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Submission + - Facebook 'Safety Check' lets friends know you're OK after a major disaster 1

Submitted by rtoz
rtoz writes: Facebook has launched a new Tool which is named as "Safety Check".

The Facebook Safety Check tool will notify your friends so that they know you're OK after a major disaster.

In times of disaster or crisis, people turn to Facebook to check on loved ones and get updates.

During a major disaster, Safety Check will help you:

        Let friends and family know you’re safe
        Check on others in the affected area
        Mark your friends as safe

When the tool is activated after a natural disaster and if you’re in the affected area, you’ll receive a Facebook notification asking if you’re safe.

Facebook will determine your location by looking at the city you have listed in your profile, your last location if you’ve opted in to the Nearby Friends product, and the city where you are using the internet.

If you’re safe, you can select “I’m Safe” and a notification and News Feed story will be generated with your update. Your friends can also mark you as safe.

Submission + - Bill Gates Thinks Thomas Piketty's Attack On Inequality Is Right (huffingtonpost.com)

Submitted by rvw
rvw writes: Billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates essentially concurs with French economist Thomas Piketty's landmark book on income inequality, according to a review Gates published on his own blog Monday. Those "most important" conclusions? High levels of income inequality are bad, capitalism cannot fix inequality on its own, and government action can help break the vicious cycle in which inequality begets more severe inequality.

It's appropriate that Gates reviewed the book, because he and his philanthropic foundation are actually mentioned to buttress Piketty's argument. After he became a very, very rich man, Gates stopped laboring and focused instead on giving away his money. Yet, more than a decade later, his wealth has actually skyrocketed. In 1998, Gates' net worth was valued at $50 billion. By October 2014, that number had increased nearly 60 percent to $79.3 billion, despite his having given away tens of billions of dollars.

Submission + - Scanning Embryos For Super-Intelligent Kids Is On the Horizon (nautil.us)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Stephen Hsu, a professor in theoretical physics at Michigan State Univeristy, has an article discussing the genetic underpinnings of intelligence, and how our understanding of it will eventually lead to smarter children. Researchers have detected genes that influence cognitive ability, but the effect of any one gene is very small — less than 1 IQ point at best. Genetically modifying such genes is unlikely to happen any time soon, but our ability to analyze an embryo's genome is becoming quick and cheap. As we isolate more and more genes that affect intelligence, this means prospective parents will soon be able to analyze a batch of zygotes and figure out which ones are likely to be the smartest. Hsu says a batch of 10 zygotes will probably have an IQ range of 15 points or more. As our understanding of intelligence genetics grows, that range will only expand. He adds, "The corresponding ethical issues are complex and deserve serious attention in what may be a relatively short interval before these capabilities become a reality."

Submission + - Samsung Achieve Outdoor 5G Mobile Broadband Speed of 7.5Gbps

Submitted by Mark.JUK
Mark.JUK writes: Samsung has successfully become the first to demonstrate a future 5G mobile network running at speeds of 7.5Gbps (Gigabits per second) in a stationary outdoor environment, but to cap that achievement off they also delivered 1.2Gbps while using the same technology and driving around a 4.3km long race track at speeds of up to 110Kph.

Crucially the test was run using the 28GHz radio spectrum band, which ordinarily wouldn't be much good for mobile networks where wide coverage and wall penetration is an important requirement. But Samsung claims it can mitigate at least some of that by harnessing the latest Hybrid Adaptive Array Technology (HAAT), which uses millimeter wave frequency bands to enable the use of higher frequencies over greater distances.

Several companies are competing to develop the first 5G technologies, although consumers aren't expected to see related services until 2020 at the earliest.

Submission + - Adobe: Click-to-Play would have avoided Java zero-day massacre (theregister.co.uk)

Submitted by mask.of.sanity
mask.of.sanity writes: Oracle could have saved mountains of cash and bad press if Click-to-Play was enabled before Java was hosed by an armada of zero day vulnerabilities, Adobe security boss Brad Arkin says. The simple fix introduced into browsers over the last year stopped the then zero day blitzkrieg in its tracks by forcing users to click a button to enable Java.

Submission + - After Negative User Response, ChromeOS To Re-Introduce Support For Ext{2,3,4}

Submitted by NotInHere
NotInHere writes: Only three days after the large public has known about ChromeOS to disable ext2fs support for external drives, and linux users voiced many protests on websites like reddit, slashdot, or the issue tracker, the ChromeOS team now plans to support it again. To quote Ben Goodger's comment:"

Thanks for all of your feedback on this bug. We’ve heard you loud and clear.

We plan to re-enable ext2/3/4 support in Files.app immediately. It will come back, just like it was before, and we’re working to get it into the next stable channel release."

Submission + - Data From Windows 10 Feedback Tool Exposes Problem Areas

Submitted by jones_supa
jones_supa writes: Two weeks in, and already 1 million people have tried out Windows 10 Technical Preview, reports Microsoft, along with a nice stack of other stats and feedback. Only 36% of installations are occurring inside a virtual machine. 68% of Windows 10 Technical Preview users are launching more than 7 apps per day, with somewhere around 25% of testers using Windows 10 as their daily driver (26 app launches or more per day). With the help of Windows 10's built-in feedback tool, thousands of testers have made it very clear that Microsoft's new OS still has lots of irksome bugs and misses many much-needed features. ExtremeTech has posted an interesting list of the most popular gripes received, them mostly being various GUI endurances. What has your experience been with the Technical Preview?

Submission + - Technology Heats Up the Adultery Arms Race

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: Michelle Cottle reports in The Atlantic that in an earlier era, a suspicious husband might have rifled through his wife's pockets or hired a private investigator but today spouses have easy access to an array of sophisticated spy software that that record every keystroke; compile detailed logs of calls, texts, and video chats; that track a phone’s location in real time; recover deleted messages from all manner of devices (without having to touch said devices); and that turn phones into wiretapping equipment. One might assume that the proliferation of such spyware would have a chilling effect on extramarital activities. But according to Cottle, aspiring cheaters, need not despair: software developers are also rolling out ever stealthier technology to help people conceal their affairs. Right or wrong, cheating apps tap into a potentially lucrative market and researchers regard the Internet as fertile ground for female infidelity in particular. “Men tend to cheat for physical reasons and women for emotional reasons,” says Katherine Hertlein. “The Internet facilitates a lot of emotional disclosure and connections with someone else.”

But virtual surveillance has its risks. Stumbling across an incriminating email your partner left open is one thing; premeditated spying can land you in court. A Minnesota man named Danny Lee Hormann, suspecting his wife of infidelity, installed a GPS tracker on her car and allegedly downloaded spyware onto her phone and the family computer. In March 2010, Hormann's wife had a mechanic search her car and found the tracker. She called the police, and Hormann spent a month in jail on stalking charges. “I always tell people two things: (1) do it legally, and (2) do it right,” says John Paul Lucich, a computer-forensics expert and the author of Cyber Lies, a do-it-yourself guide for spouses looking to become virtual sleuths. Lucich has worked his share of ugly divorces, and he stresses that even the most damning digital evidence of infidelity will prove worthless in court—and potentially land you in trouble—if improperly gathered. His blanket advice: Get a really good lawyer.

Submission + - Microsoft Partners With Docker

Submitted by rjmarvin
rjmarvin writes: Docker is teaming up with Microsoft http://sdtimes.com/microsoft-p... to bring its open container technology to the next release of Windows Server. Docker Engine will work with the next release of Windows Server and images will be available in Docker Hub, which will also integrate directly into Microsoft Azure http://azure.microsoft.com/blo.... The partnership moves Docker beyond Linux for the first time with new multi-container application capabilities for cloud and enterprise developers.

Submission + - Chemical weapons found in Iraq were covered up by the US

Submitted by mr_mischief
mr_mischief writes: Multiple sources report that the US found remnants of WMD programs, namely chemical weapons, in Iraq after all. Many US soldiers were injured by them, in fact.

Why the cover-up, when so many people were making it a point to say there were no WMD? Was it to keep morale up? Was it out of embarrassment that many of these weapons were developed with Western help? Was it because these were older weapons not actively being produced? Maybe it's because the US troops did not follow international protocols to secure and properly dispose of the weapons.

Well, whatever the reason, it's a bad thing. If there are any of these caches under ISIL control it could be a very bad thing.

Submission + - Microsoft's JavaScript Engine Gets Two-Tiered Compilation

Submitted by jones_supa
jones_supa writes: The Internet Explorer team at Microsoft recently detailed changes to the JavaScript engine coming in Windows 10. A significant change is the addition of a new tier in the Just-in-Time (JIT) compiler. In Windows 10, the Chakra JS engine now includes a second JIT compiler that bridges the gap between slow, interpreted code and fast, optimized code. It uses this middle-tier compiler, called Simple JIT, as a "good enough" layer that can move execution away from the interpreter quicker than the Full JIT can. Microsoft claims that the changes will allow certain workloads to "run up to 30% faster". The move to a two-tiered JIT compiler structure mirrors what other browsers have done. SpiderMonkey, the JavaScript engine in Firefox, has an interpreter and two compilers: Baseline and IonMonkey. In Google Chrome, the V8 JavaScript engine is also a two-tiered system. It does not use an interpreter, but compiles on a discrete background thread.

Submission + - First Demonstration Of Artificial Intelligence On A Quantum Computer

Submitted by KentuckyFC
KentuckyFC writes: Machine learning algorithms use a training dataset to learn how to recognise features in images and use this 'knowledge' to spot the same features in new images. The computational complexity of this task is such that the time required to solve it increases in polynomial time with the number of images in the training set and the complexity of the "learned" feature. So it's no surprise that quantum computers ought to be able to rapidly speed up this process. Indeed, a group of theoretical physicists last year designed a quantum algorithm that solves this problem in logarithmic time rather than polynomial, a significant improvement. Now, a Chinese team has successfully implemented this artificial intelligence algorithm on a working quantum computer, for the first time. The information processor is a standard nuclear magnetic resonance quantum computer capable of handling 4 qubits. The team trained it to recognise the difference between the characters '6' and '9' and then asked it to classify a set of handwritten 6s and 9s accordingly, which it did successfully. The team say this is the first time that this kind of artificial intelligence has ever been demonstrated on a quantum computer and opens the way to the more rapid processing of other big data sets--provided, of course, that physicists can build more powerful quantum computers.

Submission + - KDE Releases Plasma 5.1 (kde.org) 1

Submitted by jrepin
jrepin writes: KDE Plasma 5.1 sports a wide variety of improvements, leading to greater stability, better performance and new and improved features. Thanks to the feedback of the community, KDE developers were able to package a large number of fixes and enhancements into this release, among which more complete and higher quality artwork following the new-in-5.0 Breeze style, re-addition of popular features such as the Icon Tasks taskswitcher and improved stability and performance.

Those travelling regularly will enjoy better support for time zones in the panel's clock, while those staying at home a revamped clipboard manager, allowing you to easily get at your past clipboard's content. The Breeze widget style is now also available for Qt4-based applications, leading to greater consistency across applications. The work to support Wayland as display server for Plasma is still ongoing, with improved, but not complete support in 5.1. Changes throughout many default components improve accessibility for visually impaired users by adding support for screenreaders and improved keyboard navigation.

Aside from the visual improvements and the work on features, the focus of this release lies also on stability and performance improvements, with over 180 bugs resolved since 5.0 in the shell alone.

Submission + - Ebola Test Is Positive in Second Texas Health Worker (nytimes.com)

Submitted by mdsolar
mdsolar writes: The authorities in Texas reported on Wednesday that a second health care worker involved in the treatment of a patient who died of the Ebola virus had tested positive for the disease after developing a fever.

The worker, who was not identified by name, had been “among those who took care of Thomas Eric Duncan after he was diagnosed with Ebola,” a statement from the Texas Department of State Health Services said.

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