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-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

fit-PC sells a box (the Intense PC) that is rebranded as the MintBox 2, which has Linux Mint preinstalled, with the Linux Mint project getting a cut of the profits.

Clement Lefebvre, the honcho at Linux Mint, notes[1] that the firmware has a security vulnerability which needs to be patched. Hilariously, the manufacturer's instructions call out a MS Windows-only tool.

[1] In the comments there, Clem responds to Kim, saying that Linux Mint has the tools available to get the job done. In the comments attached to a clickbait article at BetaNews, it was mentioned that dd (sometimes referred to as Data Dump), an app that comes with pretty much every Linux distro, will also do the task.

Original Submission

martyb writes:

I blew it.

You rightly hold SoylentNews to a high standard and I let you down when I merged three different political stories into a single story.

Rushing to get out the door to get to work, seeing the story queue running out, having seen the interest in the UK elections in our IRC channel, having heard much on the radio concerning former FBI Director Comey's testimony, seeing a story appear on a likely nomination for that vacated FBI post, and aware of the guideline on only one Politics story per day — I made a hurried decision to merge all three stories together.

The community rightly pointed out the shortcomings in that decision. Rest assured I won't make THAT decision again!

In retrospect, it would have been much better if I released two separate stories — one with the UK Election vote, and another with a merge of the FBI-related stories with, say, a 12-hour spacing between them.

It is a privilege to volunteer for this site, one that I do not take lightly. I let down the community — you deserve better. Trust that I have taken this lesson to heart and will strive to do better going forwards.

--martyb

[n1: There will be a UK election story coming in the next day or so, when more details are available. The majority of the coverage so far is speculation and reports of agreements have been retracted.]

Original Submission

takyon writes:

French President Emmanuel Macron is offering large grants to attract foreign scientists:

Just a few hours after President Donald Trump announced on 1 June that the United States was withdrawing from the Paris climate accord, French President Emmanuel Macron pledged in a video to "make our planet great again" by intensifying efforts to combat climate change -- and inviting U.S. researchers who might be unhappy with Trump to work in France.

The French government followed up on 8 June by unveiling a website aimed at attracting foreign scientists with 4-year grants worth up to €1.5million each.

But while some U.S. researchers say the invitation is intriguing, it has irritated some French scientists, who say the move raises concerns about their nation's commitment to homegrown science. In particular, some French researchers are disappointed that the new Macron government offered grants to foreign researchers before answering their own recent call to shore up funding for struggling research institutes.

"Instead [of a commitment to stable domestic science funding], we get a fancy website which is more an empty shell than anything else," says Olivier Berné, an astrophysicist and CNRS researcher at the Research Institute in Astrophysics and Planetology in Toulouse. He helped organize the March for Science in France, as well as a letter from 1,500 scientists to France's research minister that spelled out 10 funding priorities for the new government.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

NASA chief scientist weighs in

Americans are "under siege" from disinformation designed to confuse the public about the threat of climate change, Nasa's former chief scientist has said.

Speaking to the Guardian, Ellen Stofan, who left the US space agency in December, said that a constant barrage of half-truths had left many Americans oblivious to the potentially dire consequences of continued carbon emissions, despite the science being unequivocal.

"We are under siege by fake information that's being put forward by people who have a profit motive," she said, citing oil and coal companies as culprits. "Fake news is so harmful because once people take on a concept it's very hard to dislodge it."

During the past six months, the US science community has woken up to this threat, according to Stofan, and responded by ratcheting up efforts to communicate with the public at the grassroots level as well as in the mainstream press.

"The harder part is this active disinformation campaign," she said before her appearance at Cheltenham Science Festival this week. "I'm always wondering if these people honestly believe the nonsense they put forward. When they say 'It could be volcanoes' or 'the climate always changes'... to obfuscate and to confuse people, it frankly makes me angry."

Stofan added that while "fake news" is frequently characterised as a problem in the right-leaning media, she saw evidence of an "erosion of people's ability to scrutinise information" across the political spectrum. "All of us have a responsibility," she said. "There's this attitude of 'I read it on the internet therefore it must be true'."

No editorial comment included.

Original Submission

butthurt writes:

A rally in Tesla shares [...] briefly vaulted the company's market capitalization past the German luxury carmaker in early Friday trading. The amount of ground Tesla covered was vast: BMW was valued at a $30 billion premium as of early December.

[...] Short interest represented about one fourth of the shares as of the latest quarterly filing.

—Bloomberg

According to The Drive the three most valuable auto makers are "Toyota, Daimler, and Volkswagen."

Tesla stock sat at $357.32 after market close after trading as high as $376.87 on Friday.

—Silicon Valley Business Journal

related stories:
Tear-Down/Reviews on new BMW i3 Electric Car
BMW X3 May be Emitting a Greater Amount of Poisonous Gases than VW
Electric, Autonomous Cars Will Drive BMW's Continued Growth
BMW Boosts i3 Battery Capacity by 50 Percent—and it's Retrofitable
VW Responds to Diesel Scandal, Says "the Future is Electric"
Bob Lutz Thinks Tesla is Doomed
One in Seven New BMWs Sold in the US is an Electric Vehicle
Elon Musk's "Top Secret Tesla Masterplan, Part 2"
Elon Musk's Tesla Offers to Buy Elon Musk's SolarCity, Shares Tumble
Wall Street Values Tesla Motors at $620,000 for Every Car Delivered Last Year
Tesla Soars on Financials and Ratings
Tesla Stock Price Falls as Sales Target Cut to as Few as 50,000 Vehicles
Tesla Reaches 325,000 Preorders for Model 3, But Can It Deliver?

Original Submission

kaszz writes:

Winston Churchill said in 1943: "We shape our buildings and afterwards our buildings shape us,".

Now neuroscientists and psychologists have found the connections. Specialized brain cells in the hippocampal region are attuned to the geometry and arrangement of the spaces we inhabit. But this is something architects seems to ignore at the peril of those forced to live in their creations.

Researchers has made use of wearable devices such as bracelets that monitor skin conductance which is a marker of physiological arousal. To gauge the impact of environments.

It has been found that if a façade is complex and interesting, it affects people in a positive way; negatively if it is simple and monotonous. Access to green space such as woodland or a park can offset some of the stress of city living. People feel better in rooms with curved edges and rounded contours than in sharp-edged rectangular rooms – though, tellingly perhaps is that design students preferred the opposite.

Objects and artefacts in public spaces nudges people physically closer together and makes it more likely they would talk to each other, a process called "triangulation". An example is the Rockefeller Center in New York City there by placing benches alongside the yew trees in its basement concourse instead of the people-repelling spikes the management had originally wanted, transformed the way people behaved.

To make people feel connected to a place they need to know how things relate to each other spatially. In other words, there needs to be a sense of direction. This applies both outdoors and indoors.

One visible rebellion against prescribed routes of architects and planners are the paths across grassy curbs and parks marking people's preferred paths across the city.

Adopt to human scale, making sidewalks, bike lanes, parks and public access water.

A number of studies have shown that growing up in a city doubles the chances of someone developing schizophrenia, and increases the risk for other mental disorders such as depression and chronic anxiety. The main trigger appears to be what researchers call "social stress" – the lack of social bonding and cohesion in neighborhoods.

These are probably examples of good architecture:
Jakriborg (New Urbanism)
Art Nouveau

And there is also bad..

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Sirius XM Holdings, Inc. has acquired a 16% stake of the music streaming and recommendation service Pandora, and Pandora has offloaded Ticketfly:

Troubled streaming music service Pandora has finally found a white knight of sorts to boost it with a cash injection as it looks to improve its business: SiriusXM has just announced it will be investing $480 million in cash into publicly traded Pandora, which will give the satellite radio company around 16 percent ownership of Pandora on an as-converted basis. Along with this, Pandora has offloaded a large asset: it's selling Ticketfly, the ticketing service that it acquired in October 2015 for $450 million, to Eventbrite for $200 million.

It also will enter into a distribution partnership with Eventbrite as part of that deal.

The two moves bring Pandora into a new chapter in how it will develop its business: the company today still makes most of its money from advertising around free listeners, although it has been working on building paid tiers to supplement that for some time now. In the meantime, the stock's main boost since last year has been the fact that it's been the subject of takeover speculation.

Reuters had previously reported that Pandora was given 30 days by a private equity firm to find an alternative offer to its $150 million investment offer.

Additional reporting by Bloomberg.

Previously: Songwriter Says He Made $5,679 from 178 Million Pandora Streams
Pandora Makes $450m Acquisition So It Can Sell You Live Music Tickets (sold for $200 million)
Pandora Launches Song Replays, More Ad Skips for All
Pandora Explores Sale After Securing $150 Million

Original Submission

butthurt writes:

Around the 50th anniversary of the sinking of the USS Liberty, the Modesto Bee and the Port Huron Times Herald interviewed surviving crew members. The Intercept published two classified documents (NSFW for U.S. government employees):

The first document, a formerly unreleased NSA classification guide, details which elements of the incident the agency still regarded as secret as of 2006. The second lists a series of unauthorized signals intelligence disclosures that “have had a detrimental effect on our ability to produce intelligence against terrorist targets and other targets of national concern.” Remarkably, information relevant to the attack on the Liberty falls within this highly secret category.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

How can we ensure that artificial intelligence provides the greatest benefit to all of humanity? 

By that, we don’t necessarily mean to ask how we create AIs with a sense of justice. That's important, of course—but a lot of time is already spent weighing the ethical quandaries of artificial intelligence. How do we ensure that systems trained on existing data aren’t imbued with human ideological biases that discriminate against users? Can we trust AI doctors to correctly identify health problems in medical scans if they can’t explain what they see? And how should we teach driverless cars to behave in the event of an accident?

The thing is, all of those questions contain an implicit assumption: that artificial intelligence is already being put to use in, for instance, the workplaces, hospitals, and cars that we all use. While that might be increasingly true in the wealthy West, it’s certainly not the case for billions of people in poorer parts of the world. To that end, United Nations agencies, AI experts, policymakers and businesses have gathered in Geneva, Switzerland, for a three-day summit called AI for Good. The aim: “to evaluate the opportunities presented by AI, ensuring that AI benefits all of humanity.”

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

Gaaark submitted a story using his stupid tablet:

Adam West, the actor best known for playing Batman in the 1960s television series, has died aged 88 of leukaemia. He is remembered by fans for his kooky, exaggerated portrayal of the superhero in the ABC show, which ran for three seasons from 1966 to 1968.

West once said that he played Batman “for laughs, but in order to do [that], one had to never think it was funny. You just had to pull on that cowl and believe that no one would recognise you.”

In a statement, his family said: “Our dad always saw himself as the Bright Knight and aspired to make a positive impact on his fans’ lives. He was and always will be our hero.”

Source: The Guardian

Original Submission

"exec" writes:

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

A phase III clinical trial of 4,805 women with HER2-positive breast cancer suggests adding a second HER2 targeted medicine, pertuzumab (Perjeta), to standard of care trastuzumab (Herceptin) after surgery may help, although the benefit is modest.

The study will be featured in a press briefing today and presented at the 2017 American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Annual Meeting.

At an early follow up of three years, 93.2% of women who received trastuzumab alone had not developed invasive disease compared with 94.1% of those who received pertuzumab and trastuzumab, a difference of 1%. While the prognosis for patients who receive standard of care trastuzumab is already favorable, patients in the study who received pertuzumab and trastuzumab had a 19% lower chance of developing invasive breast cancer than those who received trastuzumab alone.

[...] While trastuzumab targets only HER2, pertuzumab blocks HER2 and HER3. Using both antibodies establishes a more complete blockade of cancer cell growth signals and may lower the chance of treatment resistance. The authors estimate that about 8% of all patients diagnosed with breast cancer (about 20,000 women in the United States alone) have early, HER2-positive disease and may benefit from this adjuvant therapy.

[...] Overall, 63% of patients had cancer that had spread to the lymph nodes (node-positive disease), and 36% had hormone receptor-negative disease. There were similar proportions of patients with either disease characteristic in the two treatment groups.

The addition of pertuzumab to trastuzumab lowered the chance of developing invasive breast cancer by 19% compared to trastuzumab alone. At a median follow up of almost 4 years, 171 (7.1%) patients in the pertuzumab group had developed invasive breast cancer, compared to 210 (8.7%) patients in the placebo group.

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

charon writes:

Last week, Bloomberg's Noah Smith wrote an article titled "The U.S. Has Forgotten How To Do Infrastructure" that asked a lot of questions that would get us to a [David] Goldhill like analysis of our infrastructure approach. Just like on Healthcare Island, on Infrastructure Island we have our own way of talking about things. And we never talk about prices, only about costs. And as Smith suggests, costs go up and nobody seems to understand why.

He goes through and dismisses all of the usual suspects. Union wages drive up infrastructure costs (yet not true in countries paying equivalent wages). It's expensive to acquire land in the property-rights-obsessed United States (yet countries with weaker eminent domain laws have cheaper land acquisition costs). America's too spread out or our cities are too dense (arguments that cancel each other out). Our environmental review processes are too extensive (yet other advanced countries do extensive environmental reviews with far less delay). I concur with all these points, by the way.

Smith concludes with this:

That suggests that U.S. costs are high due to general inefficiency -- inefficient project management, an inefficient government contracting process, and inefficient regulation. It suggests that construction, like health care or asset management or education, is an area where Americans have simply ponied up more and more cash over the years while ignoring the fact that they were getting less and less for their money. To fix the problems choking U.S. construction, reformers are going to have to go through the system and rip out the inefficiencies root and branch.

Much like health care, our infrastructure incentives are all wrong. Until we fix them -- until we go through the system and rip out the inefficiencies root and branch -- throwing more money at this system is simply pouring good money after bad.

Source: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/6/4/this-is-why-infrastructure-is-so-expensive

Original Submission

"exec" writes:

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

The number of 2D materials has exploded since the discovery of graphene in 2004. However, this menagerie of single-atom-thick semiconductors, insulators and superconductors has been missing a member — magnets. In fact, physicists weren't even sure that 2D magnets were possible, until now.

Researchers report the first truly 2D magnet, made of a compound called chromium triiodide, in a paper published on 7 June in Nature. The discovery could eventually lead to new data-storage devices and designs for quantum computers. For now, the 2D magnets will enable physicists to perform previously impossible experiments and test fundamental theories of magnetism.

takyon writes:

Ambrosia has presented results showing that young blood transfusions can reduce biomarkers associated with aging-related diseases, but the company has been criticized for its testing methodology and lack of a control group:

Older people who received transfusions of young blood plasma have shown improvements in biomarkers related to cancer, Alzheimer's disease and heart disease, New Scientist has learned.

"I don't want to say the word panacea, but here's something about teenagers," Jesse Karmazin, founder of startup Ambrosia, told New Scientist. "Whatever is in young blood is causing changes that appear to make the ageing process reverse."

Since August 2016, Karmazin's company has been transfusing people aged 35 and older with plasma – the liquid component of blood – taken from people aged between 16 and 25. So far, 70 people have been treated, all of whom paid Ambrosia to be included in the study.

[...] The company's trial has been criticised for having no placebo group. "There is no telling what may be down to the placebo effect," says Arne Akbar at University College London. The placebo effect is known to be able to influence biochemistry in the body. Because the treatment cost the participants $8000 each, it's possible those involved would imagine any effects they felt to be bigger than they really were.

Found at NBF. Here's a previous article questioning the company's profit motives.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Over a year after signalling its intentions to dump the robotics demonstration company Boston Dynamics, Alphabet/Google has finally found a buyer: SoftBank. SoftBank acquired ARM Holdings for around $32 billion in 2016. Google also offloaded another robotics company, Schaft:

Google's ambitions for Boston Dynamics were never really clear. Before being acquired, the robotics company was mostly funded by DARPA—the US military's research division—with the express purpose of creating militarised robots. Within a year of being picked up, though, Google announced that it would no longer pursue any DARPA contracts, presumably to focus on possible commercial uses for the bots. No commercial robots ever emerged.

SoftBank, however, has had success with commercialising robots—specifically the small humanoid robot Pepper.

Also at The Verge, The Guardian, TNW, CNN, CNBC, and TechCrunch.

Previously: Pentagon Scientists Show Off Robot And Prosthetics
Google's Noisy "BigDog" Robot Fails to Impress U.S. Marine Corps
Google's Latest Boston Dynamics Robot Takes a Stand
Boston Dynamics Produces a Wheeled Terror as Google Watches Nervously

Original Submission