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Submission + - TRON Acquires BitTorrent (trustnodes.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The Tron Foundation has acquired BitTorrent for an undisclosed amount, but previously the sum of $140 million has been suggested for all its assets.

Submission + - The Milky Way Had a Big Sibling Long Ago — And Andromeda Ate It (theguardian.com)

Submitted by ritchiedsouza
ritchiedsouza writes: Scientists at the University of Michigan suggest that the Milky Way had a large sibling galaxy which was cannibalized by our neighboring galaxy Andromeda (https://news.umich.edu/the-milky-ways-long-lost-sibling-finally-found/). This disrupted galaxy was the third largest member of the Local Group after the Andromeda and the Milky Way galaxies. Moreover, they claim that this large disrupted galaxy left behind a trail of debris including the compact galaxy M32 and a giant stellar stream. This research was published in Nature Astronomy (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-018-0533-x)

Submission + - A Nanoscale Look At a Complete Fly Brain (cemag.us)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Two high-speed electron microscopes. 7,062 brain slices. 21 million images. For a team of scientists at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Janelia Research Campus in Ashburn, Virginia, these numbers add up to a technical first: a high-resolution digital snapshot of the adult fruit fly brain. Researchers can now trace the path of any one neuron to any other neuron throughout the whole brain, says neuroscientist Davi Bock, a group leader at Janelia who reported the work along with his colleagues on July 19 in the journal Cell.

The fruit fly brain, roughly the size of a poppy seed, contains about 100,000 neurons (humans have 100 billion). Each neuron branches into a starburst of fine wires that touch the wires of other neurons. Neurons talk to one another through these touchpoints, or synapses, forming a dense mesh of communication circuits. Scientists can view these wires and synapses with an imaging technique called serial section transmission electron microscopy. First, they infuse the fly’s brain with a cocktail of heavy metals. These metals pack into cell membranes and synapses, ultimately marking the outlines of each neuron and its connections. Then the researchers hit slices of the brain with a beam of electrons, which passes through everything except the metal-loaded parts. “It’s the same way that x-rays go through your body except where they hit bone,” Bock explains. The resulting images expose the brain’s once-hidden nooks and crannies.

Submission + - Microsoft launches open source Quantum Katas project on GitHub to teach Q# progr (betanews.com)

Submitted by BrianFagioli
BrianFagioli writes: Microsoft seems eager to get programmers on the quantum bandwagon, as today, it launches the open source Quantum Katas on GitHub. What exactly is it? It is essentially a project deigned to teach Q# programming for free.

âoeFor those who want to explore quantum computing and learn the Q# programming language at their own pace, we have created the Quantum Katas â" an open source project containing a series of programming exercises that provide immediate feedback as you progress. Coding katas are great tools for learning a programming language. They rely on several simple learning principles: active learning, incremental complexity growth, and feedback,â says The Microsoft Quantum Team.

The team further says, "The Microsoft Quantum Katas are a series of self-paced tutorials aimed at teaching elements of quantum computing and Q# programming at the same time. Each kata offers a sequence of tasks on a certain quantum computing topic, progressing from simple to challenging. Each task requires you to fill in some code; the first task might require just one line, and the last one might require a sizable fragment of code. A testing framework validates your solutions, providing real-time feedback."

Comment Hard to Monetize (Score 1) 161

by physburn (#56933420) Attached to: 'RSS Has Already Won'
12 years ago, I wrote a website that took RSS feeds checked the posts where on topic, sorted to output into new web pages and RSS feeds, was even open to the public to create new feeds, and search (via google API) for feeds on subject. I a million page view per month, but the views where mostly for the output feeds, so no ad revenue. Run it for seven years, but got tide of paying £110 per month for hosting and getting on £12 per month from google Adwords, so I had to shut down, then the server died.

Comment Leaving today (Score 2) 307

by physburn (#56895156) Attached to: In This Economy, Quitters Are Winning
Today is my last day at my current job. Starting monday a new one, with 10% more salary, 9 to 5 hours instead of 9 to 6, and 4 stop commute instead of 17 on the underground. Shop around for jobs every couple of years, it can be very profitable and improve you life greatly.

Submission + - Facebook Flags, Removes Declaration of Independence Text as Hate Speech (reason.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: America's founding document might be too politically incorrect for Facebook, which flagged and removed a post consisting almost entirely of text from the Declaration of Independence. The excerpt, posted by a small community newspaper in Texas, apparently violated the social media site's policies against hate speech.

Since June 24, the Liberty County Vindicator of Liberty County, Texas, has been sharing daily excerpts from the declaration in the run up to July Fourth. The idea was to encourage historical literacy among the Vindicator's readers.

Submission + - Latest Text Of EU Copyright Directive Shows It's Even Worse Than Expected (europa.eu)

Submitted by sandbagger
sandbagger writes: The new proposed EU copyright law is now available and it's even worse and more bizarre than reported to date. For practical purposes, legislators appear to be defining the internet as a broadcast medium rather than an interactive one. Making platforms directly accountable for user content would effectively shutter web sites such as Slashdot.

Submission + - Jonathan Blow: "C++ is a weird mess" (gamesindustry.biz) 2

Submitted by slack_justyb
slack_justyb writes: Jonathan Blow, an independent video game developer, indicated to gamesindustry.biz that while working on a recent project he stopped and considered how miserable programming can be. After some reflection Blow came to the realization as to why. [C++ is a] "really terrible, terrible language."

The main flaw with C++, in Blow's opinion, is that it's a fiendishly complex and layered ecosystem that has becoming increasingly convoluted in its effort to solve different problems; the more layers, the higher the stack, the more wobbly it becomes, and the harder it is to understand.

Blow is the developer of two games so far. Braid and The Witness and developed a new programming language known as Jai in hopes to help C++ game developers become more productive.

With Jai, Blow hopes to achieve three things: improve the quality of life for the programmer because "we shouldn't be miserable like many of us are"; simplify the systems; and increase expressive power by allowing programmers to build a large amount of functionality with a small amount of code.

Is Blow correct? Has C++ become a horrific mess that we should ultimately relegate to the bins of COBOL and Pascal? Are there redeeming qualities of C++ that justify the tangle it has become? Is Jai a solution or just yet another programming language?

Submission + - 'Why You Should Not Use Google Cloud' (medium.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Early today morning (June 28, 2018) I receive an alert from Uptime Robot telling me my entire site is down. I receive a barrage of emails from Google saying there is some "potential suspicious activity" and all my systems have been turned off. EVERYTHING IS OFF. THE MACHINE HAS PULLED THE PLUG WITH NO WARNING. The site is down, app engine, databases are unreachable, multiple Firebases say I’ve been downgraded and therefore exceeded limits.

Customer service chat is off. There’s no phone to call. I have an email asking me to fill in a form and upload a picture of the credit card and a government issued photo id of the card holder. Great, let’s wake up the CFO who happens to be the card holder. What if the card holder is on leave and is unreachable for three days? We would have lost everything—years of work—millions of dollars in lost revenue. I fill in the form with the details and thankfully within 20 minutes all the services started coming alive. The first time this happened, we were down for a few hours. In all we lost everything for about an hour. An automated email arrives apologizing for ‘inconvenience’ caused. Unfortunately The Machine has no understanding of the ‘quantum of inconvenience’ caused.

Submission + - EFF Sues to Invalidate FOSTA, an Unconstitutional Internet Censorship Law (eff.org)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: We are asking a court to declare the Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act of 2017 (“FOSTA”) unconstitutional and prevent it from being enforced. The law was written so poorly that it actually criminalizes a substantial amount of protected speech and, according to experts, actually hinders efforts to prosecute sex traffickers and aid victims.

In our lawsuit, two human rights organizations, an individual advocate for sex workers, a certified non-sexual massage therapist, and the Internet Archive, are challenging the law as an unconstitutional violation of the First and Fifth Amendments. Although the law was passed by Congress for the worthy purpose of fighting sex trafficking, its broad language makes criminal of those who advocate for and provide resources to adult, consensual sex workers and actually hinders efforts to prosecute sex traffickers and aid victims.

Submission + - How secure is Prestashop opensource (sport-net.dk)

Submitted by Jonas HA
Jonas HA writes: As a webshop owner in Denmark, we now have to comply with the new GDPR rules. In addition, we are now economic reliable for any hacking of documents and personal date linked to our customers.

Currently we run our small niche Badminton and Handball store on Prestashop 1.6.4, but how secure is this platform?

Badminton and handball are big sports in Denmark, but we only have around 3.000 customers a year, so therefor we landed on a open source webshop platform when we started 8 years ago.

I have searched around, but I can't find any indication of how secure this platform is and if there is any platforms that are more secure?

Regards
Jonas

Submission + - Canada To Become the Second Country To Legalize Weed (bloomberg.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Canada is on track to become the first G-7 nation to legalize marijuana, and the second country in the world (after Uruguay), after its Senate approved legislation in a 52-29 vote, paving the way for recreational cannabis to be legally bought and sold within the next few months.

The vote clears the way for the government in Ottawa to take the final step: The ceremonial approval of by the governor-general that would make Bill C-45 law. Still, not all of the details have been ironed out. For example, the date for when the law would take effect remains unclear. And lawmakers have said it will take a few months for producers and retail stores to stock up and get ready for legal sales to begin.

Submission + - 6G networks, with Terabyte speeds, will arrive by 2030

Submitted by dkatana
dkatana writes: According to IoT Times: "The next generation of wireless connectivity will provide speeds of 1 to 100 Gbps to the end user and MU-MIMO capability of 100 to 1,000 simultaneous independently modulated beams effectively providing speeds in the tens of terabytes per second."

Technologists at Finland’s University of Oulu recently announced the funding of “6Genesis,” an eight-year research program to conceptualize 6G under the auspices of the university’s Centre for Wireless Communications.

Submission + - New IBM robot holds its own in a debate with a human (nbcnews.com)

Submitted by PolygamousRanchKid
PolygamousRanchKid writes: The human brain may be the ultimate super computer, but artificial intelligence is catching up so fast, it can now hold a substantive debate with a human, according to audience feedback. IBM’s Project Debater made its public debut in San Francisco Monday afternoon, where it squared off against Noa Ovadia, the 2016 Israeli debate champion and in a second debate, Dan Zafrir, a nationally renowned debater in Israel. The AI is the latest grand challenge from IBM, which previously created Deep Blue, technology that beat chess champion Garry Kasparov and Watson, which bested humans on the game show Jeopardy.

In its first public outing, Project Debater turned out to be a formidable opponent, scanning the hundreds of millions of newspaper and journal articles in its memory to quickly synthesize an argument on a topic and position it was assigned on the spot.

“Project Debater could be the ultimate fact-based sounding board without the bias that often comes from humans,” said Arvind Krishna, director of IBM Research.

An audience survey taken before and after each debate found that Project Debater better enriched the audience’s knowledge as it argued in favor of subsidies for space exploration and in favor of telemedicine, but that the human debaters did a better job delivering their speeches.

The AI isn’t trained on topics — it’s trained on the art of debate. For the most part, Project Debater spoke in natural language, choosing the same words and sentence structures as a native English speaker. It even dropped the odd joke, but with the expected robotic delivery.

IBM's engineers know the AI isn’t perfect. Just like humans, it makes mistakes and at times, repeats itself. However, the company believes it could have a broad impact in the future as people now have to be more skeptical as they sort out fact and fiction. “Project Debater must adapt to human rationale and propose lines of argument that people can follow,” Krishna said in a blog post. “In debate, AI must learn to navigate our messy, unstructured human world as it is — not by using a pre-defined set of rules, as in a board game.”

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