105515002
submission
vikingpower writes:
Until now, yours truly has been running as a one-man freelancer show. However, since January 1 the first employee is here, and of course I'm mighty proud of a stellarly clever young person working for me. She works remote (I'm in one European capital, she in another), and I need to buy her a laptop. That's a bit of a puzzle: as she's straight out of university and a non-techie, she basically only knows one OS: Windows, although she could get comfortable with Mac OS. However, as a long-time (server-side) programmer, I feel Apple hardware is seriously over-priced. Also, my brilliant firstemployee will mostly do research, and hardly needs anything more than a browser, Office or Office-like software (yes, I'm looking at you, Libre Office, and I love you!), and bibliography software. Should I get her a Chromebook ? A mid-level laptop with ye standarde OEM Windows installation ? Any thoughts ?
87182507
submission
vikingpower writes:
Dutch prodigy and Amsterdam University Professor Erik Verlinde published a paper on arXiv, yesterday November 7, titled "Emergent Gravity and the Dark Universe". In the paper, Verlinde derives gravity from the so-called Holographic Principle, which — simply put — states that gravity emerges from the interplay between and entropy re-arrangement of sub-atomic "strings" that live in a negatively curved space-time. At that level, "...spacetime and gravity are emergent from an underlying microscopic description in which they have no a priori meaning" .
Most importantly, Verlinde's paper has as a consequence that Dark Matter, nemesis of many an astronomer, is nothing more than an illusion. Verlinde, who was awarded the Dutch national Spinoza science prize in the recent past, already completed the tour de force of deriving Newtonian gravity from the same principles in a 2010 paper, also on arXiv. We are probably looking at Nobel-prize material here, as Verlinde is acknowledged by his peers to "go one better than Einstein's General Theory of Relativity".
82064751
submission
vikingpower writes:
The European Space Agency's second mission to Mars, Exomars, was successfully launched from the Baikonur launch pad today. Exomars will search for traces of life, either past or present, on the Red Planet, and is the precursor to a more full-fledged mission to Mars in 2018, comprising a rover. It consists of an orbiter and of Schiaparelli, a lander built by European industry and scheduled to land in October this year. Both missions are cooperations between ESA and RosKosmos, the Russian Federal Space Agency. If one of them met their ultimate goal: proving there is or was life on Mars, the excitement here on Earth would be unimaginable.
81825211
submission
vikingpower writes:
ARPAnet pioneer and networking legend Ray Tomlinson, who is best known for his contributions in developing email standards, has died, as reported by TechRepublic..
Tomlinson is supposed to have told a colleague, shortly after showing him his invention: "Don't tell anyone! This isn't what we're supposed to be working on.", according to Sasha Cavender quoting Tomlinson in a Forbes article titled "Legends". May Ray rest in peace in /dev/null.
80453523
submission
vikingpower writes:
Earth’s 2015 surface temperatures were the warmest since modern record keeping began in 1880, according to independent analyses by NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
Globally-averaged temperatures in 2015 shattered the previous mark set in 2014 by 0.23 degrees Fahrenheit (0.13 Celsius). Only once before, in 1998, has the new record been greater than the old record by this much.
The British Met office also reports on the same phenomenon, even forecasting that global temperatures are very soon going to reach the one-degree-celsius marker.
According to Stephen Belcher, Director of the Met Office Hadley Centre, ""We've had similar natural events in the past, yet this is the first time we're set to reach the 1 C marker and it's clear that it is human influence driving our modern climate into uncharted territory."
68731979
submission
vikingpower writes:
For us developers, 2015 got kick-started, mentally, by a Linus Torvald rant about parallel computing being a bunch of crock. Although Linus' rants are deservedly famous for the political incorrectness and ( often ) for their insight, it may be that Linus has overseen Gustafson's Law, which states that parallelization becomes more efficient with larger problem sizes viz. with larger data sets. Back in 2012, the High Scalability blog already ran a post pointing towards new ways to think about parallel computing, especially the ideas of David Ungar, who thinks in the direction of lock-less computing of intermediary, possibly faulty results that are updated often. At the end of this year, we may be thinking differently about parallel server-side computing than we do today.
55542765
submission
vikingpower writes:
In a landmark report on bushfires and climate change, the Australian Climate Council concludes that heat waves in Australia, as driven by climate change, are becoming more frequent — and that they get hotter. "It is crucial that communities, emergency services, health services and other authorities prepare for the increasing severity and frequency of extreme fire conditions.", says the Council in the report. Sarah Perkins, one of the report's co-authors,
was interviewed by The Guardian Australia. "“While we can’t blame climate change for any one event, we can certainly see its fingerprint. This is another link in the chain.” Perkins said her latest work had analysed heatwave trends up to 2013. She said the trend “just gets worse – it’s a bit scary really”."
Already back in 2009, the United Nations World Meteorological Organization signaled that a Southeast Australian heatwave was the hottest in 100 years.
54846363
submission
vikingpower writes:
Isabel Allende's The House of The Spirits. Sherman Alexie's The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. Alice Walker's The Color Purple. Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye. Ralph Ellison's The Invisible Man.
What do all these titles have in common with each other ? Exactly, they are banned somewhere, on some school, in the USA. . Yes, in 2013. A project named The Kids' Right to Read ( by the National Coalition Against Censorship ) investigated three times the average number of incidents, adding to an overall rise in cases for the entire year, according to KRRP coordinator Acacia O'Connor. To date, KRRP has confronted 49 incidents in 29 states this year, a 53% increase in activity from 2012. During the second half of 2013, the project battled 31 new incidents, compared to only 14 in the same period last year.
"It has been a sprint since the beginning of the school year," O'Connor said. "We would settle one issue and wake up the next morning to find out another book was on the chopping block."
The NCAC also offers a Book Censorship Toolkit on its website. If such a toolkit is needed at all, does this indicate that intellectual freedom and free speech are ( slowly ) eroding in the USA ?
53673589
submission
vikingpower writes:
In the ever-longer wake of the NSA scandal, much-respected Dutch newspaper NRC today reveals, in English, as mandated by the gravity of the occasion, that the Dutch secret service, the AIVD, hacks internet forums. And yes, that is gross misconduct against Dutch law. The service, whose headquarters are in Zoetermeer, did not yet comment upon the divulgation of the document from Edward Snowden's collection. Incensed Dutch parliamentaries are calling for an enquiry.
53403515
submission
vikingpower writes:
The Justice Department has all but concluded it will not bring charges against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange for publishing classified documents because government lawyers said they could not do so without also prosecuting U.S. news organizations and journalists, according to U.S. officials. Read the rest of the article in today's online edition of the WP.
49266599
submission
vikingpower writes:
Today, at 14h Western European Time, Professor Mark Post of Maastricht University ( the Netherlands ) will present a world first: he will cook and serve a burger made from Cultured Beef in front of an invited audience in London. The event will include a brief explanation of the science behind the burger. You can witch the event live, online. The project's fact sheet is to be found here.
49226721
submission
vikingpower writes:
Randall Munroe, the comic author best known as the author of the xkcd webcomic, reveals the secret backstory of his epic, 3099-panel "Time" comic in an interesting interview with Wired.
The comic can be seen as an animation on youtube. There is also a complete click-through version available on geekwagon, of this comic that inspired a dedicated wiki and has its own glossary.
48785731
submission
vikingpower writes:
A Dutch newspaper has a ( Dutch-only, alas ) digital version of the letter Mr. Opstelten, Secretary of Justice and Security, sent to Dutch Parliament, in which he quietly admits to 56825 phone taps ( a 3% rise in one year ) and to 16676 internet taps in 2012, a 400% rise, or a fivefold increase, in one year. An older report alreay designed the Netherlands as one of the biggest wiretappers in the western world. Slate also knew, back in 2006, that Europeans actually love wiretapping and internet tapping. In the Netherlands, a country with a population of only 16 million, the practice has risen to the level of a staggering 1 in 1000 phones being tapped.
48758453
submission
vikingpower writes:
How a phone manufacturer making a somewhat successful come-back can shoot itself in the foot: Marc "van Hauser" Heuse, who works for German technology magazine Heise, has discovered that immediately after setting up an email account on Blackberry 10 OS, full credentials for that account are sent to Research In Motion, the Canadian Blackberry manufacturer. Shortly after performing the set-up, the first successful connections from a server located within the RIM domain appear in the mail server's logs. ( most of the story in english, some comments in German ). At least according to German law, this is completely illegal, as the phone's user does not get a single indication or notice of what is being done.
48145027
submission
vikingpower writes:
The official Russian Press agency Interfax has the scoop: Edward Snowden asks for political asylum in Russia. Russia Today, however, denies the news. Is this part of a clever desinformation move by Snowden, who reportedly is still on the Moscovite airport Sheremetyevo 2 ?
