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Phoenix666 writes:

Early developers were struggling. They loved the landmark text editor vi but needed something that was available on more than just Unix.

They needed something more tailored to programmers, something that supported syntax highlighting for various languages and remote editing via SSH. They needed to fine-tune their development environments with plugins to maximize their efficiency.

Dutch programmer Bram Moolenaar created his own solution and shared it for free, eventually asking only that users make a donation to a charity caring for children and families in Uganda.
...

Proponents of Vim commonly point out the same features as reasons why they use the program:

1. Light and portable: Commonly used as a command line interface, Vim can be launched with a terminal, run through a GUI, or used remotely through an SSH connection. Vim is widely used on Windows, Linux, and macOS.
2. Highly customizable and full of plugins: As with so many other open-source platforms, users have run amok with creating custom configurations, features, and plugins. ...
3. Modality and no mouse functionality: It seems frustrating, but your fingers never need to leave your keyboard. Maximize productivity and coding time by using keystrokes to switch among normal, insert, command line, and visual modes. Keys have different commands based on which mode you’re in.
4. Registers: Think of these as multiple clipboards. You can store copied text and macros, which record keystrokes for playback, in different registers. Registers, which persist between uses of Vim, help you save time by executing certain text in a fraction of the time.
5. Motions and text-objects: Arguably our team’s favorite facets of Vim, motions and text-objects serve as the verbs and adjectives of the Vim language, allowing you to write your code über-productively. Motions allow you to tack on an action to built-in commands, so you can, say, delete from the current cursor position until the next occurrence of a letter. Meanwhile, text-objects are used in the context of motions, allowing you to declare commands inside or around words, paragraphs, HTML tags, and even current function blocks.

This submission prepared using the Firefox vim plugin, Vimperator.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

When one of my daughters was in high school, a student in her math class stood up in disgust and exclaimed "Why do we have to learn math for 12 years when we are never going to use any of it?" You might think that as a mathematics educator I would find this statement upsetting. Instead, the student's question got me thinking about the fact that she saw no connection between the mathematics and her future, even though her curriculum was full of story problems that at the time I would have called "real-world problems." Every mathematician has probably encountered an "I'm not fond of math" confession. Choose any subject and you can probably find someone who dislikes it or does not care to practice it. But when I have talked with strangers about my experience teaching English and shop and history and physical education, I rarely (if ever) have encountered a negative response. Because math can be a pathway to many careers, the problem seems important to address.

Mathematics in its purest forms has incredible power and beauty. New mathematics is key to innovations in most science, technology, engineering and mathematics-related (STEM) fields. Often at the time new mathematics is invented, we don't yet know how it will relate to other ideas and have impact in the world. Mathematical modelers use ideas from mathematics (as well as computational algorithms and techniques from statistics and operations research) to tackle big, messy, real problems. The models often optimize a limited resource such as time, money, energy, distance, safety, or health. But rather than finding a perfect answer, the solutions are "good enough" for the real-life requirements. These problems can be motivating for mathematics students, who can relate to mathematics that solves problems that are important to them.

To solve modeling problems, mathematicians make assumptions, choose a mathematical approach, get a solution, assess the solution for usefulness and accuracy, and then rework and adjust the model as needed until it provides an accurate and predictive enough understanding of the situation. Communicating the model and its implications in a clear, compelling way can be as critical to a model's success as the solution itself. Even very young students can engage in mathematical modeling. For example, you could ask students of any age how to decide which food to choose at the cafeteria and then mathematize that decision-making process by choosing what characteristics of the food are important and then rating the foods in the cafeteria by those standards. The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) is providing leadership in communicating to teachers, students, and parents what mathematical modeling looks like in K–12 levels. The 2015 Focus issue of NCTM's Mathematics Teaching in the Middle School will be about mathematical modeling and the 2016 Annual Perspectives in Mathematics Education will also focus on the topic.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Russian researchers have developed a new material that converts infrared light to ultrashort pulses of ultraviolet. For this purpose, the scientists exposed silicon film to a laser so that its relief adjusted under the light wavelength and made properties of the material resonant. The result was a cheap and easy-to-make metasurface as effective as existing ones. The new technology is applicable in compact UV generators for biophotonics and medicine, and also devices for ultradense data processing in optical communications. The study was published in Nanoscale.

Biological media can reflect, absorb, scatter and re-emit light waves. Each of these processes contains information about micro- and macrostructure of the media, as well as shape and motion of its components. In this regard, deep ultraviolet is a promising tool for biology and medicine. Its application includes laser diagnostics and control of fast processes in cells, laser therapy and surgery at the molecular level.

Researchers from ITMO University and Saint Petersburg Academic University have developed a new method for nanostructures fabricating, which is able to convert infrared light to deep ultraviolet. The structure is a film with a regular massive of nanolumps – metasurface. It is generated by radiating silicon film, whose thickness is 100 nanometers, with ultrashort or femtosecond laser pulses that form its relief. On the film surface, the laser smelts such nanolumps, which resonate only with its wavelength and thus allow more radiation to be turned into ultraviolet. In other words, the laser adjusts metasurface to itself. When the relief is formed, the scientists reduce the power so the film starts converting radiation without deformation.

The researchers have managed not only to convert infrared light into violet, but also to get deep ultraviolet. Such radiation is strongly localized, has very short wavelength and distributes as femtosecond pulses. "For the first time, we've created a metasurface that stably emits femtosecond pulses of high power in the ultraviolet range," notes Anton Tsypkin, assistant of ITMO's Department of Photonics and Optical Information Technology. "Such light can be applied in biology and medicine, as femtosecond pulses affect biological objects more precisely."

S. V. Makarov et al. Self-adjusted all-dielectric metasurfaces for deep ultraviolet femtosecond pulse generation, Nanoscale (2016). DOI: 10.1039/C6NR04860A

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Would you have sex with a robot? Would you marry one? Would a robot have the right to say no to such a union?

These were just a few of the questions being asked at the second Love and Sex with Robots conference hastily rearranged at Goldsmiths University in London after the government in Malaysia - the original location - banned it. It has proved controversial, not only to countries with conservative views.

There were no representatives from the sex industry in attendance and no sex robots on display, leading some to question the point of the event.

RealDolls, a Californian-based firm that makes lifelike sex toys, claimed that it would release an artificial intelligence-enhanced sex doll next year. The launch, if it happens, will be vindication for Dr David Levy, who has long predicted the era of intelligent human-looking robots.

A story for those hoping to find a Fully Integrated Security Technotronic Officer under the tree Christmas morning...

Original Submission

takyon writes:

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2016/12/nintendo-sends-cease-and-desist-notice-to-pokemon-rom-hacker/

A fan-made Pokémon ROM hack in the works for eight years was set to launch this Sunday. But a letter sent by Nintendo's Australian law firm on Wednesday has stopped those plans in their tracks.

According to Adam "Koolboyman" Vierra, developer of the fan-made Pokémon Prism project, Nintendo's Australian law firm sent him a cease-and-desist letter, which he uploaded to Google Drive with identifying information redacted. (American representatives for Nintendo were not able to confirm the letter's authenticity as of press time.) The request alleges that Koolboyman's project, which alters the source ROM of the 1999 game Pokémon Gold to create an entirely new adventure, violates multiple Australian laws.

[...] Pokémon Prism is different because it's a "ROM hack"—meaning, it's not a full game. Rather, Prism is a small patch file that is worthless without the original ROM file (which can either be legally dumped from a cartridge or maybe-not-so-legally downloaded from the Internet). Computer gaming fans would describe this kind of release as a "mod." Mods do a similar thing: they take existing, paid-for game engines and assets, and they apply a patch file that remixes existing content and adds new twists.

Original Submission

Here's the Seattle Times with a syndicated NY Times article, http://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/russian-cybergang-ring-scored-millions-in-giant-ad-fraud/

$5 mil/day is enough to support a pretty good sized team, I wonder how big the scamming operation is?

Original Submission

takyon writes:

http://www.sfexaminer.com/uber-halts-self-driving-car-pilot-sf/

Uber's self-driving car saga in San Francisco has come to an end, for now. The announcement that the ride-hail giant is halting its pilot of self-driving vehicles came minutes after the DMV announced late Wednesday afternoon that it revoked the vehicle registration of 16 self-driving Uber vehicles, and said they were "improperly issued."

"Concurrently, the department invited Uber to seek a permit so their vehicles can operate legally in California," DMV wrote in a statement. In an announcement released minutes later, an Uber spokesperson wrote, "We have stopped our self-driving pilot in California as the DMV has revoked the registrations for our self-driving cars. We're now looking at where we can redeploy these cars but remain 100 percent committed to California and will be redoubling our efforts to develop workable statewide rules."

[...] At least three of the self-driving vehicles have been caught on video and in photos appearing to run red lights, though Uber has said that those instances have all been due to "human error."

Update:

It looks like Uber is abandoning California completely for its self driving car program for now and moving it to Arizona.

Only a day after the California DMV put a kibosh on Uber's scofflaw self-driving cars in San Francisco, Uber is pulling its program out of the state all together.

Uber's self-driving cars are headed to Arizona, and are going, going, gone.

Previously:

Uber's Self-Driving Cars to be Tested in San Francisco

Uber Won't Comply With the California DMV's Demand to Obtain a Permit for "Self-Driving Cars"

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

In the Arctic, the Inuits have adapted to severe cold and a predominantly seafood diet. After the first population genomic analysis of the Greenland Inuits, a region in the genome containing two genes has now been scrutinized by scientists: TBX15 and WARS2. This region is thought to be central to cold adaptation by generating heat from a specific type of body fat, and was earlier found to be a candidate for adaptation in the Inuits.

Now, a team of scientists led by Fernando Racimo, Rasmus Nielsen et al. have followed up on the first natural selection study in Inuits to trace back the origins of these adaptations.

To perform the study, they used the genomic data from nearly 200 Greenlandic Inuits and compared this to the 1000 Genomes Project and ancient hominid DNA from Neanderthals and Denisovans. The results, published in the advanced online edition of Molecular Biology and Evolution, provide convincing evidence that the Inuit variant of the TBX15/WARS2 region first came into modern humans from an archaic hominid population, likely related to the Denisovans.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Metabolons, near-mythical clusters of enzymes, have been discovered for the first time. Using fluorescent tags and microscopy -- molecular movie technology -- scientists have confirmed their existence, thus unlocking plants' secret medicinal toolbox.

The discovery has been hailed as a "milestone," and the journal Science called it "a watershed in metabolon research." The paper, featured in a recent issue of Science, shows how plants activate complex mechanisms in concert to respond so efficiently to challenges in their environment.

"The praise comes from the fact that scientists have been looking for metabolons for 40 years," said Bjoern Hamberger, Michigan State University synthetic biologist and co-author of the paper. "Revealing plants' production mechanisms is the key to harnessing the medicinal powers of plants."

What is a Metabolon?
Original Paper

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

When it comes to industrial copter-type drones, it's easy to think that there are just two varieties: little ones that carry Amazon-type small packages, and full-sized unmanned helicopters. Griff Aviation, however, recently announced an aircraft that sits somewhere between the two. The Norwegian company's Griff 300 weighs 75 kg (165 lb) on its own, and can reportedly lift a payload of up to 225 kg (496 lb).

The Griff 300 is an octocopter, meaning it has eight propellers each powered by a separate motor. Depending on how much it's carrying, one charge of its battery pack is good for a claimed flight time of 30 to 45 minutes.

It's manually flown from the ground using a radio remote control, although users can also opt for a custom helicopter-cabin-like mobile control station in which they fly it by first-person view.

Subliminal message filter returns: "go buy a drone".

Original Submission

takyon writes:

The University of Hawaii Institute of Astronomy has released a catalog of 3 billion astronomical objects imaged by the Panoramic Survey Telescope And Rapid Response System:

The Panoramic Survey Telescope & Rapid Response System, or Pan-STARRS, began observing the night sky in 2010, using a 1.8-meter telescope at the summit of Haleakala, on the island of Maui in Hawaii. In four years, the telescope scanned about three-quarters of the visible sky 12 times (using five different light filters), gradually registering about 3 billion unique objects, according to the project collaborators.

The newly released catalog is the world's largest digital sky survey to date, according to a statement from the University of Hawaii Institute of Astronomy, the project's headquarters. The catalog consists of 2 billion petabytes of data (2 million gigabytes), which is about 100 times the total content of Wikipedia. In addition to making the data freely available, the project collaborators have spent years making the catalog easy for other scientists to use.

One of the key objectives of Pan-STARRS (and of many other survey projects) is to look for short-term changes in the night sky. By comparing the images of the same section of the sky taken on different dates (or over multiple dates), scientists can look for small changes, such as objects moving or changing in brightness. With this method, Pan-STARRS has already helped identify a new comet and multiple near-Earth asteroids. (Pan-STARRS set a record by finding 19 new asteroids in a single night).

[more...]

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?

Original Submission

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

Original Submission

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.

Original Submission

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

Original Submission