London’s property bubble has got people energetically expanding their property, digging out sub-basements — and the insane bubblenomics of London housebuilding are such that it’s cheaper to just bury the digger and abandon it than to retrieve it. London’s accumulating a substrate of entombed earthmoving machinery. Read the rest
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London property bubble entombs a thousand digger-machines
It’s a good time to be a cord-cutter in the U.S. A new study says that 47% of all American households subscribe to Netflix, Hulu Plus, Amazon Prime or a combination of these. And almost half the country has at least one internet-connected TV set. Read more…
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Almost Half The U.S. Subscribes To Netflix, Amazon Prime or Hulu Plus
schwit1 (797399) writes “Eugene Goostman, a computer program pretending to be a young Ukrainian boy, successfully duped enough humans to pass the iconic test. The Turing Test which requires that computers are indistinguishable from humans — is considered a landmark in the development of artificial intelligence, but academics have warned that the technology could be used for cybercrime. Computing pioneer Alan Turing said that a computer could be understood to be thinking if it passed the test, which requires that a computer dupes 30 per cent of human interrogators in five-minute text conversations.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Turing Test Passed
An anonymous reader writes “Mesa 10.2 was introduced this week as the new shining example of what open source graphics (and open source projects in general) are capable of achieving. The latest release of this often underrepresented open source graphics driver project has many new OpenGL and driver features including a number of new OpenGL 4 extensions. The reverse-engineered Freedreno driver now poses serious competition to Qualcomm’s Adreno driver, an OpenMAX implementation was added for Radeon video encoding support, Intel Broadwell support now works better, the software rasterizer supports OpenGL 3.3, and many other changes are present.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Mesa 10.2 Improves Linux’s Open-Source Graphics Drivers
schwit1 sends word of research showing that cycles of prolonged fasting can both protect the immune system from harm and also induce regeneration by causing stem cells to start renewing themselves. ‘In both mice and a Phase 1 human clinical trial (abstract), long periods of not eating significantly lowered white blood cell counts. In mice, fasting cycles then “flipped a regenerative switch, ” changing the signaling pathways for hematopoietic stem cells, which are responsible for the generation of blood and immune systems, the research showed. “PKA is the key gene that needs to shut down in order for these stem cells to switch into regenerative mode. It gives the OK for stem cells to go ahead and begin proliferating and rebuild the entire system, ” explained [study author Valter Longo], noting the potential of clinical applications that mimic the effects of prolonged fasting to rejuvenate the immune system. “And the good news is that the body got rid of the parts of the system that might be damaged or old, the inefficient parts, during the fasting. Now, if you start with a system heavily damaged by chemotherapy or aging, fasting cycles can generate, literally, a new immune system.”‘ Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Fasting Triggers Stem Cell Regeneration of Damaged, Old Immune System
In the days of the Soviet Union, western antibiotics couldn’t make it past the Iron Curtain. So Eastern Bloc doctors figured out how to use viruses to kill the bacteria infecting their patients. Now, with antibiotic-resistant bacteria vexing modern medicine, that eerie yet effective method might come our way. In post-antibiotic world, infection is cure! Read more…
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Soviet Doctors Cured Infections With Viruses, and Soon Yours Might Too
Cisco Systems The town manager of a hamlet in south eastern New Hampshire has defied demands that he pay a ransom to recover police department computer files taken hostage by Cryptowall, a newer piece of malware that encrypts hard drive contents of infected machines until victims pay for them to be decrypted. “Make no mistake, the Town of Durham will be paying no ransom,” Town Manager Todd Selig was quoted as saying by CBS Boston news. Police department computers for the town of almost 15,000 residents were reportedly infected Thursday after an officer opened what appeared to be a legitimate file attachment to an e-mail. By Friday morning, widespread “issues” were hitting the department computer network . It was shut down by noon that day to prevent the infection from spreading to other systems. The game may be RIGged The department was reportedly hit by Cryptowall, a newer form of crypto malware that rivals the better known CryptoLocker . According to a blog post published Thursday by researchers from Cisco Systems, Cryptowall has been gaining ground since April, when it was folded into the RIG exploit kit, which is software sold in underground forums that automates computer scams and malware attacks for less technically knowledgeable criminals. Cisco’s Cloud Web Security service has been blocking requests tied to more than 90 infected Internet domains pushing Cryptowall scams to more than 17 percent of service customers. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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We “will be paying no ransom,” vows town hit by Cryptowall ransom malware
Vigile (99919) writes “Since the introduction of Intel’s Ivy Bridge processors there was a subset of users that complained about the company’s change of thermal interface material between the die and the heat spreader. With the release of the Core i7-4790K, Intel is moving to a polymer thermal interface material that claims to improve cooling on the Haswell architecture, along with the help of some added capacitors on the back of the CPU. Code named Devil’s Canyon, this processor boosts stock clocks by 500 MHz over the i7-4770K all for the same price ($339) and lowers load temperatures as well. Unfortunately, in this first review at PC Perspective, overclocking doesn’t appear to be improved much.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Intel Core i7-4790K Devil’s Canyon Increases Clocks By 500 MHz, Lowers Temps
NASA’s latest data download just covered way more distance, and contained way more awesome , than any earthbound file transfer: the agency beamed a high-def video down from the International Space Station this week using a high-powered laser . Go ahead and give your WiFi router a good stern look. Read more…
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NASA’s Using Space Laser to Download Video From Orbit at Gigabit Speeds
redletterdave writes: “‘Project Xanadu, ‘ designed by hypertext inventor Ted Nelson to let users build documents that automatically embed the sources they’re linking back to and show the visible connections between parallel webpages, was released in late April at a Chapman University event. Thing is, development on Xanadu began in 1960 — that’s 54 years ago — making it the most delayed software in history. ‘At its simplest, Xanadu lets users build documents that seamlessly embed the sources which they are linking back to, creating, in Nelson’s words, “an entire form of literature where links do not break as versions change; where documents may be closely compared side by side and closely annotated; where it is possible to see the origins of every quotation; and in which there is a valid copyright system – a literary, legal and business arrangement – for frictionless, non-negotiated quotation at any time and in any amount.” The version released on the internet, named OpenXanadu, is a simple document created using quoted sections from eight other works, including the King James Bible and the Wikipedia page on Steady State Theory.'” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Xanadu Software Released After 54 Years In the Making