[Slashdot] Stories for 2017-05-02

Slashdot Daily Newsletter

In this issue:
* VC Founder Predicts AI Will Take 50% Of All Human Jobs Within 10 Years

* Trump Has Grand Plan For Mission To Mars But Nasa Advises: Cool Your Jets

* Slashdot Asks: Do You Still Use RSS?

* Power of Modern Programming Languages is That They Are Expressive, Readable, Concise, Precise, and Executable

* 'There's No Good Way To Kill a Bad Idea'

* DRM Will Be Gone By 2025, Predicts Cory Doctorow

* Trump is Launching a New Tech Group To 'Transform and Modernize' the US Govt

* Modern 'Hackintoshes' Show That Apple Should Probably Just Build a Mac Tower

* A Sophisticated Grey Hat Vigilante Protects Insecure IoT Devices

* UEFI Secure Boot Booted From Debian 9 'Stretch'

* Facebook Lets Advertisers Target Insecure Teens, Says Report

* Apple Has a Record $250 Billion In Cash, 90% of It Is Banked Overseas

* China is Recruiting 20,000 People To Write Its Own Wikipedia

* India Aims To Make Every Car Electric By 2030 In Bid To Tackle Pollution

* SpaceX Successfully Launches Its First Spy Satellite

* Taser Will Use Police Body Camera Videos 'To Anticipate Criminal Activity'

* Linux Kernel 4.11 Officially Released

* US Adults Will Spend More Than Half the Day Consuming Media, Study Says

* US Appeals Court Won't Rehear 'Net Neutrality' Challenge


+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| VC Founder Predicts AI Will Take 50% Of All Human Jobs Within 10 Years
| from the countdown-to-unemployment dept.
| posted by EditorDavid on Sunday April 30, @21:34 (AI)
| with 394 comments
| https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/17/04/30/2230229/vc-founder-predicts-ai-will-take-50-of-all-human-jobs-within-10-years?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

An anonymous reader quotes CNBC: Robots are [0]likely to replace 50
percent of all jobs in the next decade, according to Kai-Fu Lee, founder
of venture capital firm Sinovation Ventures and a top voice on tech in
China. Artificial intelligence is the wave of the future, the influential
technologist told CNBC, calling it the "singular thing that will be
larger than all of human tech revolutions added together, including
electricity, [the] industrial revolution, internet, mobile internet --
because AI is pervasive"...

For example, he said, companies in which his firm has invested can
accomplish feats such as recognizing 3 million faces at the same time, or
dispersing loans in eight seconds. "These are things that are superhuman,
and we think this will be in every industry, will probably replace 50% of
human jobs, create a huge amount of wealth for mankind and wipe out
poverty," Lee said, later adding that he expected that displacement to
occur in the next 10 years.

Discuss this story at:
https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/17/04/30/2230229/vc-founder-predicts-ai-will-take-50-of-all-human-jobs-within-10-years?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email#commentlisting

Links:
0. http://www.cnbc.com/2017/04/27/kai-fu-lee-robots-will-replace-half-of-all-jobs.html

+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Trump Has Grand Plan For Mission To Mars But Nasa Advises: Cool Your Jets
| from the reality-check dept.
| posted by msmash on Monday May 01, @10:40 (NASA)
| with 371 comments
| https://science.slashdot.org/story/17/05/01/1354224/trump-has-grand-plan-for-mission-to-mars-but-nasa-advises-cool-your-jets?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Donald Trump would like to see Americans walk on Mars during his
presidency. Nasa would love to get there that quickly, too. The reality
of space travel is slightly more complicated, however. From a report: On
Monday, during a call with astronaut Peggy Whitson, who was aboard the
International Space Station, Trump pressed her for a timeline on a crewed
mission to Mars, one of Nasa's longest standing and most daunting goals.
"Tell me, Mars," he asked her from the Oval Office, "what do you see a
timing for actually sending humans to Mars? Is there a schedule and when
would you see that happening?" Whitson answered by pointing out that
Trump, [0]by signing a Nasa funding bill last month, had already approved
a timeline for a mission in the 2030s. She added that Nasa was building a
new heavy-launch rocket, which would need testing. "[1]Unfortunately
space flight takes a lot of time and money," she said. "But it is so
worthwhile doing." Trump replied: "Well, we want to try and do it during
my first term or, at worst, during my second term, so we'll have to speed
that up a little bit, OK?" It was not clear whether the president meant
the remark as a quip or something more serious.

Discuss this story at:
https://science.slashdot.org/story/17/05/01/1354224/trump-has-grand-plan-for-mission-to-mars-but-nasa-advises-cool-your-jets?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email#commentlisting

Links:
0. https://science.slashdot.org/story/17/03/21/2017220/trump-adds-to-nasa-budget-approves-crewed-mission-to-mars
1. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/apr/30/trump-mission-mars-nasa-space-flight

+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Slashdot Asks: Do You Still Use RSS?
| from the changing-habits dept.
| posted by msmash on Monday May 01, @14:00 (News)
| with 344 comments
| https://ask.slashdot.org/story/17/05/01/1657205/slashdot-asks-do-you-still-use-rss?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Real Site Syndication, or RSS has been around for over a decade but it
never really managed to lure regular web users (though maybe it wasn't
built to serve everyone). So much so that even [0]Google cited declining
usage of Google Reader, at one time the most popular RSS reader service,
as one of the two reasons for shutting down the service. With an
[1]increasingly number of people looking at Facebook and Twitter for news,
we thought it would be a good time to ask the following question: Do you
use any RSS reader app? If yes, do you think it is still a good way to
keep track of the "new stuff" that your favorite sites publish?

Discuss this story at:
https://ask.slashdot.org/story/17/05/01/1657205/slashdot-asks-do-you-still-use-rss?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email#commentlisting

Links:
0. https://tech.slashdot.org/story/13/03/14/0033230/google-reader-being-retired
1. https://news.slashdot.org/story/16/05/28/1321200/62-americans-get-news-on-social-media

+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Power of Modern Programming Languages is That They Are Expressive, Readable, Concise, Precise, and Executable
| from the evolution dept.
| posted by msmash on Monday May 01, @11:20 (Programming)
| with 236 comments
| https://developers.slashdot.org/story/17/05/01/146201/power-of-modern-programming-languages-is-that-they-are-expressive-readable-concise-precise-and-executable?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

An anonymous reader shares a Scientific American article: Programming has
changed. In first generation languages like FORTRAN and C, the burden was
on programmers to translate high-level concepts into code. With modern
programming languages -- I'll use Python as an example -- we use
functions, objects, modules, and libraries to extend the language, and
that doesn't just make programs better, it changes what programming is.
Programming used to be about translation: expressing ideas in natural
language, working with them in math notation, then writing flowcharts and
pseudocode, and finally writing a program. Translation was necessary
because each language offers different capabilities. Natural language is
expressive and readable, pseudocode is more precise, math notation is
concise, and code is executable. But the price of translation is that we
are limited to the subset of ideas we can express effectively in each
language. Some ideas that are easy to express computationally are awkward
to write in math notation, and the symbolic manipulations we do in math
are impossible in most programming languages. The [0]power of modern
programming languages is that they are expressive, readable, concise,
precise, and executable. That means we can eliminate middleman languages
and use one language to explore, learn, teach, and think.

Discuss this story at:
https://developers.slashdot.org/story/17/05/01/146201/power-of-modern-programming-languages-is-that-they-are-expressive-readable-concise-precise-and-executable?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email#commentlisting

Links:
0. https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/programming-as-a-way-of-thinking/

+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| 'There's No Good Way To Kill a Bad Idea'
| from the trouble-in-our-stars dept.
| posted by msmash on Monday May 01, @12:00 (Businesses)
| with 231 comments
| https://slashdot.org/story/17/05/01/1428232/theres-no-good-way-to-kill-a-bad-idea?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The world is filled with bad, baseless, factually inaccurate ideas that
refuse to die. From an article: Philosopher Russell Blackford, a lecturer
at the University of Newcastle in Australia, tweeted about this
phenomenon earlier this month: "The momentum behind bad ideas can be
enormous -- they can plunge on, gathering force, long after receiving
devastating criticism." If you've ever found yourself [0]unable to halt
someone else's idiotic plans once they were already in motion, you're not
alone. Whether you're a politician trying to make congress see sense or
simply a manager trying to halt an atrocious team-building plan, there's
simply no foolproof way to kill a terrible idea. Blackford blames the
momentum behind bad ideas on cascade effects. Yes, individuals are prone
to making poor decisions for emotional or biased reasons (known as
"cognitive heuristics") and this irrationality is part of the problem.
But there's also a broader sociological issue, in that others' opinions
carry a huge amount of weight in influencing our views. A cultural
consensus -- even without proper evidence -- can form pretty quickly. If
one person convinces a second, says Blackford, then a third person will
be far more likely to agree with the majority view. This effect
exponentially increases with each person who agrees with the others. "We
soon have a sociological effect whereby everyone knows that, say, a
certain movie is very good or very bad, even though everyone might have
'known' the exact opposite if only a few early voices had been
different," says Blackford.

Discuss this story at:
https://slashdot.org/story/17/05/01/1428232/theres-no-good-way-to-kill-a-bad-idea?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email#commentlisting

Links:
0. https://qz.com/966006/theres-no-good-way-to-kill-a-bad-idea/

+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| DRM Will Be Gone By 2025, Predicts Cory Doctorow
| from the freeing-software's-foundations dept.
| posted by EditorDavid on Monday May 01, @06:30 (DRM)
| with 171 comments
| https://yro.slashdot.org/story/17/05/01/079239/drm-will-be-gone-by-2025-predicts-cory-doctorow?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

An anonymous reader writes: It's been two years since Cory Doctorow
joined the EFF's campaign to eliminate DRM within 8 years -- and he still
believes it'll happen. "Farmers and the Digital Right To Repair Coalition
have done brilliantly and have a message which is extremely resonant with
the political right as well as the political left." And now [0]even the
entertainment industry seems to oppose extending the DMCA to tractors.
"The entertainment industry feels very proprietary towards laws that
protect DRM. They really feel that they lobbied for and bought these laws
in order to protect the business model they envisioned. For these
latecomer upstarts to turn up and stretch and distort these laws out of
proportion has really exposed one of the natural cracks in copyright
altogether."
Doctorow also says that "If there's anything good that might come of
Brexit, it's that the UK will renegotiate and reevaluate its relationship
to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and other
directives. The UK enjoys a really interesting market position if it
wants to be the only nation in the region that makes, exports, and
supports DRM-breaking tools."

Discuss this story at:
https://yro.slashdot.org/story/17/05/01/079239/drm-will-be-gone-by-2025-predicts-cory-doctorow?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email#commentlisting

Links:
0. https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/04/29/drm_cory_doctorow/

+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Trump is Launching a New Tech Group To 'Transform and Modernize' the US Govt
| from the modernizing-things dept.
| posted by msmash on Monday May 01, @12:40 (Businesses)
| with 164 comments
| https://politics.slashdot.org/story/17/05/01/1436249/trump-is-launching-a-new-tech-group-to-transform-and-modernize-the-us-govt?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

President Donald Trump announced on Monday he has signed an executive
order creating a new technology council to "transfer and modernize" the
U.S. government's IT systems. From a report: The gathering is part of a
new effort, called the American Technology Council, commissioned by Trump
in an executive order signed this morning. The effort seeks to bring
leading government officials together with Silicon Valley's top minds in
order to [0]"transform and modernize" the aging federal bureaucracy "and
how it uses and delivers information." Trump isn't the first sitting U.S.
president to look to Silicon Valley in an attempt to bring government
into the digital age. His predecessor, former President Barack Obama,
similarly launched efforts like the U.S. Digital Service, which the
administration billed at the time as a "startup at the White House" that
sought to pair tech experts with federal agencies that needed help. Over
20 technology chief executives will attend meetings at the White House in
early June to talk about improving government information technology, the
report adds.

Discuss this story at:
https://politics.slashdot.org/story/17/05/01/1436249/trump-is-launching-a-new-tech-group-to-transform-and-modernize-the-us-govt?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email#commentlisting

Links:
0. https://www.recode.net/2017/5/1/15499586/american-technology-council-trump-tech

+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Modern 'Hackintoshes' Show That Apple Should Probably Just Build a Mac Tower
| from the go-big-or-go-home dept.
| posted by BeauHD on Monday May 01, @17:20 (Desktops (Apple))
| with 136 comments
| https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/17/05/01/1957212/modern-hackintoshes-show-that-apple-should-probably-just-build-a-mac-tower?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from a report written by Andrew
Cunningham via Ars Technica: Apple is working on new desktop Macs,
including a ground-up [0]redesign of the tiny-but-controversial 2013 Mac
Pro. We're also due for some new iMacs, which Apple says will include
some features that [1]will make less-demanding pro users happy. But we
don't know when they're coming, and the Mac Pro in particular is going to
take at least a year to get here. Apple's reassurances are nice, but it's
a small comfort to anyone who wants high-end processing power in a Mac
right now. Apple hasn't put out a new desktop since it refreshed the
iMacs in October of 2015, and the older, slower components in these
computers keeps Apple out of new high-end fields like VR. This is a
problem for people who prefer or need macOS, since Apple's operating
system is only really designed to work on Apple's hardware. But for the
truly adventurous and desperate, there's another place to turn: [2]fake
Macs built with standard PC components, popularly known as
"Hackintoshes." They've been around for a long time, but the state of
Apple's desktop lineup is making them feel newly relevant these days. So
we spoke with people who currently rely on Hackintoshes to see how the
computers are being used -- and what they'd like to see from Apple.

Discuss this story at:
https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/17/05/01/1957212/modern-hackintoshes-show-that-apple-should-probably-just-build-a-mac-tower?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email#commentlisting

Links:
0. https://apple.slashdot.org/story/17/04/04/1335247/the-mac-pro-is-getting-a-major-do-over
1. https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/17/04/04/1321202/apple-will-ship-a-pro-imac-later-this-year-it-wont-feature-touchscreen
2. https://arstechnica.com/apple/2017/05/hackintoshes-keep-giving-apples-frustrated-pros-a-place-to-go/

+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| A Sophisticated Grey Hat Vigilante Protects Insecure IoT Devices
| from the internet-of-poorly-secured-things dept.
| posted by EditorDavid on Monday May 01, @00:34 (Security)
| with 132 comments
| https://it.slashdot.org/story/17/05/01/009236/a-sophisticated-grey-hat-vigilante-protects-insecure-iot-devices?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Ars Technica reports on Hajime, a sophisticated "vigilante botnet that
infects IoT devices before blackhats can hijack them." Once Hajime
infects an Internet-connected camera, DVR, and other Internet-of-things
device, the malware [0]blocks access to four ports known to be the most
widely used vectors for infecting IoT devices. It also displays a
cryptographically signed message on infected device terminals that
describes its creator as "[1]just a white hat, securing some systems."
But unlike the bare-bones functionality found in Mirai, Hajime is a
full-featured package that gives the botnet reliability, stealth, and
reliance that's largely unparalleled in the IoT landscape...

Hajime doesn't rashly cycle through a preset list of the most commonly
used user name-password combinations when trying to hijack a vulnerable
device. Instead, it parses information displayed on the login screen to
identify the device manufacturer and then tries combinations the
manufacturer uses by default... Also, in stark contrast to Mirai and its
blackhat botnet competitors, Hajime goes to great lengths to maintain
resiliency. It [2]uses a BitTorrent-based peer-to-peer network to issue
commands and updates. It also encrypts node-to-node communications. The
encryption and decentralized design make Hajime more resistant to
takedowns by ISPs and Internet backbone providers.
Pascal Geenens, a researcher at security firm Radware, watched the botnet
attempt 14,348 hijacks from 12,000 unique IP addresses around the world,
and says "If Hajime is a glimpse into what the future of IoT botnets
looks like, I certainly hope the IoT industry gets its act together and
[3]starts seriously considering securing existing and new products. If
not, our connected hopes and futures might depend on...grey hat
vigilantes to purge the threat the hard way."

And long-time Slashdot reader [4]The_Other_Kelly asks a good question.
"While those with the ability and time can roll their own solutions, what
off-the-shelf home security products are there, for non-technical people
to use to protect their home/IoT networks?"

Discuss this story at:
https://it.slashdot.org/story/17/05/01/009236/a-sophisticated-grey-hat-vigilante-protects-insecure-iot-devices?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email#commentlisting

Links:
0. https://arstechnica.com/security/2017/04/a-vigilante-is-putting-huge-amount-of-work-into-infecting-iot-devices/
1. https://arstechnica.com/security/2017/04/vigilante-botnet-infects-iot-devices-before-blackhats-can-hijack-them/
2. https://security.radware.com/ddos-threats-attacks/hajime-iot-botnet/
3. https://blog.radware.com/security/2017/04/hajime-futureproof-botnet/
4. https://slashdot.org/~The_Other_Kelly

+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| UEFI Secure Boot Booted From Debian 9 'Stretch'
| from the going-forward dept.
| posted by msmash on Monday May 01, @13:20 (Debian)
| with 119 comments
| https://linux.slashdot.org/story/17/05/01/1452209/uefi-secure-boot-booted-from-debian-9-stretch?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Debian's release team has decided to postpone its implementation of
Secure Boot. From a report: In a release update from last week, release
team member Jonathan Wiltshire wrote that "At a recent team meeting, we
decided that support for Secure Boot in the forthcoming Debian 9
'stretch' would no longer be a blocker to release. The likely, although
not certain outcome is that stretch will not have Secure Boot support." "[0]We
appreciate that this will be a disappointment to many users and
developers," he continued, "However, we need to balance that with the
limited time available for the volunteer teams working on this feature,
and the risk of bugs being introduced through rushed development." The
decision not to offer Secure Boot support at release leaves Debian behind
Red Hat and Suse, making it the only one of Linux's three main branches
not to support the heir-to-BIOS and the many security enhancements it
offers.

Discuss this story at:
https://linux.slashdot.org/story/17/05/01/1452209/uefi-secure-boot-booted-from-debian-9-stretch?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email#commentlisting

Links:
0. https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/05/01/debian_stretch_omits_secure_boot/

+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Facebook Lets Advertisers Target Insecure Teens, Says Report
| from the stranger-things dept.
| posted by msmash on Monday May 01, @15:20 (Privacy)
| with 94 comments
| https://yro.slashdot.org/story/17/05/01/1917257/facebook-lets-advertisers-target-insecure-teens-says-report?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

An anonymous reader shares a report: Leaked documents from Facebook's
team in Australia [0]allegedly show the social giant's ability to help
advertisers target teens who feel "worthless." The documents, first
revealed by The Australian, say Facebook can spot when teens "need a
confidence boost." The documents reportedly get even more specific,
saying Facebook's algorithm can pinpoint when teens feel "useless,"
"stressed," "failure," "silly," "stupid," "worthless" and "defeated."
Using Facebook's tools as well as image recognition, advertisers would be
able to find teens in some of their lowest moments -- and then target ads
to them. The leaked documents also detailed how advertisers could use
Facebook's algorithms to find teens who were interested in "working out
and losing weight" and promote health products, according to The
Australian. Facebook's team in Australia was reportedly looking to
capitalize on 6.4 million teens who use the social network in their
region.

Discuss this story at:
https://yro.slashdot.org/story/17/05/01/1917257/facebook-lets-advertisers-target-insecure-teens-says-report?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email#commentlisting

Links:
0. https://www.cnet.com/news/facebook-advertise-insecure-teens-leaked-documents/

+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Apple Has a Record $250 Billion In Cash, 90% of It Is Banked Overseas
| from the world-record dept.
| posted by BeauHD on Monday May 01, @19:20 (The Almighty Buck)
| with 81 comments
| https://apple.slashdot.org/story/17/05/01/2119215/apple-has-a-record-250-billion-in-cash-90-of-it-is-banked-overseas?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phone Arena: On Tuesday, Apple
is expected to report its fiscal second quarter earnings. In that report,
the tech titan will reportedly announce that it [0]is holding $250
billion in cash. If you think that this is a lot of money, you're
absolutely right. [1]According to Marketwatch.com, this is more than the
foreign currency reserves held by the U.K. and Canada combined. Looking
at it another way, at current valuations Apple could purchase all of the
outstanding shares of Walmart and Procter & Gamble and still have money
left over. It has taken Apple only 4 and half years to double its cash
hoard. During the fiscal first quarter of 2017, Apple was adding $3.6
million to its cash position every hour. It finished the quarter ending
in December with $246.09 billion in cash. 90% of the money is banked
overseas, which means that Apple would be one of the companies to benefit
the most from President Trump's plan to offer a one time tax break on
repatriated funds.

Discuss this story at:
https://apple.slashdot.org/story/17/05/01/2119215/apple-has-a-record-250-billion-in-cash-90-of-it-is-banked-overseas?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email#commentlisting

Links:
0. http://www.phonearena.com/news/Apple-to-report-on-Tuesday-that-it-currently-holds-250-billion-in-cash_id93610
1. http://www.marketwatch.com/story/apples-cash-stockpile-expected-to-top-a-staggering-250-billion-2017-04-30

+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| China is Recruiting 20,000 People To Write Its Own Wikipedia
| from the a-great-wall-of-culture dept.
| posted by msmash on Monday May 01, @16:40 (China)
| with 66 comments
| https://news.slashdot.org/story/17/05/01/2033241/china-is-recruiting-20000-people-to-write-its-own-wikipedia?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Chinese government is recruiting 20,000 people to create an online
encyclopedia that will be the country's own, China-centric version of
Wikipedia, or as one official put it, like "a Great Wall of culture."
From a report: Known as the "Chinese Encyclopedia," [0]the country's
national encyclopedia will go online for the first time in 2018, and the
government has employed tens of thousands of scholars from universities
and research institutes who will contribute articles in more than 100
disciplines. The end result will be a knowledge base with more than
300,000 entries, each of which will be about 1,000 words long. "The
Chinese Encyclopaedia is not a book, but a Great Wall of culture," Yang
Muzhi, the editor-in-chief of the project and the chairman of the Book
and Periodicals Distribution Association of China, said. He added that
China was under pressure from the international community to produce an
encyclopedia that will "guide and lead the public and society."

Discuss this story at:
https://news.slashdot.org/story/17/05/01/2033241/china-is-recruiting-20000-people-to-write-its-own-wikipedia?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email#commentlisting

Links:
0. https://news.vice.com/story/china-is-recruiting-20000-people-to-write-its-own-wikipedia

+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| India Aims To Make Every Car Electric By 2030 In Bid To Tackle Pollution
| from the long-term-goals dept.
| posted by BeauHD on Monday May 01, @18:40 (Power)
| with 65 comments
| https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/17/05/01/2050253/india-aims-to-make-every-car-electric-by-2030-in-bid-to-tackle-pollution?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

India's energy minister has unveiled plans for [0]every car sold in the
country to be powered by electricity by the year 2030. "The move is
intended to lower the cost of importing fuel and lower costs for running
vehicles," reports The Independent. From the report: �oeWe are going to
introduce electric vehicles in a very big way," coal and mines minister
Piyush Goyal said at the Confederation of Indian Industry Annual Session
2017 in New Delhi. "We are going to make electric vehicles
self-sufficient... The idea is that by 2030, not a single petrol or
diesel car should be sold in the country." Mr Goyal said the electric car
industry would need between two and three years of government assistance,
but added that he expected the production of the vehicles to be "driven
by demand and not subsidy" after that. "The cost of electric vehicles
will start to pay for itself for consumers," he said [1]according to the
International Business Times. "We would love to see the electric vehicle
industry run on its own," he added. An investigation by Greenpeace this
year found that as many as 2.3 million deaths occur every year due to air
pollution in the country. The report, entitled "[2]Airpocalypse," claimed
air pollution had become a "public health and economic crisis" for
Indians. It said the number of deaths caused by air pollution was only "a
fraction less" than the number of deaths from tobacco use, adding that 3
percent of the country's Gross Domestic Product (GDP) was lost to the
levels of toxic smog.

Discuss this story at:
https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/17/05/01/2050253/india-aims-to-make-every-car-electric-by-2030-in-bid-to-tackle-pollution?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email#commentlisting

Links:
0. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/india-electric-cars-2030-fossil-fuel-air-pollution-piyush-goyal-climate-change-a7711381.html
1. http://www.ibtimes.co.in/watch-india-unveils-ambitious-plan-have-only-electric-cars-by-2030-724887
2. https://secured-static.greenpeace.org/india/Global/india/Airpoclypse--Not-just-Delhi--Air-in-most-Indian-cities-hazardous--Greenpeace-report.pdf

+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| SpaceX Successfully Launches Its First Spy Satellite
| from the going-forward dept.
| posted by msmash on Monday May 01, @10:00 (NASA)
| with 63 comments
| https://science.slashdot.org/story/17/05/01/1218250/spacex-successfully-launches-its-first-spy-satellite?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

SpaceX [0]successfully launched NROL-76, a classified U.S. intelligence
mission, from NASA's Kennedy Space Center Monday. Sunday's launch attempt
was scrubbed due to a sensor issue. From a report: Not much is known
about the National Reconnaissance Office's NROL-76 satellite, a
classified payload, which will liftoff into low Earth orbit from Launch
Complex 39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

Discuss this story at:
https://science.slashdot.org/story/17/05/01/1218250/spacex-successfully-launches-its-first-spy-satellite?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email#commentlisting

Links:
0. https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/05/watch-live-spacexs-second-attempt-to-launch-its-first-spy-satellite/

+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Taser Will Use Police Body Camera Videos 'To Anticipate Criminal Activity'
| from the predictive-reporting dept.
| posted by BeauHD on Monday May 01, @18:00 (Crime)
| with 56 comments
| https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/17/05/01/203221/taser-will-use-police-body-camera-videos-to-anticipate-criminal-activity?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[0]Presto Vivace quotes a report from The Intercept: With an estimated
one-third of departments using body cameras, police officers have been
generating millions of hours of video footage. Taser stores terabytes of
such video on [1]Evidence.com, in private servers to which police
agencies must continuously subscribe for a monthly fee. Data from these
recordings is rarely analyzed for investigative purposes, though, and
Taser -- which recently rebranded itself as a technology company and
[2]renamed itself "Axon" -- is hoping to change that. Taser has started
to get into the business of making sense of its enormous archive of video
footage by building an in-house "AI team." In February, the company
acquired two computer vision startups, Dextro and Fossil Group Inc. Taser
says the companies will allow agencies to automatically redact faces to
protect privacy, extract important information, and detect emotions and
objects -- all without human intervention. This will free officers from
the grunt work of manually writing reports and tagging videos, a Taser
spokesperson wrote in an email. "Our prediction for the next few years is
that the process of doing paperwork by hand will begin to disappear from
the world of law enforcement, along with many other tedious manual
tasks." Analytics will also allow departments to observe historical
patterns in behavior for officer training, the spokesperson added.
"Police departments are now sitting on a vast trove of body-worn footage
that gives them insight for the first time into which interactions with
the public have been positive versus negative, and how individuals'
actions led to it." But looking to the past is just the beginning: Taser
is betting that its artificial intelligence tools might be useful not
just to determine what happened, [3]but to anticipate what might happen
in the future.

Discuss this story at:
https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/17/05/01/203221/taser-will-use-police-body-camera-videos-to-anticipate-criminal-activity?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email#commentlisting

Links:
0. https://slashdot.org/~Presto+Vivace
1. http://evidence.com/
2. https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/17/04/05/1959214/taser-offers-free-body-cameras-to-all-us-police
3. https://theintercept.com/2017/04/30/taser-will-use-police-body-camera-videos-to-anticipate-criminal-activity/

+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Linux Kernel 4.11 Officially Released
| from the released-candidate dept.
| posted by EditorDavid on Monday May 01, @03:34 (Open Source)
| with 51 comments
| https://linux.slashdot.org/story/17/05/01/0534253/linux-kernel-411-officially-released?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[0]prisoninmate quotes Softpedia: Linux kernel 4.11 has been [1]in
development for the past two months, since very early March, when the
first Release Candidate arrived for public testing. Eight RCs later,
we're now able to download and compile [2]the final release of Linux 4.11
on our favorite GNU/Linux distributions and enjoy its new features.
Prominent ones include scalable swapping for SSDs, a brand new perf
ftrace tool, support for OPAL drives, support for the SMC-R (Shared
Memory Communications-RDMA) protocol, journalling support for MD RAID5,
all new statx() system call to replace stat(2), and persistent scrollback
buffers for VGA consoles... The Linux 4.11 kernel also introduces initial
support for Intel Gemini Lake chips, which is an Atom-based, low-cost
computer processor family developed using Intel's 14-nanometer
technology, and better power management for AMD Radeon GPUs when the
AMDGPU open-source graphics driver is used.

Discuss this story at:
https://linux.slashdot.org/story/17/05/01/0534253/linux-kernel-411-officially-released?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email#commentlisting

Links:
0. https://slashdot.org/~prisoninmate
1. http://news.softpedia.com/news/linux-kernel-4-11-officially-released-adds-support-for-intel-gemini-lake-socs-515306.shtml
2. https://www.kernel.org/

+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| US Adults Will Spend More Than Half the Day Consuming Media, Study Says
| from the projections dept.
| posted by msmash on Monday May 01, @16:00 (Media)
| with 43 comments
| https://news.slashdot.org/story/17/05/01/1944217/us-adults-will-spend-more-than-half-the-day-consuming-media-study-says?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

An anonymous reader shares a report from marketing research firm
eMarketer: Thanks to multitasking, US adults' average daily time spent
with major media [0]will slightly exceed 12 hours this year, according to
eMarketer's latest report. But while our reports early in the decade told
a story of robust gains -- with increases in digital usage more than
compensating for declines in time spent with nondigital media -- growth
has been petering out. Of course, media multitasking is what has made so
much usage possible. That is how the figure for time spent can add up to
12 hours a day.

Discuss this story at:
https://news.slashdot.org/story/17/05/01/1944217/us-adults-will-spend-more-than-half-the-day-consuming-media-study-says?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email#commentlisting

Links:
0. https://www.emarketer.com/Article/US-Adults-Now-Spend-12-Hours-7-Minutes-Day-Consuming-Media/1015775

+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| US Appeals Court Won't Rehear 'Net Neutrality' Challenge
| from the tussle-continues dept.
| posted by msmash on Monday May 01, @14:40 (Businesses)
| with 27 comments
| https://yro.slashdot.org/story/17/05/01/1831222/us-appeals-court-wont-rehear-net-neutrality-challenge?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

A federal appeals court on Monday declined to rehear a challenge to the
Obama administration's landmark "net neutrality" rules requiring internet
providers to guarantee equal access to all websites. From a report: The
decision by the full appeals court in Washington not to reconsider a
three-judge panel's decision that upheld the ruling comes days after
Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai proposed to undo the
2015 net neutrality that reclassified internet providers like public
utilities. The 2015 order bars internet providers from blocking,
throttling or giving "fast lanes" to some websites. Pai has proposed
reversing the reclassification and scrapping internet conduct standards,
and has asked for comment on whether the FCC can or should retain any of
the rules barring blocking, throttling or "fast lanes." Judge Sri
Srinivasan said in a written opinion reviewing the decision "[0]would be
particularly unwarranted at this point in light of the uncertainty
surrounding the fate of the FCC's order."

Discuss this story at:
https://yro.slashdot.org/story/17/05/01/1831222/us-appeals-court-wont-rehear-net-neutrality-challenge?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email#commentlisting

Links:
0. http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-internet-idUSKBN17X1X4


Copyright 1997-2016, SlashdotMedia. All Rights Reserved.


======================================================================

You have received this message because you subscribed to it
on Slashdot. To stop receiving this and other
messages from Slashdot, or to add more messages
or change your preferences, please go to your user page.

https://slashdot.org/prefs/messages

You can log in and change your preferences from there.

Slashdot
1660 Logan Ave. Ste A
San Diego, CA 92113