We see a supernova, robot-pizza delivery, Nvidia has a massive graphics card and Facebook’s trailer for Straight Out of Compton was different for different ethnic groups.
An international science team led by Peter Garnavich, an astrophysics professor at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, analyzed light captured by Kepler every 30 minutes over a three-year period from 500 distant galaxies, searching some 50 trillion stars. They were hunting for signs of massive stellar death explosions known as supernovae.
In 2011, two of these massive stars, called red supergiants, exploded while in Kepler’s view. The first behemoth, KSN 2011a, is nearly 300 times the size of our sun and a mere 700 million light years from Earth. The second, KSN 2011d, is roughly 500 times the size of our sun and around 1.2 billion light years away.
We’re preparing a petition to a government agency on fair labelling practices for DRM-restricted devices, products and services. DRM used to be limited to entertainment products, but it’s spread with the Internet of Things, and it’s turning up in the most unlikely of places. As the Copyright Office heard during last summer’s hearings, DRM is now to be found in cars and tractors, in insulin pumps and pacemakers, even in voting machines. What’s more, the manufacturers using DRM believe that they have the right to invoke the “anti-circumvention” rules in 1998’s Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to prevent competitors from removing DRM in order to give you more choice about the products you own.
We believe this is an abusive extension of copyright law and that the law should protect businesses and individuals that remove digital locks for lawful purposes — for example, your mechanic should be able to diagnose your car’s problems and install aftermarket parts rather than being locked out of the vehicle’s computers and stuck with using original parts at inflated prices.
A couple of hours ago, Azer Koçulu unpublished more than 250 of his modules from NPM, which is a popular package manager used by JavaScript projects to install dependencies.
Koçulu yanked his source code because, we’re told, one of the modules was called Kik and that apparently attracted the attention of lawyers representing the instant-messaging app of the same name.
According to Koçulu, Kik’s briefs told him to rename the module, he refused, so the lawyers went to NPM’s admins claiming brand infringement. When NPM took Kik away from the developer, he was furious and unpublished all of his NPM-managed modules. “This situation made me realize that NPM is someone’s private land where corporate is more powerful than the people, and I do open source because Power To The People,” Koçulu blogged.
The company has developed a self-driving robot that can deliver hot food and cold drinks.
The four-wheeled machine dubbed DRU — for Domino’s Robotic Unit — completed its first trial delivery earlier this month.
Threema encrypts all your communications end-to-end including messages, group chats, files and even status messages. You can rest assured that only the intended recipient can read your chats, and nobody else – not even us.
Methodist Hospital’s information systems director told Krebs that the Locky malware, which came in as an attachment to a spam e-mail, attempted to spread across the network after it had infected the computer it was triggered on. Locky has been known to use malicious scripts in Microsoft Office documents as a means of infecting victims’ computers. The malware succeeded in infecting several other systems, prompting the hospital staff to shut down all the hospital’s computers. Each PC is brought back online individually after being scanned for telltale signs of Locky while off the network.
If you saw a trailer for Straight Outta Compton on Facebook, it was targeted at you based on your race—or, at least, based on what Facebook thinks is your race. People identified by the company as white, black, or Hispanic were shown different versions of the trailer. This is part of Facebook’s new “ethnic affiliation” marketing, which effectively resembles racial profiling with a big data advertising twist.
Like the 12GB version, the new 24GB Quadro M6000 is based on NVIDIA’s Maxwell architecture. It has 3,072 CUDA cores, a 384-bit memory bus, four DisplayPort 1.2 connectors, a single DVI-I connectors, and a maximum power consumption rating of 250W.
In addition to the doubling the memory buffer, NVIDIA added a few other features, including more GPU clock options, greater software temperature control to keep the GPU temp below the point where throttling occurs, and a new under-power boot message if the card is ever under powered.
The Quadro M6000 with 24GB is available today for around $5,000 street.
Episode 12 Season 16
