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AnonTechie writes:

President Trump has proposed a $54 billion increase in defense spending, which he said would be "one of the largest increases in national defense spending in American history."

Past administrations have increased military spending, but typically to fulfil a specific mission. Jimmy Carter expanded operations in the Persian Gulf. Ronald Reagan pursued an arms race with the Soviet Union, and George W. Bush waged wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Mr. Trump has not articulated a new mission that would require a military spending increase. This has left analysts wondering what goals he has in mind. Erin M. Simpson, a national security consultant, called Mr. Trump's plans "a budget in search of a strategy."

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/03/22/us/is-americas-military-big-enough.html

Donald J. Trump - Military Readiness Remarks

[Related]: 2017 Outlook for Navy Shipbuilding

What do you think about the proposed increase in military spending ? Does USA really need more weapons ?

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

If the sight of this winter's torrential rains left you pining for a way to capture the precious overflows, you are not alone.

UC Santa Cruz alum Daniel Mountjoy is working to do just that—on a scale that has the potential to ease the state's increasingly persistent cycles of deluge and drought.

The idea is to divert water from overflowing rivers onto fallow farmland, where it seeps into the soil and replenishes depleted aquifers. These "underground reservoirs" function like savings accounts, storing a valued resource for lean times.

"The goal is balance. We want to redirect surplus water, fill underground basins, and have that water available to farmers during drought years," says Mountjoy (BA, environmental studies, 1985), director of resource stewardship at Sustainable Conservation, a San Francisco-based nonprofit focused on solving resource management problems.

Mountjoy sees his role as facilitating a unique coalition—including farmers, environmentalists, academics, and water managers—that is developing and testing the strategy, called "on-farm recharge."

The strategy is in its infancy, but models show it has the capacity to capture enough river water between November and March to offset 20 percent of the annual "overdraft" pumped out of critical areas of the San Joaquin Valley.

Maybe they should follow the example of the ancient people on the Arabian Peninsula and build lots and lots of check dams.

Original Submission

ticho writes:

The OpenSSL project, home of the world’s most popular SSL/TLS and cryptographic toolkit, is changing its license to the Apache License v 2.0 (ASL v2). As part of this effort, the OpenSSL team launched a new website and has been working with various corporate collaborators to facilitate the re-licensing process.

“This re-licensing activity will make OpenSSL, already the world’s most widely-used FOSS encryption software, more convenient to incorporate in the widest possible range of free and open source software,” said Mishi Choudhary, Legal Director of Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) and counsel to OpenSSL. “OpenSSL’s team has carefully prepared for this re-licensing, and their process will be an outstanding example of ‘how to do it right.’ SFLC is pleased to have been able to help the team bring this process to this point, and looks forward to its successful and timely completion.”

The website will aid the OpenSSL team’s efforts to contact everyone who has contributed to the project so far, which includes nearly 400 individuals with a total of more than 31,000 commits. The current license dates back to the 1990’s and is more than 20 years old. The open source community has grown and changed since then, and has mostly settled on a small number of standard licenses.

The full announcement is at https://www.openssl.org/blog/blog/2017/03/20/license/

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

in with a story on Robert Elder Software blog entitled Silently Corrupting an Eclipse Workspace: The Ultimate Prank:

Next time your co-worker asks:

"What's the best way to back up my Eclipse workspace on Windows?"

you can tell them "Just right-click on it and select 'Send to Compressed (zipped) folder' and save the zip file". Unbeknownst to them, you just pulled the ultimate prank by telling them to make a corrupted backup!

          What your friend probably doesn't realize is that the Windows 'Send to Compressed (zipped) folder' utility has a mandatory optional feature to automatically not include certain folders in the archive without telling you. This is a great feature because it demonstrates the excellent sense of humour that the authors of Microsoft Windows have. This feature was no doubt included to allow you to play a variety of hilarious pranks on others by causing them lose data, only to find out about it years later when they want to open the archive and recover it.

The blog post goes on to identify other idiosyncrasies with how Windows mishandles directories whose names start with a period and/or contain Unicode characters.

Reasons you haven't switched to Linux (cont.):

• 3. Windows has superior development tools.

What other issues have you found with how Windows handles filenames?

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

A fungal biopesticide that shows promise for the control of bed bugs is highly effective even against bed-bug populations that are insecticide resistant, according to research conducted by scientists at Penn State and North Carolina State universities.

The study suggests that Aprehend, a mycoinsecticide developed at Penn State, likely will provide an important new tool for managing bed-bug infestations, which have surged in recent years.

"Bed bugs were all but eradicated from the United States and other industrialized nations after World War II, likely due to the use of DDT and other broad-spectrum insecticides," said study co-author Nina Jenkins, senior research associate in entomology, College of Agricultural Sciences, Penn State. "But in the last few decades, they have re-emerged globally as an important public-health pest."

The researchers noted that pyrethroid insecticides are a mainstay of bed bug control, but there is compelling evidence that many bed-bug populations have developed resistance. In addition, this resistance may lead to cross-resistance to other classes of insecticides.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

"Laughter" and intelligent play behaviors have been observed in a New Zealand species of parrot:

For the first time in birds, researchers say they have found evidence that a New Zealand parrot has the avian equivalent of an infectious laugh. They call it "positive emotional contagion" — which they define as "outwardly emotional actions that spread from one individual to another." In humans, this is what happens when one person hears another laugh and starts cracking up themselves. And in research published in Current Biology [open, DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2017.02.020] [DX], the researchers say that when kea parrots hear a call associated with play, they start playful tussling, aerial acrobatics, or throwing objects into the air.

The kea, native to the mountains of New Zealand, is known to be particularly intelligent, curious and social. It's also nationally endangered.

Lead author Raoul Schwing of the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna's Messerli Research Institute tells the Two-Way that during the course of his research, he had noticed that the parrot's warbling call almost always happened during times of play. He and his co-researchers from the University of Auckland and the University of Canterbury decided to test the effect of playing recordings of the playful call to parrots at a lookout point in Arthur's Pass National Park. Schwing says they were trying to determine the meaning of the call — was it seen as an invitation to play from another bird? Or was simply hearing this type of call enough to make the bird want to play, even if it wasn't with the bird making the call? To their surprise, it appears to be the latter. "In many, many cases, the bird started to play spontaneously when there was no play going on before," he says.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Do you suffer from SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder)? A new theory explains why:

When dawn comes later in the winter, the end of melatonin secretion drifts later, says Kripke. From animal studies, it appears that high melatonin levels just after the time an animal wakes up strongly suppress the making of active thyroid hormone—and lowering thyroid levels in the brain can cause changes in mood, appetite, and energy. For instance, thyroid hormone is known to influence serotonin, a neurotransmitter that regulates mood. Several studies have shown that levels of brain serotonin in humans are at their lowest in the winter and highest in the summer. In 2016, scientists in Canada discovered that people with severe SAD show greater seasonal changes in a protein that terminates the action of serotonin than others with no or less severe symptoms, suggesting that the condition and the neurotransmitter are linked.

It's possible that many of these mechanisms are at work, even if the precise relationships haven't been fully teased apart yet. But regardless of what causes winter depression, bright light—particularly when delivered in the early morning—seems to reverse the symptoms.

Bright, full spectrum lights do the trick.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

LinkedIn has revealed a new version of its SaaSy Sales Navigator that pipes activities from the network into Salesforce.com.

Sales Navigator has been around for years and offers subscribers the chance to pursue their prey within the walled garden of the social network for suits.

But as the company explains, that activity took place in a silo that made it hard to understand the progress of sales efforts conducted inside LinkedIn.

That's not how things are supposed to happen, because when CRM burst onto the scene in the late 1990s one of its main selling points was that it offered an application for sales people to record every call, mail, and sideways glance in the direction of a customer or prospect. Sales people using LinkedIn to do their jobs without their efforts being recorded in CRM is therefore an oddity.

Which LinkedIn has now fixed with a new "CRM Sync" feature that lets LinkedIn users send activities in the network with their CRM.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Mary’s story looks different to different people. Within the ghoulishly cheerful Lyft public-relations machinery, Mary is an exemplar of hard work and dedication—the latter being, perhaps, hard to come by in a company that refuses to classify its drivers as employees. Mary’s entrepreneurial spirit—taking ride requests while she was in labor!—is an “exciting” example of how seamless and flexible app-based employment can be. Look at that hustle! You can make a quick buck with Lyft anytime, even when your cervix is dilating.

[...] It does require a fairly dystopian strain of doublethink for a company to celebrate how hard and how constantly its employees must work to make a living, given that these companies are themselves setting the terms. And yet this type of faux-inspirational tale has been appearing more lately, both in corporate advertising and in the news. Fiverr, an online freelance marketplace that promotes itself as being for “the lean entrepreneur”—as its name suggests, services advertised on Fiverr can be purchased for as low as five dollars—recently attracted ire for an ad campaign called “In Doers We Trust.” One ad, prominently displayed on some New York City subway cars, features a woman staring at the camera with a look of blank determination. “You eat a coffee for lunch,” the ad proclaims. “You follow through on your follow through. Sleep deprivation is your drug of choice. You might be a doer.”

Phoenix666 writes:

The Woz speaketh. Gather 'round, Children, and hearken unto him:

More than 40 years after founding Apple Computer, Steve Wozniak has a lot to say about the early days of the world's richest company, and about technology, learning and being a born engineer.

On stage at the IEEE TechIgnite conference in Burlingame, California, on Wednesday, he gave a glimpse into how a tech legend thinks.

On open source

In the early 1970s, Wozniak read about phone phreaking, in which "phreakers" made free phone calls by using electronics to mimic the tones used for dialing each number. To learn how to do it, he went to the only place he knew that had books and magazines about computers: The Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. He went on a Sunday and walked right in. "The smartest people in the world don't lock doors," Wozniak said.

A similar philosophy led him to give away his design for what later became the Apple 1. After drawing up plans that would let people build their own computers for $300, he handed them out at the Homebrew Computer Club, an early gathering place for tinkerers who helped launched the PC revolution. He didn't even include copyright notices.

"My motivation wasn't to start a company, wasn't to make money, it was actually just to show off my engineering excellence," he said. It was a non-engineer friend, Steve Jobs, who persuaded him to monetize both phreaking and the personal computer.

Read on for further thoughts on resourcefulness, on myths and movies, on robotics, on education, and on his dream job.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Start the chopper, it's time to become the top predator again:

By a largely party-line vote Tuesday, the Senate approved a bill that repeals Obama-era hunting restrictions on national wildlife refuges in Alaska. The House already voted last month to abolish those restrictions — which were instituted by the Fish and Wildlife Service [FWS] in 2016 to protect predator species from hunters — and so the bill now heads to the desk of President Trump, who is widely expected to sign it.

The FWS rule facing repeal explicitly prohibited many kinds of "predator control" on the 16 federally owned refuges in Alaska. That prohibition included a ban on the aerial hunting, live trapping or baiting of predators such as bears and wolves — as well as on killing those predators while near their dens or their cubs.

Alaska Rep. Don Young, the Republican sponsor of the bill passed Tuesday, says these restrictions represented federal overreach. "Not only does this action undermine Alaska's ability to manage fish and wildlife upon refuge lands," Young said, "it fundamentally destroys a cooperative relationship between Alaska and the federal government."

Original Submission

"Arthur T Knackerbracket" has found the following story:

With just an inexpensive micro-thin surgical needle and laser light, University of Utah [U. of U.] engineers have discovered a minimally invasive, inexpensive way to take high-resolution pictures of an animal brain, a process that also could lead to a much less invasive method for humans.

A team led by University of Utah electrical and computer engineering associate professor Rajesh Menon has now proven the process works on mice for the benefit of medical researchers studying neurological disorders such as depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder and aggression.

[...] The process, called "computational cannula microscopy," involves taking a needle about a quarter-millimeter in diameter and inserting it into the brain. Laser light shines through the needle and into the brain, illuminating certain cells "like a flashlight," Menon says. In the case of mice, researchers genetically modify the animals so that only the cells they want to see glow under this laser light.

The light from the glowing cells then is captured by the needle and recorded by a standard camera. The captured light is run through a sophisticated algorithm developed by Menon and his team, which assembles the scattered light waves into a 2D or potentially, even a 3D picture.

[...] "Although its[sic] much more complex from a regulatory standpoint, it can be done in humans, and not just in the brain, but for other organs as well," he says. "But our motivation for this project right now is to look inside the brain of the mouse and further develop the technique to understand fundamental neuroscience in the mouse brain."

Journal Reference:
Ganghun Kim, Naveen Nagarajan, Elissa Pastuzyn, Kyle Jenks, Mario Capecchi, Jason Shepherd, Rajesh Menon. Deep-brain imaging via epi-fluorescence Computational Cannula Microscopy. Scientific Reports, 2017; 7: 44791 DOI: 10.1038/srep44791

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

AnonTechie writes:

In 1912, chemist Walther Nernst proposed that cooling an object to absolute zero is impossible with a finite amount of time and resources. Today this idea, called the unattainability principle, is the most widely accepted version of the third law of thermodynamics—yet so far it has not been proved from first principles.

Now for the first time, physicists Lluís Masanes and Jonathan Oppenheim at the University College of London have derived the third law of thermodynamics from first principles. After more than 100 years, the result finally puts the third law on the same footing as the first and second laws of thermodynamics, both of which have already been proved.

To prove the third law, the physicists used ideas from computer science and quantum information theory. There, a common problem is to determine the amount of resources required to perform a certain task. When applied to cooling, the question becomes how much work must be done and how large must the cooling reservoir be in order to cool an object to absolute zero (0 Kelvin, -273.15°C, or -459.67°F)?

The physicists showed that cooling a system to absolute zero requires either an infinite amount of work or an infinite reservoir. This finding is in agreement with the widely accepted physical explanation of the unattainability of absolute zero: As the temperature approaches zero, the system's entropy (disorder) approaches zero, and it is not possible to prepare a system in a state of zero entropy in a finite number of steps.

https://phys.org/news/2017-03-physicists-impossible-cool-absolute.html

[Abstract]: A general derivation and quantification of the third law of thermodynamics

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

A new start-up says it intends to offer an electric-powered commercial flight from London to Paris in 10 years.

Its plane, yet to go into development, would carry 150 people on journeys of less than 300 miles.

Wright Electric said by removing the need for jet fuel, the price of travel could drop dramatically.

British low-cost airline Easyjet has expressed its interest in the technology.

"Easyjet has had discussions with Wright Electric and is actively providing an airline operator's perspective on the development of this exciting technology," the airline told the BBC.

Vaporware, but the expression of intent is interesting.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

The principle of Defence in Depth ("DiD"), says OWASP (Open Web Application Security Project), is that "layered security mechanisms increase security of the system as a whole". That is, if one layer of protection is breached, there's still the opportunity for the attack to be fended off by one or more of the other layers. If anyone's ever drawn something that looks like an onion on the whiteboard – a load of concentric layers with your infrastructure in the middle – that's the concept we're looking at. It's actually a military term that's been adopted by security types in the IT industry who want to be tank commanders when they grow up.

On the face of it it's a pretty simple concept to understand. Rather than just having (say) anti-malware software on your desktop computers, why not also make your Web downloads go through a filter that has malware protection on it too? And yes, this helps. But to do it properly you have to step back a few strides and have an overview of your world: although it's going to cost me 50p in the buzzword swear box, I'm going to say "holistic view".

I secure my systems by naming things like Perl regular expressions. Attackers instantly go cross-eyed and fall over.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Scientists have succeeded in 'filming' inter-molecular chemical reactions – using the electron beam of a transmission electron microscope (TEM) as a stop-frame imaging tool. They have also discovered that the electron beam can be simultaneously tuned to stimulate specific chemical reactions by using it as a source of energy as well as an imaging tool.

This research – which shows chemical reactions happening in real time at one hundred-millionth of a centimeter - has the potential to revolutionise the study and development of new materials. It could help answer some of the most fundamental and challenging questions of chemical science; such as how molecules react with each other at the atomistic level; what drives formation of one product instead of another; as well as aid the discovery of brand new chemical reactions.

Using the technique to specifically stimulate certain reactions is especially mind-boggling.

Original Submission