An anonymous reader quotes Business Insider: An ambitious project that purported to turn anyone into a farmer with a single tool is scraping by with smoke-and-mirror tactics, employees told Business Insider. The "personal food computer," a device that MIT Media Lab senior researcher Caleb Harper presented as helping thousands of people across the globe grow custom, local food, simply doesn't work, according to two employees and multiple internal documents that Business Insider viewed. One person asked not to be identified for fear of retaliation...

Ahead of big demonstrations with MIT Media Lab funders, staff were told to place plants grown elsewhere into the devices, the insiders said. In other instances, devices delivered to local schools simply didn't work. "It's fair to say that of the 30-ish food computers we sent out, at most two grew a plant," one person said...
One worker told the site that at one school the students "would joke that the plants they were growing in plastic cups were growing better than the ones in the personal food computers."

That pilot program "ended shortly thereafter."

Microsoft's 2019 summer interns have created Microsoft: the Musical, an 8-minute video whose director describes it as "a Tony Awards-style musical theater opening number."

Long-time Slashdot reader Your Average Joe shared the Verge's article about the video: 150 full-time employees and interns at Microsoft have volunteered their mornings, weekends, and nights to create a Microsoft musical video. The video was shot in various buildings at Microsoft's corporate campus in Redmond, Washington and it features interns and staff members singing and dancing about how it's "all happening here."

It starts off with a section about co-founder Bill Gates, before some classic lines like "all around the world our products are well known, except for when we tried to make a phone!" The musical even briefly acknowledges the company missing a beat with Vista, and features former CEO Steve Ballmer's famous "developers, developers, developers" chant.
The video's description on YouTube says the music is "coming soon" to Apple's iTunes store as well as Spotify.

Directed by one of Microsoft's data science interns, it opens with a narrator remembering that "There once was a lad whose eyesight was bad, but his vision was crystal clear. He looked a line that was clearly defined and declined to align by its rigid design." (Was that a reference to the antitrust case Microsoft settled in 2001?) A later lyric emphasizes that "more than plain old gadgets is the gall that makes the magic..."

The narrator then introduces a woman with a book as Bill Gates, explaining to her that "These days, Bill Gates is more of an idea."

I think it's appalling that there's absolutely no mention of recently-deceased Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. (Although they found room for a tongue-in-cheek reference to "Clippy's strength of will.") But among other things, this whole video project really begs the question: what else did they leave out about Microsoft?

"This was a Wayne's World scene gone awry..." says an attorney for 23-year-old Andrew Harris. "They were Wayne and Garth in a blue Pacer with a dumb idea and a mixed run of luck," he told the Philadelphia Inquirer: Harris previously had filed an application for federal student aid, and noticed that the government form would redirect to the IRS and import his own tax returns automatically. Harris and his fellow classmate Justin Hiemstra wondered: What would happen if they posed as one of Trump's offspring? Could they use an application for aid to land the returns and scoop the nation's biggest newspapers? Tiffany Trump had graduated in May 2016 from the University of Pennsylvania and had announced she was going to graduate school at Georgetown University. It could work.

Six days before the 2016 election, Harris and Hiemstra went to Haverford College's computer lab and logged in using another student's credentials. They accessed a Free Application for Student Aid (FAFSA). When they attempted to register under the name of Trump's child, they were stunned to discover an application under that name already existed. Using Google, they successfully guessed most of the answers to a series of challenge questions to reset the password. Stymied four times on one of the security questions, they gave up.

What they didn't realize was that the Department of Education was monitoring all traffic on the FAFSA site. The failed attempt sent up a red flag. The IRS dispatched federal investigators to Haverford shortly after.
Last month Pulitzer Prize-winning tax journalist David Cay Johnston told the paper "It's surprising they didn't catch them until four tries." They also reported that while Harris was expelled from the college, 22-year-old Hiemstra was allowed to graduate, and both men have pleaded guilty to accessing a computer without authorization and attempting to access a computer without authorization to obtain government information.

When sentenced in December, they'll face a maximum of two years in prison, two years of supervised release, and a $200,000 fine.

"A Boston study published this month suggests people who tend to be optimistic are likelier than others to live to be 85 years old or more," reports NPR: That finding was independent of other factors thought to influence life's length -- such as "socioeconomic status, health conditions, depression, social integration, and health behaviors," the researchers from Boston University School of Medicine and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health say... The study included 69,744 women and 1,429 men. Both groups completed survey measures to assess their level of optimism, as well as their overall health and health habits such as diet, smoking and alcohol use.

In the survey, study participants were asked if they agreed with statements such as "in uncertain times I usually expect the best" or "I usually expect to succeed in things that I do." Health outcomes from women in the study were tracked for 10 years, while the men's health was followed for 30 years. Researchers found that the most optimistic men and women demonstrated, on average, an 11-15% longer lifespan, and had far greater odds of reaching 85 years old, compared to the least optimistic group.

Inside Edition filmed a 10-minute segment with safety expert Steve Kardian to answer the question, "What Will Happen if You Try to Storm Area 51." More than 2 million people have marked themselves as "attending" a Facebook event called "Storm Area 51, They Can't Stop Us" on Sept. 20. An additional 1.5 million people have expressed interest in attending, according to the page. But attendees should be prepared for an impenetrable Air Force facility, complete with guards armed with M4-type weapons, night-vision goggles and surface-to-air missiles, said Kardian, who's been in law enforcement for 33 years and has trained Navy SEALs and other military personnel.

"[Visitors are] going to have real trouble the minute they get within 100 yards of the facility," he said. Any closer, "you would likely be approached by a good number of individuals with guns pointed at you, with weaponry, screaming at you to get down on the ground...." Even if you did breach the perimeter and get past the armed guards, you would likely have to cross 50 miles before reaching anything top secret, Kardian said, and "the majority will not be visible from the ground."
Their report notes that the penalty for trespassing on a military base is 6 months in prison, a $500 fine, or both. But Vice reports that the joke Facebook event "has now spurred three supposedly real festivals over the weekend of September 20" -- Alienstock, Peacestock51, and Storm Area 51 Basecamp. "As was reported previously, the local population of Rachel, Nevada is not too thrilled about Alienstock.

In fact, the town's official web site now includes a complaint about "haphazard attempts" by the local bar to put together an event, adding "Locals are not kept in the loop and they certainly are not happy about this event that is likely to bring chaos to Rachel. "Law enforcement will be overwhelmed and local residents will step up to protect their property. It could get ugly. Please consider visiting our town another time."

"As we've discussed in the past, old people are some of the only video game streamers worth watching," writes the AV Club: Filled with the wisdom that comes from age, seniors are the necessary corrective to Twitch and YouTube channels currently dominated by excitable whippersnappers. Fortunately, as outlined in a piece NBC's Kalhan Rosenblatt that explores this world, video games are gaining popularity among the elderly. The piece references a study that found "38 percent of Americans age 50 and older said they play video games" and looks at those who belong to this demographic.... Our old pal, the Skyrim-loving Shirley Curry pops up, too, when Rosenblatt gets into the seniors who stream games or upload videos of what they're playing online. Curry, who is 83, has "more than 700,000 subscribers on YouTube," and refers to her viewers as "grandkids," is mentioned alongside 66-year-old Twitch streamer GrandpaGaming (AKA Will R.). He streams games that include PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds and Apex Legends, uploading highlights that show him kicking the ass of other players who, when their age is compared to his, are probably quite literal noobs.

c Rosenblatt mentions the social benefits of video games as well as studies that show how, "with their complex controls and fast pace" they provide "a mental workout for seniors" that could help "delay or slow the onset of degenerative neurological diseases, such as Alzheimer's or other forms of dementia." This means that, aside from providing a subgenre of game streams that are far more entertaining than the usual, these seniors are potentially improving their health as well.

An anonymous reader quotes the lead consumer technology writer for the New York Times: I'm neither a Luddite nor a cheapskate. But after testing hundreds of tech products -- and buying some along the way -- over the last dozen years, I've come to a conclusion: People will almost always get more joy from technology the longer they wait for it to mature. [Alternate URL here.] Cutting-edge gadgets can invoke awe and temptation, but being an early adopter involves risk, and the downsides usually outweigh the benefits.

Keep this in mind when, starting next month, we enter the end-of-the-year tech frenzy. That's when companies like Apple, Samsung and Google will try to woo us with hot new gadgets, including premium smartphones, tablets and wearable computers... [M]y default recommendation is to resist hitting the "Buy" button and to wait unless you absolutely need to replace your older tech. "New doesn't always necessarily mean better, or better in ways that will matter," said Nick Guy, a senior staff writer for Wirecutter, a New York Times company that tests products.
He remembers paying $600 for an original iPhone in 2007 -- only to watch the price drop to $200 within six months.

AmiMoJo quote the Verge: At least three smart June Ovens have turned on in the middle of the night and heated up to 400 degrees Fahrenheit or higher. The ovens' owners aren't sure why this happened, and June tells The Verge that user error is at fault...

The June Oven debuted in 2015 as a $1,495 countertop oven that uses a camera and computer vision to identify food that's been placed inside. The company raised nearly $30 million in funding and released its second-generation version in 2018 for $599. It's billed as "seven appliances in one": an air fryer, dehydrator, slow cooker, broiler, toaster, warming drawer, and convection countertop oven. It also pairs with an app that allows people to choose their temperature and cooking settings, as well as live stream their food as it cooks thanks to the built-in camera.
The company is planning an update that'll hopefully remedy the situation and prevent it from happening again, but that change isn't coming until next month.

In just 16 days XKCD author Randall Munroe releases a new book titled How To: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems. He's just released an excerpt from the chapter "How to Catch a Drone," in which he actually enlisted the assistance of tennis star Serena Williams.

An anonymous reader writes: Serena and her husband Alexis just happened to have a DJI Mavic Pro 2 with a broken camera -- and Munroe asked her to try to smash it with tennis balls. "My tentative guess was that a champion player would have an accuracy ratio around 50 when serving, and take 5-7 tries to hit a drone from 40 feet. (Would a tennis ball even knock down a drone? Maybe it would just ricochet off and cause the drone to wobble! I had so many questions.)

"Alexis flew the drone over the net and hovered there, while Serena served from the baseline..."

His blog has the rest of the story, and Munroe has even illustrated the experiment, promising that the book also contains additional anti-drone strategies, an analysis of other sports projectiles, and "a discussion with a robot ethicist about whether hitting a drone with a tennis ball is wrong."

Long-time Slashdot reader shanen writes: Imagine you had a perfect chair for using your computer. Also a perfect chair for watching TV. And a chair for listening to music, a chair for reading, a chair for napping, a work chair that keeps you awake, and a perfect chair for dinner. Also a massage chair and a diagnostic chair that checks your temperature, pulse, and blood pressure. Is your house full of chairs yet? Wait! what about your spouse's perfect chairs? Need a bigger house?

What if you had one chair that could be all nine of those chairs? What if you could teach the super-smart modular chair to be more chairs, too? That's what I want, plus the voodoo chair controller to manipulate and teach the slightly deformable triangular modules (in two or three sizes) that would form all of the virtual chairs for the current real chair.

Anyway, this story ticks me off because I sent that idea to a couple of companies, including IKEA. I'm still waiting. Not holding my breath.
That article shows Ikea promising a new "smart homes" unit -- but with no mention of investments in wondrous smart chair technologies.

So the original submission ends by asking how we can bring about such a smart chair revolution?

Late Christmas Eve, 1966, a retired British army major named Paddy Roy Bates piloted a motorboat seven miles off the coast of England to an abandoned anti-aircraft platform "and declared it conquered," writes Pulitzer Prize-winning author Ian Urbina.

Bates used it as a pirate radio station, sometimes spending several months there while living on tins of corned beef, rice pudding, flour, and scotch. But then he declared it to be the world's tiniest maritime nation, writes Urbina, adding that in the half-century to come, "Sealand" was destined to become "a thumb in the eye of international law." Though no country formally recognizes Sealand, its sovereignty has been hard to deny. Half a dozen times, the British government and assorted other groups, backed by mercenaries, have tried and failed to take over the platform by force. In virtually every instance, the Bates family scared them off by firing rifles in their direction, tossing gasoline bombs, dropping cinder blocks onto their boats, or pushing their ladders into the sea. Britain once controlled a vast empire over which the sun never set, but it's been unable to control a rogue micronation barely bigger than the main ballroom in Buckingham Palace.... In recent years, its permanent citizenry has dwindled to one person: a full-time guard named Michael Barrington...

In the decades since its establishment, Sealand has been the site of coups and countercoups, hostage crises, a planned floating casino, a digital haven for organized crime, a prospective base for WikiLeaks, and myriad techno-fantasies, none brought successfully to fruition, many powered by libertarian dreams of an ocean-based nation beyond the reach of government regulation, and by the mythmaking creativity of its founding family. I had to go there.
The article also acknowledges the Seasteading Institute founded by Google software engineer Patri Friedman and backed by Peter Thiel -- as well as the idea of offshore-but-online services in Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon and Google's real-world plans for offshore data centers cooling their servers with seawater.

Urbina also tells the story of HavenCo, a grand plan for a Sealand-based data empire which ultimately had trouble powering their servers, alienating their gambling-industry customers with frequent outages. And in addition, one of the Bates' family says that "we also didn't see eye to eye with the computer guys about what sort of clients we were willing to host" -- and they objected to plans to illegally rebroadcast DVDs.

"For all their daring, the Bates family was wary of antagonizing the British and upsetting their delicately balanced claim to sovereignty."

The article is adapted from Urbina's upcoming book The Outlaw Ocean: Journeys Across the Last Untamed Frontier (to be released Tuesday).

option8 ((Slashdot reader #16,509) writes: TL;DR: Mining Bitcoin on a 1MHz 8-bit processor will cost you more than the world's combined economies, and take roughly 256 trillion years.
"But it could happen tomorrow. It's a lottery, after all," explains the blog post (describing this mad scientist as a hardware hacker and "self-taught maker", determined to mine bitcoin "in what must be the slowest possible way. I call it 8BITCOIN....")

There's also a Twitch.TV stream, with some appropriate 8-bit music, and the blog post ends by including his own bitcoin address, "If you feel like you absolutely must throw some money at me and this project."

"Upon doing some research, I found that, not only were other 8-bit platforms being put to the task, but other, even more obscure and outdated hardware. An IBM 1401 from the 1960s, a rebuilt Apollo Guidance Computer, and even one deranged individual who demonstrated the hashing algorithm by hand. It turns out, those examples all come from the same deranged individual, Ken Shirriff."

Long-time Slashdot reader Ken McE shared a video of a new working prototype for a wearable tail.

Engadget reports: There are lots of companies who make wearable tails for humans, but they're usually for cosplay or other entertainment pursuits. Researchers at Keio University in Japan have created a wearable animated tail that promises to genuinely augment the wearer's capabilities -- not just appearance -- by improving their balance and agility.

The easiest way to understand what inspired this creation is to watch a video of monkeys effortlessly leaping from tree to tree. Their tails not only serve as an additional limb for grasping branches but also help them reposition their bodies mid-flight for a safe landing by shifting the monkey's center of balance as it moves. The Arque tail, as it's been named, does essentially the same thing for humans, although leaping from the highest branches of a tree isn't recommended just yet.... Inside the tail are a set of four artificial muscles powered by compressed air that contract and expand in different combinations to move and curl the tail in any direction.
Though the researchers have built a prototype, their video describes it as a "proposed tail" -- specifically, an artificial biomimicry-inspired anthropomorphic one. So how exactly would the tail controlled externally? The video describes its ability "to passively provide forces to the user's body based on the estimated center of gravity of his posture in order to correct his body balance." So basically, the tail would have a mind of its own, like the arms of Doctor Octopus?

"We also demonstrated a different approach for using the tail other than equilibrium maintenance, which is to change the center of mass of the user to off-balance his posture."

Long-time Slashdot reader Huxley_Dunsany writes: After much work rebuilding and upgrading it, my Macintosh SE/30 from 1989 is now connected via Ethernet to the Web, and is hosting a simple website and old-style "guestbook." The site has been online for a few days (other than semi-frequent reboots of the system when it gets overloaded with requests), and has served nearly 20,000 visitors. For a machine with a 16MHz CPU and 68 megabytes of ram, it's held up remarkably well!

I'm basically inviting a "Slashdotting" of my old Mac, but I thought this project might bring a few smiles here. Enjoy!
"Awesome," wrote one visitor in the guestbook, adding "You should join a webring!"

An anonymous reader quotes The Verge: Cybersecurity stock images are predictable at this point: a hooded man with a shadowy face in front of a keyboard or a mysterious person in front of binary code. A design firm called OpenIDEO thinks these images can be better, so it's hosting a contest to entice visual creators to make images that are eye-catching, informative, and clear.

"Cybersecurity," which could mean data breaches, hacks, or policy changes, is a difficult concept to visually represent, so OpenIDEO is going to reward creators for their work. The group, in association with a private organization called the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, issued an open call late last month for cybersecurity-related image submissions with plans to award $7,000 to up to five people.
The contest rules specify they're not looking for "Overused, stereotypical, fear-inducing images of cybersecurity. These create personal misperceptions and aversions, and may lead to a series of repercussions regarding public understanding of cybersecurity and data safety." And there's even a helpful collection of images providing examples of "What we're not looking for."

The deadline for submissions in August 16th, and all finalists must agree to using a Creative Commons license. "We believe that this type of licensing helps ensure your work reaches the widest possible audience..."

By the end of the year, Stop & Shop will have installed 500 "giant, gray, aisle-patrolling robots" in its chains of stores, reports Mashable, starting in Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and New Jersey.

"Attention shoppers: I've seen the future of grocery store technology, and let me tell you, we can do better." Each of the robots weighs a massive 140-pounds and costs a whopping $35,000. Oddly, all of the robots are named Marty, and atop their tall frames -- which tower over my own 5 foot, 3 inch stature -- rests a large pair of google eyes. You know, so as not to come off as complete faceless, emotionless, lifeless bots. If you're confused as to what these rolling mechanical columns do, Martys also wear the following description on their bodies like a name tag:

This store is monitored by Marty for your safety. Marty is an autonomous robot that uses image capturing technology to report spills, debris, and other potential hazards to store employees to improve your shopping experience.

Essentially, once Marty identifies a hazard using its sensors, it stops in its tracks, changes its signature operating lights from blue to yellow, and repeatedly announces "caution, hazard detected," in English and Spanish. One of several catches to their existence, however, is that the robots don't actually clean anything...

[O]ne of the robot's major flaws that its sensors appear to treat each hazard with the same level of caution. A harmless bottle cap or errant piece of cilantro will elicit the same response as a spill of clear liquid that someone could genuinely slip and injure themselves on, which means that in certain cases an employee may have to take time that could be spent interacting with a customer to walk across the store and grab a puny little grape that escaped a bag.
One customer complained on Twitter that the robot "just roams around and makes ominous beeps constantly."

And one employee confided told the New Food Economy site that "It's really not doing much of anything besides getting in the way."

An anonymous reader quotes the New York Post: John McAfee of antivirus software fame has arrived in London from the Dominican Republic, where he had been detained for several days with his wife and several others for entering the Caribbean nation with a cache of weapons on his yacht, his lawyer said Friday. Authorities "asked him where he wanted to go, and he decided on London," his attorney Candido Simon told Reuters....

While in custody, McAfee retweeted a photo posted by his wife of himself sitting shirtless in a cell... [And another shirtless photo with his cellmate.] "My crime is not filing tax returns -- not a crime. The rest is propaganda by the U.S. government to silence me..." he wrote in a July 19 tweet.
In fact, McAfee now "is laying the blame on the CIA and 'an extremely corrupt Bahamian official,'" CNET reports.

McAfee "confessed in a tweetstorm earlier this year that he hasn't paid the IRS in eight years," reports the New York Daily News, adding that this week McAfee was "essentially deported" to London. "He previously fled to Guatemala from Belize when he was sought for questioning concerning the murder of a neighbor, Reuters previously reported." Earlier this month, Reuters also reported that McAfee had again fled to Cuba "after suspecting that U.S. law enforcement was trying to extradite him from the Bahamas."

CNET also quotes McAfee as saying that he now wants to run simultaneous campaigns to be both president of the United States and Prime Minister of England. "I believe I am one of the few people stil alive who could qualify for the combined position."

An anonymous reader quotes the New York Post: The National Weather Service in Omaha, Nebraska, baked biscuits in a car Friday amid a major heat wave in the Northeast and Midwest... Within 45 minutes, the dough had begun to rise, the NWS said. After an hour, the pan had reached 175 degrees, and the tops of the biscuits were at 153 degrees.

"This is a good time to remind everyone that your car does in fact get deadly hot. Look before you lock!," the NWS said... After baking in the sun for nearly eight hours, the biscuits were edible, but the middle remained "pretty doughy." The pan maxed out at a blazing 185 degrees.

An anonymous reader quotes the Atlantic: Suze Orman wants young people to stop "peeing" away millions of dollars on coffee. Last month, the personal-finance celebrity ignited a controversy on social media when a video she starred in for CNBC targeted a familiar villain: kids these days and their silly $5 lattes. Because brewing coffee at home is less expensive, Orman argued, purchasing it elsewhere is tantamount to flushing money away, which makes it a worthy symbol of Millennials' squandered resources...

In the face of coffee shaming, young people usually point to things like student loans and housing prices as the true source of the generation's instability, not their $100-a-month cold-brew habits... Orman and her compatriots now receive widespread pushback when denigrating coffee aficionados, a change that reflects the shifting intergenerational tensions that are frequently a feature of the post-Great Recession personal-finance genre. The industry posits that many of the sweeping generational trends affecting Americans' personal stability -- student-loan debt, housing insecurity, the precarity of the gig economy -- are actually the fault of modernity's encouragement of undisciplined individual largesse. In reality, those phenomena are largely the province of Baby Boomers, whose policies set future generations on a much tougher road than their own. With every passing year, it becomes harder to sell the idea that the problems are simply with each American as a person, instead of with the system they live in. "There's a reason for this blame-the-victim talk" in personal-finance advice, the journalist Helaine Olen wrote recently. "It lets society off the hook. Instead of getting angry at the economics of our second gilded age, many end up furious with themselves."

That misdirection is useful for people in power, including self-help gurus who want to sell books... [W]hen it comes to money, says Laura Vanderkam, the author of All the Money in the World: What the Happiest People Know About Getting and Spending, there are usually only a couple of things that actually make a difference in how stable people are. It's the big stuff: how much you make, how much you pay for housing, whether or not you pay for a car.

"The World Chess Federation (FIDE) announced Saturday that it caught chess grandmaster Igors Rausis cheating during a tournament in France," writes Bleacher Report. According to ESPN.com, the FIDE noted that Rausis was "caught red-handed using his phone during a game." A cellphone was found in a toilet that Rausis had used during the competition, and Rausis later admitted to using it to cheat.

Per Chess.com, Rausis said the following regarding the scandal: "I simply lost my mind yesterday. I confirmed the fact of using my phone during the game by written [statement]. What could I say more? ... At least what I committed yesterday is a good lesson, not for me -- I played my last game of chess already...."

The 58-year-old Rausis was born in the Soviet Union and currently represents the Czech Republic after previously representing Latvia and Bangladesh. Rausis became a grandmaster in 1992, and he is the No. 53 ranked chess player in the world, according to the FIDE.
It's not the first time this has happened. A Georgian national chess champion was also found to be cheating with an iPhone hidden in a toilet stall more than four years ago. But in this case, "The 58-year-old Latvian-Czech grandmaster had raised suspicions after he increased his rating in recent years to almost 2700," reports Chess.com.

The director-general of the FIDE said they've now reported Rausis to the French police, and that they'd been suspicious of him for a long time. "It is impossible to completely eliminate the cheating, but the risk of being caught has increased significantly, and the penalties will become much more significant."