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"exec" writes:

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

The financial impact of the Note7 recall seems to be largely behind Samsung Electronics, which on Friday forecast that its profit has grown year-on-year by close to 50 percent in the fourth quarter.

A major proportion of the profit of the largest smartphone company is expected to come from components such as memory chips and display panels, rather than from smartphones, according to analysts, a shift that was noticed in the third quarter as well. "They were fortunate that their memory and displays businesses could offset the doom and gloom resulting from the Note7 debacle last quarter," said Bryan Ma, vice president for devices research at IDC.

Samsung said in its earnings guidance released Friday that its profit in the fourth quarter is expected to be 9.2 trillion Korean won ($7.6 billion), up from 6.14 trillion won in the same quarter last year. Revenue for the quarter is expected to be around 53 trillion won, which is about the same as in the fourth quarter of the previous year.

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jdavidb writes:

Last weekend it was reported that Hackers had seized control of accounts belonging to Free Ross, the effort to raise money for the legal defense of Ross Ulbricht. Ulbricht is well known as the founder of the Silk Road dark marketplace, sentenced to life in prison. Accounts seized apparently included cellphones, social network accounts, and Paypal and Bitcoin accounts.

The Free Ross effort now reports that all accounts have been recovered and that no funds have been lost.

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takyon writes:

At least one UK businessman is attaching a condition to his continued support of the ruling Conservative Party:

A major Tory donor has threatened to stop funding the party if Theresa May plans to remove the UK from the "critical" single market after Brexit. Sir Andrew Cook, who has given more than £1.2m to the party, told BBC Radio 4 that ending single market access was "chronic and dangerous" to the economy. The engineering firm chairman said at least one of his factories was almost "entirely dependent" on access to it.

Sir Andrew backed the Remain campaign in the EU referendum. "There are barriers to entry without the single market, there are tariffs," said Sir Andrew, who chairs William Cook, his family's firm which makes components for the rail, energy and defence industries. "One of my factories has 200 people employed making engineering parts that go to France, Germany and Italy," he told BBC Radio 4's Today programme.

Also at Reuters. Scotland's First Minister Nicola Sturgeon has offered to take a Scottish independence referendum off the table in exchange for a "soft Brexit" involving access to the single market.

The BBC reports that while the EU's presence in London is likely to shrink, organizations like the European Banking Authority (EBA) might stick around if the UK remains in the single market.

Finally, have you applied for your Irish passport yet?

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Fnord666 writes:

Apparently a South Korean patrol airplane accidentally dropped its load into the Sea of Japan.

A South Korean maritime patrol airplane lost its entire loadout of live weapons when a crew member accidentally hit the wrong button. Nearly $5 million dollars' worth of weapons tumbled into the Sea of Japan. The South Korean military is attempting to recover the weapons, which it says were not armed when lost.

The incident was reported on January 1 by the Yonhap News Agency. The U.S.-made P-3CK Orion maritime patrol aircraft was flying a routine mission over the Sea of Japan when a crew member on board "mistakenly touched the emergency weapons release switch."

[...] The South Korean military has sent a minesweeper and a salvage ship to the area to fetch the weapons and pledged it won't drop $5 millions worth of missiles in the future.

I wonder if they'll take it out of his paycheck?

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Fnord666 writes:

Hackaday has an interesting article about explosions that save lives rather than take them.

Normally, when something explodes it tends to be a bad day for all involved. But not every explosion is intended to maim or kill. Plenty of explosions are designed to save lives every day, from the highway to the cockpit to the power grid. Let's look at some of these pyrotechnic wonders and how they keep us safe.

Explosive Bolts

The first I can recall hearing the term explosive bolts was in relation to the saturation TV coverage of the Apollo launches in the late 60s and early 70s. Explosive bolts seemed to be everywhere, releasing umbilicals and restraining the Saturn V launch stack on the pad. Young me pictured literal bolts machined from solid blocks of explosive and secretly hoped there was a section for them in the hardware store so I could have a little fun.

"Eject! Eject! Eject!"

Holding back missiles is one thing, but where pyrotechnic fasteners save the most lives might be in the cockpits of fighter jets around the world. When things go wrong in a fighter, pilots need to get out in a hurry. Strapping into a fighter cockpit is literally sitting on top of a rocket and being surrounded by explosives.

Behind the Wheel

There's little doubt that airbags have saved countless lives since they've become standard equipment in cars and trucks. When you get into a modern vehicle, you are literally surrounded by airbags — steering wheel, dashboard, knee bolsters, side curtains, seatbelt bags, and even the rear seat passenger bags. And each one of these devices is a small bomb waiting to explode to save your life.

Grid Down

We've covered a little about utility poles and all the fascinating bits of gear that hang off them. One of the pieces of safety gear that lives in the "supply space" at the top of the poles is the fuse cutout, or explosive disconnector. This too is a place where a small explosion can save lives — not only by protecting line workers but also by preventing a short circuit from causing a fire.

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n1 writes:

Saudi Arabia has sentenced a group of foreign workers who protested against unpaid wages early last year to 300 lashes and four months imprisonment, exacerbating the already dismal plight of temporary foreign workers in the kingdom.

The men, employed by the construction conglomerates Binladin Group and Saudi Oger, had been waiting for months to be paid. Video footage from their protest in April shows them angrily setting ablaze several buses that belonged to their employers.

[...] Binladen Group, founded by the father of deceased al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden, and Saudi Oger, led by Lebanon's Prime Minister Saad Hariri, both claimed they were unable to pay employees after a plunge in oil revenues.

The companies say they completed payment to 70,000 sacked employees at the end of 2016 and that workers who are still with the company would be receiving payments soon.

Source: teleSUR

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Fnord666 writes:

Electronics retailer Monoprice recently got into the 3d printer business, selling several inexpensive, rebranded Wanhao models under their own label. At CES 2017 Monoprice announced several more models, including some resin based printers and a new $150 delta printer. Hackaday really likes the Monoprice Select Mini and has a review of the new lineup.

At CES last year, Monoprice introduced a $200 3D printer. Initial expectations of this printer were middling. My curiosity got the best of me, and last summer I picked up one of these printers for a review. The Monoprice MP Select Mini is actually phenomenal, and not just 'phenomenal for the price'. This machine showed the world how good one of the cheapest printers can be. The future is looking awesome.

You might think Monoprice wouldn't be able to top the success of this great little machine. You would be wrong. This week, Monoprice announced a bevy of new and upgraded printers. Some are resin. Some are huge. One will sell for $150 USD.

If you've ever thought about getting into 3d printing, this coming year will be the time to give it a try.

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Phoenix666 writes:

Scientists have confirmed that Miscanthus, long speculated to be the top biofuel producer, yields more than twice as much as switchgrass in the U.S. using an open-source bioenergy crop database gaining traction in plant science, climate change, and ecology research.

"To understand yield trends and variation across the country for our major food crops, extensive databases are available—notably those provided by the USDA Statistical Service," said lead author Stephen Long, Gutgsell Endowed Professor of Plant Biology and Crop Sciences at the University of Illinois. "But there was nowhere to go if you wanted to know about biomass crops, particularly those that have no food value such as Miscanthus, switchgrass, willow trees, etc."

To fill this gap, researchers at the Energy Biosciences Institute at the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology created BETYdb, an open-source repository for physiological and yield data that facilitates bioenergy research. The goal of this database is not only to store the data but to make the data widely available and usable.

"In addition to providing an easy-to-use, web-based interface, the database supports automated data collection and big data analysis," said first author David LeBauer, a research scientist at Illinois. "Today the BETYdb database contains more than 40,000 open-access records.By making all of this data open access, we hope that researchers can identify new plants and best practices for biomass production. We've been using these data not only to summarize what has been observed in field trials, but also to identify new crops and predict productivity in new environments."

More Information can be found at Global Change Biology Bioenergy, DOI: 10.1111/gcbb.12420

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charon writes:

When Allan Lasser went looking for the oldest computer used by the U.S. government, he found a surprising candidate: the Voyager probes.

When I started this project, I hadn't even considered that the oldest active computer might not even be on Earth. But after my first post, I received a few tips encouraging me to look at the computers onboard Voyager.

Benjamin Levy pointed out how, "the actual computers on board are probably older than [1977] because it takes time to design and build space probes and to certify their computers for their mission," and another tipster sent me a link to a story about the Voyager team needing to hire a new programmer with experience in FORTRAN.

I'll admit I was reluctant to pursue these computers at first, but I soon realized that it was silly to disqualify a government computer from this hunt simply because it's billions of miles away. While the hardware hasn't been upgraded since it left Earth, the software has been upgraded and maintained to meet new mission requirements. We're still in touch with these probes and they're still performing science at the edge of our solar system. Most important, these are government computers and they are both old and active.

How much computer infrastructure of today will be operable, let alone reliable in 40 years?

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Phoenix666 writes:

The Ministry of Defence has today re-announced for the third time that it has awarded a £30m contract to build a [large] laser cannon for zapping the Queen's enemies.

Originally awarded in July 2016 to the Dragonfire consortium, the Laser Directed Energy Weapons (LDEW) contract immediately stalled after a challenge to the contract award by an unknown number of losing companies.

The MoD eventually settled the contract dispute last September, stating at the time that the deal had gone through.

While exciting, in the way that setting about an old shed with a sledgehammer and a couple of gallons of petrol is exciting, the LDEW project is certainly not new.

The Dragonfire consortium – made up of BAE Systems, Leonardo (formerly known as Finmeccanica, parent company of infamous British helicopter firm AgustaWestland), Cambridge-based Marshall Defence and Aerospace, and Hampshire-based defence research company Qinetiq – is charged with building the demonstrator weapon, and a working prototype is hoped for by 2019.

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--OriginalOwner_ writes:

The Indicter reports

Author and investigative reporter Celia Farber has prepared for publication in The Indicter, an updated analysis of the Swedish Assange case. The in-depth analysis concludes that the police reports confirm Julian Assange's testimony, as given to the prosecutor in her questioning conducted at the Ecuadorian embassy in London. It has also been established that the crucial allegations against Mr Julian Assange, as have appeared in the Swedish and international media, in fact were constructed by the police and were not what the complainants really said or wished to achieve.

It has been discovered that it was the police, or the prosecutor's office, which unlawfully and/or unethically leaked the "allegations" to the evening paper "Expressen", which is clearly known for its declared NATO sympathies. Regrettably, but also predictably, this was an opportunity for Western mainstream media to create a scandal around the founder of WikiLeaks. Likewise, it was an occasion used by the MSM to insidiously attack the organization that had partly exposed the corruption of the governments they represent, and partly surpassed them in journalistic efficacy and objectivity.

But it was more than purely vendetta-time; it was a well-articulated campaign which started that day in August 2010 when--according to the Snowden documents--the US government asked the countries participating in the military occupation of Afghanistan under US command to prosecute Julian Assange. Sweden obeyed; others cooperated.

Nevertheless, the Afghan Logs and the Iraq Logs exposed by WikiLeaks remained published. The WikiLeaks founder did not surrender. The Assange case, already politically in its origins, turned into a spiral of increasing geopolitical dimensions.

[Continues...]

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Army social media psyops unit 77 Brigade is struggling to reel in new government cyber-warriors in spite of a recruitment publicity blitz last year, according to the Ministry of Defence.

The "brigade" – in reality a unit slightly smaller than an infantry battalion, with a target manning strength of 448 people – is under strength by about 40 per cent, according to figures released under the Freedom of Information Act.

Of those 448, 182 of them are supposed to be full-time soldiers, sailors and airmen, while 266 are part-time reservists bringing in specialist skills from the civilian world.

A fortnight ago the unit, known as the Security Assistance Group (SAG) until July 2015, had only 276 personnel on its books. Just 123 of those were reservists, meaning 77 Bde has a shortfall of 29 regulars and 143 reserves.

In the last year just 125 soldiers were recruited to 77 Bde, or posted into it from elsewhere in the Army.

The unit forms part of the government's wider efforts to tackle hostile use of social media by, among others, Islamist terrorists, Russian hackers and state-backed fake news and propaganda agencies such as Russia Today (RT) and Iran's Press TV. In addition, it is also supposed to engage in the dark arts of destabilising Britain's foes by starting whispering campaigns among their supporters and potential supporters.

[...] "The shortfall in the reserve numbers is partly due to the recent increase in liability... but is, in the main, due to the fact 77 Brigade is a new formation and it takes time for this capability to be built up," he added.

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takyon writes:

Astronomers at Calvin College in Michigan have predicted that the contact binary star system KIC 9832227 will merge and produce a "red nova" around 2022 (2022.2 ± 0.6):

Molnar's exploration into the star known as KIC 9832227 began back in 2013. He was attending an astronomy conference when fellow astronomer Karen Kinemuchi presented her study of the brightness changes of the star, which concluded with a question: Is it pulsing or is it a binary?

Also present at the conference was then Calvin College student Daniel Van Noord '14, Molnar's research assistant. He took the question as a personal challenge and made some observations of the star with the Calvin observatory. "He looked at how the color of the star correlated with brightness and determined it was definitely a binary," said Molnar. "In fact, he discovered it was actually a contact binary, in which the two stars share a common atmosphere, like two peanuts sharing a single shell. From there Dan determined a precise orbital period from Kinemuchi's Kepler satellite data (just under 11 hours) and was surprised to discover that the period was slightly less than that shown by earlier data" Molnar continued.

This result brought to mind work published by astronomer Romuald Tylenda, who had studied the observational archives to see how another star (V1309 Scorpii) had behaved before it exploded unexpectedly in 2008 and produced a red nova (a type of stellar explosion only recently recognized as distinct from other types). The pre-explosion record showed a contact binary with an orbital period decreasing at an accelerating rate. For Molnar, this pattern of orbital change was a "Rosetta stone" for interpreting the new data.

Upon observing the period change to continue through 2013 and 2014, Molnar presented orbital timing spanning 15 years at the January 2015 meeting of the American Astronomical Society, making the prediction that KIC 9832227 may be following in the footsteps of V1309 Scorpii. Before taking the hypothesis too seriously, though, one needed to rule out other, more mundane, interpretations of the period change. In the two years since that meeting, Molnar and his team have performed two strong observational tests of the alternative interpretations. First, spectroscopic observations ruled out the presence of a companion star with an orbital period greater than 15 years. Second, the rate of orbital period decrease of the past two years followed the prediction made in 2015 and now exceeds that shown by other contact binaries.

The prediction has been refined from an earlier estimate of 2018 to 2020. Illustrations.

PREDICTION OF A RED NOVA OUTBURST IN KIC 9832227

Related: KIC 9832227: a red nova precursor
Evolution of the stellar-merger red nova V1309 Scorpii: SED analysis

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Fnord666 writes:

Ars Technica has an article about the new space race movie Hidden Figures which they describe as "A must-see film about using math to overcome adversity and send humans into orbit". The film centers around a mathematician named Katherine Johnson who played a key role in the Mercury and Apollo projects and the challenges she had to overcome.

There is probably nothing that lifts my spirits more than a movie about heroic scientists sending astronauts into space. Apollo 13 did this masterfully, and The Martian gave it a futuristic twist. And now Hidden Figures has revitalized this quintessentially American tale again, with great success, by focusing on the true story of a group of early NASA mathematicians who plotted Project Mercury's vehicle flight paths in the 1950s and 60s.

Hidden Figures is the perfect title for this film, based on Margot Lee Shetterly's exhaustively researched book of the same name. It deals with an aspect of spaceflight that is generally ignored, namely all the calculations that allow us to shoot objects into orbit and bring them back again. But it's also about the people who are typically offscreen in sweeping tales of the white men who ran the space race. What Hidden Figures reveals, for the first time in Hollywood history, is that John Glenn would never have made it to space without the brilliant mathematical insights of a black woman named Katherine Johnson (played with what can only be called regal geekiness by Taraji Henson from Empire and Person of Interest).

Johnson was part of a group of "colored computers" at Langley Research Center in Atlanta, black women mathematicians who were segregated into their own number-crunching group. They worked on NASA's Project Mercury and Apollo 11, and Johnson was just one of several women in the group whose careers made history.

The movie is in theaters now.

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takyon writes:

Foreign firms can now launch wholly-owned investment funds in China:

China has opened the way for foreign asset managers to begin launching private investment funds in the country through local subsidiaries, by publishing long-awaited registration rules for such investments. The step removes a key technical hurdle to foreign entry 1-1/2 years after China agreed to deregulate its private fund market as part of commitments made during the U.S.-China 8th Strategic and Economic Dialogue in June, 2015.

[...] However, foreign asset managers will only be permitted to trade via China-based systems and as long as their onshore and offshore businesses are separate. In the mutual fund space, foreigners will still need to operate through minority-owned ventures with Chinese partners. The new rules came two days after Fidelity International became the first global asset manager allowed to launch investment products in China through a wholly-owned local subsidiary, after registering with [the Asset Management Association of China (AMAC)].

From an earlier story about Fidelity:

Since 2004, Fidelity has been offering offshore capabilities to Chinese investors through partnering with banks under the Qualified Domestic Institutional Investor (QDII) scheme, and "this latest development expands our capabilities to support Chinese clients' needs to invest both onshore and offshore." Fidelity also owns a quota of $1.2 billion under the Qualified Foreign Institutional Investor (QFII) scheme, which allows foreign institutions to buy Chinese stocks and bonds.

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