Once nuclear’s strongest booster, China is growing wary about its cost and safety.
External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/612564/chinas-losing-its-taste-for-nuclear-power-thats-bad-news/
Once nuclear’s strongest booster, China is growing wary about its cost and safety.
External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/612564/chinas-losing-its-taste-for-nuclear-power-thats-bad-news/
The Hackaday Superconference is over, which is a shame, but one of the great things about our conference is the people who manage to trek out to Pasadena every year to show us all the cool stuff they’re working on. One of those people was [Piotr Esden-Tempski], founder of 1 Bit Squared, and he brought some goodies that would soon be launched on a few crowdfunding platforms. The coolest of these was the iCEBreaker, an…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://hackaday.com/2018/12/13/icebreaker-the-open-source-development-board-for-fpgas/

Click here to go see the bonus panel!Hovertext:My new website, skimmedit ™ is just reddit but you can only read headlines and comment on what you think the article is about.Today’s News:
External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/skimmed
But y’know, maybe we will terminate positions post-merger if there’s a business case Cloudera founder Mike Olson has asked staffers to turn down recruiters’ advances ahead of the firm’s merger with Hortonworks – despite acknowledging there could be layoffs.…
External feed Read More at the Source: http://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.co.uk/2018/12/14/cloudera_merger_staff/
The use of face recognition by companies raises a host of concerns about privacy and unfair watchlisting. Rolling Stone reported this week that face recognition was used on attendees at a Taylor Swift concert in Los Angeles to look for stalkers. Stalkers are a real problem, and we sympathize with how scary it must be for a celebrity to know that they are out there. Nonetheless, we have a number of concerns about where this…
In Massachusetts, a federal court affirmed that the First Amendment protects secret recording of police performing their duties in public. The First Amendment right to record the police is a critical check and balance for people living in a free, open, and democratic society. It promotes the free discussion of governmental affairs as well as protects the democratic process. And for some communities, it’s a vital tool for uncovering, if not deterring, police misconduct. But…

The gentrification of cities like New York, San Francisco, Boston, Seattle, and Washington, D.C. has soared in recent years, as the affluent and educated have poured back into them. These superstar cities and tech hubs are epicenters of the “new urban crisis” with high and worsening levels of income inequality, economic segregation, and increasingly unaffordable housing, all of which have disproportionate negative effects on the less advantaged.But what is actually behind these shifts? One popular…

Today, EU negotiators in Strasbourg struggled to craft the final language of the Copyright in the Single Digital Market Directive, in their last possible meeting for 2019. They failed, thanks in large part to the Directive’s two most controversial clauses: Article 11, which requires paid licenses for linking to news stories while including more than a word or two; and Article 13, which will lead to the creation of error-prone copyright censorship algorithms that will…
Internet Archive is well-known for our interactive user services. These include the Wayback Machine, the archive.org website, and OpenLibrary. Less well known are the programmatic, or API (Application Program Interface) tools that can allow users and computer programs to access archived information “at scale.” Our APIs evolved over time, adapting to address specific projects and expanding as we introduced new services and capabilities into our operations. Although not entirely uniform, these APIS were created to…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://blog.archive.org/2018/12/13/documentation-for-public-apis-at-the-internet-archive/
US citizens: protect US ocelots — oppose the border wall. If you send a message, please spread the word!
External feed Read More at the Source: https://stallman.org/archives/2018-sep-dec.html#12_December_2018_%28Urgent%3A_Ocelots%29
Intel’s Architecture Day on Tuesday was delightfully filled with an overwhelming amount of valuable hardware information, but Intel’s software efforts were also briefly touched on too. In fact, Raja Koduri reinforced how software is a big part of Intel technology and goes in-hand with their security, interconnect, memory, architecture, and process pillars and that’s where their new oneAPI initiative will fit in. But what learning afterwards was most exciting on the software front…
External feed Read More at the Source: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Intel-Open-Source-FSP-Likely

Enlarge / After arriving from China, Wenhong Chen and Funina Wu, from Frederick, Maryland, are photographed at Dulles as part of the US Customs and Border Protection’s newly implemented biometrics system. (credit: Katherine Frey/The Washington Post via Getty Images) A new report by the Department of Homeland Security’s internal watchdog has concluded that the agency does not always adequately delete data seized as part of a border search of electronic devices, among other concerns. According…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://arstechnica.com/?p=1427505

This summer, proposed changes to Baltimore’s fire code sparked vitriolic public discord.Some lawmakers and bike advocates there were pushing to revise the code to legalize the use of narrower street lanes for emergency vehicles, in order to create more room for protected bicycling. They argued that there was plenty of space to share the road; firefighters disagreed, saying that bike lanes would block emergency access. For a fight that was ultimately over what counts as…

Google CEO Sundar Pichai came under fire from lawmakers on Tuesday over the company’s secretive plan to launch a censored search engine in China. During a hearing held by the House Judiciary Committee, Pichai faced sustained questions over the China plan, known as Dragonfly, which would blacklist broad categories of information about democracy, human rights, and peaceful protest. The hearing began with an opening statement from Rep. Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., who said launching a censored…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://theintercept.com/2018/12/11/google-congressional-hearing/
Who cares? Let’s whip out the BFG and blow up the boss On December 10, 1993, after a marathon 30-hour coding session, the developers at id Software uploaded the first finished copy of Doom for download, the game that was to redefine first-person shooter (FPS) genre. Hours later IT admins wanted id’s guts for garters.…
External feed Read More at the Source: http://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.co.uk/2018/12/10/doom_turns_25/

Lawmakers in the European Union (EU) often lament the lack of citizen engagement with the complex policy questions that they wrestle with in Strasbourg and Brussels, so we assume that they will be delighted to learn that more than 4,000,000 of their constituents have signed a petition opposing Article 13 of the new Copyright in the Single Market Directive. They oppose it for two main reasons: because it will inevitably lead to the creation of…

Romero Games Ltd. John Romero—co-creator of the classic and influential 1990s first-person shooter Doom—has announced that he will release 18 new levels for the game for its 25th anniversary next year. Scheduled for a mid-February 2019 release, the free megawad of levels will be called “Sigil.” Romero’s website describes it as “the spiritual successor” to the fourth episode of Doom, picking up “where the original left off.” It will include nine single-player levels and nine multi-player Deathmatch…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://arstechnica.com/?p=1425959
There’s this approach to computing history where we focus on work that looks shallowly similar to current norms, claim that work was ‘prophetic’ or ‘ahead of its time’, & mostly ignore differences & intent except as quirks. Because of the recent 50th anniversary of the Mother of All Demos, we’re getting a fresh batch of them. Fuck that.These folks weren’t trying to predict our current future. They were trying to create a future worth living in,…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://medium.com/@enkiv2/techs-masturbatory-historiography-6d7ae12abf1f?source=rss-43a4cf6aa464——2
Who cares about that, let’s whip out the BFG and blow up some of our coworkers On December 10, 1993, after a marathon 30-hour coding session, the developers at id Software uploaded the first finished copy of Doom for download, the game that was to redefine first-person shooter (FPS) gaming. Hours later IT admins wanted their guts for garters.…
External feed Read More at the Source: http://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.co.uk/2018/12/10/doom_turns_25/
Congress is trying to sneak an unconstitutional ban on political expression into the spending bill in order to avoid public scrutiny. According to recent reports, congressional leaders from both sides of the aisle are planning to sneak a bill criminalizing politically motivated boycotts of Israel into the end-of-the-year omnibus spending bill. The bill’s original sponsor, Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.), is pushing Democratic leadership to include this bill, which has not moved forward thus far primarily…