Slashdot Mirror

umdenken points out that the first batch of generic Top Level Domains will go live within the next several days, including .bike, .guru, .clothing, .holdings, .singles, .plumbing, and .ventures. (Early access began Jan. 29th.) ICANN CEO Fadi Chehade says there is currently huge demand for ICANN to reopen their program to let companies run their own gTLD. He said, "Many, many brands and many, many communities didn't know about the GTLD program. I get significant amounts of questions about when can we open the next round, because certainly there is a bit of angst that if Canon [who applied for the .canon gTLD] uses this to do an incredible mass customization campaign to win users to their product, I'm sure the brand next to them will say "Why aren't we doing this?" So I do believe this will snowball. But many will find a .com or whatever they have now will be good enough, and I believe that one excludes the other." He also said the $185,000 price tag to do so is likely to drop.

An anonymous reader writes "Bitcoin transactions are confirmed by performing complex calculations, also known as 'mining.' If a single mining pool gains 51% of the overall computational power in the network, various forms of transaction manipulation become possible. Only a few years into Bitcoin's existence, this existential threat appears to be at hand, with Bitcoin mining pool ghash.io approaching 51% of mining power. ghash.io has now assured the Bitcoin community in a press release (PDF): 'GHash.IO does not have any intentions to execute a 51% attack, as it will do serious damage to the Bitcoin community, of which we are a part.' But can a network relying on such assurances survive in the long run?"

Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "SF writer Charles Stross writes on his blog that like all currency systems, Bitcoin comes with an implicit political agenda attached and although our current global system is pretty crap, Bitcoin is worse. For starters, BtC is inherently deflationary. There is an upper limit on the number of bitcoins that can ever be created so the cost of generating new Bitcoins rises over time, and the value of Bitcoins rise relative to the available goods and services in the market. Libertarians love it because it pushes the same buttons as their gold fetish and it doesn't look like a "Fiat currency". You can visualize it as some kind of scarce precious data resource, sort of a digital equivalent of gold. However there are a number of huge down-sides to Bitcoin says Stross: Mining BtC has a carbon footprint from hell as they get more computationally expensive to generate, electricity consumption soars; Bitcoin mining software is now being distributed as malware because using someone else's computer to mine BitCoins is easier than buying a farm of your own mining hardware; Bitcoin's utter lack of regulation permits really hideous markets to emerge, in commodities like assassination and drugs and child pornography; and finally Bitcoin is inherently damaging to the fabric of civil society because it is pretty much designed for tax evasion. "BitCoin looks like it was designed as a weapon intended to damage central banking and money issuing banks, with a Libertarian political agenda in mind—to damage states ability to collect tax and monitor their citizens financial transactions," concludes Stross. "The current banking industry and late-period capitalism may suck, but replacing it with Bitcoin would be like swapping out a hangnail for Fournier's gangrene.""

anagama writes "According to an article at Medium, 'Cisco has seen a huge drop-off in demand for its hardware in emerging markets, which the company blames on fears about the NSA using American hardware to spy on the rest of the world. ... Cisco saw orders in Brazil drop 25% and Russia drop 30%. ... Analysts had expected Cisco's business in emerging markets to increase 6%, but instead it dropped 12%, sending shares of Cisco plunging 10% in after-hours trading.' This is in addition to the harm caused to remote services that may cost $35 billion over the next three years. Then, of course, there are the ways the NSA has made ID theft easier. ID theft cost Americans $1.52 billion in 2011, to say nothing of the time wasted in solving ID theft issues — some of that figure is certainly attributable to holes the NSA helped build. The NSA, its policies, and the politicians who support the same are directly responsible for massive losses of money and jobs."

An anonymous reader writes "A coalition of eight U.S. states, including New York and California, have announced a plan to get 3.3 million zero-emission electric vehicles onto their roads by 2025. 'The states, which represent more than a quarter of the national car market, said they would seek to develop charging stations that all took the same form of payment, simplify rules for installing chargers and set building codes and other regulations to require the stations at workplaces, multifamily residences and at other places.' An editorial in Quartz says that while the initiative itself is fine, the states should really take cues from Tesla if they want to plan out an infrastructure that will convince people to switch. ' For longer distances, [Tesla drivers] can stop at "Supercharger" stations strategically placed along highways that let them add 150 miles of range in as little as 20 minutes. Currently, [government] money is being spent on installing much-slower chargers at stores, shopping malls and other urban locations in the hope that drivers will use them. Tesla says it will blanket the US with its Superchargers for a fraction of the cost, because it studies the driving patterms of its customers and installs charging stations only where they tend to travel. This isn't hard; most other electric cars also record their drivers' habits. If privacy concerns could be addressed and automakers would be willing to share that data with government transportation planners, the rollout of public charging stations could be more targeted and cash-efficient.'"

hackingbear writes "Not only we depend on Chinese labor for the imports but we also depend on them to clean up our mess. Being green is getting a lot harder for eco-friendly states in the U.S., thanks to the country's dependency on overrun Chinese recycling facilities since the start of China's Green Fence policy this year. Recycling centers in Oregon and Washington recently stopped accepting clear plastic "clamshell" containers used for berries, plastic hospital gowns and plastic bags, while California's farmers are grappling with what to do with the 50,000 to 75,000 tons of plastic they use each year. The Green Fence initiative bans bales of plastic that haven't been cleaned or thoroughly sorted. That type of recyclable material, which costs more to recycle, often it ends up in China's landfills, which have become a source of recent unrest in the country's south. For every ton of reusable plastic, China has received many more tons of random trash, some of it toxic. That has helped build 'trash mountains' so high they sometimes bury people alive. For a country facing environmental crisis after environmental crisis, it is no longer tenable to accept US waste exports."

cartechboy writes "Even crashing into a wall is good news nowadays for Tesla Motors. Independent testing by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has awarded the company a 5-star safety rating, not just overall, but in every subcategory. While its five-star score across the board has been attained by other vehicles (around one percent of all cars tested are capable of such a score) its ratings in individual categories are higher than any other vehicle, including larger SUVs and minivans. What's really interesting is that part of the safety rating may be because the car is electric."

One of the things Google is known for is giving their employees so-called '20% time' — that is, the freedom to use a fifth of their working hours to pursue their own projects. Many of these projects have directly improved Google's existing products, and some have spawned new products entirely. An article at Quartz on Friday made that claim that 20% time was all but dead at Google, largely due to interference from upper management. Some Google engineers responded, and said that it has essentially turned into 120% time — they're still free to undertake their own projects, but they typically need their whole normal work week to meet productivity goals. "What 20% time really means is that you- as a Google eng- have access to, and can use, Google’s compute infrastructure to experiment and build new systems. The infrastructure, and the associated software tools, can be leveraged in 20% time to make an eng far more productive than they normally would be." An article at Ars makes the case that this is not necessarily a bad thing, because Google has enough good products that simply need iteration now, making the more innovative 20% time less useful. "Google wasn’t hurting for successful products when it started to tout its 20 percent time: off the backs of its pre-IPO services, it earned a market cap of over $23 billion. But if it was a company that wanted to grow and diversify beyond products that were either related to search or derivative of what already existed, it needed more ideas, better ideas, as quickly as possible. Hence, liberal use of 20 percent time made a lot of sense. Now, Google is not only an enormous company of nearly 45,000 employees with a market cap twelve times that of its first IPO ($286 billion), it has a lot of big products that it wants to make work. More than it needs more ideas, it needs to make the ideas it has great."

One of the things Google is known for is giving their employees so-called '20% time' — that is, the freedom to use a fifth of their working hours to pursue their own projects. Many of these projects have directly improved Google's existing products, and some have spawned new products entirely. An article at Quartz on Friday made that claim that 20% time was all but dead at Google, largely due to interference from upper management. Some Google engineers responded, and said that it has essentially turned into 120% time — they're still free to undertake their own projects, but they typically need their whole normal work week to meet productivity goals. "What 20% time really means is that you- as a Google eng- have access to, and can use, Google’s compute infrastructure to experiment and build new systems. The infrastructure, and the associated software tools, can be leveraged in 20% time to make an eng far more productive than they normally would be." An article at Ars makes the case that this is not necessarily a bad thing, because Google has enough good products that simply need iteration now, making the more innovative 20% time less useful. "Google wasn’t hurting for successful products when it started to tout its 20 percent time: off the backs of its pre-IPO services, it earned a market cap of over $23 billion. But if it was a company that wanted to grow and diversify beyond products that were either related to search or derivative of what already existed, it needed more ideas, better ideas, as quickly as possible. Hence, liberal use of 20 percent time made a lot of sense. Now, Google is not only an enormous company of nearly 45,000 employees with a market cap twelve times that of its first IPO ($286 billion), it has a lot of big products that it wants to make work. More than it needs more ideas, it needs to make the ideas it has great."

smaxp writes "It's no surprise that few people love their pay TV providers. In May, Variety reported that the American Consumer Satisfaction Index ranked cable television providers last in all consumer categories. Pent up frustration with cable and satellite TV providers fuels a steady buzz that Amazon, Apple, Google and Netflix will disrupt TV. These new entrants promise to offer variability in pricing and greater choice fueling notions that Americans have officially cut their proverbial cords. But true disruption is wishful thinking. Data from the PricewaterhouseCooper’s (PwC) global entertainment and media outlook for 2013-2017 doesn’t support a disruptive market scenario. Incumbent cable and satellite pay TV providers and over-the-top (OTT) challengers such as Amazon and Netflix are both forecasted to grow. OTT TV has only reinvented a single part of the TV business, streaming archival movie and television content over the internet replacing physical DVDs and time-shifted DVR replay of TV programs. To displace incumbents, OTT TV has to continue to change TV business models in ways that appeal to consumers and attract content owners. "

notscientific writes "Bacteria invest in proteins in an attempt to reduce stress or increase energy intake, while humans invest in cash. In both cases, better tradeoffs pay off. The similarities in tradeoffs faced by both bacteria and humans during investment are actually quite similar. Now, using synthetic biology, a group of scientists has shown that the outcomes of investment decisions in bacteria can be precisely defined, alluding to the idea that human investment activities, such as financial markets, can be thoroughly understood as well, and even modelled."

First time accepted submitter Consistent1 writes "A paywalled article in the "Nature Materials" journal describes the use of Magnetite to achieve ultra fast electronic switching, albeit, at the moment, only at extremely low temperatures. According to a story on Quartz, the team, led by Dr. Hermann Dürr from the Stanford Institute for Materials and Energy Sciences hopes 'to continue the experiment with materials that can operate at room temperature. One possibility is vanadium dioxide.' Chips utilizing this technology may operate at clock cycles thousands of times faster than the silicon-based chips used today."

dryriver writes "Technical barriers to grafting one person's head onto another person's body can now be overcome, says Dr. Sergio Canavero, a member of the Turin Advanced Neuromodulation Group. In a recent paper, Canavero outlines a procedure modeled on successful head transplants which have been carried out in animals since 1970. The one problem with these transplants was that scientists were unable to connect the animals' spinal cords to their donor bodies, leaving them paralyzed below the point of transplant. But, says Canavero, recent advances in re-connecting spinal cords that are surgically severed mean that it should be technically feasible to do it in humans. (This is not the same as restoring nervous system function to quadriplegics or other victims of traumatic spinal cord injury.)"

An anonymous reader writes "In April, Mayor Mike Bloomberg announced that the Nissan NV200 minivan had won a citywide competition to replace the current cab model, the Ford Crown Victoria, in a phased-in period of five years. Cab owners sued, pointing out that New York City law requires that hybrid electric models be available for immediate use for cab medallion owners; that excludes the current Nissan NV200, with its 2.0 liter, 4-cylinder engine rated at a combined 24 mpg. The NV200 also has poor accessibility for wheelchair users. After a state judge blocked the mayor's plan, Bloomberg allegedly told the CEO of Taxi Club Management at a private club, 'Come January 1st, when I am out of office, I am going to destroy your f--king industry.' Tim Fernholz of Quartz speculates that Bloomberg (a billionaire) may be planning to launch a cab-hailing service like Uber, which was just allowed back onto the streets of New York, with significant limitations."

New submitter home-electro.com writes "In the era of total CAD and CAM, is it even possible to come up with a fundamentally flawed design ? Turns out, yes. This a fascinating engineering SNAFU. Spain's newly built submarine is 100 tons too heavy, which means it is unable to float. 'Unfortunately for the Spainards, Quartz reports that they have already sunk the equivalent of $680 million into the Isaac Peral, and a total of $3 billion into the entire quartet of S-80 class submarines. If Spain hopes to salvage its submarines, it must either find some weight that can be trimmed from the current design or lengthen the ship to accommodate the excess weight, The Local notes. Though the latter option is more feasible, it is expected to cost Spain an extra $9.7 million per meter.'"

cervesaebraciator writes "According to Quartz, '[Anjan Contractor's] Systems & Materials Research Corporation just got a six month, $125,000 grant from NASA to create a prototype of his universal food synthesizer. But Contractor, a mechanical engineer with a background in 3-D printing, envisions a much more mundane — and ultimately more important — use for the technology. He sees a day when every kitchen has a 3-D printer, and the earth's 12 billion people feed themselves customized, nutritionally-appropriate meals synthesized one layer at a time, from cartridges of powder and oils they buy at the corner grocery store. Contractor's vision would mean the end of food waste, because the powder his system will use is shelf-stable for up to 30 years, so that each cartridge, whether it contains sugars, complex carbohydrates, protein or some other basic building block, would be fully exhausted before being returned to the store.' No word yet on whether anyone other than the guy trying to sell the technology thinks it'll make palatable food."