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n1 writes:

The Army and Navy must link their missile defense systems into a single network so Navy weapons can hit targets spotted by Army radars and vice versa, the chief of Pacific Command said today. That's a daunting technical task, but if surmounted, it could dramatically improve defense against North Korean, Chinese, or Russian missile salvos.

"I believe that Army missileers should incorporate their air defense systems into the Navy's integrated fire control – counter-air, or NIFC-CA, architecture," Adm. Harry Harris told the AFCEA West convention here.

"I want them to be able to deliver a missile on target, and I want them to be able to do it interchangeably," Harris elaborated to reporters afterwards. "In other words, I want the Navy to be able to do the sensing and the Army to do the shooting, or the Army to do the sensing and the Navy to do the shooting." A Navy E-2D Hawkeye radar plane might spot an incoming missile for a land-based Army Patriot battery, for example, or an Army AN/TPY-2 radar might send targeting data to an Aegis destroyer.

[...] Harris is equally excited about other applications of computer networks to warfare, particularly robotics. At the Super Bowl, "300 quad copters put on light show as an opening act for Lady Gaga — who was terrific by the way," Harris told AFCEA. "What interests me in these examples is not the drones per se, or even Lady Gaga, for that matter. What interests me is the network that allows a hundred drones or more to fly in formation, to receive new orders, and to report back. That, said there's a dark side(:) As soon as we figure out how to do this, someone else will try to hack into it."

To help make these visions reality, Harris encouraged the technologists in the audience to pitch their innovations to the Pentagon — not necessarily to his headquarters in Hawaii. "My wallet really is small. The combatant commanders don't buy stuff except in specialized areas," he told AFCEA. "You have to, at the end of the day, pitch it to the services, (to) acquisition folks at the various service secretariats and OSD (Office of the Secretary of Defense). The combatant commanders can help pull, but you have to push."

Source: Breaking Defense

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

There have been rumblings regarding some sort of nuclear incident—or possibly incidents—in the Arctic over the last month. Multiple reports, some of them from official monitoring organizations, have reported iodine 131—a radioactive isotope often associated with nuclear fission—has been detected via air sampling stations throughout the region.

The first detection of the isotope came during the second week of January, via an air sampling station located in Svanhovd, on Norway's border with Russia's Kola Peninsula. Within days, air sampling stations as far south as Spain also detected the presence of small amounts of the isotope. The fact that iodine-131 has a half-life of just eight days would point to the release occurring just days earlier, and not being a remnant of a past nuclear event.

Because of the low levels of concentration, there is no health risk to the public or the environment, at least on a wide scale. By comparison, these recent measurements are roughly 1/1000th the size of what was detected during the Fukushima incident and 1/1,000,000th the concentration found in the nuclear tainted cloud that washed across Europe following the Chernobyl disaster.

After weeks without answers, the story seemed to pass as a peculiarity, not nearly an unprecedented one at that, until Friday when the US dispatched its WC-135 Constant Phoenix atmospheric testing aircraft to Europe without explanation. The highly unique aircraft are specifically designed to respond to nuclear incidents—especially those that include the detonation of nuclear warheads.

By sampling the air over wide areas and at altitude, the aircraft can provide critical data to better understand the "signature" of a radiation release. During nuclear tests, this can help scientists define what type of weapon was detonated, and, in conjunction with other data, how large the blast was. They can also be used to measure the effects and scale of other radiological events, like the meltdown of nuclear plants. For instance, the WC-135s went to work following the 2011 earthquake that resulted in the meltdown of Japan's Fukushima nuclear power plant.

This leaves us with a number of unanswered questions. The first: What are WC-135s doing up there? Was this a good opportunity for a training sortie and to support scientific endeavors, or is it in response to a specific incident?

Lots of options are presented in the article, but unfortunately no hard answers yet.

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Within the inner ear, thousands of hair cells detect sound waves and translate them into nerve signals that allow us to hear speech, music, and other everyday sounds. Damage to these cells is one of the leading causes of hearing loss, which affects 48 million Americans.

Each of us is born with about 15,000 hair cells per ear, and once damaged, these cells cannot regrow. However, researchers at MIT, Brigham and Women's Hospital, and Massachusetts Eye and Ear have now discovered a combination of drugs that expands the population of progenitor cells (also called supporting cells) in the ear and induces them to become hair cells, offering a potential new way to treat hearing loss.

"Hearing loss is a real problem as people get older. It's very much of an unmet need, and this is an entirely new approach," says Robert Langer, the David H. Koch Institute Professor at MIT, a member of the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, and one of the senior authors of the study.

[...] Because this treatment involves a simple drug exposure, the researchers believe it could be easy to administer it to human patients. They envision that the drugs could be injected into the middle ear, from which they would diffuse across a membrane into the inner ear. This type of injection is commonly performed to treat ear infections.

Will J. McLean et al. Clonal Expansion of Lgr5-Positive Cells from Mammalian Cochlea and High-Purity Generation of Sensory Hair Cells. Cell Reports, February 2017 DOI: 10.1016/j.celrep.2017.01.066

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

takyon writes:

According to an internal audit, mismanagement of funds and the failure to involve staff IT experts led to the termination of an IBM Watson project at a University of Texas cancer center:

According to a blistering audit by the University of Texas System, the cancer center grossly mismanaged its splashy program with IBM, which started back in 2012. The program aimed to teach Watson how to treat cancer patients and match them to clinical trials. Watson initially met goals and impressed center doctors, but the project hit the rocks as MD Anderson officials snubbed their own IT experts, mishandled about $62 million in funding, and failed to follow basic procedures for overseeing contracts and invoices, the audit concludes.

IBM pulled support for the project back in September of last year. Watson is currently prohibited from being used on patients there, and the fate of MD Anderson's partnership with IBM is in question. MD Anderson is now seeking bids from other contractors who might take IBM's place. Meanwhile, a similar project that IBM started with Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York around the same time frame has already wrapped up. It resulted in a commercial product that is currently making its way into hospitals around the world, including in [Jupiter, Florida].

[...] Lastly, auditors found that invoices were paid regardless of whether services were provided, but weren't consistently paid or paid in a timely way. Some fees were suspiciously set at rates just below the amounts that would trigger review and require approval by the Board of Regents. And, MD Anderson paid out money from donations that hadn't actually come through yet—leaving the project with an $11.59 million deficit.

Original Submission

martyb writes:

PuTTY is a free implementation of SSH and Telnet for Windows and Unix platforms, along with an xterm terminal emulator. A new release of Putty was recently announced — it can be downloaded from the PuTTY latest release page.

From the changelog page:

These features are new in 0.68 (released 2017-02-21):

• Security fix: an integer overflow bug in the agent forwarding code. See vuln-agent-fwd-overflow.
• Security fix: the Windows PuTTY binaries should no longer be vulnerable to hijacking by specially named DLLs in the same directory (on versions of Windows where they previously were). See vuln-indirect-dll-hijack.
• Windows PuTTY no longer sets a restrictive process ACL by default, because this turned out to inconvenience too many legitimate applications such as NVDA and TortoiseGit. You can still manually request a restricted ACL using the command-line option -restrict-acl.
• The Windows PuTTY tools now come in a 64-bit version.
• The Windows PuTTY tools now have Windows's ASLR and DEP security features turned on.
• Support for elliptic-curve cryptography (the NIST curves and 25519), for host keys, user authentication keys, and key exchange.
• Support for importing and exporting OpenSSH's new private key format.
• Host key preference policy change: PuTTY prefers host key formats for which it already knows the key.
• Run-time option (from the system menu / Ctrl-right-click menu) to retrieve other host keys from the same server (which cross-certifies them using the session key established using an already-known key) and add them to the known host-keys database.
• The Unix GUI PuTTY tools can now be built against GTK 3.
• There is now a Unix version of Pageant.

When I first started on as staff on SoylentNews, I was running Windows XP and discovered I needed a secure client to gain terminal access to our SoylentNews servers. One of the sysops here suggested PuTTY and guided me in its installation and setup. The UI for this program is, to be kind, different from any other program I have used, yet it seems to be self-consistent in its idiosyncrasies.

Since then, I've moved on to running Windows 7 Pro x64 and have carried over my Putty install. I'll likely install the upgrade in a few days (letting others catch any as-yet unfound bugs) but I am curious what else is out there.

What programs do my fellow Soylentils use for secure terminal access to remote servers from Windows?

[Ed Note - Link from 0.68 fixed. Thanks wonkey_monkey. - Fnord666

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

A workmen's café in central France was overwhelmed with phone calls from gourmet diners wanting to book tables after it was awarded a Michelin star — by mistake, it later turned out.

Reporters, TV crews and prospective customers were astounded when they turned up at the Bouche à Oreille, in the small town of Bourges, to find a cheap and cheerful eatery with red and white polka dot plastic tablecloths. Many patrons wear high-visibility vests, it is often packed at lunchtime and the atmosphere is lively, with customers ordering beers at the bar.

It serves its regular clientèle of local tradesmen plain — if undeniably wholesome — dishes such as homemade lasagna or beef bourguignon.

The Michelin Guide soon phoned up to apologise, explaining that it had confused the café with a more refined establishment of the same name near Paris.

Not only did the error bring the café publicity it had never enjoyed before, it also got the staff invited for a genuine Michelin-standard dinner at the other Bouche à Oreille, 100 miles away in Boutervilliers, near Paris.

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

Fnord666 writes:

It's a delicious structure consisting of a small sponge with a chocolate cap covering a veneer of orange jelly. It is arguably Britain's greatest invention after the steam engine and the light bulb. But is a Jaffa Cake actually a biscuit, asks David Edmonds.

This question reheats a confectionery conundrum first raised in 1991. A tax is charged on chocolate-covered biscuits, but not on cakes. The manufacturer, McVities, had always categorised them as cakes and to boost their revenue the tax authorities wanted them recategorised as biscuits.

A legal case was fought in front of a brilliant adjudicator, Mr D C Potter. For McVities, this produced a sweet result. The Jaffa Cake has both cake-like qualities and biscuit-like qualities, but Mr Potter's verdict was that, on balance, a Jaffa Cake is a cake.

[...] We are tempted to think that every concept must have a strict definition to be useable. But Wittgenstein pointed out that there are many "family-resemblance" concepts, as he called them. Family members can look alike without sharing a single characteristic. Some might have distinctive cheek bones, others a prominent nose, etc. Equally, some concepts can operate with overlapping similarities. Take the concept of "game". Some games involve a ball, some don't. Some involve teams, some don't. Some are competitive, some are not. There is no characteristic that all games have in common.

And there is no strict definition of "cake" or "biscuit" that compels us to place the Jaffa Cake under either category.

Another temptation is to believe that all that is at stake here is an arbitrary issue of semantics. It is, the thought goes, a mere verbal convention whether one labels a Jaffa Cake a cake or a biscuit. It has nothing to do with the real world.

The distinction between statements that are true as a matter of convention or language ("All triangles have three sides"), and those that make a claim about the empirical world ("It is possible to eat 13 Jaffa Cakes in a minute") - is a longstanding one in philosophy. But in the middle of the last century the American philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine disputed whether such a rigid distinction could be maintained - and Tim Crane agrees with him that it cannot.

What say you, soylentils? Is it a cake or a biscuit? Is it both or neither?

Source:

http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-38985820

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Scientists against the demotion of objects like Pluto, Eris, Sedna, etc. to "dwarf planet" status have crafted a new definition:

It's no secret that Alan Stern and other scientists who led the New Horizons mission were extremely displeased by Pluto's demotion from planet status in 2006 during a general assembly of the International Astronomical Union. They felt the IAU decision undermined the scientific and public value of their dramatic flyby mission to the former ninth planet of the Solar System.

But now the positively peeved Pluto people have a plan. Stern and several colleagues have proposed a new definition for planethood. In technical terms, the proposal redefines planethood by saying, "A planet is a sub-stellar mass body that has never undergone nuclear fusion and that has sufficient self-gravitation to assume a spheroidal shape adequately described by a triaxial ellipsoid regardless of its orbital parameters." More simply, the definition can be stated as, "round objects in space that are smaller than stars."

From the proposal:

The eight planets recognized by the IAU are often modified by the adjectives "terrestrial," "giant," and "ice giant," yet no one would state that a giant planet is not a planet. Yet, the IAU does not consider dwarf planets to be planets. We eschew this inconsistency. Thus, dwarf planets and moon planets such as Ceres, Pluto, Charon, and Earth's Moon are "fullfledged" planets. This seems especially true in light of these planets' complex geology and geophysics. While the degree of internal differentiation of a given world is geologically interesting, we do not use it as a criterion for planethood in the spirit of having an expansive rather than a narrow definition.

Here's another article about the significance of the New Horizons mission. New Horizons will fly by 2014 MU₆₉ on January 1, 2019.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Stop terraforming taxation, says Cupertino, and let us get on with it Apple has filed its defence against the European Commission's claim it owes €13bn in back taxes in Ireland.

Apple on Monday filed a defence in which it dismissed the very idea of the US$13.75/£11bn bill, calling for the total or partial annulment of the European Commission decision that set the case in motion and suggesting the Commission pay Apple's costs into the bargain.

Cupertino's argument offers 14 pleas in law that collectively assert that the EU just doesn't understand how Apple operates and thoroughly misunderstands the way it gets stuff done in Ireland.

We therefore get familiar arguments suggesting Apple need not pay tax in Ireland because the real profit-generating work happens elsewhere. Apple Ireland "carried out only routine functions and were not involved in the development and commercialisation of Apple IP which drove profits," says Plea 4.

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

We all know about Microsoft's latest OS, so I won't rehash. A lot of us intensely dislike it, to put it politely. Those of us who can, use other operating systems. This is Soylent, so let's focus on the one that is the most important to us: Linux.

I have been using Windows as my OS since right after Atari times. A few years ago I bought an ARM (ARMHF/ARMv7) netbook and put Lubuntu on it. I had problems with my first Linux experience, mainly in the area of installing software: missing packages in Synaptic, small dependency hells, installing a package at a time by hand, some broken stuff. I put it down mainly to the architecture I have been using, which can't be supported as well as x86-64.

Now, we all know that no software is perfect, and neither is Linux, even though it is now my main OS. We support it in spirit and financially, but there is always room for improvement.

So, the question is: What are your problems with Linux and how can we fix them? How do we better it? Maybe it's filesystems, maybe it's the famous/infamous systemd. Let's have at it.

Original Submission

Fnord666 writes:

Susan Fowler, a former site reliability engineer for Uber and current engineer at Stripe, accused the company of rampant sexual harassment and human resources negligence in a blog post published today.

Fowler claims that on her first day out of training, she was solicited for sex by a superior on an internal company chat thread. She then immediately captured screenshots of the messages and sent them to Uber's human resources department. In a healthy organization, such a problem would have been quickly resolved. But Fowler alleges that the harassment only continued, preventing her from moving up within the company.

"Upper management told me that he 'was a high performer' and they wouldn't feel comfortable punishing him for what was probably just an innocent mistake on his part," explained Fowler in her post

At this point, Fowler says in her post that she was given a choice of remaining on the team and accepting, "a poor performance review," or moving to a different team.

[...] Though she didn't want to leave the role she felt she was best prepared to fill, she switched teams. Work continued, and while Fowler had settled into the new role she regularly had conversations with female employees who shared similar stories about HR negligence, even citing unacceptable experiences with the same superior that solicited her.

[...] Amid chaotic internal politics, Fowler attempted to transfer to a different department, but the company blocked her request. Citing strong performance, she couldn't understand why her request had been denied.

"I was told that 'performance problems aren't always something that has to do with work, but sometimes can be about things outside of work or your personal life,'" added Fowler in her post.

She ultimately decided to stay in the same role until her next performance review. But the frustration continued with a second reassignment rejection and a further explanation that her "review had been changed after the fact," and that she didn't show "signs of an upward career trajectory." As a result, she was shut out of a Stanford computer science graduate program sponsored by the company for high-achievers.

Source:

https://techcrunch.com/2017/02/19/former-uber-engineer-says-company-ignored-repeated-reports-of-harassment/

Also at http://www.thedrive.com/tech/7772/kalanick-eric-holder-arianna-huffington-to-investigate-sexual-harassment-incident-at-uber

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for AndyTheAbsurd

A power company has created a drone that blasts fire at power lines to get rid of rubbish. The method is being used in Xiangyang, China, using a DJI S1000+ model which costs £1,500 alone without the addition of a fire stick. It carries a weight of 11 kilos, and is guided by a man in a hard hat using a £440 Futaba 14SG 14-channel radio controller.

A video shows the tool being used in a testing capacity, replacing a job once delegated to humans on cherrypicker vehicles.

[Ed. Note: the video is on the source article page.]

Source: http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/incredible-flying-flamethrower-drones-burn-9847548

Americans do stupid (or is that awesome) things like this too.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

The "missing link" in Australia's carbon fibre capability, a wet spinning line (below), has been launched today in a ceremony at Waurn Ponds just outside Geelong. Carbon fibre combines high rigidity, tensile strength and chemical resistance with low weight and is used in aerospace, civil engineering, the military, cars, and also in competitive sports.

Only a handful of companies around the world can create carbon fibre, each using their own secret recipe. To join this elite club CSIRO and Deakin researchers had to crack the code. In doing so, using patented CSIRO technology, they've created what could be the next generation of carbon fibre that is stronger and of a higher quality.

[...] The wet spinning line machinery takes a sticky mix of precursor chemicals and turns it into five hundred individual strands of fibre, each thinner than a human hair. They're then wound onto a spool to create a tape and taken next door to the massive carbonisation ovens to create the finished carbon fibre. The CSIRO/ Deakin wet spinning line was custom built by an Italian company with input from the organisations' own researchers. The company liked the design so much it made another for its own factory and the the CSIRO/ Deakin machine has been described as "the Ferrari of wet spinning lines".

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

"What is special about WikiLeaks is that it's not just another damn story, it's not just another damn journalist putting their damn byline, advertising themselves and their position on another damn story."

That's the assessment of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who appeared in Sydney over the weekend (albeit via video link) for a wide-ranging discussion on the failings of modern media, the power of leaked information and why WikiLeaks is happy to court scandal.

WikiLeaks, which celebrated its 10th anniversary in October last year, has never been one to shrink from its stated goal of uncovering "government and corporate misconduct." However, the organisation has come under fire in recent months for the way it releases information, particularly around the timing of its leaks in the lead up to the 2016 election.

But speaking to the audience in Sydney -- including supporters who were willing to yell their support during the live cross -- Assange defended WikiLeaks as "a wonderful library you can trust" and a source of "original pristine information."

"You're not reading pre-weaponised knowledge," he said of the organisations' millions of documents. "When you read a newspaper article, you are reading weaponised text that is designed to affect a person just like you.

"I think that is the real beauty of WikiLeaks... it is that sea of information, that treasure, that intellectual treasure, that rebel library of Alexandria you can go into."

Original Submission

-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

Dissident Voice reports

After a week of limited coverage of "unimaginable levels" of radiation inside the remains of collapsed Unit 2 at Fukushima[...], Nuclear-News.net reported February 11 that radiation levels are actually significantly higher than "unimaginable".

Continuous, intense radiation at 530 sieverts an hour (4 sieverts is a lethal level), was widely reported in early February 2017--as if this were a new phenomenon. It's not. Three reactors at Fukushima melted down during the earthquake-tsunami disaster on March 3, 2011, and the meltdowns never stopped. Radiation levels have been out of control ever since. As Fairewinds Energy Education noted in an email February 10:

Although this robotic measurement just occurred, this high radiation reading was anticipated and has existed inside the damaged Unit 2 atomic reactor since the disaster began nearly 6 years ago.... As Fairewinds has said for 6 years, there are no easy solutions because groundwater is in direct contact with the nuclear corium (melted fuel) at Fukushima Daiichi.

What's new (and not very new, at that) is the official acknowledgment of the highest radiation levels yet measured there, by a factor of seven (the previously measured high was 73 sieverts an hour in 2012). The highest radiation level measured at Chernobyl was 300 sieverts an hour.

[...] This coverage relates only to Unit 2's melted reactor core. There is no reliable news of the condition of the melted reactor cores in two other units.

[...] Whatever is actually going on at Fukushima is not good, and has horrifying possibilities. It is little comfort to have the perpetrator of the catastrophe, TEPCO, in charge of fixing it, especially when the Japanese government is more an enabler of cover-up and denial than any kind of seeker of truth or protector of its people.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

NASA will soon be testing high-altitude parachute systems that let astroboffins land valuable scientific research payloads from altitudes of 60,000 feet.

The technique, using parafoils – cellular aerofoils of the same sort used to make high-performance stunt kites – will, so NASA hopes, allow it to recover scientific instruments used for high-altitude data gathering experiments without chasing balloons across vast tracts of America.

Instead of sending payloads up on research balloons and hoping the weather doesn't blow them too far off course, the parafoil method allows for payloads to be released from the balloon at around 60,000ft and then be steered back to earth for an "automatic precision landing".

[...] Being able to drop a payload from 60,000ft on to a defined point is a great leap forward from the current situation where it's a best guess as to where the payload lands, as long-time Reg readers will recall from the early LOHAN tests in Spain.

Original Submission