An anonymous reader quotes the Seattle Times: At an exclusive gathering at a golf resort near Lisbon, the big minds of monetary policy were seriously discussing the risk that artificial intelligence could eliminate jobs on a scale that would dwarf previous waves of technological change. "There is no question we are in an era of people asking, 'Is the Robocalpyse upon us?'" David Autor, a professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told an audience Tuesday that included Mario Draghi, the president of the European Central Bank, James Bullard, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, and dozens of other top central bankers and economists... [A]long with the optimism is a fear that the economic expansion might bypass large swaths of the population, in part because a growing number of jobs could be replaced by computers capable of learning -- artificial intelligence.

Policymakers and economists conceded that they have not paid enough attention to how much technology has hurt the earning power of some segments of society, or planned to address the concerns of those who have lost out... In the past, technical advances caused temporary disruptions but ultimately improved living standards, creating new categories of employment along the way... But artificial intelligence threatens broad categories of jobs previously seen as safe from automation, such as legal assistants, corporate auditors and investment managers. Large groups of people could become obsolete, suffering the same fate as plow horses after the invention of the tractor. "More and more, we are seeing economists saying, 'This time could be different,'âS" said Autor, who presented a paper on the subject that he wrote with Anna Salomons, an associate professor at the Utrecht University School of Economics in the Netherlands.
Ultimately we'll just have to wait and see, Autor concluded. "I say not Robocalpyse now. Perhaps Robocalpyse later."

An anonymous reader quotes Neowin's report on the newest browser-usage figures from NetMarketShare: Microsoft Edge only commands a market share of 5.65% -- which is an increase of only 0.02 percentage points compared to last month... it only grew by 0.56% year-over-year. On the other hand, Google Chrome has continued its dominance with a market share of 59.49%. As a point of reference, this is a sizeable growth of 10.84 percentage points year-over-year... Data from another firm, StatCounter, depicts an even more depressing situation for Microsoft. According to the report, Edge sits at 3.89%... Chrome is the king of all browsers according to these statistics as well, with a market share of 63.21% -- a decrease of 0.14 percentage points compared to last month. Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Safari command 14%, 9.28%, and 5.16% respectively.
The firm also calculates that when it comes to desktop operating systems, Windows has 91.51% of all users, followed by MacOS at 6.12 and Linux at 2.36%.

Thursday Lproven (Slashdot reader #6030) wrote: It appears that Ubuntu is using a feature it has added -- intended to insert headlines of breaking tech news (security alerts and so on) into the Message of the Day displayed at login to the console -- to display advertising and promotional messages.
The message in question linked to a Hacker Noon article titled "How HBO's Silicon Valley built 'Not Hotdog' with mobile TensorFlow, Keras & React Native." Later that day Dustin Kirkland, a Ubuntu Product Manager for the feature's design (and the Core Developer for its implementation) suggested the message had been mistaken for an ad, describing it on Hacker News as a "fun fact... an interesting tidbit of potpourri from the world of Ubuntu," and later saying it was intended like Google's doodles. "Last week's message actually announced an Ubuntu conference in Latin America. The week before, we linked to an article asking for feedback on Kubuntu. Before that, we announced the availability of Extended Security Maintenance updates for 12.04. And so on." He later confirmed Canonical received no money for the message, and also pointed out that the messages all come from an open source repository, and "You're welcome to propose your own messages for merging, if you have a well formatted, informative message for Ubuntu users."

Click through for a condensed version of the complete response by Dustin Kirkland, Ubuntu Product and Strategy at Canonical.

An anonymous reader quotes Computerworld: Ruby has had a reputation as a user-friendly language for building web applications. But its slippage in this month's RedMonk Programming Language Rankings has raised questions about where exactly the language stands among developers these days. The twice-yearly RedMonk index ranked Ruby at eighth, the lowest position ever for the language. "Swift and now Kotlin are the obvious choices for native mobile development. Go, Rust, and others are clearer modern choices for infrastructure," said RedMonk analyst Stephen O'Grady. "The web, meanwhile, where Ruby really made its mark with Rails, is now an aggressively competitive and crowded field." Although O'Grady noted that Ruby remains "tremendously popular," participants on sites such as Hacker News and Quora have increasingly questioned whether Ruby is dying. In the Redmonk rankings, Ruby peaked at fourth place in 2013, reinforcing the perception it is in decline, if a slow one.

schwit1 quotes Futurity: The plane of our solar system is warped in the outer reaches of the Kuiper Belt, suggesting the presence of an unknown Mars-to-Earth-mass planetary object far beyond Pluto -- but much closer than Planet Nine. An unknown, unseen "planetary mass object" may lurk in the outer reaches of our solar system, according to new research on the orbits of minor planets.

The object would be different from -- and much closer than -- the so-called Planet Nine, a planet whose existence has yet to be confirmed... "The most likely explanation for our results is that there is some unseen mass," says Kat Volk, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory and lead author of the study in the Astronomical Journal. "According to our calculations, something as massive as Mars would be needed to cause the warp that we measured."

Long-time Slashdot reader walterbyrd shared an article from the BBC: The most extensive study to date on neonicotinoid pesticides concludes that they harm both honeybees and wild bees. Researchers said that exposure to the chemicals left honeybee hives less likely to survive over winter, while bumblebees and solitary bees produced fewer queens. The study spanned 2,000 hectares across the UK, Germany and Hungary and was set up to establish the "real-world" impacts of the pesticides... A growing number of studies have found evidence of a link between neonicotinoids and problems for bees... Data from this study has now been submitted to the European Food Standards Agency. EFSA's report on neonicotinoids in 2013 sparked Europe's temporary ban, and it is now preparing another comprehensive assessment to be released in November.
The BBC adds that "Bayer, a major producer of neonicotinoids which part-funded this study, said the findings were inconclusive and that it remained convinced the pesticides were not bad for bees."

An anonymous reader quotes VentureBeat: GitHub wants to help more people become open source contributors with a new initiative called Open Source Friday. As the name implies, the program encourages companies to set aside time at the end of the week for their employees to work on open source projects. It's designed to bolster the ranks of open source contributors at a time when many businesses rely on freely available projects for mission-critical applications. Open Source Friday isn't just about getting businesses to offer their employees' time as a form of charity, it's also a way to improve key business infrastructure, according to Mike McQuaid, a senior software engineer at GitHub...

McQuaid hopes that carving out employees' time on Fridays could help provide additional structure and incentive to participate in the ecosystem... Users don't need to be engineers in order to take part, either. While code contribution is important to the success of a project, creating and maintaining documentation is also key.
OpenSourceFriday.com includes tips for interested contributors, as well as a page suggesting to employers that they could see benefits like developers learning to code faster, better, and more transparently.

Long-time Slashdot reader Giant Robot writes: Google Brain's latest experiment is a neural network that allows you to collaboratively draw with it inside of your web browser in real-time. The neural network is trained using the drawings collected from an earlier web game called Quick, Draw! released a few months earlier.
"Once you stop doodling, the neural network takes over and attempts to guess the rest of your doodle," explains Google's page about the project, adding "You can take over drawing again and continue where you left off."

DogDude shares an article from CBS News: The science division of the White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy was unstaffed as of Friday as the three remaining employees departed this week, sources tell CBS News... On Friday afternoon, Eleanor Celeste, the assistant director for biomedical and forensic sciences at the OSTP, tweeted, "Science division out. Mic drop" before leaving the office for the last time...

Under Mr. Obama, the science division was staffed with nine employees who led the charge on policy issues such as STEM education, biotechnology and crisis response. It's possible that the White House will handle these issues through staff in other divisions within the OSTP.

An anonymous reader quotes Newsweek's latest story about fidget spinners: In a development that now seems like it was inevitable, the three-pronged toys are starting to catch on fire. Gizmodo on Thursday pointed to two recent instances of Bluetooth-enabled fidget spinners going up in flames while they were charging. In Alabama, a fidget spinner owned by the son of Gardendale woman Kimberly Allums caught fire after being plugged in for less than 45 minutes. In Fenton, Michigan, Michelle Carr said her spinner started smoking after charging for less than half an hour. "He noticed that it burst into flames and he just started screaming," said Allums of her son and his spinner. "I was downstairs and all I heard was 'fire...fire,' and the fidget spinner had literally, It wasn't smoking, It was in flames"... The fidget spinners in question were Bluetooth-enabled so that they could light up and play music as they spun.
Friday CNET ran a column titled "Fidget spinners exploding? Of course they are." It concludes with a warning that "if you choose a powered off-brand tech item, you better pay close attention when you plug it in."

Templer421 shares an article from National Review: A new study by Environmental Progress warns that toxic waste from used solar panels now poses a global environmental threat. The Berkeley-based group found that solar panels create 300 times more toxic waste per unit of energy than nuclear-power plants. Discarded solar panels, which contain dangerous elements such as lead, chromium, and cadmium, are piling up around the world, and there's been little done to mitigate their potential danger to the environment. "We talk a lot about the dangers of nuclear waste, but that waste is carefully monitored, regulated, and disposed of," says Michael Shellenberger, founder of Environmental Progress, a nonprofit that advocates for the use of nuclear energy. "But we had no idea there would be so many panels -- an enormous amount -- that could cause this much ecological damage." Solar panels are considered a form of toxic, hazardous electronic or "e-waste," and according to EP researchers Jemin Desai and Mark Nelson, scavengers in developing countries like India and China often "burn the e-waste in order to salvage the valuable copper wires for resale. Since this process requires burning off plastic, the resulting smoke contains toxic fumes that are carcinogenic and teratogenic (birth defect-causing) when inhaled."
A spokesman for the Solar Energy Industries Association argues that the study is incorrect, and that in fact solar panels are "mainly made up of easy-to-recycle materials that can be successfully recovered and reused at the end of their useful life."

schwit1 shares an article from ZDNet: A new analysis of documents leaked by whistleblower Edward Snowden details a highly classified technique that allows the National Security Agency to "deliberately divert" U.S. internet traffic, normally safeguarded by constitutional protections, overseas in order to conduct unrestrained data collection on Americans. According to the new analysis, the NSA has clandestine means of "diverting portions of the river of internet traffic that travels on global communications cables," which allows it to bypass protections put into place by Congress to prevent domestic surveillance on Americans.

The new findings follow a 2014 paper by researchers Axel Arnbak and Sharon Goldberg, published on sister-site CBS News, which theorized that the NSA, whose job it is to produce intelligence from overseas targets, was using a "traffic shaping" technique to route US internet data overseas so that it could be incidentally collected under the authority of a largely unknown executive order... The research cites several ways the NSA is actively exploiting methods to shape and reroute internet traffic -- many of which are well-known in security and networking circles -- such as hacking into routers or using the simpler, less legally demanding option of forcing major network providers or telecoms firms into cooperating and diverting traffic to a convenient location.

An anonymous reader writes: Friday technology investor Dave McClure tweeted a link to a statement from the new CEO of the start-up incubator he co-founded which announces his demotion after engaging in "inappropriate interactions with women in the tech community." The new CEO of 500 Startups says "I sincerely apologize for the choices he made and the pain and stress they've caused people. But apologies aren't enough without meaningful actions and change. Because of this, we made the decision a few months ago to change the leadership structure at 500." Meanwhile, McClure will attend counseling "to work on changing his perspectives and preventing his previous unacceptable behavior... As much as we want to be part of the solution, we clearly have also been part of the problem."

The same day more than two dozen female entrepreneurs told the New York Times about incidents of sexual harassment in the start-up industry, "often providing corroborating messages and emails." Several women told the Times they were warned that saying anything might lead to ostracism. Chris Sacca -- whose firm invested in Twitter, Uber, Instagram, Twilio, and Kickstarter -- told the Times he was grateful for the courage of the female entrepreneur who told the Times how he'd propositioned her, and Sacca also wrote in a post on Medium, "I've learned that it's often the less obvious, yet pervasive and questionable, everyday behaviors of men in our industry that collectively make it inhospitable for women... It's the unrelenting, day-to-day culture of dismissiveness that creates a continually bleak environment for women and other underrepresented groups." The article also notes that Justin Caldbeck -- accused by six different founders of making unwanted advances -- worked at three different VC firms over the last seven years. The Times also cites a 2014 admission by investor Pavel Curda that he sent two women text messages asking for sex after a networking event, adding "The new accounts underscore how sexual harassment in the tech start-up ecosystem goes beyond one firm and is pervasive and ingrained."

As trust and familiarity with sharing economy services continues to grow, so too will the number of users, estimates marketing research firm eMarketer. From the article: Over a quarter (26.0%) of US adult internet users -- or 56.5 million people -- will use a sharing economy service at least once in 2017. This is a higher figure than previously projected due to stronger-than-expected uptake of both ride- and home-sharing services. This year, 16.9% of US adult internet users are expected to use their Airbnb account at least once, equating to 36.8 million people.

"If you don't feel rejuvenated and keen to face Monday after two work-free days, there might be a reason: You're doing your weekend wrong," an anonymous reader writes, citing a Quartz article. From the article: According to University of Calgary sociologist Robert Stebbins, most leisure falls into two categories: casual and serious. Casual leisure pursuits are short lived, immediately gratifying, and often passive; they include activities like drinking, online shopping, and binge-watching. These diversions provide instant hedonic pleasure -- quite literally, actually, as all these pastimes cause the brain to release dopamine and provide instant soothing comfort. In a culture where many people exist all week in an amped-up, overworked state, casual weekend leisure easily becomes the default for quick decompression.

But serious leisure is a far more beneficial pursuit. Serious leisure activities provide deeper fulfillment, and -- to invoke a fuzzy '70s word -- "self-actualization." Self-actualization is the pinnacle of human development, according to humanist psychologist Abraham Maslow, who describes it as "the desire to become more and more what one is, to become everything that one is capable of becoming." In other words, getting self-actualized is the whole point of life, and passive, hedonistic leisure (fun and occasionally necessary as it might be) won't get you there. Instead, the weekend goal should be "eudaimonic" happiness, which is a sense of well-being that arises from meaningful, challenging activities that cause you to grow as a person. This means spending the weekend on serious leisure activities that require the regular refinement of skills: your barbershop-quartet singing, your stamp collecting, or slightly less dorky, but still equally in-depth, projects. You pursue serious leisure with the earnest tenor of a professional, even if the pursuit is amateur.