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Submission + - Researchers Find "Achilles Heel" of Drug Resistant Bacteria

Submitted by Rambo Tribble
Rambo Tribble writes: Researchers in Britain are reporting that they have found a way to prevent bacteria from forming the "wall" that prevents antibiotics from attacking them. "At the heart of the breakthrough is the way 'gram negative' bacterial cells transport the carrier's molecular 'bricks' to the surface of the cell and form a wall." "The number of superbugs are increasing at an unexpected rate. This research provides the platform for urgently-needed new generation drugs."

Submission + - Mt. Gox CEO Returns to Twitter, Enrages Burned Investors

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Mark Karpeles doesn't seem to understand how much anger and trouble the $400 million Mt. Gox fiasco caused his customers. According to Wired: "After a long absence, the Mt Gox CEO has returned to Twitter with a bizarre string of tone-deaf tweets that were either written by a Turing test chat bot, or by a man completely oblivious to the economic chaos he has wrought. His first message after losing hundreds of millions of dollars worth of bitcoins? 'What would we do without busybox?'—a reference to a slimmed-down Linux operating system used on devices such as routers. He’s also Tweeted about a noodle dish called yakisoba and Japanese transportation systems." Andreas Antonopoulos, the CSO with Blockchain says, "He continues to be oblivious about his own failure and the pain he has caused others. He is confirming that he is a self-absorbed narcissist with an inflated sense of self-confidence who has no remorse.”

Submission + - Quantum or not, controversial computer runs no faster than a normal one (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: The D-Wave computer, marketed as a groundbreaking quantum machine that runs circles around conventional computers, solves problems no faster than an ordinary rival, a new test shows. Some researchers call the test of the controversial device, described online today in Science, the fairest comparison yet. But D-Wave argues that the computations used in the study were too easy to show what its novel chips can do.

Submission + - Svitla Ruby Conference 2014 summary (rubyc.eu)

Submitted by Svitla Systems
Svitla Systems writes: On May 31 — June 1, 2014 the second conference about Ruby and Ruby on Rails – Rubyc took place in Kiev. More than 250 rubyists gathered to hear talks from the best developers on Ruby from Ukraine, USA, Brazil, Spain, UK, Germany and Russia. Organizers, Svitla Systems company, expresses gratitude to all participants of the conference, General Sponsor — SoftServe, Ruby-sponsors: DataArt and Global Logic, as well as all media-partners. Together we managed to hold one of the brightest Ruby events in Ukraine.

Traditionally, video presentations RubyC all speakers are available on the conference website http://rubyc.eu/posts/14

Submission + - Rare materials hold promise for non-volatile magnetic RAM, or MRAM (zdnet.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Scientists in New Zealand and France are finding commercial applications for materials called rare earth nitrides (RENs) that could revolutionize computer memory and storage. The materials could be used to create non-volatile magnetic RAM, MRAM, that retains its storage even when a device is turned off. This would be ideal, the researchers say, for cloud data storage spanning multiple servers and would enable faster computers that use less energy.

Submission + - Teaching Creationism As Science Now Banned In Britain's Schools (www.gov.uk) 2

Submitted by sandbagger
sandbagger writes: The UK has banned the teaching of creationism as science in all schools receiving public money. The new regulations were published last week with little to-do, state the 'requirement for every academy and free school to provide a broad and balanced curriculum in any case prevents the teaching of creationism as evidence based theory in any academy or free school.'

Submission + - New "Silk Road Clone" Mobile App Lets You Anonymously Buy Goods With Bitcoin (ibtimes.co.uk)

Submitted by concertina226
concertina226 writes: A developer is working on a new mobile app that allows users to anonymously trade goods and services from other users nearby, using bitcoins – essentially an anonymous equivalent of Gumtree or Craigslist.

Reddit user CiniCraft has posted the link to BitCraft, a new "Silk Road Clone" for mobile that is now in beta mode for users to test out.

Currently only accessible in a web browser, users can sign up for an account, which includes a public profile, a wallet they can add bitcoins to, a private inbox, and a public chat message board for their local region.

Users of the app can also locate users providing services and goods they want on an interactive map, provided using the Google Maps API.

Submission + - HUGO Winning Author Daniel Keyes has died. (locusmag.com)

Submitted by camperdave
camperdave writes: Author Daniel Keyes, 86, died June 15, 2014.

KKeyes is best known for his Hugo Award winning classic SF story “Flowers for Algernon” (F&SF, 1959), the Nebula Award winning and bestselling 1966 novel expansion, and the film version Charly (1968).

Keyes was born August 9, 1927 in New York. He worked variously as an editor, comics writer, fashion photographer, and teacher before joining the faculty of Ohio University in 1966, where he taught as a professor of English and creative writing, becoming professor emeritus in 2000. He married Aurea Georgina Vaquez in 1952, who predeceased him in 2013; they had two daughters.

Submission + - Duverger's law in political science predicts exactly two Bitcoin mining giants (economics.com.au)

Submitted by purnima
purnima writes: It's not every day that the old area of Political Science can help us think in a new way about technology. The linked article tells us that Bitcoin is different sort of technology: it has a democratic system built into the protocol. So when recently, the mining pool GHASH.IO achieved 54% of computational power amongst all Bitcoin miner there was a great deal of `weeping and gnashing of teeth’ in the Bitcoin community. You see, anyone controlling more than 50% of mining power exercises complete control over the recording of Bitcoin transactions. But all is not lost, “Duverger’s law” in political science predicts that the eventual stable market structure for Bitcoin mining will be two large mining pools of equal size. Equal size means two mining consortiums that will each frequently cross the 50% computational power line and have temporary control of the recording of Bitcoin transactions. And that, unlike a persistent monopoly, need not be a bad thing for the longevity of the currency.

Submission + - Was 'Watch Dogs' for PC Handicapped on Purpose? (metafilter.com)

Submitted by Advocatus Diaboli
Advocatus Diaboli writes: Many PC gamers were disappointed that Ubisoft's latest AAA game Watch_Dogs did not look as nice as when displayed at E3 in 2012. But this week a modder discovered that code to improve the game on PC is still buried within the released game, and can be turned back on without difficulty or performance hits. Ubisoft has yet to answer whether (or why) their PC release was deliberately handicapped.

Submission + - Ask for the resignation of Tom Wheeler (Head of the FCC) (whitehouse.gov)

Submitted by walterbyrd
walterbyrd writes: It is now clear that Tom Wheeler is not a representative of the people, but corporations. Previously to taking his current position Wheeler was the former head of 2 different lobbying organizations, which represented companies like Verizon, Comcast, and At&t. His actions helped turn them into the monopolies that they are today.

Submission + - Endurance experiment writes one petabyte to six consumer SSDs

Submitted by crookedvulture
crookedvulture writes: Last year, we kicked off an SSD endurance experiment to see how much data could be written to six consumer drives. One petabyte later, half of them are still going. Their performance hasn't really suffered, either. The casualties slowed down a little toward the very end, and they died in different ways. The Intel 335 Series and Kingston HyperX 3K provided plenty of warning of their imminent demise, though both still ended up completely unresponsive at the very end. The Samsung 840 Series, which uses more fragile TLC NAND, perished unexpectedly. It also suffered a rash of cell failures and multiple bouts of uncorrectable errors during its life. While the sample size is far too small to draw any definitive conclusions, all six SSDs exceeded their rated lifespans by hundreds of terabytes. The fact that all of them wrote over 700TB is a testament to the endurance of modern SSDs.

Submission + - Unicode 7.0 released, supporting 23 new scripts (blogspot.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The newest major version of the Unicode Standard was released today, adding 2,834 new characters, including two new currency symbols and 250 emoji. The inclusion of 23 new scripts is the largest addition of writing systems to Unicode since version 1.0 was published with Unicode's original 24 scripts. Among the new scripts are Linear A, Grantha, Siddham, Mende Kikakui, and the first shorthand encoded in Unicode, Duployan.

Submission + - France cries foul at World Cup "spy drone" (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by mpicpp
mpicpp writes: France’s World Cup soccer team has filed a complaint with FIFA, claiming that someone used a small unmanned aircraft to spy on the team’s training camp near São Paulo, Brazil as players prepared for their match against Honduras Sunday, the BBC reports. The quadrocopter appears from video to be a Phantom II autonomous micro-drone with a video camera.

“Apparently, drones are being used more and more,” France’s manager Didier Deschamps told the BBC. “We don’t want intrusion into our privacy. It’s hard to fight.” Deschamps did not comment on who might be behind the surveillance but said in an interview with Football Italia that he believed the drone was operated by one of France’s potential opponents or by a French news agency.

Submission + - Bill Gates To Stanford Grads: Don't (Only) Focus On Profit (itworld.com)

Submitted by jfruh
jfruh writes: The scene was a little surreal. Bill Gates, who became one of the world's richest men by ruthlessly making Microsoft one of the word's most profitable companies, was giving a commencement address at Stanford, the elite university at the heart of Silicon Valley whose graduates go on to the endless tech startups bubbling up looking for Facebook-style riches. But the theme of Gates's speech was that the pursuit of profit cannot solve the world's problems.

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