119657698
submission
dryriver writes:
Reading tech news can be a depressing experience. Hackers. Identity thieves. Malware. Ransomware. Rampant data collection and privacy obliteration. Forced biometric identification. DRM and "you control nothing" software mechanisms. Patent trolls. Corporations that behave in predatory ways. Lying to sell a mediocre tech product. Companies that simply sit on their ass in terms of innovating when the competition can't catch up. Lots and lots of technically quite gifted people behaving — for lack of a better word — completely and utterly unethically. So where does unethical behavior originate? Do some people have an "ethics gene" or "idealism gene" and others a "malevolence gene" or "selfishness gene"? Are the brain structures or brain chemistry of ethical and unethical people different? Or is there something about using technology that makes people feel far less inhibited to do harm?
119490724
submission
dryriver writes:
Everybody seems to think these days that kids desperately need to learn how to code, or similar, when they turn six years old. But this ignores a glaring fact — the biggest shortage in the future labor market is not people who can code competently in Python, Java or C++, it is people who can actually discover or invent completely new and better ways of doing things, whether this is in CS, Physics, Chemistry, Biology or other fields. If you look at the history of great inventors, the last truly gifted, driven and prolific non-corporate inventor is widely regarded to be Nikola Tesla, who had around 700 patents to his name by the time he died. After Tesla, most new products, techniques and inventions have come out of corporate, government or similar structures, not from a good old fashioned dedicated, driven, independent-minded one-person inventor who feverishly dreams up new things and new possibilities and works for the betterment of humanity. How do you teach inventing to kids? By teaching them the methods of Altshuller ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ) for example. Seriously, does teaching five to seven year olds 50 year old CS/coding concepts and techniques do more for society than teaching kids to rebel against convention, think outside the box, turn convention upside down and beat their own path towards solving a thorny problem? Why does society want to create an army of code-monkeys versus an army of kids who learn how to invent new things from a young age? Or don't we want little Nikola Teslas in the 21st Century, because that creates "uncertainty" and "risk to established ways of doing things"?
119398904
submission
dryriver writes:
This is an episode of the BBC's Tomorrow's World program broadcast all the way back in 1984 ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?... ) where a presenter shows hands-on how a laser hologram of a real world object can be recorded onto a transparent plastic medium, erased again by heating the plastic with an electric current, and then re-recorded differently. The presenter states that computer scientists are very interested in holograms, because the future of digital data storage may lie in them. This was 35 years ago. Holographic data storage for PCs, smartphones et cetera still is not available commercially. Why is this? Are data storage holograms too difficult to create? Or did nobody do enough research on the subject, getting us all stuck with mechanical harddisks and SSDs instead? Where are the hologram drives that appeared "so promising" three decades ago?
118960294
submission
dryriver writes:
Every time I approach a female in a bar, crack open my 18.4" military grade laptop and write and compile some Assembly code, the female gets up and walks away. What, oh Slashdot, am I doing wrong? Is it the wrong programming language? Should I change my desktop wallpaper? Did I set the LED lighting colors on the keyboard wrong? Would an Apple laptop work better than a Windows one? Are Intel CPUs worse than AMD CPUs when you try to woo a female? Should I have used a Raspberry Pi 4? What oh what am I doing wrong?
118960096
submission
dryriver writes:
BusinessInsider reports: American car companies believe one type of female test dummy suffices to ensure women don't die in car crashes. And she's five feet tall and weighs 110 pounds. That's incredibly far from the build of an average American woman. According to the National Center for Health Statistics, she weighs 170.5 pounds and stands nearly four inches taller than the test dummy. Female car-crash victims are 73% more likely to die or suffer a serious injury in a car crash, according to a new paper from the University of Virginia. That's controlling for all of the different factors in a passenger's body, the car model, and whether or not the passenger is wearing a seat belt. CityLab's Sarah Holder first reported the study on July 18, and she pointed out that the non-representative dummy is likely linked to women's significantly-higher likelihood or being maimed or killed in a car crash. Male test dummies, which were the only kind that were widely used until 2003, when the 110-pound female dummy was introduced, are much more representative of the male population, the researchers told CityLab. "Manufacturers and designers used to all be men," Dr. David Lawrence, director of the Center for Injury Prevention Policy & Practice at San Diego State University, told ABC News in 2012. "It didn't occur to them they should be designing for people unlike themselves. Well, we got over that." The need for a male and a female test dummy comes down to the "ways that men and women are different bio-mechanically," Jason Forman, a principal scientist at UVA's Center for Applied Biomechanics and a study author, told CityLab. For example, women have wider pelvises and more tissue around the waist and thighs rather than the belly. There are also more complicated issues like hormonal impacts on tissues.
118931054
submission
dryriver writes:
Now that we have arrived in Blade Runner's November 2019 "future", the BBC asks what the 37 year old film got right: Beyond particular components, Blade Runner arguably gets something much more fundamental right, which is the world’s socio-political outlook in 2019 – and that isn’t particularly welcome, according to Michi Trota, who is a media critic and the non-fiction editor of the science-fiction periodical, Uncanny Magazine. “It's disappointing, to say the least, that what Blade Runner ‘predicted’ accurately is a dystopian landscape shaped by corporate influence and interests, mass industrialisation's detrimental effect on the environment, the police state, and the whims of the rich and powerful resulting in chaos and violence, suffered by the socially marginalised.” [...] As for the devastating effects of pollution and climate change evident in Blade Runner, as well as its 2017 sequel Blade Runner 2049, “the environmental collapse the film so vividly depicts is not too far off from where we are today,” says science-fiction writer and software developer Matthew Kressel, pointing to the infamous 2013 picture of the Beijing smog that looks like a cut frame from the film. “And we're currently undergoing the greatest mass extinction since the dinosaurs died out 65 million years ago. In addition, the film's depiction of haves and have-nots, those who are able to live comfortable lives, while the rest live in squalor, is remarkably parallel to the immense disparity in wealth between the world's richest and poorest today. In that sense, the film is quite accurate.” [...] And it can also provide a warning for us to mend our ways. Nobody, surely, would want to live in the November 2019 depicted by Blade Runner, would they? Don’t be too sure, says Kressel.
“In a way, Blade Runner can be thought of as the ultimate cautionary tale,” he says. “Has there ever been a vision so totally bleak, one that shows how environmental degradation, dehumanisation and personal estrangement are so harmful to the future of the world?
“And yet, if anything, Blade Runner just shows the failure of the premise that cautionary tales actually work. Instead, we have fetishised Blade Runner's dystopian vision. Look at most art depicting the future across literature, film, visual art, and in almost all of them you will find echoes of Blade Runner’s bleak dystopia.
“Blade Runner made dystopias ‘cool’, and so here we are, careening toward environmental collapse one burned hectare of rainforest at a time. If anything, I think we should be looking at why we failed to heed its warning.”
118592642
submission
dryriver writes:
Using a compressed disk drive or harddrive is an old hat that has been possible for decades now. But when you do this in software/OS, the CPU does the compressing and decompressing. Are there any harddrives or SSDs that can work compressed using their own built in hardware for this? I am not talking about realtime video compression using a hardware CODEC chip — this does exist and is used — but rather a storage medium that compresses every possible type of file using its own compression and decompression realtime hardware without a significant speed hit.
118526296
submission
dryriver writes:
More and more professional 3D software like 3DMax, Maya, AutoCAD (Autodesk) and Substance Painter (Adobe) is now only available on a monthly or yearly subscription basis — you cannot buy any kind of perpetual license for these industry standard 3D tools anymore, cannot offline install or activate the tools, and the tools also phone home every few days over the internet to see whether you have "paid your rent". Stop paying your rent, and the software shuts down, leaving you unable to even look at any 3D project files you may have created with software. This has caused so much frustration, concern and anxiety among 3D content creators that, increasingly, everybody is trying to replace their commercial 3D software with Open Source 3D tools. Thankfully, open source 3D tools have grown up nicely in recent years. Some of the most popular FOSS 3D tools are the complete 3D suite Blender ( https://www.blender.org/ ), polygon modeling tool Wings 3D ( http://www.wings3d.com/ ), polygon modeling tool Dust3D ( https://dust3d.org/ ), CAD modeling tool FreeCAD ( https://www.freecadweb.org/ ), PBR texturing tool ArmorPaint ( https://armorpaint.org/ ), procedural materials generator Material Maker ( https://rodzilla.itch.io/mater... ), image editing tool GIMP ( https://www.gimp.org/ ), painting tool Krita ( https://krita.org/en/ ), vector illustration tool Inkscape ( https://inkscape.org/ ) and the 2D/3D game engine Godot Engine ( https://godotengine.org/ ). Along with these tools comes a beguiling possibility — while working with commercial 3D tools pretty much forced you to use Windows X in terms of OS choice in the past, all of the FOSS 3D tool alternatives have Linux versions. This means that for the first time, professional 3D users can give Windows a miss and work with Linux as their OS instead.
118509926
submission
dryriver writes:
CNN reports: Many of our favorite fast food and restaurant chains continue to contribute to the growing threat of antibiotic resistance, according to a report released Thursday by advocacy groups. The World Health Organization calls the development of bacteria that can't be killed by some of our current medicines "one of the biggest threats to global health, food security, and development today." Fifteen of America's favorites received an "F" for their lack of action in reducing the use of beef raised with antibiotics, including Burger King, DQ, Jack In the Box, Pizza Hut, Olive Garden, Chili's, Sonic, Applebee's and the pizza chains of Domino's, Little Caesars and Pizza Hut. Only Chipotle and Panera Bread, who were early leaders in using only antibiotic-free beef and chicken, received an "A." This is the fifth year that six public interest groups have graded the 25 largest US fast food chains on where they stand on antibiotics. The report, called Chain Reaction V, focuses on antibiotic use in both poultry and beef food items. Antibiotics are routinely given to animals to keep them healthy while they fatten up for slaughter. In fact, nearly two-thirds of the medically important antibiotics sold in the US go to food animals.When antibiotics are overused, some bacteria learn to survive, multiply, and share their resistance genes with other bacteria even if those have not been exposed. Those so-called "superbugs" enter our system when we eat undercooked meat or veggies that have been exposed to irrigation water contaminated with animal waste. And suddenly, antibiotics that once cured our infections no longer do their job. Despite the severity of the problem, the US lacks appropriate laws to regulate overuse of antibiotics in our food chain. Thus advocacy groups have turned to some of the largest buyers of raw beef and chicken — restaurants — and asked them to use their purchasing power to force change.
118444442
submission
dryriver writes:
When McDonald's closed all its restaurants in Iceland in 2009, one man decided to buy his last hamburger and fries. "I had heard that McDonald's never decompose so I just wanted to see if it was true or not," Hjortur Smarason told AFP. This week, it's 10 years since the seemingly indestructible meal was purchased, and it barely looks a day older. Curious observers can watch a live stream ( https://snotrahouse.com/last-m... ) of the burger and fries from its current location in a glass cabinet in Snotra House, a hostel in southern Iceland. "The old guy is still there, feeling quite well. It still looks quite good actually," the hostel's owner Siggi Sigurdur told BBC News. "It's a fun thing, of course, but it makes you think about what you are eating. There is no mould, it's only the paper wrapping that looks old." The hostel claims that people come from around the world to visit the burger, and the website receives up to 400,000 hits daily.
118440762
submission
dryriver writes:
Several rival companies may be hard at work trying to get Elon Musk's Hyperloop concept off the ground, but hurtling across country — maybe even across continents — at 600 miles per hour in a low-pressure steel tube still feels far from reality. But 13-year-old New York student Caroline Crouchley may have invented a more economically viable and eco-friendly Hyperloop solution. Crouchley's idea, which just won second place in the annual 3M Young Scientist Challenge, is to build pneumatic tubes next to existing train tracks. Magnetic shuttles would travel through these vacuum tubes, connected via magnetic arm to trains traveling on the existing tracks. This system would utilize current train tracks, thereby cutting infrastructure costs and, Crouchley says, eradicating the potential safety risk posed by propelling passengers in a vacuum. There'd be no need for trains to use diesel or electric motors, making the trains lighter and more fuel-efficient. This is important to Crouchley, who aims to devise active solutions to the climate crisis. "I pinpointed transportation as something I wanted to work on because if we can make trains more efficient, then we can eliminate the amount of cars, trucks and buses on the road," Crouchley tells CNN Travel.
118247408
submission
dryriver writes:
In talking to people who are doing software development or other tech work, many told me that they found their tech education at university lacking in various ways. Some were taught outdated software, programming languages, methods, techniques or approaches. Others had problems with academia hostile to new ideas or creative problem solving. Some didn't get enough recognition for the coursework they did at uni. Others couldn't get into top-tier universities when they were finishing high school aged 17 or 18 and got a 2nd rate tech education at lower quality academic institution as a result. So to the question: How was the quality of your tech education at university? Was the curriculum up to date? Were you taught the right things? Was academia open to new ideas and new ways of doing things? Did your education prepare you well for real life tech work in a non-academic environment?
118246234
submission
dryriver writes:
The BBC reports: Scientists have pinpointed the homeland of all humans alive today to a region south of the Zambesi River. The area is now dominated by salt pans, but was once home to an enormous lake, which may have been our ancestral heartland 200,000 years ago. Our ancestors settled for 70,000 years, until the local climate changed, researchers have proposed. They began to move on as fertile green corridors opened up, paving the way for future migrations out of Africa. "It has been clear for some time that anatomically modern humans appeared in Africa roughly 200,000 years ago," said Prof Vanessa Hayes, a geneticist at the Garvan Institute of Medical Research in Australia. "What has been long debated is the exact location of this emergence and subsequent dispersal of our earliest ancestors." Prof Hayes' conclusions have drawn scepticism from other researchers in the field, however. The area in question is south of the Zambesi basin, in northern Botswana. The researchers think our ancestors settled near Africa's huge lake system, known as Lake Makgadikgadi, which is now an area of sprawling salt flats. "It's an extremely large area, it would have been very wet, it would have been very lush," said Prof Hayes. "And it would have actually provided a suitable habitat for modern humans and wildlife to have lived." After staying there for 70,000 years, people began to move on. Shifts in rainfall across the region led to three waves of migration 130,000 and 110,000 years ago, driven by corridors of green fertile land opening up.
However, the study, published in the journal Nature, was greeted with caution by one expert, who says you can't reconstruct the story of human origins from mitochondrial DNA alone. Other analyses have produced different answers with fossil discoveries hinting at an eastern African origin. Prof Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum, London, who is not connected with the study, said the evolution of Homo sapiens was a complex process. "You can't use modern mitochondrial distributions on their own to reconstruct a single location for modern human origins," he told BBC News. "I think it's over-reaching the data because you're only looking at one tiny part of the genome so it cannot give you the whole story of our origins." Thus, there could have been many homelands, rather than one, which have yet to be pinned down.
117443390
submission
dryriver writes:
Elon Musk was initially planning to launch 12,000 Starlink Internet satellites into Earth orbit. This number already worried experts concerned about "too much space junk" and "Kessler Syndrome". It now appears that SpaceX has filed the paperwork for 30,000 more Starlink satellites to be launched into orbit. Some experts now worry that Musk's audacious plan "to make the Internet 40 times faster" may cause so many yearly collisions in Space — 67,000 potential collisions a year — and create so much hazardous orbiting space junk in the process that humanity may one day have problems launching manned or unmanned missions into space without incident. Other experts worry that some day people will look up at the pristine night sky and see as many glittering Starlink satellites up there as we currently see stars. The Sun reports: The first 60 Starlink satellites were put into orbit in May and have already received criticism for being spotted in the night sky looking very bright and visible. When spotted flying above the Netherlands, a Dutch UFO website was inundated with more than 150 reports from people thinking that they were looking at UFOs. It is thought that the satellites appeared so bright at first because they had not had the chance to reach their intended orbit height of 340 miles above Earth. Starlink satellites have also sparked concern over increased space junk and even the European Space Agency is now worried about them disrupting its work.
Last month, the space agency tweeted: "For the first time ever, ESA has performed a 'collision avoidance manoeuvre' to protect one of its satellites from colliding with a 'mega constellation'#SpaceTraffic".
There have also been concerns that humanity could be trapped on Earth by too much space junk in Earth's orbit. That's according to one space scientist, who says Musk's plan could create an impenetrable wall of space junk around our planet. A catastrophic clutter of space debris left behind by the satellites could potentially block rockets from leaving Earth, an effect known as "Kessler syndrome". "The worst case is: You launch all your satellites, you go bankrupt, and they all stay there," European Space Agency scientist Dr Stijn Lemmens told Scientific American. "Then you have thousands of new satellites without a plan of getting them out of there. And you would have a Kessler-type of syndrome." The firm says it's already taken steps to avoid cluttering up the region. It's launching the satellites into a lower orbital plane than most space tech to avoid collisions. Even with such precautions, mega-constellations like Starlink will results in 67,000 potential collisions per year, another space scientist warned.
Musk isn't the only tech billionaire looking to colonise space with satellites. Amazon boss Jeff Bezos also has similar ideas.
117351648
submission
dryriver writes:
CNN reports: In 1502, Leonardo da Vinci sketched out a design for what would have been the world's longest bridge at the time — 280 meters (918.6 feet). Although the bridge itself was never built, engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have tested the design to see if it would work. Da Vinci submitted his innovative bridge sketch when Sultan Bayezid II, ruler of the Ottoman Empire from 1481 to 1512, put out a request for bridge designs that could span across the Golden Horn. This natural river estuary separated the cities of Galata and Istanbul. Da Vinci's proposal was not selected. Now, a cable-stayed bridge is in place. But what would it have been like if da Vinci's design had been constructed? Their [ the MIT engineers' ] model included 126 3D-printed blocks fitted together for a 32-inch long bridge. When a bridge was constructed in this Roman style, scaffolding was used to keep the stones in place. Once the final keystone was in place, the scaffolding could be removed. The researchers did the same thing with their model. "When we put it in, we had to squeeze it in," MIT graduate student Karly Bast said. "That was the critical moment when we first put the bridge together. I had a lot of doubts. When I put the keystone in, I thought, 'This is going to work.' And after that, we took the scaffolding out, and it stood up. It's the power of geometry. This is a strong concept. It was well thought out." The engineers also tested the bridge's stability by simulating what might have happened if the soil was weakened by earthquakes. The bridge withstood the simulations."What we can learn from Leonardo da Vinci's design is that the form of a structure is very important for its stability," Bast said. "Not only is Leonardo's design structurally stable, but the structure is the architecture. It is important to understand this design because it is an example of how engineering and art are not independent from each other."
