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An Anonymous Coward writes:

From https://www.standard.co.uk/goingout/restaurants/hungover-try-a-bacon-roll-infused-with-five-espresso-shots-a3709356.html

There are Christmas party season hangover cures, and then there's a bacon roll infused with five shots of espresso.

Soho restaurant The Diner is catering to Londoners who over-indulge this year with the so-called "Ba-coffee Roll". It is made of a brioche bun, boosted with two shots of espresso, bacon infused with maple syrup and coffee and - to sweeten things up - a whipped honey butter laced with coffee bean essence.

[Matthew Ford, Head of Operations] said: "The challenge has been to balance the natural bitterness in the coffee, with sweeter ingredients to create something that tastes amazing. "By using a naturally sweeter brioche dough and infusing both coffee and maple syrup with the bacon we feel like we've created something so good it's practically medicinal."

[...] The roll costs £3.95 and is available from the restaurant, on Ganton Street, via Deliveroo until December 17. There will also be a ba-coffee role[sic] giveaway at Golden Square, Soho, and Tottenham Court Road station this Friday at 8am.

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Phoenix666 writes:

For decades, scientists have been trying to make a true molecular chain: a repeated set of tiny rings interlocked together. In a study in Science published online Nov. 30, University of Chicago researchers announced the first confirmed method to craft such a molecular chain.

Many molecules described as "linked" are joined with fixed covalent bonds—not two freely moving interlocked rings. The distinction makes a big difference when it comes to how the chain moves.

"Think about dangling a silver chain onto your palm: It collapses easily into a flat pool and can flow off your hand, much different from a string of fixed beads," said Stuart Rowan, a professor at UChicago's Institute for Molecular Engineering and Department of Chemistry and lead author on the paper.

The longer interlocked chains could make materials or machines with intriguing properties, researchers said. Polymers—materials made of repeated units joined together—are extremely useful in everyday life, making up everything from plastics to proteins; and this new way to combine the repeat units could open new avenues in engineering.

[...] "A metal rod is rigid, but a metal chain made of the same material is very flexible," said UChicago postdoctoral researcher Qiong Wu, the first author on the paper. "By keeping the same chemical composition but changing the architecture, you can dramatically change the material's behavior."

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takyon writes:

Microsoft Windows is back on ARM:

Just shy of a year after announcing that Windows was once again going to be available on ARM systems, the first two systems were announced today: the Asus NovaGo 2-in-1 laptop, and the HP Envy x2 tablet.

[...] The Asus laptop boasts 22 hours of battery life or 30 days of standby, along with LTE that can run at gigabit speeds. HP's tablet offers a 12.3 inch, 1920×1280 screen, 20 hours battery life or 29 days of standby, and a removable keyboard-cover and stylus. Both systems use the Snapdragon 835 processor and X16 LTE modem, with HP offering up to 8GB RAM and 256GB storage to go with it.

Lenovo is expected to announce a similar system in the coming weeks.

Also at The Verge, Engadget, and TechCrunch.

Previously: Big Changes Planned by Microsoft - Windows 10 on ARM, Laptops to Behave More Like Phones
Windows 10 PCs Running on Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 to Arrive this Year
New Windows 10 S Only Runs Software From Windows Store
Microsoft Knows Windows is Obsolete. Here's a Sneak Peek at Its Replacement.
New App Allows Win32 Software to Run on Windows 10 S
Intel Hints at Patent Fight With Microsoft and Qualcomm Over x86 Emulation

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MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard

Linux computer vendor System76 announced this week that it will roll out a firmware update to disable Intel Management Engine on laptops sold in the past few years. Purism will also disable Intel Management Engine on computers it sells moving forward. Those two computer companies are pretty small players in the multi-billion dollar PC industry. …

... Intel's Management Engine is a hardware and software system designed to provide some remote management features. But it's come under criticism from privacy advocates, security researchers, and the free and open source software community.

That's because Intel Management Engine is basically a mystery. It's software that runs independently of a computer's operating system, which means that even if you wipe the OS, the Management Engine is still there. And there's no good way to know what it's doing.

The risks aren't just theoretical – Intel recently acknowledged a security vulnerability affecting nearly every PC that shipped with a 6th, 7th, or 8th-gen Intel Core processor. While the company is working with PC makers to roll out updates to patch that vulnerability, it wouldn't even exist if Intel hadn't bundled a feature many users don't need and won't use with its latest chips.

System76 are making a similar move:

System76 is one a handful of companies that sells computers that run Linux software out of the box. But like most PCs that have shipped with Intel’s Core processors in the past few years, System76 laptops include Intel’s Management Engine firmware. Intel recently confirmed a major security vulnerability affecting those chips and it’s working with …

Source: https://liliputing.com/2017/12/dell-also-sells-laptops-intel-management-engine-disabled.html

Source: https://liliputing.com/2017/11/system76-will-disable-intel-management-engine-linux-laptops.html

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Phoenix666 writes:

The bloom is off the rose:

It was about an hour and a half into a hearing with the Senate Intelligence Committee when Sen. Dianne Feinstein laid into Facebook, Google and Twitter.

"I don't think you get it," she began. "You bear this responsibility. You've created these platforms, and now they are being misused. And you have to be the ones to do something about it. Or we will."

The tech giants were being grilled by Congress over Russian trolls abusing their services to meddle in last year's US election, and the California Democratic lawmaker had had it.

It was just one of very public tongue-lashings the Silicon Valley companies received over the course of three marathon congressional panels last month, held over a two-day span. The hearings were anticlimactic, in part because the three companies only sent their general counsels instead of their famous CEOs -- a point several lawmakers bemoaned during the public questioning.

Is it Google, Twitter, and Facebook who don't get it, or Senators like Dianne Feinstein who don't get it?

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Phoenix666 writes:

It took a little more than a year for AT&T's DirecTV Now streaming video service to reach its first million.

The Dallas telecommunications provider said Tuesday that more than 1 million consumers have subscribed to its service, which offers a mix of live television channels and on-demand content over the internet to your phone, tablet or TV box like a Roku or Amazon Fire Stick.

The figure marks solid progress for the upstart service, though it still lags behind Sling TV, which Comscore said in June had more than 2 million customers. DirecTV Now launched last November, while Sling TV launched in February of 2015.

Will AT&T be able to build a content pipeline that's robust enough?

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takyon writes:

Samsung has announced that it is producing 64-layer 512 GB embedded Universal Flash Storage (eUFS) NAND chips for smartphones and other mobile devices. The chips boast 860 MB/s sequential read and 255 MB/s sequential write speeds, and 42k/40k random read/write IOPS.

Toshiba has announced its own 64-layer UFS chips ranging from 32 GB to 256 GB.

Also at Engadget and ZDNet.

Previously: Samsung 256 GB UFS 2.0 Phone Storage is Faster than some SATA SSDs
Samsung to Offer New Type of Flash Memory Card

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Phoenix666 writes:

What are crows saying when their loud cawing fills a dark winter's evening? Despite the inescapable ruckus, nobody knows for sure. Birds congregate daily before and after sleep, and they make some noise, but what might be happening in those brains is a mystery.

Curious about these raucous exchanges, researchers at the University of Washington Bothell are listening in. They are placing equipment on the roof of their building—a meeting place for some of the thousands of crows that sleep in nearby campus trees—and using a sort of computerized eavesdropping to study the relationship between calls and the birds' behavior.

"With audio alone, our team is able to localize and record the birds remotely, and in dim light that makes this situation less suitable for video tracking," said Shima Abadi, an assistant professor at UW Bothell's School of Science, Technology, Engineering & Mathematics. "It's still a challenging task, but we can use the audio signals to look for patterns and learn more about what the birds may be communicating."

Crows are very intelligent creatures and among the few that can use tools. In recent years scientists have come to study them as a way to better understand human intelligence and how it evolves in nature.

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takyon writes:

Germany's Interior Minister Wants Backdoors In Cars, Digital Devices

According to a new report from German newspaper Redaktions Netzwerk Deutschland (RND), Germany's Interior Minister, Thomas de Maizièr, has written a draft proposal in which he would like German cars, as well as other digital devices being sold in Germany, to grant police backdoor access. The minister is expected to present the proposal at next week's Ministry of Interior conference.

According to the RND report, the German minister would like intelligence agencies and police to gain "exclusive" access to cars, as well as digital devices such as computers, mobile devices, kitchen appliances, and smart TVs. The "back door" access would, in essence, allow the government to bypass the security protections some of these devices have. The police have been complaining that sometimes they can't install intercept equipment on some cars because their security systems are "too good."

Maizièr would also like cars and digital devices to have a "kill switch" the government can use at will to shut down certain devices, allegedly to stop cybercrime.

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Phoenix666 writes:

Now Alaska can stream Netflix and cook dinner at the same time:

Here on the edge of the U.S. Arctic, Internet connectivity is a slow—and expensive—proposition. Eighty-one percent [PDF] of rural residents in Alaska do not have broadband Internet, defined by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) as providing a minimum download speed of 25 megabits per second. People in Kotzebue have long relied on satellite connections for Internet service at speeds comparable to those of dial-up. At the beginning of the year, their average download speed was just 2 Mb/s.

The Igichuk tower is one of the final pieces of one of the most ambitious telecommunications projects in the rural United States. Built by General Communication Inc. (GCI) and known as TERRA, it was completed this past October, after US $300 million of investment and six years of construction, when engineers installed its final microwave repeater. The network uses a combination of repeater data links and fiber optics to form a giant, 5,000-⁠kilometer ring around southwest Alaska—a sparsely populated region with few paved roads and wilderness areas larger than West Virginia.

With TERRA, Kotzebue residents now pay $59.99 per month for an Internet plan with download speeds of 3 Mb/s, which is not even fast enough to stream a high-definition movie. To be able to do that, they would need to pay at least $149.99 per month for 6 Mb/s. Compare that with New York City, where residents pay an average of $55 per month for 25 Mb/s.

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Phoenix666 writes:

Here comes Rise of the Rest:

For the past several months, there has been a torrent of press around how Mr. Case and Mr. Vance have teamed to try to revive entrepreneurship in what elites often derisively refer to as the so-called flyover states. As my colleague Steve Lohr wrote recently, Mr. Case and Mr. Vance have been barnstorming various cities in a painted bus, holding entrepreneurship competitions as if they were politicians on the campaign trail.

But until now, at least to some skeptics, it seemed like a do-gooder vanity project.

How could these two men significantly change the dynamic among serious investors on the coasts to reorient their focus on cities, many of them suffering from the erosion of manufacturing, in the Rust Belt and elsewhere?

It turns out that while they were publicly crisscrossing America, they were also privately holding meetings with some of the wealthiest individuals and families in the country, urging them to not only invest in a new fund but become partners with some of the companies that will benefit from it.

"Flyover" isn't patronizing at all.

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Sulla writes:

Siemens SC-44 Charger seen rolled out across country to replace some older locomotives for corridor work.

https://seattle.curbed.com/2017/11/20/16683002/amtrak-cascades-new-train-model

The new Siemens Charger locomotives, with 16-cylinder, 4,400-horsepower engines, are both lighter and quieter, and meet EPA emission standards. The trains will travel the same speed as before—79 miles per hour—but they'll reach the top speed faster.

http://urbanmilwaukee.com/2017/11/16/plenty-of-horne-amtrak-rolls-out-new-locomotives/

The new locomotives can also take you to from Chicago to Detroit, or Chicago to St. Louis, for example, and they can do it using one-third the fuel, emitting one-tenth the pollution, and at speeds up to 125 miles per hour. (The Chicago-St. Louis route has been cut from 5-1/2 hours to 4-1/2 hours thanks to the new engines and track improvements.

http://thesouthern.com/news/local/communities/carbondale/amtrak-showcases-features-of-new-locomotives/article_6c9b8d54-62a6-51f6-a818-ca2fed76c033.html

"A lot of our customers care about the earth and about pollution, and these are so much cleaner to operate, and they're better for our partners at IDOT and the customers because they're going to cost less to operate in that they get better mileage," said Marc Magliari, Amtrak spokesman.

Just saw one while I was out for a cigar and thought it was pretty cool, I figure others might find it interesting as well. I have been taking my kids to go watch them do trackwork on the north-south line in Oregon and was wondering why they were so extensive in replacing all of the old ties. Although the speed limit is 79 I wonder if this will be increased with updated track and new locomotives. Here is hoping someone models it soon so I can waste money.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siemens_Charger
4400 horsepower, top speed of 125, and meets EPA Tier VI emission standards.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

The power user's browser Vivaldi has come to the Raspberry Pi and other Linux Arm boards.

The Chrome-based browser will run on all three generations of the Pi, as well as the CubieBoard and ASUS's Tinker Board, Vivaldi said today.

Vivaldi has supported Linux (and Mac) since it made its debut, but this is the first Arm port, a milestone on the road to a mobile version that it pledged to produce last year.

A bright spot for Opera fans.

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Phoenix666 writes:

Artificial Intelligence, or Intelligence Augmentation (IA)?

Research on IA has often been in competition with research on artificial intelligence (AI): competition for funding, competition for the interest of talented researchers. Although there has always been overlap between the fields, IA has typically focused on building systems which put humans and machines to work together, while AI has focused on complete outsourcing of intellectual tasks to machines. In particular, problems in AI are often framed in terms of matching or surpassing human performance: beating humans at chess or Go; learning to recognize speech and images or translating language as well as humans; and so on.

This essay describes a new field, emerging today out of a synthesis of AI and IA. For this field, we suggest the name artificial intelligence augmentation (AIA): the use of AI systems to help develop new methods for intelligence augmentation. This new field introduces important new fundamental questions, questions not associated to either parent field. We believe the principles and systems of AIA will be radically different to most existing systems.

The crux of the matter seems to be agency--will humans retain it?

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Craft Hard Cider Is On A Roll. How Ya Like Them Apples?

Hard cider is having a hot moment. Hotter still, if it's locally made and distributed. Over the past four years, the number of cideries across the country has doubled, from 400 to 800, according to The Cyder Market LLC, a small business that keeps statistics on the cider industry. [...] Wine has long had its connoisseurs. With the rise of the craft beer movement, drinkers have learned to appreciate the nuances of that brewed beverage, too. But cider, in many drinkers' imagination, remains an unrefined, blandly sweet drink, says Johnson. The reality is far different, he says.

[...] Hard cider's history in the U.S. goes all the way back to the Founding Fathers. During the American Revolution, many landowners had apple orchards and made homemade fermented cider using the cider apples that grew in their backyard, says Michelle McGrath, executive director of the U.S. Cider Makers Association. "Prohibition came and most of the cider apple trees were cut down in this country. But now, it's having a renaissance," she says. "It's coming back really strongly; it's taking market share from beer."

Nielsen's research says sales for regional cider are up 35.6 percent. McGrath says this is because local cideries have more varieties of cider that appeal to more sophisticated palates. In other words, cider seems to be going through what wine and beer went through years ago: people moving from drinking big brands to being more discerning, niche, and sometimes downright persnickety.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

One of the world's greatest mathematicians, Sir Andrew Wiles, made a rare public appearance in the Science Museum this week to discuss his latest research, his belief in the value of struggle, and how to inspire the next generation.
...
Terms such as 'elegance' and 'beauty' are bandied around by many mathematicians. What do they mean? They are hard to explain but Sir Andrew likened the mathematical equivalent of experiencing the rapture of beauty to walking down a path to explore a garden by the great landscape architect Capability Brown, when a breathtaking vista suddenly beckons. In other words, elegance in mathematics 'is this surprise element of suddenly see everything clarified and beautiful.'

But you should 'not stare at it non-stop', he warned, else the majesty will fade, as is also the case with great paintings and music.

Today he is still walking through the great garden of mathematics, 'the language of science,' he said. Another way Sir Andrew described his lifelong passion to the rapt audience was as a 'beautiful edifice...the most permanent thing there is.'

Industry and government realise that mathematicians are the lifeblood of a modern economy but are concerned by the lack of uptake of maths. Most young people 'do have a real appetite for mathematics', said Sir Andrew, but they are put off because, he believes, their teachers are not viscerally interested in the subject.

Sir Andrew Wiles famously proved Fermat's Last Theorem.

Original Submission