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Submission + - Forced Subscriptions Are Increasingly Driving 3D Users To Open Source Tools 2

Submitted by dryriver
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.

Submission + - America's Biggest Restaurant Chains Scored On Their Antibiotic Use (cnn.com)

Submitted by dryriver
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.

Submission + - Iceland Livestreams 10-Year-Old McDonald's Cheeseburger That Won't Decompose (bbc.com) 1

Submitted by dryriver
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.

Submission + - 13 Year Old Invents Alternative To Hyperloop (cnn.com) 1

Submitted by dryriver
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.

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: How Was The Quality Of Your Academic Tech Education?

Submitted by dryriver
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?

Submission + - Origin Of Modern Humans 'Traced To Botswana' (bbc.com)

Submitted by dryriver
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.

Submission + - Elon Musk's 30,000 Extra Broadband Satellites Could "Trap Humanity On Earth" (thesun.co.uk) 4

Submitted by dryriver
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.

Submission + - For Now Women, Not Democracy, Are the Main Victims of Deepfakes (zdnet.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: While the 2020 U.S. presidential elections have lawmakers on edge over AI-generated fake videos, a new study by Netherlands-based deepfake-detection outfit Deeptrace shows that the main victims today are women. According to Deeptrace, deepfake videos have exploded in the past year, rising from 8,000 in December 2018 to 14,678 today. And not surprisingly for the internet, nearly all of the material is pornography, which accounts for 96% of the deepfake videos it's found online. The fake videos have been viewed 134 million times.

The numbers suggest deepfake porn is still niche but also growing quickly. Additionally, 90% of the fake content depicted women from the US, UK, and Canada, while 2% represented women from South Korea and 2% depicted women from Taiwan. "Deepfake pornography is a phenomenon that exclusively targets and harms women," the company notes. That small number of non-pornographic deepfake videos it analyzed on YouTube mostly contained (61%) synthesized male subjects. According to Henry Ajder, a researcher at Deeptrace, currently most of the deepfake porn involves famous women. But he reckons the threat to all women is likely to increase as it becomes less computationally expensive to create deepfakes. As for the political threat, there actually aren't that many cases where deepfakes have changed a political outcome.

Submission + - Da Vinci's Ingenious 1502 Bridge Design For Istanbul Would Have Worked (cnn.com)

Submitted by dryriver
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."

Submission + - Study: Many Popular Medical Apps Send User Info To 3rd or 4th Parties (bmj.com)

Submitted by dryriver
dryriver writes: A study in the British Medical Journal ( https://www.bmj.com/content/36... ) that looked at 24 of the 100s of Medical apps available on Google Play found that 79% pass all sorts of user info — including sensitive medical info like what your reported symptoms are and what medications you are taking in some cases — on to 3rd and 4th parties. A German-made and apparently very popular medical app named Ada was found to share user data with trackers like Facebook, Adjust and Amplitude for example ( article in German: https://www.heise.de/ct/artike... ). The New York Times also warned recently about apps that want to retrieve/store your medical records ( https://www.nytimes.com/2019/0... ). From the conclusion of the study: 19/24 (79%) of sampled apps shared user data. 55 unique entities, owned by 46 parent companies, received or processed app user data, including developers and parent companies (first parties) and service providers (third parties). 18 (33%) provided infrastructure related services such as cloud services. 37 (67%) provided services related to the collection and analysis of user data, including analytics or advertising, suggesting heightened privacy risks. Network analysis revealed that first and third parties received a median of 3 (interquartile range 1-6, range 1-24) unique transmissions of user data. Third parties advertised the ability to share user data with 216 “fourth parties”; within this network (n=237), entities had access to a median of 3 (interquartile range 1-11, range 1-140) unique transmissions of user data. Several companies occupied central positions within the network with the ability to aggregate and re-identify user data.

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: Should People Be Able To Shop Anonymously On The Internet? 1

Submitted by dryriver
dryriver writes: Picture this: You want to buy 3 small items from some online retailer totalling about 50 bucks. A programming book, a USB thumbdrive and an HDMI cable. But you don't want to give this online retailer your full name, credit card number, email address, home postal address, phone number or other data for this insignificant little 50 Dollar online transaction, nor do you want to bother with "registering an account" at the online retailer's webpage with password hassles and such. You want to buy quickly and anonymously, just like you can from a bricks and mortar shop with cash. You now instruct your bank — or another online shopping intermediary you DO trust with your data — to pay for those 3 items, receive them, and send them on to your home address. The online retailer gets 50 bucks as usual, but does NOT get identifying private data about you. You just shopped online, without having to bend over and ID yourself in X different ways to some online retailer, and your private info didn't go into yet another who-knows-where forever-database that may some day be hacked or compromised. Why is this simple, simple service not really a thing in the real world? Why can you walk into a bricks and mortar shop in most countries, pick out some products, pay in cash and walk out, and when you want to buy the exact same (non-dangerous) items online, you have to tell some profit-oriented retailer all sorts of stuff about yourself? Why is real world store shopping pretty much anonymous — as it has been for centuries — and online shopping almost like being ID'd before boarding a flight at an airport?

Submission + - Popular "Brazilian Butt Lifts" May Have Resulted In Hundred Of Fatalities (cnn.com)

Submitted by dryriver
dryriver writes: CNN reports: The British Association of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons (BAAPS) has said it will vote later Friday on whether the procedure popularly known as the Brazilian butt lift is safe enough to be performed in the UK. An expert panel will assess the latest evidence and decide whether to uphold previous guidance it issued in 2018, which strongly warned surgeons against performing the surgery because of its high fatality rate. If the guidance is upheld it will essentially ban the procedure in the UK, though surgeons could in theory choose to ignore the recommendation.

Concern about the procedure, which has been rising in popularity over the past five years, follows a number of cases of serious illness and death. Two Britons are known to have died following the surgery, and it is feared that globally the number of fatalities could be in the hundreds, BAAPS president and plastic surgeon Paul Harris told CNN.

The surgery, which can cost in excess of £6,000 (around $7,400) in Britain, involves taking fat from another part of the patient's body and injecting it into the buttocks, to increase their size and roundness. But there is a risk of injecting the fat into large veins, after which it can travel to the heart or brain, causing a "fat embolism" and illness or death, according to the plastic surgeons' body.

According to an anonymous 2017 survey of 692 surgeons worldwide, 32 respondents reported fatalities and 103 cited non-fatal cases of fat embolism.

Comment Did Anyone Expect Any Better From A GAME Company ? (Score 4, Insightful) 312

The game industry took our installer discs away, forced Steam/Origin/UPlay cloud DRM on us, took away our right to sell games second hand, dumbed down virtually all games for "casual players" and "game consoles", and also tried to pry lots of money from teenagers and younger kids using "pay to win" game mechanics and "lootboxes". Of course these PROFIT-MONGERS will SUPPORT CHINA rather than the poor inhabitants of HongKong. Well played Activision. I'm sure this will make your company REALLY POPULAR with gamers who also happen to be IDEALISTS.

Submission + - The 2011, 440 Page Media Piracy Study The Entire Content Industry Ignored (americanassembly.org)

Submitted by dryriver
dryriver writes: In the 2000s and early 2010s, there was incredibly amounts of content producers screaming "Media piracy in developing countries is killing our business" at the top of their lungs. All sorts of evil, nasty, bad people in the developing world were buying pirated CDs, DVDs, MP3s, PC games, Software, academic textbooks and other stuff, rather than the legit items. When people pointed out "Uh, aren't you pricing your products waaaay too high for the developing world? People there are not as rich as Americans, Germans, Scandinavians or Japanese people you know?", the content producers just screamed "Piracy is illegal! Piracy is illegal!" and kept their prices skyhigh. This 440 page study published back in 2011 ( http://piracy.americanassembly... ), which went completely ignored by the entire content industry, pinpointed the problem perfectly: Market Failure caused by Dollar prices set far too high for people in countries like Brazil, Chile, Vietnam, Russia, the Phillippines and other countries to possibly afford. The consumer demand was there. People very much wanted to buy the legit item. The producers — mostly large Western corporations at that time — overpriced by incredible amounts for reasons probably only they understand. This forced low-income people in the developing world to either consume nothing at all made in the West, and become cut off from the Western "Media Bubble" in a rapidly globalizing world, or to turn to local substitute suppliers — content pirates — who provided the exact same digital product at prices that were actually within reach of the average consumer in these countries. The industry willfully ignored what every 1st year Economics student knows — if you set your product prices at a level nobody can afford, market failure will occur even when there is high demand, and consumers will go in search of legal or illegal substitutes for what they cannot buy from you.

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