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Submission + - Joseph Gordon-Levitt: HitRecord Is âGitHub For Creativityâ(TM) (venturebeat.com)

Submitted by Krystalo
Krystalo writes: HitRecord is a production company transitioning into a tech platform. We caught up with cofounders Jared Geller and Joseph Gordon-Levitt at Collision 2019 in Toronto last week to understand what HitRecord was, is, and wants to be. HitRecord is a collaborative media platform that lets anyone work together on creative projects. If a project earns money, contributors are paid based on any work that makes it into the final product. In June, HitRecord will have paid out some $375,000 over the past year, totaling over $3 million contributor payments since 2010. CEO Gordon-Levitt works 20-30 hours per week, while president Geller is full time. The site has 750,000 users interested in collaborating on content together.

Comment Re:How does it currently listen for the wakeword? (Score 1) 171

The current wake word appears to be part of the Alexa firmware. When the Echo's internet access goes down, you can still "wake" it by saying "Alexa". It just won't process any other commands because it needs the internet to do that, and will instead give you an error message.

Submission + - SpaceX's Starlink Could Change The Night Sky Forever, And Astronomers Are Upset (forbes.com)

Submitted by SonicSpike
SonicSpike writes: On Thursday, May 23, Elon Musk’s SpaceX successfully launched its first 60 Starlink satellites, a planned mega constellation of satellites designed to beam internet from space to the world. But since footage emerged of the train of satellites in the night sky, astronomers have been up in arms at the impact Starlink could have on our views of the cosmos.

Starlink is designed to eventually consist of 12,000 satellites, orbiting at altitudes of about 550 kilometers and 1,200 kilometers. SpaceX is one of nine companies known to be working on global space internet, and already concerns have been raised about space junk. Now astronomers too are worried about what the future may hold.

“The potential tragedy of a mega-constellation like Starlink is that for the rest of humanity it changes how the night sky looks,” says Ronald Drimmel from the Turin Astrophysical Observatory in Italy. “Starlink, and other mega constellations, would ruin the sky for everyone on the planet.”

Following the Starlink launch, several observers – including amateur astronomer Marco Langbroek – captured footage of the satellites in orbit. All 60 were deployed in a train, one behind the other, but astronomers were surprised that the satellites shone brighter than many had expected them to.

“What I had not anticipated was how bright the objects were and how spectacular a view it would be,” says Langbroek. “It really was an incredible and bizarre view to see that whole train of objects in a line moving across the sky.”

It turns out that these satellites are easy to see with our own eyes, much brighter than we were expecting,” says astrophysicist Darren Baskill from the University of Sussex in the U.K. “If we can see them with our eyes, that means they are extremely bright for the latest generation of large, sensitive ground-based telescopes.”

Such telescopes include the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), currently under construction and designed to take wide sweeping views of the night sky to study a variety of bodies such as asteroids and comets.

While the true impact of Starlink isn’t known yet, it’s thought the LSST may have to deal with one Starlink satellite every few images, notes astrophysicist Bruce Macintosh from Stanford University in the U.S., resulting in a streak through the image. Such issues are not new to astronomers, but the sheer number of Starlink satellites is cause for concern.

“Part of the knee-jerk reaction across the astronomy community after the launch of the Starlink satellites was purely caused by a lack of information,” says astrophysicist Jessie Christiansen from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in the U.S. “A significant amount of the outcry could have been avoided if there had been an impact study done in advance.”

During the dead of night the satellites are unlikely to be visible, as they will be in darkness with no sunlight to reflect. But it’s in the hours after sunset and before sunrise that people are most worried, when the thousands of satellites will be reflecting light from orbit and, it appears, clearly visible to anyone looking up.

Another concern is not just for visual astronomy, but radio astronomy too. Each satellite will emit radio signals in order to communicate with Earth, and for astronomers that rely on radio waves to study the universe – such as the first image of a black hole revealed last month – Starlink may bring with it new complications.

“Radio astronomers are even more concerned as the satellites are transmitting in the 10.7-12.7 GHz band, which includes the spectral lines of water among other things,” says space archaeologist Alice Gorman from Flinders University in Australia. “Radio astronomers fight daily to protect critical observation bands, and this is only going to get worse.”

Musk, to his credit, has responded to some of the concerns on Twitter. After initially seeming to misunderstand how and why the International Space Station (ISS) is visible in the night sky, he noted that SpaceX was looking into how to mitigate the effects of Starlink satellites on astronomy.

“Sent a note to Starlink team last week specifically regarding albedo reduction,” he said. “We’ll get a better sense of value of this when satellites have raised orbits and arrays are tracking to sun.”

He also implied that the ultimate goal of Starlink – bringing internet to the 3.3 billion people in the world who are offline, and using that money to fund SpaceX’s missions to Mars and beyond, albeit with an unclear market on how many of those can afford space internet or want to be online in the first place – was a “greater good” than any impact on astronomy.

“Potentially helping billions of economically disadvantaged people is the greater good,” he said. “That said, we’ll make sure Starlink has no material effect on discoveries in astronomy. We care a great deal about science.”

It’s clear, however, that much work will still need to be done to allay the concerns of the astronomy community. While some may point to the benefits services like Starlink could bring, others will be quick to point out the irrevocable impact this could have on human culture.

“I’m not so worried about astronomy per se,” says Drimmel. “I’m worried that what inspired me to become an astronomer is at risk.”

While those initial images of the train of satellites were impressive, the possibility of having so many satellites constantly visible is somewhat alarming. Astronomers may well be able to mitigate the impact of Starlink and other satellites (several teams are already working on models to see how that might be done), but the night sky itself may change forever as a result.

“With Starlink, we are expecting at least 100 satellites to be visible at any one time [at any location on Earth],” says Baskill. “Soon, even those fortunate to experience a truly dark site will find it filled with a haze of metal, slowly swarming across the night sky.”

Comment Re:Wow, what a list... (Score 1) 169

by artemis67 (#58666410) Attached to: Movie Companies Sue 'YTS' and 'YIFY' Site Operators in US Court

The reason it's a list of shitty movies is because the producers of these films are looking to make bank. These films didn't do well at the box office, so this is just another revenue stream to work. This is particularly important for them if the film didn't generate enough revenue in theaters to cover expenses.

Comment Re: First Trump U, and now this (Score 2) 165

by artemis67 (#58666212) Attached to: Some Business Schools Are Shutting Down Their MBA Programs

Couldn't most degrees be distilled down to "Read this stack of books, memorize these sets of facts, and perform these written exercises"?

Anyway, I have an MBA. I enjoyed it a lot. I got a lot of benefit from classroom instruction and interacting with professors. And I got enough understanding of business that I was able to start my own business, which I ran for six years.

I live in a banking town, so there were a lot of folks there getting an MBA with a finance concentration. It seemed to be very beneficial for them, career-wise.

I work in IT. My university did not have an IT concentration at the time, but I do have a lot of thoughts on how IT management should/could have been integrated into my university's program in a way that would have boosted my career even faster. But staying relevant to the job market is a problem for all degree programs, not just MBA's.

Submission + - Autonomous Vehicles will cause a Canadian Congestion Crisis (globalnews.ca)

Submitted by McGruber
McGruber writes: Transportation experts are warning that Autonomous Vehicles will cause a Congestion Crisis in Canada: "We could see as much as a 30 per cent increase in total vehicle traffic,” said Todd Litman, the executive director of the Victoria Transport Policy Institute in British Columbia.

Right now, the average commute in Canada’s largest city, Toronto, is already 34 minutes and with this projection, it could mean people are stuck on the street for closer to 45 minutes. For those who live in Vancouver or Montreal, where the average commute time is 30 minutes, drivers could face an extra 10 minutes stuck in traffic.

Adam Millard-Ball, an assistant professor in the environmental studies department at UC Santa Cruz, said AVs have an incentive to generate congestion. “Cruising at low speeds is not only cheaper per hour than paid parking, but cheaper per hour than traveling at high speeds." said Millard-Ball. "If they are just waiting, then they want to get stuck in traffic on purpose and create their own traffic congestion.” Ball predicted that even just 2,000 self-driving vehicles on San Francisco’s streets would slow traffic, on smaller side roads, to around three km/h.

Submission + - Is Dockerisation a fad? 4

Submitted by Qbertino
Qbertino writes: I do LAMP Development for a living, and in recent years Docker has been the hottest thing since sliced bread. You are expected to "dockerize" your setups and be able to launch a whole string of processes to boot up various containers with databases and your primary PHP monolith with the launch of a single script. All fine and dandy this far.

However, I can't shake the notion that much of this — especially in the context of LAMP — seems overkill. If Apache, MariaDB/MySQL and PHP are running, getting your project or multiple projects to run is trivial. The benefits of having Docker seem negilible, especially having each project lug its own setup along. Yes, you can have your entire compiler and CI stack with SASS, Gulp, Babel, Webpack and whatnot in one neat bundle, but that doesn't seem to dimish the usual problems with the recent bloat in frontend tooling, to the contrary. ... But shouldn't tooling be standardised anyway? And shouldn't Docker then just be an option, who couldn't be bothered to habe (L)AMP on their bare metal?

I'm still sceptical of this dockerisation fad. I get it makes sense if you need to scale microsevices easy and fast in production, but for 'traditional' development and traditional setups, it just doesn't seem to fit all that well. What are your experiences with using Docker in a development environment? Is Dockerisation a fad or something really useful? And should I put up with the effort to make Docker a standard for my development and deployment setups?

Educated slashdot opinions requested. Thanks.

Comment Re:...and the cost for not becoming carbon neutral (Score 2) 384

by artemis67 (#58591320) Attached to: Making America Carbon Neutral Could Cost $1 Trillion a Year

Migration? How about war. As the changing climate makes food and other resources more scarce, countries will be willing to go to war with one another to acquire those resources.

Expect EVERY nation to feel the pinch, while the smaller nations start fighting it out. And then it will bubble up to the larger nations.

Comment Re:...and the cost for not becoming carbon neutral (Score 5, Insightful) 384

by artemis67 (#58589446) Attached to: Making America Carbon Neutral Could Cost $1 Trillion a Year

Climate Change is a "frog in the kettle" problem. The changes are happening slowly enough that uninformed skeptics can dismiss the impacts. And the impacts are hitting poverty-stricken areas of the world the hardest, where there is already a delicate balance of life. You know, those areas of the world that we in the first world don't give a fuck about because we're cozy in our middle class lives. But those impacts will eventually catch up to us.

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