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Comment Yeah, because most channels and compression suck (Score 4, Insightful) 141

Here is the US, most of our sports are on ESPN/ABC. Maybe, maybe once in a week we'll get to see 1 or 2 college football games in 4K. The 99.9% or the rest is not even 2K. They're still in 720p ( 1/3 MPx).

On top of that, what if the video is 2K or 4K? Now the cheap lossy compression comes in. Ever watch a championship moment when the trophy comes out with confetti or glitter. The compression goes crazy. Now it's worse that SD on a CRT!

Comment Re: Grade crossings? (Score 2) 220

by gjt (#63874357) Attached to: Privately-Owned High-Speed Rail Opens New Line in Florida, Kills Pedestrian

What works more than not is by making the road traffic go under the rail at crossings.

Since the train is new, the roads were almost always there first. Tunneling the train or elevating the train would have been more appropriate. Probably easier and cheaper too since tunnels for cars generally need to be wider, taller and have powerful ventilation to vent gasoline fumes, car fires, overturned tanker trucks, etc.

Comment Grade Separation + Platform Edge Doors == Safety (Score 1) 220

by gjt (#63874347) Attached to: Privately-Owned High-Speed Rail Opens New Line in Florida, Kills Pedestrian

It's been well known for quite a while that the thing about being human is that humans make mistakes. It's not always people deliberately ignoring signals or wanting to commit suicide. But it's nearly impossible to get hit by a train when the train is underground or in a tunnel, elevated when tunneling doesn't work and there are platform edge doors in stations to keep people from falling on the tracks. They placed saving money on construction costs over saving lives. That's why nearly 100 people have been killed in such a sort time.

Submission + - Scientists At Fermilab Close In On Fifth Force of Nature (bbc.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Scientists near Chicago say they may be getting closer to discovering the existence of a new force of nature. They have found more evidence that sub-atomic particles, called muons, are not behaving in the way predicted by the current theory of sub-atomic physics. Scientists believe that an unknown force could be acting on the muons. More data will be needed to confirm these results, but if they are verified, it could mark the beginning of a revolution in physics.

All of the forces we experience every day can be reduced to just four categories: gravity, electromagnetism, the strong force and the weak force. These four fundamental forces govern how all the objects and particles in the Universe interact with each other. The findings have been made at a US particle accelerator facility called Fermilab. They build on results announced in 2021 in which the Fermilab team first suggested the possibility of a fifth force of nature. Since then, the research team has gathered more data and reduced the uncertainty of their measurements by a factor of two, according to Dr Brendan Casey, a senior scientist at Fermilab. "We're really probing new territory. We're determining the (measurements) at a better precision than it has ever been seen before."

In an experiment with the catchy name 'g minus two (g-2)' the researchers accelerate the sub-atomic particles called muons around a 50-foot-diameter ring, where they are circulated about 1,000 times at nearly the speed of light. The researchers found that they might be behaving in a way that can't be explained by the current theory, which is called the Standard Model, because of the influence of a new force of nature. Although the evidence is strong, the Fermilab team hasn't yet got conclusive proof. They had hoped to have it by now, but uncertainties in what the standard model says the amount of wobbling in muons should be, has increased, because of developments in theoretical physics. In essence, the goal posts have been moved for the experimental physicists. The researchers believe that they will have the data they need, and that the theoretical uncertainty will have narrowed in two years' time sufficiently for them to get their goal. That said, a rival team at Europe's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) are hoping to get there first.

Submission + - Rust-GPU now supports SPIR-V ray-tracing (github.com)

Submitted by guest reader
guest reader writes: New release of Rust-GPU supports SPIR-V ray-tracing.

Rust-GPU project aims at making Rust a first class language and ecosystem for GPU programming.

GPU programming has historically been done with HLSL or GLSL, simple programming languages that have evolved along with rendering APIs over the years. However, as game engines have evolved, these languages have failed to provide mechanisms for dealing with large codebases, and have generally stayed behind the curve compared to other programming languages.

Our hope with this project is that we push the industry forward by bringing Rust, an existing low-level, safe, and high performance language, to the GPU. And with it come some additional great benefits: a package/module system that's one of the industry's best, built in safety against race-conditions or out of bounds memory access, a wide range of libraries and tools to improve programmer workflows, and many others!

Submission + - Complex international missing person case solved with subpoena to Google

Submitted by wattersa
wattersa writes: I am a lawyer in Redwood City, California and a Slashdot reader since 1998 (not sure when I registered, lol). I recently concluded a three-year missing person investigation that unfortunately turned into an overseas homicide in Taiwan. I was authorized by my client to publish the case study on my website, which is based on our recent court filings and is linked here:

https://www.andrewwatters.com/...

There is an apparently rarely used statute in California that allows conservatorship of a missing person's estate (Probate Code sec. 1849). After a couple weeks of pre-lawsuit investigation, I filed that case in late 2019 and then used the subpoena power to try to solve the disappearance, which seemed appropriate. We solved the case in late 2020 due to a fake "proof of life" email that the suspect sent from the victim's email account, which he sent from a hotel where he testified he was staying alone on the night of the disappearance-- after (according to him) dropping off the victim at the local train station. The victim could not have sent the email from the other side of Taiwan, which is where the email indicated it was from. This is similar to the case of U.S.A. v. Brimager, a prosecution under 18 U.S.C. sec. 1119 in which the defendant sent fake emails from the victim's account and later pled to overseas murder in Panama. The suspect in my case is a Tony Stark-level supergenius with a Ph.D. and dozens of patents, who works at a prominent engineering company in California. He is currently wanted in Taiwan.

The case was solved with a subpoena to Google for the login/logout history of the victim's Gmail account and the originating IP address of the proof of life email. Although Google does not include the originating IP address in the email headers, it turns out that they retain the IP address for some unknown length of time and we were able to get it.

When it became clear that this case was a homicide, co-counsel and I dismissed the conservatorship case and filed a wrongful death case against the suspect in 2021. We continue to gather information through subpoenas, depositions, and interviews, all of which show that the victim died in a 10-hour window on November 29, 2019. The wrongful death case goes to trial in late 2023 in Santa Clara County. This is a rare case in which the family can afford an expensive, lengthy, attorney-led private investigation.

This obscure statute in the Probate Code was instrumental in solving the case because we didn't have to wait for law enforcement to take action, and we were able to aggressively pursue our own leads. This gave the family a sense of agency and closure, as well as the obvious benefit of solving the disappearance. Also, Taiwan law enforcement could not do subpoenas from Taiwan, so we ended up contributing to their investigation to some extent as well.

This model of using the missing person conservatorship statute to solve cases appears innovative, in my opinion. I would like to draw people's attention to it in the service of missing person cases generally, as well as the use of electronic evidence from civil subpoenas to develop cases independently of any criminal justice stakeholders who typically hold all the cards.

Submission + - More "LSD can be good for you" news (cnn.com)

Submitted by clovis
clovis writes: From the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs https://www.jsad.com/doi/10.15... comes three case studies on people who benefited from LSD overdoses including one woman who took a dose of 55 milligrams of pure powdered LSD, oops. https://www.cnn.com/2020/02/27...

"The 49-year-old woman, known as CB, had contracted Lyme disease in her early 20s, which damaged her feet and ankles and left her in "significant pain." In September 2015, she took 55 milligrams of what she believed was cocaine but was actually "pure LSD in powder form." The authors defined a normal recreational dose as 100 micrograms — equal to 0.1 milligrams. The woman blacked out and vomited frequently for the next 12 hours but reported feeling "pleasantly high" for the 12 hours after that — still vomiting, but less often. According to her roommate, she sat mostly still in a chair, either with her eyes open or rolled back, occasionally speaking random words. Ten hours later she was able to hold a conversation and "seemed coherent." Her foot pain was gone the next day and she stopped using morphine for five days. While the pain returned, she was able to control it with a lower dose of morphine and a microdose of LCD every three days. After more than two years, in January 2018, she stopped using both morphine and LSD and reported no withdrawal symptoms, although the case report said she did experience an increase in anxiety, depression and social withdrawal."

Submission + - IBM Names Arvind Krishna CEO, Replacing Ginni Rometty (bloomberg.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: IBM named Arvind Krishna as chief executive officer, replacing longtime CEO Virginia Rometty. Krishna, 57, is currently the head of IBM’s cloud and cognitive software unit and was a principal architect of the company’s purchase of Red Hat, which was completed last year. Rometty, 62, will continue as executive chairman and serve through the end of the year, when she will retire after almost 40 years with the company, IBM said in astatementThursday. The shares rose about 5% in extended trading.

Since becoming IBM’sfirst female CEOin 2012, Rometty had bet the company’s future on the market for hybrid cloud, which allows businesses to store data on both private and public cloud networks run by rivals such as AmazonWebServices and Microsoft Corp.’s Azure. By then Big Blue, once the world leader in technology, had lagged behind competitors for years after largely missing the initial cloud revolution under her predecessor, Sam Palmisano. The announcement comes as a “welcome and overdue leadership change,” said Wedbush Securities analyst Moshe Katri. “At least that’s how we’re looking at it — and obviously the market seems to agree.”

Submission + - Man Kept Getting Drunk Without Drinking. Docs Found Brewer's Yeast In His Guts (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: After years of inexplicably getting drunk without drinking alcohol, having mood swings and bouts of aggression, landing a DWI charge on the way to work one morning, and suffering a head injury in a drunken fall, an otherwise healthy 46-year-old North Carolina man finally got confirmation of having alcohol-fermenting yeasts overrunning his innards, getting him sloshed any time he ate carbohydrate-laden meals. Through the years, medical professionals and police officers refused to believe he hadn’t been drinking. They assumed the man was lying to hide an alcohol problem. Meanwhile, he went to an untold number of psychiatrists, internists, neurologists, and gastroenterologists searching for answers.

Those answers only came after he sought help from a support group online and then contacted a group of researchers at Richmond University Medical Center in Staten Island, New York. By then, it was September of 2017—more than seven years after his saga began. The New York researchers finally confirmed that he had a rarely diagnosed condition called “auto-brewery syndrome.” From there, the researchers started him on powerful anti-fungal medications to try to clear the boozy germs from his system. But he relapsed just weeks later after sneaking some forbidden pizza and soda. The researchers tried again, giving him an even stronger round of anti-fungal drugs, this time through a tube directly into his veins (central catheter). By February of 2018, tests indicated he was free of the fermenting fungi. He went back to eating his normal diet and passed his daily breathalyzer tests. He has stayed that way since, the researchers report.

Submission + - Security researcher gets access to thousands of automatic pet feeders by Xiaomi (habr.com)

Submitted by arkamax
arkamax writes: A security researcher based in Russia discovered that her research (article in Russian, Google Translate) into API for a new automatic pet feeder manufactured by Xiaomi resulted in obtaining full control of approximately 10,950 of similar devices across the world. She found ways to access logs of those pet feeders, change their settings, invoke manual feeding or completely delete all feeding schedules. She mentioned that the feeder is based on a widely known ESP8266 embedded board, adding that "apparently one could send a remote request to the feeder to download a firmware update. An evil person could use that to reboot those devices and brick them afterwards. The only way to fix it would involve mechanical disassembly and a manual firmware update that requires connecting directly to the board. Explain THAT to poor kitties and puppies who eagerly wait for their owners to come back from a 2 week vacation". She then added that the "whole architecture is one epic fail and it's hard to imagine a speedy fix". The researcher chose to stick to the responsible disclosure guidelines and declined to disclose any details until the issues are fixed. Since then manufacturer was reported to have fixed a few critical issues but the bulk of the vulnerability still remains. Looks like S in "IoT" remains to stand for Security.

Submission + - Artificial Leaf Produces First Drugs Using Sunlight (newatlas.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Making artificial versions of the humble leaf has been an ongoing area of research for decades and in a new breakthrough, researchers from the Eindhoven University of Technology (TUE) have fine-tuned their artificial leaf design and used it to produce drugs for the first time. Natural leaves are clever little machines. They collect sunlight, and that energy is then used by chlorophyll molecules to power a chemical reaction that turns CO2 and water into glucose. The plant uses this glucose for energy, and expels oxygen as a waste product. Artificial leaves are designed to mimic this process. They’re made of translucent materials that allow sunlight in and direct it towards tiny microfluidic channels running through the material like veins. A certain liquid is flowing through these channels, and the idea is that the energy from the sunlight triggers a chemical reaction in that liquid, turning it into something useful like a drug or fuel.

The new artificial leaf design from TUE builds on the team’s previous prototype, presented in 2016. Back then, the device was made of silicon rubber, but in the new version that’s been replaced with Plexiglas for several reasons. The leaf has started to earn its keep, too. The team put it to the test and found that it was able to successfully produce two different drugs: artimensinin, which is effective against malaria, and ascaridole, which is used against certain parasitic worms. Given its small size and scalability, the team says that the artificial leaf could eventually be used to produce drugs and other molecules right where they’re needed.
Firefox

Clashing Scores In the HTML5 Compatibility Test Wars 203

Posted by timothy from the jake-the-explainer-steps-in-early dept.
Andreas(R) writes "Microsoft has published a set of HTML5 tests comparing Internet Explorer 9 to other web browsers. In Microsoft's own tests, IE9 performs 100% on all tests. However, the Internet Explorer 9 HTML5 Canvas Campaign has published results that show that Internet Explorer gets 0% on all their tests." The results reported here are selected with tongue in cheek: "Therefore, we'll also present shameless results from tests which have been carefully selected to give the results that the PR department has demanded."
Google

Submission + - Installing Android 2.2 "Froyo" on the Nexus One (gadgetopolis.com)

Submitted by gjt
gjt writes: I awoke this morning to see TechCrunch's MG Siegler post what appeared to be the first news of Froyo's availability. I frantically went to my phone's settings and tried to check for an update -oe but no luck. Then I went to xda-developers.com and sure enough there was a very long thread (now over 132 pages) of fellow eager beavers waiting for release (and trying to figure out how to get it). Several hours went by waiting for a semi-technical user to get the update and check the Android logs for the download location. It turns out you can get it straight from Google. With the information scattered around in different places I decided to consolidate the How-To into a single post over here.

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