"The moon is drifting away," reports the New York Times. Every year, it gets about an inch and a half farther from us. Hundreds of millions of years from now, our companion in the sky will be distant enough that there will be no more total solar eclipses. For decades, scientists have measured the moon's retreat by firing a laser at light-reflecting panels, known as retroreflectors, that were left on the lunar surface, and then timing the light's round trip. But the moon's five retroreflectors are old, and they're now much less efficient at flinging back light. To determine whether a layer of moon dust might be the culprit, researchers devised an audacious plan: They bounced laser light off a much smaller but newer retroreflector mounted aboard a NASA spacecraft that was skimming over the moon's surface at thousands of miles per hour. And it worked... Dust can be kicked up by meteorites striking the moon's surface. It coated the astronauts' moon suits during their visits, and it is expected to be a significant problem if humans ever colonize the moon. While it has been nearly 50 years since a retroreflector was placed on the moon's surface, a NASA spacecraft launched in 2009 carries a retroreflector roughly the size of a paperback book. That spacecraft, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, circles the moon once every two hours, and it has beamed home millions of high-resolution images of the lunar surface... In 2017, Dr. Erwan Mazarico, a planetary scientist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and his collaborators began firing an infrared laser from a station near Grasse, France — about a half-hour drive from Cannes — toward the orbiter's retroreflector. At roughly 3 a.m. on Sept. 4, 2018, they recorded their first success: a detection of 25 photons that made the round trip... After accounting for the smaller size of the orbiterâ(TM)s retroreflector, Dr. Mazarico and his colleagues found that it often returned photons more efficiently than the Apollo retroreflectors... "For me, the dusty reflector idea is more supported than refuted by these results" he said. Laser-reflection measurements over long periods of time and across several reflectors "have revealed that the Moon has a fluid core," NASA notes. "Scientists can tell by monitoring the slightest wobbles as the Moon rotates."

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A couple of things they changed in the iPhone UI, not sure how recently. To get the app switcher to come up, double-tap the home button. To take a screen shot, click the power button and the home button simultaneously. I will never remember these, but at least I will be able to find them on scripting.com. The problem with the way Apple changes this stuff, when you search for it, you find the old method. To get the new method you have to have as many followers as I do on Twitter. This is a bullshit way to run a platform, Apple.

This is an emergency must-read piece. Can't wait for the election. Trump's plan to steal the election will work. First, do not vote by mail. Do not vote by mail. Not sure what you should do if you live in a state like Utah, Washington or Oregon where vote-by-mail is all you can do. Second, Congress has to come back. We must protest in the streets. Esp in DC. They must feel our ire. Now, not in November. That will, for sure, be too late.

O'Reilly media's Vice President of Content Strategy (also the coauthor of Unix Power Tools) recently explored why several popular programming languages wound up on the "most dreaded" list in StackOverflow's annual developer survey: There's no surprise that VBA is #1 disliked language. I'll admit to complete ignorance on Objective C (#2), which I've never had any reason to play with. Although I'm a Perl-hater from way back, I'm surprised that Perl is so widely disliked (#3), but some wounds never heal. It will be interesting to see what happens after Perl 7 has been out for a few years. Assembly (#4) is an acquired taste (and isn't a single language)... But he eventually suggests that both C and Java might be on the list simply because they have millions of users, citing a quote from C++ creator Bjarne Stroustrup: "there are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses." Dislike of a language may be "guilt by association": dislike of a large, antiquated codebase with minimal documentation, and an architectural style in which every bug fixed breaks something else. Therefore, it's not surprising to see languages that used to be widely used but have fallen from popularity on the list... Java has been the language people love to hate since its birth. I was at the USENIX session in which James Gosling first spoke about Java (way before 1.0), and people left the room talking about how horrible Java was — none of whom had actually used the language because it hadn't been released yet... If there's one language on this list that's associated with gigantic projects, it's Java. And there are a lot of things to dislike about it — though a lot of them have to do with bad habits that grew up around Java, rather than the language itself. If you find yourself abusing design patterns, step back and look at what you're doing; making everything into a design pattern is a sign that you didn't understand what patterns are really for... If you start writing a FactoryFactoryFactory, stop and take a nice long walk. If you're writing a ClassWithAReallyLongNameBecauseThatsHowWeDoIt, you don't need to. Java doesn't make you do that... I've found Java easier to read and understand than most other languages, in part because it's so explicit — and most good programmers realize that they spend more time reading others' code than writing their own. He also notes that Python only rose to #23 on the "most dreaded" languages list, speculating developers may appreciation its lack of curly braces, good libraries, and Jupyter notebooks. "Python wins the award for the most popular language to inspire minimal dislike. It's got a balanced set of features that make it ideal for small projects, and good for large ones." "And what shall we say about JavaScript, sixteenth on the list? I've got nothing. It's a language that grew in a random and disordered way, and that programmers eventually learned could be powerful and productive... A language that's as widely used as JavaScript, and that's only 16th on the list of most dreaded languages, is certainly doing something right. But I don't have to like it."

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"Self-driving cars are bullshit," writes Cory Doctorow: I'm a science fiction writer, so I quite enjoy thinking about self-driving cars. They make for really interesting analogies about data, liability, self-determination, information security and openness... But I'm a science fiction writer and that means I can tell the difference between "thought experiments" and "real things." Alas, the same cannot be said of corporate America. For example, according to its own IPO filings, Uber can only be profitable if it invents fully autonomous vehicles and replaces every public transit ride in the world with them. Elon Musk — a man whose "green electric car company" is only profitable thanks to the carbon credits it sells to manufacturers of the dirtiest SUVs in America, without which those planet-killing SUVs would not exist — makes the same mistake. Musk wants to abolish public transit and replace it with EVs (he says that public transit makes you sit next to strangers who might be serial killers, which tells you a lot about his view of humanity). Now, both Uber and Musk are both wrong as a matter of simple geometry. Multiply the space occupied by all those AVs by the journeys people in cities need to make by the additional distances of those journeys if we need road for all those cars, and you run out of space... these fairy tales require so much credulity to be taken seriously that they strain even the car-addled imaginations of American automotive culture, and also rely on the irrational exuberance inspired by imaginary self-driving cars to propagate and persist. But that exuberance is sorely misplaced. Machine learning systems have brittle and unpredictable failure modes that can be triggered by accident or deliberately. The unconstrained problem of navigating busy cities with unquantifiable human activities is insoluble with ML. Or, at least, it's insoluble if you care about whether cars kill even more people in even less predictable ways than they do now... Doctorow adds that a key plot point in the third book in his "Little Brother" series (coming out in October) is "subverted, lethal autonomous vehicles." But Doctorow also shares a link to his short story "Car Wars," commissioned by Deakin University to explore the sociotechnological issues around autonomous vehicle. It begins with a high school warning parents about students performing "dangerous modifications" to their car in violation of new federal laws -- three student vehicles were already confiscated for "operating with unlicensed firmware." (And "one of those cases has been referred to the police as the student involved was a repeat offender.") But as the school launches its random vehicle firmware audits, a developer sends a desperate message to his followers on Twitter about something even more disturbing that's happening in real-time...

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"There are no monsters in the sea, only the ones we make up in our heads."

27 years ago today, in 1993, Debian first appeared in the world. August 16th has since been recognized as "DebianDay," celebrated shortly before the annual Debian Conference — with lots of ways to get involved, according to Debian.org: Today is also an opportunity for you to start or resume your contributions to Debian. For example, you can scratch your creative itch and suggest a wallpaper to be part of the artwork for the next release, have a look at the DebConf20 schedule and register to participate online (August 23rd to 29th, 2020), or put a Debian live image in a DVD or USB and give it to some person near you, who still didn't discover Debian. Our favorite operating system is the result of all the work we do together. Thanks to everybody who has contributed in these 27 years, and happy birthday Debian! And the same day is also the 25th anniversary of CPAN, the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network: On the 16th August 1995, Andreas König uploaded Symdump 1.20 to CPAN. There were other things already on CPAN, but this was the first true upload, to be followed by more than 6,500 people who have released over 35,000 distributions in 230k releases. So it seems appropriate that 16th August be designated CPAN Day, to celebrate CPAN, and all the authors who've made it what it is. That blog post urges readers to celebrate the anniversary "by doing something related to CPAN: release something, blog about your favourite module, or email its author thanking her or him." Finally, Slashdot reader JobSnijders reminds us that Mutt is also enjoying a birthday: The email client that aims to suck a little bit less celebrates its 25th anniversary!

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"Steve Saleen claims that China has stolen 40 years' worth of intellectual property from him in launching the Saleen brand in China," reports the site Carscoops. More information from the Los Angeles Times: Saleen's Chinese backers have accused his business partner of fraud and embezzlement and taken over the company, freezing its accounts and forcing hundreds of employees out of work. Police raided the sprawling new factory emblazoned with Saleen's name. Two senior executives were detained, and a court order sealed its Shanghai showroom... "What I'm trying to do is to bring to light how American companies will contribute IP, brands and knowhow to the China market — and overnight they will change direction, kick you out and keep the IP," Saleen said... Whatever the outcome, Saleen's bid to bring his high-powered cars to China has crashed, leaving the 71-year-old filled with regret. "When it came to taking my brand on a global basis, it really seemed to offer me an opportunity that I could not refuse," Saleen said. "In hindsight I realize the deal was too good to be true...." Saleen said his experience should convince Washington to enact tougher protections for U.S. investors, deny Chinese firms that steal trade secrets access to capital markets and prohibit the use of Chinese asset valuations that could be subject to manipulation. Carscoops has some more background: Writing in The Wall Street Journal, Saleen claims "the deal was a sham." According to the racing legend, the joint venture applied for 510 Chinese patents based on his designs, technologies, trade secrets and engineering developments. He adds that most of these patent filings didn't list him as an inventor. The company, known as Jiangsu Saleen Automotive Technologies (JSAT), unveiled a range of models 12 months ago. Saleen asserts that the government of Rugao is attempting to take over the joint venture now that it has his intellectual property and patents. He claims that the director of corporate affairs for JSAT, Grace Yin Xu, has been missing since June 22 when she entered a government building shortly after refusing to lie to local law enforcement who wanted her to state Saleen's business partner had provided false information and embezzled money. In addition, the company's vice president of manufacturing, Frank Sterzer, was allegedly detained for six hours by the authorities. In his op-ed, Saleen states that "China can no longer go unchecked", citing a 2019 survey that 20 per cent of North American corporations say the People's Republic has stolen their intellectual property in the past year.

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I just flipped the switch, now the new version of BingeWorthy for TV has replaced the previous version. I think it's reliable enough to use going forward.

If you had an account on the original BingeWorthy, you should have one here as well. Most of what you did on the old BW has been ported to the new one, automatically.

Notes on the new version.

• Your prefs start over. So you should visit the Settings, it's in the system menu, the one you use to log in via Twitter.
• Also, any ratings added in the previous version after August 5 are not preserved. That's when I ported the data.
• There is no concept of a private profile in this version. Your ratings are public. So people can walk a web of programs and people, as a way to look for new programs to binge, as well as finding people with similar tastes. Another form of serendipity. Finding out a close friend hates a program you think the best.
• You can share anything you can see, and most of it can be read without logging in. For example, here are my ratings. And here's the page for The Sopranos. You can do a lot of surfing from those two links, wtihout logging in. You must log in to do your own ratings, of course.
• You can add programs to the database without my approval. This is a huge deal, because it's what kept the first BW from growing. People would recommend programs I knew nothing about. Which meant I had to discuss each one, and that grew really tiresome. After a while I stopped looking at the suggestions, realizing it was a deal-stopper for the product. First you have to find a page for the show on Metacritic. Then paste the URL of the page into a dialog in BingeWorthy. Look in the menu for Submit a program.
• I've learned a lot about programming SQL since doing the fit BingeWorthy, so I have been able to streamline the server, factoring, producing a new package, davesql, which anyone can use, and it'll make other projects I have that use SQL easier to upgrade and maintain. The two major ones are River6 and feedBase. I plan to revisit each of those products after BingeWorthy settles down.
• The Docs for now are in the GitHub thread we've used for support. Ask questions there, report bugs. Eventually I'll rewrite the official docs, and put that on this.how, and point to that instead. Consider this version beta, the product is almost done, but we're watching for problems, and expect to find them.
• The version number is 2.0.0. Like an odometer rolling over.

American's National Security Agency (NSA) "has shared new guidance with U.S. military and intelligence personnel, suggesting they take additional precautions to safeguard their location data," reports Engadget. "The agency argues the information devices and apps collect can pose a national security threat." Ars Technica reports: The National Security Agency is recommending that some government workers and people generally concerned about privacy turn off find-my-phone, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth whenever those services are not needed, as well as limit location data usage by apps. "Location data can be extremely valuable and must be protected," an advisory stated. "It can reveal details about the number of users in a location, user and supply movements, daily routines (user and organizational), and can expose otherwise unknown associations between users and locations." NSA officials acknowledged that geolocation functions are enabled by design and are essential to mobile communications. The officials also admit that the recommended safeguards are impractical for most users. Mapping, location tracking of lost or stolen phones, automatically connecting to Wi-Fi networks, and fitness trackers and apps are just a few of the things that require fine-grained locations to work at all. But these features come at a cost. Adversaries may be able to tap into location data that app developers, advertising services, and other third parties receive from apps and then store in massive databases. Adversaries may also subscribe to services such as those offered by Securus and LocationSmart, two services that The New York Times and KrebsOnSecurity documented, respectively. Both companies either tracked or sold locations of customers collected by the cell towers of major cellular carriers. Not only did LocationSmart leak this data to anyone who knew a simple trick for exploiting a common class of website bug, but a Vice reporter was able to obtain the real-time location of a phone by paying $300 to a different service. The New York Times also published this sobering feature outlining services that use mobile location data to track the histories of millions of people over extended periods. The advisory also warns that tracking often happens even when cellular service is turned off, since both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth can also track locations and beam them to third parties connected to the Internet or with a sensor that's within radio range. Long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shares some of the agency's other recommendations: Enter airplane mode when not using the deviceMinimize web browsing on your device and do not allow browsers to access location servicesUse an anonymous VPNMinimize location information stored in the cloud

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One thing I think we agreed on last night is that people who support Trump do so because he tells them what they want to hear. The truth doesn't enter into it.

I had a little dinner party at my house in the country last night. People do this here. But not in the time of Covid. I haven't had a gathering at my house since last winter, but last night we chanced it. These are lovely people who I speak with them frequently online, but it was so much better to eat and imbibe in person, outside, under the stars. With the animals and bugs. Ideas flowed. We made new jokes, new memes. I promised to do things that I have since forgotten. What I will never forget is how much I enjoyed their company.

Slashdot reader shirappu writes: A study published on June 25th in IEEE Transactions on Multimedia looked at creating an automated program to analyze the movements in video frames and create sound effects to match the scene. In movies and television, this work is called Foley and is considered an important part of crafting the experience, but is also time consuming and sometimes costly. The AI Foley system created in the study works by extracting image features from video frames to determine appropriate SFX. It then analyzes the action taking place in the video, and attempts to synthesize SFX to match what is happening in the video. In a survey where students were shown automated sound effects, 73% though the automated effects were more genuine than the original sound effects. It's worth noting that the automated system performed best when timing was less important (e.g. general weather) versus when timing was key (e.g. typing, thunderstorms).

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Slashdot reader sciencehabit tells the strange story of a 4.5-billion-year-old meteor from "the cold void beyond Jupiter" that sent "blazing fireballs and rocks raining down on farms and fields." On 23 April 2019, a space rock the size of a washing machine broke up in the skies over Aguas Zarcas, a village carved out of Costa Rica's rainforest. The falling fragments, which crashed through roofs and doghouses, set off a frenzy of hunting — for this rare meteorite soon became more valuable than gold. Meteorites are not uncommon: Every year, tens of thousands survive the plunge through Earth's atmosphere. But meteorite falls, witnessed strikes that take their name from where they land, are rare — just 1,196 have been documented. And even among that exclusive group, there was something extraordinary about this particular meteorite: The dull stone was, as far as rocks go, practically alive. Aguas Zarcas, as the fragments would soon collectively be called, is a carbonaceous chondrite, a pristine remnant of the early Solar System. The vast majority of meteorites are lumps of stone or metal. But carbonaceous chondrites are rich in carbon — including organic molecules as complex as amino acids, the building blocks of proteins. They illustrate how chemical reactions in space give rise to complex precursors for life; some scientists even believe rocks like Aguas Zarcas gave life a nudge when they crashed into a barren Earth 4.5 billion years ago.

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"Even with another infusion of cash from Google, you have to wonder just how long Firefox will survive as a viable, mainstream web browser," argues ZDNet contributing editor Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols: I've been using Mozilla's Firefox browser since it was still in beta. In 2004, for a while, it was my favorite web browser. Not because it was open-source, but because it was so much better and more secure than Internet Explorer. That was then. This is now. Firefox is in real danger of dying off... Mozilla and Firefox still produced important work. You need to look no further than the JavaScript, Rust, and WebAssembly languages. They were also champions of security and privacy. Projects such as embracing DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH) and overall security improvements were great, but users didn't care. With the arrival of Google's Chrome browser, users turned from Firefox to Chrome as their favorite browser... Firefox is on its way to irrelevance. Making matters even worse, Mozilla's just had its second round of layoffs... As technology writer Matthew MacDonald put it, "Mozilla "." Firefox's security and development teams have also been hard hit. This is bad. In January. Mitchell Baker, Mozilla Corporation CEO and Mozilla Foundation chairperson, said it let people go because of declining interest in Firefox, and thus reduced earnings, and that Mozilla was looking for more revenue from "sources outside of search" but "this did not happen." It still isn't happening. According to Mozilla's latest annual report, the majority of its revenue is still generated from global browser search partnerships. This includes the deal negotiated with Google in 2017... Baker assured onlookers that Mozilla would "ship new products faster and develop new revenue streams." These include its bookmarking app Pocket; its virtual rooms Hubs; and its $4.99-a-month Firefox VPN. Excuse me if I don't buy any of these new revenue sources.... Firefox will live on in one way or the other. It's open source after all. But Firefox as an important browser, or Mozilla as a significant open-source developer hub? No. I can't see it. Those days are done. Firefox is officially on my endangered species list. Technology writer Matthew MacDonald ended his Medium essay on a more hopeful note. "If you have the skills and time, the best possible support is to join the Mozilla community and contribute to their code base."

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