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Submission + - Fusion and Fission/LFTR: Let's do both, smartly 1

Submitted by TheRealHocusLocus
TheRealHocusLocus writes: Preppers have a saying, "two is one and one is none" which might also apply to 24x7 base load energy sources that could sustain us beyond the age of fossil fuel. I too was happy to see Skunkworks' Feb 2013 announcement and the recent hello again, still making progress reminder — I was moved by the reaction on Slashdot: a ground swell of "Finally!" and "We're saved!" Do you think fusion is 'the' solution, and yields 'no' radioactive waste?

All nuclear reactors will generate waste via activation as the materials of which they are constructed erode and become unstable under high neutron flux. I'm not pointing this out because I think it's a big deal — a few fusion advocates disingenuously tend to sell the process as if it were '100% clean'. I think that a low volume of non-recyclable waste from fusion reactors that is walk-away safe in ~100 years is doable. Let's do it. And likewise, the best comparable waste profile for fission is a two-fluid LFTR, a low volume of waste that is walk-away safe in ~300 years. Let's do it.

Why pursue both, with at least the same level of urgency? Because both could carry us indefinitely. Because LFTR is a sure thing. It is less complicated in theory and practice. It is closer to market. Yes those are my opinions, but I've been looking into this for awhile. There is plenty of cross-over, LFTR's materials challenges and heat engine interface — and the necessity for waste management — are the same as they will be for commercial scale fusion reactors. To get up to speed please see the 2006 fusion lecture by Dr. Robert Bussard on the Wiffle ball 6 plasma containment, likely the precursor to the Skunkworks approach. And see Thorium Remix 2011 which presents the case for LFTR. Four hours well spent. Saving humanity is worth having at least two eggs in the basket.

Submission + - Python-LMDB in a high-performance environment

Submitted by lkcl
lkcl writes: In an open letter to the core developers behind OpenLDAP (Howard Chu) and Python-LMDB (David Wilson) is a story of a successful creation of a high-performance task scheduling engine written (perplexingly) in python. With only partial optimisation allowing tasks to be executed in parallel at a phenomenal rate of 240,000 per second, the choice to use Python-LMDB for the per-task database store based on its benchmarks as well as its well-researched design criteria turned out to be the right decision. Part of the success was also due to earlier architectural advice gratefully received here on slashdot. What is puzzling though is that LMDB on wikipedia is being constantly deleted, despite its "notability" by way of being used in a seriously-long list of prominent software libre projects, which has been, in part, motivated by the Oracle-driven BerkeleyDB license change. It would appear that the original complaint about notability came from an Oracle employee as well...

Submission + - Lead Mir Developer: "Mir More Relevant Than Wayland In Two Years"

Submitted by M-Saunders
M-Saunders writes: Canonical courted plenty of controversy with it announced Mir, its home-grown display server. But why did the company choose to go it alone, and not collaborate with the Wayland project? Linux Voice has an interview with Thomas Voss, Mir's lead developer. Voss explains how Mir came into being, what it offers, and why he believes it will outlast Wayland.

Submission + - Mixing Agile with Waterfall for Code Quality

Submitted by jones_supa
jones_supa writes: The 2014 CAST Research on Application Software Health (CRASH) report states that enterprise software built using a mixture of agile and waterfall methods will result in more robust and secure applications than those built using either agile or waterfall methods alone. Data from CAST's Appmarq benchmarking repository was analyzed to discover global trends in the structural quality of business application software. The report explores the impact of factors such as development method, CMMI maturity level, outsourcing, and other practices on software quality characteristics that are based upon good architectural and coding practices. InfoQ interviewed Bill Curtis, Senior Vice President and Chief Scientist at CAST, about the research done by CAST, structural quality factors, and mixing agile and waterfall methods.

Submission + - How Curved Spacetime Can Be Created In A Quantum Optics Lab

Submitted by KentuckyFC
KentuckyFC writes: One way to explore the link between quantum mechanics and general relativity is to study the physics that occurs on a small scale in highly curved spacetimes. However, these conditions only occur in the most extreme environments such as at the edge of black holes or in the instants after the Big Bang. But now one physicist has described how it is possible to create curved spacetime in an ordinary quantum optics lab. The idea is based on optical lattices which form when a pair of lasers interfere to create an eggbox-like interference pattern. When ultracold atoms are dropped into the lattice, they become trapped like ping pong balls in an eggbox. This optical trapping technique is common in labs all over the world. However, the ultracold atoms do not stay at a fixed location in the lattice because they can tunnel from one location to another. This tunnelling is a form of movement through the lattice and can be controlled by changing the laser parameters to make tunneling easier or more difficult. Now one physicists has shown that on a large scale, the tunneling motion of atoms through the lattice is mathematically equivalent to the motion of atoms in a quantum field in a flat spacetime. And that means it is possible to create a formal analogue of a curved spacetime by changing the laser parameters across the lattice. Varying the laser parameters over time even simulates the behaviour of gravitational waves. Creating this kind of curved spacetime in the lab won't reveal any new physics but it will allow researchers to study the behaviour of existing laws under these conditions for the first time. That's not been possible even in theory because the equations that describe these behaviours are so complex that they can only be solved in the simplest circumstances.

Submission + - South Korean ID system to be rebuilt from scratch after massive leaks

Submitted by AmiMoJo
AmiMoJo writes: South Korea's national identity card system may need a complete overhaul following huge data thefts dating back to 2004. The government is considering issuing new ID numbers to every citizen aged over 17, costing billions of dollars. The ID numbers and personal details of an estimated 80% of the country's 50 million people have been stolen from banks and other targets. Some 20 million people, including the president Park Geun-hye, have been victims of a data theft. Citizens are unable to change their credentials, which are used in many different sectors, making them an attractive target for hackers.

Submission + - Debian talks about systemd begins once again (debian.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A couple of months ago the TC of Debian decided for systemd. This is now subject for discussion once again and Ian Jackson has stated that he wants a general resolution, so every developer within the Debian project can decide. After a short time the required amount of supportes has been reached and the discussion can start once again.

Submission + - The Physics of why Cold Fusion isn't real

Submitted by StartsWithABang
StartsWithABang writes: If you can reach the fabled "breakeven point" of nuclear fusion, you’ll have opened up an entire new source of clean, reliable, safe, renewable and abundant energy. You will change the world. At present, fusion is one of those things we can make happen through a variety of methods, but — unless you’re the Sun — we don’t have a way to ignite and sustain that reaction without needing to input more energy than we can extract in a usable fashion from the fusion that occurs. One alternative approach to the norm is, rather than try and up the energy released in a sustained, hot fusion reaction, to instead lower the energy inputted, and try to make fusion happen under “cold” conditions. If you listen in the right (wrong?) places, you'll hear periodic reports that cold fusion is happening, even though those reports have always crumbled under scrutiny. Here's why, most likely, they always will.

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?

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