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Submission + - Calls by college students for tuition refunds are growing louder. Here's why. (edsurge.com)

Submitted by jyosim
jyosim writes: Students want their money back since their classes have moved online. Or they want partial refunds, and their calls have been getting louder. Petition movements at more than 200 campuses are calling for partial refunds of tuition, typically asking for 50 percent back. And some student protesters are now even filing class-action lawsuits to try to force colleges to return part of the tuition money.

Whether colleges should give back money depends on how you think about what colleges are selling. Is it a straight service like any other, so if students get less they should pay less? Is the most important thing simply getting into college, in which case the degree is the main thing, and students are still getting that? Or are colleges responsible for social mobility and helping students during this time by reducing tuition?

And is online education even worse than, say, sitting in the back of a large lecture hall with 300 students?

Submission + - Large Chunks of a Chinese Rocket Missed NYC By About 15 Minutes (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A week ago, China launched the newest version of its largest rocket, the Long March 5B, from its southernmost spaceport. The launch proceeded normally and represented another success for China as it seeks to build a robust human spaceflight program. Over the next few years, this rocket will launch components of a modular space station. Notably, because of this rocket's design, its large core stage reached orbit after the launch. Typically during a launch, a rocket's large first stage will provide the majority of thrust during the first minutes of launch and then drop away before reaching an orbital velocity, falling back into the ocean. Then, a smaller second stage takes over and pushes the rocket's payload into orbit. However, the Long March 5B rocket has no second stage. For last week's launch, then, four liquid-fueled strap-on boosters generated most of the thrust off the launch pad. After this, the core stage with two YF-77 main engines pushed an experimental spacecraft into orbit before the payload separated.

This left the large core stage, with a mass slightly in excess of 20 tons, in an orbit with an average altitude of about 260km above the Earth. Because the perigee of this orbit was only about 160km above the planet, the core stage was slowly drawn back toward the planet as it interacted with the planet's upper atmosphere. This is a rather large object to make an uncontrolled return to Earth. According to Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and keen observer of satellites, this is the largest vehicle to make an uncontrolled reentry into Earth's atmosphere since 1991, when the Soviet Salyut 7 space station broke up over Argentina. [...] It is perhaps worth noting that before it entered Earth's atmosphere, the core stage track passed directly over New York City. Had it reentered the atmosphere only a little bit earlier, perhaps 15 to 20 minutes, the rocket's debris could have rained down on the largest metro area in the United States.

Submission + - SparkyLinux Now Available for Raspberry Pi

Submitted by memojuez
memojuez writes: DistroWatch Weekly reports that the Debian-based SparkyLinux's stable branch is now available for Raspberry Pi.

There are two editions of SparkyLinux's Raspberry Pi build, one which features the Openbox graphical interface and one which presents a command line only. The distribution's website states: "Sparky 4.7 armhf for Raspberry Pi is out now. Sparky of the 4.x line is based on the stable branch of Debian 9 'Stretch'. This release is available in two versions: Openbox — with a small set of applications and CLI — text based." Further details and login credentials for the default accounts can be found in the distribution's announcement.

Comment Re:truth in advertising (Score 1) 503

"on the internet" matters when it's an issue of Bob lying to sell a widget on Amazon. If Bob was in a store selling widgets, the fraud is clear. If Bob is effectively anonymous and Amazon is the seller, with Bob's referral code, once the product arrives and the fraud is detected, taking action against Bob is almost impossible. It's not about "legal" but "enforceable". They are different, but related.

Not necessarily true. I had an issue with a seller that failed to deliver the product I paid for. I contacted Amazon and they made it right.

Submission + - Google plans to clean up the web with Chrome ad blocker next year (theverge.com) 1

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: "The warning is meant to let websites assess their ads and strip any particularly disruptive ones from their pages. That’s because Chrome’s ad blocker won’t block all ads from the web. Instead, it’ll only block ads on pages that are determined to have too many annoying or intrusive advertisements, like videos that autoplay with sound or interstitials that take up the entire screen.

Sridhar Ramaswamy, the executive in charge of Google’s ads, writes in a blog post that even ads “owned or served by Google” will be blocked on pages that don’t meet Chrome’s guidelines.

Instead of an ad “blocker,” Google is referring to the feature as an ad “filter,” according to The Wall Street Journal, since it will still allow ads to be displayed on pages that meet the right requirements. The blocker will work on both desktop and mobile."

Anyone think this is NOT an attempt to control all ad blocking?

Submission + - Neural Code for Faces Deciphered

Submitted by akakaak
akakaak writes: In a new paper published in Cell (http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2017.05.011), researchers Le Chang and Doris Tsao claim to have uncovered "The Code for Facial Identity in the Primate Brain". They develop a model representing each face as a vector in a 50-dimensional "face-space", and show that the firing rate for each face-sensitive neuron represents the location along a single axis through this space. This allows them to accurately predict the appearance of a viewed face from the collective recorded activity of the neurons. This work is a major advance in the decoding of complex neural representations, and refutes exemplar-based models of face recognition.

Submission + - He didn't give police his iPhone pass code, so he got 180 days in jail (miamiherald.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: A Hollywood(FLA) man must serve 180 days in jail for refusing to give up his iPhone password to police, a Broward judge ruled Tuesday — the latest salvo in intensifying legal battles over law-enforcement access to smart phones.

Wesley Victor, and his girlfriend had been ordered by a judge to produce a pass code to phones suspected of containing text messages showing their collusion in an extortion plot.

Victor claimed he didn’t remember the number. He prevailed.

On Tuesday, Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Charles Johnson ruled that there was no way to prove that Victor actually remembered his pass code, more than 10 months after his initial arrest. Johnson declined to hold the man in contempt of court.

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: Time to stop calling Smart Phones, Phones? If so, what new name? 5

Submitted by seoras
seoras writes: Every time I see a smart phone related post here Slashdot, or other forums, there will be the obligatory rants about 1) why does a "phone" need such a large screen and/or 2) why do people pay so much for a "phone"
It strikes me that the problem is in the classification of these devices.
The fact that they are still used for making phone calls is now irrelevant, and I would guess, if you did some research on their average usage they are used as phones only a fraction of the time.
I put it to Slashdot readers that it's time we stopped calling them phones. If we stop thinking of them as such are the prices so crazy and screens so large?
I'm struggling though to think of a new, or better name for them? Suggestions? They are the PC of the early 21st century.

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