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Comment Meanwhile, in Antarctica (Score 4, Insightful) 67

by Drishmung (#63260725) Attached to: Antartica's Only EV Had To Be Redesigned Because of Climate Change
FFS! You misspelled Antarctica as Antartica in the headline?!

And if it wasn't designed to operate at 14F from the outset, then someone apparently can't even look up Wikipedia

At McMurdo Station, which is the main U.S. station in Antarctica and 1,360 km (850 miles) north of the South Pole, the mean annual temperature is -18C (0F). Temperatures may reach 8C (46F) in the austral summer and -50C (-58F) in the austral winter. The average wind is 12 knots, but winds have exceeded 100 knots.

Comment Re:World Demand (Score 1) 62

by Drishmung (#63255533) Attached to: EPA Blocks Long-Disputed Mine Project in Alaska

...

Unless of course you are intending to revert to the business model of the East India Company and do a good old-fashioned rape and pillage exercise on the less developed world....

That's what they were doing, only in this case the "less developed world" was just Alaska. What, you thought that colonialism only affected other countries?

Submission + - Top 10 Indoor Plants that Clean the Air at Low Light | Plantsly (blogspot.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: To improve air quality in a natural and healthy way, we’ve put together a list of the top 10 indoor plants that clean the air and require low light. Indoor plants play a crucial role in improving air quality insides home and buildings by removing harmful pollutants. They work by absorbing gasses through their leaves, roots and breaking down contaminents through a process known as phytoremediation. By planting theese plants in your houses and buildings, you can reduce the level of toxic chemicals such as formaldehyde, benzene and trichloroethylene promoting a healthier indoor environment.

Submission + - Microsoft want court to toss GitHub lawsuit accusing them of abusing open-source (reuters.com)

Submitted by guest reader
guest reader writes: Microsoft Corp, Microsoft's GitHub Inc and OpenAI Inc told a San Francisco federal court that a proposed class-action lawsuit for improperly monetizing open-source code to train their artificial-intelligence systems cannot be sustained.

Two anonymous plaintiffs, seeking to represent a class of people who own copyrights to code on GitHub, sued Microsoft, GitHub and OpenAI in November. They said the companies trained Copilot with code from GitHub repositories without complying with open-source licensing terms, and that Copilot unlawfully reproduces their code.

Microsoft and OpenAI said Thursday that the plaintiffs lacked standing to bring the case because they failed to argue they suffered specific injuries from the companies' actions.

From the class action complaint:

GitHub and OpenAI have offered shifting accounts of the source and amount of the code or other data used to train and operate Copilot. They have also offered shifting justifications for why a commercial AI product like Copilot should be exempt from these license requirements, often citing "fair use."

It is not fair, permitted, or justified. On the contrary, Copilot's goal is to replace a huge swath of open source by taking it and keeping it inside a GitHub-controlled paywall. It violates the licenses that open-source programmers chose and monetizes their code despite GitHub's pledge never to do so.

Submission + - Google could have used an algorithm to fire people including open source talent (theregister.com)

Submitted by Artem S. Tashkinov
Artem S. Tashkinov writes: Those who were fired last week found out from emails, discovering they no longer had corporate access and their ID badges no longer worked. How were they chosen? Good question. It has been widely reported that some of the firing was done by an algorithm. For example, Chris DiBona, who founded Google's OSPO 18 years ago, was let go. As was Jeremy Allison, co-creator of Samba and Google engineer; Cat Allman, former Program Manager for Developer EcoSystems; and Dave Lester, a new hire who was taking ownership of Google's open source security initiatives. These are not the people anyone in their right mind, or HR container, would want to fire. They are open source movers and shakers. In open source leadership circles, they're people everyone knows and are happy to work with.

Submission + - An ALS Patient Set a Record For Communicating Via a Brain Implant: 62 WPM (technologyreview.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Eight years ago, a patient lost her power of speech because of ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s disease, which causes progressive paralysis. She can still make sounds, but her words have become unintelligible, leaving her reliant on a writing board or iPad to communicate. Now, after volunteering to receive a brain implant, the woman has been able to rapidly communicate phrases like “I don’t own my home” and “It’s just tough” at a rate approaching normal speech. That is the claim in a paper published over the weekend on the website bioRxiv by a team at Stanford University. The study has not been formally reviewed by other researchers. The scientists say their volunteer, identified only as “subject T12,” smashed previous records by using the brain-reading implant to communicate at a rate of 62 words a minute, three times the previous best. [...] People without speech deficits typically talk at a rate of about 160 words a minute. Even in an era of keyboards, thumb-typing, emojis, and internet abbreviations, speech remains the fastest form of human-to-human communication.

Submission + - NYC Will Replace Its Largest Fossil Fuel Plant With Wind Power (electrek.co)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: New York City’s largest fossil-fuel plant, which powers 20% of the city, will be replaced with offshore wind power. Ravenswood Generating Station is the New York City fossil fuel plant that will become an offshore wind hub. It’s a 2,480-megawatt (MW) power plant in Long Island City, Queens, across from Roosevelt Island, and it’s the Big Apple’s largest power plant. Rise Light & Power, a New York based energy asset manager and developer that holds Ravenswood as its core asset, is submitting a proposal today, with support from community and state leaders, to the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) in response to the state’s offshore wind solicitation.

In a nutshell, the 27-acre waterfront oil and gas industrial site is going to be converted into a clean energy hub that will power one-fifth of New York City with offshore wind power. The Ravenswood offshore wind project will reuse existing physical and electrical infrastructure, and that’s going to save New York ratepayers money. An HVDC conductor cable will be brought onshore at the existing power plant site. The cable will interconnect via underground HVAC cables to the NYISO bulk electric system at existing substations adjacent to the site. It will also become an offshore wind operations and maintenance hub that will support the just transition of the existing fossil fuel plant workforce, and drive economic investment into a historically underserved community. Rise Light & Power states that the project will, with training programs and job opportunities, justly transition and upskill Ravenswood’s current Local 1-2 UWUA union workers.

Submission + - What characters are forbidden in OS X filenames? (superuser.com)

Submitted by hselasky
hselasky writes: On MacOS at least HFS and exFAT mounted filesystems, appear to not support the following UTF-16 character sequence 0x61 ("a") 0x30a (ring over — https://www.compart.com/en/uni...), looking at the byte sequence in the filename after byte swapping to little endian, it becomes like this:

"61 00 0a 03"

I guess the problem is that this byte sequence escapes to 0xE5 ("å") which appears to be some generic whiteout character in MacOS.

Unless the disk is write-protected, such files are instantly deleted. People working in the law enforcement departments in Scandinavia, probably should read this carefully before shipping files and documents between departments!

When this problem started is unknown, but probably has been this way since the beginning of the 70's (remember the VAX :-)

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