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What was highest label on your first car speedometer?

  • 80 mph
  • 88 mph
  • 100 mph
  • 120 mph
  • 150 mph
  • it was in kph like civilized countries use you insensitive clod
  • Other (please specify in comments)

[ Results | Polls ]
Comments:47 | Votes:100

posted by on Wednesday March 22 2017, @11:34PM   Printer-friendly
from the i-resign dept.

Movies and television shows are full of blunders, some more noticeable than others, and each with their specific guild of victims. Ornithologists fume when British period dramas are overdubbed with American birdsongs. Government employees will tell you that the supposed main White House staffer in Contact has a nonexistent job. Archeologists hate movie shipwrecks, and marine biologists are already mad about the zombie sharks in the upcoming Pirates of the Caribbean installment, which, as cartilaginous fishes, should not have ribs—even ghostly ones.

But these are merely occasional grievances. There's one group of experts who can barely flip on the television without being exposed to egregious, head-on-desk mistakes: chess players.

"There are a ton of chess mistakes in TV and in film," says Mike Klein, a writer and videographer for Chess.com. While different experts cite different error ratios, from "20 percent" to "much more often than not," all agree: Hollywood is terrible at chess, even though they really don't have to be. "There are so many [errors], it's hard to keep track," says Grandmaster Ilja Zaragatski, of chess24. "And there are constantly [new ones] coming out."

[...] Peter Doggers of Chess.com notes another Dramatic Checkmate move: the felled king. "Tipping over your king as a way of resigning the game is only done in movies," he says. (See Mr. Holland's Opus, in which Jay Thomas slaps his king down after being owned by Richard Dreyfuss).A normal chess player will just go in for a good-game-style handshake. "This falling king thing has somehow become a strong image in cinematography," he says, "But chess players always think: 'Oh no, there we go again...'"

-- submitted from IRC


Original Submission

posted by on Wednesday March 22 2017, @10:07PM   Printer-friendly
from the if-only-you-knew-the-power-of-the-dark-side dept.

Dark matter, long theorised but remaining controversial, may have found yet another piece of evidence in its favour. The theory of dark matter has it that billions of years ago, not so much dark matter should have fallen into the galaxies yet, so instead of the flat rotation curves that are observed in the galaxies of today, younger galaxies should exhibit falling rotation curves that slow further from the centre. The measurement of the rotation curves of such younger, more distant galaxies has so far been elusive, but astronomers have now succeeded in doing so. In a paper just submitted to the Astrophysical Journal, they show how they have measured the rotation curves of 101 distant galaxies with redshifts between 0.6 to 2.6 (or 7.2 billion to 19 billion light years away comoving distance, 8 billion to 2.5 billion years after the Big Bang). These galaxies all show a precipitous drop-off in rotational velocity as one goes further away from the centre. From an article by Ethan Siegel:

When they use a technique called "stacking" — where they calibrate each galaxy to one another to examine their overall, average properties — they find that there is, in fact, a precipitous drop-off in rotational velocity as you move away from the center of these galaxies.

This is, remarkably, a strong piece of evidence that points to dark matter and not to modified gravity! As Philipp Lang and his coauthors write in a paper just submitted to the Astrophysical Journal:

Our stacked rotation curve exhibits a decrease in rotation velocity beyond the turn-over radius down to ∼ 62% of the maximum normalized velocity Vmax, confirming the drop [...] as a representative feature for our sample of high-z disk galaxies. The drop seen in our stacked rotation curve strikingly deviates from the average rotation curves of local spirals at the same mass at > 3σ significance level.

This is just a 3-sigma effect so far, but it should be improved upon by future telescopes like the Giant Magellan Telescope, E-ELT, and WFIRST that are coming in the 2020s.

Related: Dark Matter Is Missing From Young Galaxies


Original Submission

posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday March 22 2017, @08:34PM   Printer-friendly
from the believe-it-when-I-see-it dept.

As the world ends, will you lock arms and sing "Kumbayah" or embark on a path of law-breaking, anti-social behavior?

A new study, based upon the virtual actions of more than 80,000 players of the role-playing video game ArcheAge, suggests you'll be singing.

The study, conducted by a University at Buffalo-led team of computer scientists, will be presented next month at the International World Wide Web Conference in Australia. It found that despite some violent acts, most players tended toward behavior that was helpful to others as their virtual world came to an end.

Researchers acknowledge that the results have limitations -- namely that they are based upon a video game, not real life. Nevertheless, researchers argue that the study offers a realistic view into the behavior of people in an end-times scenario that is useful to both the game industry and other research communities.

"We realize that, because this is a video game, the true consequences of the world ending are purely virtual. That being said, our dataset represents about as close as we can get to an actual end-of-the-world scenario," says Ahreum Kang, postdoctoral researcher at UB's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, and the study's lead author.

What would happen if the world was ending? As with most questions in life, Nicolas Cage has already supplied us with the answer.


Original Submission

posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday March 22 2017, @07:03PM   Printer-friendly
from the bacterial-predator-list dept.

Antibiotic resistance is one of medicine's most pressing problems. Now, a team from Korea is tackling this in a unique way: using bacteria to fight bacteria.

Before the discovery of penicillin in 1928, millions of lives were lost to relatively simple microbial infections. Since then, antibiotics have transformed modern medicine. The World Health Organization estimates that, on average, antibiotics add 20 years to each person's life. However, the overuse of antibiotics has put pressure on bacteria to evolve resistance against these drugs, leading to the emergence of untreatable superbugs.

Now, researchers at South Korea's Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST) aim to fight fire with fire by launching predatory bacteria capable of attacking other bacteria without harming human cells. "Bacteria eating bacteria. How cool is that?" asks Professor Robert Mitchell, the team leader. He and his colleagues are also developing a natural compound called violacein to tackle Staphylococcus, a group of around 30 different bacteria known to cause skin infections, pneumonia and blood poisoning. Some Staphylococcus bacteria such as MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus) are resistant to antibiotics, making infections harder to treat.

Violacein is a so-called 'bisindole': a metabolite produced by bacteria from the condensation of two molecules of tryptophan (an essential amino acid used in many organisms to ensure normal functioning and avoid illness and death). This compound is vibrant purple in colour and of interest to researchers for its anticancer, antifungal and antiviral properties. Researchers have discovered that it can stop bacteria from reproducing, and even kill the multidrug resistant bacterium Staphylococcus aureus, when used in the right doses. It also works well in conjunction with other existing antibiotics.

Previously on SoylentNews: Predatory Bacteria could be a New Weapon Against Superbugs


Original Submission

posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday March 22 2017, @05:23PM   Printer-friendly
from the some-good-news dept.

2016 was the third year in a row that global carbon emissions remained stable, even as the overall economy grew. Although 32.1 Gigatonnes of emissions is certainly not good news for future climates, there is some cause for optimism within the numbers, as some major economies saw their emissions drop. And controlling emissions didn't come at the expense of the world's finances, as preliminary estimates show that the global economy grew by over three percent.

[...] China was one of those countries, starting up five new reactors to increase its nuclear capacity by 25 percent. Nuclear combined with renewables to handle two-thirds of the country's rising demand. China also shifted some of its fossil fuel use from coal to natural gas. The net result was a drop in emissions of about one percent, even as demand grew by over five percent (and the economy grew by nearly seven percent). Gas still represents a small fraction of China's energy economy, so there's the potential for further displacement of coal.

In the US, the process of shifting from coal to natural gas is already well advanced. Coal use was down by 11 percent last year, the IEA estimates, allowing natural gas to displace it as the US' largest single source of energy. This, along with booming renewables, allowed the US to drop its carbon emissions by three percent in 2016. That takes emissions to levels not seen since 1992, even though the economy is now 80 percent larger than it was then.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/03/global-carbon-emissions-continue-to-stabilize-us-has-3-drop/


Original Submission

posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday March 22 2017, @03:54PM   Printer-friendly
from the what-about-caffeine? dept.

Zinc is a vital micronutrient involved in many cellular processes: For example, in learning and memory processes, it plays a role that is not yet understood. By using nanoelectrochemical measurements, Swedish researchers have made progress toward understanding by demonstrating that zinc influences the release of messenger molecules. As reported in the journal Angewandte Chemie, zinc changes the number of messenger molecules stored in vesicles and the dynamics of their release from the cell.

When signals are transmitted by synapses, messenger molecules (neurotransmitters) are released from storage chambers (synaptic vesicles) into the synaptic cleft, where they are "recognized" by neighboring nerve cells. This release is based on exocytosis: The vesicle docks at the cell membrane, opens at the point of contact, releases part of its contents to the outside, closes, and separates from the plasma membrane so it can be refilled.

Treatment with zinc results in more messenger molecules being released.


Original Submission

posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday March 22 2017, @02:26PM   Printer-friendly
from the spin-me-a-tale dept.

Over 200 years after steamships first began crossing the ocean, wind power is finding its way back into seafaring. Global shipping firm Maersk is planning to fit spinning "rotor sails" to one of its oil tankers as a way of reducing its fuel costs and carbon emissions. The company behind the technology, Finnish firm Norsepower, says this is the first retrofit installation of a wind-powered energy system on a tanker.

Yet the idea of using these spinning cylinders on ships to generate thrust and drive them forward was first trialled in 1924 – and shortly after disregarded. So why do Norsepower and Maersk (and the UK government, which is providing most of the £3.5m of funding), think this time the technology will be more of a success?

The rotor sail was invented by German engineer Anton Flettner. It is effectively a large, spinning metal cylinder that uses something called the Magnus effect to harness wind power and propel a ship.

How does it work?

When wind passes the spinning rotor sail, the air flow accelerates on one side and decelerates on the opposite side. This creates a thrust force that is perpendicular to the wind flow direction. Although it takes energy in the form of electricity to spin the sail, the thrust it produces means the engines can be significantly throttled back, so it reduces overall fuel use and emissions.


Original Submission

posted by on Wednesday March 22 2017, @12:57PM   Printer-friendly
from the the-man-knows-what-you're-watching dept.

Encrypted Media Extensions (EME), a mechanism by which HTML5 video providers can discover and enable DRM providers offered by a browser, has taken the next step on its contentious road to standardization. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the standards body that oversees most Web-related specifications, has moved the EME specification to the Proposed Recommendation stage.

The next and final stage is for the W3C's Advisory Committee to review the proposal. If it passes review, the proposal will be blessed as a full W3C Recommendation.

Ever since W3C decided to start working on a DRM proposal, there have been complaints from those who oppose DRM on principle. The work has continued regardless, with W3C director and HTML inventor Tim Berners-Lee arguing that—given that DRM is already extant and, at least for video, unlikely to disappear any time soon—it's better for DRM-protected content to be a part of the Web ecosystem than to be separate from it.

Berners-Lee argued that, for almost all video providers, the alternative to DRM in the browser is DRM in a standalone application. He also argued that these standalone applications represent a greater risk to privacy and security than the constrained, sandboxed environment of the Web. He acknowledges that DRM has problems, chiefly the difficulties it imposes for fair use, derivative works, and backups. He notes, however, that a large body of consumers don't appear overly concerned with these issues, as they continue to buy or subscribe to DRM-protected content.

-- submitted from IRC


Original Submission

posted by on Wednesday March 22 2017, @11:24AM   Printer-friendly
from the microwaving-the-books dept.

This article http://buffalonews.com/2017/03/17/ub-professor-discovers-investors-really-care/ is a review of the new book, "The End of Accounting and the Path Forward for Investors and Managers." After reviewing hundreds of earnings conference calls, the authors have concluded that investors are much more interested in the future than in current returns (traditional measures like earnings per share, etc).

A couple of quotes from the interview with author Feng Gu:

Financial analysts are widely regarded as the most sophisticated investors. They spend their whole life and career tracking the performance of publicly traded companies. Their main job is to help investors understand the performance and the changing risk of each company, so this way investors can make decisions about whether or not they want to invest in a given company.

It turned out the majority of analysts' questions and interests are not along the line of traditional financial reports. So for example, when a company like Sirius XM comes out with its quarterly earnings, the CEO or CFO starts with a quick mention of the earnings per share, which is really one of the key numbers that is included in companies' financial reports. Quickly, everybody forgets about earnings per share and they talk about something else that is not required by the system financial reporting, that is not included in the standard financial reports. ... After reading 200, 300 such examples, we got a very clear sense that investors are not interested in what is included in the standard financial reports. They are interested in something more important, something that is not being reported by companies today.

I think in our book, we made a point very clear that regulators have to require companies to treat investment in their strategic assets as investment for accounting purposes. ... Most of the investment in strategic assets like R&D, advertising, branding and so on, are not being treated as an asset on the balance sheet of the company. They're being treated as just a one-time expense. ... This is the least that regulators can do to correct the information problem that we have documented and other people have documented.


Original Submission

posted by on Wednesday March 22 2017, @10:41AM   Printer-friendly
from the supreme-court-positions-are-different dept.

Submitted via IRC for Runaway1956

More than a decade ago, many Democrats still in office now went along with Gorsuch as he was unanimously confirmed to the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in July 2006. Things are different today, ahead of his hearing for the highest court in the land.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., expressed deep doubts during a press conference last Wednesday about the nominee and asserted Gorsuch "may act like a neutral, calm judge," but "his record and his career clearly show he harbors a right wing, pro-corporate, special interest agenda."

[...] Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy said he would demand "real answers" to questions he has about Gorsuch's judicial philosophy.

"I hope next week, when the president's Supreme Court nominee will appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee, he provides transparent, truthful answers to Senators' questions," Leahy said in a statement. "I will insist on real answers from Judge Neil Gorsuch, because there are real concerns about his record and his judicial philosophy."

Source: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2017/03/20/gorsuch-won-broad-dem-support-in-2006-now-things-are-different.html


Original Submission

posted by on Wednesday March 22 2017, @09:53AM   Printer-friendly
from the no-leaves dept.

Trees and other plants, from towering redwoods to diminutive daisies, are nature's hydraulic pumps. They are constantly pulling water up from their roots to the topmost leaves, and pumping sugars produced by their leaves back down to the roots. This constant stream of nutrients is shuttled through a system of tissues called xylem and phloem, which are packed together in woody, parallel conduits.

Now engineers at MIT and their collaborators have designed a microfluidic device they call a "tree-on-a-chip;," which mimics the pumping mechanism of trees and plants. Like its natural counterparts, the chip operates passively, requiring no moving parts or external pumps. It is able to pump water and sugars through the chip at a steady flow rate for several days. The results are published this week in Nature Plants.
...
To make the chip, the researchers sandwiched together two plastic slides, through which they drilled small channels to represent xylem and phloem. They filled the xylem channel with water, and the phloem channel with water and sugar, then separated the two slides with a semipermeable material to mimic the membrane between xylem and phloem. They placed another membrane over the slide containing the phloem channel, and set a sugar cube on top to represent the additional source of sugar diffusing from a tree's leaves into the phloem. They hooked the chip up to a tube, which fed water from a tank into the chip.

With this simple setup, the chip was able to passively pump water from the tank through the chip and out into a beaker, at a constant flow rate for several days, as opposed to previous designs that only pumped for several minutes.

Hmm, the sugar content of a 5-yr old's system ought to be able to power thousands of these...


Original Submission

posted by on Wednesday March 22 2017, @08:19AM   Printer-friendly
from the better-treatment-than-if-he's-guilty dept.

On Monday, a US federal appeals court sided against a former Philadelphia police officer who has been in jail 17 months because he invoked his Fifth Amendment right against compelled self-incrimination. He had refused to comply with a court order commanding him to unlock two hard drives the authorities say contain child porn.

The 3-0 decision (PDF) by the 3rd US Circuit Court of Appeals means that the suspect, Francis Rawls, likely will remain jailed indefinitely or until the order (PDF) finding him in contempt of court is lifted or overturned. However, he still can comply with the order and unlock two FileVault encrypted drives connected to his Apple Mac Pro. Using a warrant, authorities seized those drives from his residence in 2015. While Rawls could get out from under the contempt order by unlocking those drives, doing so might expose him to other legal troubles.

In deciding against Rawls, the court of appeals found that the constitutional rights against being compelled to testify against oneself were not being breached. That's because the appeals court, like the police, agreed that the presence of child porn on his drives was a "foregone conclusion." The Fifth Amendment, at its most basic level, protects suspects from being forced to disclose incriminating evidence. In this instance, however, the authorities said they already know there's child porn on the drives, so Rawls' constitutional rights aren't compromised.

[...] The suspect's attorney, Federal Public Defender Keith Donoghue, was disappointed by the ruling.

"The fact remains that the government has not brought charges," Donoghue said in a telephone interview. "Our client has now been in custody for almost 18 months based on his assertion of his Fifth Amendment right against compelled self-incrimination."

-- submitted from IRC


Original Submission

posted by on Wednesday March 22 2017, @06:47AM   Printer-friendly
from the CIA-has-the-best-0-days dept.

It looks like Cisco won't be chasing up a partnership with WikiLeaks: it's combing the "Vault7" documents itself, and has turned up an IOS / IOS XE bug in more than 300 of its switch models.

The vulnerability is in the Cisco Cluster Management Protocol (CMP) in IOS and IOS XE. The protocol passes around information about switch clusters using either Telnet or SSH.

The bug is in the default configuration of affected devices, even if the user doesn't have switch clusters configured, and can be exploited over either IPv4 or IPv6.

It's a two-fold bug: first, the protocol doesn't restrict CMP-specific Telnet to local communications, instead processing commands over "any Telnet connection to an affected device"; and second, malformed CMP-specific Telnet options are incorrectly processed.

[...] Cisco's advisory doesn't tell us if it's aware of exploits using the flaw. If they are discovered, this is very substantial news because The Reg expects there are tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of these devices installed around the world. And all look to have been at the CIA's mercy for an unknown period of time.

-- submitted from IRC


Original Submission

posted by on Wednesday March 22 2017, @05:14AM   Printer-friendly
from the bad-sysadmin,-no-biscuit dept.

The operator of a website that accepts subscriber logins only over unencrypted HTTP pages has taken to Mozilla's Bugzilla bug-reporting service to complain that the Firefox browser is warning that the page isn't suitable for the transmission of passwords.

"Your notice of insecure password and/or log-in automatically appearing on the log-in for my website, Oil and Gas International, is not wanted and was put there without our permission," a person with the user name dgeorge wrote here (the link was made private shortly after this post went live). "Please remove it immediately. We have our own security system, and it has never been breached in more than 15 years. Your notice is causing concern by our subscribers and is detrimental to our business."

Around the same time this post was going live, participants of this Reddit thread claimed to hack the site using what's known as a SQL injection exploit. Multiple people claimed that passwords were stored in plaintext rather than the standard practice of using cryptographic hashes. A few minutes after the insecurity first came up in the online discussion, a user reported the database was deleted. Ars has contacted the site operator for comment on the claims, but currently Ars can't confirm them. The site, http://www.oilandgasinternational.com, was displaying content as it did earlier at the time this post was being updated.

As a member of the Mozilla developer team pointed out in reply to the complaint, both Firefox and Chrome routinely issue warnings whenever users encounter a login page that's not protected by HTTPS encryption. The warnings became standard earlier this year.

The site in question appears to be completely offline at this time.

Source: ArsTechnica


Original Submission

posted by on Wednesday March 22 2017, @03:43AM   Printer-friendly
from the didn't-burn-his-legs-off dept.

This is not a drill, people. JetPack Aviation trained a normal schmoe like us to fly a true jet-powered backpack.

There's a utopian future society that exists in my imagination. I have a few non-negotiables in it, including humanoid service robots, clean energy and jetpacks. In particular, the jetpack really captured my heart when I watched George Jetson in his flying suit and The Rocketeer light up my local movie theater screen.

I've now seen an ordinary person fly a real jetpack after a scant few hours of training. And it's just as exciting as those moments of hope and wonder I felt as a kid.

Mischa Pollack, a vlogger and designer from Los Angeles, was picked for JetPack Aviation's first "civilian" flight. After less than 10 hours of training, he was able to lift off and test the JB-10 pack.

But learning how to fly isn't the same as flying smoothly. How long would that take? "It appears that within 5 to 10 flights you'll get the hovering down at least," Chief Engineer Stefano Paris said. "You'll be able to climb up and hold position, and be steady and be in control. And then you progress forward from there."

The article has a video of Pollack's flight.

-- submitted from IRC


Original Submission

posted by on Wednesday March 22 2017, @02:12AM   Printer-friendly
from the he-didn't-want-to-get-his-hands-dirty dept.

Delivery is the weakest link in the "dark web" drug trade: the postal habits of a large-scale trader have led to his undoing.

Chukwuemeka Okparaeke is accused of dealing in very nasty stuff: Fentanyl, a high-strength synthetic opioid the Centre for Disease Control says is 50 times the potency of heroin and was responsible for nearly 10,000 deaths in the US in 2015.

Okparaeke may have been a capable Tor user, but his logistical clue needed work: he was caught not because someone linked him to his handle ("Fentmaster", on a site called the AlphaBay Marketplace), but because wearing latex gloves while depositing large numbers of packages at US post offices got the attention of staff.

He was seen at several post offices in the Middletown area of New York, and because he was bulk-buying priority delivery stamps, staff had also viewed his driver's licence.

-- submitted from IRC


Original Submission

posted by on Wednesday March 22 2017, @12:40AM   Printer-friendly
from the now-with-25%-less-sugar dept.

US doctors are conducting tests on a British man who no longer uses insulin to treat his type 1 diabetes.

Daniel Darkes, from Daventy in Northamptonshire, was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes seven years ago. But his recent tests have baffled doctors as his pancreas has shown signs of working properly again. Branded 'Miracle Dan' by his friends, the 30-year-old recently travelled to America so doctors could run tests to further understand what had happened to his body.

Speaking to the Northampton Chronicle and Echo newspaper, he said: "I had numerous tests, about four or five, to confirm the main reason why my pancreas had started producing insulin again.

[...] Mr Darkes says that doctors are now 80 per cent convinced he is cured of the condition, which has never before been reversed. The findings from Mr Darkes' test results are set to be published next week and it is hoped they will help find future treatments for the autoimmune condition.

-- submitted from IRC


Original Submission