"The U.S. federal government just awarded a grant to the blockchain startup Key Retroactivity Network Consensus (KRNC)," reports Futurism.com, "to study the feasibility of integrating cryptocurrency into the economy." That doesn't mean that the U.S. is going to pivot to a digital blockchain dollar, CoinDesk reports. Rather, the National Science Foundation funded KRNC because it's interested in exploring new ways to improve the security of digital transactions. The protocol KRNC is developing would meter out a new cryptocurrency in proportion to a user's existing wealth, CoinDesk reports, instead of requiring them to purchase or actively mine new crypto. In other words, it wouldn't make people richer, but it would grant them an alternative means to transfer funds online. "Bitcoin, which runs on the principle of Proof-of-Work, is wasteful," KRNC CEO Clint Ehrlich told CoinDesk. "It requires people to waste money and computing power solving pointless problems."

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Republicans are desperate to whip up fear of something, anything, that seems more dangerous than Covid-19 actually is. They could, instead, embrace the actual disaster, and you know, as the governing party, help save American lives.

There's going to be massive starvation and homelessness, soon, and the virus isn't going to "spike" -- that's wishful thinking. It's more likely the curve is going to go up and up and up, getting steeper all the time, until we stop the party and get serious about saving lives. Let's find ways to help each other. Black lives mattering can help save all our lives. We're all in the same boat now, believe me. The police may loom large as the biggest problem, but imho, they are far from the biggest problem. That's the virus, and the broken political system. We have to work together. That's the only way out.

Health care is a #BLM issue. With all the trillions the US government is going to spend in the next year trying to keep the economy alive, we could use part of that money to convert the American health care system to a single-payer, no more paying the insurance industry their unearned cut.

In the "quick launch bar" of Windows 10, native app icons "support a shortcut menu for commonly or frequently performed tasks in the app. This menu can be invoked by right-clicking the app's quick launch bar icon," writes the Windows Club site -- adding that Mac users can use similar functionality when opening a web browser from the MacOS dock. But now Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge are working on similar "App Shortcuts" that allow users to do things like send email or composing tweets directly from the Windows 10 taskbar or macOS dock. Slashdot reader techtsp shares their report: Right now, Chromium does not allow users to start a key task within a progressive web app through the Windows 10 taskbar. This is exactly what Chromium-based web browsers are now trying to change. This feature will enable web developers to add support in Chromium for shortcuts defined in a Web App Manifest. As a result, Chromium progressive web apps can offer App shortcuts for their quick launch bar icon much like native apps. The App shortcuts feature is currently in development on Microsoft Edge. Meanwhile, Google Chrome 85 is in the Dev channel.

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In 1999, Ray Kurzweil made predictions about what the world would be like 20 years in the future. Last month the community blog LessWrong took a look at how accurate Kurzweil's predictions turned out to be: This was a follow up to a previous assessment about his predictions about 2009, which showed a mixed bag, roughly evenly divided between right and wrong, which I'd found pretty good for 10-year predictions... For the 2019 predictions, I divided them into 105 separate statements, did a call for volunteers [and] got 46 volunteers with valid email addresses, of which 34 returned their predictions... Of the 34 assessors, 24 went the whole hog and did all 105 predictions; on average, 91 predictions were assessed by each person, a total of 3078 individual assessments... Kurzweil's predictions for 2019 were considerably worse than those for 2009, with more than half strongly wrong. The assessors ultimately categorized just 12% of Kurzweil's predictions as true, with another 12% declared "weakly true," while another 10% were classed as "cannot decide." But 52% were declared "false" -- with another 15% also called "weakly false." Among Kurzweil's false predictions for the year 2019: "Phone" calls routinely include high-resolution three-dimensional images projected through the direct-eye displays and auditory lenses... Thus a person can be fooled as to whether or not another person is physically present or is being projected through electronic communication. The all-enveloping tactile environment is now widely available and fully convincing. "As you can see, Kurzweil suffered a lot from his VR predictions," explains the LessWrong blogpost. "This seems a perennial thing: Hollywood is always convinced that mass 3D is just around the corner; technologists are convinced that VR is imminent." But the blog post also thanks Kurzweil, "who, unlike most prognosticators, had the guts and the courtesy to write down his predictions and give them a date. I strongly suspect that most people's 1999 predictions about 2019 would have been a lot worse." And they also took special note of Kurzweil's two most accurate predictions. First, "The existence of the human underclass continues as an issue." And second: "People attempt to protect their privacy with near-unbreakable encryption technologies, but privacy continues to be a major political and social issue with each individual's practically every move stored in a database somewhere."

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"The terms 'allowlist' and 'blocklist' describe their purpose, while the other words use metaphors to describe their purpose," reads a change description on the source code for Android -- from over a year ago. 9to5Mac calls it "a shortened version of Google's (internal-only) explanation" for terminology changes which are now becoming more widespread. And Thursday GitHub's CEO said they were also "already working on" renaming the default branches of code from "master" to a more neutral term like "main," reports ZDNet: GitHub lending its backing to this movement effectively ensures the term will be removed across millions of projects, and effectively legitimizes the effort to clean up software terminology that started this month. But, in reality, these efforts started years ago, in 2014, when the Drupal project first moved in to replace "master/slave" terminology with "primary/replica." Drupal's move was followed by the Python programming language, Chromium (the open source browser project at the base of Chrome), Microsoft's Roslyn .NET compiler, and the PostgreSQL and Redis database systems... The PHPUnit library and the Curl file download utility have stated their intention to replace blacklist/whitelist with neutral alternatives. Similarly, the OpenZFS file storage manager has also replaced its master/slave terms used for describing relations between storage environments with suitable replacements. Gabriel Csapo, a software engineer at LinkedIn, said on Twitter this week that he's also in the process of filing requests to update many of Microsoft's internal libraries. A recent change description for the Go programming language says "There's been plenty of discussion on the usage of these terms in tech. I'm not trying to have yet another debate." It's clear that there are people who are hurt by them and who are made to feel unwelcome by their use due not to technical reasons but to their historical and social context. That's simply enough reason to replace them. Anyway, allowlist and blocklist are more self-explanatory than whitelist and blacklist, so this change has negative cost. That change was merged on June 9th -- but 9to5Mac reports it's just one of many places these changes are happening. "The Chrome team is beginning to eliminate even subtle forms of racism by moving away from terms like 'blacklist' and 'whitelist.' Google's Android team is now implementing a similar effort to replace the words 'blacklist' and 'whitelist.'" And ZDNet reports more open source projects are working on changing the name of their default Git repo from "master" to alternatives like main, default, primary, root, or another, including the OpenSSL encryption software library, automation software Ansible, Microsoft's PowerShell scripting language, the P5.js JavaScript library, and many others.

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Long-time Slashdot reader destinyland writes: Vintage computing enthusiasts have recreated NASA's legendary "Apollo Guidance Computer," the 1960s-era assembly-language onboard guidance and navigation computer for the Apollo missions to the moon. Unfortunately, the software had been lost for the Apollo 10 mission (a manned "dress rehearsal" mission which flew to the moon eight weeks before Neil Armstrong's famous moonwalk mission). But spaceflight engineer Mike Stewart found a clever way to recreate it, according to one science show on YouTube. Stewart found a print-out of an earlier version of the program, and "with the help of a small army of volunteers, Mike hand-transcribed the source listing and all of its programs..." — all 1,735 pages of it. (Though what used to take 25 minutes to compile together on a Honeywell mainframe now takes less than a second on his modern laptop.) There were also NASA memos which described the change, later versions of the program which had implemented the changes — and most importantly, a recently-discovered NASA document giving the checksum for every version of every program run on the Apollo Guidance Computer. So Stewart was able to cut-and-paste carefully-chosen code and variables from later versions of the program — based on the clues in NASA's memos — until he'd recreated a program with the exact same checksum. There's also a separate video about the Apollo 10 code, highlighting "lighthearted comments in very serious code." (For example, to warn off people who'd change their crucial constants, they'd actually included a Latin phrase — a play on a biblical quote which translates roughly to "Don't touch these.") The ignition routine that actually lights the descent engine for the moon landing is named BURNBABY. The comment accompanying it? "OFF TO SEE THE WIZARD."

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After seven years, Lego has finally unveiled a new Mindstorms kit, reports PC Magazine -- the Lego Mindstorms Robot Inventor, available this fall for $359: The Robot Inventor kit lets kids (or adults) build five different robot models out of 949 pieces, ranging from a four-legged walker to a bipedal wheeled robot that can give high-fives. All of these robots can be programmed to perform different tricks, like grabbing items, firing plastic projectiles, avoiding obstacles, and playing various sports with a ball. The kit includes four low-profile, medium-angular motors; a color and light sensor; and a distance sensor, which work together with the Intelligent Hub block to power these robots and execute commands. Of course, like all Mindstorms kits, you can build your own robotic creations with the tools at hand, and add Lego Technic and System pieces for more complex projects. The Intelligent Hub serves as the brain of Lego Mindstorms, and the block that houses the Mindstorms Robot Inventor Kit is the most advanced one yet. It features six input/output ports for sensors and motors, a six-axis gyro/accelerometer, a speaker, and a five-by-five LED matrix. The Intelligent Hub and all robots built with it can be controlled wirelessly over Bluetooth with the Lego Mindstorms Robot Inventor app for Android, iOS, Windows 10, and macOS. The app supports programming in both the tile-based Scratch language and in Python, for more complex projects that require the precision of written code.

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In JavaScript, what do promises make possible that callbacks don't?

i've been writing large pieces of code in JavaScript for about seven years, all flow is via callbacks because:

• That's all that existed when I started.
• I like them, I think in terms of them.
• My editor is proficient at managing them.
• All this proficiency didn't come cheaply. A lot of time went into it.

I'm a big believer in this: one way of doing something is better than two, no matter how much better the second way is. Why? Because I'm going to end up supporting both.

Here's some space, please help me understand why you think promises is a game-changer. The more succinct the answer the better. Thanks.

Bjarne Stroustrup, the 69-year-old Danish creator of C++, just released a 168-page paper (published under a Creative Commons Attributions-NoDerivatives license) in the Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages, detailing the growth of C++ from its 21st birthday in 2006 up through the year 2020. It begins by noting that by 2006, C++ "contained parts that had survived unchanged since introduced into C in the early 1970s as well as features that were novel in the early 2000s..." Originally, I designed C++ to answer to the question "How do you directly manipulate hardware and also support efficient high-level abstraction?" Over the years, C++ has grown from a relatively simple solution based on a combination of facilities from the C and Simula languages aimed at systems programming on 1980s computers to a far more complex and effective tool for an extraordinary range of applications... [T]his is also the story of the people involved in the evolution of C++, the way they perceived the challenges, interpreted the constraints on solutions, organized their work, and resolved their inevitable differences. From the abstract: From 2006 to 2020, the C++ developer community grew from about 3 million to about 4.5 million. It was a period where new programming models emerged, hardware architectures evolved, new application domains gained massive importance, and quite a few well-financed and professionally marketed languages fought for dominance. How did C++ -- an older language without serious commercial backing -- manage to thrive in the face of all that? This paper focuses on the major changes to the ISO C++ standard for the 2011, 2014, 2017, and 2020 revisions... Themes include efforts to preserve the essence of C++ through evolutionary changes, to simplify its use, to improve support for generic programming, to better support compile-time programming, to extend support for concurrency and parallel programming, and to maintain stable support for decades' old code... Specific language-technical topics include the memory model, concurrency and parallelism, compile-time computation, move-semantics, exceptions, lambda expressions, and modules. "I hope other languages learn from C++'s successes," the paper concludes. "It would be sad if the lessons learned fromC++'s evolution were limited to the C++ community."

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What do promises do/make possible that callbacks don't?

i've been writing large pieces of code in JavaScript for about seven years, all flow is via callbacks because:

• That's all that existed when I started.
• I like them, I think in terms of them.
• My editor is proficient at managing them.
• All this proficiency didn't come cheaply. A lot of time went into it.

I'm a big believer in this: one way of doing something is better than two, no matter how much better the second way is. Why? Because I'm going to end up supporting both.

Here's some space, please help me understand why you think promises are a game-changer. The more succinct the answer the better. Thanks.

Perhaps it should be illegal for a company to own both a search engine and a web browser, esp if they dominate. They might try to take full possession of something that belongs to the public.

"Scientists in Japan successfully triggered a hibernation-like state in mice by activating a specific group of brain cells," reports UPI, which points out that entering a hibernation-like state "could help astronauts conserve food and water, as well as avoid the ill-effects of microgravity, on long journeys through space." The research, published this week in the journal Nature, suggests even animals that don't naturally sleep through the winter are capable of hibernation... Hibernation isn't simply prolonged sleep. When food gets scarce and winter approaches, hibernating animals begin to slow down their metabolism and drop their body temperature. During their prolonged slumber, hibernating animals quiet their brains and slow their heart rate and breathing. As a result, bears, snakes, turtles and other hibernating species are able to conserve energy. When spring arrives, the animals wake having lost a little weight, but are otherwise healthy. Mice don't hibernate in the wild. But in the lab, researchers were able to coax mice into a hibernation-like state by activating a type of brain cell called Q neurons... During their approximately weeklong hibernation, the mice had slower heart rates, reduced oxygen consumption and slower respiration.

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