feed on feeds - 2015/12/08 - items 0 to 15

An anonymous reader writes: Chipmaker Qualcomm is on the receiving end of an antitrust investigation in Europe, where officials say the company has abused its market dominance by offering financial incentives to device manufacturers to exclusively use Qualcomm chips. "Qualcomm was also accused of unfairly setting prices below manufacturing costs to force competitors from the market. ... If found to have breached Europe's antitrust rules, the chip maker could face fines amounting to about 10 percent of its annual global revenue, which was $26.49 billion in 2014, and could be required to change some of its business practices. In previous European antitrust cases, however, companies typically have not been asked to pay such high financial penalties."

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Apple has updated iOS to 9.2, with improvements to iBooks, Apple Music, and Apple News, as well as the addition of the Mail Drop attachment feature to Mail and support for the new Lightning to SD Card Camera Reader.

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StewBeans writes: Typically it's developers — not senior IT executives — who have been pushing their IT departments to adopt open source software, but the tide is beginning to turn. The Weather Company's CIO, Bryson Koehler, says if IT decision makers are not bringing up open source solutions to business problems, they will start to lose credibility as leaders. He references recent moves from major players like Apple, Google and IBM as evidence of open source going mainstream. As it continues to increase in importance, "companies that are still shying away from open are clearly being led by people who are probably not fully informed about the decisions they're making." Koehler hypothesizes that as these leaders are replaced by more informed decision makers, "expect to see a continued rise in the use of open source technology solutions, especially in modularized ways so that it's easier to replace one set of libraries or components in your stack with a new set as open source projects ebb and flow throughout their life cycles."

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Here's how I got there.

First, we are as damaged by the war in Iraq as Iraq is.

What we lost -- our sense of invincibility. People of my generation already had lost it, through the Vietnam War. But there's a new generation that doesn't remember Vietnam, and didn't learn the lesson. That's what Iraq did for them.

After Iraq kicked our ass, we did what we did after Vietnam. We elected a President who wouldn't go to war. That's what we wanted in 2008. (I still want it, always will, but I'm not the majority.)

We forget so quickly. Or we can be urged to forget. Or a small portion of the country is so angry, so left behind, so wanting to return to medieval times, that they can pretend they don't remember.

Sound familiar? That's what ISIS is selling. Let's go back to a simpler time when our ability to kill each other with hand-held weapons is what mattered. This appeals to young men.

Trump probably isn't finished driving us into the brink. It's a step by step process. Next he's going to say it's too dangerous to let Muslims walk around, we need to round em up.

He doesn't run the government so he can't make that happen, and unless we're complete idiots (we might be) he won't. But his followers have guns, and they can create a lot of mayhem. Esp the young males.

My guess is he will go there. I would hope there would be a limit to how depraved he is, but so far if you had bet on there being a limit you would have lost that bet.

Josiah Zayner, a research fellow at NASA Ames Research Center, is running an Indiegogo campaign to make DIY gene editing kits that use the CRISPR technique to modify DNA. The campaign has already exceeded its goal, and he points out an article at Motherboard noting the controversy surrounding cheap, DIY genetic modification. Quoting:The kits won't going to allow people to genetically modify humans, but Zayner is still getting some heat for the project. One medical doctor emailed him with "grave concerns" about putting the technology in the hands of lay people. "Reprogramming bacteria or fungi could have serious ramifications, such as inadvertent or intended multi-drug resistance, faster multiplication, toxin production, and persisting potency when aerosolized," the doctor wrote. ... There is no legal framework surrounding this at-home work, unless it results in a product to be distributed, said Todd Kuiken, a senior program associate with the Synthetic Biology Project at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. "Who actually uses kits like these and what they are using them for will determine if any of these products they make would be regulated or not," he said.