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Submission + - Stack Overflow admits it isn't very welcoming and plans to change (stackoverflow.blog)

Submitted by Paul Fernhout
Paul Fernhout writes: Jay Hanlon wrote at the StackOverflow blog: "Let's start with the painful truth: Too many people experience Stack Overflow as a hostile or elitist place, especially newer coders, women, people of color, and others in marginalized groups. Our employees and community have cared about this for a long time, but we've struggled to talk about it publicly or to sufficiently prioritize it in recent years. And results matter more than intentions."

Submission + - SPAM: Trump Announces Unprecedented Support for Legalizing Marijuana 1

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: President Trump is preparing to support far-reaching legislation to reform federal marijuana prohibition so that states can enact their own cannabis laws without interference.

"Since the campaign, President Trump has consistently supported states' rights to decide for themselves how best to approach marijuana," U.S. Sen. Cory Gardner (D-CO) said in a statement. "Late Wednesday, I received a commitment from the President that the Department of Justice's rescission of the Cole memo will not impact Colorado's legal marijuana industry. Furthermore, President Trump has assured me that he will support a federalism-based legislative solution to fix this states' rights issue once and for all."

In a briefing with reporters on Friday afternoon, White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders confirmed the development, calling Gardner's statement "accurate."

"We're always consulting Congress about issues including states' rights, of which the president is a firm believer," she said.
Link to Original Source

Submission + - SPAM: Viagra Has a Shocking Effect on Cancer, And Could Save Thousands of Lives

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Researchers studying the effects of Viagra (aka sildenafil) on mice have discovered a small, daily dose of the medication in the animals' drinking water significantly reduces their risk of developing colorectal cancer.

"Giving a baby dose of Viagra can reduce the amount of tumours in these animals by half," says biochemist Darren D. Browning from Augusta University.

The next step the team wants to pursue, saying a clinical trial with patients considered at high risk of colorectal cancer – or with a family history of the disease – should be a research priority. If the effects can be replicated in humans, it could be a huge step forward in saving lives lost to cancer.

In people, colorectal cancer is the third most common cancer worldwide, causing in excess of 1 million cases annually – some 50,000 of which end in death in the US each year.
Link to Original Source

Submission + - Tesla Relied On Too Many Robots To Build the Model 3, Elon Musk Says (theverge.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Elon Musk says Tesla relied on too many robots to build the Model 3, which is partly to blame for the delays in manufacturing the crucial mass-market electric car. In an interview with CBS Good Morning, Musk agreed with Tesla’s critics that there was over-reliance on automation and too few human assembly line workers building the Model 3. Earlier this month, Tesla announced that it had officially missed its goal of making 2,500 Model 3 vehicles a week by the end of the first financial quarter of this year. It will start the second quarter making just 2,000 Model 3s per week, but the company says it still believes it can get to a rate of 5,000 Model 3s per week at the midway point of 2018. Previously, Tesla has blamed bottlenecks in the production of the Model 3’s batteries at the company’s Gigafactory for the delays. But in a wide-ranging (and largely positive) interview with CBS’s Gayle King, Musk also admits it was Tesla’s over-reliance on robots in the production. Musk then said the company needs more people working in the factory and that automation slowed the Model 3 production process. He alluded to a “crazy, complex network of conveyor belts” the company had previously used and said the company eliminated it after it became clear it wasn’t working.

Submission + - SPAM: Japan team maps 'semi-infinite' trove of rare earth elements

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Japanese researchers have mapped vast reserves of rare earth elements in deep-sea mud, enough to feed global demand on a “semi-infinite basis,” according to a new study.

The deposit, found within Japan’s exclusive economic zone waters, contains more than 16 million tons of the elements needed to build high-tech products ranging from mobile phones to electric vehicles, according to the study, released Tuesday in the journal Scientific Reports. The team, comprised of several universities, businesses and government institutions, surveyed the western Pacific Ocean near Minamitori Island.

In a sample area of the mineral-rich region, the team’s survey estimated 1.2 million tons of “rare earth oxide” is deposited there, said the study, conducted jointly by Waseda University’s Yutaro Takaya and the University of Tokyo’s Yasuhiro Kato, among others.

The finding extrapolates that a 2,500-sq. km region off the southern Japanese island should contain 16 million tons of the valuable elements, and “has the potential to supply these metals on a semi-infinite basis to the world,” the study said.
Link to Original Source

Submission + - Consequences of doing business in China (npr.org) 1

Submitted by tomhath
tomhath writes:

Beijing-based Sinovel, which provided three-quarters of Massachusetts-based American Superconductor's revenue, refused to accept a shipment of electronic components for its wind turbines — and wouldn't pay millions of dollars it owed for them. The reasons it gave were ambiguous.

Within weeks, the company concluded that Sinovel had somehow obtained the source code for its electronic components and was installing a pirated version in the wind turbines it sold.

"Participation in the Chinese market is for Chinese companies only. Your participation as a Western company, at least to date, is a mirage. They're there to bring you in, be able to figure a way to harvest whatever they can from you, and then spit you out when you're no longer useful."

Submission + - Study blames gender pay gap on motherhood (nytimes.com)

Submitted by tomhath
tomhath writes:

Women who have their first child before 25 or after 35 eventually close the salary divide with their husbands. It’s the years in between that are most problematic, research shows.

When women have their first child between age 25 and 35, their pay never recovers, relative to that of their husbands. Yet women who have their first baby either before 25 or after 35 — before their careers get started or once they’re established — eventually close the pay gap with their husbands.

Submission + - PUBG Ransomware Decrypts Your Files If You Play PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds (bleepingcomputer.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: In what could only be a joke, a new ransomware has been discovered called "PUBG Ransomware" that will decrypt your files if you play the game called PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds. When the PUBG Ransomware is launched it will encrypt a user's files and folders on the user's desktop and append the .PUBG extension to them. When it has finished encrypting the files, it will display a screen giving you two methods that you can use to decrypt the encrypted files. Users can unlock it either by playing PUBG, or by entering a secret unlock code of "s2acxx56a2sae5fjh5k2gb5s2e".

The ransomware checks to see if you played PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds by monitoring the running processes for one named "TslGame". Once a user plays the game and the process is detected, the ransomware will automatically decrypt the victim's files. This ransomware is not too advanced as it only looks for the process name and does not check for other information to confirm that the game is actually being played. That means you can simply run any executable called TslGame.exe and it will decrypt the files.

Submission + - Intel Reportedly Designing Arctic Sound Discrete GPU For Gaming And Pro Graphics (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: When AMD's former graphics boss Raja Koduri landed at Intel after taking a much-earned hiatus from the company, it was seen as a major coup for the Santa Clara chip outfit, one that seemed to signal that Intel might be targeting to compete in the discrete graphics card market. While nothing has been announced in that regard, some analysts are claiming that there will indeed be a gaming variant of Intel's upcoming discrete 'Arctic Sound' GPU. According to reports, Intel originally planned to build Arctic Sound graphics chips mainly for video streaming chores and data center activities. However, claims are surfacing that the company has since decided to build out a gaming variant at the behest of Koduri, who wants to "enter the market with a bang." Certainly a gaming GPU that could compete with AMD and NVIDIA would accomplish that goal. Reportedly, Intel could pull together two different version of Arctic Sound. One would be an integrated chip package, like the Core i7-8809G (Kaby Lake-G) but with Intel's own discrete graphics, as well as a standalone chip that will end up in a traditional graphics cards. Likely both of those will have variants designed for gaming, just as AMD and NVIDIA build GPUs for professional use and gaming as well.

Submission + - Thousands of black holes in Milky Way's Center (npr.org)

Submitted by xonen
xonen writes: For decades, scientists have thought that black holes should sink to the center of galaxies and accumulate there. But scientists had no proof that these exotic objects had actually gathered together in the center of the Milky Way.
Isolated black holes are almost impossible to detect, but black holes that have a companion — an orbiting star — interact with that star in ways that allow the pair to be spotted by telltale X-ray emissions. The team searched for those signals in a region stretching about three light-years out from our galaxy's central supermassive black hole.
What they found there: a dozen black holes paired up with stars. Finding so many in such a small region is significant, because until now scientists have found evidence of only about five dozen black holes throughout the entire galaxy.
What they've found should help theorists make better predictions about how many cosmic smashups might occur and generate detectable gravitational waves.

https://www.nature.com/article...

Submission + - Crossing the chasm theory could explains the C++ reborn and the python rising.

Submitted by lahlali issam
lahlali issam writes: How many times do you read “C++ is dead” or “Is the C programming language still used?”, but in the reality they still very popular.
And how many times we read “WOW this newcomer programming language is the best”, but after few years nothing really happens and the new language decrease in popularity. However, there are some exceptions, the most interesting one is python which rise from a not widely used scripting language to a very popular programming language.Read more...

Submission + - Tesla announces results for Q1; Model 3 production up fourfold from Q4

Submitted by Rei
Rei writes: Furthering recent rumours, Tesla today announced their results for Q1 2018, with 34491 vehicles produced, a 40% increase since Q4. Of particular interest, however, is Model 3 production, at 9766 vehicles, four times as many as were produced in Q4. The last week produced 2020 vehicles, and Tesla states that it expects to produce another 2000 next week. Guidance remains unchanged: Tesla continues to target a rate of 5000 vehicles per week by the end of Q2 and have good margins, high volume, and strong cash flow in Q3. Summing up their progress, Tesla added: "As a result, Tesla does not require an equity or debt raise this year, apart from standard credit lines." The initial quality satisfaction score on Model 3 deliveries is recorded at 93% — Tesla's highest ever — and reservations have remained stable through Q1.

Submission + - Is Is Eclipse IDE dying? (dunebook.com)

Submitted by tom singh
tom singh writes: In 2014 the Eclipse IDE is the leading development environment for Java with a market share of approximately 65%. but according to a recent survey Eclipse IDE market share has dropped in 2017- 2018 to 40.5% from 65% in 2014.Currently, The Eclipse open source community is growing much bigger. it consists of more than 150 projects covering different aspects of software development.

Submission + - How can I prove my ISP is slowing certain traffic? 1

Submitted by GerryGilmore
GerryGilmore writes: I live in North Georgia where we have a monopoly ISP provider — Windstream — whose service overall could charitably be described as iffy.
Sometimes, I have noticed that certain services like Netflix and/or HBONow will be ridiculously slow but — when I run an internet speed test from my Linux laptop — the basic throughput is what it's supposed to be for my DSL service. That is, about 3Mbps due to my distance from the nearest CO. Other basic web browsing seems to be fine.
I know that this is laughably slow to most /. readers, but it should still be consistent at least.
So, to my question: as a basically pretty knowledgeable Linux guy totally comfortable with the command line (I've written some pretty nice shell scripts and C fragments, plus a SCO UNIX device driver), but I don't know enough about network tracing to be able to identify where/why such severe slowdowns in certain circumstances are occurring.
PS — my goal in gathering this info is to try to pressure my local reps to put pressure (Hah!) on Windstream.
Any other suggestions, etc. are greatly appreciated. (Aside from moving! I live on a riverside lot that is to die for and I'd sacrifice the internet before I'd ever leave.)

Submission + - How a Norwegian comment section turned chaos into order—with a simple quiz (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by jebrick
jebrick writes: The five-person team behind a simple WordPress plugin, which took three hours to code, never expected to receive worldwide attention as a result. But NRKbeta, the tech-testing group at Norway's largest national media organization, tapped into a meaty vein with the unveiling of last February's Know2Comment, an open source plugin that can attach to any WordPress site's comment section.

"It was a basic idea," NRKbeta developer Ståle Grut told a South By Southwest crowd on Tuesday. "Readers had to prove they read a story before they were able to comment on it."

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