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Earth

NASA, NOAA: 2014 Was the Warmest Year In the Modern Record 360

Posted by Soulskill from the but-it-was-cold-this-morning dept.
Titus Andronicus writes: NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration both announced today that 2014 was the warmest year in the instrumental temperature record, surpassing the prior winners, 2010 and 2005. NASA also released a short video. They said, "Since 1880, Earth’s average surface temperature has warmed by about 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit (0.8 degrees Celsius), a trend that is largely driven by the increase in carbon dioxide and other human emissions into the planet’s atmosphere. The majority of that warming has occurred in the past three decades. ... While 2014 temperatures continue the planet’s long-term warming trend, scientists still expect to see year-to-year fluctuations in average global temperature caused by phenomena such as El Niño or La Niña. These phenomena warm or cool the tropical Pacific and are thought to have played a role in the flattening of the long-term warming trend over the past 15 years. However, 2014’s record warmth occurred during an El Niño-neutral year."
Sony

Sony Demands Press Destroy Leaked Documents 250

Posted by samzenpus from the do-not-share dept.
SydShamino writes In an effort that may run afoul of the first amendment, Sony, through their lawyer David Boies (of SCO infamy), has sent a letter to major news organizations demanding that they refrain from downloading any leaked documents, and destroy those already possessed. Sony threatens legal action to news organizations that do not comply, saying that "Sony Pictures Entertainment will have no choice but to hold you responsible for any damage or loss arising from such use or dissemination by you."

Submission + - Patent Trolls and Trial Lawyers (city-journal.org)

Submitted by Jayson
Jayson writes: Steve Malanga takes down patent trolls and trial lawyers. Automated Transactions to the EFF to Judge Posner to sewing machines in a (very) long form article.

In fact, the opposition ran deeper than the trial bar, threatening future patent reform. Flaws in our patent system, which the distinguished appellate judge and law professor Richard Posner dubs “dysfunctional,” have transformed the technology market, making ceaseless litigation lucrative not only for Automated and patent trolls like it, but for others, too.

Submission + - Sony Hires SCO's Anti-Linux Lawyer in Attempt to Bully the Press

Submitted by ErikTheRed
ErikTheRed writes: In what can only be taken as a serious attempt to provoke maximum outrage in the hacking community, Sony has retained the services of David Boies — the lead attorney in SCO's failed attempts at destroying Linux through its legal actions against Novell and IBM — to engage in some rather pathetic and legally questionable (per UCLA law professor and Washington Post blogger Eugene Volokh) attempts to get the media to stop talking about what is probably the largest corporate hack in history. What could possibly go wrong?

Submission + - Was 2014 the beginning of the end for Samsung? (networkworld.com)

Submitted by colinneagle
colinneagle writes: Despite success with its Note line of smartphones, Samsung has given up ground in the smartphone market to Apple on the high end and to low-cost Android competitors like Xiaomi and Huawei on the low end. And Samsung’s flagship smartphone, the Galaxy S5, has been a disaster. The S5 sold an estimated 12 million units in its first three months, some 4 million fewer than the Galaxy S4 did in 2013. In China, Galaxy S5 sales have dropped a reported 50% compared to the S4 over six months. Sales came in so far under predictions that the Korean company was forced to dismiss several of its top mobile executives.

Samsung’s smartphone selling prices and margins continue to fall, while IDC reports the company’s smartphone market share fell all the way from 32.2% in Q3 2013 to 23.7% in Q3 2014. The company still leads the smartphone market in overall share, but among the top five companies in that category, it was the only one to post a negative year-over-year change, according to IDC. Is it too late for Samsung to turn itself around and retain dominance of the smartphone market?

Submission + - A New Descent Freespace? Its only been over a decade! (kickstarter.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Descent Freespace was a classic space shooter PC game similar to Tie Fighter. Gamers have begged for a sequel for over a decade and maybe just maybe a first step in the right direction is occuring. Freespace Development Corporation (FDC) in association with Interplay Entertainment has announced a Kickstarter table top game called Freespace Tactics. Here is what FDC had to say about a new Freespace game:

"Part of why we are doing with this project is to gauge interest in the FreeSpace universe. If this is successful, it will certainly help us get a couple steps closer to a new PC game."

Exciting stuff for sure for the Freespace community.

Heres the link to the kickstarter page. So far funding is at 17% and its only been a few days. https://www.kickstarter.com/pr...
Earth

Denmark Faces a Tricky Transition To 100 Percent Renewable Energy 488

Posted by Soulskill from the it-ain't-easy-being-green dept.
HughPickens.com writes Justin Gillis writes in the NYT that Denmark is pursuing the world's most ambitious policy against climate change, aiming to end the burning of fossil fuels in any form by 2050 — not just in electricity production, as some other countries hope to do, but in transportation as well. The trouble is that while renewable power sources like wind and solar cost nothing to run, once installed, as more of these types of power sources push their way onto the electric grid, they cause power prices to crash at what used to be the most profitable times of day. Conventional power plants, operating on gas or coal or uranium, are becoming uneconomical to run. Yet those plants are needed to supply backup power for times when the wind is not blowing and the sun is not shining. With their prime assets throwing off less cash, electricity suppliers in Germany and Denmark have applied to shut down a slew of newly unprofitable power plants, but nervous governments are resisting, afraid of being caught short on some cold winter's night with little wind. "We are really worried about this situation," says Anders Stouge, the deputy director general of the Danish Energy Association. "If we don't do something, we will in the future face higher and higher risks of blackouts."

Environmental groups, for their part, have tended to sneer at the problems the utilities are having, contending that it is their own fault for not getting on the renewables bandwagon years ago. But according to Gillis, the political risks of the situation also ought to be obvious to the greens. The minute any European country — or an ambitious American state, like California — has a blackout attributable to the push for renewables, public support for the transition could weaken drastically. Rasmus Helveg Petersen, the Danish climate minister, says he is tempted by a market approach: real-time pricing of electricity for anyone using it — if the wind is blowing vigorously or the sun is shining brightly, prices would fall off a cliff, but in times of shortage they would rise just as sharply.
Government

US Midterm Elections Discussion 401

Posted by timothy from the mostly-I-vote-because-I-love-dark-humor dept.
November 4th will be election day in the U.S. Though the presidential race is still forming, this midterm election has lots of close races that may give a hint about the likely outcome in 2016. Many pundits and pollsters see a strong chance that Republicans will gain a majority in the Senate in Tuesday's election. Think of the discussion attached to this post as the place to discuss the election: candidates, political advertising, voting technology, and the wisdom of voter ID laws. If you are voting, this chart of poll closing times might be useful. (And, as with the similar post from 10 years ago today, you can take a look at the current poll to see what the Zeitgeist looks like for Slashdot readers, and mentally fill in the past tense, if you're one of the many early voters; not much room in the poll question field.)
Patents

Disney Patents a Piracy Free Search Engine 164

Posted by timothy from the that-cuts-out-a-bunch-of-disney-movies dept.
wabrandsma writes with this excerpt from Torrentfreak: Disney has just obtained a patent for a search engine that ranks sites based on various "authenticity" factors. One of the goals of the technology is to filter pirated material from search results while boosting the profile of copyright and trademark holders' websites. A new patent awarded to Disney Enterprises this week describes a search engine through which pirated content is hard to find. Titled "Online content ranking system based on authenticity metric values for web elements," one of the patent's main goals is to prevent pirated movies and other illicit content from ranking well in the search results. According to Disney their patent makes it possible to "enable the filtering of undesirable search results, such as results referencing piracy websites." Disney believes that current search engines are using the wrong approach as they rely on a website's "popularity." This allows site owners to game the system in order to rank higher. "For example, a manipulated page for unauthorized sales of drugs, movies, etc. might be able to obtain a high popularity rating, but what the typical user will want to see is a more authentic page," they explain. Probably not a good place to look for a grey-market copy of Song of the South.
Earth

Imagining the Future History of Climate Change 495

Posted by samzenpus from the it's-getting-hot-in-here dept.
HughPickens.com writes "The NYT reports that Naomi Oreskes, a historian of science at Harvard University, is attracting wide notice these days for a work of science fiction called "The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View From the Future," that takes the point of view of a historian in 2393 explaining how "the Great Collapse of 2093" occurred. "Without spoiling the story," Oreskes said in an interview, "I can tell you that a lot of what happens — floods, droughts, mass migrations, the end of humanity in Africa and Australia — is the result of inaction to very clear warnings" about climate change caused by humans." Dramatizing the science in ways traditional nonfiction cannot, the book reasserts the importance of scientists and the work they do and reveals the self-serving interests of the so called "carbon combustion complex" that have turned the practice of science into political fodder.

Oreskes argues that scientists failed us, and in a very particular way: They failed us by being too conservative. Scientists today know full well that the "95 percent confidence limit" is merely a convention, not a law of the universe. Nonetheless, this convention, the historian suggests, leads scientists to be far too cautious, far too easily disrupted by the doubt-mongering of denialists, and far too unwilling to shout from the rooftops what they all knew was happening. "Western scientists built an intellectual culture based on the premise that it was worse to fool oneself into believing in something that did not exist than not to believe in something that did."

Why target scientists in particular in this book? Simply because a distant future historian would target scientists too, says Oreskes. "If you think about historians who write about the collapse of the Roman Empire, or the collapse of the Mayans or the Incans, it's always about trying to understand all of the factors that contributed," Oreskes says. "So we felt that we had to say something about scientists.""

Comment Oh boy, even more oversubscription. (Score 3, Insightful) 97

OK, let's say for sake of argument you bring gigabit to every doorstep. Or heck, even 1% of doorsteps. All of your uplinks are going to be so massively oversubscribed that it's essentially meaningless, except for content that's hosted on local caching servers. This is great for things like Netflix, but even ultra-high quality 4K video with uncompressed multichannel audio isn't going to consume that much bandwidth. 40Gbit connections are standard on the largest backbones, with 100 Gbit coming on-line, but that's some awfully expensive hardware right now.

So my question would be: what added benefit you expect to get with a gigabit local loop when it's still going into the same sort of congestion limits? i don't mean to sound like a curmudgeonly old bastard, but this sounds more like a marketing gimmick. Even governments aren't immune from spreading marketing bullshit; in fact it's sometimes easier when you know you won't be held accountable (advertising fraud vs political promises) and it's all other people's money anyway.
Operating Systems

The Classic Control Panel In Windows May Be Gone 347

Posted by timothy from the good-riddance-or-sorely-missed dept.
jones_supa writes In Windows 8, there was an arrangement of two settings applications: the Control Panel for the desktop and the PC Settings app in the Modern UI side. With Windows 10, having the two different applications has started to look even more awkward, which has been voiced loud and clear in the feedback too. Thus, the work at Microsoft to unify the settings programs has begun. The traditional Control Panel is being transformed to something temporarily called "zPC Settings" (sic), which is a Modern UI app that melts together the current two settings applications.

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