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Phoenix666 writes:

In a rather curious turn, the Raspberry Pi foundation has released an x86 PC port of its PIXEL+Debian Linux desktop environment.

PIXEL (which is a clunky backronym for Pi Improved Xwindows Environment, Lightweight) is an extensively modified version of the LXDE X11 desktop environment. It was originally released in September for use with Raspberry Pi single-board computers, but now it has also been packaged up for x86 PCs. You can boot your Windows or Mac PC into the PIXEL desktop environment right now, if you so wish.

In the words of Eben Upton, founder of the foundation, PIXEL is "our best guess as to what the majority of users are looking for in a desktop environment [...] Put simply, it's the GNU/Linux we would want to use." To that end, PIXEL is both clean and modern-looking, but more importantly it is useful, with a wide range of productivity software and programming tools pre-installed. PIXEL doesn't eschew proprietary software, either; it even comes with the Adobe Flash browser plug-in.

Can any PIXEL users comment?

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

China's once-celebrated Traffic Elevated Bus (TEB) (reported here) has been left abandoned in the middle of a Hebei city road, not having moved once in over two months. Originally touted as the futuristic solution to urban traffic jams, the "straddling bus" is currently causing them.

A local reporter recently checked up on "the future of public transportation" at its testing site in Qinhuangdao, only to find it forgotten in a rusted garage, covered in dust. The bus is currently being looked after by a pair of old security guards who reluctantly admit that they've been forgotten about as well.

http://shanghaiist.com/2016/12/05/straddling_bus_abandoned.php

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quietus writes:

Everything you do, and everything that happens -- from the location of a water cooler down to serious violations of the law -- is confidential upon pain of termination and the risk of ruinous litigation. You are forbidden to speak to the government, attorneys or the press about wrongdoings at the Company. You are forbidden to speak to your spouse, or your friends, about whether you think your boss could do a better job.

These are only a few of the eye-catching elements in Google's confidentiality policies, according to a lawsuit brought forward by one of the 65,000 "Googlers". The plaintiff has registered his complaint under a "John Doe" identity, as Brian Katz, Google's Director of Global Investigations, Intelligence & Protective Services falsely informed the rest of the Googlers that plaintiff had been terminated for leaking certain information to the press. This was not the case, and Katz knew this, according to the plaintiff: he fears going public will ruin his reputation in the tech industry.

Earlier this year, a Nest employee was fired because he posted comments about Nest's CEO Tony Fadell on Facebook. The reason given for termination was that these posts breached Google's Data Classification guidelines.

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AnonTechie writes in with a solution to a problem we reported a couple of days ago:

Developers of the popular Signal secure messaging app have started to use Google's domain as a front to hide traffic to their service and to sidestep blocking attempts. Bypassing online censorship in countries where internet access is controlled by the government can be very hard for users. It typically requires the use of virtual private networking (VPN) services or complex solutions like Tor, which can be banned too.

The solution from Signal's developers was to implement a censorship-circumvention technique known as domain fronting that was described in a 2015 paper [PDF] by researchers from University of California, Berkeley, the Brave New Software project and Psiphon.

The technique involves sending requests to a "front domain" and using the HTTP Host header to trigger a redirect to a different domain. If done over HTTPS, such redirection would be invisible to someone monitoring the traffic, because the HTTP Host header is sent after the HTTPS connection is negotiated and is therefore part of the encrypted traffic.

http://www.computerworld.com/article/3153059/security/encrypted-messaging-app-signal-uses-google-to-bypass-censorship.html

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Phoenix666 writes:

Scientists are using lasers to accurately "weigh" trees in the tropical rainforests.

The researchers, from University College London and the National Physical Laboratory created an animation of their laser-scanned trees, which they presented at the British Ecological Society meeting in Liverpool.

The method could help to monitor and combat deforestation by more accurately calculating how much carbon is locked within the rainforests, so a financial value can be assigned to in-tact forests.

A large-scale field assessment of carbon stocks in human-modified tropical forests (open, DOI: 10.1111/gcb.12627) (DX)

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n1 writes:

Nigeria has seized over 100 bags of plastic rice smuggled into the country, where prices of the staple food are skyrocketing ahead of the Christmas and New Year holidays.

[...] The rice is suspected of having been smuggled or illegally shipped in from China through Lagos port, a senior customs official in Nigeria's commercial hub told AFP.

The 50-kilo bags branded "Best Tomato Rice," had no date of manufacture and were intercepted Monday in the Ikeja area of the sprawling city, the official said on condition of anonymity.

"We have done a preliminary analysis of the plastic rice. After boiling, it was sticky and only God knows what would have happened if people consumed it," Ikeja area customs controller Mohammed Haruna was quoted as saying.

Nigeria has banned rice imports as it seeks to boost local production.

Source: teleSUR

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Phoenix666 writes:

Canada's telecom regulator yesterday declared that broadband Internet must be considered "a basic telecommunications service for all Canadians" and created a fund to connect rural and remote communities. With this decision, high-speed broadband is now treated as an essential technology similar to voice service.

All Canadians should be able to purchase home Internet with 50Mbps download speeds and 10Mbps uploads, and they should have the option of purchasing unlimited data, the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) announcement said. A new fund will make $750 million available over the next five years to support projects in areas where that level of broadband isn't available.

Money will be distributed to applicants based upon a competitive process. Funding can be used either for fixed broadband service or to upgrade mobile networks, but the goals of 50Mbps/10Mbps and unlimited data for all is specifically for home Internet service. About 10 percent will be allocated to communities that are dependent on satellite access.

Currently, about 18 percent of Canadians, representing 2 million households, don't have access to 50Mbps/10Mbps service. "The CRTC's goal is to reduce that to 10 per cent by 2021 and down to zero in the next 10 to 15 years," a CBC article said.

This sort of thing is why I have so much affection for Canada.

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takyon writes:

An American flight was delayed due to a passenger changing the SSID of a device to "Samsung Galaxy Note 7_1097":

Lucas Wojciechowski was on Virgin America flight 358 from San Francisco to Boston and told BBC News he photographed the hotspot after noticing it when he opened his laptop. A call went out for any passenger with a Note 7 to press their call button. Mr. Wojciechowski subsequently tweeted the crew's announcements from the late night flight after the pilot warned passengers they would have to make an emergency landing.

"This isn't a joke. We're going to turn on the lights (it's 11pm) and search everyone's bag until we find it. "This is the captain speaking. Apparently the plane is going to have to get diverted and searched if nobody fesses up soon." The owner came forward confessing there was no Samsung Galaxy Note 7 on board, but they had changed the name of their SSID wireless device to 'Samsung Galaxy Note 7_1097.'

The real world is funnier than any joke.

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Phoenix666 writes:

Physicists have failed to find disintegrating protons, throwing into limbo the beloved theory that the forces of nature were unified at the beginning of time.

For 20 years, physicists in Japan have monitored a 13-story-tall tank of pure water cloistered deep inside an abandoned zinc mine, hoping to see protons in the water spontaneously fall apart. In the meantime, a Nobel Prize has been won for a different discovery in the cathedral-esque water tank pertaining to particles called neutrinos. But the team looking for proton decays — events that would confirm that three of the four forces of nature split off from a single, fundamental force at the beginning of time — is still waiting.

"So far, we never see this proton decay evidence," said Makoto Miura of the University of Tokyo, who leads the Super-Kamiokande experiment's proton decay search team.

Different "grand unified theories" or "GUTs" tying together the strong, weak and electromagnetic forces make a range of predictions about how long protons take to decay. Super-K's latest analysis finds that the subatomic particles must live, on average, at least 16 billion trillion trillion years, an increase from the minimum proton lifetime of 13 billion trillion trillion years that the team calculated in 2012. The findings, released in October and under review for publication in Physical Review D, rule out a greater range of the predicted proton lifetimes and leave the beloved, 1970s-era grand unification hypothesis as an unproven dream. "By far the most likely way we would ever verify this idea is proton decay," said Stephen Barr, a physicist at the University of Delaware.

Without proton decay, the evidence that the forces that govern elementary particles today are actually splinters of a single "grand unified" force is purely circumstantial: The three forces seem to converge to the same strengths when extrapolated to high energies, and their mathematical structures suggest inclusion in a larger whole, much as the shape of Earth's continents hint at the ancient supercontinent Pangea.

"You have these fragments and they fit together so perfectly," Barr said. "Most people think it can't be an accident."

[Continues...]

Phoenix666 writes:

It was hailed as an elegant confirmation of Einstein's general theory of relativity — but ironically the discovery of gravitational waves earlier this year could herald the first evidence that the theory breaks down at the edge of black holes. Physicists have analysed the publicly released data from the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), and claim to have found "echoes" of the waves that seem to contradict general relativity's predictions.

The echoes could yet disappear with more data. If they persist, the finding would be extraordinary. Physicists have predicted that Einstein's hugely successful theory could break down in extreme scenarios, such as at the centre of black holes. The echoes would indicate the even more dramatic possibility that relativity fails at the black hole's edge, far from its core.

If the echoes go away, then general relativity will have withstood a test of its power — previously, it wasn't clear that physicists would be able to test their non-standard predictions.

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Phoenix666 writes:

For the first time, geologists from the University of Liège have been able to determine the nature of the minerals present on the surface of Mercury - one of the four telluric planets in our solar system. Their study, published this week in the journal Nature Geoscience, is based on experiments conducted in laboratory at extreme temperatures, to reconstitute the conditions observed during the crystallization of magmas. The mineralogy of rocks on the surface of the planets is an excellent indicator of the origin and evolution of the planets since the origins of the solar system.

Between 2011 and 2015, the Messenger probe sent by NASA orbited Mercury and collected tens of thousands physico-chemical measurements of the Mercury crust. It is on the basis of these measurements that Olivier Namur and Bernard Charlier, researchers at FRS-FNRS, were able to reproduce - in their new experimental petrology laboratory at Université de Liège using a unique equipment in Belgium - samples of Mercury magma.

Their conclusions help us to better understand the mineralogy of Mercury, which remained an enigma, and more globally the evolution of this planet. The crust of Mercury is of magmatic origin, produced by lava from the mantle between 4.2 and 3.5 billion years ago. In their study, the two researchers were able to define different regions in the northern hemisphere of Mercury, each characterized by a specific mineralogy.

Their major discovery is the link between the age of these regions and the mineralogy of the lava on their surface, which demonstrates the major role of the thermal evolution of Mercury on its volcanic history. The magmatic activity on Mercury was interrupted early 3.5 billion years ago, making it the telluric planet that cooled the most rapidly in our solar system.

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kazzie writes:

Excessive Facebook browsing at Christmas, and seeing "perfect" family photos posted by others, is more likely to make you miserable, reports the BBC on a paper recently published by a graduate at the University of Copenhagen. The Facebook Experiment: Quitting Facebook Leads to Higher Levels of Well-Being.

Researchers warn of envy and a "deterioration of mood" from spending too long looking at other people's social media stories, induced by "unrealistic social comparisons".

Actively engaging in conversation and connecting with people on social media seems to be a much more positive experience, suggests the study, published in the journal Cyberpsychology, Behaviour and Social Networking.

This seems to be much less gloomy than "passive" users who spend too long "lurking" on social networking websites without getting involved.

The study also suggests benefits from stopping using social media altogether for a week.

You may not be surprised to learn that similar studies have been published in the past. (No reports yet from the Maximegalon Institute of Slowly and Painfully Working Out the Surprisingly Obvious.)

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Phoenix666 writes:

AT&T yesterday unveiled free robocall blocking for postpaid smartphone customers.

Named Call Protect, the service blocks some fraud calls at the network level before they reach customers' phones. In other cases, when it's less clear whether the call is fraudulent, Call Protect doesn't block the call but shows "suspected spam warnings on the incoming call screen which let customers choose whether or not to answer calls that originate from a suspected spam source," AT&T's announcement said.

At least for now, the service is available only for AT&T postpaid wireless customers with iPhones or Android phones that support AT&T's HD Voice technology. Call Protect is not automatically enabled. Instead, customers can add the feature in their AT&T account settings or the Call Protect app for iPhone and Android. Some Android users complained in the Google Play store reviews that Call Protect doesn't support unlocked devices like the Google Pixel.

Coming in 6 months, AT&T premium business service for companies that want to circumvent Call Protect.

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Phoenix666 writes:

Neuroscientists at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) have mapped the brain injuries -- or lesions -- that result in delusional misidentification syndromes (DMS), a group of rare disorders that leaves patients convinced people and places aren't really as they seem. In a study published in the journal Brain, Michael D. Fox, MD, PhD, Director of the Laboratory for Brain Network Imaging and Modulation and the Associate Director of the Berenson-Allen Center for Noninvasive Brain Stimulation at BIDMC and colleagues reveal the neuro-anatomy underlying these syndromes for the first time.

"How the brain generates complex symptoms like this has long been a mystery," said Fox. "We showed how complex symptoms can emerge based on brain connectivity. With a lesion in exactly the right place, you can disrupt the brain's familiarity detector and reality monitor simultaneously, resulting in bizarre delusions. Understanding where these symptoms come from is an important step toward treating them."

Ah, so that's why...

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

Bridging the gap between left and right. I came across this clip showing Glenn Beck and Samantha Bee, and thought that this SoylentNews story / comment thread should be stickied till the new year so we have an ongoing conversation. It's a short clip from her show where Glenn Beck is a willing guest; the key point is they are trying to find common ground. Beck points out that Bee is following some of his own patterns of crying "catastrophe" but they really don't provide much insight beyond the significance of their little coming together moment.

The divide is clear and present on this site as most everywhere else, I would like to see a meta discussion where we fact check each other and drill down through the rhetoric until we get some straightforward lists and proposals on how we can move forward together. What are the fundamental blockers? Which ideas do we consider to be too outrageous for credibility? Many here are guilty of attacking each other — can we try and Spock it out for about a week?

I'll start us off with my supposition:

Climate change is real and human activity has an important effect on it. We must agree on this point in order to move forward, and social/economic issues must be handled after needed environmental changes."

If you post as AC — try and behave as if you were logged in — reduce the flames for better quality discussion.

Original Submission