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An Anonymous Coward writes:

If the government really wanted to protect us from ourselves they would limit gambling, which costs poor people a lot and is known to result in unfavorable odds, and they would discontinue the lottery. Instead because the lottery and gambling make the government and big institutions money they are legal. Restricting pattern day trading is, likewise, an attempt to give those with money more leverage over those without money. This law directly discriminates against those without money and it was passed by those with money. The government has essentially passed two sets of laws, one for the rich and one for the poor.

These laws were undemocratically passed by the rich for the rich under the false pretense of protecting the poor. Such is a hallmark of an aristocracy. No nation should have a different set of laws for the rich than for the poor.

The entire Wikipedia article, especially all the criticisms, are worth reading.

FINRA (formerly National Association of Securities Dealers, Inc. or NASD) rule applies to any customer who buys and sells a particular security in the same trading day (day trades), and does this four or more times in any five consecutive business day period; the rule applies to margin accounts, but not to cash accounts. A pattern day trader is subject to special rules. The main rule is that in order to engage in pattern day trading you must maintain an equity balance of at least $25,000 in a margin account.

[...] The SEC believes that people whose account equity is less than $25,000 may represent less-sophisticated traders, who may be less able to handle the losses that may be associated with day trades.

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard

Gierad Laput wants to make homes smarter without forcing you to buy a bunch of sensor-laden, Internet-connected appliances. Instead, he's come up with a way to combine a slew of sensors into a device about the size of a Saltine that plugs into a wall outlet and can monitor many things in the room, from a tea kettle to a paper towel dispenser.

Laput, a graduate student studying computer-human interaction at Carnegie Mellon University, built the gadget as part of a project he calls Synthetic Sensors. He says it could be used to do things like figure out how many paper towels you've got left, detect when someone enters or leaves a building, or keep an eye on an elderly family member (by tracking the person's typical routine via appliances, for example). It's being shown off this week in Denver at the CHI computer-human interaction conference.

[...] Laput says he and fellow researchers were curious to see if they could find a compact, capable alternative to existing smart gadgets, which can be costly and don't always play nice with each other, and wireless smart tags, which have to be stuck to various things around the house. They also wanted to see how much sensing they could do without a camera, which their research showed people found invasive.

Source: MIT Technology Review

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard

Shares in Snapchat’s parent company Snap Inc. have plummeted in value by almost a quarter – to the tune of $6 billion. The drop comes after the first earnings report since the company went public showed a slowdown in user growth and revenue.

On Tuesday, the company posted a $2.2 billion loss in the first quarter, much of which was tied to compensation following the company’s IPO in March. After adjusting for the expected expenses, losses of $188.2 million were reported – greater than analysts anticipated.

The company’s stock dropped 23 percent in after-hours trading following the report, wiping a staggering $6 billion off the company’s value, according to Reuters.

Source: RT

Q1: 05-08-17 Earnings Summary via Seeking Alpha

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

One of the big worries about the widespread use of multicopter drones is the possibility that if they stop working, they might plummet from the sky and hit someone on the head. As a result, we've seen suggestions such as parachutes, autorotating bodies, and even the ability to fly with one or more failed motors. NASA is now developing a system of its own, in which drones automatically select the best place to land in the event of a malfunction.

Known as Safe2Ditch, the technology would see drones continuously running self-diagnostic checks on themselves while in flight. If any problems were detected, the system would estimate how much longer the aircraft was able to remain airborne – it could also adapt the manner in which the drone was flying, allowing it to "limp" along a little longer.

The system would additionally search a database for locations that the drone could reach within that time, where it would be safe to land. Based on that information, the aircraft would then autonomously perform a landing at the closest such place, using sensors to confirm that no one was standing beneath it.

Original Submission

butthurt writes:

A press release, dated 11 May, posted to the White House Web site (archived copy) announces (all links and party affiliations were added by the submitter):

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard

Microsoft just announced that three different versions of the free Linux operating system — Ubuntu, Suse, and Fedora — are coming to the Windows Store, the app market in Windows 10. 

It sounds weird, but it makes perfect sense. In early 2016, Microsoft announced the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), a way for developers to use full versions of Linux within Windows 10 itself.

Putting aside the historical ramifications here — Microsoft spent the 90s unsuccessfully trying to stamp out Linux, a free alternative to Windows — it was a move intended to bait programmers into using Windows 10.

Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-store-gets-ubuntu-suse-fedora-linux-2017-5

Original Submission

Ned Ryerson writes:

"The openSUSE project has announced that its authentication system has been breached and a number of services have been shut down or put into read-only mode. "This includes the openSUSE OBS, wiki, and forums. The scope and impact of the breach is not yet fully clear. The disabling of authentication is to ensure the protection of our systems and user data while the situation is fully investigated. Based on the information available at this time, there is a possibility that the breach is limited to users of non-openSUSE infrastructure that shares the same authentication system." There does not appear to be reason to worry that the download infrastructure has been compromised.

Full Story: https://lwn.net/Articles/722591/

Original Submission

butthurt writes:

Kaiser Health News reports on work published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (DOI: 10.1001/jama.2017.5150). In the journal article, the researchers concluded that

According to the Kaiser Health News article, the 21st Century Cures Act, enacted in December,

additional coverage:

• Yale University press release
• AP via WCRB-TV
• Fortune
• CNN
• San Diego Union-Tribune
• MedPage Today

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

According to a study conducted through heartbeat measurement app Cardiogram and the University of California, San Francisco, the Apple Watch is 97 percent accurate in detecting the most common abnormal heart rhythm when paired with an AI-based algorithm.

The study involved 6,158 participants recruited through the Cardiogram app on Apple Watch. Most of the participants in the UCSF Health eHeart study had normal EKG readings. However, 200 of them had been diagnosed with paroxysmal atrial fibrillation (an abnormal heartbeat). Engineers then trained a deep neural network to identify these abnormal heart rhythms from Apple Watch heart rate data.

Cardiogram began the study with UCSF in 2016 to discover whether the Apple Watch could detect an oncoming stroke. About a quarter of strokes are caused by an abnormal heart rhythm, according to Cardiogram co-founder and data scientist for UCSF's eHeart study Brandon Ballinger.

Yes, but can the Apple Watch then pace you or shock you?

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard

Two teams of experts have conducted audits of the open-source virtual private network (VPN) application OpenVPN, including its use of cryptography, and they identified only one high severity vulnerability

One audit, conducted between December 2016 and February 2017, was carried out by cryptography expert Dr. Matthew Green and funded by Private Internet Access (PIA). Green and his team looked for both memory-related vulnerabilities (e.g. buffer overflows and use-after-free) and cryptographic weaknesses.

A security review of OpenVPN was also conducted by Quarkslab over a 50-day period between February and April, with funding from the Open Source Technology Improvement Fund (OSTIF). This audit focused on OpenVPN for Windows and Linux, the OpenVPN GUI, and the TAP driver for Windows. Both audits targeted OpenVPN 2.4.

Quarkslab discovered one vulnerability that has been rated high severity. The flaw, tracked as CVE-2017-7478, is a denial-of-service (DoS) issue that allows an unauthenticated attacker to crash OpenVPN clients and servers. Researchers pointed out that the weakness can be easily exploited.

Quarkslab also identified a medium severity DoS vulnerability (CVE-2017-7479) that can only be exploited by an authenticated attacker. The other security bugs found by the company have been classified as low severity or informational issues.

The audit conducted by Dr. Green's Cryptography Engineering did not uncover any major flaws.

Source: http://www.securityweek.com/audit-finds-only-one-severe-vulnerability-openvpn

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Tesla's Solar Roof Pricing Is Cheap Enough to Catch Fire

Tesla Inc. has begun taking $1,000 deposits for its remarkable solar roof tiles—to be delivered this summer at a price point that could expand the U.S. solar market.

Tesla will begin with production of two of the four styles it unveiled in October: a smooth glass and a textured glass tile. 1 Roofing a 2,000 square-foot home in New York state—with 40 percent coverage of active solar tiles and battery backup for night-time use—would cost about $50,000 after federal tax credits and generate $64,000 in energy over 30 years, according to Tesla's website calculator.

That's more expensive upfront than a typical roof, but less expensive than a typical roof with traditional solar and back-up batteries. The warranty is for the lifetime of your home.

"The pricing is better than I expected, better than everyone expected," said Hugh Bromley, a solar analyst at Bloomberg New Energy Finance who had been skeptical about the potential market impact of the new product. Tesla's cost for active solar tiles is about $42 per square foot, "significantly below" BNEF's prior estimate of $68 per square foot, Bromley said. Inactive tiles will cost $11 per square foot.

Also: Elon Musk has discovered a new passion in life — and it could be Tesla's best product yet

Original Submission

takyon writes:

The first SLS flight, around the moon, will not include a crew.

The first flight of NASA's next-generation heavy-lift rocket, the Space Launch System (SLS), is now scheduled for 2019 and will not include a human crew, agency officials said today (May 12).

As of 2016, NASA had planned for the SLS' first flight to take place in 2018, without a crew on board. But the transition team that the Trump administration sent to the agency earlier this year asked for an internal evaluation of the possibility of launching a crew atop the SLS inside the agency's Orion space capsule.

Robert Lightfoot, NASA's acting administrator, said during a news conference today that, based on the results of this internal evaluation, a crewed flight would be "technically feasible," but the agency will proceed with its initial plan to make the rocket's first flight uncrewed.

[...] SLS' first flight will be called Exploration Mission 1, or EM-1, and will send an uncrewed Orion capsule (which has already made one uncrewed test flight, aboard a United Launch Alliance Delta IV Heavy rocket) on a roughly three-week trip around the moon. The first crewed flight, EM-2, was originally scheduled to follow in 2021.

Source:NASA Won't Fly Astronauts On 1st Orion-SLS Test Flight Around the Moon
Also at:
NASA Study Warns Against Putting Crew On Huge Rocket's First Flight
NASA Denies Trump's Request to Send Astronauts Past the Moon on New Rocket

Previously: SpaceX to Fly Two Tourists Around the Moon in 2018
Maiden Flight of the Space Launch System Delayed to 2019

SpaceX might beat SLS to the moon with humans.

Original Submission

cafebabe writes:

Higher education is generally a poor deal. A good course at a good institution will boost a career but the vast majority of higher education options are worthless or detrimental. Despite this, people are willing to get themselves into maybe US$100,000 of educational debt. Meanwhile, Ivy League faculty salary often exceeds US$150,000. What do students get for a lifetime of debt? Weed-out classes with a 50% failure rate then top grades awarded with abandon. An increasingly long-tail of third-tier academic journals which are full of bogus results. (A racket within a racket.) Deluxe gymnasiums and student accommodation with en-suite bathrooms. And, in some cases, pressure on staff to ignore plagurism; often due to financial or cultural reasons.

Yes, there's the social aspect and in-person interaction but why is online education seen like a poor substitute along with correspondence courses, vocational courses and community colleges? And here's a humdinger: Why don't the best educational establishments have ISO9000 certification? Are the inputs too variable or is the process too scattershot? Actually, how efficient is education? Are these guys with the US$150,000 salaries even 1% efficient at teaching? I doubt many of them care.

So, what's the Shannon channel capacity of education. Who knows? That's a really poor state of affairs. In the 1940s, telcos knew more about their operational efficiency than educators know now. So, how effective could an education be? How much can we accelerate learning? With CAL [Computer Aided Learning] running since the 1960s we should achieve small miracles. Well, it works brilliantly in limited domains, such as numeracy and vocabulary but the bulk of CAL, educational videos, are a sea of unending dross. So far, I've sat through 18 out of 42 hours of Buckminster Fuller and nine hours of Stanford cultural history. Computer history was the most enjoyable. There's no shortage of content. It ranges from whizzy edutainment to excruitiating virtual blackboards.

takyon writes:

How one obscure court case could decide the future of internet business

In August, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit dealt the Federal Trade Commission a major blow by calling into question one of the consumer protection agency's most important powers. The court said the FTC should be banned from regulating a company if even a small part of that firm's business is regulated by the Federal Communications Commission as a telecom service, otherwise known as a "common carrier."

[...] The court's decision this week to rehear the case served to nullify the ruling, so the loophole is temporarily closed. But it could easily be reopened if the court comes to the same conclusion, analysts say. Other possibilities include reversing the court's previous position entirely or coming down somewhere in the middle.

AT&T said in a statement that it looked forward to participating in the rehearing.

The outcome of the case won't just affect the FTC; it may also lend momentum to the FCC's effort to repeal its own net neutrality rules. FCC Chairman Ajit Pai has argued that the trade commission should be responsible for policing internet providers, not the FCC. Right now, the FTC has no power over ISPs because the net neutrality rules consider all ISPs as common carriers.

Undoing the 9th Circuit's ruling for good would mean giving the FTC the ability once again to go after the parts of an ISP's business that aren't common carrier-related. But the FCC wants to go further than that. Pai has proposed undoing the classification of ISPs as common carriers, which could give the FTC even greater jurisdiction over internet providers.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Prescription drugs have enabled millions of Americans with chronic medical conditions to live longer and more fulfilling lives, but many promising new drugs never make it to the human trials stage due to the potential for cardiac toxicity.

Through "heart-on-a-chip" technology—modeling a human heart on an engineered chip and measuring the effects of compound exposure on functions of heart tissue using microelectrodes—Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) researchers hope to decrease the time needed for new drug trials and ensure potentially lifesaving drugs are safe and effective while reducing the need for human and animal testing. The research is part of the Lab's iCHIP (in-vitro Chip-Based Human Investigational Platform) project, which replicates human systems on engineered platforms to test the effects of toxic chemical and biological compounds.

The research, published online on April 18 in the journal Lab on a Chip, describes the successful recording of both electrical signals and cellular beating from normal human heart cells grown on a multi-electrode array developed at the Lab. It is the first design, according to the researchers, capable of simultaneously mapping both the electrophysiology and contraction frequency of the cells.

"This platform allows you to do high-throughput screening of pharmaceutical drugs and predict their effects on the heart," said iCHIP principal investigator Elizabeth Wheeler. "This research allows us to measure two functions of the heart, contraction and electrophysiology, for the first time. There's still validation and data we need, but eventually it would allow us to reduce the need for animal testing."

Original Submission