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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for AzumaHazuki:

Rwanda makes its own morphine while U.S. awash with opioids:

It was something, the silence. Nothing but the puff of her breath and the scuff of her slip-on shoes as Madeleine Mukantagara walked through the fields to her first patient of the day. Piercing cries once echoed down the hill to the road below. What she carried in her bag had calmed them.

For 15 years, her patient Vestine Uwizeyimana had been in unrelenting pain as disease wore away at her spine. She could no longer walk and could barely turn over in bed. Her life narrowed to a small, dark room with a dirt-floor in rural Rwanda, prayer beads hanging on the wall by her side.

A year ago, relief came in the form of liquid morphine, locally produced as part of Rwanda's groundbreaking effort to address one of the world's great inequities: As thousands die from addiction in rich countries awash with prescription painkillers, millions of people writhe in agony in the poorest nations with no access to opioids at all.

Companies don't make money selling cheap, generic morphine to the poor and dying, and most people in sub-Saharan Africa cannot afford the expensive formulations like oxycodone and fentanyl, prescribed so abundantly in richer nations that thousands became addicted to them.

Rwanda's answer: plastic bottles of morphine, produced for pennies and delivered to homes across the country by community health workers like Mukantagara. It is proof, advocates say, that the opioid trade doesn't have to be guided by how much money can be made.

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RandomFactor writes:

SpaceX has launched both a real car (Elon Musk's Tesla Roadster), and what Wired refers to as the rocketry equivalent of a clown car into space.

It was about a year ago that SpaceX launched

A rocket crowded with more than 60 small satellites. Inside one of them, Excite, were even more. It was actually a satellite made of other satellites, all clones of each other, all capable of joining together and working together. It was one of the first in-space tests of such a contraption—but in the coming years, this modular approach is likely to show up on more and more missions.

Excite (made by the company NovaWurks) consists of 14 Lego-like 'satlets' (or 'HiSats') that are smaller than a sheet of paper and only a few inches thick.

The great promise of satlets is that they are agnostic about what instruments they support and about what function they fulfill. They can be mass-produced, which both slashes costs and dents the idea that each new instrument to be sent into orbit requires a whole new satellite. Instead, you can buy a satlet (or 15) that will provide everything your camera, radar device, radio detector, infrared sensor, or data processor will need. In theory, the set can also fix itself after launch by reallocating resources: A group of linked satlets can share functions among themselves and adjust their effort based on changing needs. If a battery in one gets a bad cell, for instance, its partners can help out.

Other government agencies such as the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) are also investigating the use of small standardized satellites that instruments can be attached to based on the mission.

[T]he NRO established a new "Greenlighting" program in 2017, to provide developers with a quick, cheap way to test technology in space. The NRO has created a standard interface, the size of a deck of cards, that people can stick their experiments into. Multiple interfaces can be stacked together, and experiments swapped in or out, before launch.

The promised reductions in cost and time to orbit will potentially allow for the massive risk averse missions of yesterday to slowly morph into nimble risk accepting missionlets in the future.

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://thenewstack.io/donald-knuths-2019-christmas-tree-lecture-explores-pi-in-the-art-of-computer-programming/

For a quarter of a century, Stanford's great computer science professor emeritus has been delivering a special "Christmas Tree" lecture each December.

[...] But for this year's lecture, Knuth did something special. He showed the audience how, throughout the last half of a century, he's whimsically worked the digits of pi into various exercises in his book — again, and again, and again. Knuth tells the audience that he's searched the entire text of his own book, The Art of Computer Programming, using the Linux tool egrep, and he's found a whopping 1,700 occurrences of the word pi, "which mean pi occurs maybe twice every five pages in the book so far." He feels that using pi in his examples assures readers that the algorithms really will work, even on an arbitrarily chosen cluster of digits.

But before long his talk had turned into a kind of intellectual funhouse, sharing other pi-related miscellanies that are often surprising — and occasionally even mind-boggling.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for SoyCow1337:

Huawei denies receiving billions in financial aid from Chinese government:

Huawei may not be as much of a self-made success story as founder Ren Zhengfei has consistently made the company out to be. According to The Wall Street Journal, the Chinese government has granted as much as $75 billion worth of financial assistance to Huawei, allowing the company to spend more freely than it would have otherwise been able to.

Using a combination of publicly-available records, the WSJ estimates Huawei received $46 billion in loans and lines of credit from state-controlled lenders, as well as $1.6 billion in grants. The company was also able to save as much as $25 billion in taxes between 2008 and 2018 thanks to incentives aimed at China's tech companies, and $2 billion on land purchases.

Chinese diplomats may have also helped the company. According to court documents obtained by the WSJ, the Chinese government helped Huawei close a deal in Pakistan by offering the country's government a $124.7 million loan through the Export-Import Bank of China. The state-controlled bank waived most of the three percent annual interest on the 20-year loan. The catch, however, was that Pakistan's government had to skip its usual competitive bidding process and award the contract to Huawei.

Huawei responded to the article in a series of tweets and a lengthy statement posted earlier today. "Once again, the WSJ has published untruths about Huawei based on false information. This time, wild accusations about Huawei's finances ignore our 30 years of dedicated investments in R&D that have driven innovation and the tech industry as a whole," the company said. Huawei also said that it reserved the right to take legal action against the WSJ for "a number of disingenuous and irresponsible articles."

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

Earlier this month we covered a story where we quoted the following:

Due to Debian developers having differing opinions on handling non-systemd bugs in 2019 and the interest/commitment to supporting systemd alternatives in the scope of Debian packaging and various related friction points, they've taken to a new general resolution over weighing init system diversity.

The results of the ballot to discover how the Debian devs feel about their earlier decision with the benefit of hindsight is now in:

Using its power under Constitution section 4.1 (5), the project issues the following statement describing our current position on Init systems, multiple init systems, and the use of systemd facilities. This statement describes the position of the project at the time it is adopted. That position may evolve as time passes without the need to resort to future general resolutions. The GR process remains available if the project needs a decision and cannot come to a consensus.

The Debian project recognizes that systemd service units are the preferred configuration for describing how to start a daemon/service. However, Debian remains an environment where developers and users can explore and develop alternate init systems and alternatives to systemd features. Those interested in exploring such alternatives need to provide the necessary development and packaging resources to do that work. Technologies such as elogind that facilitate exploring alternatives while running software that depends on some systemd interfaces remain important to Debian. It is important that the project support the efforts of developers working on such technologies where there is overlap between these technologies and the rest of the project, for example by reviewing patches and participating in discussions in a timely manner.

Packages should include service units or init scripts to start daemons and services. Packages may use any systemd facility at the package maintainer's discretion, provided that this is consistent with other Policy requirements and the normal expectation that packages shouldn't depend on experimental or unsupported (in Debian) features of other packages. Packages may include support for alternate init systems besides systemd and may include alternatives for any systemd-specific interfaces they use. Maintainers use their normal procedures for deciding which patches to include.

Debian is committed to working with derivatives that make different choices about init systems. As with all our interactions with downstreams, the relevant maintainers will work with the downstreams to figure out which changes it makes sense to fold into Debian and which changes remain purely in the derivative.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for SoyCow1337:

One year in, NASA's Parker Probe returns clues to long-held mysteries about solar wind, sun's atmosphere- Technology News, Firstpost:

Since it launched last year, NASA's Parker Solar Probe has made three dives toward the sun as it reached the fastest speed ever clocked by a human-built vehicle. Scientists released the mission's first batch of findings Wednesday, revealing that the dynamics of our star are even weirder than once imagined.

Four   papers   published   in the journal Nature describe what the spacecraft observed during its first two flybys, as it passed within about 15 million miles of the surface of the sun. That is about half the distance that the planet Mercury orbits the sun.

"All of this brand-new information about how the way our star works is going to help us understand how the sun drives change in the space environment throughout our solar system," said Nicola Fox, director of the heliophysics division at NASA, during a telephone news conference Wednesday.

The information could help scientists develop ways to provide advance warning of solar storms that could knock out satellites and electrical grids or endanger the health of astronauts in orbit.

The sun is essentially a big ball of hydrogen and helium, and for something that we see every day, it remains a complex ball of mystery.

barbara hudson writes:

From The Guardian: Russia has deployed world's first manoeuvrable hypersonic cruise missile.

Russia has deployed its first hypersonic nuclear-capable missiles, with Vladimir Putin boasting that it puts his country in a class of its own.

The president described the Avangard hypersonic glide vehicle, which can fly at 27 times the speed of sound, as a technological breakthrough comparable to the 1957 Soviet launch of the first satellite.

[...] The strategic missile forces chief, Gen Sergei Karakaev, said during the call that the Avangard had been put on duty with a unit in the Orenburg region in the southern Ural mountains.

Putin unveiled the Avangard and other prospective weapons systems in his state-of-the-nation address in March 2018, saying its ability to make sharp manoeuvres on its way to a target would render missile defense useless. "It heads to target like a meteorite, like a fireball," he said at the time.

The Russian leader said the Avangard had been designed using new composite materials to withstand temperatures of up to 2,000C (3,632F) which can be reached while travelling at hypersonic speeds. The missile can carry a nuclear weapon of up to 2 megatons.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for SoyCow1337:

Intel may be responding to AMD Ryzen with a hyperthreaded Core i3 processor (archive)

It's been a minute since we've seen new desktop processors from Intel, with Team Blue basically going all of 2019 without releasing a single mainstream desktop chip, with the exception of the Intel Core i9-9900KS. But that era of silence might be ending.

A leaked UserBenchmark entry for an Intel Core i3-10300 has just appeared, giving us an idea of what to expect from Intel's next generation of desktop Core processors, and it shows us that Intel might be feeling that heat from AMD.

These specs might not be extremely detailed, but it's enough to be exciting nonetheless. AMD Ryzen processors have essentially made their name on making hyperthreaded processors accessible for everyone, so we're definitely excited for Intel to jump on this bandwagon. 

What we don't know is whether or not this is going to be a part of the rumored Intel Comet Lake-S lineup, or if Intel is skipping that to bring 10nm silicon to the mainstream desktop market. The inclusion of hyperthreading in an entry-level model seems to suggest that something new may be afoot. We guess we'll just have to wait to see what Intel has to show at CES 2020 and beyond, but the CPU market may continue to heat up next year, and we're so here for it. 

For perhaps a better view on this subject see Takyon's journal entry.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for SoyCow1337:

Space and Astronomy in 2019: Unforgettable findings and events in space exploration, the universe- Technology News, Firstpost:

It's not easy to say that any particular space or astronomy development was the most important in a given year. But if we had to choose some highlights, we'd opt for these unforgettable events and findings.

• [...]We saw the unseeable
• [...]Landing on the moon is difficult
• [...]Women need more than an all-female spacewalk
• [...]A year in orbit changes a person
• [...]The first allegation of a space crime was made
• [...]Space will become a battlefield
• [...]An asteroid was bombed; another shot back
• [...]Gassy mysteries were detected on Mars
• [...]The business of space is messy
• [...]Our first close-ups from beyond Pluto
• [...]Get ready for visitors from beyond our solar system

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for SoyCow1337:

A Programmer Lost A Game He Made As A Kid, Until Someone Streamed It On Twitch:

Rick Brewster is a programmer and the author of Paint.NET, a free replacement for Microsoft Paint that’s expanded to have features similar to image creation programs like Photoshop and GIMP. In 1994, at the age of 12, Brewster made The Golden Flute IV: The Flute of Immortality, a DOS-based roleplaying game inspired by a text adventure from a 1984 instructional book on how to write adventure games. He wrote The Golden Flute IV on a Tandy 1000 TL/2, an IBM clone computer.

[...]“I made ONE installable copy onto 3.5" 720K disks that I packaged up and mailed to my cousin on the east coast, and that’s it,” Brewster explained in a Twitter thread. That copy was seemingly lost, with no playable copy surviving.

[...] Somehow, a version of that game found its way into the hands of a streamer name Macaw, who specializes in old and obscure games. [...] He played The Golden Flute IV on December 23rd, exploring it for a short time before moving on to other games.

[...]Brewster speculated on Twitter that his cousin possibly uploaded the game to a BBS, because it somehow ended up in the “Frostbyte” archive, a collection of old games that was uploaded to the Internet Archive. If you’re curious how it plays, you can check it out using this in-browser DOSbox emulator.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for SoyCow1337:

Galactic cosmic ray model works without physics, and that is bad:

Way back when the world was young and I still attended physics conferences, I got very excited by galactic cosmic rays. There seemed to be more cosmic rays than expected coming from the center of our galaxy. Those excess cosmic rays might be evidence for dark matter, which would be a big breakthrough if confirmed. Later modeling of cosmic ray sources showed that the extra cosmic rays were probably not coming from the annihilation of dark matter. But, now it seems we are back to square one, because that model may not have been accurate.

[...]Except that the fitting procedure turns out to be not so robust after all. A pair of scientists performed the fitting procedure on model data but modified the availability of the types of sources that could be fit (called templates) and played with the amount of cosmic rays from dark matter. They found that the model almost always drove the dark matter contribution to zero. The net result was that, even if up to 15 percent of the cosmic ray flux was due to dark matter, the model would still report a dark matter contribution that was near zero.

The researchers also tested the fit on real data. They took observational data and modified it by adding a dark matter contribution to it. As with the model data, they found that the fitting procedure attributed all the dark matter signal to other sources. Only if they set the dark matter contribution to around 15 percent or higher would it start showing up in the fitting results.

Although the results might be explained by a coincidence, it seems more likely that the statistical procedure is simply not good enough. The consequence is that the dark matter explanation for the cosmic ray excess is back on the table.

Revival of the Dark Matter Hypothesis for the Galactic Center Gamma-Ray Excess Rebecca K. Leane, Tracy R. Slatyer. Phys. Rev. Lett. 123, 241101 – Published 11 December 2019.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for SoyCow1337:

The surprisingly complicated physics of why cats always land on their feet:

Scientists are not immune to the alluringly aloof charms of the domestic cat. Sure, Erwin Schrödinger could be accused of animal cruelty for his famous thought experiment, but Edwin Hubble had a cat named Copernicus, who sprawled across the papers on the astronomer's desk as he worked, purring contentedly. A Siamese cat named Chester was even listed as co-author (F.D.C. Willard) with physicist Jack H. Hetherington on a low-temperature physics paper in 1975, published in Physical Review Letters. So perhaps it's not surprising that there is a long, rich history, spanning some 300 years, of scientists pondering the mystery of how a falling cat somehow always manages to land on their feet, a phenomenon known as "cat-turning."

"The falling cat is often sort of a sideline area in research," physicist and cat lover Greg Gbur told Ars. "Cats have a reputation for being mischievous and well-represented in the history. The cats just sort of pop in where you least expect them. They manage to cause a lot of trouble in the history of science, as well as in my personal science. I often say that cats are cleverer than we think, but less clever than they think." A professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, Gbur gives a lively, entertaining account of that history in his recent book, Falling Felines and Fundamental Physics.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for SoyCow1337:

Driver training was reportedly too much of "a bottleneck" for Amazon:

Amazon is rapidly dispensing with carriers such as FedEx for its retail deliveries, bringing the logistics business in-house to ship more Prime packages more quickly. The speed and money savings, though, seem to be coming at the cost of health and safety concerns—and a new report says the company is well aware, and Amazon is letting it happen anyway.

Internal documents show the company had plans to implement driver safety training courses but scrapped them in order to get drivers up and running faster, ProPublica and BuzzFeed News report.

"We chose not to have onroad practical training because it was a bottleneck" to getting drivers on the road, a senior manager wrote.

It was just one of many examples the reporters found of Amazon ignoring evidence its logistics business was overburdened.

[...] Amazon strenuously objected to the new story, calling the report "another attempt by ProPublica and BuzzFeed to push a preconceived narrative that is simply untrue."

The company told ProPublica it provided more than 1 million hours of safety training to employees and contractors in the last year but did not say how many of its 750,000 worldwide employees participated in said training. Amazon also said it spent $55 million on "safety improvement projects" last year—"about one-fifth of 1% of the $27.7 billion the company spent on shipping last year," the reporters write.

"Nothing is more important to us than safety," the company added.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for chromas:

https://gadgets.ndtv.com/mobiles/news/us-colleges-turning-students-phones-into-surveillance-devices-tracking-locations-of-hundreds-of-thou-2154310 :

When Syracuse University freshmen walk into professor Jeff Rubin's Introduction to Information Technologies class, seven small Bluetooth beacons hidden around the Grant Auditorium lecture hall connect with an app on their smartphones and boost their "attendance points." And when they skip class? The SpotterEDU app sees that, too, logging their absence into a campus database that tracks them over time and can sink their grade. It also alerts Rubin, who later contacts students to ask where they've been. His 340-person lecture has never been so full.

"They want those points," he said. "They know I'm watching and acting on it. So, behaviorally, they change."

Short-range phone sensors and campuswide Wi-Fi networks are empowering colleges across the United States to track hundreds of thousands of students more precisely than ever before. Dozens of schools now use such technology to monitor students' academic performance, analyse their conduct or assess their mental health.

But some professors and education advocates argue that the systems represent a new low in intrusive technology, breaching students' privacy on a massive scale. The tracking systems, they worry, will infantilise students in the very place where they're expected to grow into adults, further training them to see surveillance as a normal part of living, whether they like it or not.

In response we have:

How to (Hypothetically) Hack Your School's Surveillance System:

This week, hacktivist and security engineer Lance R. Vick tweeted an enticing proposition along with a gut-punch headline: "Colleges are turning students' phones into surveillance machines, tracking the locations of hundreds of thousands," read the Washington Post link.

Vick countered with an offer to students:

If you are at one of these schools asking you to install apps on your phone to track you, hit me up for some totally hypothetical academic ideas on how one might dismantle such a system.

We're always up for hacker class, so Vick supplied Gizmodo with a few theories for inquiring minds.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for SoyCow1337:

Bring the charging port to you:

As electric vehicles gain in popularity, building the infrastructure necessary to charge them all will be a costly endeavor. However, Volkswagen may have a solution. VW Group Components introduced a new mobile robot concept that could autonomously help charge EVs wherever they are located, essentially making any parking spot a charging port.

The robot, which is autonomous, can move what VW calls battery wagons – 25-kilowatt-hour battery packs – to a vehicle where the robot then connects the battery wagon to the vehicle. Summoning the robot happens either via a mobile app or vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communications. The robot uses various cameras, laser scanners, and ultrasonic sensors to operate autonomously, including recognizing and reacting to obstacles.

VW says the robot and battery wagons could help charge vehicles in areas where installing sufficient EV charging infrastructure could be costly – like an underground parking structure or other difficult-to-renovate locations. Drivers looking for a parking spot in a parking structure could park anywhere, regardless of whether there are any open charge ports, and have VW's mobile robot wheel a battery wagon over to begin charging the vehicle.

Also at Digital Trends

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