Tag: journal

Photographer Glimpses Larry Page’s Flying Car Hovering In California (Maybe)

From Hollister, California — population 40, 000 — comes a good update from the Mercury News on Larry Page’s efforts to fund a flying car: Even from a few hundred yards away, the aircraft made a noise strikingly different from the roar of a typical plane. “It sounded like an electric motor running, just a high-pitched whine, ” said Steve Eggleston, assistant manager at an airplane-parts company with offices bordering the Hollister Municipal Airport tarmac. But it wasn’t only the sound that caught the attention of Eggleston and his co-workers at DK Turbines. It was what the aircraft was doing. “What the heck’s that?” saleswoman Brittany Rodriguez thought to herself. It’s just hovering.” That, apparently, was a flying car, or perhaps a prototype of another sort of aircraft under development by a mysterious startup called Zee.Aero…one of two reportedly funded by Google co-founder Larry Page to develop revolutionary forms of transportation… A Zee.Aero spokeswoman said the firm is “currently not discussing (its) plans publicly.” However, a Zee.Aero patent issued in 2013 describes in some detail an aircraft capable of the hovering seen by people working at the airport. And the drawings showcase a vision of the future in which flying cars park in lots just like their terrestrial, less-evolved cousins. Page has invested $100 million in Zee.Aero, which appears to have hired more than 100 aerospace engineers. But the article reports that apparently, in the small town where it’s headquartered, “the first rule about Zee.Aero is you don’t talk about Zee.Aero.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Photographer Glimpses Larry Page’s Flying Car Hovering In California (Maybe)

American ‘Vigilante Hacker’ Defaces Russian Ministry’s Website

An anonymous Slashdot reader quotes CNN Money: An American vigilante hacker — who calls himself “The Jester” — has defaced the website of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in retaliation for attacks on American targets… “Comrades! We interrupt regular scheduled Russian Foreign Affairs Website programming to bring you the following important message, ” he wrote. “Knock it off. You may be able to push around nations around you, but this is America. Nobody is impressed.” In early 2015, CNN Money profiled The Jester as “the vigilante who hacks jihadists, ” noting he’s a former U.S. soldier who now “single-handedly taken down dozens of websites that, he deems, support jihadist propaganda and recruitment efforts. He stopped counting at 179.” That article argues that “the fact that he hasn’t yet been hunted down and arrested says a lot about federal prosecutors and the FBI. Several cybersecurity experts see it as tacit approval.” “In an exclusive interview with CNNMoney this weekend, Jester said he chose to attack Russia out of frustration for the massive DNS cyberattack that knocked out a portion of the internet in the United States on Friday… ‘I’m not gonna sit around watching these f—-rs laughing at us.'” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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American ‘Vigilante Hacker’ Defaces Russian Ministry’s Website

Facebook Employees Tried To Remove Trump Posts As Hate Speech

An anonymous reader quotes a report from USA Today: Facebook employees pushed to remove some of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s Facebook posts — such as one proposing the ban of Muslims from entering the U.S. — from the service as hate speech that violated the giant social network’s policies, the Wall Street Journal reported Friday. The decision not to remove the Trump posts was made by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, the newspaper reported. Employees complained that Facebook was changing the rules for Trump and some who review content on Facebook threatened to quit. “When we review reports of content that may violate our policies, we take context into consideration. That context can include the value of political discourse, ” Facebook said in an emailed statement. “Many people are voicing opinions about this particular content and it has become an important part of the conversation around who the next U.S. president will be. For those reasons, we are carefully reviewing each report and surrounding context relating to this content on a case by case basis.” Senior members of Facebook’s policy team posted more details on its policy on Friday: “In the weeks ahead, we’re going to begin allowing more items that people find newsworthy, significant, or important to the public interest — even if they might otherwise violate our standards.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Facebook Employees Tried To Remove Trump Posts As Hate Speech

First New US Nuclear Reactor In 20 Years Goes Live

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: The Tennessee Valley Authority is celebrating an event 43 years in the making: the completion of the Watts Bar Nuclear Plant. In 1973, the TVA, one of the nation’s largest public power providers, began building two reactors that combined promised to generate enough power to light up 1.3 million homes. The first reactor, delayed by design flaws, eventually went live in 1996. Now, after billions of dollars in budget overruns, the second reactor has finally started sending power to homes and businesses. Standing in front of both reactors Wednesday, TVA President Bill Johnson said Watts Bar 2, the first U.S. reactor to enter commercial operation in 20 years, would offer clean, cheap and reliable energy to residents of several southern states for at least another generation. Before Watts Bar 2, the last time an American reactor had fired up was in 1996. It was Watts Bar 1 — and according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, it cost $6.8 billion, far greater than the original price tag at $370 million. In the 2000s, some American power companies, faced with growing environmental regulations, eyed nuclear power again as a top alternative to fossil fuels such as coal and oil. A handful of companies, taking advantage of federal loan guarantees from the Bush administration, revived nuclear reactor proposals in a period now known as the so-called “nuclear renaissance.” Eventually, nuclear regulators started to green light new reactors, including ones in Georgia and South Carolina. In 2007, the TVA resumed construction on Watts Bar 2, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency. The TVA originally said it would take five years to complete. The TVA, which today serves seven different southern states, relies on nuclear power to light up approximately 4.5 million homes. Watts Bar 2, the company’s seventh operating reactor, reaffirms its commitment to nukes for at least four more decades, Johnson said Wednesday. In the end, TVA required more than five years to build the project. The final cost, far exceeding its initial budget, stood at $4.7 billion. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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First New US Nuclear Reactor In 20 Years Goes Live

‘Cultlike’ Devotion: Apple Once Refused To Join Open Compute Project, So Their Entire Networking Team Quit

mattydread23 writes: Great story about the Open Compute Project from Business Insider’s Julie Bort here, including this fun tidbit: “‘OCP has a cultlike following, ‘ one person with knowledge of the situation told Business Insider. ‘The whole industry, internet companies, vendors, and enterprises are monitoring OCP.’ OCP aims to do for computer hardware what the Linux operating system did for software: make it ‘open source’ so anyone can take the designs for free and modify them, with contract manufacturers standing by to build them. In its six years, OCP has grown into a global entity, with board members from Facebook, Goldman Sachs, Intel, and Microsoft. In fact, there’s a well-known story among OCP insiders that demonstrates this cultlike phenom. It involves Apple’s networking team. This team was responsible for building a network at Apple that was so reliable, it never goes down. Not rarely — never. Building a 100% reliable network to meet Apple’s exacting standards was no easy task. So, instead of going it alone under Apple’s secrecy, the Apple networking team wanted to participate in the revolution, contributing and receiving help. But when the Apple team asked to join OCP, Apple said ‘no.’ ‘The whole team quit the same week, ‘ this person told us.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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‘Cultlike’ Devotion: Apple Once Refused To Join Open Compute Project, So Their Entire Networking Team Quit

California City Converts Its Street Lights Into A High-Speed IoT Backbone

Harvard Law professor Susan Crawford describes how the city of Santa Monica installed its own high-speed IoT backbone on its street lights and traffic signals — and why it’s important. Neutral “micro” cell sites can make very high-capacity wireless transmissions available, competitively, to everyone (and every sensor) nearby. This can and should cause an explosion of options and new opportunities for economic growth, innovation, and human flourishing in general… Very few American cities have carried out this transmogrification, but every single one will need to. Santa Monica…is a city that will be able to control its future digital destiny, because it is taking a comprehensive, competition-forcing approach to the transmission of data… Cities that get control of their streetlights and connect them to municipally overseen, reasonably priced dark fiber can chart their own Internet of Things futures, rather than leave their destinies in the hands of vendors whose priorities are driven (rationally) by the desire to control whole markets and keep share prices and dividends high rather than provide public benefits. Santa Monica’s CIO warns that now telecoms “are looking for exclusive rights to poles and saying they can’t co-locate [with their competitors]. They’re all hiring firms to lock up their permits and rights to as many poles as possible, as quickly as possible, before governments can organize.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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California City Converts Its Street Lights Into A High-Speed IoT Backbone

Google To Divide Its Index, Giving Mobile Users Better and Fresher Content

Desktop Google searches could soon feel slightly out of touch compared to those done via smartphones as the company begins to push mobile search. Google has said it is fully splitting its search index into two versions: a rapid updated mobile one, and a secondary search index for the desktop web. SearchEngineLand reports: The news came today during a keynote address from Gary Illyes, a webmaster trends analyst with Google, at Pubcon. Illyes didn’t give a timeline in his talk, but in a follow-up with Search Engine Land, he confirmed that it would happen within “months.” Google first announced that it was experimenting with the idea of a mobile index last year at SMX East. Since that time, Google’s clearly decided that a mobile index makes sense and is moving ahead with the idea. It’s unclear exactly how the mobile index will work. For example, since the mobile index is the “primary” index, will it really not be used for any desktop queries? Will it only contain “mobile-friendly” content? How out-of-date will the desktop index be? Desktop usage is now a minority of Google queries but still generates substantial usage. The most substantial change will likely be that by having a mobile index, Google can run its ranking algorithm in a different fashion across “pure” mobile content rather than the current system that extracts data from desktop content to determine mobile rankings. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Google To Divide Its Index, Giving Mobile Users Better and Fresher Content

Ubuntu 16.10 Released, Ready to Download

After six months of development, Ubuntu 16.10, the latest stable release of the world’s most popular desktop Linux distro, is now available to download. The ISO image file of Ubuntu 16.10 is a little larger (up from 1.4GB to 1.5GB). OMGUbuntu talks about the new features (condensed): Ubuntu 16.10 is not a big update over Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, released back in April. If you were hoping it’d be a compelling or must-have upgrade you’ll be sadly disappointed. There are a number of small improvements to the Unity desktop and the Compiz window manager that powers it. Improvements that help everything work that little bit faster, and that little bit smoother. Ubuntu 16.10 also performs better in virtual machines thanks to the new Unity Low Graphics Mode. An all-new version of the Nautilus file manager also features, and is packed with some significant UI and UX differences. Plus, as always, there’s a newer Linux kernel to enjoy. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Ubuntu 16.10 Released, Ready to Download

When Her Best Friend Died, She Rebuilt Him Using Artificial Intelligence

When Roman Mazurenko died, his friend Eugenia Kuyda created a digital monument to him: an artificial intelligent bot that could “speak” as Roman using thousands of lines of texts sent to friends and family. From the report: “It’s pretty weird when you open the messenger and there’s a bot of your deceased friend, who actually talks to you, ” Fayfer said. “What really struck me is that the phrases he speaks are really his. You can tell that’s the way he would say it — even short answers to ‘Hey what’s up.’ It has been less than a year since Mazurenko died, and he continues to loom large in the lives of the people who knew him. When they miss him, they send messages to his avatar, and they feel closer to him when they do. “There was a lot I didn’t know about my child, ” Roman’s mother told me. “But now that I can read about what he thought about different subjects, I’m getting to know him more. This gives the illusion that he’s here now.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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When Her Best Friend Died, She Rebuilt Him Using Artificial Intelligence

AT&T Gigabit Internet Coming To 11 More US Regions

AT&T is bringing its gigabit Internet service to 11 new metro areas. Currently available in parts of 29 cities around the country, the ultra-fast network — which the company is now calling AT&T Fiber — is expected to reach another 45 locations by the end of this year, reads a PCMag article. From the report: That includes 11 new markets: Florida: Gainesville and Panama City, Georgia: Columbus, Kentucky: Central Kentucky, Louisiana: Lafayette, Mississippi: Biloxi-Gulfport and Northeast Mississippi, Tennessee: Southeastern Tennessee and Knoxville, and Texas: Corpus Christi. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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AT&T Gigabit Internet Coming To 11 More US Regions