241685
submission
mattnyc99 writes:
The tragic collapse last night in Minneapolis of a truss bridge—one that the U.S. Dept. of Transportation found "structurally deficient" two years ago—raises an important issue beyond just the engineering of one single span. As national security expert Stephen Flynn pleads in an op-ed on American infrastructure in the wake of yesterday's disaster, "The blind eye that taxpayers and our elected officials have been turning to the imperative of maintaining and upgrading the critical foundations that underpin our lives is irrational and reckless." Do we need to start spending to rebuild America?
93766
submission
socram writes:
From the moment of birth, we begin the battle against death — against the inevitable. Statistics say that a newborn child can expect to live an average of 76 years. But averages may not be what they use to be.In 1786, life expectancy was 24 years. A hundred years later it doubled to 48. Right now, it's 76.
The cause of human aging is now being understood.
92300
submission
An anonymous reader writes:
On December 23, Amazon advertised a "buy one get one free" sale on DVD boxsets, but did not test the promotion before going live. When anyone placed two boxsets in their cart, the website gave a double discount — so the "grand total" shown (before order submission) was $0.00 or something very small. Despite terms stating that Amazon checks order prices before shipping, Amazon shipped the vast majority of orders. Five days later (December 28), after orders had been received and presumably opened, Amazon emailed customers advising them to return the boxsets unopened or customers' credit cards would be charged an additional amount. (You can read more threads about this here and here.) Starting yesterday, Amazon has been (re)charging credit cards, often without authorization.
On Amazon's side, they didn't advertise any double discount, and the free or nearly-free boxsets must have cost them a mint. But with Amazon continually giving unadvertised discounts that seem to be errors, is "return the merchandise or be charged" the new way that price glitches will be handled?
92282
submission
Yosi writes:
Ashay Dharwadker claims to have proved that P = NP. In a paper he publishes on his website he claims to have found a polynomial algorithm for finding maximal independent sets in a graph and provides actual source code implementation of the proposed algorithm. If this is indeed true, I guess a lot of professors will start looking for a new job.
