Can NASA Protect Earth from Catastrophic Asteroid Collisions?
An anonymous reader quotes Qz: NASA is not going to be able to find all the asteroids big enough to cause serious devastation on Earth by 2020 -- or even 2033. Also: For a hypothetical attempt to send a spacecraft to divert an seriously dangerous incoming asteroid, we'll need a ten year heads-up to build it and get it to the asteroid. The good… Read More »
Posted on 23 June 2018 | 4:45 pmAmerica's 'CyberWar' With Foreign Governments Could Get More Aggressive
America's Department of Defense "has quietly empowered the United States Cyber Command to take a far more aggressive approach to defending the nation against cyberattacks, a shift in strategy that could increase the risk of conflict with the foreign states that sponsor malicious hacking groups," reports the New York Times. Long-time Slashdot… Read More »
Posted on 23 June 2018 | 3:37 pmShould Professional Sports Switch To Robot Referees?
Everyone who watches sports spends some amount of time yelling at the umpire or sports referee. For the past few years we've also been shouting, "Replace that ump with a robot!" But is it technically feasible? Is the current level of AI and robotics tech up to the job? This article starts with… Read More »
Posted on 23 June 2018 | 2:34 pmDropbox Open Sources DivANS: a Compression Algorithm In Rust Compiled To WASM
DivANS is a new compression algorithm developed at Dropbox that can be denser than Brotli, 7zip or zstd at the cost of compression and decompression speed. The code uses some of the new vector intrinsics in Rust and is multithreaded. It has a demo running in the browser. One of the new ideas is that it has an… Read More »
Posted on 23 June 2018 | 1:34 pmHappy Birthday Alan Turing! How Modern Technology Could Win WWII In 13 Minutes
A grateful reporter whose father-in-law liberated a concentration camp after D-Day reports on a high-tech team that "accomplished in 13 minutes what took Alan Turing years to do — and at a cost of just $7." "In late 2017, at the Imperial War Museum in London, developers applied modern AI techniques to break the 'unbreakable'… Read More »
Posted on 23 June 2018 | 12:34 pmOracle Plans To Switch Businesses to Subscriptions for Java SE
A reminder for commenters: non-commercial use of Java remains free. An anonymous reader quotes InfoWorld: Oracle has revamped its commercial support program for Java SE (Standard Edition), opting for a subscription model instead of one that has had businesses paying for a one-time perpetual license plus an annual support fee... It is required for… Read More »
Posted on 23 June 2018 | 11:34 am