Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×

Submission + - EU brings in 'right to repair' rules for appliances (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by AmiMoJo
AmiMoJo writes: Household appliances will become easier to repair thanks to new standards being adopted across the European Union. From 2021, firms will have to make appliances longer-lasting, and they will have to supply spare parts for machines for up to 10 years. The rules apply to lighting, washing machines, dishwashers and fridges.

But campaigners for the "right to repair" say they do not go far enough as only professionals — not consumers — will be able carry out the repairs. The legislation has been prompted by complaints from consumers across Europe and North America infuriated by machines that break down when they are just out of warranty. Owners are usually unable to repair the machines themselves — or find anyone else to do it at a decent price — so are forced to buy a replacement.

Submission + - Scientists Are Starting to Take Warp Drives Seriously (popularmechanics.com) 1

Submitted by appedology.pk
appedology.pk writes: Warp drive is one of the many futuristic ideas proposed in Star Trek, allowing for faster-than-light travel across the galaxy. Einstein's Theory of Relativity prevents anything from moving faster than light.
In 1994, a theoretical physicist proposed a workaround: creating a bubble within space-time that would twist distances, allowing anything within the bubble to travel long distances. Many think it makes theoretical sense, but is practically unworkable.
An undergrad at the University of Alabama wants to restart the conversation, and he's focused on how much energy such a bubble would need.
Star Trek's science fiction has been intermingled with real-life science for decades. The franchise has inspired technologies that people use and study every day, and now a mechanical engineering student at the University of Alabama in Huntsville wants to bring forth another one: warp drive.

Warp drive is fundamental to the world of Star Trek, as it's the crucial component to superluminal starships. Without these super-fast ships that run on warp drive, we can't become a space-faring species. Thus, warp drive is tremendously important to humanity's evolution.

But Einstein's Theory of Relativity kind of throws a wrench into the whole thing, since nothing can travel faster than the speed of light.

"As objects travel faster and faster, they get heavier and heavier—the heavier they get, the harder it is to achieve acceleration, so you never get to the speed of light," Roger Rassool, a physicist at the University of Melbourne, Australia, once told the BBC. Only things with no mass, like photons, can travel at those tremendous speeds. That certainly rules out massive ships like the Enterprise.

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: How Do You Estimate The Cost Of An Algorithm Turned Into An ASIC? 2

Submitted by dryriver
dryriver writes: Another coder and I are exploring the possibility of having a video processing algorithm written in C turned into an ASIC ("Application Specific Integrated Circuit") hardware chip that could go inside various consumer electronics devices. The problem? There seems to be very little good information on how much a 20Kb, or 50Kb or indeed a 150Kb algorithm written in the C language would cost to turn in an ASIC or "Custom Chip". We've been told that "the chip-design engineering fees alone would likely start at around 500K Dollars". We've been told "the cost per ASIC will fluctuate wildly depending on whether you are having 50K ASICS manufactured or 5 Million ASICs manufactured". Is there some rough way to calculate from the source code size of an algorithm — lets say 100 Kilobytes of C code, or 1000 lines of code — a rough per-unit estimate of how much the ASIC hardware equivalent might cost to make? Why do we need this? Because we want to pitch our video processing tech to a company that makes consumer products, and they will likely ask us "so... how many Dollars of extra cost will this new video processing chip of yours add to our existing products?".

Submission + - Waymo Releases a Self-Driving Open Data Set For Free Use By Research Community (techcrunch.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Waymo is opening up its significant stores of autonomous driving data with a new Open Data Set it’s making available for the purposes of research. The data set isn’t for commercial use, but its definition of “research” is fairly broad, and includes researchers at other companies as well as academics. The data set is “one of the largest, riches and most diverse self-driving data sets ever released for research,” according to Waymo principal scientist and head of Research, Drago Anguelov, who was at both Zoox and Google prior to joining Waymo last year. Anguelov said in a briefing that the reason he initiated the push to make this data available is that Waymo and several other companies working in the field are “currently hampered by the lack of suitable data sets.”

The Waymo Open Data set tries to fill in some of these gaps for their research peers by providing data collected from 1,000 driving segments done by its autonomous vehicles on roads, with each segment representing 20 seconds of continuous driving. It includes driving done in Phoenix, Ariz.; Kirkland, Wash.; Mountain View, Calif.; and San Francisco, Calif., and offering a range of different driving conditions, including at night, during rain, at dusk and more. The segments include data collected from five of Waymo’s own proprietary lidars, as well as five standard cameras that face front and to the sides, providing a 360-degree view captured in high resolution, as well as synchronization Waymo uses to fuse lidar and imaging data. Objects, including vehicles, pedestrians, cyclists and signage is all labeled.

Submission + - China's Warning to Global CEOs: Toe the Party Line on Hong Kong (bloomberg.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: As anti-government protests in Hong Kong intensified this month, KPMG issued a directive to its employees in the city: Don’t speak on behalf of the company in public. It went on to say that the firm supports China’s policy for governing Hong Kong.

PwC, another Big Four accounting giant, sent a similar message to staff telling them to avoid disclosing anything about the company on social media platforms, according to emails seen by Bloomberg.

This is the new reality for multinational businesses that have long grappled with a thorny question on China: What’s the price of access to Asia’s biggest economy? Beijing’s response to the protests, most notably its clampdown on Cathay Pacific Airways Ltd. this month, has provided one answer: compliance with the Communist Party’s worldview, from senior management on down.

“The Chinese government doesn’t see business as being separate from the state and it has made it clear that if you want to do business in China, you’d better toe the line,”

Submission + - Facebook allows flat-Earthers to censor a space history book (nytimes.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A photographer trying to raise money for a self-published book of historical space artifacts had his Facebook ads repeatedly removed by Facebook because flat-Earthers and Moon hoax conspiracy theorists were offended.

About 24 hours after the ads were approved, he got a notification telling him the ad had been removed. He resubmitted it. It was accepted — and then removed again — 15 or 20 times, he said. The explanation given: He had run “misleading ads that resulted in high negative feedback.”

He understood that it was Facebook’s algorithm that rejected the ads, not a person. Getting additional answers proved difficult, a common complaint with advertising on Facebook. The best clues he could find came in the comments under the ads, which he and his colleagues captured in screenshots before they were removed and in responses to other posts about the project: There were phrases such as “The original moon landing was faking” and “It’s all a show,” along with memes mocking space technology. Some comments were hard to gauge, with users insisting that the earth was flat but that they’d buy the book anyway.

To fix the problem he had to hire an outside expert who knew how to get to a human being at Facebook, proving once again that Facebook is a very unethical and corrupt company. It should not have been so hard for Redgrove to get his problem fixed.

Submission + - Man Sued For Using Bogus YouTube Takedowns To Get Address For Swatting (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: YouTube is suing a Nebraska man the company says has blatantly abused its copyright takedown process. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act offers online platforms like YouTube legal protections if they promptly take down content flagged by copyright holders. However, this process can be abused—and boy did defendant Christopher L. Brady abuse it, according to YouTube's legal complaint (pdf). Brady allegedly made fraudulent takedown notices against YouTube videos from at least three well-known Minecraft streamers. In one case, Brady made two false claims against a YouTuber and then sent the user an anonymous message demanding a payment of $150 by PayPal—or $75 in bitcoin.

"If you decide not to pay us, we will file a 3rd strike," the message said. When a YouTube user receives a third copyright strike, the YouTuber's account gets terminated. A second target was ordered to pay $300 by PayPal or $200 in Bitcoin to avoid a third fraudulent copyright strike. A third incident was arguably even more egregious. According to YouTube, Brady filed several fraudulent copyright notices against another YouTuber with whom he was "engaged in some sort of online dispute." The YouTuber responded with a formal counter-notice stating that the content wasn't infringing—a move that allows the content to be reinstated. However, the law requires the person filing the counter-notice to provide his or her real-world name and address—information that's passed along to the person who filed the takedown request. This contact information is supposed to enable a legitimate copyright holder to file an infringement lawsuit in court.

Comment This too will become illegal... (Score 0) 157

by Cheerio Boy (#55064151) Attached to: People Are Using Recycled Laptop Batteries To Power Their Homes
...eventually. Either the NIMBY people will get all concerned that "Something might go wrong!" "What if it catches on fire?!" "There's no way that can be environmental or legal!"

OR

The energy companies will lobby to REQUIRE that federal law prohibits re-using the cells from internally sealed battery packs as "They just aren't safe!". They'll cite public battery fires and MSDS listing the "Volatile internal chemicals!" in the batteries that are safely contained UNLESS OPENED.

These power walls are far too easy to convert for solar or wind use so you can be sure they represent a threat to the power companies. You can bet that they will try and squash any attempt to get away from a completely dependent energy system.

Comment Re:2 weeks vacation (Score 1) 262

by Cheerio Boy (#54186821) Attached to: Employee Burnout Is a Problem with the Company, Not the Person

I'll take my vacation sure! But while I'm gone it's one more opportunity for them to "forget" how much work I do. And that's working a regular 51 hours a week (yeah I'm a lightweight in the industry) and being extremely productive while doing so. I'm over 40 in "the biz" so EVEN if I had full certs, and EVEN if they were current, and EVEN with a TON of experience, If I'm let go, I'm unlikely to get employed at anything but the lowest technical position. This has already happened to me once. If I want to keep paying my bills and supporting my family I can't let that happen again. Fear runs this business in a lot of places.

You're doing it wrong. It should be the other way around. The company should be afraid that you will leave with valuable experience and knowledge.

You should only have FOMO, fear of missing out. Someone else grabs a nice opportunity when you're on vacation.

When agism is rampant in multiple industries, and when there are people who will work for much less than I am, then the companies have the upper hand.

I'm not disagreeing that things should be different - just pointing out that they currently aren't.

Comment Re:2 weeks vacation (Score 1) 262

by Cheerio Boy (#54186425) Attached to: Employee Burnout Is a Problem with the Company, Not the Person
I'll take my vacation sure! But while I'm gone it's one more opportunity for them to "forget" how much work I do. And that's working a regular 51 hours a week (yeah I'm a lightweight in the industry) and being extremely productive while doing so. I'm over 40 in "the biz" so EVEN if I had full certs, and EVEN if they were current, and EVEN with a TON of experience, If I'm let go, I'm unlikely to get employed at anything but the lowest technical position. This has already happened to me once. If I want to keep paying my bills and supporting my family I can't let that happen again. Fear runs this business in a lot of places.

Comment Re:Not sure why this is a question (Score 2) 246

by Cheerio Boy (#47590275) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: IT Personnel As Ostriches?

I treat everyone's email the same: I don't read it. I may see subject lines but I don't see the technical reason requiring you to read them.

What happens when you get a request from management to help them identify/bring to their attention people potentially 'abusing' the e-mail system, such as by e-mailing sensitive information out of the organization, or by identifying employee(s) sending e-mail that are obscene, abusive, harrassing, or contain inappropriate language?

That's an official request from management and is part of your job at that point even if it wasn't before. Inform HR of what you've been asked to do and if there's a conflict let them hash it out. Document everything and keep a personal copy of the documentation in a safe offline place. If you get fired for doing your job you either have enough documentation to take legal action (if you can afford it) or enough to clear your name if it becomes necessary.

Comment Re:Our local department has this (Score 1) 320

by Cheerio Boy (#43889231) Attached to: Montreal Union Wants a Camera On Every Policeman's Uniform

Started about a year ago. They are turned on when the shift starts and can't be turned off until the shift has ended.

Mounted on a hat above the right ear and they have sound.

Indiana, by the way.

This is absolutely needed. The powers that be forget far too often that they themselves are human and not only make mistakes but are corruptible as well. Kudos to your locals for doing this!

Of course this wouldn't stop a sudden application of silly putty on the lense and/or microphone. The mic would be the better choice there - "I'm sorry sir but we seemed to have had audio transmission issues during that incident."

Comment Re:I've been designing/building a 3D printer for (Score 1) 348

by Cheerio Boy (#43575097) Attached to: What's Holding Back 3-D Printing

I guess what I'm saying is, get an stm32. Or msp430 if you're ok writing in windows only.

And MPS430 actually has support in Linux now. Google for "mps430 linux" and you'll find a host of options. One of those is a port of the Arduino IDE called Energia. Though that one is not ready completely yet. (I had trouble getting it to run on Mint13.)

Regardless the TI Launchpad stuff is supported well enough outside of Windows.

Slashdot Top Deals

"The medium is the massage." -- Crazy Nigel

Close