Cable industry lobbyists have urged the Federal Communications Commission to avoid regulating data caps and overage charges, comparing broadband plans to restaurant menus in a filing last week. NCTA - The Internet & Television Association argued that usage-based pricing benefits low-income consumers by providing cheaper options, pushing back against advocacy groups who say data caps disproportionately harm price-sensitive users. The group likened different pricing models to restaurants offering tasting menus, buffets, or unlimited soup and salad. Consumer advocates, including Public Knowledge and Free Press, countered that low-income households often have no choice but to accept data caps since lower-priced plans typically include usage limits. They cited examples of users like Gloria Simmons, a Georgia retiree who pays $60 monthly for internet service plus $10 for every 50 gigabytes over her data allowance.

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Microsoft, trying to mitigate the climate impact of its data center building boom, is starting to roll out a new design that uses zero water to cool the facilities' chips and servers. From a report: Launched in August, the new design will eliminate the more than 125 million liters of water each data center typically uses per year, the company said in a statement. The new system use a "closed loop" to recycle water; liquid is added during construction and continually circulated -- obviating the need for fresh supplies. Data centers will still require fresh water for worker facilities like bathrooms and kitchens. Microsoft spent more than $50 billion on capital expenditures in the fiscal year ended June 30, the vast majority related to data center construction fueled by demand for artificial intelligence services. It plans to top that figure in the current year, requiring rapidly rising amounts of energy to run the networks and water to cool equipment. Many of latest facilities are going up in hot, dry areas like Arizona and Texas, making it even more critical to find ways to conserve water. Microsoft's existing data centers will continue to use a mix of older technologies, but new projects in Phoenix and Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin, will begin using the zero-water designs in 2026.

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China should focus on developing original technologies and scientific knowledge and leverage the expertise of scientists returning from the United States, according to a top Chinese-American mathematician. From a report: Yau Shing-Tung retired from Harvard University in 2022 to teach at Tsinghua University and help China become a maths powerhouse. He said many ethnic Chinese students had been driven away from the US by discrimination from the government, including accusations of misusing American research funds for China's benefit. "Chinese scientists have no choice but to leave the US because they work best under a supportive research environment," he said. "This exodus is unfortunate for the US as it could diminish its research capabilities. For China, the return of these scientists means it is gaining top talent, but it also results in weakened ties with the US and a loss of first-hand knowledge of advanced technologies." An increasing number of leading scientists are leaving the West for Chinese institutions. Yau's maths centre at Tsinghua in Beijing is one example where top foreign mathematicians have been recruited. In a survey of 1,300 US-based scientists of Chinese descent conducted between late 2021 and early 2022, 72 per cent of respondents said they did not feel safe as academic researchers. And 61 per cent said they had thought about leaving the United States for either Asian or non-Asian countries.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Amazon on Tuesday said it is piloting a quick commerce service in India that will see the U.S. tech giant delivering grocery and other items in 15 minutes or less. [...] The quick-commerce model -- delivering items to customers within 10 to 15 minutes -- hasn't worked in most parts of the world, but it's increasingly finding success in India, where a range of retailers and internet firms, from food delivery giant Swiggy to online cosmetics platform Nykaa, are gearing up their supply chain ecosystems to accommodate for faster deliveries.

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As tech giants struggle to profit from AI, a growing industry of specialized AI training firms is emerging by hiring doctors, radiologists and other experts to develop commercially viable applications. The $20 billion data services sector, projected to grow 20% annually, is attracting major investment by focusing on high-value, specialized AI applications. Companies like iMerit and Centaur Labs are recruiting specialists worldwide, from radiologists in Kazakhstan to agricultural experts in Bhutan, paying premium rates for domain expertise rather than basic data processing. While Microsoft and Alphabet post losses on AI development, this specialized sector is finding profitability by bridging the gap between raw AI capabilities and practical business applications.

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China's high-speed rail network, which has tripled to nearly 30,000 miles under President Xi Jinping's leadership, faces mounting financial challenges amid aggressive expansion plans. China State Railway Group, the national operator, has accumulated nearly $1 trillion in debt and liabilities, requiring $25 billion annually for debt service. Despite this, plans call for adding 15,000 more miles by 2035. While flagship routes between major cities like Beijing and Shanghai remain profitable, newer lines into rural regions are struggling with low ridership. In Sichuan province's Fushun County, which received high-speed rail service in 2021, stations built for thousands sit largely empty despite having 12 high-speed rail stops within a 40-mile radius. The expansion has become a symbol of China's technological advancement but raises concerns about economic viability. Ticket prices are maintained at about one-quarter of global averages to ensure public access, limiting profit potential. The railway operator turned a modest $460 million profit in 2023, aided by government subsidies, after three years of losses during the pandemic.

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An area of land nearly a third larger than India has turned from humid conditions to dryland -- arid areas where agriculture is difficult -- in the past three decades, research has found. From a report: Drylands now make up 40% of all land on Earth, excluding Antarctica. Three-quarters of the world's land suffered drier conditions in the past 30 years, which is likely to be permanent, according to the study by the UN Science Policy Interface, a body of scientists convened by the United Nations. Africa lost about 12% of its GDP owing to the increasing aridity between 1990 and 2015, the report found. Even worse losses are forecast: Africa will lose about 16% of its GDP, and Asia close to 7%, in the next half decade. Ibrahim Thiaw, executive secretary of the UN convention to combat desertification (UNCCD), said: "Unlike droughts -- temporary periods of low rainfall -- aridity represents a permanent, unrelenting transformation. Droughts end. When an area's climate becomes drier, however, the ability to return to previous conditions is lost. The drier climates now affecting vast lands across the globe will not return to how they were, and this change is redefining life on Earth." Some crops will be particularly at risk: maize yields are projected to halve in Kenya by 2050, if current trends continue. Drylands are areas where 90% of the rainfall is lost to evaporation, leaving only 10% for vegetation. Two-thirds of land globally will store less water by mid-century, according to the report published on Monday.

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Malaysian lawmakers voted in favor of broadening the government's control over the internet, unmoved by criticism that the law risks suppressing dissent and free speech. From a report: Communications Minister Fahmi Fadzil told parliament Monday that the government needed to amend existing laws to tackle online harm including scams, cyber-bullying, and more. "Freedom of speech does exist, but we are also given power through parliament to impose any necessary restrictions for the safety of the public," said Fahmi. The bill imposes stricter penalties on content violations and grants sweeping powers to law enforcement, such as the right of any authorized officer to search and seize without a warrant. Service providers may also be held liable under the law, and compelled to disclose user data to authorities during investigations of alleged violations. More than 20 consultation sessions were held with stakeholders in the drafting of the bill, Fahmi said.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Scientific advisers to the European Commission are calling for a moratorium across the EU on efforts to artificially cool Earth through solar geoengineering. That includes controversial technologies used to reflect sunlight back into space, primarily by sending reflective particles into the atmosphere or by brightening clouds. Proponents argue that this can help in the fight against climate change, especially as planet-heating greenhouse gas emissions continue to climb. But small-scale experiments have triggered backlash over concerns that these technologies could do more harm than good. The European Commission asked its Group of Chief Scientific Advisors (GCSA) and European Group on Ethics in Science and New Technologies (EGE) to write up their opinions on solar geoengineering, which were published today alongside a report synthesizing what little we know about how these technologies might work. There's "insufficient scientific evidence" to show that solar geoengineering can actually prevent climate change, says the opinion written by the GCSA. "Given the currently very high levels of scientific and technical uncertainty ... as well as the potential harmful uses, we advocate for a moratorium on all large-scale [solar geoengineering] experimentation and deployment," writes the EGE in the second highly anticipated opinion.

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Over 300 musicians have signed an open letter defending the Internet Archive against a $621 million copyright infringement lawsuit over its preservation of 78 rpm records. The letter, organized by Fight for the Future, opposes the lawsuit filed by major record labels including Universal Music Group and Sony Music. The labels claim the Archive's Great 78 Project, which digitizes shellac discs from the 1890s-1950s, amounts to widespread copyright infringement. Musicians argue the lawsuit prioritizes corporate profits over artists' interests.

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chiguy writes: In October, a jury in a federal class-action lawsuit returned a verdict that found Cognizant intentionally discriminated against more than 2,000 non-Indian employees between 2013 and 2022. The verdict, which echoed a previously undisclosed finding from a 2020 US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission investigation, centered on discrimination claims based on race and national origin. Cognizant, based in Teaneck, New Jersey, was found to have preferred workers from India, most of whom joined the firm's US workforce of about 32,000 using skilled-worker visas called H-1Bs. The case is part of a wave of recent discrimination claims against IT outsourcing companies that underscore growing concerns that these firms have exploited a broken employment-visa system to secure a cheaper, more malleable workforce. In the process, US workers say they've been disadvantaged. The industry, which provides computer services to other companies, makes extensive use of H-1Bs; over the past decade and a half, no employer has obtained more of them than Cognizant, federal records show.

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ChatGPT maker OpenAI released its AI-generated video tool called Sora for general use by its paying customers Monday. From a report: The company then said it would do wide testing with creatives and red-teaming with security experts before its release to the public. "We don't want the world to just be text," OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a live-streamed announcement Monday. "[Video] is important to our culture," Altman added. The company said in a statement that the latest version of Sora, which will be offered as a standalone product to ChatGPT Plus and Pro customers, is "significantly faster" than the one it previewed. It lets you generate videos up to 20 seconds long.

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Google has achieved a major breakthrough in quantum error correction that could enable practical quantum computers by 2030, the company announced in a paper published Monday in Nature. The research demonstrated significant error reduction when scaling up from 3x3 to 7x7 grids of quantum bits, with errors dropping by half at each step. The advance addresses quantum computing's core challenge of maintaining stable quantum states, which typically last only microseconds. Google's new quantum chip, manufactured in-house, maintains quantum states for nearly 100 microseconds -- five times longer than previous versions. The company aims to build a full-scale system with about 1 million qubits, projecting costs around $1 billion by decade's end. IBM, Google's main rival, questioned the scalability of Google's "surface code" error correction approach, claiming it would require billions of qubits. IBM is pursuing an alternative three-dimensional design requiring new connector technology expected by 2026. The breakthrough parallels the first controlled nuclear chain reaction in 1942, according to MIT physics professor William Oliver, who noted that both achievements required years of engineering to realize theoretical predictions from decades earlier.

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Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman predicts conversational AI will become the primary way people interact with technology, replacing traditional web browsers and search engines within the next few years. In an interview with The Verge, Suleyman, who oversees Microsoft's consumer AI products including Bing and Copilot, called current search interfaces "completely broken" and "a total pain," arguing that voice-based AI interactions will prove "100 times easier" for users. He said: The UI that you experience is going to be automagically produced by an LLM in three or five years, and that is going to be the default. And they'll be representing the brands, businesses, influencers, celebrities, academics, activists, and organizations, just as each one of those stakeholders in society ended up getting a podcast, getting a website, writing a blog, maybe building an app, or using the telephone back in the day. The technological revolution produces a new interface, which completely shuffles the way that things are distributed. And some organizations adapt really fast and they jump on board and it kind of transforms their businesses and their organizations, and some don't. There will be an adjustment. We'll look back by 2030 and be like, "Oh, that really was the kind of moment when there was this true inflection point because these conversational AIs really are the primary way that we have these interactions." And so, you're absolutely right. A brand and a business are going to use that AI to talk to your personal companion AI because I don't really like doing that kind of shopping. And some people do, and they'll do that kind of direct-to-consumer browsing experience. Many people don't like it, and it's actually super frustrating, hard, and slow. And so, increasingly you'll come to work with your personal AI companion to go and be that interface, to go and negotiate, find great opportunities, and adapt them to your specific context. That'll just be a much more efficient protocol because AIs can talk to AIs in super real-time. And by the way, let's not fool ourselves. We already have this on the open web today. We have behind-the-scenes, real-time negotiation between buyers and sellers of ad space, or between search ranking algorithms. So, there's already that kind of marketplace of AIs. It's just not explicitly manifested in language. It's operating in vector space.

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AI-powered teams at a major U.S. materials company discovered 44% more new materials and filed 39% more patents compared to teams using standard methods, according to a study by MIT economist Aidan Toner-Rodgers. The research, conducted at an unnamed corporate laboratory with over 1,000 scientists, tracked the implementation of a custom machine-learning system combining graph neural networks with reinforcement learning. The AI tool, deployed in 2022, was pre-trained on crystal and molecular structure databases. Top-performing scientists showed the greatest gains with AI assistance, while lower-ranked researchers saw minimal benefits. The AI-designed materials demonstrated higher novelty compared to human designs, based on patent text analysis. The company's secrecy limits independent verification of results, according to University College London chemist Robert Palgrave. Researchers using AI reported lower job satisfaction, citing reduced creative involvement in the discovery process.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Fans post about him on social media. Swag bearing his name sells out on the regular. College professors dedicate class sessions and textbook sections to him. Foreign government officials have been known to express jealousy over his skills, and one prominent economist refers to him as a "national treasure." Meet FRED, a 33-year-old data tool from St. Louis, Mo., and the economics world's most unlikely celebrity. Even if you have not interacted with FRED yourself, there is a good chance you've encountered him without knowing it. The tool's signature baby blue graphs dot social media and crop up on many of the world's most popular news websites. Many people feel that way about FRED. The website had nearly 15 million users last year, and it is on track for even more in 2024, up from fewer than 400,000 as recently as 2009. Their reasons for clicking are diverse: FRED users are coming for freshly released unemployment data, to check in on egg inflation or to find out whether business is booming in Memphis. That appeal crosses political lines. Larry Kudlow, who directed the National Economic Council during the first Trump administration, has tweeted and retweeted FRED charts. Groups as disparate as the spending-focused Alaskans for a Sustainable Budget and the pro-worker advocacy organization Employ America have used its charts to back up their arguments. It is even occasionally used by professional and White House economists, who tend to have access to sophisticated data tools, for quick charts. "It is unfathomable for me now, to think of the days before FRED," said Ernie Tedeschi, the director of economics at the Budget Lab at Yale and a former chief economist at the White House Council of Economic Advisers. When he speaks to foreign government economists, he noted, they are often "jealous" of the data tool, which is more comprehensive and easier to use than what other countries offer. "It's a compliment to FRED," he said. FRED -- whose name stands for Federal Reserve Economic Data -- was born in 1991. But he was a sparkle in the eye of the St. Louis Fed long before that. The story started in the 1960s, with an economist named Homer Jones (now sometimes referred to as the "grandfather of FRED"). Mr. Jones was the director of research at the Fed's branch in St. Louis, and he wanted to make central bank decisions more data-based, so he started to mail typed data reports to Fed officials around the country.

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Amazon is offering $25 (one-way) plane tickets to 5,000 students (or young adults between 18 and 24 years old) who have a Prime membership (up to $700 off the ticket's original price). CNET REports: Last year, Amazon offered the $25 flight deals to Prime Student members, but this holiday season, the retail giant is expanding the limited-time offer to those enrolled in its Prime for Young Adults plan... Once again, Amazon is joining with [travel-booking site] StudentUniverse to offer several thousand $25 flights you can book between December 9, 2024, and January 14, 2025. The offer is for a one-way domestic ticket within the U.S., including Washington, DC, while supply lasts. Amazon said it's making available 1,000 tickets to Prime Student and Young Adult subscribers each day for five days, starting at 10 a.m. PST on December 9.

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Bruce Perens, original co-founder of the Open Source Initiative, has responded to questions from Slashdot readers about a new alternative he's developing that hopefully helps "Post Open" developers get paid. But first, "One of the things that's clear from the Slashdot patter is that people are not aware of what I've been doing, in general," Perens says. "So, let's start by filling that in..." Read on for the rest of his wide-ranging answers....

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"Mercedes-Benz is researching a new type of solar modules that could be seamlessly applied to the bodywork of electric vehicles," according to a recent Mercedes-Benz press release. They describe the 5-micrometer coating as "similar to a wafer-thin layer of paste... significantly thinner than a human hair" — but creating an active photovoltaic surface with an efficiency of 20%. An area of 118.4 square feet (equivalent to the surface of a mid-size SUV) could produce energy for up to 7,456 miles per year under ideal conditions [based on daylight conditions from their testing in Stuttgart]. The energy generated by the solar cells is used for driving or fed directly into the high-voltage battery... Solar paint has a high level of efficiency and contains no rare earths or silicon — only non-toxic, readily available raw materials. It is easy to recycle and considerably cheaper to produce than conventional solar modules. The Mercedes-Benz research department is currently working to enable use of the new solar paint on all exterior vehicle surfaces — regardless of shape or angle. Solar paint could power 62% of the travel for a typical Stuttgart driver, their announcement notes. But in a sunnier city like Los Angeles, "It could be used for 100% of their driving, on average." (And "the surplus of energy could be fed directly into the home network via bidirectional charging.") Mercedes-Benz researchers "initially thought the tech had limited scope for mass production," reports EV Central, "until experiments were carried out with prototypes coated with the paint in real-world scenarios. Instead of just coating the roof and bonnet to form a 1.8-square-metre surface area, one scientist suggested covering an entire car with the new solar paint, ramping up the surface area to more than 11m2. Another difference to the [Mercedes-Benz 2022 Vision EQXX concept] is instead of wiring the body panels to the 12-volt system, scientists hardwired the body panels to the Benz's high-voltage battery and the performance of the paint was well beyond expectations... Available in all colours, engineers admit the solar paint work best in darker shades. When it's launched, the tech should be as durable as regular paint. The photovoltaic surface is protected by at least two protective lacquer finishes to ensure it isn't damaged in daily use. Mercedes-Benz says the solar paint could mean "increased electric range and fewer charging stops." And this is significant, because "Electric vehicle charging and infrastructure are two major obstacles to EV adoption on a mass scale," writes Autoblog — arguing that Mercedes-Benz "may have a solution... " Alternative methods of energy harnessing could help alleviate range anxiety, increase an EV's driving distance, and reduce charging costs across the board. Not only that but considering the cost of producing Mercedes' solar coating and the lack of rare earth metals, it could be the leading solution to charging concerns... While the German automaker says the solar paint isn't ready for production on a mass scale, research, and development are progressing at a steady rate. If all goes well, we'll hopefully see solar coating as an accessory EV charging solution within the next decade. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the news.

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Slashdot reader prisoninmate shared this report from the blog 9to5Linux Renowned Linux kernel developer Greg Kroah-Hartman announced Thursday that the Linux 6.12 kernel series has been officially marked as LTS (Long Term Support) on the kernel.org website with a predicted life expectancy of at least two years. Linux kernel 6.12 was released on November 17th, 2024, and introduces new features like real-time "PREEMPT_RT" support, a new scheduler called sched_ext, and DRM panic messages as QR codes, as well as numerous new and updated drivers for better hardware support... Linux kernel 6.12 joins the many other long-term support kernel branches, namely Linux 6.6 LTS, Linux 6.1 LTS, Linux 5.15 LTS, Linux 5.10 LTS, and Linux 5.4 LTS. Apart from the latter, the rest of them, including Linux kernel 6.12, will be officially supported until the end of December 2026. Hopefully, Linux kernel 6.12 will be supported for more than two years as the kernel maintainers usually aim for four years of support for a new LTS kernel, especially if there's demand from hardware manufacturers and other companies that aim to use a long-term supported kernel in their devices.

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