146877942
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PolygamousRanchKid writes:
A Florida high school is facing backlash for altering the yearbook photos of 80 female students to add clothing to their chests and shoulders. The school district told local media the changes were made to ensure the photos met the dress code, which says girls' shirts must be "modest". But critics pointed to yearbook photos of male students left unedited despite violating the same standards. The digital alterations were made without permission, the students say.
In a statement to WJAX, the district said the school's previous policy was to remove all photos that violated the dress code, and this year's edits were to make sure all students were included. The district's dress code for the 2020-2021 school year says that girls' tops and shirts "must cover the entire shoulder" and must be "modest and not revealing or distracting". "Excessive make-up" is not permitted and all students are prohibited from donning "extreme hairstyles".
146825116
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PolygamousRanchKid writes:
Bitcoin took investors on another rollercoaster ride over the weekend after a top regulator in China announced a crackdown on mining, a new tack in the country’s ongoing fight against the cryptocurrency.
The government will “crack down on bitcoin mining and trading behavior and resolutely prevent the transfer of individual risks to the society,” said the statement, which was issued by the Financial Stability and Development Committee of the State Council, the country’s cabinet equivalent. The committee is chaired by Vice Premier Liu He, who acts as President Xi Jinping’s top representative on economic and financial matters.
“The wording of the statement did not leave much leeway for cryptocurrency mining,” Li Yi, chief research fellow at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, told the South China Morning Post. “When all mining activities are banned in China, it will be a turning point for the fate of bitcoin, as a large chunk of its processing power is taken out of the picture.”
China’s hardening stance toward bitcoin comes as the highest-valued cryptocurrency is under increasing scrutiny for its outsize carbon footprint. The bitcoin network demands a staggering amount of energy. Today, it uses as much power as the Netherlands to maintain its normal operations. That load must be particularly obvious to the Chinese government, since a recent Nature Communications paper estimated that 75 percent of all bitcoin mining happens in China.
China’s warning to bitcoin miners is certain to push many operations out of the country. At least one bitcoin observer said that he anticipates miners pushed out of China will set up operations in Mongolia, Kazakhstan, and Afghanistan.
146706340
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PolygamousRanchKid writes:
California is requiring ride-sharing companies such as Uber and Lyft to transition from gasoline to electric vehicles (EVs) in their networks by the end of this decade. The state’s clean-air regulator on Thursday unanimously approved the Clean Miles Standard mandating that EVs account for 90 percent of ride-hailing vehicle miles traveled in California by 2030. The ride-share companies will have to begin the electrification of their fleets in 2023.
“The transportation sector is responsible for nearly half of California’s greenhouse gas emissions, the vast majority of which come from light-duty vehicles,” CARB (California Air Resources Board) Chair Liane M. Randolph said in a statement.
Both Uber and Lyft have already committed to converting their fleets entirely to EVs by 2030 and have made efforts to help drivers make the shift. The companies have said, however, California needs to spend more money to help drivers afford the zero emissions vehicles, according to Reuters.
Pin the tail on the donkey; Pin the bill on the Taxpayer.
146501168
submission
PolygamousRanchKid writes:
Colonial Pipeline is having network issues preventing shippers from planning upcoming shipments of fuel, the company said on Tuesday, just after the nation's biggest fuel pipeline reopened after a week-long ransomware attack. The disruption was caused by efforts by the company to harden its system as it restores service following the cyberattack, Colonial said, and not the result of a reinfection of its network. It did not say when the issue would be fixed, but said it was still delivering products scheduled by shippers.
Colonial has been using its shipper nomination system to schedule batches of fuel deliveries to bring flows back to normal. A prolonged network outage could prevent shippers from adding to or making changes to deliveries — which would hamper delivery across the U.S. southeast and east coasts just after the line reopened.
146497068
submission
PolygamousRanchKid writes:
On the night of May 25-27, observers in Oceania, Hawaii, eastern Asia and Antarctica will see a lunar eclipse that coincides with the moon's closest approach to Earth — making it a "supermoon" eclipse that will turn the moon reddish — also known as a "blood moon." (The dates of this eclipse span two days because the area it will be visible spans the international date line)
Lunar eclipses occur when the moon is on the opposite side of the Earth as the sun. Usually we see a full moon when this happens, but every so often the moon enters the Earth's shadow, resulting in an eclipse. This doesn't happen every full moon because the plane of the moon's orbit is tilted about 5 degrees from the plane of the Earth's orbit, and the moon "misses" the shadow of the Earth.
Unlike a solar eclipse, which is only visible along a narrow track, lunar eclipses are visible from the entire night side of the Earth; this entire eclipse takes about five hours from start to finish. The timing depends a lot on what time zone you are in, relative to what is called Universal Coordinated Time (effectively the hour in Greenwich, England). In Asia, the eclipse occurs near moonrise in the evening. On the west coast of the Americas, the eclipse happens in the early morning hours, near moonset. The best viewing will be in between those two extremes: Australia, New Zealand, Hawaii, the islands of the South Pacific and southwestern Alaska.
146373790
submission
PolygamousRanchKid writes:
When Israel launches air strikes and artillery bombardments on Gaza, Palestinians have few sources of protection. But when Palestinians fire rockets into the Jewish state, its citizens can bank on one of the world’s most tried and tested air-defence systems for security — the Iron Dome.
The Islamist movement has maintained its barrage even as Israeli fighter jets, artillery and tanks have pounded the impoverished Palestinian territory of 2m people. At least 122 people have been killed since Monday in Gaza, including 31 children and 20 women, and 900 others wounded, Palestinian medical officials said. But, according to the Israeli military, close to 1,000 of the Palestinian rockets have been intercepted by the Iron Dome, a system built by Israeli defence companies and funded and developed jointly with the US.
The Obama administration stepped up US funding for Iron Dome partly to show support for Israel. But it also hoped it would help prevent conflicts from escalating.
Ulrike Franke, a senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, said this week’s events underlined the “political importance” of Iron Dome which made it possible for Israelis to “continue a somewhat normal life while under attack”.
“It gives the government leeway — if Hamas attacks killed hundreds of Israeli civilians, the Israeli government would be pushed very hard to intervene with a ground operation,” she said. “With the protection of Iron Dome, the government has more freedom of maneuver. However, on the other hand, it also gives the government freedom to not try and find a peaceful solution — as it can endure, at least for a while, the attacks.”
146220248
submission
PolygamousRanchKid writes:
President Biden signed an executive order Wednesday boosting America's cyberdefenses following a ransomware attack on a company that operates a pipeline that provides nearly half of the gasoline and jet fuel for the country's East Coast. The broad order, which the administration had been working on for months, aims to strengthen cybersecurity for federal networks and outline new security standards for commercial software used by both business and the public.
In a briefing with reporters Wednesday, a senior Biden administration official said that the order "reflects a fundamental shift in our mindset from incident response to prevention, from talking about security to doing security." The administration's goal is not only to boost federal defenses but also to use the purchasing power of the government to get those higher standards to trickle down to the private sector. The administration also wants to pilot a program like those Energy Star ratings on appliances so consumers know if software was developed securely.
It also establishes a Cybersecurity Safety Review Board to analyze incidents. It's modeled on the National Transportation Safety Board, which reviews airplane crashes and incidents with other modes of transportation.
While cyberthreats come from all over the world, the pipeline attack brought focus back to Russia, because Biden says the alleged criminal group has ties to the country. "I'm going to be meeting with President [Vladimir] Putin, and so far there is no evidence based on, from our intelligence people, that Russia is involved, although there's evidence that the actors' ransomware is in Russia," Biden has said. "They have some responsibility to deal with this."
146201610
submission
PolygamousRanchKid writes:
The hacker group DarkSide claimed on Wednesday to have attacked three more companies, despite the global outcry over its attack on Colonial Pipeline this week, which has caused shortages of gasoline and panic buying on the East Coast of the U.S.
Over the past 24 hours, the group posted the names of three new companies on its site on the dark web, called DarkSide Leaks. The information posted to the site includes summaries of what the hackers appear to have stolen but do not appear to contain raw data. DarkSide is a criminal gang, and its claims should be treated as potentially misleading.
The posting indicates that the hacker collective is not backing down in the face of an FBI investigation and denunciations of the attack from the Biden administration. It also signals that the group intends to carry out more ransom attacks on companies, even after it posted a cryptic message earlier this week indicating regret about the impact of the Colonial Pipeline hack and pledging to introduce “moderation” to “avoid social consequences in the future.”
One of the companies is based in the United States, one is in Brazil and the third is in Scotland. None of them appear to engage in critical infrastructure. Each company appears to be small enough that a crippling hack would otherwise fly under the radar if the hackers hadn’t received worldwide notoriety by crippling gasoline supplies in the United States.
145089198
submission
PolygamousRanchKid writes:
Charles “Chuck” Geschke — the co-founder of the major software company Adobe Inc. who helped develop Portable Document Format technology, or PDFs — died at age 81.
“This is a huge loss for the entire Adobe community and the technology industry, for whom he has been a guide and hero for decades,” Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen wrote in an email to the company’s employees.
“As co-founders of Adobe, Chuck and John Warnock developed groundbreaking software that has revolutionized how people create and communicate,” Narayen said. “Their first product was Adobe PostScript, an innovative technology that provided a radical new way to print text and images on paper and sparked the desktop publishing revolution. Chuck instilled a relentless drive for innovation in the company, resulting in some of the most transformative software inventions, including the ubiquitous PDF, Acrobat, Illustrator, Premiere Pro and Photoshop.”
After earning a doctorate from Carnegie Mellon University, Geschke began working at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, where he met Warnock, the Mercury News reported. The men left the company in 1982 to found Adobe, developing software together.
144514190
submission
PolygamousRanchKid writes:
In November 2019, twelve bottles of Chateau Petrus 2000—a rare and expensive red wine from Bordeaux, France—hitched a ride to the International Space Station aboard a Northrop Grumman spacecraft. It was followed several months later by 320 snippets of grapevine, or canes, of Merlot and Cabernet Sauvignon. For a year, both viticultural products were exposed to the unique stress of the station’s microgravity environment.
On January 1st, the wine bottles and canes returned to earth aboard a SpaceX cargo vessel, and were hurried back to the Institute of Vine and Wine Science (ISVV) at the University of Bordeaux. Researchers have already begun analyzing the changes they underwent while in orbit, and during a press conference on Wednesday, revealed their preliminary findings. They had also, of course, tasted the wine.
Scientists at the European startup behind the experiment, Space Cargo Unlimited (SCU), hope that observing a difference in the structural makeup of both the wines and canes, compared with the control samples that remained on earth, will contribute to an SCU program called Mission WISE. That initiative is aimed at harnessing the potential of microgravity to produce agricultural products resistant to climate change.
140648634
submission
PolygamousRanchKid writes:
In hard-hit Los Angeles County, the total COVID-19 death toll has reached 10,850 and confirmed cases topped 818,000. The county reported more than 7,700 people hospitalized, including 21% in ICUs.
Hospitals are so overwhelmed that last week the Los Angeles County Emergency Medical Services Agency issued directives that ambulances should stop transporting patients to hospitals if they have virtually no chance of surviving, including those whose hearts and breathing have stopped and who couldn’t be resuscitated by paramedics.
The agency also issued a directive Monday directing ambulance crews to administer less oxygen. Supplies have been strained because of the pandemic.
Elsewhere, organizations representing actors, commercial advertisers, advertising agencies and independent film and television producers recommended a hold on in-person production in Southern California.Link to Original Source
140456216
submission
PolygamousRanchKid writes:
Cheech: "Yes, I do drugs.
Chong: "But sometimes, drugs do you!
Four German healthcare workers were hospitalized on Sunday after receiving five times the recommended dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus vaccine.
Officials from the Vorpommern-Ruegen district said the doses were administered to eight employees, ranging from age 66 to 82, in a nursing home in the Hanseatic city of Stralsund on December 27.
When the mistake was discovered, officials sent half of the employees home. However, the other half was sent to the hospital for observation after developing flu-like symptoms.
The district officials cited an earlier statement from BioNTech that pointed out that large doses were used in the vaccine's first phase of clinical trials without any serious consequences.
Getting high on a COVID vaccine . . . definitely 2020's gone wild.
138244872
submission
PolygamousRanchKid writes:
The country's prime minister said the mutated virus, found on mink farms, "may pose a risk to the effectiveness of a future vaccine."
The mutated virus was found in a dozen people who got infected by minks. Half of the 783 human Covid-19 cases in northern Denmark "are related to mink," Health Minister Magnus Heunicke said.
There are between 15 million and 17 million minks in Denmark, one of the world's main mink fur exporters. According to government estimates, culling the country's mink population could cost up to $785 million. National police head Thorkild Fogde urged that “it should happen as soon as possible."
136346126
submission
PolygamousRanchKid writes:
Police in Vietnam have confiscated an estimated 345,000 used condoms which had been cleaned and resold as new, state media reported.
Footage broadcast by state-owned Vietnam Television (VTV) this week showed dozens of large bags containing the used contraceptives scattered across the floor of a warehouse in the southern province of Binh Duong.
The owner of the warehouse said they had received a "monthly input of used condoms from an unknown person," state newspaper Tuoi Tre reported.
A woman detained during the bust told police that the used prophylactics were first boiled in water then dried and reshaped on a wooden phallus before being repackaged and resold.
136018446
submission
PolygamousRanchKid writes:
SoftBank is set to sell the UK’s Arm Holdings to US chip company Nvidia for more than $40 billion, just four years after its founder Masayoshi Son bought the chip designer and said it would be the linchpin for the future of the Japanese technology group.
Multiple people with direct knowledge of the matter said a cash-and-stock takeover of Arm by Nvidia may be announced as soon as Monday, and that SoftBank will become the largest shareholder in the US chip company.
Nvidia had a market valuation of roughly similar to that of Arm’s at the time of the 2016 deal, but now trades with a market value of $300 billion, or roughly 10 times the amount SoftBank paid in cash for Arm. By paying for a large portion of the deals with its own shares, it is also passing part of the risk of the transaction to SoftBank.
To pave the way for the deal, SoftBank reversed an earlier decision to strip out an internet-of-things business from Arm and transfer it to a new company under its control. That would have stripped Arm of what was meant to be the high-growth engine that would power it into a 5G-connected future. One person said that SoftBank made the decision because it would have put it in conflict with commitments made to the U.K. over Arm, which were agreed at the time of the 2016 deal to appease the government.