Slashdot Mirror

An anonymous reader writes: Drone lawyer and commercial pilot Jonathan Rupprecht believes any drone registration plan is a necessary first step, but he's also doubtful that registering drones will be a valuable solution. "Who is going to regulate this? Point-of-sale? Wal-Mart? Best Buy?" he asked. "What if I'm ordering parts off the Internet and put them together? That's what the gun industry does." A registration number, he said, could quickly be lost if a drone is bought and sold multiple times. Rupprecht believes geofencing will produce far better results by preventing problems as opposed to trying to figure out who is responsible after something has happened.

Susan Crawford yesterday published at Medium a critique of Uber and similar ride-coordinating services, in the form of a kind of paean to the American taxicab. Though she didn't start out with negative feelings for Uber, Crawford writes, her sentiment has swung away from objections to taxis (such as that they seek unfair protection from competition) to an extravagant defense, though it comes with a long list of "shoulds": "[Cities] should be focusing on making their taxi services better," she writes. "Taxis should be more accessible to everyone. Taxi fares should be low, predictable, and uniform. Taxi geographies should be wide. Taxis should be clean, fuel-efficient, driven by trustworthy, well-trained drivers, and available for frictionless electronic hailing." Even with the flaws that list implies, Crawford's description of how well taxis work now is more positive than I've found to be true: "Their rates are regulated and set; their pricing is transparent and can be double-checked (just look at the meter, which is itself regularly tested); they look like a uniform fleet; they are subject to very strict licensing and safety requirements. With rare exceptions, they don’t employ surge/congestion pricing schemes."

Tim O'Reilly has written a response, calling Crawford's arguments "puzzling and unconvincing." O'Reilly dissects some of the math behind the business of driving others for money, as it applies to both conventional taxi drivers and "gig economy" drivers, as well as some of the qualitative effects of ride-dispatch services; surely some readers will take issue with his figures and examples, but they provide a plausible case for doubting Crawford's rosy picture of taxis and dark view of modern app-dispatched rides. O'Reilly writes: "Regulation is not a good in itself. It is a means of achieving public goods. And so far, it is pretty clear that Uber and Lyft (and in particular, the competition between them) are improving the transportation options in American cities. Regulators should be using the opportunity to revisit the old way of doing things rather than trying to make the new conform to outdated rules that no longer serve their purpose."

nickweller points out Ars Technica's report (based on news initially on Torrent Freak) that The BBC has begun to block VPN users from its iPlayer video streaming service. From the article: Naturally, VPN providers are already working on a fix for the block, with IPVanish already claiming it has found a way around it. Earlier this year, a GlobalWebIndex report claimed that up to 60 million people outside the UK had been accessing iPlayer. The BBC disputes this figure however, saying: "These figures simply aren’t plausible. All our evidence shows the vast majority of BBC iPlayer usage is in the UK. BBC iPlayer and the content on it is paid for by UK licence fee payers in the UK and we take appropriate steps to protect access to this content."

Muad'Dave writes: Here's an interesting article at The Atlantic about the prevalence of surveillance and the recent uptick in 'deja-vu' moments where devices seemingly hear your conversations and then attempt to market to you. From the article: "One night the previous summer, I’d driven to meet a friend at an art gallery in Hollywood, my first visit to a gallery in years. The next morning, in my inbox, several spam e-mails urged me to invest in art. That was an easy one to figure out: I’d typed the name of the gallery into Google Maps. Another simple one to trace was the stream of invitations to drug and alcohol rehab centers that I’d been getting ever since I’d consulted an online calendar of Los Angeles–area Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. Since membership in AA is supposed to be confidential, these emails irked me. Their presumptuous, heart-to-heart tone bugged me too. Was I tired of my misery and hopelessness? Hadn’t I caused my loved ones enough pain? Some of these disconcerting prompts were harder to explain. For example, the appearance on my Facebook page, under the heading “People You May Know,” of a California musician whom I’d bumped into six or seven times at AA meetings in a private home. In accordance with AA custom, he had never told me his last name nor inquired about mine. And as far as I knew, we had just one friend in common, a notably solitary older novelist who avoided computers altogether. I did some research in an online technology forum and learned that by entering my number into his smartphone’s address book (compiling phone lists to use in times of trouble is an AA ritual), the musician had probably triggered the program that placed his full name and photo on my page."

MojoKid writes: Wireless routers are going through somewhat of a renaissance right now, thanks to the arrival of the 802.11ac standard that is "three times as fast as wireless-N" and the proliferation of Internet-connected devices in our homes and pockets. AC is backward compatible with all previous standards, and whereas 802.11n was only able to pump out 450Mb/s of total bandwidth, 802.11ac is capable of transmitting at up to 1,300Mbps on a 5GHz channel. AC capability is only available on the 5GHz channel, which has fewer devices on it than a typical 2.4GHz channel. The trade-off is that 5GHz signals typically don't travel as far as those on the 2.4GHz channel.

However, 802.11ac makes up for it with a technology named Beamforming, which allows it to figure out where devices are located and amplify the signal in their direction instead of just broadcasting in all directions like 802.11n. Also, while 802.11n supports only four streams of data, 802.11ac supports up to eight streams on channels that are twice as wide. HotHardware's AC Router round-up takes a look at four flagship AC routers from ASUS, TRENDnet, D-Link and Netgear. All are AC3200 routers that use the new Broadcom XStream 5G platform. Netgear's Nighthawk X6 tends to offer the best balance of performance in various use cases. However, all models performed similarly, with subtle variances in design, features and pricing left to differentiate them from one another.

theodp writes: Android users have long complained publicly that it's way too easy to accidentally dial 911. So it's pretty astonishing that it took a team of Google Researchers and San Francisco Department of Emergency Management government employees to figure out that butt-dialing was increasing the number of 911 calls. The Google 9-1-1 Team presented its results in How Googlers helped San Francisco Use Data Science to Understand a Surge in 911 Calls, a Google-sponsored presentation at the Code for America Summit, and in San Francisco's 9-1-1 Call Volume Increase, an accompanying 26-page paper.

szczys writes: You'd think tide prediction would be quite easy: it comes in, it goes out. But of course it's driven by gravity between the moon and earth and there's a lot more to it. Today, computer models make this easy, but before computers we used incredible analog machines to predict the tides. The best of these machines were the deciding factor in setting a date for the Allies landing in Europe leading to the end of the second world war. From the Hackaday story: "In England, tide prediction was handled by Arthur Thomas Doodson from the Liverpool Tidal Institute. It was Doodson who made the tidal predictions for the Allied invasion at Normandy. Doodson needed access to local tide data, but the British only had information for the nearby ports. Factors like the shallow water effect and local weather impact on tidal behavior made it impossible to interpolate for the landing sites based on the port data. The shallow water effect could really throw off the schedule for demolishing the obstacles if the tide rose too quickly. Secret British reconnaissance teams covertly collected shallow water data at the enemy beaches and sent it to Doodson for analysis. To further complicate things, the operatives couldn't just tell Doodson that the invasion was planned for the beaches of Normandy. So he had to figure it out from the harmonic constants sent to him by William Ian Farquharson, superintendent of tides at the Hydrographic Office of the Royal Navy. He did so using the third iteration of Kelvin's predictor along with another machine. These were kept in separate rooms lest they be taken out by the same bomb.

HughPickens.com writes: Nick Wingfield has an interesting article in the NYT about how Seattle, Austin, Boulder, Portland, and other tech hubs around the country are seeking not to emulate San Francisco where wealth has created a widely envied economy, but housing costs have skyrocketed, and the region's economic divisions have deepened with rent for a one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco at more than $3,500 a month, the highest in the country. "Seattle has wanted to be San Francisco for so long," says Knute Berger. "Now it's figuring out maybe that it isn't what we want to be." The core of the debate is over affordable housing and the worry that San Francisco is losing artists, teachers and its once-vibrant counterculture. "It's not that we don't want to be a thriving tech center — we do," says Alan Durning. "It's that the San Francisco and Silicon Valley communities have gotten themselves into a trap where preservationists and local politics have basically guaranteed buying a house will cost at least $1 million. Already in Seattle, it costs half-a-million, so we're well on our way."

Seattle mayor Ed Murray says he wants to keep the working-class roots of Seattle, a city with a major port, fishing fleet and even a steel mill. After taking office last year, Murray made the minimum-wage increase a priority, reassured representatives of the city's manufacturing and maritime industries that Seattle needed them., and has set a goal of creating 50,000 homes — 40 percent of them affordable for low-income residents — over the next decade. "We can hopefully create enough affordable housing so we don't find ourselves as skewed by who lives in the city as San Francisco is," says Murray. "We're at a crossroads," says Roger Valdez. "One path leads to San Francisco, where you have an incredibly regulated and stagnant housing economy that can't keep up with demand. The other path is something different, the Seattle way."

An anonymous reader writes: This month Twitter is closing down the JSON endpoint API which thousands of third-party software and plugin developers have depended upon for years. The alternative Rest API offers data which is aggregated or limited in other ways, whilst the full-featured share data offered by Gnip (purchased last year by Twitter) can cost developers thousands per month to access — in one case up to £20,000 a month. The general objective seems to be to either drive users back to the core Twitter interface where they can be monetized via the social network's advertising, or to regain lost advertising by converting open source data — currently utilized a lot in scientific research — into premium information, offering the possibility for well-funded organizations to gain reputations as Twitter barometers without ever needing to expose the expensive, accurate share figures. The company also announced today that co-founder Jack Dorsey would be the new CEO.

I was both pleased and disappointed, as always, when I heard that a book I enjoyed was being made into a movie. Andy Weir's The Martian was the best new book I'd read in years. It was written for nerds, by a nerd — by somebody with an obvious love for NASA, science, and spaceflight. How could it possibly be condensed into the format of a Hollywood blockbuster? Well, director Ridley Scott and screenwriter Drew Goddard figured out how. The Martian is an excellent film, well worth watching. Read on for my review (very minor spoilers only), and feel free to share your own in the comments.

Let's briefly discuss the book, first. If you haven't read it, I recommend doing so. In short: near-future astronaut Mark Watney gets stranded on the surface of Mars, and must figure out how to stay alive using only the limited resources at hand. This is hard science fiction. Weir meticulously researched all the problems facing Watney, without giving him magically advanced technology to defeat them.

The story is largely told through Watney's journal updates, which read remarkably like following a brilliant engineer's blog while he solves fascinating problems. Weir also infuses Watney with dry humor and an unwillingness to be told that the right way is wrong. For being so dense with science and engineering, the book manages to have a rapid pace.

Fortunately, that pace made the transition to film a bit easier, as did the book's narrative form. Watney's thought processes tend to be spoken, rather than a typical internal monologue, and this keeps it more conversational and brief. In the novel, when Watney has to "do the math" — for example to figure out the hydrogen levels in his living space — you follow along as he actually does the math, then as he develops a procedure to safely lower those levels. The movie tackles this complex scene by making him discover the problem right when it begins, with a small amount of hydrogen igniting dramatically. It keeps the science and the problem-solving, but conveys it quickly and moves on.

That's the real triumph of this movie's creators — they accelerate the plot while maintaining the book's love and respect for science and for thoughtful engineering. They embellish for interesting visuals, like the martian wind, and for dramatic license. But they never go over the top. It's... refreshing, to say the least.

One thing the film does even better than the book is bringing intensity to particular scenes. It's one thing to read Watney's account of how he dealt with an emergency in past tense — it's another to see it as it's happening. The first scene of Watney alone on Mars is incredibly tense and visceral.

This is largely due to Matt Damon's performance as Watney (and to Ridley Scott, for enabling that performance). Damon does a great job coming off not as a movie superhero, but as a funny, capable guy you might run into at your local makerspace. The other roles in the film are well cast and performed, too. Jeff Daniels as the director of NASA is the closest the movie gets to having a 'bad guy.'

He's the one who tends to raise the practical and ethical questions surrounding Watney's predicament. How many resources should be allocated to helping a single man? What will be the cost to future missions if they don't? They're impossible questions to answer, but they deserved to be brought up and debated.

One of the big reasons to see this film is for its cinematography. If you're a space buff, you'll really enjoy the long, lingering shots of the Martian surface. The graphic artists really deserve commendation. They make the landscape look both desolate and fascinating. They had lots of source material to work with from all the rovers and orbiters we've sent to Mars, and they used it to fill each scene with incredible detail. Look carefully and you'll see one of Mars's lumpy moons in the background of a shot on the surface, or a dust storm slowly flowing across a vast mesa when looking down from orbit.

The Martian, much like Apollo 13 twenty years ago, inspires us to cheer on our civilization's brightest scientists and engineers to solve hideously complex problems. NASA has been falling all over itself to help promote the film, and for good reason. I think the reception of this film will show support is still there from the general public to go and do really challenging missions. The Martian the best movie I've seen all year, and I highly recommend it.

StartsWithABang writes: Yes, asteroids might be humanity's undoing in the worst-case scenario. It's how the dinosaurs went down, and it could happen to us, too. The B612 foundation has been working to protect us by mapping and then learning to deflect potential threats to our planet, but their proposed mission needed $450 million, a goal they've fallen well short of. As a result, NASA has severed their partnership, which is a good thing for humanity: the risk assessment figures show that worrying about killer asteroids is largely a waste.

alphadogg writes: iFixit, the fix-it-yourself advocate for users of Apple, Google and other gear, has had its repair manual app banned from Apple's App Store after it conducted an unauthorized teardown of Apple TV and Siri remote. iFixit blogged "we're a teardown and repair company; teardowns are in our DNA -- and nothing makes us happier than figuring out what makes these gadgets tick. We weighed the risks, blithely tossed those risks over our shoulder, and tore down the Apple TV anyway." iFixit does still have Windows and Android apps, and has no immediate plans to rewrite its Apple app to attempt being reinstated.

chicksdaddy writes: Everybody recognizes that open source software incredibly valuable, by providing a way to streamline the creation of new applications and services. But how valuable, exactly? The Linux Foundation has released a new research paper that tries to put a price tag on the value of the open source projects it comprises, and the price they've come up with is eye-popping: $5 billion. That's how much the Foundation believes it would cost for companies to have to rebuild or develop from scratch the software residing in its collaborative projects.

To arrive at that figure, the Foundation analyzed the code repositories of each one of its projects using the Constructive Cost Model (COCOMO) to estimate the total effort required to create these projects. With 115,013,302 total lines of source code, LF estimated the total amount of effort required to retrace the steps of collaborative development to be 41,192.25 person-years — or 1,356 developers 30 years to recreate the code base present in The Linux Foundation's current collaborative projects listed above.

Andy Smith writes: The annoying App Store redirect issue has blighted iPhone users for years, but now there's a new annoyance and it's already being exploited: Visit a web page on your iPhone and any advertiser can automatically open your messages app and create a new text message with the recipient and message already filled in. We can only hope they don't figure out how to automatically send the message, although you can bet they're trying.

szczys writes: Here's an interesting fact: when at sea you can't establish your longitude without a reliable clock. You can figure out latitude with a sextant, but not longitude. Early clocks used pendulums that don't work on a rocking boat. So in the 1700s the British government offered up £20,000 for a reliable clock that would work at sea. John Harrison designed a really accurate ocean-worthy clock after 31 years of effort and was snubbed for the prize which would be £2.8 Million at today's value. After fighting for the payout for another 36 years he did finally get it at the ripe old age of 80. The methods he used to build this maritime chronometer were core to every wrist and pocket watch through the first third of the 20th Century. One of his timepieces, designated Clock B, was declared by Guinness to be the world's most accurate mechanical clock with a pendulum swinging in free air' more than 250 years after it was designed.

New submitter Elixon writes: Czech trademark monitoring service IP Defender reported that The British Broadcasting Corporation applied for a figurative trademark on the "POLICE PUBLIC CALL BOX" for wide range of goods and services like cinematographic and photographic films, printed publications, key chains, textile goods, toys, telecommunications and more. The Metropolitan Police was defeated by the BBC in the past while trying to monopolize the London police box; now it's the BBC's turn.

sciencehabit writes: The Ig Nobel prizes award research that 'makes people laugh, and then think', and this year was no exception. At a ceremony at Harvard University Thursday night, awards were given for a variety of wacky science papers. Among the winners, a scientist who repeatedly had himself stung by bees to figure out the most painful place in the body to be stung, and a study of which animals take the longest to urinate.

Mickeycaskill writes: Despite the rush by vendors and software developers to issue fixes for the notorious Heartbleed OpenSSL flaw, 200,000 connected devices have still not been patched — eighteen months after discovery. Figures from Internet of Things (IoT) search engine provider Shodan show not all admins have been quick to fix their systems, while some security experts suggest the world will never be free of Heartbleed, which at one point was present on 220 million downloaded Android applications. "Clearly, some manufacturers and IT teams have dropped the ball, and failed to update vulnerable systems," said expert Graham Cluely. "My bet is that there will always be devices attached to the internet which are vulnerable to Heartbleed."

HughPickens.com writes: Matthew Yglesias writes at Vox that Apple's recent announcement of an entry level iPhone 6S is a serious strategic mistake because it contains just 16GB of storage — an amount that was arguably too low even a couple of years back. According to Yglesias, the user experience of an under-equipped iPhone can be quite bad, and the iPhone 6S comes with features — like the ability to shoot ultra-HD video — that are going to fill up a 16GB phone in the blink of an eye. "It's not too hard to figure out what Apple is up to here," writes Yglesias. "Leaving the entry-level unit at 16GB of storage rather than 32GB drives higher profit margins in two ways. One, it reduces the cost of manufacturing the $649 phone, which increases profit margins on sales of the lowest-end model. Second, and arguably more important, it pushes a lot of people who might be happy with a 32GB phone to shell out $749 for the 64GB model."

But this raises the question of what purpose is served by Apple amassing more money anyhow. Apple pays out large (and growing) sums of cash to existing shareholders in the form of dividends and buybacks, but its enormous cash stockpile keeps remorselessly marching up toward $200 billion. "Killing the 16GB phone and replacing it with a 32GB model at the low end would obtain things money can't buy — satisfied customers, positive press coverage, goodwill, a reputation for true commitment to excellence, and a demonstrated focus on the long term. A company in Apple's enviable position ought to be pushing the envelop forward on what's considered an acceptable baseline for outfitting a modern digital device, not squeezing extra pennies out of customers for no real reason."

An anonymous reader writes: The Guardian has an in-depth article on the status of self-driving car development at BMW. The technology can handle the autobahn just fine, for the most part. But the article highlights philosophical differences in how various companies are developing self-driving tech. European and Asian car manufacturers are fine working on it piece-by-piece. The car will drive itself when it can, but they expect drivers to always be monitoring the situation and ready to take control. Google's tests have taught it otherwise — even after being told it's a prototype, new drivers immediately place a lot more trust in the car than they should. They turn their attention away and stop looking at the road for much longer than is safe. This makes Google think autonomous cars need an all-or-nothing approach. Conversely, BMW feels that incremental progress is the only way to go. They also expect cars to start carrying "black boxes" that will help crash investigators figure out exactly what caused an accident. In related news, Google is bringing on John Krafcik as the CEO of its self-driving car project. He has worked in product development for Ford, he was the CEO of Hyundai North America, and most recently he was president of Truecar.