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Submission + - Not Exercising Worse For Your Health Than Smoking, Diabetes and Heart Disease (cnn.com) 2

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: We've all heard exercise helps you live longer. But a new study goes one step further, finding that a sedentary lifestyle is worse for your health than smoking, diabetes and heart disease. Researchers retrospectively studied 122,007 patients who underwent exercise treadmill testing at Cleveland Clinic between January 1, 1991 and December 31, 2014 to measure all-cause mortality relating to the benefits of exercise and fitness. Those with the lowest exercise rate accounted for 12% of the participants. Dr. Wael Jaber, a cardiologist at the Cleveland Clinic and senior author of the study, said the other big revelation from the research is that fitness leads to longer life, with no limit to the benefit of aerobic exercise. Researchers have always been concerned that "ultra" exercisers might be at a higher risk of death, but the study found that not to be the case. "There is no level of exercise or fitness that exposes you to risk," he said. "We can see from the study that the ultra-fit still have lower mortality."

Submission + - Either This Data is Incorrect or These Physicists Just Changed the World (vice.com)

Submitted by dmoberhaus
dmoberhaus writes: Last month, two Indian physicists posted a paper to arxiv claiming to have demonstrated superconductivity at room temperature. If this paper is legitimate, it would represent a breakthrough in a problem that has existed for superconductivity for 100 years. Understandably, the paper shook the physics world, but when researchers started digging into the data they noticed something wasn't quite right--the noise patterns in two independent measurements exactly correlated, which is basically impossible in a random system. The Indian researchers are doubled down on their data, and things only got weirder from there. This is a look inside the biggest drama to happen in physics in nearly a decade.

Submission + - Fewer than half of young Americans are positive about capitalism (cnbc.com)

Submitted by gollum123
gollum123 writes: According to a new poll from Gallup, young Americans are souring on capitalism. Less than half, 45 percent, view capitalism positively. "This represents a 12-point decline in young adults' positive views of capitalism in just the past two years and a marked shift since 2010, when 68 percent viewed it positively," notes Gallup, which defines young Americans as those aged 18 to 29. While young people have a less upbeat view on capitalism, "older Americans have been consistently more positive about capitalism than socialism," Gallup reports. Of those between 30 and 49 years old, 58 percent have a positive view of capitalism and 41 percent have a positive view of socialism. Of those aged 50 to 64, 60 percent have a positive view of capitalism and 30 percent have a positive view of socialism. "Socialism clearly sounds better as a concept to young people than to those who are older, as it has over the past eight years," Gallup notes. "Whether the appeal of socialism to young adults is a standard function of idealism at that age that dissipates as one grows older, or will turn out to be a more permanent part of the political beliefs held by the cohort of millennials who have come of age over the past decade, remains to be seen."

Submission + - SPAM: The Problem With Programming and How To Fix It 1

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: Programming today," begins Jonathan Edwards' The problem with programming and how to fix it, "is exactly what you'd expect to get by paying an isolated subculture of nerdy young men to entertain themselves for fifty years. You get a cross between Dungeons & Dragons and Rubik's Cube, elaborated a thousand-fold." To be a 'full stack' developer, Edwards laments, one must master the content of something like a hundred thousand pages of documentation. "Isn't the solution to design technology that doesn't require a PhD?" he asks. "What of the #CSForAll movement? I have mixed feelings. The name itself betrays confusion — want we really want is #ProgrammingForAll. Computer science is not a prerequisite for most programming, and may in fact be more of a barrier to many. The confusion of computer science with programming is actually part of the problem, which seems invisible to this movement." It wasn't always this way, Edwards notes, citing spreadsheets, HyperCard, and the many incarnations of Basic as examples of how programming technology can be vastly easier and more accessible. "Unfortunately application programming got trampled in the internet gold rush," Edwards explains. "Suddenly all that mattered was building large-scale systems as fast as possible, and money was no object, so the focus shifted to 'rock star' programmers and the sophisticated high-powered tools they preferred. As a result the internet age has seen an exponential increase in the complexity of programming, as well as its exclusivity. It is long past time to return to designing tools not just for rock stars at Google but the vast majority of programmers and laypeople with simple small-scale problems. We've done it before so we can do it again, even better this time."

Submission + - A Nanoscale Look At a Complete Fly Brain (cemag.us)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Two high-speed electron microscopes. 7,062 brain slices. 21 million images. For a team of scientists at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Janelia Research Campus in Ashburn, Virginia, these numbers add up to a technical first: a high-resolution digital snapshot of the adult fruit fly brain. Researchers can now trace the path of any one neuron to any other neuron throughout the whole brain, says neuroscientist Davi Bock, a group leader at Janelia who reported the work along with his colleagues on July 19 in the journal Cell.

The fruit fly brain, roughly the size of a poppy seed, contains about 100,000 neurons (humans have 100 billion). Each neuron branches into a starburst of fine wires that touch the wires of other neurons. Neurons talk to one another through these touchpoints, or synapses, forming a dense mesh of communication circuits. Scientists can view these wires and synapses with an imaging technique called serial section transmission electron microscopy. First, they infuse the fly’s brain with a cocktail of heavy metals. These metals pack into cell membranes and synapses, ultimately marking the outlines of each neuron and its connections. Then the researchers hit slices of the brain with a beam of electrons, which passes through everything except the metal-loaded parts. “It’s the same way that x-rays go through your body except where they hit bone,” Bock explains. The resulting images expose the brain’s once-hidden nooks and crannies.

Submission + - Microsoft launches open source Quantum Katas project on GitHub to teach Q# progr (betanews.com)

Submitted by BrianFagioli
BrianFagioli writes: Microsoft seems eager to get programmers on the quantum bandwagon, as today, it launches the open source Quantum Katas on GitHub. What exactly is it? It is essentially a project deigned to teach Q# programming for free.

âoeFor those who want to explore quantum computing and learn the Q# programming language at their own pace, we have created the Quantum Katas â" an open source project containing a series of programming exercises that provide immediate feedback as you progress. Coding katas are great tools for learning a programming language. They rely on several simple learning principles: active learning, incremental complexity growth, and feedback,â says The Microsoft Quantum Team.

The team further says, "The Microsoft Quantum Katas are a series of self-paced tutorials aimed at teaching elements of quantum computing and Q# programming at the same time. Each kata offers a sequence of tasks on a certain quantum computing topic, progressing from simple to challenging. Each task requires you to fill in some code; the first task might require just one line, and the last one might require a sizable fragment of code. A testing framework validates your solutions, providing real-time feedback."

Submission + - Jonathan Blow: "C++ is a weird mess" (gamesindustry.biz) 2

Submitted by slack_justyb
slack_justyb writes: Jonathan Blow, an independent video game developer, indicated to gamesindustry.biz that while working on a recent project he stopped and considered how miserable programming can be. After some reflection Blow came to the realization as to why. [C++ is a] "really terrible, terrible language."

The main flaw with C++, in Blow's opinion, is that it's a fiendishly complex and layered ecosystem that has becoming increasingly convoluted in its effort to solve different problems; the more layers, the higher the stack, the more wobbly it becomes, and the harder it is to understand.

Blow is the developer of two games so far. Braid and The Witness and developed a new programming language known as Jai in hopes to help C++ game developers become more productive.

With Jai, Blow hopes to achieve three things: improve the quality of life for the programmer because "we shouldn't be miserable like many of us are"; simplify the systems; and increase expressive power by allowing programmers to build a large amount of functionality with a small amount of code.

Is Blow correct? Has C++ become a horrific mess that we should ultimately relegate to the bins of COBOL and Pascal? Are there redeeming qualities of C++ that justify the tangle it has become? Is Jai a solution or just yet another programming language?

Submission + - 'Why You Should Not Use Google Cloud' (medium.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Early today morning (June 28, 2018) I receive an alert from Uptime Robot telling me my entire site is down. I receive a barrage of emails from Google saying there is some "potential suspicious activity" and all my systems have been turned off. EVERYTHING IS OFF. THE MACHINE HAS PULLED THE PLUG WITH NO WARNING. The site is down, app engine, databases are unreachable, multiple Firebases say I’ve been downgraded and therefore exceeded limits.

Customer service chat is off. There’s no phone to call. I have an email asking me to fill in a form and upload a picture of the credit card and a government issued photo id of the card holder. Great, let’s wake up the CFO who happens to be the card holder. What if the card holder is on leave and is unreachable for three days? We would have lost everything—years of work—millions of dollars in lost revenue. I fill in the form with the details and thankfully within 20 minutes all the services started coming alive. The first time this happened, we were down for a few hours. In all we lost everything for about an hour. An automated email arrives apologizing for ‘inconvenience’ caused. Unfortunately The Machine has no understanding of the ‘quantum of inconvenience’ caused.

Submission + - EFF Sues to Invalidate FOSTA, an Unconstitutional Internet Censorship Law (eff.org)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: We are asking a court to declare the Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act of 2017 (“FOSTA”) unconstitutional and prevent it from being enforced. The law was written so poorly that it actually criminalizes a substantial amount of protected speech and, according to experts, actually hinders efforts to prosecute sex traffickers and aid victims.

In our lawsuit, two human rights organizations, an individual advocate for sex workers, a certified non-sexual massage therapist, and the Internet Archive, are challenging the law as an unconstitutional violation of the First and Fifth Amendments. Although the law was passed by Congress for the worthy purpose of fighting sex trafficking, its broad language makes criminal of those who advocate for and provide resources to adult, consensual sex workers and actually hinders efforts to prosecute sex traffickers and aid victims.

Submission + - New IBM robot holds its own in a debate with a human (nbcnews.com)

Submitted by PolygamousRanchKid
PolygamousRanchKid writes: The human brain may be the ultimate super computer, but artificial intelligence is catching up so fast, it can now hold a substantive debate with a human, according to audience feedback. IBM’s Project Debater made its public debut in San Francisco Monday afternoon, where it squared off against Noa Ovadia, the 2016 Israeli debate champion and in a second debate, Dan Zafrir, a nationally renowned debater in Israel. The AI is the latest grand challenge from IBM, which previously created Deep Blue, technology that beat chess champion Garry Kasparov and Watson, which bested humans on the game show Jeopardy.

In its first public outing, Project Debater turned out to be a formidable opponent, scanning the hundreds of millions of newspaper and journal articles in its memory to quickly synthesize an argument on a topic and position it was assigned on the spot.

“Project Debater could be the ultimate fact-based sounding board without the bias that often comes from humans,” said Arvind Krishna, director of IBM Research.

An audience survey taken before and after each debate found that Project Debater better enriched the audience’s knowledge as it argued in favor of subsidies for space exploration and in favor of telemedicine, but that the human debaters did a better job delivering their speeches.

The AI isn’t trained on topics — it’s trained on the art of debate. For the most part, Project Debater spoke in natural language, choosing the same words and sentence structures as a native English speaker. It even dropped the odd joke, but with the expected robotic delivery.

IBM's engineers know the AI isn’t perfect. Just like humans, it makes mistakes and at times, repeats itself. However, the company believes it could have a broad impact in the future as people now have to be more skeptical as they sort out fact and fiction. “Project Debater must adapt to human rationale and propose lines of argument that people can follow,” Krishna said in a blog post. “In debate, AI must learn to navigate our messy, unstructured human world as it is — not by using a pre-defined set of rules, as in a board game.”

Submission + - Sucking CO2 From Air Is Cheaper Than Scientists Thought (technologyreview.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: While avoiding the worst dangers of climate change will likely require sucking carbon dioxide out of the sky, prominent scientists have long dismissed such technologies as far too expensive. But a detailed new analysis published today in the journal Joule finds that direct air capture may be practical after all. The study concludes it would cost between $94 and $232 per ton of captured carbon dioxide, if existing technologies were implemented on a commercial scale. One earlier estimate, published in Proceedings of the National Academies, put that figure at more than $1,000 (though the calculations were made on what’s known as an avoided-cost basis, which would add about 10 percent to the new study’s figures). Crucially, the lowest-cost design, optimized to produce and sell alternative fuels made from the captured carbon dioxide, could already be profitable with existing public policies in certain markets. The higher cost estimates are for plants that would deliver compressed carbon dioxide for permanent underground storage.

Submission + - GCC 8.1 Compiler Introduces Initial C++20 Support (gnu.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: GNU has released the GCC 8.1 compiler with initial support for the C++20 (C++2A) revision of C++ currently under development. This annual update to the GNU Compiler Collection also comes with many other new features/improvements including but not limited to new ARM CPU support, support for next-generation Intel CPUs, AMD HSA IL, and initial work on Fortran 2018 support.

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 + - 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 + - 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.

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