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What was highest label on your first car speedometer?

  • 80 mph
  • 88 mph
  • 100 mph
  • 120 mph
  • 150 mph
  • it was in kph like civilized countries use you insensitive clod
  • Other (please specify in comments)

[ Results | Polls ]
Comments:46 | Votes:110

posted by chromas on Thursday May 24 2018, @11:23PM   Printer-friendly
from the IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL dept.

Uber ends self-driving operation in Arizona

Uber has shuttered its self-driving testing program in Arizona and laid off close to 300 workers there — most of them test drivers, or "vehicle operators" — two months after one of its autonomous cars killed a pedestrian, the company said on Wednesday. The company had been testing its self-driving technology in the state since 2016, but halted operations in the wake of the March crash. The company's testing was also indefinitely suspended by the Arizona governor's office.

[...] Uber says it still plans to restart its self-driving operations in other locations (like Pittsburgh or San Francisco) once the investigations into the Arizona crash are complete. But in those locations, Uber will "drive in a much more limited way," according to an internal email obtained by ArsTechnica.


Original Submission

posted by chromas on Thursday May 24 2018, @09:49PM   Printer-friendly
from the oh,-now-that-it-involves-YOUR-identity dept.

TechDirt reports

Last year, you'll recall that somebody abused the nonexistent privacy protections at the FCC website to flood the net neutrality repeal proceeding with millions of fake comments. While the vast majority of real people oppose the repeal, a bad actor was able to either fraudulently use the identities of real people (like myself), or hijack the identities of dead people to spam the proceeding with bogus support. The goal: undermine public trust in the public comment period in order to downplay the massive opposition to the FCC's handout to AT&T and Comcast.

Up to this point, the FCC has done less than nothing to investigate the fraud or prevent it from happening again, largely because it aided the FCC's agenda. In fact, the FCC went so far as to block a law enforcement investigation into who was behind the fraud.

Hoping to pull the scandal back onto a front burner, Senators Jeff Merkley and Pat Toomey this week sent a letter to the FCC stating that they've discovered that their names were also used to post fake comments during the repeal. The two demanded the FCC implement some kind of CAPTCHA system to help police automated bogus comments (a bot seems to have posted millions of bogus comments in alphabetical order), and asked what the agency was doing to prevent the problem from occurring again:

"Late last year, the identities of as many as two million Americans were stolen and used to file fake comments during the FCC's comment period for the net neutrality rule," the letter to Pai, dated May 21, read.

"We were among those whose identities were misused to express viewpoints we do not hold. We are writing to express our concerns about these fake comments and the need to identify and address fraudulent behavior in the rulemaking process."

The letter comes more than a year after alarms were first sounded over the tsunami of seemingly faked comments submitted by "astroturfing" campaigns to sway the commission's opinion. Many of the comments were put up in the name of actual people without their knowledge or permission.

Ultimately, about 22 million messages were submitted, and while three in five were in favor of net neutrality, once duplicates and those with garbage email addresses were tossed out, the overall sentiment was against net neutrality. About 17 per cent of the total, though, were likely filed by real people logging into the FCC's website rather than through the watchdog's API designed for accepting submissions via third-party applications and websites. It is suspected someone, or some people, abused this gateway using automated software to cram the regulator with millions of bogus submissions.


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posted by martyb on Thursday May 24 2018, @08:20PM   Printer-friendly
from the R.I.P. dept.

The Linux Journal reports

Linux Journal has learned fellow journalist and long-time voice of the Linux community Robin "Roblimo" Miller has passed away. Miller was perhaps best known by the community for his roll as Editor in Chief of Open Source Technology Group, the company that owned Slashdot, SourceForge.net, freshmeat, Linux.com, NewsForge, and ThinkGeek from 2000 to 2008. He went on to write and do video interviews for FOSS Force, penned articles for several publications, and authored three books, The Online Rules of Successful Companies, Point & Click Linux!, and Point & Click OpenOffice.org, all published by Prentice Hall.

See, also: "Roblimo" on Wikipedia.

[Ed note: The SoylentNews web site runs on a fork of Slashcode, an open-sourced version of the code that ran Slashdot. --martyb]

[Update: Removed extra content; retained the part which noted Roblimo's passing. --martyb]


Original Submission

posted by chromas on Thursday May 24 2018, @06:56PM   Printer-friendly
from the don't-expect-full-time-wages dept.

For some people, a 40-hour workweek is something to aspire to; for others, it’s still too much time taken up by a job. If you fall into that second category, if you want more time for hobbies, family and friends, or working on your own software projects, you too might dream of working less than full time.

But how do you get there? Almost no one advertises part-time programming jobs–believe me, I’ve me[sic] looked.

The answer: negotiation. I’ve negotiated a shorter workweek a few times myself, and I’ve met other programmers who have done so as well, some with just a few years of experience. And of all the programmers I’ve met who’ve negotiated part-time work, Mike’s record is the most impressive.

Mike has spent pretty much all his career working part-time: he’s been working part-time for more than 15 years. To help you get to a shorter, saner workweek, I sat down to interview Mike about how he does it.

Original Submission

posted by chromas on Thursday May 24 2018, @05:18PM   Printer-friendly
from the s/(CC)/U\1-U/g dept.

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow3941

In an interview just prior to leaving the FCC this month, former Commissioner Mignon Clyburn took aim at the agency where she worked for nearly nine years, saying it has abandoned its mission to safeguard consumers and protect their privacy and speech.

Clyburn, a net neutrality proponent who served as interim FCC chief in 2013, equated the FCC's mission to the Starfleet Prime Directive, saying the agency's top priority is to ensure "affordable, efficient, and effective" access to communications—a directive it has effectively deserted under the new administration, working instead to advance the causes of "last-mile monopolies."

Clyburn spoke to Ars Technica's Jon Brodkin during a phone interview shortly before she left the agency this month.

"I'm an old Trekkie," she said. "I go back to my core, my prime directive of putting consumers first."

Clyburn said that, whereas some of her colleagues shied away from their role as a government regulator, she had embraced it, particularly when it came to internet service providers (ISPs).

"Let's face it," she told Ars, ISPs are "last-mile monopolies."

"In an ideal world, we wouldn't need regulation," Clyburn continued. "We don't live in an ideal world, all markets are not competitive, and when that is the case, that is why agencies like the FCC were constructed. We are here as a substitute for competition."

Source: https://gizmodo.com/fcc-commissioner-says-the-agency-is-a-shill-for-isps-as-1826203464


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posted by chromas on Thursday May 24 2018, @03:41PM   Printer-friendly
from the Oops,-the-honest-people-are-in-a-minority-again dept.

CCN reports:

A malicious miner successfully executed a double spend attack on the Bitcoin Gold network last week, making BTG at least the third altcoin to succumb to a network attack during that timespan.

[...] To execute the attack, the miner acquired at least 51 percent of the network's total hashpower, which provided them with temporary control of the blockchain. Obtaining this much hashpower is incredibly expensive — even on a smaller network like bitcoin gold — but it can be monetized by using it in tandem with a double spend attack.

After gaining control of the network, the attacker began depositing BTG at cryptocurrency exchanges while also attempting to send those same coins to a wallet under their control. Ordinarily, the blockchain would resolve this by including only the first transaction in the block, but the attacker was able to reverse transactions since they had majority control of the network.

Consequently, they were able to deposit funds on exchanges and quickly withdraw them again, after which they reversed the initial transaction so that they could send the coins they had originally deposited to another wallet.

A bitcoin gold address implicated in the attack has received more than 388,200 BTG since May 16 (mostly from transactions it sent to itself). Assuming all of those transactions were associated with the double spend exploit, the attacker could have stolen as much as $18.6 million worth of funds from exchanges.

The last transaction was sent on May 18, but the attacker could theoretically attempt to resume it if they still have access to enough hashpower to gain control of the blockchain.

Bitcoin gold's developers advised exchanges to address the attack by increasing the number of confirmations required before they credit deposits to customer accounts. Blockchain data indicates that the attacker successfully reversed transactions as far back as 22 blocks, leading developers to advise raising confirmation requirements to 50 blocks.

Bitcoin Gold appears to use a standard ~10 min block rate so the new recommendation is for exchanges to hold funds for ~8 hours before clearing them.


Original Submission

posted by chromas on Thursday May 24 2018, @01:24PM   Printer-friendly
from the 694a5b3e413a0ac1a7daaba2116966ea356ff40328b556ed14781f2a67e2e909 dept.

Aaron Toponce demonstrates why he thinks that using sha256crypt or sha512crypt on current GNU/Linux operating systems is dangerous, and why he thinks that the developers of GLIBC should move to scrypt or Argon2, or at least bcrypt or PBKDF2. After going into a bit of analysis, he concludes that practically everything else should be avoided, especially md5crypt, sha256crypt, and sha512crypt and many others.


Original Submission

posted by chromas on Thursday May 24 2018, @12:02PM   Printer-friendly
from the classical-sauce dept.

Thomas Knoll, a PhD student in computer vision at the University of Michigan, had written a program in 1987 to display and modify digital images. His brother John, working at the movie visual effects company Industrial Light & Magic, found it useful for editing photos, but it wasn’t intended to be a product. Thomas said, “We developed it originally for our own personal use…it was a lot a fun to do.”

Gradually the program, called “Display”, became more sophisticated. In the summer of 1988 they realized that it indeed could be a credible commercial product. They renamed it “Photoshop” and began to search for a company to distribute it. About 200 copies of version 0.87 were bundled by slide scanner manufacturer Barneyscan as “Barneyscan XP”.

The fate of Photoshop was sealed when Adobe, encouraged by its art director Russell Brown, decided to buy a license to distribute an enhanced version of Photoshop. The deal was finalized in April 1989, and version 1.0 started shipping early in 1990.

Over the next ten years, more than 3 million copies of Photoshop were sold.

That first version of Photoshop was written primarily in Pascal for the Apple Macintosh, with some machine language for the underlying Motorola 68000 microprocessor where execution efficiency was important. It wasn’t the effort of a huge team. Thomas said, “For version 1, I was the only engineer, and for version 2, we had two engineers.” While Thomas worked on the base application program, John wrote many of the image-processing plug-ins.

With the permission of Adobe Systems Inc., the Computer History Museum is pleased to make available, for non-commercial use, the source code to the 1990 version 1.0.1 of Photoshop. All the code is here with the exception of the MacApp applications library that was licensed from Apple. There are 179 files in the zipped folder, comprising about 128,000 lines of mostly uncommented but well-structured code. By line count, about 75% of the code is in Pascal, about 15% is in 68000 assembler language, and the rest is data of various sorts.

Download Photoshop version 1.0.1 Source Code


Original Submission

posted by chromas on Thursday May 24 2018, @10:24AM   Printer-friendly
from the strength-in-diversity dept.

Usually, birds of a feather flock together—but in the Amazon, some flocks feature dozens of species of all shapes and colors. A new study by San Francisco State University biologists singles out one reason why these unusually diverse flocks exist: lookout species that call in alarm when they spot dangerous predators.

[...] To put that idea to the test, the team captured alarm-calling dusky-throated antshrikes (Thamnomanes ardesiacus) from eight mixed-species flocks in southeastern Peru and kept each bird in an aviary for several days.

After the team removed the antshrikes, birds in each flock responded in a matter of hours. In three flocks, birds retreated to areas of denser cover at the same vertical level in the forest, while in another the members joined new flocks high in the canopy, another area that affords more cover from predators. Birds in control flocks, where the researchers captured antshrikes but immediately released them, tended to stay out in the open. The team reported their results today in the journal Ecology.

The results support the idea that alarm-calling species might allow their neighbors to live in dangerous neighborhoods. "These flocks occupy a middle layer of the rainforest that's not quite the ground and not quite the canopy," explained coauthor Eliseo Parra, a lecturer and researcher at San Francisco State. "A lot of literature suggests that this area is more dangerous. There are more opportunities for a predator to be hidden and still have a quick flight path." Remove the antshrikes and their former flockmates are left exposed, so they retreat to safer habitats.


Original Submission

posted by martyb on Thursday May 24 2018, @08:57AM   Printer-friendly
from the the-price-is-right dept.

http://www.euronews.com/2018/05/21/free-public-transport-across-estonia

Estonia is set to implement free transport for its residents across much of the country as of July 1. The free fare zone will run 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2018/05/estonia-will-roll-out-free-public-transit-nationwide/560648/

Estonia is already a world leader in free public transit: In 2013, all public transit in its capital, Tallinn, became free to local residents (but not tourists or other visitors, even those from other parts of the country). The new national free-ride scheme will extend this model even further, making all state-run bus travel in rural municipalities free and extending cost-free transit out from the capital into other regions.


Original Submission

posted by martyb on Thursday May 24 2018, @07:20AM   Printer-friendly
from the Adding-aliens-to-press-release-to-sound-sexy dept.

The Breakthrough Listen project discovered what is called a Fast Radio Burst while scanning the skies from Australia as part of the biggest search for extra terrestrial life in the Milky Way and nearby stars.

Breakthrough Listen scientist Danny Price said it was exciting when the burst from billions of light years away was picked up, but it was unlikely aliens were behind it.

[...] It is not the first burst to be detected, with the CSIRO Parkes Radio Telescope picking up the first one in 2001.

The bursts last for about a millisecond, and sound like an ambulance driving past when picked up by special receivers.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-05-23/search-for-aliens-finds-mysterious-radio-signal/9788202


Original Submission

posted by martyb on Thursday May 24 2018, @05:43AM   Printer-friendly
from the is-an-EmDrive-twice-as-wide-as-an-EnDrive? dept.

German researchers have tested their own EmDrive design as well as a Mach Effect Thruster, finding that interactions between components and Earth's magnetic field may explain anomalous thrust:

The researchers – Martin Tajmar, Matthias Kößling, Marcel Weikert and Maxime Monette – presented their findings last week at the Aeronautics and Astronautics Association of France's Space Propulsion conference. The title of their paper is "The SpaceDrive Project – First Results on EmDrive and Mach-Effect Thrusters."

[...] The TU Dresden team constructed an EmDrive similar to the NASA test model. They stuck it in a shielded vacuum chamber and bombarded it with microwaves. They were able to measure thrust but it wasn't correlated with the direction the engine was pointing, leading them to conclude the test apparatus itself was affecting the measurements. They found that "magnetic interaction from twisted-pair cables and amplifiers with the Earth's magnetic field can be a significant error source for EMDrives."

The researchers will continue to conduct more tests, and will attempt to better shield the setup from interference, scale up the power, and add a missing dielectric disc component.

Meanwhile, NASA's Harold White has released another paper, Spacedrives and Conservation Laws. At a Breakthrough Discuss conference in April, he revealed plans to scale up to 400 Watts, and got grilled by Lawrence Krauss (video) and Robert Zubrin (same video) about the physics behind the device as well as a presentation slide assuming 400 times greater thrust per kilowatt than what Eagleworks observed, enabling "intersteller [sic] precursor" missions.

Also at Ars Technica, Phys.org, and Space.com.


Original Submission

posted by janrinok on Thursday May 24 2018, @04:06AM   Printer-friendly
from the leaving-our-mark dept.

The authors of the open-access article The biomass distribution on Earth (DOI:10.1073/pnas.1711842115) undertook

[...] a census of the ≈550 gigatons of carbon (Gt C) of biomass distributed among all of the kingdoms of life [...]

According to Science Alert,

The most comprehensive study ever of the weight of all living biomass on the planet has discovered humans account for only about 0.01 percent of life on Earth [...]

[...] their analysis suggests human civilisation has slashed the total biomass of wild mammals by as much as 85 per cent, and has cut plant biomass in half.

Livestock, mostly cattle and pigs, makes up about 60 percent of all mammals on Earth (at 0.1 Gt C).

[...] the biomass of domesticated poultry [is] about three times greater than that of wild birds.

The Guardian interviewed one of the authors.

"It is definitely striking, our disproportionate place on Earth," said Milo. "When I do a puzzle with my daughters, there is usually an elephant next to a giraffe next to a rhino. But if I was trying to give them a more realistic sense of the world, it would be a cow next to a cow next to a cow and then a chicken."

[...] in weight terms Homo sapiens is puny. Viruses alone have a combined weight three times that of humans, as do worms. Fish are 12 times greater than people and fungi 200 times as large.

In a 2016 study (PDF) covered by Gizmodo, the Anthropocene Working Group estimated

[...] the weight of Earth's "technosphere"—basically, all of the structures people have built, modified, or messed with [...] everything from factories to smartphones to the land we've farmed [and our garbage at] 30 trillion tons [...].

[...] "It has enabled the production of an enormous array of material objects....Many of these, if entombed in strata, can be preserved into the distant geological future"

Its authors noted that "the total [mass of the technosphere] is five orders of magnitude greater than the standing biomass of humans."


Original Submission

posted by janrinok on Thursday May 24 2018, @02:32AM   Printer-friendly
from the well,-that-cleared-that-up dept.

A team of physicists from ICTP-Trieste and IQOQI-Innsbruck has come up with a surprisingly simple idea to investigate quantum entanglement of many particles. Instead of digging deep into the properties of quantum wave functions - which are notoriously hard to experimentally access - they propose to realize physical systems governed by the corresponding entanglement Hamiltonians. By doing so, entanglement properties of the original problem of interest become accessible via well-established tools. This radically new approach could help to improve understanding of quantum matter and open the way to new quantum technologies.

Quantum entanglement forms the heart of the second quantum revolution: it is a key characteristic used to understand forms of quantum matter, and a key resource for present and future quantum technologies.

Physically, entangled particles cannot be described as individual particles with defined states, but only as a single system. Even when the particles are separated by a large distance, changes in one particle also instantaneously affect the other particle(s). The entanglement of individual particles - whether photons, atoms or molecules - is part of everyday life in the laboratory today.

The physicists turn the concept of quantum simulation upside down by no longer simulating a certain physical system in the quantum simulator, but directly simulating its entanglement Hamiltonian operator, whose spectrum of excitations immediately relates to the entanglement spectrum.

"Instead of simulating a specific quantum problem in the laboratory and then trying to measure the entanglement properties, we propose simply turning the tables and directly realizing the corresponding entanglement Hamiltonian, which gives immediate and simple access to entanglement properties, such as the entanglement spectrum" explains Marcello Dalmonte. "Probing this operator in the lab is conceptually and practically as easy as probing conventional many-body spectra, a well-established lab routine." Furthermore, there are hardly any limits to this method with regard to the size of the quantum system.

This could also allow the investigation of entanglement spectra in many-particle systems, which is notoriously challenging to address with classical computers. Dalmonte, Vermersch and Zoller describe the radically new method in a current paper in Nature Physics and demonstrate its concrete realization on a number of experimental platforms, such as atomic systems, trapped ions and also solid-state systems based on superconducting quantum bits.


Original Submission

posted by janrinok on Thursday May 24 2018, @12:58AM   Printer-friendly
from the it-was-an-error,-not-exageration,-honest! dept.

Submitted via IRC for Runaway1956

For the past several months, the FBI has been claiming that encryption has prevented the agency from accessing around 7,000 mobile devices connected to various crimes.

On Tuesday, the FBI told PCMag that a programming error resulted in a "significant overcounting" of the encrypted devices. "The FBI is currently conducting an in-depth review of how this over-counting previously occurred," the agency said in a statement.

The news was first reported by The Washington Post, which said the correct number is probably between 1,000 and 2,000 devices. One internal estimate from the FBI puts the figure at 1,200, but the agency plans to launch an audit to get the full number, The Post said, citing unnamed sources.

The mistake seriously undercuts one of the FBI's central arguments in the ongoing encryption debate. For years now, the agency has been pushing for what critics call a "backdoor" into smartphone products that'll let federal agents easily unlock mobile devices tied to crimes. Without such access, some investigations may grind to halt, the agency claims.

[...] How did the FBI make the mistake? According to the agency, starting in April 2016, it began using a new "collection methodology" with how it counted the encrypted devices. But only recently did the FBI become aware of flaws in the methodology, it said, without elaborating.

Source: https://www.pcmag.com/news/361357/oops-fbi-inflated-the-number-of-encrypted-devices-it-cant

Also at CNET and TechCrunch


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