SoylentNews

Phoenix666 writes:

Even though Olympic swimmers have admitted doing it, peeing in the pool is not a condoned practice. Urine contributes to the formation of compounds in pool water that can be harmful to people's health. Now scientists are tackling a new way to monitor water quality: by measuring how sweet it is. Their report appears in ACS' journal Environmental Science & Technology Letters.

Recent studies have shown that nitrogenous compounds (e.g., urea) in urine and sweat react with chlorine to form disinfection byproducts (DBPs), including trichloramine, that can cause eye irritation and respiratory problems. Xing-Fang Li, Lindsay K. Jmaiff Blackstock and colleagues say this evidence has highlighted the need for improved understanding of pool chemistry to raise awareness and educate the public on the importance of swimming hygiene practices. To estimate how much urine -- and potentially DBPs -- might be in a given pool, Li's team needed to identify what compound might consistently be present in urine. So the researchers turned to the artificial sweetener, acesulfame potassium (ACE), which is marketed as Sunett and Sweet One. The sweetener, which is often used in processed foods like sodas, baked goods and even in other sweeteners, is widely consumed, chemically stable and passes right through the digestive tract and into consumers' urine.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Alphabet/Google/YouTube is betting that millennials and other cord-cutters will pay $35/month for a cloudy form of cable TV:

On Feb. 28, YouTube Inc. announced a new service that will deliver an assortment of major television channels to paying customers via the internet. For $35 a month, starting sometime this spring, subscribers to YouTube TV will be able to watch the top four broadcast networks—ABC, NBC, Fox, and CBS—and 35 or so of their affiliated cable channels, including ESPN, Disney Channel, MSNBC, National Geographic, and Fox News. Among other enticements, YouTube TV will give subscribers a DVR tool for recording shows and unlimited storage space in the cloud. The only catch is that shows are automatically deleted after nine months.

Subscribers will be able to watch YouTube TV on smartphones, tablets, laptop computers—pretty much however they want. The mobile apps are designed to easily "cast" from smartphones to larger screens, perhaps even—for we olds—actual TV sets. Throughout the app, native YouTube content will be layered in alongside the network shows. The goal, executives say, is not so much to lure older viewers away from their cable subscriptions, but rather to coax youngsters into paying for a package of linear TV channels for the first time. "This is TV reimagined for the YouTube generation," says Christian Oestlien, director of product management at YouTube.

[...] YouTube TV is organized around three zones—a home tab for finding things to watch, a live tab for scrolling through channels, and a library tab that organizes a user's recorded shows. Mohan says the ability to record limitless amounts of TV was one of the features that most excited early testers. [...] There are plenty of gaps in the lineup. Subscribers won't be able to watch anything from Viacom (Comedy Central, MTV), Discovery Communications, AMC Networks, A+E Networks (History, A&E), or Turner Broadcasting (CNN, TBS, TNT), to name a few. Replicating the entire cable-TV bundle would have been too costly, says Wojcicki. Instead, her team targeted a selection of channels that would deliver the essential elements—particularly live sports.

From the talk about a DVR-like interface, it seems like they found a compromise that allows the service to be more like TiVo than Netflix.

Original Submission

"exec" writes:

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Research out of the University of Alabama at Birmingham School of Public Health suggests preventive dental care provided by a dentist for children before the age of 2 enrolled in Medicaid in Alabama may lead to more care long-term. Early preventive dental care was associated with more frequent subsequent treatment for tooth decay, more visits and more spending on dental care, compared with no early preventive dental care for children, according to a study.

The American Academy of Pediatrics, American Dental Association and American Academy of Pediatric Dentistry recommend children see a dentist once baby teeth begin to come in; but limited evidence is available about the effectiveness of early preventive dental care or whether primary care providers can deliver it. Despite the focus on preventive dental care, dental caries, such as tooth decay or cavities, are on the rise in children under the age of 5.

The study, published in JAMA Pediatrics, compared tooth decay-related treatment, visits and dental expenditures for children receiving preventive dental care from a dentist or primary care provider, and those receiving no preventive dental care.

[...] "Adding to a limited body of literature on early preventive dental care, we observed little evidence of the benefits of this care, regardless of the provider. In fact, preventive dental care from dentists appears to increase caries-related treatment, which is surprising. Additional research among other populations and beyond administrative data may be necessary to elucidate the true effects of early preventive dental care," the study concluded.

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

butthurt writes:

America's new president gave an address to a joint session of Congress. The Los Angeles Times posted a full transcript of the speech (along with remarks from its staff that may require Javascript to view); Bloomberg uploaded a video of the event.

The New York Times called it "the most presidential speech Mr. Trump has ever given — delivered at precisely the moment he needed to project sobriety, seriousness of purpose and self-discipline."

[Ed. Note: This is the first story specifically placed into the Politics Nexus. The intent is that most stories with a predominantly political topic will be in this Nexus. They will appear on the main page with other stories under default settings, but individual logged in users can choose to turn off any Nexus so the stories published therein are not shown. The setting to change visibility of Nexi is on your preferences page under the tab marked "Homepage."]

Original Submission

MostCynical writes:

The Sydney Morning Herald is reporting that Australia's electronic spy agency, the Australian Signals Directorate, was forced to rely on diesel backup generators when the nation's power supply came under intense pressure during last month's heatwave. The Department of Defence Directorate is a heavy user of power, probably related to the use of powerful computers.

ASD shifted to generators as a precautionary measure because it was concerned about the reliability of the grid, where the local power supplier feared it would be required to conduct rolling blackouts across Canberra, where ASD is housed, to meet the demands of the Australian Energy Market Operator to help stabilise the network.

However it suffered only minor outages after households, businesses and government agencies helped reduce demand.

Politicians are using the event to argue about renewable energy.

There are no indications anyone missed out on being spied on while this occurred.

http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/spy-agency-australian-signals-directorate-forced-to-operate-on-generators-during-heatwave-20170301-guo7ep.html

Original Submission

stormwyrm writes:

The dominant Lambda-CDM model is the standard model of physical cosmology, and it has proved reasonably successful. It does, however, have problems, such as dark matter, whose true nature remains elusive. Dutch physicist Erik Verlinde has, in a recent paper, proposed that gravity might not actually be a fundamental interaction at all, but rather an emergent property of spacetime itself, and as such, what current cosmological theory considers dark matter is really an emergent gravity phenomenon. Sabine Hossenfelder has an article about several recent tests of Verlinde's theory, which show that the idea might have promise.

Physicists today describe the gravitational interaction through Einstein's Theory of General Relativity, which dictates the effects of gravity are due to the curvature of space-time. But it's already been 20 years since Ted Jacobson demonstrated that General Relativity resembles thermodynamics, which is a framework to describe how very large numbers of individual, constituent particles behave. Since then, physicists have tried to figure out whether this similarity is a formal coincidence or hints at a deeper truth: that space-time is made of small elements whose collective motion gives rise to the force we call gravity. In this case, gravity would not be a truly fundamental phenomenon, but an emergent one.

[...] Verlinde pointed out that emergent gravity in a universe with a positive cosmological constant – like the one we live in – would only approximately reproduce General Relativity. The microscopic constituents of space-time, Verlinde claims, also react to the presence of matter in a way that General Relativity does not capture: they push inwards on matter. This creates an effect similar to that ascribed to particle dark matter, which pulls normal matter in by its gravitational attraction.

[...] So, it's a promising idea and it has recently been put to test in a number of papers.

[...] Another paper that appeared two weeks ago tested the predictions from Verlinde's model against the rotation curves of a sample of 152 galaxies. Emergent gravity gets away with being barely compatible with the data – it systematically results in too high an acceleration to explain the observations.

A trio of other papers show that Verlinde's model is broadly speaking compatible with the data, though it doesn't particularly excel at anything or explain anything novel.

[...] The real challenge for emergent gravity, I think, is not galactic rotation curves. That is the one domain where we already know that modified gravity – at last some variants thereof – work well. The real challenge is to also explain structure formation in the early universe, or any gravitational phenomena on larger (tens of millions of light years or more) scales.

Particle dark matter is essential to obtain the correct predictions for the temperature fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background. That's a remarkable achievement, and no alternative for dark matter can be taken seriously so long as it cannot do at least as well. Unfortunately, Verlinde's emergent gravity model does not allow the necessary analysis – at least not yet.

Previously:
Emergent Gravity and the Dark Universe

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

A new study finds that compared to people born around 1950, when colorectal cancer risk was lowest, those born in 1990 have double the risk of colon cancer and quadruple the risk of rectal cancer.

The study is led by American Cancer Society scientists and appears in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. It finds colorectal cancer (CRC) incidence rates are rising in young and middle-aged adults, including people in their early 50s, with rectal cancer rates increasing particularly fast. As a result, three in ten rectal cancer diagnoses are now in patients younger than age 55.

To get a better understanding, investigators led by Rebecca Siegel, MPH of the American Cancer Society used "age-period-cohort modeling," a quantitative tool designed to disentangle factors that influence all ages, such as changes in medical practice, from factors that vary by generation, typically due to changes in behavior. They conducted a retrospective study of all patients 20 years and older diagnosed with invasive CRC from 1974 through 2013 in the nine oldest Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) program registries. There were 490,305 cases included in the analysis.

The study found that after decreasing since 1974, colon cancer incidence rates increased by 1% to 2% per year from the mid-1980s through 2013 in adults ages 20 to 39. In adults 40 to 54, rates increased by 0.5% to 1% per year from the mid-1990s through 2013.

Also at The New York Times

Study: Colorectal cancer incidence patterns in the United States, 1974-2013; J Natl Cancer Inst (2017) 109(8): DOI: 10.1093/jnci/djw322

Original Submission

Martyb here once again with an update on our progress with the site upgrade.

Our development team (paulej72, TheMightyBuzzard, and NCommander) have been hard at it trying to isolate and quash the bugs that have been reported. Having looked at some of the site source code (Perl) I can attest there are places where the comparison of Perl code to line noise is an apt description. Also, some of the code we inherited was written by, um, creative people who did not write the most readable code. Further the code documents what it does, but is just a wee bit short on the why. Translation: we have an amazing dev team here who have slogged many many hours trying to isolate and correct the issues that have arisen. If you've ever been bleary-eyed after a several-day coding sprint, you have an idea of things. I hereby express my personal thanks to the brain-numbing hard work these guys have put in for this site. And now on to where things stand.

We had an issue with getting a single comment to display correctly in "Flat" mode which appears to have been caused by issues with specifying the correct page it appeared in. Also, there was a rewrite of this code so things should be better, but watch out for regressions.

There are known issues with accessing the site via TOR most likely because we added a very restrictive Content Security Policy.

The new comment viewing modes "Threaded-TOS" and "Threaded-TNG" have been tweaked.

There is a strong voice to replicate the old "Threaded" behavior and it appears that may be feasible, now that we better understand how the community used it in the past. No promises, but it is being looked into.

We are close to making some changes for the defaults for Anonymous Cowards (non logged-in users), so if you have a preference, please speak up and make your voice known.

Oh, we have had reports of seemingly random 503 (Site Unavailable) errors. If you should experience one, please reply to this story with a description of what you were doing and a copy/paste of the entire error message. That will greatly help in our identifying, isolating, and hopefully fixing whatever gremlin is in the gears.

We have not forgotten about replacing chevrons with single/double plus/minus, but had some fires to put out that postponed action on these.

I expect I've left out a thing (or three) — please reply with a comment to (gently) remind us if you see a problem persisting, or if you find something new. it is most helpful to provide your user nickname, the date/time (and timezone), steps taken to cause the problem, and (ideally) suggestions on how you expected it to behave. Reports so far have for the most part been amazingly detailed and helpful — thanks!

Penultimately (I like that word!), I must express my sincere appreciation to the community who has been amazingly supportive and helpful in this transition. One benefit of the upgrade is you should see quicker page-load times on highly-commented stories. Our servers are experiencing a much lighter load to serve up those pages, too. Speaking of servers, I noticed that several of you have renewed your subscription to the site which is the primary way we can afford to keeps the lights on. Please accept my sincere and heart-felt thanks! The "Site News" slashbox has been updated to reflect our current situation.

Lastly, I must express my sincere gratitude to the community. I continue to be amazed at the breadth of knowledge that is freely shared here. Nary a day goes by that I don't learn something new. And many days when I am just blown away. Some long-held ideas have been challenged, and in some cases changed, thanks to what I've read here. Thank you!

Dev Note: Deployed a fix tonight for broken comment links that was due to yesterday's deploy. Alos deployed a partial fix for Flat comments and single comments. TMB will be working on getting it fixed up fully but I thought we needed what we had out now. -- paulej72

Continuation of:
Site Update 17_2
Comments Redux
Site Update: The Next Episode

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

After analyzing two decades' worth of U.S. government agency wildfire records spanning 1992-2012, the researchers found that human-ignited wildfires accounted for 84 percent of all wildfires, tripling the length of the average fire season and accounting for nearly half of the total acreage burned.

The findings were published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"There cannot be a fire without a spark," said Jennifer Balch, Director of CU Boulder's Earth Lab and an assistant professor in the Department of Geography and lead author of the new study. "Our results highlight the importance of considering where the ignitions that start wildfires come from, instead of focusing only on the fuel that carries fire or the weather that helps it spread. Thanks to people, the wildfire season is almost year-round."

The U.S. has experienced some of its largest wildfires on record over the past decade, especially in the western half of the country. The duration and intensity of future wildfire seasons is a point of national concern given the potentially severe impact on agriculture, ecosystems, recreation and other economic sectors, as well as the high cost of extinguishing blazes.

-- submitted from IRC

Jennifer K. Balch, Bethany A. Bradley, John T. Abatzoglou, R. Chelsea Nagy, Emily J. Fusco, Adam L. Mahood. Human-started wildfires expand the fire niche across the United States. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2017; 201617394 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1617394114

Original Submission

"exec" writes:

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Great ideas so often get lost in translation -- from the math teacher who can't get through to his students, to a stand-up comedian who bombs during an open mic night.

But how can we measure whether our audiences understand what we're trying to convey? And better yet, how can we improve that exchange?

Drexel University biomedical engineers, in collaboration with Princeton University psychologists, are using a wearable brain-imaging device to see just how brains sync up when humans interact. It is one of many applications for this functional near-infrared spectroscopy (or fNIRS) system, which uses light to measure neural activity during real-life situations and can be worn like a headband.

Published in Scientific Reports, a new study shows that the fNIRS device can successfully measure brain synchronization during conversation. The technology can now be used to study everything from doctor-patient communication, to how people consume cable news.

"Being able to look at how multiple brains interact is an emerging context in social neuroscience," said Hasan Ayaz, PhD, an associate research professor in Drexel's School of Biomedical Engineering, Science and Health Systems, who led the research team. "We live in a social world where everybody is interacting. And we now have a tool that can give us richer information about the brain during everyday tasks -- such as natural communication -- that we could not receive in artificial lab settings or from single brain studies."

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

takyon writes:

MediaTek has released more details of an upcoming 10-core SoC:

MediaTek first unveiled the Helio X30—its next-generation high-end SoC—last fall, but today at Mobile World Congress the Taiwanese company announced its commercial availability. The Helio X30 is entering mass production and should make its debut inside a mobile device sometime in Q2 2017.

The Helio X30, like the Helio X20 family before it, incorporates 10 CPU cores arranged in a Max.Mid.Min tri-cluster configuration. Two of ARM's latest A73 CPU cores replace the two A72s in the Max cluster, which should improve performance and reduce power consumption. The Mid cluster still uses 4 A53 cores, but they receive a 10% frequency boost relative to the top-of-the-line Helio X27. In the X30's Min cluster we find the first implementation of ARM's most-efficient A-series core. The A35 consumes 32% less power than the A53 it replaces (same process/frequency), while delivering 80%-100% of the performance, according to ARM. With a higher peak frequency of 1.9GHz, the X30's A35 cores should deliver about the same or better performance than the X20's A53 cores and still consume less power.

Also at Tom's Hardware, entitled "The 10nm Helio X30 May Be MediaTek's First Truly Competitive High-End Chip".

While some smartphone SoCs like the X30 are a bit of an exception due to cluster configurations, there are going to be many CPUs with 8+ cores sold in 2017. Some examples that come to mind: AMD's Ryzen 7 desktop CPUs, the AMD APUs in the Xbox One, PS4, and PS4 Pro (with 7 cores usable in these consoles), and other smartphone SoCs like the Exynos 7 Octa 7880, which uses equivalent cores rather than clusters. Will games and popular applications be able to exploit this newfound glut of cores?

Related: Samsung's Exynos 8895 to be the First 10nm Chip on the Market

Original Submission

"exec" writes:

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

We all know that practice makes us better at things, but scientists are still trying to understand what kinds of practice work best. A research team led by a Brown University computer scientist has found insights about how people improve their skills in a rather unlikely place: online video games.

In a pair of studies reported in the journal Topics in Cognitive Science, researchers looked at data generated from thousands of online matches of two video games, the first-person shooter game Halo: Reach and the strategy game StarCraft 2. The Halo study revealed how different patterns of play resulted in different rates of skill development in players. The StarCraft study showed how elite players have unique and consistent rituals that appear to contribute to their success.

"The great thing about game data is that it's naturalistic, there's a ton of it, and it's really well measured," said Jeff Huang, a computer science professor at Brown and the study's lead author. "It gives us the opportunity to measure patterns for a long period of time over a lot of people in a way that you can't really do in a lab."

Halo: Reach is a science fiction war game in which players battle with rifles, grenades and other weapons (part of a wildly popular series of Halo games). One of the most popular ways to play is known as Team Slayer, where online players from[sic] are placed together on teams for 10- to 15-minute matches to see which team can score the most kills against an opposing team. In order to arrange matches in which players have roughly similar skill levels, the game rates players using a metric called TrueSkill. TrueSkill ratings are constantly updated as players play more matches and their skill level changes, so they offered Huang and his colleagues the opportunity to see what kinds of playing habits influence a player's skill acquisition.

Huang and his colleagues looked at data generated by seven months of Halo matches -- every online match played by the 3.2 million people who started playing the week the game was released in 2010.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the research showed that people who played the most matches per week (more than 64) had the largest increase in skill over time. But playing lots of games wasn't the most efficient way to improve skill. Looking at the data another way -- in terms of which groups showed the most improvement per match rather an over time -- showed markedly different results. That analysis showed that, over their first 200 matches, those who played four to eight matches[sic] week gained the most skill per match, followed by those who played eight to 16 matches.

"What this suggests is that if you want to improve the most efficiently, it's not about playing the most matches per week," Huang said. "You actually want to space out your activity a little bit and not play so intensively."

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

"exec" writes:

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

The most prevalent method for obtaining images of clogged coronary vessels is coronary angiography. For some patients, however, the contrast agents used in this process can cause health problems. A team at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) has now demonstrated that the required quantity of these substances can be significantly reduced if monoenergetic X-rays from a miniature particle accelerator are used.

Soft tissues such as organs and blood vessels are nearly impossible to examine in X-ray images. To detect a narrowing or other changes in coronary blood vessels, patients are therefore usually injected with an iodinated contrast agent.

These substances can sometimes be hazardous to health, however: "Particularly in patients with kidney insufficiency, complications may arise, in some cases even kidney failure," explains Dr. Daniela Münzel, , an adjunct teaching professor for radiology at TUM's Klinikum rechts der Isar. "That is why we are studying possibilities of using lower concentrations of contrast agents."

One approach to reducing the dosage has now been developed by scientists from the Department of Diagnostic and Interventional Radiology at the Klinikum rechts der Isar, working in close cooperation with the Chair of Biomedical Physics at TUM's Department of Physics. The method, which they have described in a paper published in Nature Scientific Reports, is not based on new contrast agents. Instead it relies on special X-rays generated using the Munich Compact Light Source (MuCLS), the world's first mini-synchrotron, which was officially inaugurated at TUM at the end of 2015.

"Conventional X-ray sources generate a relatively broad range of energy levels. By contrast, the energy of X-rays produced by the MuCLS can be controlled much more precisely," says physicist Elena Eggl, the first author of the paper.

Publication:

E. Eggl, et al. "Mono-Energy Coronary Angiography with a Compact Synchrotron Source". Scientific Reports 7, Article number: 42211 (2017) doi:10.1038/srep42211

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

"exec" writes:

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Patent-holding company TQP Development made millions claiming that it owned a breakthrough in Web encryption, even though most encryption experts had never heard of the company until it started a massive campaign of lawsuits. Yesterday, the company's litigation campaign was brought to an end when a panel of appeals judges refused (PDF) to give TQP a second chance to collect on a jury verdict against Newegg.

The TQP patent was invented by Michael Jones, whose company Telequip briefly sold a kind of encrypted modem. The company sold about 30 models before the modem business went bust. Famed patent enforcer Erich Spangenberg bought the TQP patent in 2008 and began filing lawsuits, saying that the Jones patent actually entitled him to royalties on a basic form of SSL Internet encryption. Spangenberg and Jones ultimately made more than $45 million from the patent.

TQP appealed its case, and oral arguments were heard at the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit on February 8. Yesterday, the three-judge panel found in Newegg's favor, issuing a short two-page order that did not explain its reasoning. While TQP could theoretically still appeal to the full Federal Circuit or to the Supreme Court, it's far from clear there's any legal issue in the case that would compel either of those bodies to take the case.

-- submitted from IRC

---

Original Submission

takyon writes:

The NuSTAR space telescope, launched in 2012, has been used to find some of the universe's brightest known pulsars:

The brightest pulsar, as reported in the journal Science [DOI: 10.1126/science.aai8635] [DX], is called NGC 5907 ULX. In one second, it emits the same amount of energy as our sun does in three-and-a-half years. The European Space Agency's XMM-Newton satellite found the pulsar and, independently, NASA's NuSTAR (Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array) mission also detected the signal. This pulsar is 50 million light years away, which means its light dates back to a time before humans roamed Earth. It is also the farthest known neutron star.

"This object is really challenging our current understanding of the accretion process for high-luminosity pulsars," said Gian Luca Israel, from INAF-Osservatorio Astronomica di Roma, Italy, lead author of the Science paper. "It is 1,000 times more luminous than the maximum thought possible for an accreting neutron star, so something else is needed in our models in order to account for the enormous amount of energy released by the object."

The previous record holder for brightest pulsar was reported in October 2014. NuSTAR had identified M82 X-2, located about 12 million light-years away in the "Cigar Galaxy" galaxy Messier 82 (M82), as a pulsar rather than a black hole. The pulsar reported in Science, NGC 5907 ULX, is 10 times brighter.

Another extremely bright pulsar, the third brightest known, is called NGC 7793 P13. Using a combination of XMM-Newton and NuSTAR, one group of scientists reported the discovery in the Astrophysical Journal Letters [DOI: 10.3847/2041-8205/831/2/L14] [DX], while another used XMM-Newton to report it in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society [DOI: 10.1093/mnrasl/slw218] [DX]. Both studies were published in October 2016. Scientists call three extremely bright pulsars "ultraluminous X-ray sources" (ULXs). Before the 2014 discovery, many scientists thought that the brightest ULXs were black holes.

Original Submission

-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

Common Dreams reports:

Proponents of an open internet are holding a rally on Monday [February 27] to mark the two-year anniversary of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) vote that enshrined net neutrality protections that the new Trump administration has already begun eroding.

The 3pm event in Washington, D.C [was] backed by the Color of Change, National Hispanic Media Coalition, Center for Media Justice, and Free Press, and will feature the FCC's only Democratic commissioner, Mignon Clyburn.

[...] According to Timothy Karr, senior director of strategy for Free Press, "No FCC chair over the past 40 years has been so bent on undermining the agency's public-service mission and destroying the safeguards on which hundreds of millions of Americans rely."

Laying out the stakes, Max Anderson, coordinator for Human Rights Watch's general counsel's office, wrote last week:

Should net neutrality be scrapped in the U.S., it will enable service providers to throttle internet speeds or block access to websites based on commercial deals they cut with media providers. That would undermine freedom of expression and access to information. Once these practices have been established, it's a short step to other human rights consequences. Governments that already attempt to stifle lawful online expression will welcome a new tool for silencing critics. The FCC should retain its good example to the world and enforce net neutrality. If the internet stands a chance of enabling the realization of human rights, then access needs to be nondiscriminatory and in line with human rights in the widest sense.

[...] So, what can people do?

"The short answer is to raise hell", said Craig Aaron, CEO of Free Press, to Mercury News columnist Troy Wolverton.

"Net neutrality is an issue that a lot of people care about--millions and millions more than the FCC ever expected", Aaron said. "We need to hear from those people again."

The good old days: U.S. Appeals Court Upholds Net Neutrality Rules in Full
What's that? You thought we fought this one before? FCC Extends Net Neutrality Comment Period (Again)

Original Submission

rob_on_earth writes:

The raspberry pi foundation have announced a new edition to the famously cheap Raspberry Pi Zero: Raspberry Pi Zero W

It appears to be the Raspberry Pi Zero with the Raspberry Pi 3's wireless chipset added on.

The retail price will be double from the $5 of the original Pi Zero to $10, but as before, expect to add on the price of the specific mini cables and pin headers to turn it into a fully fledged Pi. [takyon ed note: But not necessarily as many because... wireless?]

There is also a new Raspberry Pi Zero official case (which fits both Pi Zero editions).

Original Submission

-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

Hackaday reports:

In an interesting turn of events last week in a German court, evidence has materialized that engineers were ordered to cheat emissions testing when developing automotive parts.

[February 21], Ulrich Weiß brought forward a document[1] that alleges Audi Board of Director members were involved in ordering a cheat for diesel emissions. Weiß was the head of engine development for Audi, suspended in November of 2015 but continued to draw more than half a million dollars in salary before being fired after prior to last week's court testimony.

Volkswagen Group is the parent company of Audi and this all seems to have happened while the VW diesel emissions testing scandal we've covered since 2015 was beginning to come to light. Weiß testified that he was asked to design a method of getting around strict emissions standards in Hong Kong even though Audi knew their diesel engines weren't capable of doing so legitimately.

According to Weiß, he asked for a signed order. When he received that order he instructed his team to resist following it. We have not seen a copy of the letter, but the German tabloid newspaper Bild reports [Deutsch] that the letter claims approval by four Audi board members and was signed by the head of powertrain development at the company.

[1] Forbes has all content behind scripts and is AdBlocker-phobic. archive.li's copy

Original Submission