backbone of the Western intelligence alliance against terrorism. Its signals intelligence is responsible for the strong majority of successful counterterrorism operations in the West. More than three-quarters of the time, NSA or one of its close partner Anglosphere spy partners like Britain's GCHQ, develops a lead on a terror cell which is passed to the FBI and others for action which crushes that cell before it kills. If NSA loses the ability to do this, innocent people in many countries will die.

Unfortunately, there's mounting evidence that NSA's edge over the terrorists is waning. It's impossible not to notice that jihadist emphasis on communications security and encryption, which is now gaining ground, began in 2013. That, of course, is when Edward Snowden, an NSA IT contractor, stole something like 1.7 million classified documents from his employer, shared them with outsiders, then defected to Moscow."

"However, our precious edge in the SpyWar is waning fast. We are no longer winning. We're about to hear a great deal of unwarranted praise of Ed Snowden thanks to the hagiographic movie about him by Oliver Stone that's to be released this week. Don't be fooled. Snowden is no hero. In truth, he and his journalist helpers have aided terrorists in important ways. Snowden and his co-conspirators have blood on their hands—and perhaps much more blood soon thanks to their aid to the genocidal maniacs of ISIS."

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) has confirmed that its Anti-Doping Administration and Management System (ADAMS) database has been accessed by a "Russian cyber espionage group operator by the name of Tsar Team (APT28), also known as Fancy Bear."

The breach was made possible by spear phishing of an "International Olympic Committee (IOC)-created account for the Rio 2016 Games" that saw the account-holder's passwords obtained.

"The group accessed athlete data," WADA says, "including confidential medical data - such as Therapeutic Use Exemptions delivered by International Sports Federations (IFs) and National Anti-Doping Organizations (NADOs) - related to the Rio Games; and, subsequently released some of the data in the public domain, accompanied by the threat that they will release more."

Fancy Bear is thought to also go by the names APT 28 and Tsar Team. Whatever the group's name, the site [please think before visiting site run by hackers - Ed] on which it has posted a rationale for its attack claims no national affiliation. The Russian link comes from WADA director general Olivier Niggli, so says the agency "has been informed by law enforcement authorities that these attacks are originating out of Russia."

The Russian link matters because ahead of the Rio games the nation was the subject of accusations of systematic, government-sponsored doping. Some Russian athletes were even banned from competition. Others were roundly booed during the games.

[Continues...]

Phoenix666 writes:

A new study from scientists at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) shows that "holes" in HIV's defensive sugar shield could be important in designing an HIV vaccine.

It appears that antibodies can target these holes, which are scattered in HIV's protective sugar or "glycan" shield, and the question is now whether these holes can be exploited to induce protective antibodies.
...
In the 1990s, scientists discovered that HIV can have random holes in its protective outer shell of glycan molecules. Until now, however, scientists weren't sure if antibodies could recognize and target these holes.

Researchers at Cornell and TSRI had previously designed a stabilized version of an important HIV protein, called the envelope glycoprotein (Env) trimer, to prompt rabbit models to produce antibodies against the virus. In the new study, the plan was to reveal HIV's vulnerabilities by examining where the antibodies bound the virus.

The hope is that they can use the holes in HIV's sugar shield to defeat the immune system, as it were, of the virus that defeat's the human immune system.

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Phoenix666 writes:

Claw arms hardly make a drone look less terrifying, but they could make it more useful. That's the promise of Prodrone's latest hoverbot, the snappily-named PD6B-AW-ARM.

This claw-handed drone can fly up to 6 km per hour and stay in the air for 30 minutes. Using its two five-axis robotic arms, it can lift a whopping 44 pounds, which is the equivalent of a four-year-old child. The Japanese drone-maker says its eerie new toy will have a range of industrial uses, from lifting cargo to cutting cables -- but could also drop a lifesaving buoy.

Perhaps most striking is the drone's ability to perch, crow-like, on a railing -- using its claw arms to balance itself. Check that out in the promo video... , and excuse us while we install anti-claw metal sheeting on our windows and rucksacks.

Nanny drones could snatch small children about to fall in the pool or run into traffic.

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