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An Anonymous Coward writes:

Several sites are reporting that BlackBerry Mobile seems to be prepping a new QWERTY phone after the modest success of the KEYone. From GSMarena:

The new BBF100-1 has a physical QWERTY keyboard too and it will keep the screen resolution of the Keyone, namely 1,080x1,620. It's unclear if the screen size will stay the same at 4.5", but it wouldn't be surprising if it did.

A clear upgrade will come in processing power, because the Keyone's successor will sport Qualcomm's Snapdragon 660 chipset. It comes with a 2.2 GHz octa-core Kryo 260 CPU and the Adreno 512 GPU, along with the X12 LTE modem enabling up to 600Mbps peak download speeds and 150Mbps peak uploads. All in all, it should definitely provide better performance than the Snapdragon 625 inside the Keyone.

So not the Passport 2 many people have hoped for, but good news for the few still demanding a physical keyboard on their mobile devices. It seems that BlackBerry, or now TCL could do well just releasing updated models of a handful of devices every few years rather than brand new devices and formfactors every time.

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takyon writes:

Walmart isn't stocking shelves with robots just yet, but they will scan shelves using robots:

Wal-Mart Stores Inc is rolling out shelf-scanning robots in more than 50 U.S. stores to replenish inventory faster and save employees time when products run out.

The approximately 2-foot (0.61-meter) robots come with a tower that is fitted with cameras that scan aisles to check stock and identify missing and misplaced items, incorrect prices and mislabeling. The robots pass that data to store employees, who then stock the shelves and fix errors.

Out-of-stock items are a big problem for retailers since they miss out on sales every time a shopper cannot find a product on store shelves.

Scanbots won't help with finding the 2 cans of baba ganoush hidden behind 50 cans of hummus.

Also at BGR and ArkansasOnline.

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AnonTechie writes:

Researchers have pinpointed the date of what could be the oldest solar eclipse yet recorded. The event, which occurred on 30 October 1207 BC, is mentioned in the Bible, and could have consequences for the chronology of the ancient world.

Using a combination of the biblical text and an ancient Egyptian text, the researchers were then able to refine the dates of the Egyptian pharaohs, in particular the dates of the reign of Ramesses the Great. The results are published in the Royal Astronomical Society journal Astronomy & Geophysics.

The biblical text in question comes from the Old Testament book of Joshua and has puzzled biblical scholars for centuries. It records that after Joshua led the people of Israel into Canaan -- a region of the ancient Near East that covered modern-day Israel and Palestine -- he prayed: "Sun, stand still at Gibeon, and Moon, in the Valley of Aijalon. And the Sun stood still, and the Moon stopped, until the nation took vengeance on their enemies."

"If these words are describing a real observation, then a major astronomical event was taking place -- the question for us to figure out is what the text actually means," said paper co-author Professor Sir Colin Humphreys from the University of Cambridge's Department of Materials Science & Metallurgy, who is also interested in relating scientific knowledge to the Bible.

Colin Humphreys and Graeme Waddington. 'Solar eclipse of 1207 BC helps to date pharaohs.' Astronomy & Geophysics (2017). DOI: 10.1093/astrogeo/atx178.

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DeathMonkey and an Anonymous Coward submitted an NPR story, which has been updated since being posted. The Justice Department has unsealed charges against three former aides of President Donald Trump, as part of an investigation led by special counsel Robert Mueller:

Manafort and Gates, were charged with "conspiracy against the United States," "conspiracy to launder money" and other offenses. The two were expected in court in Washington by the afternoon.

The Justice Department indictment on Manafort and Gates contains 12 counts: "conspiracy against the United States, conspiracy to launder money, unregistered agent of a foreign principal, false and misleading FARA statements, false statements, and seven counts of failure to file reports of foreign bank and financial accounts."

Papadopoulos pleaded guilty to making false statements to the FBI.

The Manafort and Gates indictment unsealed on Monday morning does not make any reference to Russia's influence campaign against the presidential election, but it does allege extensive financial ties between Manafort and Gates and powerful Ukrainians.

The Papadopoulos materials, on the other hand, detail the many contacts investigators say he had with Russian-linked operatives. He met at least two people, a man and a woman, who the FBI says were working for the Russian government and had boasted to him about the help it could offer the Trump campaign against Clinton.

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takyon writes:

Apple fires iPhone X engineer after daughter's hands-on video goes viral

Apple has reportedly dismissed an engineer after his daughter's iPhone X hands-on video went viral on YouTube. Brooke Amelia Peterson published a vlog earlier this week, which included a trip to the Apple campus to visit her father and see an unreleased iPhone X. Peterson's video was quickly picked up by sites like 9to5Mac, and it spread even further on YouTube.

Peterson now claims her father has been fired as a result of her video. In a tearful video, Peterson explains her father violated an Apple company rule by allowing her to film the unreleased handset at Apple's campus. Apple reportedly requested that Peterson remove the video, but it was clearly too late as the content spread further and further.

From the follow-up video (at 2:14):

"He takes full responsibility for letting me film his iPhone X. Apple let him go. At the end of the day, when you work for Apple, it doesn't matter how good of a person you are. If you break a rule, they just have no tolerance. They had to do what they had to do. I'm not mad at Apple. I'm not gonna stop buying Apple products. Rules are in place for the happiness and for the safety of workers."

Will Mr. Peterson get sued if he tries to work somewhere else in Silicon Valley?

Also at Engadget.

Related: iPhone X screen repair: That'll be $275

Previously: Apple's New iPhone X will let You Control the Poo Emoji with Your Face
Apple and Belkin's $35 Dongle Brings 3.5mm Headphone Port Back to the iPhone
Apple Sued Over "Animoji" Trademark

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takyon writes:

Intel has announced new 3D XPoint "Optane" solid state drives at two capacities:

The Intel Optane SSD 900P will come to market in two capacity sizes, 280GB and 480GB. The series uses two form factors, 2.5" U.2 and half-height, half-length add-in card (AIC). This will start to get confusing so look closely. The 280GB will have two 2.5" models on launch day. One comes with a standard U.2 cable and the second comes with an M.2 to U.2 adapter cable. The 480GB will not ship in a 2.5" form factor until a later date. It will ship in the add-in card form factor starting today.

Regardless of the form factor or capacity size, all Optane SSD 900P drives deliver up to 2,500 MBps sequential read and 2,000 MBps sequential write performance. This is lower than some of the other high-performance NVMe SSDs shipping today, but we will address that in the next section. The drives also deliver up to 550,000 random read and 500,000 random write IOPS performance. This is class leading performance, but there is more to the story.

3D XPoint memory performance is closer to the speed of DRAM than NAND used in SSDs. SSD marketing numbers show maximum performance that comes only at high queue depths. Most of us rarely surpass queue depth 4 and the faster the storage, the less likely you are to even build data requests. This memory addresses the problem with performance at usable workloads.

In the chart [here] we have the three fastest Intel consumer storage products from different market segments: SATA SSD, NVMe SSD, and Optane NVMe SSD. We've also added the new Seagate BarraCuda Pro 12TB, the fastest consumer hard disk drive shipping today.

Pricing is $390 for 280 GB, and $600 for 480 GB. That's $1.25/GB for the larger drive, compared to $2.34/GB for the 32 GB Optane Memory M.2 2280 and the launch price of $4.05/GB for the 375 GB Optane SSD DC P4800X (Reviewed here).

3D XPoint is a non-volatile memory/storage technology.

Previously: First Intel Optane 3D XPoint SSD Released: 375 GB for $1520
Intel Announces Optane 16 GB and 32 GB M.2 Modules
Intel Announces "Ruler" Form Factor for Server SSDs

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aristarchus writes:

Social networks, though, have since colonized the web for television's values. From Facebook to Instagram, the medium refocuses our attention on videos and images, rewarding emotional appeals—'like' buttons—over rational ones. Instead of a quest for knowledge, it engages us in an endless zest for instant approval from an audience, for which we are constantly but unconsciouly performing. (It's telling that, while Google began life as a PhD thesis, Facebook started as a tool to judge classmates' appearances.) It reduces our curiosity by showing us exactly what we already want and think, based on our profiles and preferences. Enlightenment's motto of 'Dare to know' has become 'Dare not to care to know.'

It is a development that further proves the words of French philosopher Guy Debord, who wrote that, if pre-capitalism was about 'being', and capitalism about 'having', in late-capitalism what matters is only 'appearing'—appearing rich, happy, thoughtful, cool and cosmopolitan. It's hard to open Instagram without being struck by the accuracy of his diagnosis.

Now the challenge is to save Wikipedia and its promise of a free and open collection of all human knowledge amid the conquest of new and old television—how to collect and preserve knowledge when nobody cares to know. Television has even infected Wikipedia itself—today many of the most popular entries tend to revolve around television series or their cast.

This doesn't mean it is time to give up. But we need to understand that the decline of the web and thereby of the Wikipedia is part of a much larger civilizational shift which has just started to unfold.

Wired: How Social Media Endangers Knowledge

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MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1

Waymo is the name of the autonomous vehicle program being developed under Alphabet, the parent company of Google.

Waymo announced on Thursday that it is bringing its Chrysler Pacifica minivans to the Detroit area to test how the company's technology performs in the region's harsh winters.

"Our ultimate goal is for our fully self-driving cars to operate safely and smoothly in all kinds of environments," Waymo CEO John Krafcik writes.

Krafcik says that Waymo has been doing cold-weather tests since 2012. But so far Waymo has done most of its testing in sunny places like Mountain View, California; Phoenix, Arizona; and Austin, Texas. where snow is rare. Waymo believes it has largely mastered driving in sunny climates and is preparing to launch a commercial service in the sun-drenched Phoenix area.

[...] "This type of testing will give us the opportunity to assess the way our sensors perform in wet, cold conditions," Krafick writes. "And it will also build on the advanced driving skills we've developed over the last eight years by teaching our cars how to handle things like skidding on icy, unplowed roads."

Source: Waymo starts testing in Michigan to master snow and ice

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Phoenix666 writes:

After RT published excerpts from Twitter's "limited offer" to spend millions on US election marketing, the company abruptly banned all advertising from the news network. This makes full disclosure and transparency imperative, so here goes.

On Thursday, the micro-blogging platform announced a policy decision to ban ads from RT and Sputnik, citing alleged meddling in the 2016 US election.

It followed Twitter's report implying that RT was trying to influence US public opinion, crucially without providing context that virtually all news media organizations spend money on advertising their news coverage.
...
RT was thereby forced to reveal some details of the 2016 negotiations during which Twitter representatives made an exclusive multi-million dollar advertising proposal to spend big during the US presidential election, which was turned down.

Having since been banned, and in order to set the record straight, we are publishing Twitter's presentation and details of the offer in full.

Lenin said it: "The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them."

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Cost to Enter National Parks Will More Than Double, As Land Around Them Gets Leased for Oil and Gas

Phoenix666 writes:

The current Republican president and his Secretary of the Interior have a different view of things. They are cutting the budget of the National Park Service and significantly increasing the fees to get in.

"The infrastructure of our national parks is aging and in need of renovation and restoration," said U.S. Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke. "Targeted fee increases at some of our most-visited parks will help ensure that they are protected and preserved in perpetuity and that visitors enjoy a world-class experience that mirrors the amazing destinations they are visiting."

But then according to AP,
"While the national parks counted 292 million visitors in 2014, those visitors tend to be older and whiter than the U.S. population overall." Sounds like people who voted for the president, and if you are over 62 it's free (albeit with a lifetime pass that just increased in price) so the boomer base is protected.

But wait, there's more; in accordance with the President's executive order "promoting energy independence and economic growth, "they have started leasing land around National Parks (they are not allowed to in the parks) to today's Robber Barons for oil and gas development.

Oh well. National Monuments are better anyway.

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1

Trump's Department of Justice is trying to get a do-over with its campaign to get backdoors onto iPhones and into secure messaging services. The policy rebrand even has its own made-up buzzword. They're calling it "responsible encryption."

After Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein introduced the term in his speech to the U.S. Naval Academy, most everyone who read the transcript was doing spit-takes at their computer monitors. From hackers and infosec professionals to attorneys and tech journalists, "responsible encryption" sounded like a marketing plan to sell unsweetened sugar to diabetics.

Government officials -- not just in the U.S. but around the world -- have always been cranky that they can't access communications that use end-to-end encryption, whether that's Signal or the kind of encryption that protects an iPhone. The authorities are vexed, they say, because encryption without a backdoor impedes law-enforcement investigations, such as when terrorist acts occur.

[...] "Look, it's real simple. Encryption is good for our national security; it's good for our economy. We should be strengthening encryption, not weakening it. And it's technically impossible to have strong encryption with any kind of backdoor," said Rep. Will Hurd (R-Texas), when asked about Rosenstein's proposal for responsible encryption at The Atlantic's Cyber Frontier event in Washington, D.C.

Source: Great, now there's 'responsible encryption'

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takyon writes:

Dawn Finds Possible Ancient Ocean Remnants at Ceres

Minerals containing water are widespread on Ceres, suggesting the dwarf planet may have had a global ocean in the past. What became of that ocean? Could Ceres still have liquid today? Two new studies from NASA's Dawn mission shed light on these questions.

The Dawn team found that Ceres' crust is a mixture of ice, salts and hydrated materials that were subjected to past and possibly recent geologic activity, and that this crust represents most of that ancient ocean. The second study builds off the first and suggests there is a softer, easily deformable layer beneath Ceres' rigid surface crust, which could be the signature of residual liquid left over from the ocean, too.

"More and more, we are learning that Ceres is a complex, dynamic world that may have hosted a lot of liquid water in the past, and may still have some underground," said Julie Castillo-Rogez, Dawn project scientist and co-author of the studies, based at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California.

Ceres.

Constraints on Ceres' internal structure and evolution from its shape and gravity measured by the Dawn spacecraft (open, DOI: 10.1002/2017JE005302) (DX)

The interior structure of Ceres as revealed by surface topography (DOI: 10.1016/j.epsl.2017.07.053) (DX)

Previously: Dawn Spies Magnesium Sulphate and Possible Geological Activity on Ceres
Ceres's Cryovolcanoes Viscously Relax Into Nothingness
Organic Molecules Found on Ceres
Early Asteroids May Have Been Made of Mud Rather Than Rock
Dawn Mission Extended at Ceres

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takyon writes:

Chinese scientists put rice grown in seawater on the nation's tables

Rice grown on a commercial scale in diluted seawater has, for the first time, made it into the rice bowls of ordinary Chinese people after a breakthrough in food production following more than four decades of efforts by farmers, researchers, government agencies and businesses.

[...] China has one million square kilometres of waste land, an area the size of Ethiopia, where plants struggle to grow because of high salinity or alkalinity levels in the soil. Agricultural scientist Yuan Longping, known as China's "father of hybrid rice", told mainland media that if a tenth of such areas were planted with rice species resistant to salt, they could boost China's rice production by nearly 20 per cent. They could produce 50 million tonnes of food, enough to feed 200 million people, he said. A research team led by Yuan, 87, recently doubled the output of seawater rice, which in the past was too low for large-scale production.

[...] Last month, at the nation's largest seawater rice farm, in Qingdao, the output of Yuan's seawater rice exceeded 4.5 tonnes a hectare, according to state media reports. [...] Each kilogram of "Yuan Mi" costs 50 yuan (US$7.50), or eight times as much as ordinary rice. It is sold in packs weighing 1kg, 2kg, 5kg and 10kg.

[...] The seawater rice developed by Yuan and other research teams is not irrigated by pure seawater, but mixes it with fresh water to reduce the salt content to 6 grams per litre. The average litre of seawater contains five times as much salt. Researchers said it would take years more research to develop a rice species that could grow in pure seawater.

Professor Zhu Xiyue, an economics and policy expert at the national rice institute, said the seawater rice project would help secure China's food supply by turning "waste land to green fields". "The output may be low and price high, but they can increase China's total area of arable land, which can be used and save many lives in hard times," Zhou said.

Related: Where's the Golden Rice?

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takyon writes:

Dinosaur sported 'bandit mask'

A dinosaur from China sported a "bandit mask" pattern in the feathers on its face, scientists have said. Researchers came to their conclusion after studying three well-preserved fossil specimens of the extinct creature, called Sinosauropteryx. They were able to discern the dinosaur's colour patterns, showing that it had a banded tail and "counter-shading" - where animals are dark on top and lighter on their underside. The study appears in Current Biology [open, DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2017.09.032] [DX].

The bandit mask pattern is seen in numerous animals today, from mammals - such as raccoons and badgers - to birds, such as the nuthatch. "This is the first time it's been seen in a dinosaur and, to my knowledge, any extinct animal that shows colour bands," co-author Fiann Smithwick, from Bristol University, told BBC News.

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takyon writes:

A study has found that people who smoke more cannabis have more sex than those who smoke less or abstain:

Tobacco companies put a lot of effort into giving cigarettes sex appeal, but the more sensual smoke might actually belong to marijuana. Some users have said pot is a natural aphrodisiac, despite scientific literature turning up mixed results on the subject. At the very least, a study published Friday [DOI: 10.1016/j.jsxm.2017.09.005] [DX] in the Journal of Sexual Medicine suggests that people who smoke more weed are having more sex than those who smoke less or abstain. But whether it's cause or effect isn't clear.

The researchers pulled together data from roughly 50,000 people who participated in an annual Centers for Disease Control and Prevention survey during various years between 2002 and 2015. "We reported how often they smoke — monthly, weekly or daily — and how many times they've had sex in the last month," says Dr. Michael Eisenberg, a urologist at Stanford University Medical Center and the senior author on the study. "What we found was compared to never-users, those who reported daily use had about 20 percent more sex. So over the course of a year, they're having sex maybe 20 more times."

Women who consumed marijuana daily had sex 7.1 times a month, on average; for men, it was 6.9 times. Women who didn't use marijuana at all had sex 6 times a month, on average, while men who didn't use marijuana had sex an average of 5.6 times a month.

When the researchers considered other potentially confounding factors, such as alcohol or cocaine use, age, religion or having children, the association between more marijuana and more sex held, Eisenberg says. "It was pretty much every group we studied, this pattern persisted," he says. The more marijuana people smoked, the more they seemed to be having sex.

An Anonymous Coward would like to remind you that he is "not cool enough" to acquire cannabis illegally from drug dealers.

Also at CNN.

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