SoylentNews

takyon writes:

California Governor Jerry Brown has signed Senate Bill 10, the California Money Bail Reform Act, eliminating cash bail in the state:

An overhaul of the state's bail system has been in the works for years, and became an inevitability earlier this year when a California appellate court declared the state's cash bail system unconstitutional. The new law goes into effect in October 2019. "Today, California reforms its bail system so that rich and poor alike are treated fairly," Brown said in a statement, moments after signing the California Money Bail Reform Act.

The governor has waited nearly four decades to revamp the state's cash bail system. In his 1979 State of the State Address, Brown argued the existing process was biased, favoring the wealthy who can afford to pay for their freedom, and penalizing the poor, who often are forced to remain in custody.

[...] Under the California law those arrested and charged with a crime won't be putting up money or borrowing it from a bail bond agent to obtain their release. Instead, local courts will decide who to keep in custody and whom to release while they await trial. Those decisions will be based on an algorithm created by the courts in each jurisdiction.

Bail agents disapprove.

See also: California's 'cautionary tale' for others considering no cash bail system
California's bail bond empire strikes back

Original Submission

takyon writes:

$600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft

Among the new hardware launched this week at IFA in Berlin are a couple of premium Chromebooks. Lenovo's $600 Yoga Chromebook brings high-end styling and materials to the Chromebook space, along with well-specced internals and a high quality screen. Dell's $600 Inspiron Chromebook 14 has slightly lower specs but is similarly offering better styling, bigger, better quality screens, and superior specs to the Chromebook space. These systems join a few other premium Chromebooks already out there. HP's Chromebook x2 is a $600 convertible hybrid launched a few months ago, and Samsung has had its Chromebook Plus and Pro systems for more than a year now. And of course, Google's Pixelbook is an astronomically expensive Chrome OS machine. These systems should cause ripples in Redmond.

[...] Lenovo reps told us that its new Chromebook was developed because the company was seeing demand for Chromebooks from users with a bit more disposable income. For example, new college students that had used Chrome OS at high school and families who wanted the robustness Chrome OS offers are looking for machines that are more attractive, use better materials, and are a bit faster and more powerful. The $600 machines fit that role.

And that's why Microsoft should be concerned. This demand shows a few things. Perhaps most significantly of all, it shows that Chrome OS's mix of Web applications, possibly extended with Android applications, is good enough for a growing slice of home and education users. Windows still has the application advantage overall, but the relevance of these applications is diminishing as Web applications continue to improve. A browser and the Web are sufficient to handle the needs of a great many users. No Windows necessary, not even to run the browser. Second, this demand makes clear that exposure to Chrome OS in school is creating sustained interest in, and even commitment to, the platform. High school students are wanting to retain that familiar environment as they move on. The ecosystem they're a part of isn't the Windows ecosystem.

Finally, it also shows that Chrome OS's relatively clean-slate approach (sure, it's Linux underneath, but it's not really being pushed as a way of running traditional Linux software) has advantages that are appealing even to home users. The locked down, highly secure Chrome OS machines require negligible maintenance while being largely immune to most extant malware. And the platform's cloud syncing means that even chores like backups can be largely avoided. Microsoft may be trying to offer the same with Windows, in particular Windows 10 S-Mode, but it's going to take a rather more radical change to Windows to really rival Chrome OS in this regard.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

FDA Advises Consumers to Avoid Eating, Drinking, or Handling Food Products Prepared with Liquid Nitrogen at the Point of Sale

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration alerts consumers and retailers of the potential for serious injury from eating, drinking, or handling food products prepared by adding liquid nitrogen at the point of sale, immediately before consumption.

These products are often marketed under the names "Dragon's Breath," "Heaven's Breath," "nitro puff" and other similar names.

[...] Foods and drinks prepared by adding liquid nitrogen immediately before consumption may be sold in malls, food courts, kiosks, state or local fairs, and other food retail locations. These products may include liquid nitrogen-infused colorful cereal or cheese puffs that emit a misty or smoke-like vapor. Similarly, alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks prepared with liquid nitrogen emit a fog.

The FDA has become aware of severe -- and in some cases, life-threatening -- injuries, such as damage to skin and internal organs caused by liquid nitrogen still present in the food or drink. There has also been a report of difficulty breathing after inhaling the vapor released by liquid nitrogen when added immediately before consumption. Injuries have occurred from handling or eating products prepared by adding liquid nitrogen immediately before consumption, even after the liquid nitrogen has fully evaporated due to the extremely low temperature of the food.

Original Submission

martyb writes:

Though this happened earlier in the week, I just now found out about it. Given how well-known the company is, I thought other Soylentils would like to know about this, too.

Supermicro® Announces Suspension of Trading of Common Stock on Nasdaq and its Intention to Appeal:

Super Micro Computer, Inc. (NASDAQ:SMCI) [...] today announced that, as expected, the Company received a notification letter from The Nasdaq Stock Market Hearings Panel [...] on August 22, 2018, indicating that trading in the Company's common stock on Nasdaq's Global Select Market will be suspended effective at the open of business on August 23, 2018.

The Company previously announced on August 21, 2018 that it did not expect to regain compliance with the Nasdaq continued listing requirements by August 24, 2018, the deadline previously set by the Panel.

The Panel's letter also stated that the Panel has determined to delist the Company's shares from Nasdaq after applicable appeal periods have lapsed. The Company intends to appeal the Panel's decision to the Nasdaq Listing and Hearing Review Council. During the appeal period, trading in the Company's common stock on Nasdaq will remain suspended and Nasdaq will not delist the Company's common stock pending such appeal. Once the Company has regained compliance with its SEC filing requirements, the Company intends to promptly request that Nasdaq lift the suspension in trading of its common stock or, in the event the common stock is delisted, to promptly apply to relist its common stock on Nasdaq or another national securities exchange.

While the Company's common stock is suspended from trading on Nasdaq, the Company expects that its shares will be quoted on the OTC Markets under the trading symbol SMCI.

According to Wikipedia:

Bytram (from IRC) writes:

China culls 38,000 pigs as swine fever spreads.

More than 38,000 pigs have been culled across China, state media said Sunday, as the world's largest pork producer scrambles to contain an outbreak of African swine fever.

The disease has been discovered in five Chinese provinces, the official Xinhua news service reported, quoting statistics from the country's ministry of agriculture.

China reported its first case of the disease in August in northeast Liaoning province.

Since then the disease has moved south, with cases discovered as far as 1,000 kilometres (600 miles) away, raising concerns it could infect pig farms across the country.

Original Submission

Bytram (from IRC) writes:

With rising sea levels, Bangkok struggles to stay afloat.

As Bangkok prepares to host climate-change talks, the sprawling city of more than 10 million is itself under siege from the environment, with dire forecasts warning it could be partially submerged in just over a decade.

[...] As temperatures rise, abnormal weather patterns—like more powerful cyclones, erratic rainfall, and intense droughts and floods—are predicted to worsen over time, adding pressure on governments tasked with bringing the 2015 Paris climate treaty to life.

Bangkok, built on once-marshy land about 1.5 metres (five feet) above sea level, is projected to be one of the world's hardest hit urban areas, alongside fellow Southeast Asian behemoths Jakarta and Manila.

"Nearly 40 percent" of Bangkok will be inundated by as early as 2030 due to extreme rainfall and changes in weather patterns, according to a World Bank report.

Currently, the capital "is sinking one to two centimetres a year and there is a risk of massive flooding in the near future," said Tara Buakamsri of Greenpeace.

Original Submission

chromas (from IRC) writes:

Ars Technica:

A team of mathematicians has devised the most precise recipe yet for blowing perfect bubbles, and it's not just for fun and frolics. Achieving a better understanding of the dynamics at work could lead to more efficient industrial production of commercial sprays and foams, like shaving cream or Reddi-Wip—pretty much anything that has drops or bubbles in it.

[...] Just two years ago, French physicists worked out a theoretical model for the exact mechanism for how soap bubbles form when jets of air hit a soapy film. They tested their model by hanging weighted fishing line from a three-foot contraption. Then they carefully dripped a soapy solution (a bit of Dawn dish soap in plain tap water) onto the top of the wires so the wires stuck together as it dribbled down. Gently pulling the wires apart again created a thin soap film. Then they zapped the film with jets of gas to see which speeds of blowing air produced bubbles, filming it all with a high-speed camera.

"We can now say exactly what wind speed is needed to push out the film and cause it to form a bubble."

The results: bubbles only formed above a certain speed, which in turn depends on the width of the jet of air. If the jet is wide, there will be a lower threshold for forming bubbles, and those bubbles will be larger than the bubbles produced by narrower jets with their higher speed thresholds. The former is often the case when we blow bubbles through a little plastic wand: the jet forms at our lips, and is usually wider than the soapy film suspended within the wand.

In a new paper in Physical Review Letters, mathematicians at New York University's Applied Math Lab have fine-tuned the recipe for the perfect bubble even further based on similar experiments with soapy thin films. "We can now say exactly what wind speed is needed to push out the film and cause it to form a bubble, and how this speed depends on parameters like the size of the wand," said co-author Leif Ristroph. The answer: you want a circular wand with a 1.5-inch perimeter, and you should gently blow at a consistent 6.9 cm/s. Blow at higher speeds and the bubble will burst. Use a smaller or larger wand, and the same thing will happen, or the bubbles will be smaller, or perhaps not form at all.

[...] DOI: Physical Review Letters, 2018. 10.1103/PhysRevLett.121.094501  (About DOIs).

Original Submission

martyb writes:

Cheese Danish Shipping, Warrantless GPS Trackers, and a Border Doctrine Challenge :

At the end of August, a federal judge in Riverside, California made a potentially landmark decision for border privacy advocates—finding that it is unconstitutional for federal agents to warrantlessly install GPS tracking devices onto a truck entering the United States from Canada.

In the grand scheme, the decision stands in the face of a controversial but standing legal idea called "the border doctrine." The doctrine's concept is that warrants are not required to conduct a search at the border in the name of national sovereignty.

And in this particular incident—a case called United States v. Slavco Ignjatov et al. that allegedly involves Starbucks cheese danishes and a trafficking organization that sounds straight out of Breaking Bad^[0]—the ruling could be a major victory for defendants as it would suppress any evidence obtained through the use of the warrantless GPS tracker.

The story is a bit on the longish side, but well worth the read. What I find amazing is that those involved could likely have gotten a warrant in advance with what they knew, and surely could have received one in the 24 hours after they affixed the GPS tracker... but they didn't even bother to try and get one.

On the other hand, given that roughly two-thirds of the US' population is treated as being within 100 miles of the border, I'm heartened to see any kind of pushback.

[⁰by which they mean its spin-off series, Better Call Saul —ed]

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

To procrastinate or not

exec and Arthur T Knackerbracket have found the following story:

Students returning to school in Detroit next week will find their water fountains entirely shut off over concerns of elevated lead and copper levels—something that federal lawmakers say is part of a "disturbing and unacceptable" nationwide issue.

The decision to shut off the drinking water in Detroit was based on a first round of results from testing that the school district carried out in its 106 schools earlier this year. The results from just 24 schools so far surfaced 16 that had water sources tainted with excessive levels of lead, copper, or both. For instance, tests at the district's Academy of the Americas Elementary school found a kitchen and drinking faucet in a basement cafeteria that had lead levels of 182 micrograms per liter (ug/L) and 154 ug/L, respectively. Those are more than ten times the Environmental Protection Agency's recommended limit of 15 ug/L. The full testing results can be found here.

[...] In a joint statement, the Great Lakes Water Authority (GLWA) and the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department (DWSD) were quick to point out that the contamination is not due to a problem with the region's water system. Rather, the pair blamed aging plumbing within the schools for the contamination.

"The water at GLWA's treatment plants is tested hourly and DWSD has no lead service lines connected to any DPSCD building. The drinking water is of unquestionable quality," the statement read.

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Intel has backtracked on the license for its latest microcode update that mitigates security vulnerabilities in its processors – after the previous wording outlawed public benchmarking of the chips.

With the Linux 4.19 kernel that just kicked off development this month has been continued churn in the Spectre/Meltdown space, just not for x86_64 but also for POWER/s390/ARM where applicable. For getting an overall look at the performance impact of these mitigation techniques I tested three Intel Xeon systems and two AMD EPYC systems as well as a virtual machine on each side for seeing how the default Linux 4.19 kernel performance -- with relevant mitigations applied -- to that of an unmitigated kernel.

At the BlackHat conference last month, Christopher Domas demonstrated an attack against an x86 CPU using MSR's and an embedded RISC core to bypass ring protections. The full presentation "GOD MODE UNLOCKED - Hardware Backdoors in x86 CPUs" is viewable on YouTube. Is it time for CPU vendors to rethink security?

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Technology Review reports on a startup restaurant https://www.technologyreview.com/s/611788/engineering-lunch/ that features specialized robots to assemble ingredients and wok-fry them for healthy fast food.

As customers placed their orders, Spyce's automated food storage bins (known as hoppers) reliably fed refrigerated ingredients through a portioning system that measures precise quantities into a red box that zips along a horizontal track. That box, called the runner, collects ingredients and delivers them to one of seven induction-heated woks that spin to tumble the food so it cooks evenly at 450 °F. ...

The development process had some low points,

Even so, their cooking robot was still a work in progress. That fall, it dumped half-cooked food straight onto the counter in front of a potential investor. One outcome of that fiasco: each of the restaurant's automated woks now has a sensor telling it whether there's a bowl underneath.

These MechEs recognized that they might not know much about the restaurant business,

Even as they were perfecting their automated kitchen technology, the founders knew they needed more than technical expertise to develop a successful robotic restaurant. So Farid got in touch with restaurateur Daniel Boulud, the chef-owner of multiple award-winning restaurants and author of nine cookbooks, by guessing his e-mail address in five tries—and the team ultimately convinced him to serve as Spyce's culinary director and invest in the concept.

Check out the link to see how they managed to make kale (reasonably) palatable...

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Movie madness: Why Chinese cinemas are empty but full

For a country which will soon assume the mantle of the world's largest cinema audience, China comes out with a surprising number of big budget B-grade flops. Some blame this on censorship, others on a lack of creativity but there are also those who see a more sinister force at work, which has nothing to do with film-making.

It also has nothing to do with selling tickets: at least not real ones. Some investors are apparently financially backing movies with the sole goal of boosting their stock price that can shift on the perception of a movie's performance, irrespective of its true popularity.

Chinese film critic and industry observer Raymond Zhou has been digging into the darker side of film financing in his country. "When you have a hit film, your stock price will go up several times in terms of market valuation compared with the grosses from the box office so some 'financial genius', came up with this idea: Why don't I have fake box office numbers so that I can make much more money from the stock market?" he said.

[...] How many hundreds of thousands of seats would a company need to buy to boost the figures enough to make a difference to its own stock price? Well what if the cinema chain is also an investor? It can just sell itself the phantom tickets for free.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Going Back to the Moon Won't Break the Bank, NASA Chief Says

Sending humans back to the moon won't require a big Apollo-style budget boost, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said. During the height of the Apollo program in the mid-1960s, NASA gobbled up about 4.5 percent of the federal budget. This massive influx of resources helped the space agency make good on President John F. Kennedy's famous 1961 promise to get astronauts to the moon, and safely home to Earth again, before the end of the decade. NASA's budget share now hovers around just 0.5 percent. But something in that range should be enough to mount crewed lunar missions in the next 10 years or so, as President Donald Trump has instructed NASA to do with his Space Policy Directive 1, Bridenstine told reporters yesterday (Aug. 30) here at NASA's Ames Research Center.

The key lies in not going it alone and continuing to get relatively modest but important financial bumps, he added. (Congress allocated over $20.7 billion to NASA in the 2018 omnibus spending bill — about $1.1 billion more than the agency got in the previous year's omnibus bill.)

"We now have more space agencies on the surface of the planet than we've ever had before. And even countries that don't have a space agency — they have space activities, and they want to partner with us on our return to the moon," Bridenstine said in response to a question from Space.com. "And, at the same time, we have a robust commercial marketplace of people that can provide us access that historically didn't exist," the NASA chief added. "So, between our international and commercial partners and our increased budget, I think we're going to be in good shape to accomplish the objectives of Space Policy Directive 1."

We're talking about the surface of the Moon, right? Not the mini-ISS in lunar orbit that would give the Space Launch System somewhere to go?

Previously: President Trump Signs Space Policy Directive 1
2020s to Become the Decade of Lunar Re-Exploration
NASA Cancels Lunar Rover
NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine Serious About Returning to the Moon

Related: Should We Skip Mars for Now and Go to the Moon Again?
How to Get Back to the Moon in 4 Years, Permanently
NASA Administrator Ponders the Fate of SLS in Interview

Original Submission

chromas (from IRC) writes:

ScienceAlert:

The mystery behind how birds navigate might finally be solved: it's not the iron in their beaks providing a magnetic compass, but a protein in their eyes that lets them "see" Earth's magnetic fields.

These findings come courtesy of two papers - one studying robins, the other zebra finches.

The fancy eye protein is called Cry4, and it's part of a class of proteins called cryptochromes - photoreceptors sensitive to blue light, found in both plants and animals. These proteins play a role in regulating circadian rhythms.

Original Submission