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-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

Computerworld reports

Ford engineer called MyFord Touch infotainment system "a polished turd"

Documents in a class-action lawsuit against Ford and its original MyFord Touch in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) system reveal that the company's engineers and even its top executive were frustrated with the problematic technology.

The documents from the 2013 lawsuit show Ford engineers believed the IVI, which was powered by the SYNC operating system launched in 2010, might be "unsaleable" and even described a later upgrade as a "polished turd", according to a report in the Detroit News , which was confirmed by Computerworld.

The SYNC OS was originally powered by Microsoft software. Microsoft continued releasing software revisions it knew were defective, according to the lawsuit.

"In the spring of 2011, Ford hired Microsoft to oversee revisions, and hopefully the improvement, of the [software]. But ... Microsoft was unable to meaningfully improve the software, and Ford continued releasing revised software that it knew was still defective", the lawsuit states.

[The week of October 3], a U.S. District Court judge certified the case as a class action.

Consumer groups from nine states are involved in the lawsuit against Ford. The lawsuit describes an IVI screen that would freeze or go blank; generate error messages that wouldn't go away; voice recognition and navigation systems that failed to work; problems wirelessly pairing with smartphones; and a generally slow system.

[...] In 2014, Ford announced it was dropping Microsoft as the platform supplier for SYNC and moving to one based on Blackberry QNX for its SYNC 3 IVI.

Previous: It's Official: Ford Dumps Windows for QNX

Original Submission

-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

Quartz reports

Seven Rhode Island universities, including Brown and Rhode Island College, will move to open-license textbooks [1] in a bid to save students $5 million over the next five years, the governor announced [September 27].

The initiative is meant to put a dent in the exorbitant cost of college and, more specifically, college textbooks. Mark Perry, a professor of economics and finance at the University of Michigan Flint, and a writer at the American Enterprise Institute, estimated last year [Cloudflare protected] that college textbook prices rose 945% between 1978 and 2014, compared to an overall inflation rate of 262% and a 604% rise in the cost of medical care.

That is not the result of a general trend of higher costs in publishing, he notes: the consumer price index for recreational books has been falling relative to overall inflation since 1998.

[...] Open textbooks are defined as "faculty-written, peer-reviewed textbooks that are published under an open license--meaning that they are available free online, they are free to download, and print copies are available at $10-40, or approximately the cost of printing", according to a report by the Student Public Interest Research Groups (PIRGs) (pdf). They are part of the move toward Open Educational Resources, which has roots in the open-source software movement, it says.

Open licenses allow for content to be shared, unlike traditional textbooks which limit the use of their materials. [Richard Culatta, the chief innovation officer for Rhode Island] remembers teaching and replacing a section of a textbook with more relevant information for his class, only to be informed that he was infringing on international copyright law.

[1] A very bloated (webfonts) all-script-driven page.

Note: If you are thinking of using "begs the question" in the same way the state official did, that is a bad idea.

Our previous discussions of student materials and adoption of openness.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

A new automaker pulled aside the curtain in Silicon Valley, revealing its name as Lucid Motors and showing off its prototype car, a premium electric sedan. The company previously existed under the name of Atieva, where it got its start developing battery packs for electric vehicle applications.

Impressively, in just two years of development the company is so far along with its first vehicle that it already has a body-in-white, an automotive term for a welded sheetmetal body.

Lucid Motors came out of stealth mode, but only issued a few detail photos of its car.

As part of a limited media gathering where photos were prohibited, I visited the company's Menlo Park, California headquarters, where it has secretly been developing its launch model. Along with seeing the body-in-white and a 90 to 95 percent complete version of the car, Lucid Motors showed off the car's components, from the electric drivetrain to interior design concepts.

Greeting me at Lucid Motors were two of the company's luminaries, Chief Technology Officer Peter Rawlinson who includes Tesla and Jaguar on his resume, and Vice President of Design Derek Jenkins. In Jenkins previous position at Mazda, he designed the latest generation of the MX-5 Miata. Other members of Lucid Motors' staff came over from Tesla.

When I asked for the name of Lucid Motors' electric sedan, Rawlinson demurred, saying that would be announced at a later date.

Lucid Motors builds on Atieva's battery research. The company's patented lithium-ion battery chemistry shows significant resistance to degradation over high power charging cycles, an important ingredient for electric cars. It also claims 20 percent greater energy density in its batteries than competitors, due to its cooling and power control technologies.

With its battery technology and a dual motor system developed for the launch car, Rawlinson said it will get well over 300 miles of range, and the company is considering a 400-mile version as well, much as Tesla sells models with different ranges. He also said the car, which will use a motor at each axle, could likely get to over 200 mph, although the production vehicle will have its speed limited.

Under the name Atieva, the company has released video of its test mule van, which it calls Edna. This van uses the dual motor system, with total horsepower adding to 1,200, although for stability reasons that amount has been restricted to 900 horsepower. Still, it gets to 60 mph in 2.69 seconds. Rawlinson says that the sedan will weigh about 1,000 pounds less and have much better aerodynamics, so is likely to be even quicker.

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Phoenix666 writes:

In Mexico, organised crime reaches everywhere, even into the smallest village - except for one small town in the state of Michoacan. Led by local women, the people of Cheran rose up to defend their forest from armed loggers - and kicked out police and politicians at the same time.
...
Early on Friday 15 April 2011, Cheran's levantamiento, or uprising, began. On the road coming down from the forest outside Margarita's home, the women blockaded the loggers' pick-ups and took some of them hostage. As the church bells of El Calvario rang out and fireworks exploded in the dawn sky alerting the community to danger, the people of Cheran came running to help. It was tense - hotheads had to be persuaded by the women not to string up the hostages from an ancient tree outside the church.
...
The municipal police arrived with the mayor, and armed men came to free their hostage-friends. There was an uneasy stand-off between the townspeople, the loggers and the police. It ended after two loggers were injured by a young man who shot a firework directly at them. And Cheran - a town of some 20,000 people - began its journey towards self-government.

"It makes me want to cry remembering that day," says Margarita. "It was like a horror movie - but it was the best thing we could have done."

The police and local politicians were quickly driven out of town because the people suspected they were collaborating with the criminal networks. Political parties were banned - and still are - because they were deemed to have caused divisions between people. And each of the four districts of Cheran elected representatives to a ruling town council. In many ways, Cheran - a town populated by the indigenous Purepecha people - returned to its roots: to the ancient way of doing things, independent of outsiders.

Original Submission

Not everyone who strives to navigate the internet without being tracked is up to no good. This is the underlying premise of a qualitative study led by a trio of Drexel University researchers, who set out to gather the stories of people working on collaborative projects online — like editing Wikipedia — and are concerned about their privacy and taking steps to protect it.

The study, entitled "Privacy, Anonymity, and Perceived Risk in Open Collaboration: A Study of Tor Users and Wikipedians," which was published in advance of its presentation at the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing in February, offers a rare look into why some people turn to IP obfuscation tools, such as the onion router, to keep a low profile and how they experience the internet as a result.

The study's central finding is that perceived threats from other individuals, groups of people and governments are substantial enough to force users below the radar in order to protect their reputation, themselves, and their families.

"Wikipedia editors are volunteers who are trying to build a comprehensive free information resource for everyone on the planet. Tor users are often not seen in those positive ways. But these two organizations are actually committed to the same things — a free global exchange of information with everyone able to participate," said Andrea Forte, PhD , an associate professor in Drexel's College of Computing & Informatics and lead author of the study.

Press Release

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Ancient Greeks May Have Influenced the Creation of China's Terracotta Army

takyon writes:

Archaeologists have suggested that ancient Greeks may have been in contact with China nearly 1,500 years before the arrival of Marco Polo, and that Greek sculptors influenced the creation of the Terracotta Army:

China and the West were in contact more than 1,500 years before European explorer Marco Polo arrived in China, new findings suggest. Archaeologists say inspiration for the Terracotta Warriors, found at the Tomb of the First Emperor near today's Xian, may have come from Ancient Greece. They also say ancient Greek artisans could have been training locals there in the Third Century BC.

Polo's 13th Century journey to China was the first to be well-documented. However, Chinese historians recorded much earlier visits by people thought by some to have been emissaries from the Roman Empire during the Second and Third Centuries AD. "We now have evidence that close contact existed between the First Emperor's China and the West before the formal opening of the Silk Road. This is far earlier than we formerly thought," said Senior Archaeologist Li Xiuzhen, from the Emperor Qin Shi Huang's Mausoleum Site Museum.

[...] Farmers first discovered the 8,000 terracotta figures buried less than a mile from the tomb of China's first emperor Qin Shi Huang in 1974. However there was no tradition of building life-sized human statues in China before the tomb was created. Earlier statues were simple figurines about 20cm (7.9ins) in height. To explain how such an enormous change in skill and style could have happened, Dr Xiuzhen believes that influences must have come from outside China. "We now think the Terracotta Army, the Acrobats and the bronze sculptures found on site have been inspired by ancient Greek sculptures and art," she said.

Also at National Geographic.

Did Ancient Greeks Help Build China's Terracotta Army?

Phoenix666 writes:

Greek sculptors may have helped carve the famous terracotta warriors that have for more than 2,000 years watched over the tomb of Qin Shi Huang, China's first emperor.

Historians and archeologists excavating the tomb surmise that the statues, which were unusual for the time period, were influenced by Greek sculpture, suggesting that East and West met much earlier than previously thought.

"We now think the Terracotta Army, the acrobats and the bronze sculptures found on site, have been inspired by ancient Greek sculptures and art," Li Xiuzhen, a senior archaeologist at the site, told the Guardian.

Not the sort of thing that senior scientists on the Chinese mainland usually suggest.

Original Submission #1  Original Submission #2 

An Anonymous Coward writes:

A study in Current Biology concludes that the demand for ivory far exceeds any sustainable harvest model and that there is a high risk that lifting the ivory ban will make things worse. The authors note that attempts must be made to reduce the demand for ivory:

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/09/legalizing-ivory-trade-wont-save-elephants-study-concludes
http://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(16)31005-3
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destruction_of_ivory

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

With all the noise about default passwords on Internet-connected devices, it is maybe time to revisit a 2012 paper on the Carna botnet. There were probably other even quieter ones before that and certainly default passwords have been long exploited. The Carna botnet operator went to the trouble of publishing a paper four years ago. He or she was playing around with the Nmap Scripting Engine (NSE) and discovered an amazing number of open embedded devices on the Internet. Many allowed login with empty or default credentials and were thus used to build a distributed port scanner to scan all IPv4 addresses to form a kind of census of the IPv4 Internet. The scanned data is in the public domain and available for download and analysis over Bittorrent.

IPv6 is another can of worms and the IPv4 data is thus of historical interest.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Yet another United States Postal Service employee is joining The Mail Carrier Hall Of Shame, after being accused of dumping hundreds of pieces of mail into a ditch — while a local filmed the whole thing.

The USPS is investigating after residents in Decatur, GA reported seeing a mail carrier throwing several bins of mail into the woods behind a subdivision, WSB-TV reports.

The subdivision's HOA president witnessed the dumping on Tuesday, and sent the news station video and photos of incident.

"I sat there and recorded for about five minutes. And he continued to just grab more mail and continued to just toss it over the fence," she told WSB-TV. "At one point he actually stopped and took a break like he was tired, and continued to toss the mail. He eventually drove off like it was normal."

The station tipped off USPS, and the agency dispatched investigators to the scene. Once there, it took five postal workers two hours to collect more than a dozen bins' worth of mail.

- https://consumerist.com/2016/10/20/video-shows-usps-worker-dumping-bins-of-mail-in-a-ditch/
https://web.archive.org/web/20161023092445/https://consumerist.com/2016/10/20/video-shows-usps-worker-dumping-bins-of-mail-in-a-ditch/
- https://web.archive.org/web/20161023092445/http://www.wsbtv.com/news/local/dekalb-county/thousands-of-pieces-of-mail-dumped-in-woods-usps-launches-investigation/458775917

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

I wonder how many people who proclaim that they "never get sick" would be willing to test their claim.

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/05/studies-intentionally-infect-people-disease-causing-bugs-are-rise

The dengue vaccine trial mentioned in TFA was discussed here earlier this year:
https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=16/03/18/199234

Original Submission

Colombia and FARC Resume Peace Talks

takyon writes:

Colombia and FARC have resumed peace talks in Cuba, following the narrow defeat of the previous peace deal in a public referendum. The deal will have to be rewritten... and probably not in FARC's favor:

An amendment to the deal that does not include FARC transitioning to a political movement would be difficult for the leftist movement to stomach. Under the deal, FARC would have been given 10 congressional seats in government, which opponents say is unacceptable. The rebels, Colombia's armed forces and right-wing paramilitaries have all been implicated in crimes committed during the nearly five-decade war, which has claimed at least 220,000 lives and displaced some 8 million people. President Juan Manuel Santos, who won the Nobel Peace Prize earlier this month for his efforts, has extended a ceasefire until the end of the year and vowed to reach a new peace deal as soon as possible.

Colombian President Receives Nobel Peace Prize for Rejected Accord with FARC

-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

The World Socialist Web Site reports

[October 7], Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his role in the four years of negotiations to reach a peace accord with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) guerrillas. The announcement came five days after Colombians narrowly rejected the accord in a referendum marked by widespread abstention.

As the second Colombian to receive a Nobel prize--after the renowned novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez received the prize for literature in 1982--Santos accepted it "in the name of all Colombians", He also announced on Sunday that the $930,000 reward will be "donated for the reparation of the victims" of the civil war.

This attempt to exploit the prize to promote national unity fell flat, however, in the face of the deep and bitter divisions revealed by the unexpected rejection of the accord in a referendum that saw only a 37 percent turnout and a margin of victory for the "no" camp of just 60,000 votes out of the 13 million ballots cast.

The selection of Santos for the Nobel Peace Prize only underscores the dubious character of this distinction, which has been bestowed on the likes of Barack Obama in the midst of military escalation in Afghanistan and drone assassinations, [as well as] figures ranging from the US war criminal Henry Kissinger to the right-wing Israeli leader and former terrorist Menachem Begin.

As is often the case, the selection of Santos for the prize was driven by definite political and economic interests. The bourgeoisie internationally has a serious stake in the Colombian accord, which it hopes will end the armed conflict, opening up the country to far more intensive penetration by transnational capital. At the same time, it would serve to turn the FARC, the last major guerrilla movement, into a new bourgeois party tasked with containing and diverting the struggles of the Colombian working class.

[...] The 2016 Nobel Peace Prize celebrates this political figure and a "peace accord" that grants virtual impunity for war crimes carried out by the government, the paramilitaries, and the FARC.

Previous: FARC Peace Deal Rejected by Colombians

Original Submission #1  Original Submission #2 

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Recent research suggests climate change will lead to troubling social and economic damages, including a severe drop in global GDP.

What will a planet plagued by escalating climate change look like? No one really knows. But speaking at EmTech MIT 2016, Solomon Hsiang, a professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, presented results based on his recent analysis of economic and climate data that begin to more clearly define what the world might look like as it gets hotter.

It's not a pretty picture. Rising temperatures will dramatically damage agricultural yields and human health, and will significantly reduce overall economic growth. In fact, Hsiang said, data suggests global GDP will be reduced by 23 percent by the end of the century if climate change progresses largely unabated, compared to a world without global warming.

That decrease in economic output will hit the poorest 60 percent of the population disproportionately hard, said Hsiang. In doing so, it will surely exacerbate inequality, as many rich regions of the world that have lower average annual temperatures, such as northern Europe, benefit from the changes. Hotter areas around the tropics, including large parts of south Asia and Africa, already tend to be poorer and will suffer.

Original Submission

NotSanguine writes:

Phys.org is reporting on a recent paper from the journal Astrobiology.

Viking LR experimentors Gilbert Levin and Patricia Straat are trying to determine whether the experiment actually identified life on Mars or not.

From the Phys.Org article:

In 1976, two Viking landers became the first US spacecraft from Earth to touch down on Mars. They took the first high-resolution images of the planet, surveyed the planet's geographical features, and analyzed the geological composition of the atmosphere and surface. Perhaps most intriguingly, they also performed experiments that searched for signs of microbial life in Martian soil.

Overall, these life-detection experiments produced surprising and contradictory results. One experiment, the Labeled Release (LR) experiment, showed that the Martian soil tested positive for metabolism—a sign that, on Earth, would almost certainly suggest the presence of life. However, a related experiment found no trace of organic material, suggesting the absence of life. With no organic substances, what could be, or seem to be, metabolizing?

[...] In the LR experiment, both the Viking 1 and Viking 2 landers collected samples of Martian soil, injected them with a drop of dilute nutrient solution, and then monitored the air above the soil for signs of metabolic byproducts. Since the nutrients were tagged with radioactive carbon-14, if microorganisms in the soil metabolized the nutrients, they would be expected to produce radioactive byproducts, such as radioactive carbon dioxide or methane.

[...] Ever since the LR experiments, researchers have been searching for other kinds of nonbiological chemicals that might produce identical results.

In their new paper, Levin and Straat review some of these proposals. One possible candidate is formate, which is a component of formic acid found naturally on Earth. A 2003 LR-type experiment found that formate in a soil sample from the Atacama Desert in South America produced a positive result, even though the soil contained virtually no microorganisms. However, the study did not include a sterilization control, and it's likely that the formate concentration in the Atacama Desert is much higher than that on Mars.

Another potential candidate is perchlorate or one of its breakdown products. In 2009, the Phoenix mission to Mars detected perchlorates in the Martian soil. Although perchlorates could yield a positive result because they produce gas when interacting with some amino acids, they do not break down at 160 °C, and so would continue to give positive results after the sterilization control.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

If you want hardcore gaming performance, but need it in a system that's portable, if not completely lightweight, then Razer's new Blade Pro could be just the ticket. Razer is calling it the "desktop in your laptop," and they the company has a point.

On the inside, the system packs a quad core Skylake processor, an 8GB Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 GPU, 32GB RAM, up to 2TB of NVMe SSD storage in RAID 0, Thunderbolt 3, and a 4K G-Sync capable screen. That's a machine that isn't giving much up in performance to most desktop PCs, so already justifies Razer's strapline... but it's the next thing they did that really makes this a laptop desktop.

The Blade Pro doesn't have the usual membrane keys found in laptops. It has a full mechanical keyboard, with switches—not rubber domes—beneath each key. OK, it's still a laptop, so it's a low profile mechanical keyboard with reduced key travel and chiclet style buttons. But it's a mechanical keyboard nonetheless (Razer also has a similar mechanical mechanism for its iPad Pro keyboard). And of course, being a Razer laptop, it's not just a mechanical keyboard. It's a mechanical keyboard that can be lit up with any color of the rainbow. Alongside it sits a giant touchpad.

[...] There is of course the small matter of the price; it's a little eye-watering. With 512GB of storage, it starts at $3,699/€4,199/£3,499.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Udacity President Sebastian Thrun speaking at Vanity Fair's New Establishment Summit.

Prepare for your car to become an intellectual giant -- and for you to like it.

In a highly optimistic forecast at the Vanity Fair New Establishment Summit in San Francisco, computer scientist Sebastian Thrun said artificial intelligence will radically reshape our lives for the better.

"In the last 200 or 300 years, we have made ourselves into superhumans," able to plow a field a thousand times faster than our ancestors, fly across the Atlantic Ocean and talk to a person in Australia, he said. Artificial intelligence will take us to the next step: "Rather than replacing our muscles, we're going to be making our brains stronger."

That'll start with artificially intelligent cars, said Thrun, who rose to Silicon Valley fame in his former job leading Google's self-driving car project.

"All the unborn cars get born with the full wisdom of their forefathers. AI cars will outpace all of us because they can learn faster," said Thrun, still a Stanford professor and now president of online learning site Udacity.

Artificial intelligence is spreading like wildfire across the technology industry, screening out junk email, labeling our photos, translating foreign languages and helping us type faster. But not everybody is so sanguine about the possibility of AI machines taking over high-skilled jobs.

Original Submission