An anonymous reader quotes Qz: NASA is not going to be able to find all the asteroids big enough to cause serious devastation on Earth by 2020 -- or even 2033. Also: For a hypothetical attempt to send a spacecraft to divert an seriously dangerous incoming asteroid, we'll need a ten year heads-up to build it and get it to the asteroid.

The good news? They're working on it. "If a real threat does arise, we are prepared to pull together the information about what options might work and provide that information to decision-makers," Lindley Johnson, NASA's Planetary Defense Officer, told reporters.
But NASA's methodology is now being criticized by former Microsoft CTO Nathan Myhrvold -- in the peer-reviewed journal Icarus. An anonymous reader quotes Scientific American: Since 2016, Nathan Myhrvold has argued that there are fatal flaws in the data from NASA's NEOWISE mission to hunt space rocks... NASA is working to develop a follow-up space telescope that would use the same scientific approach to fulfill a mandate from the US Congress to discover nearly all of the space rocks that could pose a threat to Earth.

After 18 months of peer review, and plenty of acrimony on both sides, Myhrvold's latest critique appeared on 22 May on the website of the journal Icarus. Among other things, he argues that NEOWISE estimates of asteroid diameters should not be trusted -- a crucial challenge, because the size of an asteroid determines how much damage it would cause if it hit Earth. "These observations are the best we're going to have for a very long time," says Myhrvold. "And they weren't really analysed very well at all."
NASA hasn't responded in detail to Myhrvold's criticism, though a June 14th statement said their team "stands by its data and scientific findings," noting that they'd also been published in several peer-reviewed journals.

Long-time Slashdot reader Esther Schindler writes: Everyone who watches sports spends some amount of time yelling at the umpire or sports referee. For the past few years we've also been shouting, "Replace that ump with a robot!"

But is it technically feasible? Is the current level of AI and robotics tech up to the job? This article starts with the assumption that someone seriously wants to create a robot umpire or sports referee and then evaluates whether it possible to build an accurate and trustworthy augmented reality solution today.
The article points out that professional tennis matches already apply AI to high-definition video feeds from up to six different cameras to dispense binding judgments on whether a ball was in or out. At the same time, not every officiating decision in every sport is so easily automated, since AI "can't yet handle calls that hinge on judgment of players' intent."

But there's a larger question: do we really want to remove those human watchers from our sports? "Sports is a human activity," argues a professor of social sciences at Cardiff University in Wales, suggesting that human officials continue a cultural tradition which reminds us of who we are. "Humans are imperfect; that's OK."

What do Slashdot's readers think? Should professional sports switch to robot referees?

Slashdot reader danielrh writes: DivANS is a new compression algorithm developed at Dropbox that can be denser than Brotli, 7zip or zstd at the cost of compression and decompression speed. The code uses some of the new vector intrinsics in Rust and is multithreaded. It has a demo running in the browser.

One of the new ideas is that it has an Intermediate Representation, like a compiler, and that lets developers mashup different compression algorithms and build compression optimizers that run over the IR. The project is looking for community involvement and experimentation.

DevNull127 writes: A grateful reporter whose father-in-law liberated a concentration camp after D-Day reports on a high-tech team that "accomplished in 13 minutes what took Alan Turing years to do — and at a cost of just $7."

"In late 2017, at the Imperial War Museum in London, developers applied modern AI techniques to break the 'unbreakable' Enigma machine used by the Nazis to encrypt their correspondences in World War II."

Two Polish co-founders of a company called Enigma Pattern decided to honor Alan Turing's ground-breaking work at Bletchley Park, where Turing had automated the testing of over 15 billion possible passwords each day by building what's considered the first modern computer. They took the problem to a modern cloud infrastructure provider, renting what one describes as "2,000 minions that do the tedious work" — specifically, crunching 41 million combinations each second — using Grimm's Fairy Tales to train an algorithm to recognize when they had found a commonly-used German word (including familiar bedtime stories like Hansel & Gretl and Rumpelstiltskin). "In the end the AI could not understand German. But it did what machine learning does best: recognize patterns."

"After 13 minutes of minion work, boom! The new Bombe had broken the code."

Turing's birthday is Saturday — and it's nice to see him being remembered so fondly.

U.S. states can now require online retailers to collect local sales taxes, according to a recent Supreme Court ruling that could affect thousands of third-party sellers on top tech sites. An anonymous reader quotes The Verge: In fact, Amazon, which last year started collecting sales tax in all 45 states that require it by law, may have a substantial amount of work to do to help its Amazon Marketplace sellers stay compliant. Yet we don't know if that burden will fall primarily on Amazon or if it will be the responsibility of the sellers. More than 50 percent of all sales on the site are conducted via third-party sellers, some of which use Amazon for fulfillment but otherwise operate independent small- to medium-sized businesses... Etsy, eBay, and others are in similar boats. According to the US Government Accountability Office, as much as $13 billion in annual sales tax revenue is at stake....

Etsy is concerned about what it sees as "significant complexities in the thousands of state and local sales tax laws" and that by overruling the Quill decision, the Supreme Court has put the ball in Congress' court. "We believe there is now a call to action for Congress to create a simple, fair federal solution for micro-businesses," Silverman added.
The Verge writes that "the case may be litigated for years to come to figure out how to account for the over 10,000 state jurisdictions that govern sales tax across the country. That is, unless congressional legislation supersedes the state court decisions... Even groups that were in favor of the ruling, like the nonpartisan research institute the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, are imploring Congress to act."

eBay has already mass-emailed many of their users urging them to sign an online petition "to protect entrepreneurs, artisans and small businesses from potentially devastating Internet sales tax legislation." The petition presses state governors, U.S. lawmakers, and president Trump to "support the millions of small businesses and consumers across the country."

Keep reading to see what eBay is urging legislators to do...