Linux Mint, the maker of popular Linux distro, announced on Friday the general availability of a new version of their operating system. Called Linux Mint 19 "Tera", the new version offers a range of new features, improvements, and a promise that it would stick around for a while. Writing for BetaNews, Brian Fagioli: The most significant aspect of Linux Mint 19 is the new Ubuntu 18.04 LTS base. Tara will receive updates until 2023 -- very impressive. The kernel is at 4.15, and all three desktop environments are being updated too. Mate is now at version 1.2, Cinnamon gets bumped up to 3.8, and Xfce is updated to 4.12. In Linux Mint 19, the star of the show is Timeshift, said, Clement Lefebvre, Linux Mint Project Leader. Although it was introduced in Linux Mint 18.3 and backported to all Linux Mint releases, it is now at the center of Linux Mint's update strategy and communication, he added. Thanks to Timeshift you can go back in time and restore your computer to the last functional system snapshot. If anything breaks, you can go back to the previous snapshot and it's as if the problem never happened.

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DRC government spokesman says information by US-based rights group is 'wrong', accuses it of bias.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: For people who put down a $1,000 deposit for a Tesla Model 3 as long as two years ago, the big day has arrived. Specifically, the day has arrived when they can give Tesla another $2,500 and then wait a few more months for their car to arrive. Days before the end of the second quarter, Tesla is now allowing all reservation holders in the United States and Canada to place orders for the Model 3. Customers will be able to choose between several variants of the Model 3 -- including the high-end "performance" model -- as well as choosing colors and option packages. However, the low-end version of the Model 3 with its long-promised $35,000 price tag isn't available to order yet. Each customer will get a specific delivery estimate based on the model they choose and their position on the waiting list. A typical delivery window is two to four months. While the original $1,000 Model 3 deposit was fully refundable, customers who pay the extra $2,500 will be locked in three days after placing an order, the company told CNBC. That isn't a new requirement -- a Tesla spokeswoman told Ars that the company has long asked customers to pay a $2,500 deposit when they order other Tesla models.

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Climate discussions typically center on the need to replace fossil-fuel power plants with technologies like wind turbines and solar panels. But a new paper in Science offers a stark reminder that there are still huge parts of the global energy system where we simply don't have affordable ways of halting greenhouse-gas emissions. MIT Technology Review: Air travel, long-distance transportation and shipping, steel and cement manufacturing, and remaining parts of the power sector account for 27 percent of global emissions from the energy and industrial sectors. And the authors say we need much more research, innovation, and strategic coordination to clean up these sources. "If we're really ambitious about meeting our climate targets, we need to be tackling these hard sectors now," says the paper's lead author, Steven Davis, an earth system scientist at the University of California, Irvine.

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David Popp, 23, was stabbed to death by ultranationalist attackers in the latest bout of racist violence in Ukraine.

The chief of the International Committee of the Red Cross doubts Myanmar repatriation.

A team of academics has published research this week that describes three attacks against the mobile communication standard LTE (Long-Term Evolution), also known as 4G. From a report: Two of the three attacks are passive, meaning an attacker can watch LTE traffic and determine various details about the target, while the third is an active attack that lets the attacker manipulate data sent to the user's LTE device. According to researchers, the passive attacks allow an attacker to collect meta-information about the user's traffic (an identity mapping attack), while the second allows the attacker to determine what websites a user might be visiting through his LTE device (a website fingerprinting attack).

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Unidentified attackers assault headquarters of five-nation military taskforce in central Mali.

Many doctors now are likely to wear everyday clothes, or blue or green "scrubs", which are said to reduce eye strain in brightly-lit operating theatres. White coats are reckoned to be capable of spreading diseases as easily as clothing of any other colour, especially when long sleeves brush against multiple surfaces. Many clinics and hospitals now have a "bare below the elbows" policy for staff, whether in uniform or their own clothes. This is also supposed to encourage more thorough handwashing. What, though, if the clothes worn by medical staff could actively help prevent bugs being passed around? From a report: Some metals, such as gold and silver, have natural antibacterial properties and are used to coat certain solid items, such as medical implants. But putting metallic coatings onto stretchy and foldable fabrics is tricky, and those coatings can quickly be swept away in a washing machine. What is needed, reckons Liu Xuqing of the University of Manchester, in England, is a way to make antibacterial coatings for fabrics that, quite literally, hold tight. Instead of gold or silver, Dr Liu's metal of choice is copper. This exhibits the same bug-killing properties but has the benefit of being an awful lot cheaper than those two precious metals, making a commercial coating process easier to devise. Working with colleagues from two Chinese institutions, Northwest Minzu University in Lanzhou and Southwest University in Chongqing, Dr Liu has been treating samples of fabric with a chemical process that grafts what is called a "polymer brush" onto their surfaces. As the name suggests, when viewed at a resolution of a few nanometres (billionths of a metre) through an electron microscope, the polymer strands look like tiny protruding bristles. That done they use a second chemical procedure to coat the bristles with a catalyst. After this, they immerse the fabric in a copper-containing solution from which the catalyst causes the metal to precipitate and form tiny particles that anchor themselves to the polymer brush. Indeed, they bond so tightly that Dr Liu compares the resulting coating to reinforced concrete. Yet the process takes place at such a minute scale on the surface of the fabric that it should not affect the feel or quality of the finished material.

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Sometimes I invest in companies I dislike. If they win, at least I made some money. If they lose, well that's its own reward.

Sometimes I think Twitter is like the Wailing Wall.

Thousands of people from across the country are reporting that they are facing connectivity issues with Comcast and its service Xfinity on Friday. Comcast is yet to acknowledge and address the outage, hence it is unclear how long the widespread outage may last. According to DownDetector, a service that tracks outages, the majority of the northeast United States and areas in Colorado, California, the midwest and southeast were affected. Some users reported issues watching TV as well. Veteran reporter Ed Oswald said, "Nearly an hour into what is clearly a massive nationwide outage for #Comcast/#Xfinity and nary a peep out of the company across any of its public facing channels. I can understand not bringing attention to local outages, but this.." Update: Comcast says it is aware of a "nationwide outage impacting some of our internet, video and voice customers."

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An anonymous reader shares a report: The US remains well behind pace to meet its commitments to cut greenhouse-gas emissions under the landmark Paris climate agreement. Under current policies, the nation will reduce climate pollution between 12 and 20 percent from 2005 levels by 2025, according to a Rhodium Group analysis published today. That's well below the 26 to 28 percent target agreed to under the Paris accords. The report estimates that total emissions between 2020 and 2030 could be 196 million metric tons lower than Rhodium projected last year. That's due to an increase in the number of planned coal plant closures, as well as the falling costs of natural gas, renewables, and electric vehicles. Slower economic growth forecasts were also a factor.

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Economists and political observers urge President Rouhani to take specific steps to fix the currency woes.

Thousands of people from across the country are reporting that they are facing connectivity issues with Comcast and its service Xfinity on Friday. Comcast is yet to acknowledge and address the outage, hence it is unclear how long the widespread outage may last. According to DownDetector, a service that tracks outages, the majority of the northeast United States and areas in Colorado, California, the midwest and southeast were affected. Some users reported issues watching TV as well. Veteran reporter Ed Oswald said, "Nearly an hour into what is clearly a massive nationwide outage for #Comcast/#Xfinity and nary a peep out of the company across any of its public facing channels. I can understand not bringing attention to local outages, but this.."

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