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Submission + - Hacking Weight Loss: What I Learned Losing 30 Pounds (jeffreifman.com)

Submitted by reifman
reifman writes: The CDC reports that 69% of adult Americans are overweight or obese. Techies like us are at increased risk because of our sedentary lifestyles. Perhaps you even scoffed at Neilsen's recent finding that some Americans spend only 11 hours daily of screen time. Over the last nine months, I've lost 30 pounds and learned a lot about hacking weight loss and I did it without fad diets, step trackers, running or going paleo.
Earth

How 'Virtual Water' Can Help Ease California's Drought 417

Posted by timothy from the it's-as-if-prices-conveyed-information dept.
HughPickens.com writes Bill Davidow And Michael S. Malone write in the WSJ that recent rains have barely made a dent in California's enduring drought, now in its fourth year. Thus, it's time to solve the state's water problem with radical solutions, and they can begin with "virtual water." This concept describes water that is used to produce food or other commodities, such as cotton. According to Davidow and Malone, when those commodities are shipped out of state, virtual water is exported. Today California exports about six trillion gallons of virtual water, or about 500 gallons per resident a day. How can this happen amid drought? The problem is mispricing. If water were priced properly, it is a safe bet that farmers would waste far less of it, and the effects of California's drought—its worst in recorded history—would not be so severe. "A free market would raise the price of water, reflecting its scarcity, and lead to a reduction in the export of virtual water," say Davidow and Malone. "A long history of local politics, complicated regulation and seemingly arbitrary controls on distribution have led to gross inefficiency."

For example, producing almonds is highly profitable when water is cheap but almond trees are thirsty, and almond production uses about 10% of California's total water supply. The thing is, nuts use a whole lot of water: it takes about a gallon of water to grow one almond, and nearly five gallons to produce a walnut. "Suppose an almond farmer could sell real water to any buyer, regardless of county boundaries, at market prices—many hundreds of dollars per acre-foot—if he agreed to cut his usage in half, say, by drawing only two acre-feet, instead of four, from his wells," say the authors. "He might have to curtail all or part of his almond orchard and grow more water-efficient crops. But he also might make enough money selling his water to make that decision worthwhile." Using a similar strategy across its agricultural industry, California might be able to reverse the economic logic that has driven farmers to plant more water-intensive crops. "This would take creative thinking, something California is known for, and trust in the power of free markets," conclude the authors adding that "almost anything would be better, and fairer, than the current contradictory and self-defeating regulations."
Security

LightEater Malware Attack Places Millions of Unpatched BIOSes At Risk 83

Posted by timothy from the nothing's-perfect dept.
Mark Wilson writes Two minutes is all it takes to completely destroy a computer. In a presentation entitled 'How many million BIOSes would you like to infect?' at security conference CanSecWest, security researchers Corey Kallenberg and Xeno Kovah revealed that even an unskilled person could use an implant called LightEater to infect a vulnerable system in mere moments. The attack could be used to render a computer unusable, but it could also be used to steal passwords and intercept encrypted data. The problem affects motherboards from companies including Gigabyte, Acer, MSI, HP and Asus. It is exacerbated by manufactures reusing code across multiple UEFI BIOSes and places home users, businesses and governments at risk.

Submission + - Chinese Vice Premier Says Rapid Growth Isn't What Economy Needs (bloomberg.com)

Submitted by jones_supa
jones_supa writes: China doesn't need the rapid economic growth of the past and will instead focus on tasks including returning the blue to Beijing's skies, said Zhang Gaoli, a member of the seven-man Politburo Standing Committee, the nation’s top decision-making body. "It is both impossible and unnecessary to maintain the very high growth of the past. We've paid the price for that. It's not sustainable." China's growth has cooled as officials rein in local-government debt, crack down on graft and strengthen environmental laws after economic expansion averaged about 10% annually over 30 years. Premier Li Keqiang's targeted gain of about 7% in gross domestic product this year would be the smallest increase since 1990, and the growth rate is bound to slow even further. President Xi Jinping and other leaders describe the slowdown as a new normal and a higher quality of expansion. China's advantages have also weakened because labor costs have increased, Zhang reminded.
Earth

In Response to Pollution Spike, Paris Temporarily Halves Traffic By Decree 198

Posted by timothy from the solomonic-wisdom dept.
As reported by News.com.au, the city of Paris has implemented a harsh (but temporary) measure for drivers, in response to a surge in pollution: banning cars with even-numbered registration plates from the streets. According to the article, City mayor Anne Hidalgo had asked authorities to prevent one in every two cars from taking to the capital’s streets and make all public transport temporarily free in a bid to drive down pollution. Only vehicles with numberplates ending in an odd number will be allowed to drive, though exceptions exist for vehicles like taxis, electric cars and ambulances. ... Public transportation is to be free until at least Monday in Paris and its surrounding towns in an effort to force pollution down by coaxing drivers to give up their cars for a few days. Similar emergency measures were last implemented almost exactly a year ago — on March 17 — during a particularly bad spike in the pollution levels.

Feed Google News Sci Tech: ESA Rosetta Spacecraft Observes Comet 67P Slowing Down - Pioneer News (google.com)

From feed by feedfeeder

Pioneer News
ESA Rosetta Spacecraft Observes Comet 67P Slowing Down
Pioneer News
Observations of the Comet 67P, from the ESA Rosetta satellite, show that the comet appears to be slowing down. Rosetta flight director, Andrea Accomazzo, explains: “The gas jets coming out of the comet, are acting like thrusters and are slowing down the...
Rosetta's Comet Slowing Down As It Approaches SunDesign & Trend
Molecular Nitrogen on Rosetta Focuses to the Comet's Extremely Frosty ... Empire State Tribune
Rosetta nears Comet 67P; Philae lander still not operationalScience Recorder
American Register-Northern Voices Online-Delhi Daily News
all 72 news articles

Crime

Hundreds Expelled, Many Arrested, For Cheating In India's School Exams 233

Posted by timothy from the not-exactly-subtle-about-it dept.
Etherwalk writes Sources conflict, but it looks like as many as 300 people have been arrested for cheating in the Indian state of Bihar after the Hindustan Times published images of dozens of men climbing the walls of a test center to pass answers inside. 500-700+ students were expelled and police had been bribed to look the other way. Xinhau's version of the story omits any reference to police bribery, while The ABC's omits the fact that police fired guns into the air.

Submission + - Modern PHP: New Features and Good Practices

Submitted by Michael Ross
Michael Ross writes: Robert, here is the book review meta-data: author: Josh Lockhart pages: 268 publisher: O'Reilly Media rating: 8/10 reviewer: Michael Ross ISBN: 978-1491905012 summary: Solid advice on some state-of-the-art PHP tools and techniques.

In recent years, JavaScript has enjoyed a dramatic renaissance as it has been transformed from a browser scripting tool primarily used for special effects and form validation on web pages, to a substantial client-side programming language. Similarly, on the server side, after years as the target of criticism, the PHP computer programming language is seeing a revival, partly due to the addition of new capabilities, such as namespaces, traits, generators, closures, and components, among other improvements. PHP enthusiasts and detractors alike can learn more about these changes from the book Modern PHP: New Features and Good Practices, authored by Josh Lockhart.

Programmers familiar with the language and its community may recognize the author's name, because he is the creator of PHP The Right Way, a website which he describes as "an easy-to-read, quick reference for PHP popular coding standards, links to authoritative tutorials around the Web and what the contributors consider to be best practices at the present time," in 21 different languages.

Yet rest assured that the book under review is not merely a dead-tree version of the website. Instead, the book covers the more recent advancements within the language, while the website covers best practices and standards. This should be borne in mind, otherwise the reader may be baffled by the absence from the book of certain topics on the website essential to the language, such as SPL, PEAR, and PHPDoc. Moreover, of the topics shared between the book and the website, the information is generally organized quite differently, with more example code in the book.

This title was published on 1 March 2015, under the ISBN 978-1491905012, by O'Reilly Media, who kindly provided me with a review copy. Its material is presented in 268 pages, organized into 13 chapters (The New PHP; Features; Standards; Components; Good Practices; Posting; Provisioning; Tuning; Deployment; Testing; Profiling; HHVM and Hack; Community), which are grouped into three parts (Language Features; Good Practices; Deployment, Testing, and Tuning) — as well as two appendices (Installing PHP; Local Development Environments) and an index. The publisher's page does not offer much of interest. However, all of the example code is available from the book's GitHub repository. There are differences between the GitHub code and what is printed in the book, e.g., a baffling require 'vendor/autoload.php'; in the first example code file. The author claims that the reader does not need to know PHP, but at least "a basic understanding of [] fundamental programming concepts" (page xiv). However, anyone without at least intermediate skills and experience with PHP could conceivably struggle with these more advanced subjects.

The first chapter is only a brief overview of the history of PHP, its current state, and some possible future changes to the language's engine. The real content starts in the second chapter, in which the author gives the reader a fast-paced introduction to his seven favorite major new features in PHP: namespaces, class interfaces, traits, generators, closures, Zend OPcache, and the built-in HTTP server. In some regards, the coverage is a bit too fast-paced, as some topics and questions likely in the reader's mind are not addressed — for instance, namespace case-sensitivity and techniques for ensuring that a chosen namespace is globally unique (page 9). For each topic, its purpose and advantages are explained, and sometimes illustrated with code examples, although none are extensive.

The second part of the book opens with a chapter on some of the new standards in the PHP ecosystem that are intended to move the common development process from a reliance upon one isolated framework, with an idiosyncratic coding style, to distributed components that can interoperate through the use of interfaces, industry-wide coding standards, and the use of autoloaders for finding and loading classes, interfaces, and traits at runtime. Components are covered in more detail in the subsequent chapter, as is Composer, for installing components and managing dependencies. The fifth chapter is a lengthy but information-packed exposition of numerous best practices regarding input data sanitization, password handling, dates and times, and safe database queries, among other topics. Some of the advice can be found in other PHP books and online, but all of this is neatly explained, updated with the newer PHP versions, and worthwhile as a refresher.

Deployment, testing, and tuning are the broad subject areas of the third and final part of the book. The author discusses the options for hosting your PHP applications, as well as provisioning any self-managed web server and tuning a server for optimal performance. All of the instructions assume you are using Linux and nginx, and thus would be of less value to those using Windows or Apache, for instance. The material on application deployment is relatively brief, and focuses on use of the Capistrano tool. Testing is often neglected in real-world projects, but certainly not in this book, as the author explains unit and functional testing, illustrated through the use of PHPUnit. This is followed by information on how to use a development or production profiler to analyze the performance of your application, with detailed coverage of Xdebug and XHProf, among other tools. The next two chapters dive into topics related to the (possible) future of PHP — specifically, Facebook's HHVM PHP interpreter and their Hack derivative language. The final chapter briefly discusses the PHP community. The two appendices explain how to install PHP on Linux or OS X for commandline use, and how to set up a local development environment. The author mentions a free edition of Zend Server, but the vendor page mentions no such pricing.

Despite its technical subject matter, this book is not a difficult read. The author's writing style is usually light and friendly, especially in the preface. In a few places, the phrasing is a bit too terse, which might prove momentarily confusing to some readers, e.g., "Function and constant aliases work the same as [those of] classes" (page 11). The text has some errata (aside from the two, as of this writing, already reported): "curl" (pages 15, 220, and 222; should read "cURL"), "a an argument" (page 33), "Prepared statement [to] fetch" (pages 99 and 100), "with [the] php://filter strategy" (page 110), "2 Gb" (page 129; should read "2 GB"), "the the" (page 154), "path to a the code" (page 176), and "Wordpress" (page 190; should read "WordPress").

One weakness with the book is that for several of the topics — including some critical ones — there is not enough detailed information provided that would allow one to begin immediately applying that technique or resource to one's own coding, but instead just enough information to whet one's appetite to learn more (presumably from another book or a website). Secondly, some of the narrative — particularly near the end of the book, when discussing various tools — would be of less value to anyone not developing analytics environment. Beware that some of the tools require numerous dependencies. For instance, do you have Composer, Git, MongoDB, and its PHP extension installed? If not, then you won't be using XHGUI. Also, some of the installation and configuration steps are quite lengthy, with no details provided for troubleshooting issues that might arise. Lastly, despite the promise that any reader with only basic programming knowledge will be able to fully understand the book, such a reader would likely find much of its contents mystifying without further preparation from other sources.

Nonetheless, the book has much to offer, despite its slender size. Numerous resources are recommended — most if not all apparently vetted by the author, who clearly has considerable experience in this arena. Some valuable techniques are presented, such as those instances in the text where the author shows how to use iteration on large data sets to minimize memory usage. In addition, the example code demonstrates that the author has made the effort to produce quality code that can serve as a model to others. Modern PHP does a fine job overall of explaining and advocating the newer capabilities of PHP that would attract developers to choose the language for building state-of-the-art websites and web applications.

Michael Ross is a freelance web developer and writer.
OS X

For Boot Camp Users, New Macs Require Windows 8 Or Newer 209

Posted by timothy from the you-can't-quite-you're-fired dept.
For anyone using Windows 7 by way of Apple's Boot Camp utility, beware: support for Windows via Boot Camp remains, but for the newest Apple laptops, it's only for Windows 8 for now. From Slashgear: This applies to the 2015 MacBook Air, and the 13-inch model of the 2015 MacBook Pro. Windows 8 will remain compatible, as will the forthcoming Windows 10. The 2013 Mac Pro also dropped Boot Camp support for Windows 7, while 2014 iMacs are still compatible, along with 2014 MacBook Airs and 2014 MacBook Pros. For those who still prefer to run Windows 7 on their Macs, there are other options. This change to Boot Camp will not affect using the Microsoft operating system through virtualization software, such as Parallels and VMware Fusion. Also at PC Mag.

Submission + - Mars One Delayed 2 Years, CEO releases video in response to criticism (astrowatch.net)

Submitted by CryoKeen
CryoKeen writes: Its interesting how different news sites spin #marsgate first the Yahoo News
The private colonization project Mars One has pushed its
planned launch of the first humans toward the Red Planet
back by two years, to 2026.
The delay was necessitated by a lack of investment funding,
which has slowed work on a robotic precursor mission that
Mars One had wanted to send toward the Red Planet in
2018, Mars One CEO Bas Lansdorp said in a new video
posted today... "We had a very successful investment round in 2013 that
has financed all the things that we have done up to now.
And we have actually come to an agreement with a
consortium of investors late last year for a much bigger
round of investments. Unfortunately, the paperwork of that
deal is taking much longer than we expected," Lansdorp Lansdorp said in the video.

This Astrowatch article is a lot more scathing and to the point " Mars One, the Dutch company planning to send people on a
one-way trip to Mars, that recently selected a group of 100
hopefuls, struggles with criticism. In a Medium story this
week, Mars One finalist Joseph Roche presented multiple
reasons as to why he believed the entire operation is a
complete scam. In response, the company published a
video Thursday in which Bas Lansdorp, CEO and Co-
founder of Mars One, replies to recent criticism concerning
the feasibility of Mars One's human trip to Mars. He also
revealed that the mission will be delayed for two years.
Roche said that the “only way” to get selected for the next
round of the Mars One candidacy process was to donate
money. “My nightmare about it is that people continue to
support it and give it money and attention, and it then gets
to the point where it inevitably falls on its face,” Roche told
Elmo Keep for Medium."

Submission + - How 'Virtual Water' Can Help Ease California's Drought

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: Bill Davidow And Michael S. Malone write in the WSJ that recent rains have barely made a dent in California's enduring drought, now in its fourth year so it's time to solve the state’s water problem with radical solutions, and they can begin with “virtual water.” This concept describes water that is used to produce food or other commodities, such as cotton. According to Davidow and Malone, when those commodities are shipped out of state, virtual water is exported. Today California exports about six trillion gallons of virtual water, or about 500 gallons per resident a day. How can this happen amid drought? The problem is mispricing. If water were priced properly, it is a safe bet that farmers would waste far less of it, and the effects of California’s drought—its worst in recorded history—would not be so severe. "A free market would raise the price of water, reflecting its scarcity, and lead to a reduction in the export of virtual water," say Davidow and Malone. "A long history of local politics, complicated regulation and seemingly arbitrary controls on distribution have led to gross inefficiency."

For example, producing almonds is highly profitable when water is cheap but almond trees are thirsty, and almond production uses about 10% of California’s total water supply. The thing is, nuts use a whole lot of water: it takes about a gallon of water to grow one almond, and nearly five gallons to produce a walnut. "Suppose an almond farmer could sell real water to any buyer, regardless of county boundaries, at market prices—many hundreds of dollars per acre-foot—if he agreed to cut his usage in half, say, by drawing only two acre-feet, instead of four, from his wells," say the authors. "He might have to curtail all or part of his almond orchard and grow more water-efficient crops. But he also might make enough money selling his water to make that decision worthwhile." Using a similar strategy across its agricultural industry, California might be able to reverse the economic logic that has driven farmers to plant more water-intensive crops. "This would take creative thinking, something California is known for, and trust in the power of free markets," conclude the authors adding that "almost anything would be better, and fairer, than the current contradictory and self-defeating regulations."

Feed Google News Sci Tech: Apple Kicks Windows 7 Out of New MacBooks' Boot Camp - PC Magazine (google.com)

From feed by feedfeeder

TechCrunch
Apple Kicks Windows 7 Out of New MacBooks' Boot Camp
PC Magazine
If you just bought a brand-new MacBook laptop, and you loathe everything about Windows 8—but still need to run a Windows operating system on your MacBook for some reason—then we have a bit of bad news for you. According to the latest support page...
Apple retires Windows 7 from its Boot Camp with new MacBooks, supporting ... Inferse
Boot Camp in new Mac models no longer support Windows 7I4U News
Apple Stops Supporting Windows 7 in Boot Camp on New MacBook Pro ... Mac Rumors

all 60 news articles

Communications

How To Encode 2.05 Bits Per Photon, By Using Twisted Light 91

Posted by timothy from the isn't-that-a-slayer-album? dept.
Thorfinn.au writes Researchers at the University of Rochester and their collaborators have developed a way to transfer 2.05 bits per photon by using "twisted light." [Abstract here.]This remarkable achievement is possible because the researchers used the orbital angular momentum of the photons to encode information, rather than the more commonly used polarization of light. The new approach doubles the 1 bit per photon that is possible with current systems that rely on light polarization and could help increase the efficiency of quantum cryptography systems.

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