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Submission + - May Go Car Shopping Without Reading This First! (fcc.gov)

Submitted by brandygas1
brandygas1 writes: Does it appear like car store assistants have gotten the better of an individual? Well, it's most likely because the seller is looking out for himself and even trying to get the most money for the car he's selling. You have to get down to business when buying a car; they are not your buddy. Keep reading this article intended for advice.When sitting with the bargaining stand, check out negotiate the price of the auto before talking about your trade-in. Performing this will allow you to acquire the best value on both cars. To get this done effectively do not discuss trade-ins until once you have

Submission + - SPAM: Researchers Teach Human Brain Cells in a Dish to Play "Pong"

Submitted by Hmmmmmm
Hmmmmmm writes: Researchers at the biotechnology startup Cortical Labs have created “mini-brains“ consisting of 800,000 to one million living human brain cells in a petri dish, New Scientist reports. The cells are placed on top of a microelectrode array that analyzes the neural activity.

To teach the mini-brains the game, the team created a simplified version of “Pong” with no opponent. A signal is sent to either the right or left of the array to indicate where the ball is, and the neurons from the brain cells send signals back to move the paddle.

Kagan said that while the mini-brains can’t play the game as well as a human, they do learn faster than some AIs.

“The amazon aspect is how quickly it learns, in five minutes, in real time,” he told New Scientist. “That’s really an amazing thing that biology can do.”

While this is certainly some amazing Twitch fodder, the team at Cortical Labs hope to use their findings to develop sophisticated technology using “live biological neurons integrated with traditional silicon computing,” according to the outfit’s website.

Video of brain cells playing "pong": [spam URL stripped]...
Link to Original Source

Submission + - AmigaOS4 NovaBridge testing

Submitted by Mike Bouma
Mike Bouma writes: AmigaOS4 betatester Roman Kargin (aka kas1e) has posted a youtube video demonstrating a betatest version of NovaBridge. This is a layer between old Warp3D/MiniGL apps and Warp3DNova which was written by Hans de Ruiter. So all applications written for old Warp3D and MiniGL works on Warp3DNova based cards such as Radeon HD and Radeon RX.

Kas1e demonstrates older Amiga PPC games like Heretic 2, Shogo and WipeOut 2097 running seamlessly on AmigaOS4. Kas1e can be found at the Amigans.net community portal. NovaBridge will become available through a future Enhancer Software release.

For more AmigaOS4 games have a look at this youtube video. It shows games including Descent: Freespace, Hurrican, M.A.C.E., Spencer and Tower 57 running on AmigaOS4.

Submission + - Cargo Drone Nails Its First Urban Transport Flight in Europe (autoevolution.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Italian UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) developer FlyingBasket has been showing off its FB3 cargo drone for a year now since it received operational authorization. But so far, the drone’s missions have been restricted to sparsely populated locations. The company reached a new milestone this week though, performing the first urban area flight in Turin. FlyingBasket is also the he first European drone operator in the Specific Category to obtain approval for executing cross-border operations.

Submission + - For 120,000+ San Diego Kids, Data Science is the New Computer Science

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: In a San Diego Union-Tribune op-ed, Freakonomics co-author and U. of Chicago prof Steven D. Levitt reports that the San Diego Unified school district is preparing students for a new world of work by expanding data science to more than 120,000 students. "The data boom of today isn’t just relevant to certain professionals like tech entrepreneurs and programmers," Levitt explains. "Workers at all levels and job functions are using tools from Google Sheets to Tableau and R to visualize trends, make sense of analytics reports and plan their work. Many have begun to question how well K-12 and higher education is preparing our students for the modern economy."

The push by educators for Data Science as a way to bring computing skills to the K-12 masses counters a decade-long call for 'rigorous' computer science for children by tech giants like Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Facebook, who have pretty much controlled the crisis-driven K-12 CS education narrative in the U.S. since 2012 and are currently throwing their money (and clout) behind a new AP CS A curriculum that would dramatically boost the number of high schools students who graduate with Java skills.

That CS may not be the best way to expose most kids to CS does not appear to have been completely lost on tech-backed Code.org, however. The nonprofit just introduced its new CS Connections curriculum, which it says "makes the connections between learning computer science and other subjects like math, language arts, science, and social studies," moving into the same domain as Data Science with lessons such as Data Visualization, which have students use the nonprofit's own 'Data Visualizer' app instead of widely-adopted open source or vendor dataviz software.

Submission + - SPAM: Fentanyl overdoses become No. 1 cause of death among US adults, ages 18-45

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: More adults between 18 and 45 died of fentanyl overdoses in 2020 than COVID-19, motor vehicle accidents, cancer and suicide

Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid that can be deadly even in very small amounts, and other drugs, including heroin, meth and marijuana, can be laced with the dangerous drug. Mexico and China are the primary sources for the flow of fentanyl into the United States, according to the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA).
Link to Original Source

Submission + - SPAM: Forget dogs: These rats could be the future of search and rescue

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: Think search and rescue animal, and you’re likely to picture a dog in an orange vest. But a Tanzanian nonprofit wants you to imagine something else: the African giant pouched rat. Donna Kean and her colleagues at APOPO, a nonprofit that trains pouched rats to save lives, have spent the past 2 decades working with the curious animals (Cricetomys ansorgei) to sniff out tuberculosis and track down land mines. Now, they’re moving on to search and rescue.

Science caught up with Kean to chat about the new project, known as RescueRats. Topics include, jus how to train a rat, what advantages they have over dogs, and whether people would be freaked out about a rodent coming to save them.
Link to Original Source

Submission + - SPAM: And the biggest scientific breakthrough of 2021 is...

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: In his 1972 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, American biochemist Christian Anfinsen laid out a vision: One day it would be possible, he said, to predict the 3D structure of any protein merely from its sequence of amino acid building blocks. With hundreds of thousands of proteins in the human body alone, such an advance would have vast applications, offering insights into basic biology and revealing promising new drug targets. Now, after nearly 50 years, researchers have shown that artificial intelligence (AI)-driven software can churn out accurate protein structures by the thousands—an advance that realizes Anfinsen’s dream and is Science’s 2021 Breakthrough of the Year.

Protein structures could once be determined only through painstaking lab analyses. But they can now be calculated, quickly, for tens of thousands of proteins, and for complexes of interacting proteins. “This is a sea change for structural biology,” says Gaetano Montelione, a structural biologist at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. David Baker, a University of Washington, Seattle, computational biochemist who led one of the prediction projects, adds that with the bounty of readily available structures, “All areas of computational and molecular biology will be transformed.”
Link to Original Source

Submission + - The war over Chinese Wikipedia (fastcompany.com)

Submitted by harrymcc
harrymcc writes: Earlier this year, the Wikimedia Foundation banned or demoted many of its editors responsible for the Chinese version of the encyclopedia. The foundation accused these volunteers of biasing it in favor of the Chinese government’s viewpoint. Over at Fast Company, we’ve published Alex Pasternack’s investigation into the story behind this incident, which involves beatings, doxxings, and harassment designed to ensure pro-Beijing content. With Wikipedia versions in other countries also under pressure of a variety of sorts, what’s happening in China is big—but hardly unique.

Comment Re:Like Anyone on /. Needed... (Score 1) 74

In response to your post:
>> Well, they mentioned there was no benefit after 3-4 cups a day. It shouldn't impact us around here.

That is NOT what the article said, The study stated that there is no ADDITIONAL BENEFIT after the fourth cup of coffee consumed daily.

If you follow the link in the article, the supporting study found that four or more cups of coffee daily are correlated with a 50% decline in death from liver disease.

Based on the alcohol consumption of some of us in the Slash Dot community, this is actually a pretty relevant article.

Comment The MacBook Air as great Windows PC (Score 1) 757

My first computer was an Apple II purchased in 1981. Armed with VisiCalc, I was a a spreadsheet warrior.

After using CP/M and MP/M in '82 and '83, I got my first MS-Dos PC in 1982.

For ten years, I loved MS-DOS, and my personal computing world included WordStar, VisiCalc, dBase, Q&A, BASIC, Forth, and 1802 Assembler.

In 1992, I transitioned to MS Windows, MS Office, Access, Oracle, and never looked back.

In 2012, I joined a company where part of my job was to support executives who were struggling to use MS Excel on MacBooks.
In 2013, I bought an 11" MacBook Air not because I wanted to, but because I couldn't convince those executives that using Windows devices did not make them look old and "out of touch."

While I had to special order it, my MacBook Air has an i7 processor, 16 GB of RAM, and a 1 TB SSD. (That size RAM and disk were not available in Apple stores at that time.) It cost almost three times more than if I had bought a Dell or HP laptop with similar specs.

For my own computing needs, I run Windows under Parallels on that MacBook Air and switch back to the Mac environment only when absolutely necessary.

So here we are in 2017. My MacBook air still looks like it is brand new. It still runs 100% of the software I need to do my job (especially Visio and MS Project). Even 3+ years later, the hardware specs are not antiquated. While I have a brand new Windows desktop at home, the Apple is in my hands the entire work day.

From a ruggedness and reliability perspective, my MacBook Air has been phenomenal.

While my next laptop will probably be a Yoga, (I bought one for my youngest son and he loves it), who knows ow many more years my 2013 MacBook Air will continue to be the machine with which I earn my living.

Obligatory XKCD Mac vs. Windows comic: https://xkcd.com/934/

Comment Re:This Means Very Little. (Score 1) 179

The very fact that Lyft's app allows for post-ride tipping shows they are less insensitive than Uber when it comes to their drivers. (As of the last time I used the Uber app, no provision for post-ride tipping existed.) While I have both apps on my phone, I use Uber only if I am in a city where Lyft is not available. If Uber ever runs out of money and leverage to artificially keep fares low, Lyft should be able to raise the fares by a couple of bucks and allow drivers to make a living wage. Until then, ethical riders should consider overly generous tipping as a way to help drivers of both services make ends meet.

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: Is Flexnet's Agent running on your computer? 1

Submitted by shanen
shanen writes: Is Flexnet's Agent running on your computer?

Not the first time I've noticed this on Windows 10... In your Task Manager you may be able to find an agent.exe process that runs from time to time. It's identified as the Flexnet Remote Desktop Connection software. Uh? But I didn't know I was running a remote connection to my desktop. You?

How serious is this version of the Microsoft ppyware problem?

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