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Comment You create legends (Score 1) 273

by linear a (#60375055) Attached to: How To Build a Nuclear Warning For 10,000 Years' Time
If you really want the message to stick around, you screw it up so horrendously right now that it becomes a legend embedded in the fabric of our culture. Don't think 'Titanic' but more like 'Noah's Ark Flood'. Make sure the hideous disaster affects most of the world so it isn't specific to only certain future cultures.
Cloud

'The New Dropbox Sucks' (daringfireball.net) 135

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
Earlier this week, Dropbox introduced a new desktop application that brings a new look to the file-sharing service as well as new capabilities. With this release, Dropbox has changed the underlying structure of its desktop application to operate just like any other desktop application, rather than its previous incarnation, which was tied very closely to desktop file systems like Windows File Explorer or Apple's Finder. Dropbox adds: It's a single workspace to organize your content, connect your tools, and bring everyone together, wherever you are. The first thing you'll notice is an all-new Dropbox desktop app that we're introducing today through our early access program. It's more than an app, though -- it's a completely new experience. That all sounds great, until you attempt to use it. John Gruber, writing for Daring Fireball: I don't want any of this. All I want from Dropbox is a folder that syncs perfectly across my devices and allows sharing with friends and colleagues. That's it: a folder that syncs with sharing. And that's what Dropbox was. Now it's a monstrosity that embeds its own incredibly resource-heavy web browser engine. In a sense Steve Jobs was right -- the old Dropbox was a feature not a product. But it was a feature well-worth paying for, and which made millions of people very happy.
Space

Exploding Stars Led To Humans Walking On Two Legs, Radical Study Suggests (theguardian.com) 170

Posted by BeauHD from the behind-the-scenes dept.
dryriver shares a report from The Guardian: It was the evolutionary leap that defined the species: while other apes ambled around on all fours, the ancestors of humans rose up on two legs and, from that lofty position, went on to conquer the world. The benefits of standing tall in the African savannah are broadly nailed down, but what prompted our distant forebears to walk upright is far from clear. Now, in a radical proposal, U.S. scientists point to a cosmic intervention: protohumans had a helping hand from a flurry of exploding stars, they say.

According to the researchers, a series of stars in our corner of the Milky Way exploded in a cosmic riot that began about 7 million years ago and continued for millions of years more. The supernovae blasted powerful cosmic rays in all directions. On Earth, the radiation arriving from the cataclysmic explosions peaked about 2.6 million years ago. The surge of radiation triggered a chain of events, the scientists argue. As cosmic rays battered the planet, they ionized the atmosphere and made it more conductive. This could have ramped up the frequency of lightning strikes, sending wildfires raging through African forests, and making way for grasslands, they write in the Journal of Geology. With fewer trees at hand in the aftermath, our ancient ancestors adapted, and those who walked upright thrived.

Comment Three examples: (Score 1) 132

by linear a (#58364248) Attached to: The Dangers of Sharing Your Screen With Co-Workers
Three examples: 1 Working with corporate database team member. That person needed to look up the system password for my database and brought up their master password list for all the DBs they managed. I managed to get a screenshot of that (maybe 30 various corporate DB systems). 2 Colleague shared screen for a meeting. We ended the meeting but he didn't stop the screenshare and I switched to another window to do other stuff. Came back later and he was busy messaging on a (non-explicit) dating site. 3 Twice, a colleague closed his remote sharing software but the sharing did not stop on my end. All visible trace of the software was closed on his PC but I could still see his desktop. Called him to troubleshoot and he could find no trace on his PC that it was running except that the screenshare software windows service was still running under Task Manager.
Advertising

Spotify Bans Ad Blockers In Updated ToS (theverge.com) 172

Posted by BeauHD from the read-the-fine-print dept.
In an updated Terms of Service policy sent out on Thursday, Spotify is now explicitly banning ad blockers. "The new rules specifically state that 'circumventing or blocking advertisements in the Spotify Service, or creating or distributing tools designed to block advertisements in the Spotify Service' can result in immediate termination or suspension of your account," reports The Verge. From the report: The service already takes significant measures to limit ad blockers. In a DigiDay report from last August, a Spotify spokesperson revealed that the company has "multiple detection measures in place monitoring consumption on the service to detect, investigate and deal with [artificial manipulation of streaming activity]." After it was reported last March that 2 million users (about 2 percent of free Spotify users) were dodging ads with modded apps and accounts, Spotify began cracking down by disabling accounts when the company detected abnormal activity. Users were sent email warnings and given the chance to reactivate their accounts after uninstalling the ad-blocking software. In some rare cases where the problem persisted, Spotify would terminate the account. The new Terms of Service, which go into effect on March 1st, will give Spotify the authority to terminate accounts immediately, without warning.
Power

World's Oldest Nobel Prize Winner Is Working On Light 'Concentrators' That May Give Everyone Clean, Cheap Energy (businessinsider.com) 156

Posted by BeauHD from the there's-more-where-that-came-from dept.
A reader shares a report from Business Insider: Arthur Ashkin, the world's oldest Nobel Prize winner, [...] has turned the bottom floor of his house into a kind of laboratory where he's developing a solar-energy-harnessing device. Ashkin's new invention uses geometry to capture and funnel light. Essentially, it relies on reflective concentrator tubes that intensify solar reflections, which could make existing solar panels more efficient or perhaps even replace them altogether with something cheaper and simpler. The tubes are "dirt cheap," Ashkin says -- they cost just pennies to create -- which is why he thinks they "will save the world." He's even got his eye on a second Nobel Prize.

Ashkin's lifelong fascination with light has already saved countless lives. He shared the 2018 Nobel Prize in physics for his role in inventing a tiny object-levitating technology called optical tweezers, which is essentially a powerful laser beam that can "catch very small things," as Ashkin describes it. Optical tweezers can hold and stretch DNA, thereby helping us probe some of the biggest mysteries of life. [...] Ashkin has already filed the necessary patent paperwork (he holds at least 47 patents to date) for his new invention, but said he isn't ready to share photos of the concentrators with the public just yet. Soon, he hopes to publish his results in the journal Science.
Science

Scientists Have 'Hacked Photosynthesis' To Boost Crop Growth By 40 Percent (npr.org) 280

Posted by BeauHD from the food-for-thought dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: There's a big molecule, a protein, inside the leaves of most plants. It's called Rubisco, which is short for an actual chemical name that's very long and hard to remember. Rubisco has one job. It picks up carbon dioxide from the air, and it uses the carbon to make sugar molecules. It gets the energy to do this from the sun. This is photosynthesis, the process by which plants use sunlight to make food, a foundation of life on Earth. "But it has what we like to call one fatal flaw," Amanda Cavanagh, a biologist and post-doctoral researcher at the University of Illinois, says. Unfortunately, Rubisco isn't picky enough about what it grabs from the air. It also picks up oxygen. "When it does that, it makes a toxic compound, so the plant has to detoxify it."

Plants have a whole complicated chemical assembly line to carry out this detoxification, and the process uses up a lot of energy. This means the plant has less energy for making leaves, or food for us. Cavanagh and her colleagues in a research program called Realizing Increased Photosynthetic Efficiency (RIPE), which is based at the University of Illinois, have spent the last five years trying to fix Rubisco's problem. "We're sort of hacking photosynthesis," she says. They experimented with tobacco plants, just because tobacco is easy to work with. They inserted some new genes into these plants, which shut down the existing detoxification assembly line and set up a new one that's way more efficient. And they created super tobacco plants. "They grew faster, and they grew up to 40 percent bigger" than normal tobacco plants, Cavanagh says. These measurements were done both in greenhouses and open-air field plots. The scientists are trying to apply this technique to other plants, like tomatoes, soybeans, and black-eyed peas, which are a staple food crop for a lot of farmers in sub-Saharan Africa. Cavanagh and her colleagues published their work this week in the journal Science.
Medicine

Why Doctors Hate Their Computers (newyorker.com) 292

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
Digitization promises to make medical care easier and more efficient. But are screens coming between doctors and patients? Here's an excerpt by Atul Gawande of The New Yorker, which talks about the deployment of Epic, a new medical software which cost Partners HealthCare a staggering $1.6 billion, panned out: On May 30, 2015, the Phase One Go-Live began. My hospital and clinics reduced the number of admissions and appointment slots for two weeks while the staff navigated the new system. For another two weeks, my department doubled the time allocated for appointments and procedures in order to accommodate our learning curve. This, I discovered, was the real reason the upgrade cost $1.6 billion. The software costs were under a hundred million dollars. The bulk of the expenses came from lost patient revenues and all the tech-support personnel and other people needed during the implementation phase.

In the first five weeks, the I.T. folks logged twenty-seven thousand help-desk tickets -- three for every two users. Most were basic how-to questions; a few involved major technical glitches. Printing problems abounded. Many patient medications and instructions hadn't transferred accurately from our old system. My hospital had to hire hundreds of moonlighting residents and pharmacists to double-check the medication list for every patient while technicians worked to fix the data-transfer problem.

Many of the angriest complaints, however, were due to problems rooted in what Sumit Rana, a senior vice-president at Epic, called "the Revenge of the Ancillaries." In building a given function -- say, an order form for a brain MRI -- the design choices were more political than technical: administrative staff and doctors had different views about what should be included. The doctors were used to having all the votes. But Epic had arranged meetings to try to adjudicate these differences. Now the staff had a say (and sometimes the doctors didn't even show), and they added questions that made their jobs easier but other jobs more time-consuming. Questions that doctors had routinely skipped now stopped them short, with "field required" alerts. A simple request might now involve filling out a detailed form that took away precious minutes of time with patients.

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