Now that systemd is uneventfully running the latest releases of major distributions like Debian, Fedora, and Ubuntu, you might imagine that opposition to it is melting away -- but you'd be wrong. Instead, the rumors are as common as ever. Devuan, the anti-systemd fork of Debian, is still trudging towards a release while making the same arguments as ever. Devuan's home page asks: Have you tried to opt-out of the systemd change in Debian and stay with sysvinit? You will quickly notice that "Debian offers no choice." Yet a search quickly unearths instructions for making an install image without systemd and for removing systemd from your system.

Nor does the claim that systemd violates the Unix design principles stand up under scrutiny. Systemd is actually a general name for a series of related, similarly structured commands. From this perspective, systemd conforms to the principle of one program doing a single function in much the same way as the Linux kernel or a command line shell does. It is a suite of programs, not a single monolithic one. Systemd may not be ideal, but systems continue to boot and function the way they are supposed to.

In fact, not only are the most common anti-systemd arguments easily discounted, but they are surrounded by a vagueness that raises suspicions. Wild claims are made without any attempt at substantiation. The result is an air of secrecy and danger that, however appealing and reminiscent of freedom-fighting that it might be, does nothing to justify the anti-systemd rhetoric or make it plausible. Devuan's mailing list mostly shows the same dozen or so posters, and has raised only 7934 Euros. Supporters sound as though they are doing more fear-mongering than constructive effort.

For the first time ever, natural gas trumped coal as the top source of electric power generation in the U.S. In April, roughly 31 percent of electric power generation came from natural gas, whereas coal accounted for 30 percent. It's a dramatic difference from April 2010, when coal accounted for 44 percent of the mix and natural gas just 22 percent. In last 18 months, 17 gigawatt hours of coal-fired capacity has been retired completely, much of it already replaced by gas generation. "It could be the beginning of the end for the current fleet of coal plants."

As domestic demand at power plants has been falling, global demand for U.S. coal exports also continues to sag. On Monday Chinese customs data showed coal imports in China plunged 33.7 percent in June versus a year earlier. China is the largest consumer of the commodity in the world. U.S. coal exports have been in free fall for years as countries like Australia and Indonesia have provided supply to China more inexpensively. The stronger dollar is also making American supply pricier abroad.

Coal prices have continued to crater. This is particularly true of coal mined in the eastern U.S. Since their 2011 peak, prices have nearly halved. But the ripple effects extend beyond coal stocks. Coal, a historically high-margin business for railroads, accounted for nearly 19 percent of revenue for the Class I railroads in the U.S. in 2014. Of the 1.8 billion tons of freight transported via rail in 2014, 39 percent was coal.

When Microsoft announced its deal to acquire Nokia's mobile phone business, Steven A. Ballmer, Microsoft's chief executive at the time, boasted that the deal was a "bold step into the future." But on Wednesday, Microsoft's current chief executive, Satya Nadella, sought to leave that deal in the past. He announced a broad rethinking of the company's phone strategy, a change that includes cutting up to 7,800 jobs, mostly from the phone business, and writing off nearly all of the value of its Nokia acquisition. The move is a clear acknowledgment that the deal was a multibillion-dollar strategic blunder by Mr. Ballmer, who had envisioned it as a way to make Microsoft more competitive in the mobile market.

While Microsoft will not stop making smartphones, Mr. Nadella said on Wednesday that it would no longer focus on the growth of that business. Microsoft has continued to lose market share in smartphones since acquiring Nokia's handset business. The company has failed to turn the Windows Phone operating system, which runs on its handsets, into a vibrant alternative to the two leading mobile platforms, iOS from Apple and Android from Google.

This has been "a big blow" for Finland's economy. The "death curve" of their electronics industry as Nokia faltered and fell to just 2-3 per cent of the global smartphone market, along with falling global demand for paper products and EU sanctions on neighboring Russia, have entrenched the Scandinavian country in a three-year recession. Meanwhile, Nokia has confirmed rumors that it intends to reenter the smartphone market. Nokia certainly won't be recouping the massive investment required to start manufacturing smartphones again, instead they would design the products and earn the royalties, but everything else would be up to whomever they partner with.

Solar Impulse 2 has successfully landed in Hawaii after completing its audacious five-day journey across the Pacific Ocean. The mission, which has been dogged by recent delays, touched down safely at Kalaeloa Airport with Swiss pilot Andri(C) Borschberg in the cockpit. He had endured more than 100 hours alone in the plane with minimal sleep during the flight - smashing the record for the longest solo flight in aviation history by two days. The plane had originally been intended to fly straight from China to Hawaii, but worsening weather on the way meant Borschberg had to abort and land in Japan. Bad weather had also kept the plane grounded in China for several weeks longer than intended.

The next leg of the global circumnavigation flight was to be a four-day crossing to Phoenix, Arizona, but that has been postponed at least until 2016. The plane's batteries overheated and were damaged beyond repair during the latest leg of the trip. It's not the technology itself that was the problem, the pilots say, but how the batteries were insulated. Replacing and testing the batteries will take at least a few months, and because the days in the Northern Hemisphere are already getting shorter, completing the rest of the journey in 2015 isn't an option.

The flight began in March over the desert sands of Abu Dhabi, and flown across Oman, India, Myanmar, China, Japan, and the Pacific Ocean. If all goes to plan, Bertrand Piccard will fly the next leg to Phoenix, Arizona, sometime in April. Piccard and Borschberg will alternate flying across the U.S., the Atlantic, and eventually all the way back to Abu Dhabi, completing the 35,000 kilometer (22,000 mile) journey.

Native to the forests of Borneo, Nepenthes hemsleyana feeds on bat guano, which provides the plant with all the nutrients it needs, minus the hassle of digestion. To that end, N. hemsleyana has developed special structures that reflect bats' ultrasonic calls back to them - an ability that helps the plant attract bats to roost in its pitcher so that it can feast on the animal's feces, a new study has found. The signals are specific to the bat species Kerivoula hardwickii, making it easier for the bats to find their partner plant.

Unlike its carnivorous cousins, N. hemsleyana is not especially adept at catching insects. Yet scientists noticed that it somehow manages to thrive. Pursuing the mystery, Schiner and his team discovered that N. hemsleyana provides some insect-eating bats with a spacious, stable, and parasite-free roosting spot. In return, the bats fertilize the plant with their feces, the researchers discovered. "Carnivorous plants in general have already solved the problem of nutrient deficiency in a very unusual way by reversing the 'normal system' of animals feeding on plants. It is even more astonishing that in the case of N. hemsleyana the system is taking a new turn," Dr. Schiner said.

After restarting to run at higher power than ever, the Large Hadron Collider has made its first proper discovery. Today, a team of scientists announced that they've found a new class of sub-atomic particles known as pentaquarks, a particle composed of four quarks and an antiquark.
From BBC:

It was first predicted to exist in the 1960s but, much like the Higgs boson particle before it, the pentaquark eluded science for decades until its detection at the LHCb experiment. The findings have been submitted to the journal Physical Review Letters.

The LHCb experiment is an experiment set up to understand what allowed matter to survive (as opposed to antimatter) by studying the properties of quarks.

A Ukrainian nonprofit organization, started in 2012 as a watchdog for human rights and democratic development in Ukraine, had its website temporarily taken offline by a subsidiary of the U.S.-based registrar company GoDaddy.com at the behest of the Russian government.

The Maidan Monitoring Information Center announced today that one of its domain names-maidanua.org-had been blocked indefinitely by Wild West Domains, LLC, the GoDaddy subsidiary, following a formal request by Roskomnadzor, Russia's telecom regulator and censor. "They refuse to reply to our requests," says Nataliya Zubar, board chair. However, following numerous requests by The Daily Beast to GoDaddy for comment, the URL appears to have been reactivated.

"We registered it with a U.S.-based registrar as an alias because we were afraid of censorship attempts from Ukrainian authorities at the time. The threat of censorship in Ukraine has dissipated after the political breakthrough of March 2014, but now, ironically, we are being censored by a U.S.-based company."

Satoru Iwata, president of Nintendo from 2002, died of a tumor Saturday at Kyoto University Hospital, after a lengthy illness. He was 55. He had not been seen recently at game events, such as E3 in Los Angeles, where he was usually a participant. The announcement drew a flood of emotional tributes from game fans and industry rivals.

Iwata led Nintendo's development into a global company, with its hit Wii home console and DS handheld, and also through its recent troubles caused by the popularity of smartphones. Iwata had been poised to lead Nintendo through another stage after it recently did an about-face and said it will start making games for smartphones, meaning that Super Mario would soon start arriving on cellphones and tablets. The company returned to profit in the fiscal year ended March 2015 after several years of losses.

Iwata succeeded Hiroshi Yamauchi, who ruled over the Kyoto-based company for half a century, transforming it from a traditional playing-card company to a technological powerhouse. Iwata is survived by his wife Kayoko. A funeral service will be held on July 17. His replacement was not immediately announced, but the company said star game designer Shigeru Miyamaoto will remain in the leadership team along with Genyo Takeda.

Microsoft has become The OpenBSD Foundation's first ever Gold contributor ($25,000 to $50,000), in large part due to the OpenSSH project. The donation was made following the PowerShell's Team's blog last month, announcing their future plans to implement the widely requested SSH protocol. In recent years, and attributed to change in leadership, Microsoft has done an about face in support of open-source, beyond just pushing .NET.

The Foundation helps fund work on some widely distributed, under-funded open source projects, including OpenBSD, OpenBGPD, LibreSSL, and OpenNTPD, to name a few. This donation is a boon to the cash strapped projects, where users often out-donate corporations, who directly profit from the software. The 2015 fund raising campaign has raised $125,000 which just tops last year's contributions after the fallout of OpenSSL, and the branch of LibreSSL.

As of today, the press statement is out for the release of Oracle's VirtualBox 5.0. This comes 4-6 months after an inquiry started about whether Oracle had abandoned further development of VirtualBox following 2013's v4.3. Infoworld's April 2, 2015 review of the VB 5.0 beta states "don't expect anything truly revolutionary... but its main advantage over VMware remains with its offer of a free incarnation of many of the same core features."

Highlights for the new release include support for USB 3.0 Devices and Disk Image Encryption, among other things.