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Submission + - Ra unstable branch supports non-English programming (github.com)

Submitted by oahmad04
oahmad04 writes: The unstable branch on the GitHub project page for Ra supports programming in user-defined languages (as in non-English languages). I need help for testing, bug reporting, and language submissions that Ra can support by default. Also, I would love feedback on my implementation. I already foresee some issues (see the issue tracker). If anyone is remotely interested, thank you for your interest.

Submission + - The Peculiar Economics of Developing New Antibiotics

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: Every year at least two million people are infected with bacteria that can’t be wiped out with antibiotics but the number of F.D.A.-approved antibiotics has decreased steadily in the past two decades. Now.Ezekiel J. Emanuel writes at the NYT that the problem with the development of new antibiotics is profitability. “There’s no profit in it, and therefore the research has dried up, but meanwhile bacterial resistance has increased inexorably and there’s still a lot of inappropriate use of antibiotics out there," says Ken Harvey. Unlike drugs for cholesterol or high blood pressure, or insulin for diabetes, which are taken every day for life, antibiotics tend to be given for a short time so profits have to be made on brief usage. "Even though antibiotics are lifesaving, they do not command a premium price in the marketplace," says Emanuel. "As a society we seem willing to pay $100,000 or more for cancer drugs that cure no one and at best add weeks or a few months to life. We are willing to pay tens of thousands of dollars for knee surgery that, at best, improves function but is not lifesaving. So why won’t we pay $10,000 for a lifesaving antibiotic?"

Emanuel says that we need to use prize money as an incentive. "What if the United States government — maybe in cooperation with the European Union and Japan — offered a $2 billion prize to the first five companies or academic centers that develop and get regulatory approval for a new class of antibiotics?" Because it costs at least $1 billion to develop a new drug, the prize money could provide a 100 percent return — even before sales. "From the government perspective, such a prize would be highly efficient: no payment for research that fizzles. Researchers win only with an approved product. Even if they generated just one new antibiotic class per year, the $2-billion-per-year payment would be a reasonable investment for a problem that costs the health care system $20 billion per year." Unless payers and governments are willing to provide favorable pricing for such a drug, the big companies are going to focus their R&D investments in areas like cancer, depression, and heart disease where the return-on-investments are much higher.

Submission + - Argonne National Laboratory shuts down Online Ask a Scientist Program (anl.gov)

Submitted by itamblyn
itamblyn writes: In a surprising decision, Argonne National Laboratory has decided to pull the plug on its long-standing NEWTON Ask A Scientist Program. NEWTON is (soon to be was) an on online repository of science questions submitted by school children from around the world. A volunteer group of scientists contributed grade-level appropriate answers to these questions.

For the past 25 years, a wide range of topics ranging have been covered, including the classic “why is the sky blue” to “is there way to break down the components of plastics completely into their original form”. Over the years, over 20,000 questions have been answered.

According to ANL, the website will be shut down permanently on 1 March. There is no plan to make the content available in an alternate form or to hand over stewardship to another organization.

When contacted about transferring the repository to another institution or moving to a donation model, the response from ANL was simply: "Thank you again for all your support for Newton. Unfortunately, moving Newton to another organization is not a possibility at this time. Thank you again for your energy and support.”

Given the current state of scientific literacy in the general public, it is difficult to understand how removing 20,000 scientific FAQ from the internet makes any sense. If you’re interested in starting a letter writing campaign, the Director of ANL, Peter Littlewood, can be reached at pblittlewood@anl.gov. I’m sure he would love to hear from all of us.

Full disclosure: I am one of those scientific volunteers and I’ve already run wget on the site. It’s about 300 mb in total. I do not have the ability to host the material at scale (apparently NEWTON receives millions of hits / month).

Submission + - Comcast and Time Warner - Match Made in Heaven

Submitted by whitesea
whitesea writes: I must admit that I protested the merger and even submitted a comment to FCC that they needed to protect Time Warner customers from Comcast. I have now discovered that I was wrong, and this is indeed a perfect match. Remember all these articles that told us about Comcast employees changing names of complaining customers to something obscene? Here is a proof that Time Warner employees have already been trained in such customer service niceties.

Submission + - 25 Years in the Making - This is How Photoshop 1.0 Looks Today (lensvid.com)

Submitted by Iddo Genuth
Iddo Genuth writes: In celebration of Photoshop’s 25 anniversary Adobe decided to publish an interesting an a bit nostalgic video which looks at the original Photoshop — version 1.0 announced back in 1990.

There are very few working computers these days that can run Photoshop 1.0 directly, however using an emulator you can more or less reproduce the software as it was a quarter of a century ago. There are many things that we take for granted in Photoshop that you could not do in the original version including using layers (these came only in version 3.0), use live preview or even something as basic as saving your image as JPEG (which was introduced around 1992), not to speak of Camera RAW which was introduced quite a few years later (as there were no commercial digital cameras anywhere). Of course there was also no real internet so the only way to get digital images was by scanning prints...

Submission + - Moxie Marlinspike: GPG Has Run Its Course (thoughtcrime.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Security researcher Moxie Marlinspike has an interesting post about the state of GPG-encrypted communications. After using GPG for much of its lifetime, he says he now dreads getting a GPG-encrypted email in his inbox. "Instead of developing opinionated software with a simple interface, GPG was written to be as powerful and flexible as possible. It’s up to the user whether the underlying cipher is SERPENT or IDEA or TwoFish. The GnuPG man page is over sixteen thousand words long; for comparison, the novel Fahrenheit 451 is only 40k words. Worse, it turns out that nobody else found all this stuff to be fascinating. Even though GPG has been around for almost 20 years, there are only ~50,000 keys in the “strong set,” and less than 4 million keys have ever been published to the SKS keyserver pool ever. By today’s standards, that’s a shockingly small user base for a month of activity, much less 20 years." Marlinspike concludes, "I think of GPG as a glorious experiment that has run its course. ... GPG isn't the thing that’s going to take us to ubiquitous end to end encryption, and if it were, it’d be kind of a shame to finally get there with 1990’s cryptography."

Submission + - Should a carebot bring an alcoholic a drink? It depends on who own the robot (robohub.org) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: In a care scenario, a robot may have been purchased by the patient, by the doctor or hospital (which sent it home with the patient to monitor their health), or by a concerned family member who wants to monitor their relative. The latest poll research by the Open Roboethics Initiative (ORi) looked at people’s attitudes about whether a care robot should prioritize its owner’s wishes over those of the patient.

Submission + - FBI Posts $3 Million Bounty On GameOver Zeus Botnet Creator

Submitted by blottsie
blottsie writes: The Federal Bureau of Investigation is offering a $3 million reward for information that leads to the capture of Evgeniy Mikhailovich Bogachev, a hacker said to be responsible for over $130 million in theft. American authorities have been hunting Bogachev, a 30-year-old Russian national, since 2012. He's accused of creating the GameOver Zeus botnet, a massive network of hacked computers utilized to steal online banking accounts.

Submission + - China Leads in Patent Applications Again (chinadaily.com.cn)

Submitted by hackingbear
hackingbear writes: If you think your intellectual properties get no legal protection in China, hundreds of thousands of patent applicants (or trolls) would disagree with you. China had more invention patent applications than any other country in 2014 for the fourth year running, with 928,000 invention patent applications filed to the State Intellectual Property Office (SIPO), up 12.5 percent from 2013. One of the Chinese government's priorities has been to boost innovation by improving intellectual property rights protection. While that's probably true, the logical consequence is that it will become another paradise for patent trolls and lawyers.

Submission + - Firefox 36 Arrives With Full HTTP/2 Support, New Design For Android Tablets

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Mozilla today launched Firefox 36 for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android. Major additions to the browser include full HTTP/2 support and a new tablet user interface on Android. The biggest news for the browser is undoubtedly HTTP/2 support, the roadmap for which Mozilla outlined just last week. Mozilla plans to keep various draft levels of HTTP/2, already in Firefox, for a few versions. These will be removed “sometime in the near future.” The full changelog is here.

Submission + - Giant Asian Gerbils May Have Caused The Black Death

Submitted by Dave Knott
Dave Knott writes: Rats, long believed to be the scourge that brought the Black Death to 14th-century Europe, may not be the disease-bearing scoundrels we thought they were. Scientists have shifted blame for the medieval pandemic responsible for millions of deaths to a new furry menace: giant gerbils from Asia. University of Oslo researchers, working with Swiss government scientists, say a "pulse" of bubonic plague strains arrived sporadically from Asia. They posit the Yersinia pestis bacterium was likely carried over the Silk Road via fleas on the giant gerbils during intermittent warm spells. The fleas could have then transmitted the disease to humans. The Black Death is believed to have killed up to 200 million people in Europe. Though very rare today, cases of the plague still arise in Africa, Asia, the Americas and parts of the former Soviet Union, with the World Health Organization reporting 783 cases worldwide in 2013, including 126 deaths.

Submission + - ASRock Unveils First LGA 1151 Motherboard (wccftech.com)

Submitted by jones_supa
jones_supa writes: The first LGA 1151 socketed motherboard, featuring support for Intel’s next generation Skylake processors has been spotted by Computerbase at the Embedded World 2015 exhibition in Nuremberg, Germany. Slated for launch in Q3/2015, Skylake processors will be compatible with the latest iteration of LGA 1151 motherboards that will be fused with the Intel 100-series chipsets. The motherboard revealed by ASRock is their IMB-190 that features the Mini-ITX form factor design and support for DDR3L SO-DIMM memory (the Skylake platform also supports DDR4).

Submission + - Facebook AI Director Discusses Deep Learning, Hype, and the Singularity (ieee.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: In a wide-ranging interview with IEEE Spectrum, Yann LeCun talks about his work at the Facebook AI Research group and the applications and limitations of deep learning and other AI techniques. He also talks about hype, "cargo cult science", and what he dislikes about the Singularity movement. The discussion also includes brain-inspired processors, supervised vs. unsupervised learning, humanism, morality, and strange airplanes.

Submission + - What happens when Betelgeuse explodes? 1

Submitted by StartsWithABang
StartsWithABang writes: One of the great, catastrophic truths of the Universe is that everything has an expiration date. And this includes every single point of light in the entire sky. The most massive stars will die in a spectacular supernova explosion when their final stage of core fuel runs out. At only an estimated 600 light years distant, Betelgeuse is one (along with Antares) of the closest red supergiants to us, and it’s estimated to have only perhaps 100,000 years until it reaches the end of its life. Here's the story on what we can expect to see (and feel) on Earth when Betelgeuse explodes!

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