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Fnord666 writes:

A mysterious issue is affecting the default Windows NTP server (time.windows.com), according to multiple complaints coming from Reddit and Twitter users, screwing up everyone's computer clocks.

Based on reports, the time.windows.com NTP server is sending Windows users the incorrect time, sometimes off by seconds, but in other cases, off even by hours. The issue was spotted today, April 3, early in the morning, and is ongoing for at least 10 hours.

The impact was felt immediately by servers that rely on the Windows NTP service to schedule and execute tasks. Unhappy admins found their servers launching routines early or too late, botching scripts and crashing their applications.

[...] UPDATE: A Microsoft representative acknowledged the issue. "We investigated and quickly resolved the issue our time service experienced," the Microsoft spokesperson wrote in an email. Tests carried out by Bleeping Computer confirmed the Windows NTP serrvice is up and running at the time of this update.

Source: Bleeping Computer

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

You may never buy another laptop.

Ten years ago, laptop sales overtook desktop PC sales to become the dominant hardware platform for computing. Now smartphones are about to do to laptops what laptops did to desktops.

[...] The first fatal trend is that young people are already choosing smartphones over laptops, even without docking and clamshell smartphones. ComScore reports that the use of laptops and desktops among younger people is on the decline. Some 20 percent of millennials use their smartphone as their only computing device, according to a recent report, and this percentage grows each year. Raw demographics alone favor the end of laptops.

The second fatal trend is that the industry is champing at the bit to move everything off Intel and onto ARM. (Intel and Intel-compatible chips have powered desktop and laptop platforms for decades; the smartphones and smartphone apps run on ARM chips.) Once laptops, especially laptops from Apple, run ARM chips, they'll run iOS and Android instead of OS X and Windows. And at that point, they'll essentially be identical to docking solutions, but more expensive.

The third and final fatal trend can be found in your wallet. Smartphones are becoming amazing. The Galaxy S8 is amazing. And this year's iPhone is expected to be mind-blowing as well. The new phones have cameras that rival DSLRs. They have performance that rivals desktop PCs. They run increasingly amazing apps, including professional-quality apps. Unlike laptops, smartphones are exciting.

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard

After stirring up a ruckus by using words like "restrictive" and "virus" to describe the GPL in a Linux.com article, the Linux Foundation responds by quietly removing the post from the website.

The Linux Foundation has no respect for FOSS. Nor does it seem care about any users of Linux who aren't connected with the enterprise. It's been that way since the beginning. It now appears that the Foundation also has little respect for the GPL...you know, Linux's license. Nor does it appear to be much of a believer in the notion of transparency.

[...] On March 23, the Linux Foundation posted an article on its website, Linux.com, by Greg Olson, the foundation's senior director open source consulting services. In the article, "Five Legal Risks For Companies Involved in Open Source Software Development," he wrote that "permissive licenses present little risk," while referring to the GPL and other copyleft licenses as "Restrictive Licenses" and "viral."

[...] While his points are accurate enough, and reflect what I've already written in this article, the terms he uses suggest that the foundation holds the GPL and other copyleft licenses in contempt.

Source: http://fossforce.com/2017/04/lin-desktop-linux-gpl-openness/

takyon: Archive of the Linux.com article. The original blog post currently says "Access Denied" and "You are not authorized to access this page."

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Scientists have found evidence that a land link existing between Europe and Britain 450,000 years ago was damaged and later destroyed:

The UK has now started the formal process of leaving the EU, but scientists say they have evidence of a much earlier "Brexit". They have worked out how a thin strip of land that once connected ancient Britain to Europe was destroyed. The researchers believe a large lake overflowed 450,000 years ago, damaging the land link, then a later flood fully opened the Dover Strait. The scars of these events can be found on the seabed of the English Channel.

The study is published in the journal Nature Communications [open, DOI: 10.1038/ncomms15101] [DX]. Professor Sanjeev Gupta, who led the study, from Imperial College London, said: "This was really one of the defining events for north west Europe - and certainly the defining event in Britain's history. "This chance geological event, if it hadn't happened, would have meant Britain was always connected to the continent."

The shortest distance across the Dover Strait is currently 33.3 kilometers (20.7 miles).

2007 letter to Nature from some of the same authors: Catastrophic flooding origin of shelf valley systems in the English Channel (DOI: 10.1038/nature06018) (DX)

Original Submission

Fnord666 writes:

Peter Ma looked around his San Francisco condo and realized he'd won everything in it. His flat-screen TV, home theater system, 3D printers, phones, tablets, computers and furniture were either hackathon prizes or purchased with hackathon earnings. Stashed under his leather couch -- which he'd bought with an Amazon gift card -- was a thick stack of 2- and 3-foot-long cardboard checks commemorating his most cherished wins. "The only non-schwag I have are shoes," he said.

With his gray hoodie and close-cropped goatee, 33-year-old Ma looks like any of the thousands of computer programmers roaming the city, but he's part of an elite corps. He and about a dozen friends travel the hackathon circuit. They build apps, connected devices and other products during all-night, fiercely competitive programming contests where sleep is scarce and caffeine is plentiful. The sessions are usually sponsored by corporations, and top prizes mean serious cash.

Some of the hackers have jobs. Some do contracting work. Some have corporate sponsors. Almost all of them are working on a pet startup idea. For Ma and a few others, hackathons are a job. Ma knows he would make more money if he had a more traditional career. He just doesn't want one.

Source: Bloomberg

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Sir Tim Berners-Lee gave an interview with radio station WBUR about the state of the Web and its future:

Berners-Lee initially imagined the web as a beautiful platform that could help us overcome national and cultural boundaries. He envisioned it would break down silos, but many people today believe the web has created silos.

And he still largely sees the potential of the web, but the web has not turned out to be the complete cyber Utopian dream he had hoped. He's particularly worried about the dark side of social media — places where he says anonymity is being used by "misogynist bullies, by nasty people who just get a kick out of being nasty."

He also identified personal data privacy, the spread of misinformation, and a lack of transparency in online political advertising as major problems with the current Web in a letter marking the World Wide Web's 28th birthday last month.

Previously: World Wide Web Turns 25 years Old
Tim Berners-Lee Proposes an Online Magna Carta
Berners-Lee on HTML 5: If It's Not on the Web, It Doesn't Exist
The First Website Went Online 25 Years Ago
Berners-Lee: World Wide Web is Spy Net
Tim Berners-Lee Just Gave us an Opening to Stop DRM in Web Standards

Original Submission

Fnord666 writes:

Four privacy-minded lawmakers have introduced legislation requiring law enforcement officials to obtain a warrant before searching phones belonging to US citizens, and prohibiting them from barring entry to Americans who decline to share their passwords at the border.

"Americans' Constitutional rights shouldn't disappear at the border," Senator Ron Wyden said in statement to BuzzFeed News. "By requiring a warrant to search Americans' devices and prohibiting unreasonable delay, this bill makes sure that border agents are focused on criminals and terrorists instead of wasting their time thumbing through innocent Americans' personal photos and other data."

[...] The bill would require law enforcement to establish probable cause before searching or seizing a phone belonging to an American. "Manual searches," in which a border agent flips through a person's stored pictures would be covered under the proposed law as well. But the bill does allow for broad emergency exceptions.

"The government should not have the right to access your personal electronic devices without probable cause," Rep. Polis told BuzzFeed news in a statement. "Whether you are at home, walking down the street, or at the border, we must make it perfectly clear that our Fourth Amendment protections extend regardless of location. This bill is overdue, and I am glad we can come together in a bicameral, bipartisan manner to ensure that Customs and Border Patrol agents don't continue to violate essential privacy safeguards."

Source: Buzzfeed

Original Submission

CoolHand writes:

LinuxGizmos has an interesting article on how an Intel Engineer fixed up Linux's DisplayPort compliance, and got the kernel patch moved upstream.

At ELC 2017, Intel's Manasi Navare described how she patched Linux 4.12 for true DisplayPort compliance, and offered tips on pushing patches upstream.

If you've ever hooked up a Linux computer to a DisplayPort monitor and encountered only a flickering or blank screen, we've got good news for you. A graphics kernel developer at Intel's Open Source Technology Center has solved the problem with a patch that will go into Linux Kernel 4.12. Manasi Navare's patch modifies Atomic Kernel Mode Setting (KMS) technology to gracefully drop down to a lower resolution to display the image.

"Someone had to fix this problem, so I said okay, I have the knowledge and I have the community to help me," said Navare at the recent Embedded Linux Conference.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/04/norway-plans-exterminate-large-reindeer-herd-stop-fatal-infectious-brain-disease

A year after a deadly and highly contagious wildlife disease surfaced in Norway, the country is taking action. Chronic wasting disease (CWD), caused by misfolded proteins called prions, has already ravaged deer and elk in North America, costing rural economies millions in lost revenue from hunting. Its presence in Norway's reindeer and moose—the first cases in Europe—is "a very serious situation for the environment and for our culture and traditions," says Bjørnar Ytrehus, a veterinary researcher at the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research in Trondheim.

Last week, Norway's minister of agriculture and food gave the green light for hunters to kill off the entire herd in which three infected individuals were found, about 2000 reindeer, or nearly 6% of the country's wild population. "We have to take action now," says Karen Johanne Baalsrud, director of plant and animal health at the Norwegian Food Safety Authority in Oslo. The deer's habitat will be quarantined for at least 5 years to prevent reinfection. The odds of a successful eradication, experts say, will depend largely on how long CWD has been present in Norway.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Many Norwegian fjords present similar difficulties to bridge builders, so instead the country's coastal population relies on ferries that link their often remote communities.

Each year, some 20 million cars, vans and trucks cross the country's many fjords on roughly 130 ferry routes.

Most of Norway's ferries run on diesel, spewing out noxious fumes and CO2.

But this is about to change.

Following two years of trials of the world's first electric car ferry, named Ampere, ferry operators are busy making the transition from diesel to comply with new government requirements for all new ferry licensees to deliver zero- or low-emission alternatives.

"We continue the work with low-emission ferries because we believe it will benefit the climate, Norwegian industry and Norwegian jobs," Prime Minister Erna Solberg said in a speech in April 2016, in which she vowed to help fund required quayside infrastructure.

Ferry company Fjord1, which operates the MF Norangsfjord, has ordered three fully electric ferries that are scheduled to enter active service on some of its routes in January 2018.

Norway has also been a strong adopter of electric cars.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

The Syrian government has once again been accused of attacking a rebel-held area with chemical weapons:

A suspected Syrian government chemical attack killed scores of people, including children, in the northwestern province of Idlib on Tuesday, a monitoring group, medics and rescue workers in the rebel-held area said.

The Syrian military denied responsibility and said it would never use chemical weapons.

The head of the health authority in rebel-held Idlib said more than 50 people had been killed and 300 wounded. The Union of Medical Care Organizations, a coalition of international aid agencies that funds hospitals in Syria, said at least 100 people had died.

The British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the attack killed at least 58 people and was believed to have been carried out by Syrian government jets. It caused many people to choke, and some to foam at the mouth.

White House press secretary Sean Spicer blamed the attack on the "weakness and irresolution" of the previous U.S. administration.

Also at BBC, NYT, Fox News, the Washington Post, and The Hill.

Original Submission

Fnord666 writes:

Recent college graduates who borrow are leaving school with an average of $34,000 in student loans. That's up from $20,000 just 10 years ago, according to a new analysis from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

In that report, out this week, the New York Fed took a careful look at the relationship between debt and homeownership. For people aged 30 to 36, the analysis shows having any student debt significantly hurts your chances of buying a home, compared to college graduates with no debt. The cliche of "good debt" notwithstanding, the consequences of borrowing are real, and they are lasting.

The report paints a mixed picture of how student borrowing has evolved over the last decade, since the financial crisis. There are some bright spots: For example, student loan defaults peaked five years ago and have declined ever since.

And repayment seems to have slowed down among high-balance borrowers —those who owe $75,000 or more. Meaning, after 10 years, they have paid down only one-quarter to one-third of what they owe.

On the face, this isn't necessarily good. But taken alongside the decline in defaults, Fed president William Dudley said in a press briefing Monday, it reflects something good. That is, graduate students, in particular, are signing up for government programs intended to help make payments more affordable.

Source: NPR

Original Submission

takyon writes:

The Cassini spacecraft will make the first of a series of dives in between Saturn and its rings on April 26th, following a final flyby of Atlas¹ on April 12th and Titan on April 22nd:

NASA's Cassini spacecraft, in orbit around Saturn since 2004, is about to begin the final chapter of its remarkable story. On Wednesday, April 26, the spacecraft will make the first in a series of dives through the 1,500-mile-wide (2,400-kilometer) gap between Saturn and its rings as part of the mission's grand finale.

"No spacecraft has ever gone through the unique region that we'll attempt to boldly cross 22 times," said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "What we learn from Cassini's daring final orbits will further our understanding of how giant planets, and planetary systems everywhere, form and evolve. This is truly discovery in action to the very end."

Cassini will plunge into Saturn's atmosphere on September 15th.

April 26th also seems to be the planned airdate for a NOVA special about the legacy and end of the Cassini–Huygens mission.

[1] Cassini flew as close as 32,000 km to Atlas in 2015, capturing imagery with a resolution of 190 meters per pixel. Cassini will fly by Atlas at an altitude of 14,800 km this month.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Taking a cue from the Marvel Universe, researchers report that they have developed a self-healing polymeric material with an eye toward electronics and soft robotics that can repair themselves. The material is stretchable and transparent, conducts ions to generate current and could one day help your broken smartphone go back together again.

[...] "When I was young, my idol was Wolverine from the X-Men," Chao Wang, Ph.D., says. "He could save the world, but only because he could heal himself. A self-healing material, when carved into two parts, can go back together like nothing has happened, just like our human skin. I've been researching making a self-healing lithium ion battery, so when you drop your cell phone, it could fix itself and last much longer."

The key to self-repair is in the chemical bonding. Two types of bonds exist in materials, Wang explains. There are covalent bonds, which are strong and don't readily reform once broken; and noncovalent bonds, which are weaker and more dynamic. For example, the hydrogen bonds that connect water molecules to one another are non-covalent, breaking and reforming constantly to give rise to the fluid properties of water. "Most self-healing polymers form hydrogen bonds or metal-ligand coordination, but these aren't suitable for ionic conductors," Wang says.

Wang's team at the University of California, Riverside, turned instead to a different type of non-covalent bond called an ion-dipole interaction, a force between charged ions and polar molecules. "Ion-dipole interactions have never been used for designing a self-healing polymer, but it turns out that they're particularly suitable for ionic conductors," Wang says. The key design idea in the development of the material was to use a polar, stretchable polymer, poly(vinylidene fluoride-co-hexafluoropropylene), plus a mobile, ionic salt. The polymer chains are linked to each other by ion-dipole interactions between the polar groups in the polymer and the ionic salt.

More information: Mechanically adaptive electronic polymers for transparent self-healing artificial muscle, the 253rd National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society (ACS), 2017.

Related: https://phys.org/news/2016-12-wolverine-material-self-healing-transparent-highly.html

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

The internet dominates our world and each one of us is leaving a larger digital footprint as more time passes. Those footprints are ripe for studying, experts say.

In a recently published paper, a group of Stanford sociology experts encourage other sociologists and social psychologists to focus on developing online research studies with the help of big data in order to advance the theories of social interaction and structure.

[...] In the new study, the researchers make a case for "online field experiments" that could be embedded within the structure of existing communities on the internet.

The researchers differentiate online field experiments from online lab experiments, which create a controlled online situation instead of using preexisting environments that have engaged participants.

"The internet is not just another mechanism for recruiting more subjects," Parigi said. "There is now space for what we call computational social sciences that lies at the intersection of sociology, psychology, computer science and other technical sciences, through which we can try to understand human behavior as it is shaped and illuminated by online platforms."

As part of this type of experiment, researchers would utilize online platforms to take advantage of big data and predictive algorithms. Recruiting and retaining participants for such field studies is therefore more challenging and time-consuming because of the need for a close partnership with the platforms.

But online field experiments allow researchers to gain an enhanced look at certain human behaviors that cannot be replicated in a laboratory environment, the researchers said.

For example, theories about how and why people trust each other can be better examined in the online environments, the researchers said, because the context of different complex social relationships is recorded. In laboratory experiments, researchers can only isolate the type of trust that occurs between strangers, which is called "thin" trust.

Is Big Data the path to respectability for the social sciences?

More information: Paolo Parigi et al. Online Field Experiments, Social Psychology Quarterly (2017). DOI: 10.1177/0190272516680842

Original Submission