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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Apple is pushing back against the Environmental Protection Agency's proposal to repeal the Clean Power Plan. The company filed a public comment with the EPA today arguing that scrapping the policy, which calls for cutting power plant pollution, would dull the United States' competitive edge in the clean energy economy. The Clean Power Plan (or CPP) was finalized by the Obama administration, and it takes aim at power plants -- the number one carbon polluters in the U.S., according to the Obama-era EPA website. Had the CPP ever taken effect, it would have given power plants until the year 2030 to curb their carbon emissions by about 30 percent, a move that the Obama administration said could protect the environment, public health, and consumer's pocketbooks.

Apple's comment cites the economic advantages of supporting clean energy, including that it provides "corporate electricity buyers with a hedge against fuel price fluctuation." The price of solar and wind don't change like the price of oil, Apple's filing says. (It also notes that China is currently beating the U.S. in clean energy investments.) The company also says that regulating the grid's carbon emissions "power plant by power plant" won't work. It references its own experiences operating with 100 percent renewable energy here in the U.S. and the work of its subsidiary, Apple Energy LLC, which sells the excess electricity the company generates back to the grid. The electricity system is far too interconnected, the filing says, so "regulation should consider the dynamic and interconnected nature of how power is generated, sold and consumed." That's why it supports the clean power plan, which it says provides a nationwide framework for regulating electricity generation: "It is both needed and the smart thing to do."

An anonymous reader quotes Bloomberg: [A] Russian tycoon and his Renova Group plan a record-breaking effort to send a plane around the world nonstop using only the power of the sun. If all goes well, a single pilot will fly for five days straight at altitudes of up to 10 miles, about a third higher than commercial airliners. The project isn't just a stunt. The glider-style airplane with a 36-meter (120-foot) wingspan will be a test of technologies that are set to be used to build new generations of autonomous craft for the military and business, say aerospace experts. They will fly continuously, have far greater reach and control than satellites and expand broadcast, communication and spying capabilities around the globe... "Our flight should prove that it's possible to make long-distance flights using solar energy," said Mikhail Lifshitz, Renova's director of high-tech asset development and a qualified pilot-instructor. A "flying laboratory" test-plane will be ready by year-end, Lifshitz said in an interview.
The plane will conserve power by slowly gliding down from the high altitudes at night -- without ever touching the ground. In comparison a solar plane (partially funded by Google) already circled the earth last year -- but it took 22 days, and made 17 different stops.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: U.S. Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump opposes a long-planned transition of oversight of the internet's technical management from the U.S. government to a global community of stakeholders, his campaign said in a statement on Wednesday. Congress should block the handover, scheduled to occur on Oct. 1, "or internet freedom will be lost for good, since there will be no way to make it great again once it is lost," Stephen Miller, national policy director for the Trump campaign, said in a statement. Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, a former presidential primary foe of Trump's who has refused to endorse the real estate developer, has led a movement in Congress to block the transition, arguing it could cede control of the internet itself to authoritarian regimes like Russia and China and threaten online freedom. Technical experts have said those claims are baseless, and that a delay will backfire by undermining U.S. credibility in future international negotiations over internet standards and security. Publicly proposed in March 2014, the transfer of oversight of the nonprofit Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, is expected to go forward unless Congress votes to block the move. Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton supports the Obama administration's planned transition to a global community of technologists, civil society groups and internet users, according to policy positions available on her campaign website.

Ronald Dumsfeld writes "Wikinews puts together some of the details around the EU's five-year-plan called Project INDECT, and brings attention to a leaked 'sales-pitch' video: 'An unreleased promotional video for INDECT located on YouTube is shown to the right. The simplified example of the system in operation shows a file of documents with a visible INDECT-titled cover stolen from an office and exchanged in a car park. How the police are alerted to the document theft is unclear in the video; as a "threat," it would be the INDECT system's job to predict it. Throughout the video use of CCTV equipment, facial recognition, number plate reading, and aerial surveillance give friend-or-foe information with an overlaid map to authorities. The police proactively use this information to coordinate locating, pursing, and capturing the document recipient. The file of documents is retrieved, and the recipient roughly detained.'"

karvind writes "Groklaw has posted another interesting article about AIX/Monterey/POWER research. The primary purpose of Project Monterey was to provide a stepping stone to Linux. IBM clearly stated this in promotional and technical materials, some of which SCO participated in publishing. It was always the plan that Project Monterey would be for POWER and SCO knew about IBM using SVR4 on POWER as far back as 2001. The article asks (and answers) some interesting questions: 'Where is the monetary damage to SCO? Where is there copyright infringement? Was SCO fully aware how quickly Linux would develop, that it would replace Unix, or did it take them by surprise?'"

JimLynch writes "In my last DIY column, I discussed what it was like to build my first system. As time went by, unfortunately, my DIY system wasn't all wine and roses. This column tells the story of how I destroyed my motherboard through a series of ill-planned and stupid actions. It should stand as a shining example of What Not to Do for DIYers everywhere."

"Stratolaunch, the aerospace venture founded by the late Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, sent the world's biggest airplane into the air today for its first flight test," report GeekWire. The twin-fuselage plane, which incorporates parts from two Boeing 747 jumbo jets and has a world-record wingspan of 385 feet, took off from Mojave Air and Space Port in California for a flight that lasted two and a half hours. For more than seven years, Stratolaunch has been working with Mojave-based Scaled Composites on the project, which aims to use the plane as a flying launch pad for orbital-class rockets. The first flight test had been anticipated for months. "We finally did it," Stratolaunch CEO Jean Floyd said today during a briefing.

Stratolaunch's plane, which has been nicknamed Roc after a giant mythical bird, took off at 6:58 a.m. PT and went through a series of in-flight maneuvers, including roll doublets, yawing maneuvers, pushovers and pull-ups, steady heading side slips and simulated landing approach exercises. Stratolaunch said it reached a maximum speed of 189 mph and maximum altitude of 17,000 feet.... The plan ahead calls for further tests over the next 12 to 18 months, with the aim of getting the plane fully certified by the Federal Aviation Administration. Stratolaunch has already struck a deal to use Northrop Grumman's Pegasus XL rocket to send payloads weighing as much as 816 pounds (370 kilograms) to low Earth orbit...

Stratolaunch's air-launch system is designed to carry multiple rockets up to an altitude of about 40,000 feet, and then drop them into the air to fire up their rocket engines. The advantage of such a system is that it can take off from any runway that's long enough to accommodate the plane, fly around bad weather if need be, and launch a satellite into any orbital inclination.
Stratolaunch CEO Jean Floyd said their team had dedicated the flight to Paul Allen.

"[A]s the plane lifted gracefully from the runway, I did whisper a 'thank you' to Paul for allowing me to be part of this remarkable achievement."

Tesla and Panasonic are reportedly freezing their plans to add more battery production lines at Gigafactory 1, its massive factory outside of Reno, Nevada that is a cornerstone to the automaker's business. "The partners had planned to increase capacity by 50 percent next year, but financial problems have forced a rethink," reports TechCrunch, citing a report from Nikkei. "Nikkei also reported that Panasonic was suspending a planned investment in Tesla's automotive battery and EV plant in Shanghai." From the report: TechCrunch confirmed that Tesla is not adding more battery production lines and will instead focus its efforts on existing equipment. Tesla stressed that it will continue to make new investments as needed into the plant. However, the automaker noted that attention and investments might be focused on improving existing equipment to increase battery cell output.

As of November, Panasonic had 11 production lines operating at Gigafactory 1. Panasonic president President Kazuhiro Tsuga told Bloomberg that the company planned to add two more lines by the end of the year to bring total capacity up to 35 gigawatt-hours. The last number shared by Tesla is from July when the company reported an annualized run rate of 20 gigawatt-hours of capacity. It's not clear if those two production lines were added. "We will of course continue to make new investments in Gigafactory 1, as needed. However, we think there is far more output to be gained from improving existing production equipment than was previously estimated," a Tesla spokesperson wrote in an emailed statement.

Tuesday's hearing was meant to examine the rise of white nationalism and white supremacy and the role social media plays in its spread. Then the comments got hijacked. From a report: YouTube moderators disabled comments on livestreams of the House Judiciary Committee's hearing about hate crimes the rise of white nationalism on Tuesday, deeming them too hateful for the platform. The comment sections quickly flooded with hate speech and white nationalist memes before the hearing had even started. The comments included derogatory remarks about women on camera, anti-Semitic slurs, far-right memes with references to "white genocide," and pro-Trump slogans. The channels' comments sections were deactivated within an hour. [...] YouTube's disabling of comments is ironic: House Judiciary Committee Chair Jerrold Nadler, a Democrat from New York, made special reference in his opening statement of the role social media platforms play in spreading hate speech and extremism in his opening statement.

"A second male birth control pill succeeded in preliminary testing, suggesting that a new form of contraception may eventually exist," reports Time: The new pill, which works similarly to female contraception, passed initial safety tests and produced hormone responses consistent with effective birth control in 30 men, according to research presented by the Los Angeles Biomedical Research Institute and the University of Washington at the Endocrine Society's annual meeting. (The study has not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal.) It's early days for the drug -- which has not yet been submitted for approval by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) -- but co-principal investigator Dr. Christina Wang, lead researcher at LA BioMed, says it's an important step toward effective, reversible male hormonal contraception....

Unlike a 2016 male birth control trial that famously stopped enrolling volunteers early because so many men complained of side effects, none of the men experienced serious problems, and no one stopped taking the drug because of side effects.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: The staff of Kickstarter announced plans to unionize today. If recognized, Kickstarter would be the first major tech company with union representation in the United States. Members of the union, which goes by Kickstarter United, say they want to improve inclusivity and transparency at the company. To unionize, they're working with the Office and Professional Employees International Union (OPEIU) Local 153. In a statement, the union said: "Kickstarter United is proud to start the process of unionizing to safeguard and enrich Kickstarter's charter commitments to creativity, equity, and a positive impact on society. We trust in the democratic process and are confident that the leadership of Kickstarter stands with us in that effort. Kickstarter has always been a trailblazer, and this is a pivotal moment for tech. We want to set the standard for the entire industry. Now is the time. Come together. Unionize."

In a world of Facebook and Twitter, Kickstarter feels almost quaint in its mission -- "to help bring creative projects to life" -- and in its charter as a public benefit corporation, which means that the company is "obligated to consider the impact of their decisions on society, not only shareholders." Its staff unionizing means the company will also have to consider more seriously its responsibilities to its employees. It also means that its fellows in Silicon Valley and beyond could be next. Kickstarter is fundamentally a tech company, and its staff unionizing with the OPEIU shows a way forward for other employees in the space. Kickstarter's staff is unionizing because they want to "promote our collective values: inclusion and solidarity, transparency and accountability; a seat at the table," the organizers write, noting that in the decade that Kickstarter has been around, it's democratized crowdfunding and brought more than 150,000 projects to life. "Kickstarter's efforts are incomplete, and these values have failed to manifest in our workplace. We can do better together -- for ourselves and our industry."

bbsguru writes: Windstream Holdings Inc. of Arkansas filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on Monday, less than two weeks after a federal court judge found that the 2015 spinoff of its fiber and copper assets into a separate company ran afoul of bond covenants, exposing the company to a $310 million judgment. Windstream, a spinoff of the old Alltel Corp. of Arkansas, reported $5.8 billion in revenue in 2017. It employs about 13,000 companywide. CEO Tony Thomas said in a press release that the reorganization is "a necessary step to address the financial impact" of the judge's decision and "the impact it would have on consumers and businesses across the states in which we operate."

"Taking this proactive step will ensure that Windstream has access to the capital and resources we need to continue building on Windstream's strong operational momentum while we engage in constructive discussions with our creditors regarding the terms of a consensual plan of reorganization," Thomas said. "We acted decisively to secure the long-term financial stability of Windstream, and we are confident that, upon completion of the reorganization process, we will be even better positioned to invest in our business, expand our speed and capabilities for our customers and compete for the long term." A court approval of a reorganization plan will allow the company to continue paying its employees and maintain relationships with vendors, business partners and customers, Thomas said.

The Razer Game Store will close on February 28 at 1am PST, the company announced in a blog post. This comes less than a year after its launch last April. From a report: The shutdown is part of "the company's realignment plans," according to Razer. "It has been a privilege for us to recommend and deliver great digital game deals to you. We have been extremely fortunate to have you as part of our awesome community," the post reads. "Thank you for the support and making all this possible. We will be investing in other ways to deliver great content and introduce game promotions through Razer Gold, our virtual credits system."

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanual has released a roadmap for transitioning to 100% renewable energy by 2035 and to an electric Chicago Transit Authority bus fleet by 2040. The move is especially noteworthy as there are 11 nuclear reactors in operation in Illinois. From a report: Yesterday, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel unveiled the Resilient Chicago plan, which with action number 38 commits to "transition to 100% clean, renewable energy in buildings community-wide by 2035." The deadline for all city government buildings to be powered solely by renewables, first established in 2017, has been brought forward to 2025. The policy has been introduced as part of environmental group the Sierra Club's "Ready for 100" campaign, and Chicago is the largest city to join the effort to date. (Editor's note: While Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti has announced his city is on a path to 100% renewable energy, it is not clear if the formal goal is 100% renewable or 100% zero-carbon, and LA is not included in the Sierra Club's Ready for 100 list.)

The language of the Resilient Chicago text says "clean, renewable energy," and the Sierra Club does not include nuclear as part of its Ready to 100 campaign. The new policy is a particularly interesting move for Emanuel, once considered one of the more pro-nuclear politicians in the Democratic Party, and a man who brokered the deal that created Exelon. Were Chicago to include nuclear in a 2035 target, it would require either buying power from existing plants instead of investing in new generation, or starting new nuclear plants within six years. Given the high cost of nuclear compared to wind and solar, few decision makers are contemplating that option.

"Verily, Alphabet's life science division, is building a tech-focused rehab campus in Dayton, Ohio to combat the opioid crisis," reports CNBC. Verily will join two health networks, Kettering Health Network and Premier Health, to create a nonprofit named OneFifteen. Alexandria Real Estate Equities will design and develop the campus, which will offer both inpatient and outpatient services. There is no single solution to treating substance abuse, with strategies spanning from intensive rehabilitation programs to drop-in meetings. Verily hopes to get a better understanding of what works and what doesn't work in helping people get and stay sober....

Initially, Verily will focus on understanding what works in the clinic and then track patient behavior when they get out to see what sticks, Danielle Schlosser, senior clinical scientist of behavioral health at Verily, said in an interview. Verily will use a "variety of means" to track what works, she said, adding that patients would have to consent to being monitored... OneFifteen CEO Marti Taylor said "Because we will have facilities, an entire ecosystem and data, we'll be able to take a more holistic understanding of a person's health both inside and outside as we follow them long-term."
Verily's blog points out that Americans under 50 years old are more likely to die from unintentional overdoses than any other cause, and that two-thirds of those deaths involve an opioid. "In the face of one of the greatest public health crises the U.S. has seen, we feel compelled to act," they write, saying their company is "focused on making health information useful so people can live healthier lives."

Their blog says their team recognized "the absence of high quality information to guide individuals, communities, and legislators" for picking effective recovery treatements. "Leaning into our capabilities of building health platforms, we are setting out to create a 'learning health system' that aims to address this critical information gap in addiction medicine."

From a report: Last summer, Justin Sun, the 28-year-old CEO of Tron acquired BitTorrent, the 15-year-old file-sharing company that is one of the biggest decentralized networks in existence for $140 million. He wanted to take advantage of blockchain, the decentralized ledger that is both secure and transparent, and combine it with the decentralized file-sharing app, offering crypto rewards to those who share their computers for file sharing. And this week, Sun appeared on stage with former basketball star Kobe Bryant at the NiTron Summit, which drew more than 1,000 attendees. Tron has also created a $100 million fund to convince game developers to make games that use Tron's protocol and its TRX cryptocurrency. The promise is to create a crypto network that is both fast -- at 2,000 transactions per second -- and reliable.

I interviewed Sun backstage at the NiTron Summit, where he said he wanted his company to become the major blockchain platform that could one day be the decentralized alternative to the centralized internet networks of Google, Facebook, and Apple. But to make that happen, Sun has to get mainstream people like the 100 million BitTorrent users to trust cryptocurrency, even after a coin market slide that has wiped out billions in value, including taking Tron's TRX market value down from near $20 billion to $1.6 billion today.

Earlier today, ASUS announced that long-time CEO Jerry Shen is stepping down ahead of "a comprehensive corporate transformation" -- part of which involving a new co-CEO structure, as well as a major shift in mobile strategy to focus on gamers and power users. From a report: In other words, we'll be seeing more ROG Phones and maybe fewer ZenFones, which is a way to admit defeat in what ASUS chairman Jonney Shih described as a "bloody battlefield" in his interview with Business Next. During his 11 years serving as CEO, Shen oversaw the launch of the PadFone series, Transformer series, ZenBook series and ZenFone series. Prior to that, Shen was also credited as the main creator of the Eee PC, the small machine that kickstarted the netbook race in 2006.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Open plan offices, once the darling of design, are now showing their fault lines. To get a little bit of personal space, we've come up with all sorts of solutions, from phone booths to furniture designed to create a sense of privacy. All of those ideas seem totally, completely normal compared to this new project from Panasonic. The tech company's Future Life Factory design studio partnered with Japanese fashion designer Kunihiko Morinaga to develop an open-plan solution to end all open-plan solutions. Say hello to Wear Space. Wear Space is, for lack of a better description, like equine blinkers for humans. The strip of flexible material wraps around the back of the head and covers the side of the eyes, blocking up to 60 percent of a wearer's peripheral vision, Panasonic says. Think of it as a sign for potential bothersome coworkers that broadcasts, "I'm busy."

An anonymous reader shares a report: A blue-ribbon panel of researchers chaired by the University of Toronto's Barbara Sherwood Lollar assembled the report at the behest of the US Congress, which asked in a 2017 law that a "strategy for astrobiology" be developed to prioritize "the search for life's origin, evolution, distribution, and future in the universe." The 196-page report does not offer easy access to ET, but the steady drumbeat of scientific advancement it documents suggests an increasingly sophisticated understanding of what we know -- and don't know -- about biology on our planet and beyond.

Indeed, the recently gained knowledge it highlights is the front end of a wave: Only the Viking mission in the 1970s hunted rigorously for signs of life on other planets, and now the first new NASA mission to do so, the Europa lander, is being designed. In the past four years alone, scientists using data gathered by space probes on Mars discovered evidence of past surface water, the presence of nutrients and organic molecules, and methane gas in the atmosphere that varies by season. This doesn't mean life exists now on Mars, but it is helping contribute to an understanding of astrobiology as a discipline that looks at physical and chemical processes over time to determine if the conditions for life once existed or may do so in the future.

Much work on astrobiology is Earth-focused; it is the only place we know life exists and thus is our guinea pig for detecting life from a distance. The Galileo space probe found signs of life on our planet in 1990. The report stressed that recent discoveries of life on Earth that exists without the sun's energy, deep under the ocean or the ground, should inform what we look for on other worlds. Scientists are expanding their understanding of habitability beyond a binary and into a spectrum, which may sound trite, but previous research relied on blunt instruments and blunter assumptions about alien life -- starting with the idea that it would appear on the surface.

"I've seen this 'Smart Compose' feature described publicly with a range of adjectives," writes Lauren Weinstein, "including intrusive, wonderful, invasive, creepy, accurate, loony, mistaken, helpful, misguided -- well, you get the point, opinions are all over the map...." My foundational complaint here isn't that Google deployed Smart Compose, but rather that they enabled it by default without providing users even basic related information, including the all important "How the hell do I turn this damned thing off?" -- the very question filling my inbox of late!

So here's how you turn it off. It's easy, IF you know how.
One anonymous reader has another solution. "I'm just using Gmail in HTML-only mode now. Its actually far more usable than their new crap and I'm quite fond of the older look anyway." You could also just stop using Gmail -- but Weinstein thinks it's easier to disable the "Smart Compose feature.

"With the understanding that Google has great AI and is itching to use it whenever and wherever possible, I don't really need it analyzing my email drafts as I type them. At least in my case, its proposed wordings are nearly always -- what's the technical term? -- oh yes, WRONG.

"And the predictions intrusively and continuously interrupt my flow of typing as each one needs to be individually bypassed."