Large hydropower dams 'not sustainable' in the developing world BBC News | Science/Nature | UK Edition(cached at November 5, 2018, 11:30 pm)

A new study says that big hydro electricity projects in Europe and the US have been disastrous for the environment.
Google Has Enlisted NASA To Help it Prove Quantum Supremacy Within Months Slashdotby msmash on google at January 1, 1970, 1:00 am (cached at November 5, 2018, 11:04 pm)

Google wants NASA to help it prove quantum supremacy within a matter of months, MIT Technology Review reported Monday, citing the Space Act Agreement. From the report: Quantum supremacy is the idea, so far undemonstrated, that a sufficiently powerful quantum computer will be able to complete certain mathematical calculations that classical supercomputers cannot. Proving it would be a big deal because it could kick-start a market for devices that might one day crack previously unbreakable codes, boost AI, improve weather forecasts, or model molecular interactions and financial systems in exquisite detail. The agreement, signed in July, calls on NASA to "analyze results from quantum circuits run on Google quantum processors, and ... provide comparisons with classical simulation to both support Google in validating its hardware and establish a baseline for quantum supremacy." Google confirmed to MIT Technology Review that the agreement covered its latest 72-qubit quantum chip, called Bristlecone. Where classical computers store information in binary bits that definitely represent either 1 or 0, quantum computers use qubits that exist in an undefined state between 1 and 0. For some problems, using qubits should quickly provide solutions that could take classical computers much longer to compute.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Chile seeks return of artifacts from London museums AL JAZEERA ENGLISH (AJE)(cached at November 5, 2018, 11:00 pm)

Chile is the latest country to seek repatriation for significant items taken away by the British.
Bin Salman launches Saudi Arabia's first nuclear plant project AL JAZEERA ENGLISH (AJE)(cached at November 5, 2018, 11:00 pm)

Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman launches project to build the first nuclear research reactor in the kingdom.
Statue of footballer Mo Salah draws online ridicule AL JAZEERA ENGLISH (AJE)(cached at November 5, 2018, 11:00 pm)

Figurine of Egyptian footballing star draws comparisons with Simpsons character, famous musicians and Home Alone actor.
First-time immigrant voters: 'I now feel one with America' AL JAZEERA ENGLISH (AJE)(cached at November 5, 2018, 11:00 pm)

How do recently naturalised citizens feel about the Tuesday's midterms elections?
US midterms 2018: When do polls open and close? AL JAZEERA ENGLISH (AJE)(cached at November 5, 2018, 11:00 pm)

Tens of millions will vote in 50 states across five different time zones.
Flaws in Self-Encrypting SSDs Let Attackers Bypass Disk Encryption Slashdotby msmash on security at January 1, 1970, 1:00 am (cached at November 5, 2018, 10:34 pm)

An anonymous reader writes: Researchers have found flaws that can be exploited to bypass hardware encryption in well known and popular SSD drives. Master passwords and faulty standards implementations allow attackers access to encrypted data without needing to know the user-chosen password. SSDs from Micron (Crucial) and Samsung are affected. These are SSDs that support hardware-level encryption via a local built-in chip, separate from the main CPU. Some of these devices have a factory-set master password that bypasses the user-set password, while other SSDs store the encryption key on the hard drive, from where it can be retrieved. The issue is worse on Windows, where BitLocker defers software-level encryption to hardware encryption-capable SSDs, meaning user data is vulnerable to attacks without the user's knowledge. More in the research paper.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Wellcome Trust, Two of the World's Largest Bio Slashdotby msmash on medicine at January 1, 1970, 1:00 am (cached at November 5, 2018, 10:04 pm)

Two of the world's largest biomedical research funders have backed a plan to make all papers resulting from work they fund open access on publication by 2020. From a report: On 5 November, the London-based Wellcome Trust and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in Seattle, Washington, announced they were both endorsing 'Plan S,' adding their weight to an initiative already backed by 13 research funders across Europe since its launch in September. The plan was spearheaded by Robert-Jan Smits, the European Commission's special envoy on open access. The Wellcome Trust, which gave out $1.4 billion in grants in 2016-17, is also the first funder to detail how it intends to implement Plan S. Its approach suggests that journals may not need to switch wholesale to open-access (OA) models by 2020 to be compliant with Plan S -- if the initiative's other backers decide on a similar line. The biomedical charity already has an OA policy, but in some cases it allows an embargo of up to six months after publication before papers have to be made free to read. The organization says that by 1 January 2020, it will ban all such embargoes. Wellcome-funded work will not be able to appear in Nature, Science and other influential subscription journals unless these publications permit Wellcome-funded papers to be published under OA terms. Researchers that the charity funds could still publish in subscription journals, says Robert Kiley, Wellcome's head of open research. But only if those journals agree that the authors can immediately deposit their accepted manuscript in the PubMed Central repository under a liberal publishing licence. Some publishers, such as the Royal Society in London, already allow this.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Fallout from the new watch Scripting News(cached at November 5, 2018, 10:03 pm)

Note: I wrote this narrative, then stumbled across a fix, at the end.

I bought a new Apple Watch. So far it's just like the old one. I bought it for the health features. If it can give me a realtime EKG, that alone is worth the price. Heart rate, etc, all good stuff.

But I had to update my iPhone to get it to talk to the new watch. And as usual the problems cascade from there. First my phone says I also need a new version of the Watch app. OK. Then the Watch app, first thing it wants to do is update the old watch. Nothing can convince it not to do this. Only other choice is to reset to factory defaults. It gets half-way through, and says oops you have to charge it up to 50 percent or no-go. Okay that takes about an hour. And that's far from the end of the story.

Now completely separate from the Watch and its software, most of the apps on my iPhone are gone. Ones I built the use of the phone around. This kind of shit always happens with Apple updates.

Get this. The apps are there. If I search it finds them. They just aren't on the desktop. I had about 5 pages of apps before the update. Now I have two pages and there's only one app on the second page. All kinds of apps are missing from the desktop. Apple apps. BigCo apps (Facebook, Twitter). Apps for managing various brands of headphones I have.

And then I stumbled across a fix. I deleted one of the apps, and the rest came back.

How can Iran bypass US sanctions? AL JAZEERA ENGLISH (AJE)(cached at November 5, 2018, 10:00 pm)

US Secretary of State Pompeo said Trump administration 'fully prepared' to counter Iran's effort to circumvent hurdles.
Amazon Plans To Split HQ2 Evenly Between Two Cities, Report Says Slashdotby msmash on business at January 1, 1970, 1:00 am (cached at November 5, 2018, 9:34 pm)

Amazon plans to split its second headquarters evenly between two locations rather than picking one city for HQ2, WSJ reported Monday, citing a person familiar with the matter, a surprise decision that will spread the impact of a massive new office across two communities. From the report: The driving force behind the decision to build two equal offices in addition to the company's headquarters in Seattle is recruiting enough tech talent, according to the person familiar with the company's plans. The move will also ease potential issues with housing, transit and other areas where adding tens of thousands of workers could cause problems. [...] The report, published Monday, did not specify the locations Amazon is exploring, but on Sunday, the newspaper had reported that the ecommerce giant was in late-stage discussions with Crystal City in Virginia, Dallas and New York City. [The aforementioned link may be paywalled; here's an alternative source.]

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Vote for Democrats Everywhere inessential.com(cached at November 5, 2018, 9:32 pm)

The president recently called himself a nationalist — and it’s no stretch at all to call him a white nationalist.

From before his campaign, to his remarks after coming down that escalator in Trump Tower, to everything he’s said and done since — including his recent drumming up of fear about refugees planning to seek asylum in the United States — he’s led the effort to ensure that America respects only white power.

This is antithetical to Western democracy, which is built on individual liberty and equal protection, which says that all adult citizens have the right to vote.

If Republicans in Congress had acted as a check on his power, if they had exercised oversight, then I could plausibly suggest voting for the best candidate in each race.

But that didn’t happen. Not even close. It’s been quite the opposite — Republican politicians have aided him at every conscience-shocking turn, and the Republican party has become the party of white nationalism.

I don’t agree with every position of the Democratic Party, and I certainly don’t agree with every position of the candidates available to me. But that’s always true.

What I know, though, is that a Democratic majority in at least one Congressional chamber would finally allow for checks on the president’s power. There would be oversight, at long last.

And we’d have the chance to preserve Western democracy in the United States, and stop this acceleration toward something dark and old and corrupt and dangerous.

Please vote. Please vote for Democrats.

Tim Berners-Lee Launches Campaign To Save the Web From Abuse Slashdotby msmash on internet at January 1, 1970, 1:00 am (cached at November 5, 2018, 9:04 pm)

Tim Berners-Lee has launched a global campaign to save the web from the destructive effects of abuse and discrimination, political manipulation, and other threats that plague the online world. A report adds: In a talk at the opening of the Web Summit in Lisbon on Monday, the inventor of the web called on governments, companies and individuals to back a new "Contract for the Web" that aims to protect people's rights and freedoms on the internet. The contract outlines central principles that will be built into a full contract and published in May 2019, when half of the world's population will be able to get online. More than 50 organisations have already signed the contract, which is published by Berners-Lee's World Wide Web Foundation alongside a report that calls for urgent action. "For many years there was a feeling that the wonderful things on the web were going to dominate and we'd have a world with less conflict, more understanding, more and better science, and good democracy," Berners-Lee told the Guardian. "But people have become disillusioned because of all the things they see in the headlines. Humanity connected by technology on the web is functioning in a dystopian way. We have online abuse, prejudice, bias, polarisation, fake news, there are lots of ways in which it is broken. This is a contract to make the web one which serves humanity, science, knowledge and democracy." Under the principles laid out in the document, which Berners-Lee calls a "Magna Carta for the web", governments must ensure that its citizens have access to all of the internet, all of the time, and that their privacy is respected so they can be online "freely, safely and without fear." Berners-Lee, added, "We're at a 50/50 moment for the web. We've created something amazing together, but half the world is still not online, and our online rights and freedoms are at risk. The web has done so much for us, but now we need to stand up #ForTheWeb." You can watch his talk here (skip the first 10 minutes).

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Yemen: Fighting flares near Hodeidah despite calls for peace AL JAZEERA ENGLISH (AJE)(cached at November 5, 2018, 9:00 pm)

Thousands trapped on the southern outskirts of Hodeidah as Saudi-led coalition forces battle Houthi insurgents.