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Submission + - Mojolicious 5.0: The Very Modern Perl Web Framework (kraih.com) 1

Submitted by Kvorg
Kvorg writes: Back in 2012 Slashdot noticed how a the time of Perl 5.16 the modern Perl projects, including Mojolicious, form a new and expanding movement of a Perl Renaissance. With Perl 5.20 and Mojolicious 5.0, the Modern Perl Renaissance is ever more striking.

Faster, neater, sharper with its asynchronious APIs, Mojolicious is the modern age swiss-army toolchest in your pocket, and it cuts it beyond the web, too. It is extremely flexible with its advanced request routing, plugin system, perl templating and hook API. But its adherence to the modern interfaces and standards and its implementation of advanced features in support tools, DOM and CSS selectors makes it a joy to program with.

Mojolicious with its filosophy of optimized code-generation (think metaprogramming), enabled-by-default support for endcodings and UTF-8, zero dependency deployment with wide support for existing CPAN packages, zero downtime restarts and fully tested implementations remind us of how fun and flexible programming in scripting langauges use to be. Of course, integrated documentation and a very supportive bundled development server don't hurt, either.

The new Perl release with new postfix dereference syntax, subroutine signatures, new slice syntax and numerous optimizations makes it all even more fun.

Submission + - Concert industry fights FCC's auction of RF spectrum (fohonline.com)

Submitted by SonicSpike
SonicSpike writes: Ever since last year, when the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) announced plans to auction off the 608 to 698 MHz UHF spectrum — the UHF TV channels 36 through 51 — the pro audio community has been justifiably worried. After all, many pro users have far-too-vivid memories of the last reallocation of TV channels 52 to 69 (the so-called “700 MHz band” from 698 to 806 MHz) in 2008, which were made illegal for pro wireless applications after June 12, 2010.

This time around, nearly the entire 600 MHz band could possibly be up for grabs to the highest bidder at an auction slated for the summer of 2015. With major deep-pocket players in the telecom industry anxious and ready to bid as much as $20 billion, it is unlikely that pro audio users could possibly compete on a cash basis against these corporate giants, such as AT&T, Verizon, Sprint and others.

However, leading manufacturers of pro wireless have been very active in working with the FCC to make the commission aware of the needs of our industry, and there may be a ray of hope on the horizon.

The first good news came from an announcement late last year by FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler that the Broadcast Television Spectrum Incentive Auction — originally scheduled for 2014 — was rescheduled to next year, which would give the FCC more time to examine the issue.

Another breakthrough came in February of this year, when a contingent of audio wireless manufacturers (Audio-Technica, Lectrosonics, Sennheiser and Shure), along with production professionals and broadcast industry representatives, arranged a meeting with some FCC Commissioners and the Incentive Auction Task Force — essentially those working on FCC guidelines regarding the proposed 600 MHz band sale.

The results of that were a positive sign and the open dialog laid down by these meetings began to increase the FCC’s awareness of the needs of the pro wireless community to hopefully reach a resolution — or at least compromise — well before any frequency reallocations reach the auctioneer’s final hammer.

Submission + - Hunt Intensifies for Aliens on Kepler's Planets (discovery.com)

Submitted by astroengine
astroengine writes: Could ET be chatting with colleagues or robots on sister planets in its solar system? Maybe so, say scientists who last year launched a new type of Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, or SETI, project to eavesdrop on aliens. Using data collected by NASA’s Kepler space telescope, a team of scientists spent 36 hours listening in when planets in targeted solar systems lined up, relative to Earth’s perspective, in hopes of detecting alien interplanetary radio signals. “We think the right strategy in SETI is a variety of strategies. It’s really hard to predict what other civilizations might be doing,” Dan Werthimer, director of SETI research at the University of California Berkeley, told Discovery News. So far the search hasn't turned up any artificial signals yet, but this marks a change in strategy for radio searches for ETI with Kepler data taking a focused lead.

Submission + - Computer science could untangle a messy problem in theoretical physics (nature.com)

Submitted by bmahersciwriter
bmahersciwriter writes: "Computational complexity is grounded in practical matters, such as how many logical steps are required to execute an algorithm. But it could resolve one of the most baffling theoretical conundrums to hit his field in recent years: the black-hole firewall paradox, which seems to imply that either quantum mechanics or general relativity must be wrong."

Submission + - Why David Deutsch's New Theory of Reality is Deeper Than Quantum Mechanics

Submitted by KentuckyFC
KentuckyFC writes: In 1948, the Bell Labs mathematician and engineer Claude Shannon published The Mathematical Theory of Communication (pdf). In it, he laid out the basic process of communication and formally introduced ideas such as information, the role of transmitters and receivers as well as the idea of a channel and its capacity to carry information. This theory now forms the basis of all digital communication so it's no exaggeration to say that it has been hugely influential. By contrast, no equivalent theory exists for quantum information, despite decades of work by quantum theorists. That could all change now thanks to the work of David Deutsch, a theoretical physicist, who has developed a theory that links classical and quantum information using a deeper theoretical framework. Deutsch's new approach is called constructor theory and it turns the conventional approach to physics on its head. Physicists currently ply their trade by explaining the world in terms of initial conditions and laws of motion. This leads to a distinction between what happens and what does not happen. By contrast, Deutsch’s new fundamental principle is that all laws of physics are expressible entirely in terms of the physical transformations that are possible and those that are impossible. In other words, the laws of physics do not tell you what is possible and impossible, they are the result of what is possible and impossible. So reasoning about the physical transformations that are possible and impossible leads to the laws of physics. He uses this approach to develop a number of principles that all physical laws must follow, both those that are known and those that are unknown. Consequently, constructor theory must be deeper than all known physical theories such as quantum mechanics and relativity. He draws an analogy between this and conservation laws which are deeper than all other physical laws which must follow them. It's too early to say what impact Deutsch's new approach will have. But he has a spectacular record in physics having been a pioneer of quantum computation in the 1980s and one of the chief exponents of the multiverse, both of which have become mainstream ideas.

Submission + - Robots Will Pave the Way to Mars (ieee.org)

Submitted by szotz
szotz writes: There's a lot of skepticism swirling around NASA's plan to send humans to Mars in the 2030's, not to mention all those private missions. If we want to have sustainable (read: not bank-breaking) space exploration, the argument goes, there's no way we can do it the way we've been going to the moon and low-Earth orbit. We have to find a way to exploit space resources and cut down on the amount of stuff we need to launch from Earth. That's not a new idea. But this article in IEEE Spectrum suggests research on resource extraction and fabrication in low and zero gravity might actually be making progress...and that we could take these technologies quite far if we get our act together.

Submission + - Goodbye, Ctrl-S (medium.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: 'Save your work!' — This was a rallying cry for an entire generation of workers and students. The frequency and unpredictability of software crashes, power outages, and hardware failures made it imperative to constantly hit that save button. But in 2014? Not so much. My documents are automatically saved (with versioning) every time I make a change. My IDE commits code changes automatically. Many webforms will save drafts of whatever data I'm entering. Heck, even the games I play have an autosave feature. It's an interesting change — the young generation will grow up with an implicit trust that whatever they type into a computer will stay there. Maybe this is my generation's version of: 'In my day, we had to get up and walk across the room to change the channel on the TV!' In any case, it has some subtle but interesting effects on how people write, play, and create. No longer do we have to have constant interruptions to worry about whether our changes are saved — but at the same time, we don't have that pause to take a moment and reflect on what we've written. I'm sure we've all had moments where our hands hover over a save/submit button before changing our minds and hammering the backspace key. Maybe now we'll have to think before we write.

Submission + - Dump world's nuclear waste in Australia says Ex-PM Hawke (sourceable.net)

Submitted by mdsolar
mdsolar writes: "The former Labor leader added that Australia bore a responsibility to assist with the safe disposal of radioactive waste, given the ample space the country possesses.

“If Australia has – as we do – the safest remote locations for storing the world’s nuclear waste, we have a responsibility to make those sites available for this purpose,” he said.

Hawke based this conclusion on a 25-year old report made by Ralph Slayter, whom the former prime minister appointed as Australia’s first chief scientist back in 1989. According to Slayter’s report, some of the remote reaches of the Northern Territory and Western Australia could provide apt dumping grounds for radioactive waste."

Submission + - Trillions of Plastic Pieces May Be Trapped in Arctic Ice (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: Humans produced nearly 300 million tons of plastic in 2012, but where does it end up? A new study has found plastic debris in a surprising location: trapped in Arctic sea ice. As the ice melts, it could release a flood of floating plastic onto the world.

Submission + - Conscious Sentient Robots Capable of Feelings are Impossible, Say Researchers (ibtimes.co.uk)

Submitted by concertina226
concertina226 writes: If you're a big fan of Isaac Asimov and sentient robots like Johnny Five and Sonny, you might not be happy to hear that computer science researchers have used mathematical theory to prove that robots capable of feelings and emotions will never exist.

Using a variation of Giulio Tononi's influential mathematical framework for consciousness, a team of researchers from the National University of Ireland have proved mathematically that computers are unable to completely integrate information.

Tononi's 2008 framework argued that integrated information cannot be reduced into smaller components, so for example, if a human were to perceive a red triangle, the human brain would not be able to break down the triangle as a colourless outline of a triangle and a shapeless patch of red at the same time. The researchers disagree.

"There's no computer you could build that could integrate information so that it cannot be edited. Computers can still be useful and intelligent without complete integration, but we will never trust it as we trust a person, as the computer is just following certain algorithms," said Dr Maguire, who led the research.

"We agree with Tononi's approach but we feel his quantification of integrated information didn't work. The cost of integrating something was that you would lose a lot of your memories at the same time, so we decided to provide a new type of quantification."

Submission + - Sony CEO: Company Must Reform By April 2016 -- Or Die (itworld.com)

Submitted by jfruh
jfruh writes: New Sony CEO Kazuso Hirai isn't beating around the bush: he says the company must be radically reformed by the end of its next fiscal year in April 2016, and if those reforms aren't in place by then, 'it will be all but impossible to envision a growth strategy for the mid- to long term.' The company is already in the midst of exiting the PC and television business to focus on more profitable lines of business.

Submission + - GitHub Woos Scientific Community (itworld.com)

Submitted by jfruh
jfruh writes: GitHub is increasingly popular as a code repository, and is increasingly targeting one group that you might not think of as in the coding business: scientists. Scientific researchers write lots of rough and ready programs to help support their work, code which usually just sits on a computer in their lab. GitHub hopes its collaborative features will make sure scientists aren't just wasting their time re-inventing the wheel.

Comment Re:Morals, ethics, logic, philosophy (Score 1) 255

by jdschulteis (#47051345) Attached to: The Sci-Fi Myth of Robotic Competence

Lin and Sofge advocate that the programmers should use strict utilitarian philosophy when deciding what to hit. I don't think that is going to fly, either from a legal or a sales perspective; the least damaging choice is just to try to stop the vehicle even if there is no time, rather than trying to "select" a crash for the least possible damage.

I agree--the results of collisions are simply too unpredictable. The idea of "knowing" the outcomes and choosing the one that leads to the fewest deaths (greatest utility) is preposterous. If a collision is unavoidable, simply remove as much kinetic energy as possible in order to minimize damage to the vehicle and its occupants.

Submission + - What STEM Shortage? (nationalreview.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The sector isn’t seeing wage growth and has more graduates than jobs.

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