An anonymous reader quotes a report from CBS News: For the first time, new research suggests artificial intelligence may be better than highly-trained humans at detecting skin cancer. A study conducted by an international team of researchers pitted experienced dermatologists against a machine learning system, known as a deep learning convolutional neural network, or CNN, to see which was more effective at detecting malignant melanomas. The results? 'Most dermatologists were outperformed by the CNN,' the researchers wrote in their report, published in the journal Annals of Oncology. Fifty-eight dermatologists from 17 countries around the world participated in the study. More than half of the doctors were considered expert level with more than five years' experience. Nineteen percent said they had between two to five years' experience, and 29 percent had less than two years' experience. At first look, dermatologists correctly detected an average of 87 percent of melanomas, and accurately identified an average of 73 percent of lesions that were not malignant. Conversely, the CNN correctly detected 95 percent of melanomas. The study has been published in the journal Annals of Oncology.

Presto Vivace shares a report from The Intercept: Officials at the Lockport, New York, school district have purchased face recognition technology as part of a purported effort to prevent school shootings. Starting in September, all 10 of Lockport District's school buildings, just north of Buffalo, will be outfitted with a surveillance system that can identify faces and objects. The software, known as Aegis, was developed by SN Technologies Corp., a Canadian biometrics firm that specifically advertises to schools. It can be used to alert officials to whenever sex offenders, suspended students, fired employees, suspected gang members, or anyone else placed on a school's "blacklist" enters the premises. Aegis also sends alerts any time one of the "top 10" most popular guns used in school shootings appears in view of a camera. The district is spending most of its recent $4 million state "Smart School" grant on these and other enhancements to its security systems, including bullet-proof greeter windows and a mass notification system, according to the Niagra Gazette. Slashdot reader Presto Vivace adds: "This is why municipal elections are so important. Just because this stuff is on the market, does not mean your local school system has to buy it."

The report notes that "all the major school shootings in the last five years in the U.S. have been carried out by current students or alumnae of the school in question." These students wouldn't have their face entered into the face recognition system's blacklist. Furthermore, "Most shooters don't brandish their guns before opening fire; and by the time they do, an object-detection algorithm that could specify the exact type of weapon they're firing would not be of much use," reports The Intercept. "... the technology would give a school, at best, only a few extra seconds in response time to a shooting."

schwit1 quotes a report from Newsweek: You may well have heard that Australia's iconic Great Barrier Reef is dying as warmer and more acidic waters bleach the system's vibrant coral reefs. In fact, a heat wave killed nearly a third of the system's corals in 2016. Now, scientists writing in the journal Nature Geoscience have discovered the reef has bounced back from near-extinction five times in the last 30,000 years. The current stresses, however, are probably far more intense than those felt in the past.

Low sea levels 30,000 and 22,000 years ago killed coral by air exposure. The remaining reef shifted seaward and eventually bounced back. Rising sea levels -- like those we see today -- killed off the coral twice between 13,000 and 17,000 years ago. This time, coral inched close to land to survive. The reef system, the scientists think, migrated up to 60 inches a year in the face of a changing environment. The last of the five great die-offs occurred about 10,000 years ago, and was likely caused by a huge influx of sediment, a reduction in water quality and a general sea level rise. The reef system may be due for another die-off sometime in the next few thousand years "if it follows its past geological pattern," study author Jody Webster told AFP. "But whether human-induced climate change will hasten that death remains to be seen."

The latest project from Tom "Tom7" Murphy is an unmodified NES running Super NES games. "Murphy breaks down this wizardry in a pair of detailed videos laying out his tinkering process," reports Ars Technica. "Though the NES hardware itself is untouched, the cartridge running this reverse emulation is a heavily customized circuit board (ordered from China for about $10), with a compact, multi-core Raspberry Pi 3 attached to handle the actual Super NES emulation." From the report: The Pi essentially replaces the PPU portion of the cartridge, connecting to the NES via a custom-coded EEPROM chip that tells the system how to process and display what would normally be an overwhelming stream of graphical data coming from the miniature computer. Only the CIC "copyright" chip from the original cartridge remains unmodified to get around the hardware's lockout chip. Murphy -- you may remember him from previous efforts to teach an AI how to play NES games -- says that the Raspberry Pi actually has too much latency to effectively "stream" tile-by-tile graphical instructions to the NES' cartridge CPU. By the time the Pi manages to "discharge" a set of instruction bits (only 180ns after they were generated), the NES itself has already moved on to the next part of its read-write cycle.

Murphy used a one-cycle delay to compensate for this latency, essentially guessing where the fairly predictable PPU would be writing to next and just sending data to that location ahead of time. That process works pretty well but results in the persistent flickering and graphical noise you see throughout his video demonstrations.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Car and Driver: California is taking its first steps toward America's first digital license plate. Using display technology akin to the e-ink used in the Amazon Kindle, a Foster City, California, outfit called Reviver Auto has come up with a digital plate that is now available on a limited basis in California, with the first fleet trial taking place on a fleet of 24 City of Sacramento -- owned Chevrolet Volt cars wearing plates supplied at no cost by Reviver. The new monochrome units -- which were also just rolled out in Dubai -- comply with reflectivity standards and are GPS enabled, allowing owners to track a stolen vehicle or at least its plate.

Owners accustomed to an otherwise-paperless lifestyle will appreciate that, thanks to the Reviver's Rplate Pro, registration can be paid via the internet, assuring that one never has to make a last-minute trip to the DMV's no-appointment Hell Line. It should also be a boon to companies with large fleets. What's more, it's easy to upgrade to a special-interest plate if one chooses to do so.

madsci1016 writes: Frustrated with how long my Windows Server 2016 Essentials was taking to apply weekly updates, I turned to the web. A quick search revealed that I'm not alone. Many people are reporting similar experiences across the web. All sharing stories of weekly patching taking hours and sometimes ending in hung welcome screens. Some of these threads started a year ago and are still active, with no response from Microsoft addressing the issue. If you use Server 2016, have you experienced this problem?

Hoping to maintain the high ground in AI and high-performance computing, Nvidia late Tuesday debuted a new computing architecture that it claims will unify both fast-growing areas of the industry. From a report: The announcement of the HGX-2 cloud-server platform, made by Nvidia Chief Executive Jensen Huang at its GPU Technology Conference in Taipei, Taiwan, is aimed at many new applications that combine AI and HPC. "We believe the future requires a unified platform for AI and high-performance computing," Paresh Kharya, product marketing manager for Nvidiaâ(TM)s accelerated-computing group, said during a press call Tuesday.

Others agree. "I think that AI will revolutionize HPC," Karl Freund, a senior analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, told SiliconANGLE. "I suspect many supercomputing centers will deploy HGX2 as it can add dramatic computational capacity for both HPC and AI." More specifically, the new architecture enables applications involving scientific computing and simulations, such as weather forecasting, as well as both training and running of AI models such as deep learning neural networks, for jobs such as image and speech recognition and navigation for self-driving cars.

A prominent Gartner analyst argues that Windows 10 Pro is a dead end for enterprises, citing recent changes by Microsoft to the Windows 10 support schedule. "[We] predict that Microsoft will continue positioning Windows [10] Pro as a release that is not appropriate for enterprises by reducing [...] support and limiting access to enterprise management features," Stephen Kleynhans, a research vice president at Gartner and one of the research firm's resident Windows experts, said in a report he co-authored. Computerworld reports: Last year, the Redmond, Wash. developer announced a six-month support extension for Windows 10 1511, the November 2015 feature upgrade, "to help some early enterprise adopters that are still finishing their transition to Windows as a service." In February, Microsoft added versions 1609, 1703 and 1709 -- released in mid-2016, and in April and October of 2017, respectively -- to the extended support list, giving each 24 months of support, not the usual 18. There was a catch: Only Windows 10 Enterprise (and Windows 10 Education, a similar version for public and private school districts and universities) qualified for the extra six months of support. Users running Windows 10 Pro were still required to upgrade to a successor SKU (stock-keeping unit) within 18 months to continue receiving security patches and other bug fixes.

Another component of Microsoft's current Windows 10 support strategy, something the company has labeled "paid supplemental servicing," was also out of bounds for those running Windows 10 Pro. The extra support, which Microsoft will sell at an undisclosed price, is available only to Enterprise and Education customers. Paid supplemental servicing adds 12 months to the 18 months provided free of charge.

Yesterday at the Augmented World Expo in Santa Clara, California, Qualcomm announced a new chip specifically designed for standalone augmented reality and virtual reality devices: the Snapdragon XR1. Ars Technica reports: The company is staying tight-lipped on technical details about the new SoC for the time being. Qualcomm says the SoC will use a Kryo CPU and Adreno GPU, as Qualcomm chips typically do, but exactly how those and the rest of the XR1's building blocks will be configured isn't yet clear. That said, Qualcomm is slotting the XR1 below its existing Snapdragon 845 -- the chip powering most of the year's highest-end smartphones -- in terms of memory bandwidth and GPU power. It is primarily aiming XR1 devices at "lean back" experiences like 360-degree video viewing, at least to start.

Even still, the company says the XR1 can output video up to 4K resolution at 60 frames per second, that it'll keep motion-to-photon latency "well below" 20 milliseconds (so as to prevent nausea and motion sickness), and that it can handle both 3DoF and 6DoF tracking for headsets and accompanying controllers if needed. (Devices with the latter allow users to replicate a fuller range of movement in a virtual space.) Qualcomm is talking up the chip's power management and 3D-audio abilities and its support for always-on voice assistance as well.

According to Alexa, the Amazon-owned web traffic analyzing platform, more people now visit Reddit than Facebook in the US. From a report: Spotted, of course, on Reddit by user IamATechieNerd, the stats will be a big boost for the social sharing platform, especially with many users still irked about the recent re-design. It's important to note that analyzing web traffic using a tool like Alexa is not an exact science, but it's interesting that it has now put Reddit ahead of Facebook. If the stats are to be believed, Google is still the most visited site, followed by YouTube, Reddit, and Facebook, with Amazon rounding out the top five.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: The California Senate voted on Wednesday to approve a bill that would reinstate the net neutrality regulations repealed by the Federal Communications Commission in December. The bill, S.B. 822, authored by Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco), was introduced in March and passed through three committees, all along party-lines. The bill was approved 23-12 and will now head to the state Assembly. The bill would reinstate rules similar to those in the FCC's 2015 Open Internet Order. It forbids ISPs from throttling or blocking online content and requires them to treat all internet traffic equally. But the bill also takes the original rules further by specifically banning providers from participating in some types of "zero-rating" programs, in which certain favored content doesn't contribute to monthly data caps. If the bill goes on to pass in the Assembly, providers will no longer be able to obtain government contracts in the state of California without obeying the regulations.

Intel announced the availability of its long-awaited Optane DIMMs Wednesday, bringing 3D XPoint memory onto the DDR4 memory bus. From a report: The modules that have been known under the Apache Pass codename will be branded as Optane DC Persistent Memory, to contrast with Optane DC SSDs, and not to be confused with the consumer-oriented Optane Memory caching SSDs. The new Optane DC Persistent Memory modules will be initially available in three capacities: 128GB, 256GB and 512GB per module. This implies that they are probably still based on the same 128Gb 3D XPoint memory dies used in all other Optane products so far. The modules are pin-compatible with standard DDR4 DIMMs and will be supported by the next generation of Intel's Xeon server platforms.

Consumer Reports said on Wednesday that it now recommends Tesla's Model 3 sedan after its latest tests showed that a firmware update improved the car's braking distance by nearly 20 feet. From a report: The magazine last week flagged "big flaws" in the car, including braking slower than a full-sized pickup truck, while also highlighting many positives. In a tweet, Mr. Musk said he really appreciates "the high quality critical feedback from @ConsumerReports. Road noise & ride comfort already addressed too. UI improvements coming via remote software update later this month."

A Washington D.C. court has dismissed Kaspersky Lab's lawsuits against the U.S. government over two different rules banning Kaspersky products from federal systems. From a report: Both a federal law passed as part of last years National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA,) and a binding operational directive (BOD) issued by the Department of Homeland Security, prohibit federal agencies from using Kaspersky products. Both portrayed Kaspersky, a Moscow based company, as a national security risk. Kaspersky sued to prevent the two rules from coming into place, claiming the NDAA was a form of unlawful punishment against a specific company known as a bill of attainder. The judge reasoned that "The NDAA does not inflict 'punishment' on Kaspersky Lab. It eliminates a perceived risk to the Nation's cybersecurity and, in so doing, has the secondary effect of foreclosing one small source of revenue for a large multinational corporation." Because the NDAA ruling remains in effect, the judge ruled the BOD case was more or less a moot point. Further reading: Who's Afraid of Kaspersky?, and US Government Can't Get Controversial Kaspersky Lab Software Off Its Networks.

Walmart will begin offering to subsidize college tuition for its 1.5 million workers in the United States, joining a growing list of companies that are helping employees pay for higher education as a perk in a tight labor market. From a report: The retailer's 1.5 million employees can now pursue associate's or bachelor's degrees in business or supply-chain management at three nonprofit schools for $1 a day, according to a statement Wednesday. Walmart will subsidize tuition, books and fees and provide support with the application and enrollment processes. As many as 68,000 employees might sign up, Walmart executives estimated. "Many of our associates don't have the opportunity to complete a degree," said Drew Holler, Walmart's U.S. vice president of people innovation, in an interview. "We felt strongly that this is something that would improve their lives and help us run a better business." The tuition program -- offered to part-time staff as well as full-timers -- is the latest move by Walmart to improve employee retention and engagement. A handful of other companies, including Starbucks and Amazon, also offer tuition support.