Amid an escalating crisis, the power source offers a dream -- or a pipe dream -- of limitless clean energy. From a report: Let's say that you've devoted your entire adult life to developing a carbon-free way to power a household for a year on the fuel of a single glass of water, and that you've had moments, even years, when you were pretty sure you would succeed. Let's say also that you're not crazy. This is a reasonable description of many of the physicists working in the field of nuclear fusion. In order to reach this goal, they had to find a way to heat matter to temperatures hotter than the center of the sun, so hot that atoms essentially melt into a cloud of charged particles known as plasma; they did that. They had to conceive of and build containers that could hold those plasmas; they did that, too, by making "bottles" out of strong magnetic fields. When those magnetic bottles leaked -- because, as one scientist explained, trying to contain plasma in a magnetic bottle is like trying to wrap a jelly in twine -- they had to devise further ingenious solutions, and, again and again, they did. Over decades, in the pursuit of nuclear fusion, scientists and engineers built giant metal doughnuts and Gehryesque twisted coils, they "pinched" plasmas with lasers, and they constructed fusion devices in garages. For thirty-six years, they have been planning and building an experimental fusion device in Provence. And yet commercially viable nuclear-fusion energy has always remained just a bit farther on.

As the White Queen, in "Through the Looking Glass," said to Alice, it is never jam today, it is always jam tomorrow. The accelerating climate crisis makes fusion's elusiveness more than cutely maddening. Solar energy gets more efficient and affordable each year, but it's not continuously available, and it still relies on gas power plants for distribution. The same is true for wind power. Conventional nuclear power has extremely well-known disadvantages. Carbon capture, which is like a toothbrush for the sky, is compelling, but after you capture a teraton or two of carbon there's nowhere to put it. All these tools figure extensively in decarbonization plans laid out by groups like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, but, according to those plans, even when combined with one another the tools are insufficient. Fusion remains the great clean-energy dream -- or, depending on whom you ask, pipe dream. Fusion, theoretically, has no scarcity issues; our planet has enough of fusion's primary fuels, heavy hydrogen and lithium, which are found in seawater, to last thirty million years.

Fusion requires no major advances in batteries, it would be available on demand, it wouldn't cause the next Fukushima, and it wouldn't be too pricey -- if only we could figure out all the "details." (A joke I heard is that fusion operates according to the law of the "conservation of difficulty": when one problem is solved, a new one of equal difficulty emerges to take its place.) The details are tremendously complex, and the people who work to figure them out have for years been dealing with their own scarcities -- scarcities of funding and scarcities of faith. Fusion, as of now, has no place in the Green New Deal. In 1976, the U.S. Energy Research and Development Administration published a study predicting how quickly nuclear fusion could become a reality, depending on how much money was invested in the field. For around nine billion a year in today's dollars -- described as the "Maximum Effective Effort" -- it projected reaching fusion energy by 1990. The scale descended to about a billion dollars a year, which the study projected would lead to "Fusion Never." "And that's about what's been spent," the British physicist Steven Cowley told me. "Pretty close to the maximum amount you could spend in order to never get there."

"An international team of physicists have come up with a way to generate antimatter in the lab," reports Popular Mechanics, theoretically "allowing them to recreate conditions that are similar to those near a neutron star." This setup, at Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) research laboratory in Germany, involves two high-intensity laser beams that can generate a jet of antimatter, as outlined in a paper published earlier this summer in the journal Communications Physics. That could make antimatter-based research far more accessible for scientists around the world...

it's tremendously difficult to recreate a neutron star's extreme conditions in terms of the science and logistics — imagine if a sugar cube weighed as much as Mount Everest in your laboratory! Two, scientists want to make antimatter for further analysis in the lab... So how did the researchers at Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf figure out how to generate antimatter? They're using opposing lasers in a setup they're referring to as a laser pincer... There's a tiny piece of plastic that both lasers shoot toward. As the lasers destroy the plastic, they send clouds of electrons toward each other... By smashing particles together between two lasers, scientists can begin to approach the intensely concentrated gravity and matter of a neutron star...

In this case, scientists are still speculating that the laser pincers will work, with support from a computer simulation that has helped them test and confirm their theory. Now, the next step is to begin building the rig that will really fire the lasers. "[C]olleagues are developing a platform that can be used to experimentally test whether the magnetic fields actually form as our simulations predict," HZDR physicist Toma Toncian says.
Thanks to Slashdot reader Third Position for submitting the article!

"An enormous black hole keeps slipping through astronomers' nets..." reports Space.com: The big galaxy at the core of the cluster Abell 2261, which lies about 2.7 billion light-years from Earth, should have an even larger central black hole — a light-gobbling monster that weighs as much as 3 billion to 100 billion suns, astronomers estimate from the galaxy's mass. But the exotic object has evaded detection so far. For instance, researchers previously looked for X-rays streaming from the galaxy's center, using data gathered by NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory in 1999 and 2004. X-rays are a potential black-hole signature: As material falls into a black hole's maw, it accelerates and heats up tremendously, emitting lots of high-energy X-ray light. But that hunt turned up nothing.

Now, a new study has conducted an even deeper search for X-rays in the same galaxy, using Chandra observations from 2018... But the Chandra data didn't reveal any significant X-ray sources, either in the galactic core or in big clumps of stars farther afield. So the mystery of the missing supermassive black hole persists.

That mystery could be solved by Hubble's successor — NASA's big, powerful James Webb Space Telescope, which is scheduled to launch in October 2021. If James Webb doesn't spot a black hole in the galaxy's heart or in one of its bigger stellar clumps, "then the best explanation is that the black hole has recoiled well out of the center of the galaxy," NASA officials wrote.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: More than 1 billion people could be immunized against coronavirus by the end of next year with shots from the first two companies to reveal positive results, after the latest vaccine was shown to be nearly 95% effective in trials. With the US's top infectious diseases official, Anthony Fauci, hailing "the light at the end of the tunnel", the US biotech firm Moderna announced impressive results for its mRNA vaccine on Monday, a week after interim results for a Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine showed 90% effectiveness.

The inclusion of high-risk and elderly people in the Moderna trial suggested the vaccine would protect those most vulnerable to the disease, said Peter Openshaw, a professor of experimental medicine at Imperial College London, who described the results as "tremendously exciting." Though it is more expensive, Moderna's vaccine could potentially provide a major advantage over Pfizer's, which requires ultracold freezing between -70C (-94F) and -80C from production facility to patient. Moderna said it had improved the shelf life and stability, meaning its vaccine can be stored for six months at -20C for shipping and long-term storage, and at standard refrigeration temperatures of 2C to 8C for 30 days. Moderna said it could potentially manufacture 1bn doses by the end of 2021, adding to a further 1.3bn from Pfizer/BioNTech in the same timeframe. Both vaccines require two doses and are due to be assessed by regulators in coming weeks. Moderna is planning to apply to the FDA for emergency use authorization in the coming weeks. "The biotech company said it would have 20 million doses ready to ship in the U.S. before the end of 2020 and hoped to manufacture 500 million to 1 billion doses globally next year," reports The Guardian. It's not expected to be available outside the U.S. until next year.

"It's hard for those of us who live outside of China to grasp how paying for everything has gone digital in the country," writes the New York Times, introducing a Q&A with technology reporter Ray Zhong (who used to live in Beijing): Most businesses there, from the fanciest hotels to roadside fruit stands, display a QR code — a type of bar code — that people scan with a smartphone camera to pay with China's dominant digital payment apps, Alipay and WeChat. Paying by app is so much the norm that taxi drivers might curse at you for handing them cash...

Ray: Credit cards were never prevalent in China. The country skipped over a generation of finance and went straight to smartphone-based digital payments.

And the apps are simple for businesses. If a business can get a printout of a QR code, it can get paid by app. They don't need special machines like businesses do to accept credit cards or many mobile payments like Apple Pay, which are essentially digital wallets of bank cards, while Alipay and WeChat are more pure digital payments... China has a stodgy, state-dominated banking system. These apps have allowed small businesses to connect to modern financial infrastructure easily.

I know paying with a credit card isn't tremendously difficult, but making it a fraction easier to buy stuff has enabled different kinds of commerce. You probably wouldn't buy something on Instagram for 50 cents with your credit card, but people in China buy digital books one chapter at a time.

What are the downsides?

Ray: Imagine if powerful tech companies like Google knew everything you've purchased in your entire life. That's one. There are also concerns that Alipay and WeChat are so dominant that no one can compete with them.
Yet towards the end of the interview, the reporter concedes that Alipay and WeChat were "developed for China's specific needs. I'm not convinced similar QR-code-based digital payment systems will catch on elsewhere. Maybe in India."

Julianne Pepitone from IEEE Spectrum writes about the uncertain future of ham radio. An anonymous reader shares an excerpt: Will the amateur airwaves fall silent? Since the dawn of radio, amateur operators -- hams -- have transmitted on tenaciously guarded slices of spectrum. Electronic engineering has benefited tremendously from their activity, from the level of the individual engineer to the entire field. But the rise of the Internet in the 1990s, with its ability to easily connect billions of people, captured the attention of many potential hams. Now, with time taking its toll on the ranks of operators, new technologies offer opportunities to revitalize amateur radio, even if in a form that previous generations might not recognize. The number of U.S. amateur licenses has held at an anemic 1 percent annual growth for the past few years, with about 7,000 new licensees added every year for a total of 755,430 in 2018. The U.S. Federal Communications Commission doesn't track demographic data of operators, but anecdotally, white men in their 60s and 70s make up much of the population. As these baby boomers age out, the fear is that there are too few young people to sustain the hobby.

This question of how to attract younger operators also reveals deep divides in the ham community about the future of amateur radio. Like any large population, ham enthusiasts are no monolith; their opinions and outlooks on the decades to come vary widely. And emerging digital technologies are exacerbating these divides: Some hams see them as the future of amateur radio, while others grouse that they are eviscerating some of the best things about it. No matter where they land on these battle lines, however, everyone understands one fact. The world is changing; the amount of spectrum is not. And it will be hard to argue that spectrum reserved for amateur use and experimentation should not be sold off to commercial users if hardly any amateurs are taking advantage of it. One of the key debates in ham radio is its main function in the future: Is it a social hobby? A utility to deliver data traffic? And who gets to decide? "Those questions have no definitive or immediate answers, but they cut to the core of the future of ham radio," writes Pepitone. "Loring Kutchins, president of the Amateur Radio Safety Foundation, Inc. (ARSFi) -- which funds and guides the 'global radio email' system Winlink -- says the divide between hobbyists and utilitarians seems to come down to age."

"Younger people who have come along tend to see amateur radio as a service, as it's defined by FCC rules, which outline the purpose of amateur radio -- especially as it relates to emergency operations," Kutchins (W3QA) told Spectrum last year. Kutchins, 68, expanded on the theme in a recent interview: "The people of my era will be gone -- the people who got into it when it was magic to tune into Radio Moscow. But Grandpa's ham radio set isn't that big a deal compared to today's technology. That doesn't have to be sad. That's normal."

"Ham radio is really a social hobby, or it has been a very social hobby -- the rag-chewing has historically been the big part of it," says Martin F. Jue (K5FLU), founder of radio accessories maker MFJ Enterprises, in Starkville, Miss. "Here in Mississippi, you get to 5 or 6 o' clock and you have a big network going on and on -- some of them are half-drunk chattin' with you. It's a social group, and they won't even talk to you unless you're in the group."

hcs_$reboot writes: President Donald Trump said Monday that he has been taking anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine for over a week to prevent coronavirus infection even though it is not yet a proven treatment. Hydroxychloroquine, which is available as a generic drug and is also produced under the brand name Plaquenil by French drugmaker Sanofi, can have serious side effects, including muscle weakness and heart arrhythmia. A small study in Brazil was halted for safety reasons after coronavirus patients taking chloroquine, which hydroxychloroquine is derived from, developed arrhythmia, including some who died. Even Fox News agrees that this drug is harmful, adds hcs_$reboot. "I cannot stress this enough, this will kill you," Fox News host Neil Cavuto said.

Trump said Monday he asked his White House physician about the drug. "I asked him, 'What do you think?' He said, 'Well, if you'd like it.' I said, 'Yeah, I'd like it. I'd like to take it.'" Trump said Monday that if the drug wasn't good he'd "tell you." He said he's gotten "a lot of tremendously positive news on the hydroxy, and I say hey -- you know the expression I've used, John? What do you have to lose?"

"I'm not gonna get hurt by it. It's been around for 40 years," he said. "For malaria, for lupus, for other things. I take it. Front-line workers take it. A lot of doctors take it -- excuse me, a lot of doctors take it. I take it."

Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs, or CSOs) across the industry are reporting high levels of stress. From a report: Many say the heightened stress levels has led to mental and physical health issues, relationship problems, medication and alcohol abuse, and in some cases, an eventual burnout, resulting in an average 26-month tenure before CISOs find new employment. The numbers, reported by Nominet, represent a growing issue that's been commonly acknowledged, but mostly ignored across the information security (infosec) community, but one that is slowly starting to rear its ugly head as once-ignored infosec roles are becoming more prominent inside today's companies. [...] The survey's results paint a gloomy picture about one of today's most in-demand jobs. According to the numbers: 88% of CISOs reported being "moderately or tremendously stressed." 48% of CISOs said work stress has had a detrimental impact on their mental health. 40% of CISOs said that their stress levels had affected their relationships with their partners or children. 32% said that their job stress levels had repercussions on their marriage or romantic relationships.

"During its Q4 earnings call, Netflix shot down the idea of an ad-supported option for its service," writes Slashdot reader saccade.com. TechCrunch reports: "Google and Facebook and Amazon are tremendously powerful at online advertising because they're integrating so much data from so many sources. There's a business cost to that, but that makes the advertising more targeted and effective. So I think those three are going to get most of the online advertising business," Netflix CEO Reed Hastings said. To grow a $5 billion to $10 billion advertising business, you'd need to "rip that away" from the existing providers [such as Facebook, Amazon Google], he continued. And stealing online advertising business from [them] is "quite challenging," Hastings added, saying "there's not easy money there."

"We've got a much simpler business model, which is just focused on streaming and customer pleasure," he said. The CEO also noted that Netflix's strategic decision to not enter the ad business has its upsides, in terms of the controversies that surround companies that collect personal data on their users. To compete, Netflix would have to track more data on its subscribers, including things like their location -- that's not something it's interested in doing, he said, calling it "exploiting users." "We don't collect anything. We're really focused on just making our members happy," Hastings stated. "We think with our model that we'll actually get to larger revenue, larger profits, larger market cap because we don't have the exposure to something that we're strategically disadvantaged at -- which is online advertising against those big three," he said. TechCrunch points out that Netflix does track viewership data, overall viewing trends, and users' own interactions with its service. It also recently introduced a new "chose to watch" viewership metric.

"However, none of this viewership tracking is on the scale of big tech's data collection practices, which is what Hastings meant by his comment," the report says.

Is it embarrassing for adults to like superheroes? According to Alan Moore -- creator of the Watchmen series and widely considered one of the greatest comic book writers -- it is. From a report: He says superheroes are perfectly fine for 12 or 13-year-olds but adults should think again. "I think the impact of superheroes on popular culture is both tremendously embarrassing and not a little worrying," he says. Alan wrote Watchmen in 1986. The series depicts an alternate history where superheroes emerged in the 1940s and 1960s and their presence changed the course of history. He believes the characters are "perfectly suited" to the imaginations of a younger audience - but now, they serve a "different function, and are fulfilling different needs." The writer claims adults enjoy superhero films because they don't wish to leave their "relatively reassuring childhoods" behind, or move into the 21st century.

A U.S. online privacy bill is not likely to come before Congress this year, Reuters reported Monday, citing three sources, as lawmakers disagree over issues like whether the bill should preempt state rules, forcing companies to deal with much stricter legislation in California that goes into effect on Jan. 1. From a report: Without a federal law, technology companies, retailers, advertising firms and others dependent on collecting consumer data to track users and increase sales must adapt to the California law, potentially harming corporate profits over the long term. The delay is a setback for companies ranging from Amazon and Facebook to Alphabet's Google and retailers like Walmart, who either directly collect shopper information to run their websites, or provide free services and derive revenues from advertising that relies on online data collection.

"This will be tremendously challenging... companies need to really focus on complying with California now because there is not going to be a life raft from a federal level," Gary Kibel, a partner specializing in technology and privacy at law firm Davis & Gilbert. While the sources, who are involved in the negotiations, still think it is possible at least one discussion draft of the bill could land before the year ends, congressional negotiators must still agree on whether it is adequate to simply ask consumers to consent to collection of personally identifiable information and give them the opportunity to opt out and how the new law would be enforced.

Microsoft's original co-founder Paul Allen was honored posthumously with a lifetime achievement award for philanthropy this week at the Forbes Philanthropy summit.

Bill Gates remembers Allen as "one of the most intellectually curious people I've ever known," adding "I wish more people understood just how wide-ranging his giving was," and shared his remembrances at the ceremony: Later in life, Paul gave to a huge spectrum of issues that seem unrelated at first glance. He wanted to prevent elephant poaching, improve ocean health, and promote smart cities. He funded new housing for the homeless and arts education in the Puget Sound region. In 2014 alone, he supported research into the polio virus and efforts to contain the Ebola outbreak in West Africa -- all while standing up an amazing new institute for studying artificial intelligence.

If you knew him, the logic in Paul's portfolio is easy to see. He gave to the things that he was most interested in, and to the places where he thought he could have the most impact. Even though Paul cared about a lot of different things, he was deeply passionate about each of them.
There's a picture of a young Bill Gates in the eighth grade watching Paul Allen on a teletype terminal. "The only way for us to get computer time was by exploiting a bug in the system."

"We eventually got busted, but that led to our first official partnership between Paul and me: we worked out a deal with the company to use computers for free if we would identify problems. We spent just about all our free time messing around with any machine we could get our hands on." One day -- when Paul and I were both in Boston -- he insisted that I rush over to a nearby newsstand with him. He wanted to show me the cover of the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics. It featured a new computer called the Altair 8800, which ran on a powerful new chip. I remember him holding up the cover and saying, "This is happening without us!"

Paul always wanted to push the boundaries of science. He did it when we were testing the limits of what a chip could do at Microsoft, and he continues to do it today -- even after he's gone -- through the work of the Allen Institute. When I first heard he was creating an organization to study brain science, I thought, "Of course...."

I wish Paul had gotten to see all of the good his generosity will do. He was one of the most thoughtful, brilliant, and curious people I've ever met....

I will miss him tremendously.

Phoronix has conducted a series of tests to show just how much the Spectre and Meltdown patches have impacted the raw performance of Intel and AMD CPUs. While the patches have resulted in performance decreases across the board, ranging from virtually nothing to significant depending on the application, it appears that Intel received the short end of the stick as its CPUs have been hit five times harder than AMD, according to ExtremeTech. From the report: The collective impact of enabling all patches is not a positive for Intel. While the impacts vary tremendously from virtually nothing to significant on an application-by-application level, the collective whack is about 15-16 percent on all Intel CPUs without Hyper-Threading disabled. Disabling increases the overall performance impact to 20 percent (for the 7980XE), 24.8 percent (8700K) and 20.5 percent (6800K).

The AMD CPUs are not tested with HT disabled, because disabling SMT isn't a required fix for the situation on AMD chips, but the cumulative impact of the decline is much smaller. AMD loses ~3 percent with all fixes enabled. The impact of these changes is enough to change the relative performance weighting between the tested solutions. With no fixes applied, across its entire test suite, the CPU performance ranking is (from fastest to slowest): 7980XE (288), 8700K (271), 2990WX (245), 2700X (219), 6800K. (200). With the full suite of mitigations enabled, the CPU performance ranking is (from fastest to slowest): 2990WX (238), 7980XE (231), 2700X (213), 8700K (204), 6800K (159). In closing, ExtremeTech writes: "AMD, in other words, now leads the aggregate performance metrics, moving from 3rd and 4th to 1st and 3rd. This isn't the same as winning every test, and since the degree to which each test responds to these changes varies, you can't claim that the 2990WX is now across-the-board faster than the 7980XE in the Phoronix benchmark suite. It isn't. But the cumulative impact of these patches could result in more tests where Intel and AMD switch rankings as a result of performance impacts that only hit one vendor."

Elon Musk took to Twitter Sunday evening to announce the "first firing of Starship Raptor flight engine." While SpaceX has fired individual components before and experimented with various designs, this is the first time the now-completed design has been assembled and fired in its intended spaceflight configuration. ExtremeTech reports: Raptor has gone through a number of design changes -- originally, SpaceX planned to mount it to the ITS launch vehicle back in 2016 (powered by 42 Raptor engines), before changing gears and unveiling its BFR rocket concept (officially known as "Super Heavy" for the first stage, and Starship for the second). The Super Heavy mounts 31 Raptor engines, while the Starship has seven. The engine has been designed with a priority on lowering overall wear and tear and removing failure points that could limit its reusability or increase long-term operating costs. Unlike SpaceX's Merlin engine, which runs on a mixture of RP-1 and LOX, the Raptor engine is fueled by cryogenic liquid methane and LOX. The Raptor uses subcooled methane (subcooling refers to keeping the temperature of the liquid well below its boiling point). Subcooling the methane allows SpaceX to increase the amount of propellant stored in the rocket. It increases specific impulse and reduces cavitation.

The actual test burn only goes on for a few seconds, but yields tremendously valuable information about the actual performance of the rocket and its ability to ignite in a controlled fashion. The green glow in the exhaust near the end of the firing indicates the copper liner in the engine chamber burned by accident. While this should not have happened, it's precisely to find these pain points that engineers conduct test firings in the first place. There is no substitute for this kind of test-firing and, as Ars Technica notes, "any 'first' test firing of a new, full-scale rocket engine that doesn't end in an uncontrolled explosion is a good thing." Ars also states that this specific engine may be deployed for "hopper" flights this year when SpaceX attempts to fly the Starship roughly 5km high, then land it again.

Daylight Saving Time ended in the United States on Sunday, bumping the clocks back an hour. The change happened in Europe a week earlier, meaning the time difference between the continents was momentarily smaller. It's another confusing wrinkle in a confusing temporal process that confounds the world. From a story: Today, 70 countries change their clocks midyear for Daylight Saving Time, including most of North America, Europe and parts of South America and New Zealand. China, Japan, India and most countries near the equator don't fall back or jump ahead. In much of Asia and South America, the Daylight Saving Time shift was adopted, but then abandoned. It has never been observed in most of Africa. While the United States extended its Daylight Saving Time in 2005 and Florida wants to make it its standard time, other countries are moving to ditch the practice.

The European Union is weighing a plan to abandon shifting from daylight saving time midyear. "Millions ... believe that summertime should be all the time," the European Union's chief executive, Jean-Claude Juncker, told German reporters in August. Juncker was referring, in part, to an online poll conducted by the E.U., which found that changing clocks is tremendously unpopular. (As my colleague Rick Noack pointed out, however, there are methodological problems: "The largest share of participants came from one country -- Germany -- where the time switch has been a somewhat odd front-page topic for years. But any E.U. decision would also impact the 27 other member states.")

"Dire as it is, the latest IPCC report is actually too optimistic," writes Slashdot reader Dan Drollette. "It ignores the risk of self-reinforcing climate feedbacks pushing the planet into chaos beyond human control. So says a team of climate experts, including the winner of the 1995 Nobel for his work on depletion of the ozone layer." From their article: These cascading feedbacks include the loss of the Arctic's sea ice, which could disappear entirely in summer in the next 15 years. The ice serves as a shield, reflecting heat back into the atmosphere, but is increasingly being melted into water that absorbs heat instead. Losing the ice would tremendously increase the Arctic's warming, which is already at least twice the global average rate. This, in turn, would accelerate the collapse of permafrost, releasing its ancient stores of methane, a super climate pollutant 30 times more potent in causing warming than carbon dioxide.

By largely ignoring such feedbacks, the IPCC report fails to adequately warn leaders about the cluster of six similar climate tipping points that could be crossed between today's temperature and an increase to 1.5 degrees -- let alone nearly another dozen tipping points between 1.5 and 2 degrees. These wildcards could very likely push the climate system beyond human ability to control. As the UN Secretary General reminded world leaders last month, "We face an existential threat. Climate change is moving faster than we are.⦠If we do not change course by 2020, we risk missing the point where we can avoid runaway climate change, with disastrous consequences."
In related news, a court in The Hague "has upheld a historic legal order on the Dutch government to accelerate carbon emissions cuts, a day after the world's climate scientists warned that time was running out to avoid dangerous warming. Appeal court judges ruled that the severity and scope of the climate crisis demanded greenhouse gas reductions of at least 25% by 2020 -- measured against 1990 levels -- higher than the 17% drop planned by Mark Rutte's liberal administration. The ruling -- which was greeted with whoops and cheers in the courtroom -- will put wind in the sails of a raft of similar cases being planned around the world, from Norway to New Zealand and from the UK to Uganda."

Meanwhile, a new article in GQ cites estimates that more than 70 percent of global emissions come from just 100 companies, complaining that "there is no 'free market' incentive to prevent disaster."

An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from a report written by Gillian Hadfield via TechCrunch. Hadfield is a professor of law and strategic management at the the University of Toronto; a faculty affiliate at the Vector Institute for AI; and a senior policy advisor at OpenAI. From the report: Building machines that can perform any cognitive task means figuring out how to build AI that can not only learn about things like the biology of tomatoes but also about our highly variable and changing systems of norms about things like what we do with tomatoes. [...] For AI to be truly powerful will require machines to comprehend that norms can vary tremendously from group to group, making them seem unnecessary, yet it can be critical to follow them in a given community. [...] Norms concern things not only as apparently minor as what foods to combine but also things that communities consider tremendously consequential: who can marry whom, how children are to be treated, who is entitled to hold power, how businesses make and price their goods and services, when and how criticism can be shared publicly. Successful and safe AI that achieves our goals within the limits of socially accepted norms requires an understanding of not only how our physical systems behave, but also how human normative systems behave.

Norms are not just fixed features of the environment, like the biology of a plant. They are dynamic and responsive structures that we make and remake on a daily basis, as we decide whether or when to let someone know that "this" is the way "we" do things around here. These normative systems are the systems on which we rely to solve the challenge of ensuring that people behave the way we want them to in our communities, workplaces and social environments. Only with confidence about how everyone around us is likely to behave are we all willing to trust and live and invest with one another. Ensuring that powerful AIs behave the way we want them to will not be so terribly different. Just as we need to raise our children to be competent participants in our systems of norms, we will need to train our machines to be similarly competent. It is not enough to be extremely knowledgeable about the facts of the universe; extreme competence also requires wisdom enough to know that there may be a rule here, in this group but not in that group. And that ignoring that rule may not just annoy the group; it may lead them to fear or reject the machine in their midst.

Long-time Slashdot reader cold fjord writes: Extremetech reports, "At CES 2018 this week, Intel's CEO Brian Krzanich declared the company's new 49-qubit quantum computer represented a step towards "quantum supremacy." A 49 qubit system is a major advance for Intel, which just demonstrated a 17-qubit system two months ago. Intel's working with the Netherlands-based Qutech on this project, and expanding the number of qubits is key to creating quantum computers that can deliver real-world results... "Qubits are tremendously fragile," Intel wrote in October. "Any noise or unintended observation of them can cause data loss. This fragility requires them to operate at about 20 millikelvin -- 250 times colder than deep space." This is also why we won't be seeing quantum computers in anyone's house at any point."
Krzanich also thanked the industry for "coming together" to address the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities. "The collaboration among so many companies to address this industry-wide issue across several different processor architectures has been truly remarkable."

You asked, he answered!

For Slashdot's 20th anniversary -- and the 23rd anniversary of the first release of Red Hat Linux -- here's a special treat.

Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst has responded to questions submitted by Slashdot readers. Read on for his answers...

An anonymous reader shares a Bloomberg report: Over the past two years, after decades of declining deaths on the road, U.S. traffic fatalities surged by 14.4 percent. In 2016 alone, more than 100 people died every day in or near vehicles in America, the first time the country has passed that grim toll in a decade. Regulators, meanwhile, still have no good idea why crash-related deaths are spiking: People are driving longer distances but not tremendously so; total miles were up just 2.2 percent last year. Collectively, we seemed to be speeding and drinking a little more, but not much more than usual. Together, experts say these upticks don't explain the surge in road deaths. There are however three big clues, and they don't rest along the highway. One, as you may have guessed, is the substantial increase in smartphone use by U.S. drivers as they drive. From 2014 to 2016, the share of Americans who owned an iPhone, Android phone, or something comparable rose from 75 percent to 81 percent. The second is the changing way in which Americans use their phones while they drive. These days, we're pretty much done talking. Texting, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram are the order of the day -- all activities that require far more attention than simply holding a gadget to your ear or responding to a disembodied voice. By 2015, almost 70 percent of Americans were using their phones to share photos and follow news events via social media. In just two additional years, that figure has jumped to 80 percent.