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Submission + - Indian Woman Sues Uber in the U.S. Over Alleged New Delhi Taxi Rape

Submitted by yuetteasvy
yuetteasvy writes: Uber has been the subject of controversy all around the globe Accoring to Rueters: http://www.reuters.com/article... An Indian woman who says she was raped by an Uber driver while she was traveling in his cab in December is suing the San Francisco–based online firm in a U.S. federal court in California, claiming it failed to put in place basic safety procedures while running its car service in India. In her lawsuit, filed on Thursday, the New Delhi woman called the app-based service the “modern day equivalent of electronic hitchhiking.” The unidentified plaintiff also calls for Uber to overhaul its safety practices, and seeks unspecified damages in the case, according to Reuters. The news agency quoted Uber as saying that it’s “deepest sympathies remain with the victim of this horrific crime.” Earlier, the woman was reported to have enlisted the services of Douglas Wigdor, a high-profile U.S. lawyer who represented Nafissatou Diallo, the New York City hotel maid who accused the former International Monetary Fund managing director Dominique Strauss-Kahn of sexual assault. Prosecutors from the Manhattan district attorney’s office went on to drop all charges against Strauss-Kahn, while a civil suit was settled out of court. The rape allegations against the New Delhi Uber driver had prompted protests in the Indian capital, which became the focus of concerns about the safety of women after the horrific gang rape and murder of a student on a moving bus in late 2012.
Math

There Is No "You" In a Parallel Universe 226

Posted by timothy from the speak-for-yourself-singleton dept.
StartsWithABang (3485481) writes "Ever since quantum mechanics first came along, we've recognized how tenuous our perception of reality is, and how — in many ways — what we perceive is just a very small subset of what's going on at the quantum level in our Universe. Then, along came cosmic inflation, teaching us that our observable Universe is just a tiny, tiny fraction of the matter-and-radiation filled space out there, with possibilities including Universes with different fundamental laws and constants, differing quantum outcomes existing in disconnected regions of space, and even the fantastic one of parallel Universes and alternate versions of you and me. But is that last one really admissible? The best modern evidence teaches us that even with all the Universes that inflation creates, it's still a finite number, and an insufficiently large number to contain all the possibilities that a 13.8 billion year old Universe with 10^90 particles admits."

Feed Google News Sci Tech: Exploding Kittens gains $4.7 million with most Kickstarter backers ever - The Ho (google.com)

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Exploding Kittens gains $4.7 million with most Kickstarter backers ever
The Hoops News
'Exploding Kittens' the card game has garnered an incredible amount of attention. That attention has never been any more apparent than through the games Kickstarter campaign. It recently became the single most backed Kickstarter campaign in the history...
"Exploding Kittens" card game breaks Kickstarter record for most backersNational Monitor
Five Times Matthew Inman Won The InternetMediaPost Communications
'Exploding Kittens' Kickstarter Breaks RecordsInvestorplace.com
Television Week-Bustle-Wall Street Journal (blog)
all 66 news articles

Submission + - There is no "you" in a parallel Universe

Submitted by StartsWithABang
StartsWithABang writes: Ever since quantum mechanics first came along, we’ve recognized how tenuous our perception of reality is, and how — in many ways — what we perceive is just a very small subset of what’s going on at the quantum level in our Universe. Then, along came cosmic inflation, teaching us that our observable Universe is just a tiny, tiny fraction of the matter-and-radiation filled space out there, with possibilities including Universes with different fundamental laws and constants, differing quantum outcomes existing in disconnected regions of space, and even the fantastic one of parallel Universes and alternate versions of you and me. But is that last one really admissible? The best modern evidence teaches us that even with all the Universes that inflation creates, it's still a finite number, and an insufficiently large number to contain all the possibilities that a 13.8 billion year old Universe with 10^90 particles admits.
Books

George R. R. Martin's "The Winds of Winter" Wiill Not Be Published In 2015 180

Posted by timothy from the generalissimo-fransico-franco-is-still-dead dept.
Dave Knott (2917251) writes George R.R. Martin's "The WInds Of Winter", the fifth book of his bestselling fantasy saga "A Song Of Ice And Fire" (known to television fans as "Game Of Thrones") will not be published in 2015. Jane Johnson at HarperCollins has confirmed that it is not in this year's schedule. "I have no information on likely delivery," she said. "These are increasingly complex books and require immense amounts of concentration to write. Fans really ought to appreciate that the length of these monsters is equivalent to two or three novels by other writers."
Instead, readers will have to comfort themselves with a collection, illustrated by Gary Gianni, of three previously anthologised novellas set in the world of Westeros. "A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms" takes place nearly a century before the bloody events of the A Song of Ice and Fire series. Out in October, it is a compilation of the first three official prequel novellas to the series, The Hedge Knight, The Sworn Sword and The Mystery Knight, never before collected.
Medicine

Scientists Float Soap Bubbles As a More Effective Drug Delivery Method 15

Posted by Soulskill from the bad-news-if-you-enjoy-getting-stabbed-by-sharp-objects dept.
Zothecula writes: As if soap bubbles don't spread enough happiness on their own, scientists have discovered a way of coating them in biomolecules with a view to treating viruses, cancer and other diseases. The technology has been developed at the University of Maryland, where researchers devised a method of tricking the body into mistaking the bubbles for harmful cells, triggering an immune response and opening up new possibilities in the delivery of drugs and vaccines.

Submission + - Test shows big data text analysis inconsistent, inaccurate (computerworld.com)

Submitted by DillyTonto
DillyTonto writes: The 'state of the art' in big-data unstructured data (text) analysis turns out to use a method of categorizing words and documents that, when tested, offered different results for the same data in 20% of the time and was flat wrong another 10%, according to an analysis by researchers at Northwestern. Researchers offered a more accurate method, but only as an example of how to use community detection algorithms to improve on the leading method (LDA). Meanwhile, a certain percentage of answers from all those big data installations will continue to be flat wrong until they're re-run, which will make them wrong in a different way.

Submission + - DARPA-Funded Robots Learning To Cook By Watching YouTube Videos (itworld.com)

Submitted by jfruh
jfruh writes: Once you've built humanoid-shaped robots, how do you get them to move and act like humans? Well, one way to teach them how to do it is to have them watch one of the greatest repository of recorded human experience ever: YouTube. Robots in a Maryland lab have learned how to prepare meals by watching and processing a slew of cooking videos, one of YouTube's most popular genres.
Networking

Wi-Fi Issues Continue For OS X Users Despite Updates 120

Posted by Soulskill from the no-motivation-to-fix dept.
itwbennett writes: Although Apple has never officially acknowledged issues surrounding Yosemite and Wi-Fi connectivity, the company is clearly aware of the problem: Leading off the improvements offered in the update 10.10.2 update released Tuesday was 'resolves an issue that might cause Wi-Fi to disconnect,' according to the release notes. Despite this, Apple's support forum was filled with tales of frustrated users. And Mac owners aren't the only Apple users experiencing wireless connection failures after updating their OS. Wi-Fi connectivity issues have also dogged iOS 8 since Apple released the mobile OS on Sept. 17.

Submission + - Joint Dust Analysis Deflates Big Bang Signal (quantamagazine.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Last March, when a group of astronomers announced that they had detected faint swirls in the sky that almost certainly reflected undulations in the shape of the early universe, experts agreed it could be one of the greatest cosmological discoveries of all time. If confirmed, the undulating “gravitational waves” would amount to near-proof of the Big Bang theory known as inflation, and their magnitude would reveal exactly how energetically the universe inflated 13.8 billion years ago, when, according to the theory, it grew from a speck in a fraction of a second.

But soon, many had doubts. The rising skepticism was validated this week, with a definitive analysis showing that the swirl pattern detected by the astronomers fits the profile of radiating space dust rather than gravitational waves.

Scientists cross-checked the data, which were gathered by the BICEP2 telescope, pixel-for-pixel against observations by the Planck telescope, which was better attuned to differences between dust and gravitational waves. The analysis confirmed what a previous Planck study suggested: Dust obscuring the patch of the sky probed by BICEP2 generated most if not all of the observed swirl pattern.

The results appeared in a leaked press release Thursday evening intended to accompany a paper that has been submitted for publication in Physical Review Letters.

So where, one might ask, does the new analysis leave the theory of cosmic inflation?
Oracle

VirtualBox Development At a Standstill 288

Posted by Soulskill from the not-with-a-virtual-bang,-but-a-virtual-whimper dept.
jones_supa writes: Phoronix notes how it has been a long time since last hearing of any major innovations or improvements to VirtualBox, the virtual machine software managed by Oracle. This comes while VMware is improving its products on all platforms, and KVM, Xen, Virt-Manager, and related Linux virtualization technologies continue to advance as well. Is there any hope left for a revitalized VirtualBox? It has been said that there are only four paid developers left on the VirtualBox team at the company, which is not enough manpower to significantly advance such a complex piece of software. The v4.3 series has been receiving some maintenance updates during the last two years, but that's about it.
China

Tech Companies Worried Over China's New Rules For Selling To Banks 127

Posted by Soulskill from the worried-all-the-way-to-the-bank dept.
An anonymous reader writes: China is putting into place a new set of regulations for how banks interact with technology, and it has many companies worried. While the rules might enhance security for the Chinese government, they devastate it for everyone else. For example, not only will China require that companies turn over source code for any software sold to banks, the companies building the software (and hardware) must also build back doors into their systems. The bad news for us is that most companies can't afford to simply refuse the rules and write China off. Tech industry spending is estimated to reach $465 billion in 2015, and it's projected for a huge amount of growth.

Submission + - BT Unveils 1000Mbps Capable G.fast Broadband Rollout for the United Kingdom

Submitted by Mark.JUK
Mark.JUK writes: The national telecoms operator for the United Kingdom, BT, has today announced that it will begin a country-wide deployment of the next generation hybrid-fibre G.fast (ITU G.9701) broadband technology from 2016/17, with most homes being told to expect speeds of up to 500Mbps (Megabits per second) and a premium service offering 1000Mbps will also be available.

At present BT already covers most of the UK with hybrid Fibre-to-the-Cabinet (FTTC) technology, which delivers download speeds of up to 80Mbps by running a fibre optic cable to a local street cabinet and then using VDSL2 over the remaining copper line from the cabinet to homes. G.fast follows a similar principal, but it brings the fibre optic cable even closer to homes (often by installing smaller remote nodes on telegraph poles) and uses more radio spectrum (17-106MHz) over a shorter remaining run of copper cable (ideally less than 250 metres).

The reliance upon copper cable means that the real-world speeds for some, such as those living furthest away from the remote nodes, will probably struggle to match up to BT’s claims. Never the less many telecoms operators see this as being a more cost effective approach to broadband than deploying a pure fibre optic / Fibre-to-the-Home (FTTH) network.

Submission + - How, and Why, Apple Overtook Microsoft

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: James B. Stewart writes in the NYT that in 1998 Bill Gates said in an interview that he “couldn’t imagine a situation in which Apple would ever be bigger and more profitable than Microsoft" but less than two decades later, Apple, with a market capitalization more than double Microsoft’s, has won. The most successful companies need a vision, and both Apple and Microsoft have one. But according to Stewart, Apple’s vision was more radical and, as it turns out, more farsighted. Where Microsoft foresaw a computer on every person’s desk, Apple went a big step further: Its vision was a computer in every pocket. “Apple has been very visionary in creating and expanding significant new consumer electronics categories,” says Toni Sacconaghi. “Unique, disruptive innovation is really hard to do. Doing it multiple times, as Apple has, is extremely difficult." According to Jobs' biographer Walter Isaacson, Microsoft seemed to have the better business for a long time. “But in the end, it didn’t create products of ethereal beauty. Steve believed you had to control every brush stroke from beginning to end. Not because he was a control freak, but because he had a passion for perfection.” Can Apple continue to live by Jobs’s disruptive creed now that the company is as successful as Microsoft once was? According to Robert Cihra it was one thing for Apple to cannibalize its iPod or Mac businesses, but quite another to risk its iPhone juggernaut. “The question investors have is, what’s the next iPhone? There’s no obvious answer. It’s almost impossible to think of anything that will create a $140 billion business out of nothing.”

Submission + - Irish woman first adult in world to be given bionic spine (evoke.ie)

Submitted by TechCurmudgeon
TechCurmudgeon writes: An Irish woman has become the first adult to undergo an operation to insert magnets in her back to combat a severe curvature of her spine. ... Deirdre McDonnell, from Drogheda, County Louth, spent 30 years in pain after being diagnosed with scoliosis. ... Surgeons performed the pioneering MAGEC rod operation on the 34-year-old, inserting magnetic rods into her spine. ... The procedure, also known as the magnetic expansion control system, involves screwing the rods into the spine. ... The rods can then be controlled externally in order to correct the curvature of the spine. ... Consultant orthopaedic surgeon at Tallaght Hospital, Doctor Patrick Kiely, said: ‘This is a big step forward for us. The largest benefit of MAGEC rod technology is that it removes the need for repeat operations. With the rod, once the initial procedure has been carried out, the patient doesn't have to undergo any more incisions. The spine is straightened externally using a remote control, which is painless and is performed without anaesthesia.'

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