"The environmental cost of music is now greater than at any time during recorded music's previous eras," argues Kyle Devine, in his recent book, "Decomposed: The Political Ecology of Music."

The New Yorker's music critic writes: He supports that claim with a chart of his own devising, using data culled from various sources, which suggests that, in 2016, streaming and downloading music generated around a hundred and ninety-four million kilograms of greenhouse-gas emissions — some forty million more than the emissions associated with all music formats in 2000... Exploitative regimes of labor enable the production of smartphone and computer components. Conditions at Foxconn factories in China have long been notorious; recent reports suggest that the brutally abused Uighur minority has been pressed into the production of Apple devices. Child laborers are involved in the mining of cobalt, which is used in iPhone batteries. Spotify, the dominant streaming service, needs huge quantities of energy to power its servers. No less problematic are the streaming services' own exploitative practices, including their notoriously stingy royalty payments to working musicians...

When the compact disk entered circulation, in the nineteen-eighties, audio snobs attacked it as a degradation of listening culture — a descent from soulful analog sound to soulless digital. In environmental terms, however, the CD turned out to be somewhat less deleterious [than vinyl records]. Devine observes that polycarbonate, the medium's principal ingredient, is not as toxic as polyvinyl chloride. Early on, the widespread use of polystyrene for CD packaging wiped out that advantage, but a turn toward recyclable materials in recent years has made the lowly CD perhaps the least environmentally harmful format on the market.

In a chapter on the digital and streaming era, Devine drives home the point that there is no such thing as a nonmaterial way of listening to music: "The so-called cloud is a definitely material and mainly hardwired network of fiber-optic cables, servers, routers, and the like." This concealment of industrial reality, behind a phantasmagoria of virtuality, is a sleight of hand typical of Big Tech, with its genius for persuading consumers never to wonder how transactions have become so shimmeringly effortless. In much the same way, it has convinced us not to think too hard about the regime of mass surveillance on which the economics of the industry rests.... At the end of "Decomposed," Devine incorporates his ecology of music into a more comprehensive vision of anthropogenic crisis. "Musically, we may need to question our expectations of infinite access and infinite storage," he writes. Our demand that all of musical history should be available at the touch of a finger has become gluttonous. It may seem a harmless form of consumer desire, but it leaves real scars on the face of the Earth.

DC Universe, which started out as a streaming service for original DC superhero content, will in January become DC Universe Infinite, a supersized subscription service for DC Comics. CNET reports: The service launches on Jan. 21 for $7.99 per month, or $74.99 for a year-long subscription. DC says that subscribers will be able to read 24,000 comic book titles at launch, along with digital-first titles and access to exclusive fan events. Recently released titles featuring Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman and other DC mainstays will make their way onto the platform in digital format six months after the physical copies arrive in stores. Those who subscribe during the initial preorder run will receive a $10 voucher to the DC Shop on Feb. 1 -- and make that $25 if you lock in a year-long subscription.

The move comes as DC nestles in with HBO, with original DC programming making a home on the HBO Max streaming service. A third season of the Harley Quinn animated series starring Kaley Cuoco was just announced for the platform earlier today, with all seasons of the show now sitting as an HBO exclusive. [...] To that end, DC is extending its offer for DC Universe subscribers to add HBO Max membership for $4.99 per month. Fans can jump on that deal through the end of October.

NCamero (Slashdot reader #35,481) brings some news from the world of 12-sided dodecahedrons: Quanta magazine reports that a trio of mathematicians has resolved one of the most basic questions about the dodecahedron. The cube, tetrahedron, octahedron and icosahedron cannot have a straight path you could take [starting from a corner] that would eventually return you to your starting point without passing through any of the other corners. The dodecahedron can.
Mathematicians studied dodecahedrons for over 2,000 years without solving the problem, reports Quanta magazine. But now... Jayadev Athreya, David Aulicino and Patrick Hooper have shown that an infinite number of such paths do in fact exist on the dodecahedron. Their paper, published in May in Experimental Mathematics, shows that these paths can be divided into 31 natural families. The solution required modern techniques and computer algorithms.

"Twenty years ago, [this question] was absolutely out of reach; 10 years ago it would require an enormous effort of writing all necessary software, so only now all the factors came together," wrote Anton Zorich, of the Institute of Mathematics of Jussieu in Paris, in an email.

Google today launched new features in Google Images "to help people use images on the web responsibly." From a report: The features should benefit photographers, as they help people both identify photos that can be licensed as well as find out how to properly license them. Google Images' new "Licensable" badge, which had been in beta testing since February 2020, is now live. "[W]ith a seemingly infinite number of images online, finding the right image to use, and knowing how to use that image responsibly, isn't always a simple task," Google says. Google's new Licensable badge aims to make it easier for photo buyers to find photos they can license. Whenever a publisher or photographer provides licensing information for a photo (by providing structured data or IPTC photo metadata), Google will display a badge that says "Licensable" over the photo in search results.

Matt Asay, a former COO of Canonical now working at AWS, argues that the question of open source sustainability "is really a people problem."

But to make the case, he cites comments by Tobie Langel, formerly W3C's testing lead (and a former member of Facebook's Open Source and Web Standards Team) who's now founded an open-source strategies consulting firm whose clients include Mozilla, Intell, Google, and Microsoft. Much of the "open source sustainability" discussion has focused on the one thing that really needs no help being sustained: software. As Tobie Langel rightly points out, "Open source code isn't a scarce resource. It's the exact opposite, actually: It's infinitely reproducible at zero cost to the user and to the ecosystem." Nor is sustainability really a matter of funding, though this gets closer to the truth.

No, open source sustainability is really a people problem. Or, as Langel highlights, "In open source, the maintainers working on the source code are the scarce resource that needs to be protected and nurtured."

Over the past several weeks, I've interviewed a number of maintainers for popular open source projects. In every case, they talked about how they contribute because it's fun, but also acknowledged that some aspects of open source development can make it decidedly "un-fun" (e.g., demanding users who complain about missing features or existing bugs but don't contribute code or fixes). Most have found ways to turn their passion into financial independence, but Langel stresses that cash is critical to keeping open source humming along... "Without revenue, there is no maintenance, and without maintenance, the commons becomes toxic very quickly... As new security issues are discovered, open source code that isn't updated becomes a security risk..."

Langel is absolutely correct to argue, "In an ecosystem with infinite resources, the attention needs to be on the people taking care of and maintaining that resource, because that's where the bottleneck is." Again, that's partly a question of money, but it's even more a question of treating people with dignity and respect, while making open source communities a fun, welcoming place.

The Texas Advanced Computer Center talks to Masahiro (Hiro) Ono, who leads the Robotic Surface Mobility Group at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory which led all the Mars rover missions (also one of the researchers who developed the software that allows the current rover to operate): The Perseverance rover, which launched this summer, computes using RAD 750s — radiation-hardened single board computers manufactured by BAE Systems Electronics. Future missions, however, would potentially use new high-performance, multi-core radiation hardened processors designed through the High Performance Spaceflight Computing project. (Qualcomm's Snapdragon processor is also being tested for missions.) These chips will provide about one hundred times the computational capacity of current flight processors using the same amount of power. "All of the autonomy that you see on our latest Mars rover is largely human-in-the-loop" — meaning it requires human interaction to operate, according to Chris Mattmann, the deputy chief technology and innovation officer at JPL. "Part of the reason for that is the limits of the processors that are running on them. One of the core missions for these new chips is to do deep learning and machine learning, like we do terrestrially, on board. What are the killer apps given that new computing environment...?"

Training machine learning models on the Maverick2 supercomputer at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC), as well as on Amazon Web Services and JPL clusters, Ono, Mattmann and their team have been developing two novel capabilities for future Mars rovers, which they call Drive-By Science and Energy-Optimal Autonomous Navigation.... "We'd like future rovers to have a human-like ability to see and understand terrain," Ono said. "For rovers, energy is very important. There's no paved highway on Mars. The drivability varies substantially based on the terrain — for instance beach versus bedrock. That is not currently considered. Coming up with a path with all of these constraints is complicated, but that's the level of computation that we can handle with the HPSC or Snapdragon chips. But to do so we're going to need to change the paradigm a little bit."

Ono explains that new paradigm as commanding by policy, a middle ground between the human-dictated: "Go from A to B and do C," and the purely autonomous: "Go do science."

Commanding by policy involves pre-planning for a range of scenarios, and then allowing the rover to determine what conditions it is encountering and what it should do. "We use a supercomputer on the ground, where we have infinite computational resources like those at TACC, to develop a plan where a policy is: if X, then do this; if y, then do that," Ono explained. "We'll basically make a huge to-do list and send gigabytes of data to the rover, compressing it in huge tables. Then we'll use the increased power of the rover to de-compress the policy and execute it." The pre-planned list is generated using machine learning-derived optimizations. The on-board chip can then use those plans to perform inference: taking the inputs from its environment and plugging them into the pre-trained model. The inference tasks are computationally much easier and can be computed on a chip like those that may accompany future rovers to Mars.

"The rover has the flexibility of changing the plan on board instead of just sticking to a sequence of pre-planned options," Ono said. "This is important in case something bad happens or it finds something interesting...." The efforts to develop a new AI-based paradigm for future autonomous missions can be applied not just to rovers but to any autonomous space mission, from orbiters to fly-bys to interstellar probes, Ono says.

Microsoft isn't providing a specific release date for its next-gen Xbox Series X console, but the company did reveal it will launch in the month of November. Sadly, Microsoft and 343 Industries also announced today that Halo Infinite is being delayed to 2021. The Verge reports: The lack of Halo Infinite does mean there's no big launch title for the Xbox Series X later this year. Microsoft is choosing to highlight Xbox Game Pass, alongside "more than 50 new games" that are launching this year with optimizations for Xbox Series X. More than 40 existing games will also be optimized for Xbox Series X, which can include anything from hardware-accelerated DirectX ray tracing, 120fps frame rates, faster loading times, and Quick Resume support. Existing backward compatible games across Xbox, Xbox 360, and Xbox One will also run on the Xbox Series X when it launches in November. We're now waiting to hear exactly when the Xbox Series X will be available, its price, and when people can start preordering the next-gen console. In addition to Xbox Game Pass, Microsoft is also highlighting its Project xCloud gaming service.

"Project xCloud will enter a beta stage from August 11 as a new version of the Xbox Game Pass app will launch on Android devices," reports NME. "While the full service won't be available in the beta phase, users will have the ability to test a smaller selection of titles ahead of the launch next month. [A]round 30 games will be available in the beta stage, with the full 100+ titles added next month (September)."

sciencehabit writes: As scientists uncover drugs that can treat coronavirus infections, demand will almost certainly outstrip supplies -- as is already happening with the antiviral remdesivir. To prevent shortages, researchers have come up with a new way to design synthetic routes to drugs now being tested in some COVID-19 clinical trials, using artificial intelligence (AI) software. The AI-planned new recipes -- for 11 medicines so far -- could help manufacturers produce medications whose syntheses are tightly held trade secrets. And because the new methods use cheap, readily available starting materials, licensed drug suppliers could quickly ramp up production of any promising therapies. "If you are going to supply a drug to the world, your starting materials have to be cheap and as available as sugar," says Danielle Schultz, a chemist at Merck. The new method, posted as a preprint this week, "is really solid," she says. "I am impressed by the speed at which [the researchers] were able to find new solutions for making existing drugs."

Patents give pharmaceutical companies the right to be the sole supplier of a new drug in a given country, usually for 20 years. Once a drug goes off patent, other companies can produce and sell it as a generic. The method to make the drug is often secret to discourage competition even after patents expire. But COVID-19 has changed all that, Schultz says. "We are at a time when it's all hands on deck." Only two medicines -- remdesivir and dexamethasone -- are currently proven to fight COVID-19. That has led to supply shortages for both. On 4 August, attorneys general from 34 U.S. states wrote federal officials, calling remdesivir supplies "dangerously limited," and urging states be given "march-in rights" to violate owner Gilead Sciences' patents. Such rights would allow states to work with third-party manufacturers to make additional supplies of the drug. To prevent future supply crunches, University of Michigan chemist Timothy Cernak and colleagues turned to a commercial drug synthesis AI program called Synthia. The software can help pharmaceutical manufacturers find the most efficient and cost-effective strategy for synthesizing medicines, most of which are fairly complex molecules that can be built in myriad ways -- much as an artist can apply brush strokes in infinite combinations to paint the same landscape. "It's more options than the human mind can comprehend," Cernak says.

Last month, Microsoft removed the option to purchase 12 months of Xbox Live Gold from the Microsoft Store, leading many to believe the company could be planning to phase out the service altogether with the launch of the Xbox Series X. When asked about the plans by The Verge, Microsoft said: "We have no plans to discontinue Xbox Live Gold at this time. It is an important part of gaming on Xbox today, and will continue to be in the future." The Verge's report also notes the company isn't planning to rename Xbox Live: Rumors of an Xbox Live rename appeared this week, after Microsoft announced changes to its services agreement. The software giant started referring to Xbox Live as the "Xbox online service," prompting some to assume Xbox Live was going away. "The update to 'Xbox online service' in the Microsoft Services Agreement refers to the underlying Xbox service that includes features like cross-saves and friend requests," says a Microsoft spokesperson in a statement to The Verge. "This language update is intended to distinguish that underlying service, and the paid Xbox Live Gold subscription. There are no changes being made to the experience of the service or Xbox Live Gold."

While it's clear Xbox Live Gold isn't going away, Microsoft's statement doesn't mean the service won't be made free at some point in the future. Microsoft still requires Xbox One owners, and potentially Xbox Series X owners, to purchase an Xbox Live Gold subscription to play multiplayer games online. Windows 10 players of Xbox Live-enabled games do not require the same subscription, however. This split gets especially tricky for games like Halo Infinite, which Microsoft has promised will have a free-to-play multiplayer mode. If Microsoft does continue Xbox Live Gold as a paid service on Xbox consoles, then PC players will get totally free access to Halo Infinite and Xbox players will not.

Steven Levy from Wired remembers the Power Mac G4 Cube, which debuted July 19, 2000. From the report: I was reminded of this last week, as I listened to a cassette tape recorded 20 years prior, almost to the day. It documented a two-hour session with Jobs in Cupertino, California, shortly before the launch. The main reason he had summoned me to Apple's headquarters was sitting under the over of a dark sheet of fabric on the long table in the boardroom of One Infinite Loop. "We have made the coolest computer ever," he told me. "I guess I'll just show it to you." He yanked off the fabric, exposing an 8-inch stump of transparent plastic with a block of electronics suspended inside. It looked less like a computer than a toaster born from an immaculate conception between Philip K. Dick and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. (But the fingerprints were, of course, Jony Ive's.) Alongside it were two speakers encased in Christmas-ornament-sized, glasslike spheres.

"The Cube," Jobs said, in a stage whisper, hardly containing his excitement. He began by emphasizing that while the Cube was powerful, it was air-cooled. (Jobs hated fans. Hated them.) He demonstrated how it didn't have a power switch, but could sense a wave of your hand to turn on the juice. He showed me how Apple had eliminated the tray that held CDs -- with the Cube, you just hovered the disk over the slot and the machine inhaled it. And then he got to the plastics. It was as if Jobs had taken to heart that guy in The Graduate who gave career advice to Benjamin Braddock. "We are doing more with plastics than anyone else in the world," he told me. "These are all specially formulated, and it's all proprietary, just us. It took us six months just to formulate these plastics. They make bulletproof vests out of it! And it's incredibly sturdy, and it's just beautiful! There's never been anything like that. How do you make something like that? Nobody ever made anything like that! Isn't that beautiful? I think it's stunning!"

For one thing, the price was prohibitive -- by the time you bought the display, it was almost three times the price of an iMac and even more than some PowerMacs. By and large, people don't spend their art budget on computers. That wasn't the only issue with the G4 Cube. Those plastics were hard to manufacture, and people reported flaws. The air cooling had problems. If you left a sheet of paper on top of the device, it would shut down to prevent overheating. And because it had no On button, a stray wave of your hand would send the machine into action, like it or not. In any case, the G4 Cube failed to push buttons on the computer-buying public. Jobs told me it would sell millions. But Apple sold fewer than 150,000 units.

Microsoft will be holding its next Xbox Games Showcase on July 23, the company announced today. Ars Technica reports: Unlike Microsoft's May promotional event, which focused on third-party launch titles for the upcoming console, the July 23 event is expected to discuss first-party exclusives from Microsoft's own Xbox Game Studios. That likely includes new footage of Halo Infinite, which saw a new teaser trailer a few weeks ago. That lineup of first-party studios now includes Psychonauts 2 developer Double Fine, which Microsoft acquired in June, and The Outer Worlds developer Obsidian Entertainment, which Microsoft acquired last November.

An anonymous reader quotes CNN: The U.S. Food and Drug Administration on Friday issued an emergency use authorization for the first at-home Covid-19 test that uses saliva samples, the agency said in a news release. Rutgers University's RUCDR Infinite Biologics lab received an amended emergency authorization late Thursday. With the test, people can collect their own saliva at home and send their saliva samples to a lab for results...

"Authorizing additional diagnostic tests with the option of at-home sample collection will continue to increase patient access to testing for COVID-19. This provides an additional option for the easy, safe and convenient collection of samples required for testing without traveling to a doctor's office, hospital or testing site," FDA Commissioner Dr. Stephen M. Hahn said in the FDA's press release on Friday...

The test remains prescription only.

MicroProse, an American video game publisher and developer founded by Bill Stealey and Sid Meier in 1982, is being resurrected after an absence of almost 20 years. The publisher's last game was Grand Prix 4 released in 2002, but is most famous for the XCOM and Civilization franchises. MojoKid shares a report from HotHardware: The company is now being led by CEO David Lagettiu, while Bill Stealey, who originally founded MicroProse with Sid Meier, will be onboard as a consultant this time around. For those that would like to see some of their MicroProse classics "refreshed" for modern systems, you're in luck. It will be remastering a number of games, although those specific titles haven't been revealed at this time. What the reinvigorated company has announced, however, is that it has three new games on deck. The first is Task Force Admiral, which will have you in command of a U.S. Navy WWII (Pacifica Theater) carrier task force. This will be a full 3D simulation game with 90 ship classes and 40 different types of aircraft with realistic ballistics and full damage modeling. The game is being developed by Drydock Dreams.

Next up is Second front, which is another WWII-themed game developed by Hexdraw. "Second Front is an accessible WWII turn-based tactical game with more than 40 infantry units and 200 tanks, vehicles and guns," writes MicroProse. It has all the depth of a paper wargame and the ease of a computer simulation. Campaign, scenarios and a complete editor make it an infinite tactical sandbox experience." Finally, there's Sea Power, which was developed by Triassic Games. Sea Power shifts to "modern naval conflict campaigns." All three of the games will be launching soon via Steam, which you can check out using the follow links: Task Force Admiral, Second Front, Sea Power.

"When you point a telescope at a black hole, it turns out you don't just see the swirling sizzling doughnut of doom formed by matter falling in," reports the New York Times. "You can also see the whole universe." Light from an infinite array of distant stars and galaxies can wrap around the black hole like ribbons around a maypole, again and again before coming back to your eye, or your telescope. "The image of a black hole actually contains a nested series of rings," said Michael Johnson of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, not unlike the rings that form around your bathtub drain.

Dr. Johnson was lead author of a study, describing the proposed method that would allow our telescopes to pry more secrets from the maw of any black hole, that was published in the March 18 edition of the journal Science Advances. He and other authors of the paper are also members of the team operating the Event Horizon Telescope, a globe-girding network of radio telescopes that made that first image of a black hole. Their telescope saw these rings, but it didn't have enough resolution to distinguish them, so they were blurred into a single feature.... Andrew Strominger, a Harvard theorist and co-author of the paper, said, "Understanding the intricate details of this historic experimental observation has forced theorists like myself to think about black holes in a new way..."

As Peter Galison of Harvard, another E.H.T. collaborator said, "As we peer into these rings, we are looking at light from all over the visible universe, we are seeing farther and farther into the past, a movie, so to speak, of the history of the visible universe."

Engadget reports on a new tech-industry-in-space comedy premiering tonight on HBO:
If you thought that HBO was done mocking technology companies now that Silicon Valley is done, think again. Avenue 5 is the channel's new sitcom, and one that asks the question: "What if tech bros were in charge of more than just our internet histories?'" The answer, at least according to the first half of the season, is that it won't be pretty -- or safe...

The Avenue 5 is a large space liner that, in the words of cinematographer Eben Bolter, is designed after a vulgar space hotel that goes too far and "gets the details wrong". This Titanic-like vessel and its 5,000 passengers are on a routine jaunt through the solar system when a minor disaster strikes, and its course is altered. But this is space, where a small deviation changes the flight time from eight weeks to several years.

The ship is owned by Herman Judd (Josh Gad) of the Judd Corporation, a self-regarding business magnate who, in Bolter's mind, has "only ever had one good idea." He's not quite an analog for the Bezoses and Musks you may be thinking of, but more a cracked-mirror version of both. Throughout the show, he attempts to impose his thinking on the crisis as if he was still in California, or wherever Silicon Valley moved after the show's alluded-to Huawei Wars. Early on, Judd is presented with the intractable problem of space physics, and he hopes to fix things as he did on Earth. He says, in the Jobsian tradition, that you can make something happen by making someone say that it can. The fight between visionary optimism and reality is harder when you're surrounded by an infinite vacuum, after all.

Avenue 5's point seems to be that you can't simply blue-sky your way out of a crisis when reality keeps getting in the way.

Slashdot reader JoshuaZ writes:
In a major breakthrough in quantum computing it was shown that MIP* equals RE. MIP* is the set of problems that can be efficiently demonstrated to a classical computer interacting with multiple quantum computers with any amount of shared entanglement between the quantum computers. RE is the set of problems which are recursive; this is essentially all problems which can be computed.

This result comes through years of deep development of understanding interactive protocols, where one entity, a verifier, has much less computing power than another set of entities, provers, who wish to convince the verifier of the truth of a claim. In 1990, a major result was that a classical computer with a polynomial amount of time could be convince of any claim in PSPACE by interacting with an arbitrarily powerful classical computer. Here PSPACE is the set of problems solvable by a classical computer with a polynomial amount of space. Subsequent results showed that if one allowed a verifier able to interact with multiple provers, the verifier could be convinced of a solution of any problem in NEXPTIME, a class conjectured to be much larger than PSPACE. For a while, it was believed that in the quantum case, the set of problems might actually be smaller, since multiple quantum computers might be able to use their shared entangled qubits to "cheat" the verifier. However, this has turned out not just to not be the case, but the exact opposite: MIP* is not only large, it is about as large as a computable class can naturally be.

This result while a very big deal from a theoretical standpoint is unlikely to have any immediate applications since it supposes quantum computers with arbitrarily large amounts of computational power and infinite amounts of entanglement.

The paper in question is a 165 tour de force which includes incidentally showing that the The Connes embedding conjecture, a 50 year old major conjecture from the theory of operator algebras, is false.

Dubbed the "infinite money cheat code" by users of Reddit's WallStreetBets forum, the bug is being exploited, according to users on the forum. One trader bragged about a $1 million position funded by a $4,000 deposit. From a report: Robinhood is "aware of the isolated situations and communicating directly with customers," spokesperson Lavinia Chirico said in an email response to questions. The Menlo Park, California-based money-management software designer touts trading "free from commission fees." Robinhood Gold customers are invited to "supercharge" their investing by paying $5 a month to trade on margin, or money borrowed from the company. Here's how the trade works. Users of Robinhood Gold are selling covered calls using money borrowed from Robinhood. Nothing wrong with that. The problem arises when Robinhood incorrectly adds the value of those calls to the user's own capital. And that means that the more money a user borrows, the more money Robinhood will lend them for future trading. One trader managed to turn his $2,000 deposit into $50,000 worth of purchasing power, which he used to buy Apple puts.

An anonymous reader shares a report: In the early days of the mobile phone, Nokia was everywhere -- ubiquitous, inescapable, supreme. It created the best-selling 1100, with a keypad like droplets of water; the gray-blue 3310; even the cutting-edge 8810, with a slip-sliding protective cover that felt like the future. Today, the firm is doing just fine, though its primary money-makers are less obvious than they once were. The Finnish giant now derives most of its income from those invisible elements of the mobile internet that allow you to access an infinite repository of information from almost anywhere in the world: routers, network processors, base station radio access units, and other whizz-bang components. In 2018, with a revenue of $25.5 billion, Nokia dropped to 466th place. The transition from handset juggernaut to invisible technological unguent was not without casualties. Over nine years of downsizing, the company lost its handset business; eliminated thousands of jobs; and saw millions down the drain.

The Finnish town of Oulu, with a present-day population of around 200,000, looked like another certain victim. Formerly a quiet lumber town, it had been buoyed by the rise of Nokia, becoming a regional tech powerhouse in the process. By 2000, the so-called "Oulu miracle" had hit its stride, with more than 15,000 IT jobs in the city. But Nokia's travails became the town's: Between 2009 and 2011, the company cut more than 1,000 Oulu jobs, many of which were related to its handset business. Five years later, another 1,000 positions followed. But contrary to the expectations of local residents and the Finnish media alike, Nokia's tumble did not take the town with it.

At its height, the company had sucked in the city's talent like a whirlpool. Now, that same talent has the opportunity to flourish elsewhere, thanks to structured support and intervention from the local government, entrepreneurs, and Nokia itself. It is still the largest employer in town -- earlier this year, the company's Oulu 5G operation was honored by the World Economic Forum as a world leader in the sector -- but there are now many more options for enterprising tech workers with a yen to stay in the north. Oulu's greatest hits have much greater name recognition than their shared point of origin: 5G. Texting, and then chatting online. Paying for things with your mobile phone. Fitness trackers. All of these inventions, and thousands more like them, were developed, thought up, tested, or launched from this sleepy Nordic spot, some 120 miles south of the Arctic Circle. To this day, the town remains home of the world's most talented engineers, still at work at other things that might someday improve your life: a smart ring that tracks your sleep and fitness, for instance, or directional speakers that push sound only where it is required.

Google has whittled down some free storage offers in recent months, while prodding more users toward a new paid cloud subscription called Google One. That's happening as the amount of data people stash online continues to soar. From a report: When people hit those caps, they realize they have little choice but to start paying, or risk losing access to emails, photos and personal documents. The cost isn't excessive for most consumers, but at the scale Google operates, this could generate billions of dollars in extra revenue each year for the company. A big driver of the shift is Gmail. Google shook up the email business when Gmail launched in 2004 with much more free storage than rivals were providing at the time. It boosted the storage cap every couple of years, but in 2013 it stopped. People's in-boxes kept filling up. And now that some of Google's other free storage offers are shrinking, consumers are beginning to get nasty surprises.

"I was merrily using the account and one day I noticed I hadn't received any email since the day before," said Rod Adams, a nuclear energy analyst and retired naval officer. After using Gmail since 2006, he'd finally hit his 15 GB cap and Google had cut him off. Switching away from Gmail wasn't an easy option because many of his social and business contacts reach him that way. "I just said 'OK, been free for a long time, now I'm paying,'" Adams said. Other Gmail users aren't so happy about the changes. "I am unreasonably sad about using almost all of my free google storage. Felt infinite. Please don't make me pay! I need U gmail googledocs!," one person tweeted in September.

An anonymous reader quotes the I-Programmer site: Humans! Rest easy, we still beat the evil AI at the all-important Angry Birds game. Recent research by Ekaterina Nikonova and Jakub Gemrot of Charles University (Czech Republic) indicates why this is so....

"Firstly, this game has a large number of possibilities of actions and nearly infinite amount of possible levels, which makes it difficult to use simple state space search algorithms for this task. Secondly, the game requires a planning of sequences of actions, which are related to each other... For example, a poorly chosen first action can make a level unsolvable by blocking a pig with a pile of objects. Therefore, to successfully solve the task, a game agent should be able to predict or simulate the outcome of it is own actions a few steps ahead."
The researchers also report that the game requires AI to distinguish "between multiple birds, their abilities and optimum tapping times..."

"Despite the fact we have come close to a human-level performance on selected 21 levels, we still lost to 3 out of 4 humans in obtaining a maximum possible total score."