firehose

The Telegraph reports that European Union police officials are quietly meeting to develop a system that would allow law enforcement to kill any car's engine from a central control facility. The fundamental technology already exists and is deployed with some auto manufacturers — GM, for example, offers "Stolen Vehicle Slowdown" as a service on 2009 and newer OnStar-equipped vehicles — but the goal of the EU effort appears to be a standardized, mandated system that would be controlled directly by police, not by car companies. If pushed through, The Telegraph suggests that it would be required by the end of the decade.

The technology already exists

Reaction to the news has been strongly negative, with one member of British parliament saying that "the price we pay for surrendering our democratic sovereignty is that we are governed by an unaccountable secretive clique." Another questions the liability to governments should the kill switch be triggered accidentally while a car is traveling at highway speeds, potentially causing a crash. Besides the concerns about an invasion of privacy and freedom for law-abiding citizens, it's easy to imagine the potential for catastrophic consequences if the "switch" fell in the wrong hands.

Documents obtained by The Telegraph claim that the technology behind the remote-stop feature has yet to be developed — but considering that automakers have already developed it on their own, it seems unlikely that police would face engineering roadblocks if it ends up being mandated.

Intel's NUC: not just for Windows.

Andrew Cunningham / Aurich Lawson

One of the drawbacks of buying a barebones PC like Intel’s NUC—at least if you’re a Windows user—is that it comes with no operating system. The big PC OEMs get Windows at a steep discount compared to end users, and you’ll have to pay somewhere in the neighborhood of $100 for a full OEM Windows license (and more if you want a retail version with tech support).

The other side of that coin is that barebones PCs can be good for people who aren’t planning on paying for an OS. You can use your favorite Linux distribution on a barebones PC without paying the added cost for some Windows license you have no intention of using.

As a follow-up to our original review, we’ve installed four different Linux distributions to the Haswell NUC to get an idea of what open source enthusiasts can expect to experience when they load up Linux on the hardware. We tried Ubuntu 13.10, Linux Mint 16, and Fedora 20 because of their popularity, and then we loaded up SteamOS to test out its recently acquired Intel graphics support.

Cabe Atwell

Every engineer wants to build a drink-mixing robot according to Cabe Atwell, who turned that dream into reality.

Atwell calls it the "Drinkmotizer," or just "Drinkmo." It was constructed with an Arduino and Raspberry Pi, liquor bottles, power tools, and a lot of dedication.

"I know what you are thinking, 'hey, there are other drink mixing bots out there, what makes this one different?' This one doesn’t break the bank. It’s DIY, Open, expandable. Artistically speaking, It isn’t just a nozzle that sprays alcohol at objects, it uses the actual bottle, and gravity," Atwell wrote in a post on Element14's community site. Atwell also wrote about the project yesterday on DesignNews.

Justin Bieber was famously discovered on YouTube, perhaps the most spectacular example to date of an entertainer parlaying the internet into mainstream popularity — now, a startup headed by a music industry veteran wants to repeat that success using Twitter as a backbone. Lyor Cohen, who cut his teeth at Rush and Def Jam in the 80s and 90s before heading Warner Music Group in the last decade, announced at French music conference Midem this weekend that his new company 300 is working with Twitter to mine millions of tweets in the hopes of finding the next platinum-selling artist.

Twitter gets something out of the deal, too

At its founding last year, Cohen and his team described 300 as a "content company" primed to help artists make their mark — in the age of Twitter, Pinterest, and Vevo, the old notion of a "record label" doesn't quite cover it. While 300's access to Twitter's real-time firehose could help it get a jump on emerging artists, Twitter is getting 300's help curating music data in return, which it'll then be able to sell to artists and other factions in the industry.

Of course, this isn't Twitter's first foray into the business: #music famously fell flat last year after a high-profile launch, but that was a consumer-facing product — the 300 partnership is aimed squarely at labels and artists. It bears some resemblance to the company's recently announced deal with CNN and Dataminr to improve news discovery through the social network, suggesting that the art and science of decoding Twitter's half-billion-plus tweets per day could help pay the bills in the coming years.

Microsoft Research's Andy Wilson demonstrates a 'touch-screen' projector on Joshua Topolsky's back.

Microsoft will aim to make all of its scientific research publicly accessible in a move to spread "the fruits of its research and scholarship as widely as possible." Since its formation in 1992, the research arm of Microsoft has authored or helped author many papers, but this research is often submitted to commercial journals such as Nature. While these journals remain invaluable to the scientific community, in recent years some institutions have begun to establish more open, collaborative workflows, allowing peers to access research without cost or hassle. Under the terms of Microsoft's new policy, which was first reported by Recode, authors are free to publish their work to private journals, but Microsoft will retain the rights to add the research to its open database where possible.

This approach is called Open Science, and it's continuing to rise in popularity. Microsoft notes in a blog post explaining the move that the scientific community is "undoubtedly in the midst of a transition in academic publishing," and the company's sentiments are clearly echoed by pharmaceutical giant Johnson and Johnson, which similarly announced recently it will release clinical trial data through Yale University's Open Data Access Project.

Some journals require a six-month delay before republishing

Yale is one of many US universities to have an Open Science policy, and many journals accommodate simultaneous publishing to open sites. There are some notable holdouts, with Nature, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and others requiring a six-month delay before journals are released elsewhere. Microsoft acknowledges these issues, nothing that there are "nuances to be understood and adjustments to be made," but says it remains "excited and optimistic about the impact that open access will have on scientific discovery."

A question I figured the redditors of Portland could answer best; Would it be considered cruel/frowned upon to take my cat to vet visits by bike? Or in the unlikely event that my cat enjoyed them, to take him on bike rides?

Just a curiosity, thanks people!

Good morning, all! I posted a couple of weeks ago about the cabinet of curiosities-themed art festival I'm running this weekend, Curious Gallery. One of our most anticipated presentations today is on terrariums, and I just got an email first thing this morning from the presenter saying that due to unfortunately circumstances she's unable to attend today.

Is there anybody out there who would be able, willing and even eager to spend noon to one today talking about the basics of Wardian cases and other terrariums, setting up and caring for them at the Lloyd Center Doubletree hotel? Props like plants and substrate samples aren't absolutely necessary, especially on such short notice; we just have people who really want to know how to get started on creating their own terrariums.

Reply or pm me if interested, and many thanks!

ETA: We do have a replacement-yay! Terrarium Talk starts at noon!

Sad to see Backspace go, but with it on the outs is there a similar place where I can go plug in my laptop, work for a bit and maybe play some games without looking like the odd one out?