Four years after announcing a 9% tax on streaming entertainment services, the city has collected $2 million in sales tax from Sony and two online ticketing services, making it the first major city to collect such a tax successfully. CBS News reports: The city collected $1.2 million from Sony in January, on services including PlayStation Video live events and purchases of music and video, according to Bloomberg. It also collected nearly $800,000 from Eventbrite and $70,000 from Fandango, the outlet said. The levy has been dubbed the "Netflix tax" because it targets streaming video services in addition to gaming and other digital entertainment.

While Chicago seems to be the first city to successfully tax streaming services, it probably won't be the last. Rhode Island's governor proposed a budget this year that includes new sales taxes on digital videos, books and music. Pennsylvania enacted a similar tax in 2016 and is set to start enforcing it this summer. Chicago's expanded digital entertainment and services tax could raise up to $12 million per year, according to estimates issued at the time it passed in 2015. A lawsuit filed by a libertarian group on behalf of Netflix, Spotify and Amazon Prime customers is currently in the appeal stage.

Northeastern University requires all of its computer science majors to take improv -- a class in theatre and improvisation, taught by professors in the drama department. The Wall Street Journal says it "forces students to come out of their shells and exercise creative play" before they can get their diplomas. (Although when the class was made mandatory in 2016, "We saw a lot of hysterics and crying," says Carla E. Brodley, dean of the computer science department.)

So what happens to the computer science majors at Northeastern? The course requires public speaking, lecturing on such nontechnical topics as family recipes. Students also learn to speak gibberish -- 'butuga dubuka manala phuthusa,' for instance... One class had students stare into a classmate's eyes for 60 seconds. If someone laughed, you had to try again...

The class is a way to 'robot-proof' computer-science majors, helping them sharpen uniquely human skills, said Joseph E. Aoun, the university president. Empathy, creativity and teamwork help students exercise their competitive advantage over machines in the era of artificial intelligence, according to Mr. Aoun, who wrote a book about it... Other professionals agree that improv can teach the teamwork and communication required of working with others. Many software applications now are built in small teams, a collaboration of engineers, writers and designers.

A petition by an angry fan demanding that HBO remake the final season of "Game of Thrones" has now been signed by more than 502,000 people. From a report: Showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss are the target of the petition, which asserts that the pair, who have shepherded the HBO hit from the beginning, "have proven themselves to be woefully incompetent writers when they have no source material (i.e. the books) to fall back on." The show first moved beyond George R.R. Martin's ongoing book series in the sixth season. The online petition, which was started on Change.org by a user called Dylan D., is titled "Remake 'Game of Thrones' season 8 with competent writers" and states that fans of the smash-hit show deserve "a final season that makes sense." [...] The petition originally began with a target of 15,000 signatures, which was reached on Wednesday. A revised target of 300,000 was surpassed Thursday, and a newly revised target is now aiming at half a million signatures. By 8:30 a.m. ET, the petition had been signed by 350,000 "Game of Thrones" fans, with the number of signatories continuing to grow rapidly. Just two hours later it hit 400,000 and by 02:10 p.m. ET it was up to 502,000.

An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from a report via Ars Technica: The Voynich manuscript is a famous medieval text written in a mysterious language that so far has proven to be undecipherable. Now, Gerard Cheshire, a University of Bristol academic, has announced his own solution to the conundrum in a new paper in the journal Romance Studies. Cheshire identifies the mysterious writing as a "calligraphic proto-Romance" language, and he thinks the manuscript was put together by a Dominican nun as a reference source on behalf of Maria of Castile, Queen of Aragon. Apparently it took him all of two weeks to accomplish a feat that has eluded our most brilliant scholars for at least a century. So case closed, right? After all, headlines are already trumpeting that the "Voynich manuscript is solved," decoded by a "UK genius." Not so fast. There's a long, checkered history of people making similar claims. None of them have proved convincing to date, and medievalists are justly skeptical of Cheshire's conclusions as well.

What is this mysterious manuscript that has everyone so excited? It's a 15th century medieval handwritten text dated between 1404 and 1438, purchased in 1912 by a Polish book dealer and antiquarian named Wilfrid M. Voynich (hence its moniker). Along with the strange handwriting in an unknown language or code, the book is heavily illustrated with bizarre pictures of alien plants, naked women, strange objects, and zodiac symbols. It's currently kept at Yale University's Beinecke Library of rare books and manuscripts. Possible authors include Roger Bacon, Elizabethan astrologer/alchemist John Dee, or even Voynich himself, possibly as a hoax. "Cheshire argues that the text is a kind of proto-Romance language, a precursor to modern languages like Portuguese, Spanish, French, Italian, Romanian, Catalan, and Galician that he claims is now extinct because it was seldom written in official documents," the report adds. "If true, that would make the Voynich manuscript the only known surviving example of such a proto-Romance language."

Lisa Fagin Davis, executive director of the Medieval Academy of America, is dubious of Cheshire's claim, tweeting: "Sorry, folks, 'proto-Romance language' is not a thing. This is just more aspirational, circular, self-fulfilling nonsense."

Carl Malamud believes in open access to government records, and he has spent more than a decade putting them online. You might think states would welcome the help. From a report: But when Mr. Malamud's group posted the Official Code of Georgia Annotated, the state sued for copyright infringement. Providing public access to the state's laws and related legal materials, Georgia's lawyers said, was part of a "strategy of terrorism." A federal appeals court ruled against the state, which has asked the Supreme Court to step in. On Friday, in an unusual move, Mr. Malamud's group, Public.Resource.Org, also urged the court to hear the dispute, saying that the question of who owns the law is an urgent one, as about 20 other states have claimed that parts of similar annotated codes are copyrighted.

The issue, the group said, is whether citizens can have access to "the raw materials of our democracy." The case, Georgia v. Public.Resource.Org, No. 18-1150, concerns the 54 volumes of the Official Code of Georgia Annotated, which contain state statutes and related materials. The state, through a legal publisher, makes the statutes themselves available online, and it has said it does not object to Mr. Malamud doing the same thing. But people who want to see other materials in the books, the state says, must pay the publisher.

"Star Wars" actor Peter Mayhew, who played Chewbacca in the original trilogy, died on Tuesday, his family said today. He was 74. He died at his North Texas home surrounded by his family. From a report: He was discovered by producer Charles H. Schneer while working as a hospital attendant in London, and cast in Ray Harryhausen's "Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger." The next year, he was cast as Chewbacca, the 200-year-old Wookiee. Mayhew went on to appear in "The Empire Strikes Back," "Return of the Jedi," "Revenge of the Sith," "The Force Awakens" and "The Star Wars Holiday Special." He was active on the "Star Wars" convention circuit and wrote two books, "Growing Up Giant" and "My Favorite Giant." His height was not due to gigantism, but he measured 7 feet 3 inches at his highest. George Lucas originally had his eye on bodybuilder David Prowse, but Prowse decided to play Darth Vader instead and Lucas went with the even taller Mayhew.

Canonical's real money comes from the cloud and Internet of Things, but AI and machine learning developers are demanding -- and getting -- Ubuntu Linux desktop with enterprise support. From a report: In a wide-ranging conversation at Open Infrastructure Summit, Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Ubuntu Linux and its corporate parent Canonical, said: "We have seen companies signing up for Linux desktop support, because they want to have fleets of Ubuntu desktop for their artificial intelligence engineers." This development caught Shuttleworth by surprise. "We're starting actually now to commercially support the desktop in a way that we've never been asked to before," he said. Of course, Ubuntu has long been used by developers, but Shuttleworth explained, "Previously, those were kind of off the books, under the table. You know, 'Don't ask don't tell deployments.' "But now suddenly, it's the AI team and they've got to be supported."

In no place was Barnes & Noble's diminished fortune felt as intensely as it was in the Bronx, where gratitude for what it provided far outweighed snobbishness. From a report: Five years ago when Barnes & Noble announced that it was closing the only branch it had opened there, residents and local civic leaders were angry and heartbroken and fought to save it. At the time, there were 90 bookstores in Manhattan. But the Bronx essentially had just the one, and now it would disappear.

Noelle Santos, who worked in human resources, was especially torn up. In 2014 she was on Facebook when she stumbled upon a petition to save Barnes & Noble. It pointed out how alarming it was that the Bronx was getting more and more cellphone stores and chain restaurants but would be left without a place to buy novels or training manuals or SAT preparation guides. Ms. Santos grew up in the Bronx, in Soundview, a rough neighborhood, and she stayed in the Bronx for college and graduate school. But she suddenly felt a radical need to do change things.

"Up to that point I had measured my success by how far I could get away from the Bronx," she told me recently. "I was disappointed in myself for thinking about leaving a community in no better condition that I had found it," she said. "I had never been inside an independent book store before I decided to open one." On Saturday, she will open such a store, The Lit. Bar.

The New York State attorney general's office plans to open an investigation into Facebook's unauthorized collection of more than 1.5 million users' email address books, according to The New York Times, citing two people briefed on the matter. From the report: The inquiry concerns a practice unearthed in April in which Facebook harvested the email contact lists of a portion of new users who signed up for the network after 2016, according to the two people, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the inquiry had not been officially announced. Those lists were then used to improve Facebook's ad-targeting algorithms and other friend connections across the network.

"Facebook has repeatedly demonstrated a lack of respect for consumers' information while at the same time profiting from mining that data," said Letitia James, the attorney general of New York, in a statement. "It is time Facebook is held accountable for how it handles consumers' personal information." The attorney general's investigation will focus on how the practice came about, and whether or not the email contact collection spread to hundreds of millions more people across the social network, according to the two people. Nearly 2.4 billion people use Facebook each month, with 1.56 billion people visiting the site at least once every day.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: The team at the University of California, San Francisco says the technology is "exhilarating." They add that their findings, published in the journal Nature, could help people when disease robs them of their ability to talk. The mind-reading technology works in two stages. First an electrode is implanted in the brain to pick up the electrical signals that maneuver the lips, tongue, voice box and jaw. Then powerful computing is used to simulate how the movements in the mouth and throat would form different sounds. This results in synthesized speech coming out of a "virtual vocal tract." "The system is better with prolonged sounds like the 'sh' in ship than with abrupt sounds such as the 'buh' sound in 'books,'" the report adds. "In experiments with five people, who read hundreds of sentences, listeners were able to discern what was being spoken up to 70% of the time when they were given a list of words to choose from."

"At the first annual charity event conducted by Puget Sound Programming Python on April 2, four legendary language creators came together to discuss the past and future of language design," reports PacktPub.

- Guido van Rossum, the creator of Python
- James Gosling, the founder, and lead designer behind the Java programming language
- Anders Hejlsberg, the original author of Turbo Pascal who has also worked on the development of C# and TypeScript
- Larry Wall, the creator of Perl

You can watch the video here -- the speaker introductions start about 50 minutes into the video-- or read PacktPub's summary of the event: Guido van Rossum said designing a programming language is very similar to the way JK Rowling writes her books, the Harry Potter series... He says JK Rowling is a genius in the way that some details that she mentioned in her first Harry Potter book ended up playing an important plot point in part six and seven... When designing a language we start with committing to certain details like the keywords we want to use, the style of coding we want to follow, etc. But, whatever we decide on we are stuck with them and in the future, we need to find new ways to use those details, just like Rowling...

When James Gosling was asked how Java came into existence and what were the design principles he abided by, he simply said, "it didn't come out of like a personal passion project or something. It was actually from trying to build a prototype.... It started out as kind of doing better C and then it got out of control that the rest of the project really ended up just providing the context." In the end, the only thing out of that project survived was Java...

Larry Wall wanted to create a language that was more like a natural language. Explaining through an example, he said, "Instead of putting people in a university campus and deciding where they go we're just gonna see where people want to walk and then put shortcuts in all those places." A basic principle behind creating Perl was to provide APIs to everything. It was aimed to be both a good text processing language linguistically but also a glue language....

Similar to the views of Guido van Rossum, Anders Hejlsberg adds that any decision that you make when designing a language you have to live with it. When designing a language you need to be very careful about reasoning over what "not" to introduce in the language.
There was also some discussion of types -- Gosling believes they help improve performance, while Hejlsberg said types are also useful when building coding tools. "It turns out that you can actually be more productive by adding types if you do it in a non-intrusive manner and if you work hard on doing good type inference and so forth." In fact, Hejlsberg told the audience that the TypeScript project was inspired by massive "write-only" JavaScript code bases, while a semantic understanding (including a type system) makes refactoring easier.

Guido van Rossum acknowledged that TypeScript "is actually incredibly useful and so we're adding a very similar idea to Python. We are adding it in a slightly different way because we have a different context.... I've learned a painful lesson, that for small programs dynamic typing is great. For large programs, you have to have a more disciplined approach. And it helps if the language actually gives you that discipline, rather than telling you, 'Well, you can do whatever you want.'"

In the video Larry Wall says the Perl 6 team had also noticed the limitations of loose typing, and added a robust type system to Perl 6 to "help with programming in the large."

This was the first annual benefit for CSforALL, a group promoting high-quality computer science classes at every grade level.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: It's just as you suspected; the information age has changed the general attention span. A recently published study from researchers at the Technical University of Denmark suggests the collective global attention span is narrowing due to the amount of information that is presented to the public. Released on Monday in the scientific journal Nature Communications, the study shows people now have more things to focus on -- but often focus on things for short periods of time.

The researchers studied several modes of media attention, gathered from several different sources, including (but not limited to): the past 40 years in movie ticket sales; Google books for 100 years; and more modernly, 2013 to 2016 Twitter data; 2010 to 2018 Google Trends; 2010 to 2015 Reddit trends; and 2012 to 2017 Wikipedia attention time. The researchers then created a mathematical model to predict three factors: the "hotness" of the topic, its progression throughout time in the public sphere and the desire for a new topic, said Dr Philipp Hovel, an applied mathematics professor of University College Cork in Ireland. The empirical data found periods where topics would sharply capture widespread attention and promptly lose it just as quickly, except in the cases of publications like Wikipedia and scientific journals. For example, a 2013 Twitter global trend would last for an average of 17.5 hours, contrasted with a 2016 Twitter trend, which would last for only 11.9 hours.

Scientists have uncovered the first strong evidence that the amount of plastic polluting the oceans has risen vastly in recent decades -- by analyzing 60 years of log books for plankton-tracking vessels. Nature reports: Data recorded by instruments known as continuous plankton recorders (CPRs) -- which ships have collectively towed millions of kilometres across the Atlantic Ocean -- show that the trackers have become entangled in large plastic objects, such as bags and fishing lines, roughly three times more often since 2000 than in preceding decades. This is the first time that researchers have demonstrated the rise in ocean plastics using a single, long-term data set, says Erik van Sebille, an oceanographer at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. "I'm excited that this has been finally done," he says. The analysis was published on 16 April in Nature Communications.

Van Sebille says that because the study focused on large plastic items, it doesn't reveal much about the quantity of microplastics -- fragments fewer than 5 millimetres long -- in the oceans. These tiny contaminants come from sources such as disposable plastic packaging, rather than from fishing gear. Nevertheless, he adds, the study demonstrates that fisheries play a major part in plastic pollution, and will provide useful baseline data for tracking whether policy changes affect the levels of plastic in the oceans. "As fisheries become more professional, especially in the North Sea, hopefully we might see a decrease," he says.

Developer and blogger Guilherme Rambo, writing for 9to5Mac: Fellow developer Steve Troughton-Smith recently expressed confidence about some evidence found indicating that Apple is working on new Music, Podcasts, and perhaps Books apps for macOS, to join the new TV app. I've been able to independently confirm that this is true. On top of that, I've been able to confirm with sources familiar with the development of the next major version of macOS -- likely 10.15 -- that the system will include standalone Music, Podcasts, and TV apps, but it will also include a major redesign of the Books app.

The new Books app will have a sidebar similar to the News app on the Mac, it will also feature a narrower title bar with different tabs for the Library, Book Store, and Audiobook Store. On the library tab, the sidebar will list the user's Books, Audiobooks, PDFs and other collections, including custom ones. The new Music, Podcasts, and TV apps will be made using Marzipan, Apple's new technology designed to facilitate the porting of iPad apps to the Mac without too many code changes. Further reading: Steven Troughton-Smith Thinks iTunes Breakup is Nigh (DaringFireball).

Starting today, Microsoft is ending all ebook sales in its Microsoft Store for Windows PCs. "Previously purchased ebooks will be removed from users' libraries in early July," reports The Verge. "Even free ones will be deleted. The company will offer full refunds to users for any books they've purchased or preordered." From the report: Microsoft's "official reason," according to ZDNet, is that this move is part of a strategy to help streamline the focus of the Microsoft Store. It seems that the company no longer has an interest in trying to compete with Amazon, Apple Books, and Google Play Books. It's a bit hard to imagine why anyone would go with Microsoft over those options anyway.

If you have purchased ebooks from Microsoft, you can continue accessing them through the Edge browser until everything vanishes in July. After that, customers can expect to automatically receive a refund. According to a newly published Microsoft Store FAQ, "refund processing for eligible customers start rolling out automatically in early July 2019 to your original payment method." If your original payment method is no longer valid (or if you used a gift card), you'll receive a credit back to your Microsoft account to use online at the Microsoft Store. Microsoft will also offer an additional $25 credit (to your Microsoft account) if you annotated or marked up any ebook that you purchased from the Microsoft Store prior to today, April 2nd. Liliputing reminds us that "if you pay for eBooks, music, movies, video games, or any other content from a store that uses DRM, then you aren't really buying those digital items so much as paying a license fee for the rights to access them... a right that can be revoked if the company decides to remove a title from your device unexpectedly or if a company shuts down a server that would normally handle the digital rights management features."

You can find DRM-free eBooks at some online stores including Smashwords and Kobo (by browsing the DRM-free selection), or from publisher websites including Angry Robot, and Baen.

An anonymous reader quotes the Guardian: Sharp and potentially devastating temperature rises of 3C to 5C in the Arctic are now inevitable even if the world succeeds in cutting greenhouse gas emissions in line with the Paris agreement, research has found.

Winter temperatures at the north pole are likely to rise by at least 3C above pre-industrial levels by mid-century, and there could be further rises to between 5C and 9C above the recent average for the region, according to the UN. Such changes would result in rapidly melting ice and permafrost, leading to sea level rises and potentially to even more destructive levels of warming. Scientists fear Arctic heating could trigger a climate "tipping point" as melting permafrost releases the powerful greenhouse gas methane into the atmosphere, which in turn could create a runaway warming effect. "What happens in the Arctic does not stay in the Arctic," said Joyce Msuya, the acting executive director of UN Environment...

Even if all carbon emissions were to be halted immediately, the Arctic region would still warm by more than 5C by the century's end, compared with the baseline average from 1986 to 2005, according to the study from UN Environment. That is because so much carbon has already been poured into the atmosphere. The oceans also have become vast stores of heat, the effect of which is being gradually revealed by changes at the poles and on global weather systems, and will continue to be felt for decades to come.
The findings were presented at the UN Environment assembly Wednesday, where a report written by 250 scientists and experts from over 70 countries also warned that "damage to the planet is so dire that people's health will be increasingly threatened unless urgent action is taken."

What if a robot came to your house to retrieve library books? An anonymous reader quotes the Bay Area Newsgroup: Residents in downtown Mountain View have gotten their first peek at the future with the debut of BookBot, the library's newest non-human helper. A creation of Google's Area 120 -- an experimental division of the technology juggernaut -- the bot is the company's first personal delivery robot to hit the streets and begin interacting with the public, said Christian Bersch, the project's team lead. It's part of a program to test the waters of what could be possible for autonomous, electric robots, he said...

The pilot will run for nine months with a human handler following behind the BookBot for the first six months, he said. That's just to make sure it's operating as planned, get it out of trouble as needed and observe how people are responding. After that, a human will sit behind the controls remotely. And, on a recent Thursday, the response was overwhelmingly positive. Children shrieked at the sight of the robot and immediately jumped in its path to see if it would stop. (It does...) Users must schedule the pickup time in advance, which -- because the bot is fairly popular -- means planning at least a week ahead. It can carry up to about 10 items, Bersch said, depending on the size of the books.

Georgia high school teacher Donelan Andrews won a $10,000 reward after she closely read the terms and conditions that came with a travel insurance policy she purchased for a trip to England. Squaremouth, a Florida insurance company, had inserted language promising a reward to the first person who emailed the company. NPR reports: "We understand most customers don't actually read contracts or documentation when buying something, but we know the importance of doing so," the company said. "We created the top-secret Pays to Read campaign in an effort to highlight the importance of reading policy documentation from start to finish." Not every company is so generous. To demonstrate the importance of reading the fine print, many companies don't give; they take. The mischievous clauses tend to pop up from time to time, usually in cheeky England. The report continues to highlight a number of different cases where companies have intentionally inserted unusual clauses into their terms of service, knowing people wouldn't read them. Here's one such case: A few years earlier, several Londoners agreed (presumably inadvertently) to give away their oldest child in exchange for Wi-Fi access. Before they could get on the Internet, users had to check a box agreeing to "assign their first born child to us for the duration of eternity." According to the Guardian, six people signed up, but the company providing the Wi-Fi said the clause likely wouldn't be enforceable in a court of law. "It is contrary to public policy to sell children in return for free services," the company explained.

Amazon is closing all 87 of its U.S. pop-up kiosks, which let customers try and buy gadgets such as smart speakers and tablets in malls, Kohl's department stores and Whole Foods groceries. It's the latest change in Amazon's brick-and-mortar retail strategy. NPR reports: "Across our Amazon network, we regularly evaluate our businesses to ensure we're making thoughtful decisions around how we can best serve our customers," an Amazon spokesperson said Thursday. Instead, the company is expanding Amazon Books and Amazon 4-star retail stores, the spokesperson said. Amazon 4-star stores, currently in New York City, Denver and Berkeley, Calif., sell various products, including consumer electronics, kitchen products and books that are rated 4 stars or above by customers on Amazon.com. The pop-up kiosks are expected to close by the end of April, The Wall Street Journal reported.

The news comes days after a Wall Street Journal report that Amazon plans to open dozens of grocery stores in several major U.S. cities. Those stores would be separate from the Whole Foods Market chain, which Amazon bought in 2017 in a $13.7 billion deal. The Amazon spokesperson declined to comment on the report. Amazon said it launched Amazon pop-up stores in six European countries during the 2018 holiday season. It was unclear if those stores would be affected by the closings.

Americans are spreading their book consumption across several formats, and the use of audiobooks is rising, Pew Research said in a report published on Thursday. From the report: About three-quarters (74%) of Americans have read a book in the past 12 months in any format, a figure that has remained largely unchanged since 2012, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted in January. Print books remain the most popular format for reading, with 67% of Americans having read a print book in the past year.

And while shares of print and e-book readers are similar to those from a survey conducted in 2016, there has been a modest but statistically significant increase in the share of Americans who read audiobooks, from 14% to 18%. Overall, Americans read an average (mean) of 12 books per year, while the typical (median) American has read four books in the past 12 months. Each of these figures is largely unchanged since 2011, when the Center first began conducting the surveys of Americans' book reading habits.

Despite some growth in certain digital formats, it remains the case that relatively few Americans consume digital books (which include audiobooks and e-books) to the exclusion of print. Some 39% of Americans say they read only print books, while 29% read in these digital formats and also read print books. Just 7% of Americans say they only read books in digital formats and have not read any print books in the past 12 months. Some demographic groups are more likely than others to be digital-only book readers, but in general this behavior is relatively rare across a wide range of demographics. For example, 10% of 18- to 29-year-olds only read books in digital formats, compared with 5% of those ages 50-64 and 4% of those 65 and older.