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Submission + - Apple and Google Named In US Lawsuit Over Congolese Child Cobalt Mining Deaths (theguardian.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A landmark legal case has been launched against the world’s largest tech companies by Congolese families who say their children were killed or maimed while mining for cobalt used to power smartphones, laptops and electric cars, the Guardian can reveal. Apple, Google, Dell, Microsoft and Tesla have been named as defendants in a lawsuit filed in Washington DC by human rights firm International Rights Advocates on behalf of 14 parents and children from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). The lawsuit accuses the companies of aiding and abetting in the death and serious injury of children who they claim were working in cobalt mines in their supply chain. The families and injured children are seeking damages for forced labour and further compensation for unjust enrichment, negligent supervision and intentional infliction of emotional distress.

Submission + - California Coastal Waters Rising In Acidity At Alarming Rate, Study Finds (latimes.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Waters off the California coast are acidifying twice as fast as the global average, scientists found, threatening major fisheries and sounding the alarm that the ocean can absorb only so much more of the world’s carbon emissions. A new study led by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration also made an unexpected connection between acidification and a climate cycle known as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation — the same shifting forces that other scientists say have a played a big role in the higher and faster rates of sea level rise hitting California in recent years. El Nino and La Nina cycles, researchers found, also add stress to these extreme changes in the ocean’s chemistry.

This study, published Monday in the journal Nature Geoscience, came up with a creative way to confirm these greater rates of acidification. Researchers collected and analyzed a specific type of shell on the seafloor — and used these data to reconstruct a 100-year history of acidification along the West Coast. The study analyzed almost 2,000 shells of a tiny animal called foraminifera. Every day, these shells — about the size of a grain of sand — rain down onto the seafloor and are eventually covered by sediment. Scientists took core samples from the Santa Barbara basin — where the seafloor is relatively undisturbed by worms and bottom-feeding fish — and used the pristine layers of sediment to create a vertical snapshot of the ocean’s history. The more acidic the ocean, the more difficult it is for shellfish to build their shells. So using a microscope and other tools, the research team measured the changes in thickness of these shells and were able to estimate the ocean’s acidity level during the years that the foraminifera were alive. Using these modern calibrations, the scientists concluded that the waters off the California coast had a 0.21 decline in pH over a 100-year period dating back to 1895 (the lower the pH, the greater the acidity, according to the logarithmic pH scale of 0 to 14). This is more than double the decline — 0.1 pH — that scientists estimate the ocean has experienced on average worldwide.

Submission + - GM car executive says self-driving cars are the only way forward

Submitted by jmcbain
jmcbain writes: In a blog post last week, Dan Amman, the CEO of Cruise Automation (General Motors' self-driving car division), laments the pollution, waste of space, accidents, and cost of cars as we know them today. He says "here we are, living in a state of cognitive dissonance with exactly this — the human-driven, gasoline-powered, single-occupant car — as our primary mode of transportation". He notes that public transportation is still useful but ride-hailing services like Uber and Lyft are only contributing to the problem. He says the only way moving forward is self-driving cars.

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: Who is most likely to challenge Microsoft in the office?

Submitted by Tablizer
Tablizer writes: Microsoft still dominates cubicle-land. Google is making a push into that domain, but it's unclear how far or how fast they can go. Most "serious" applications still run on only Windows and that doesn't seem to be changing much. What's keeping others out? Do we need new desktop-oriented cross-platform standards? It seems everyone "went web" and forgot about the desktop niche, but it's a big niche still.
Software

Submission + - GPL Use Declining Faster Than Ever (itworld.com) 3

Submitted by bonch
bonch writes: An analysis of software licenses shows usage of GPL and other copyleft licenses declining at an accelerating rate. In their place, developers are choosing permissive licenses such as BSD, MIT, and ASL. One theory for the decline is that GPL usage was primarily driven by vendor-led projects, and with the shift to community-led projects, permissive licenses are becoming more common.

Comment Re:Apple and the UK (Score 0) 127

by Lars T. (#30257776) Attached to: Apple Forced To Clean Up Its Fine Print

They were complained about adverts for the iPhone - it was ironic that with such a great product they had to stoop to such misrepresentation.

Oh come on - they showed something you could actually do with an iPhone, just not in the 23 seconds it took in the video. Adds where the phones literally pick the sun out of the sky are however accepted as okay, just like that spot where the train station is quickly filled with people just because somebody uses this rad new phone - because the whole idea is stupid to begin with, nobody cares that you couldn't gather a crowd in 30 seconds.

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