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Submission + - Sparkfun CEO on running an Open Hardware business (youtube.com)

Submitted by MoHaG
MoHaG writes: A recent talk by Sparkfun founder Nathan Seidle gives a great overview on how they grew their business and how better service and constant innovation means that copies of products are not a significant risk to the company.

Submission + - Physicist:There is no Dark Matter and the Universe is Twice as Old as We Thought (sciencealert.com) 1

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Sound waves fossilized in the maps of galaxies across the Universe could be interpreted as signs of a Big Bang that took place 13 billion years earlier than current models suggest.

Last year, theoretical physicist Rajendra Gupta from the University of Ottawa in Canada published a rather extraordinary proposal that the Universe's currently accepted age is a trick of the light, one that masks its truly ancient state while also ridding us of the need to explain hidden forces.

Gupta's latest analysis suggests oscillations from the earliest moments in time preserved in large-scale cosmic structures support his claims.

"The study's findings confirm that our previous work about the age of the Universe being 26.7 billion years has allowed us to discover that the Universe does not require dark matter to exist," says Gupta.

"In standard cosmology, the accelerated expansion of the Universe is said to be caused by dark energy but is in fact due to the weakening forces of nature as it expands, not due to dark energy."

Rewind currently accepted models of accelerating expansion, and the emptiness of space stops being very empty about 13.7 billion years ago, with every fleck of material in the Universe confined to a volume you could now fit into your top pocket with room to spare.

This was all fine and dandy until measures of what are thought to be freshly-baked galaxies revealed a Universe that appeared surprisingly mature for massive cosmic objects not even a billion years out of the ovens.

This leaves astronomers with a dilemma – either existing models on the evolution of galaxies and black holes need adjusting, or the Universe has, in fact, been around a lot longer than we think.

Submission + - Cognition emerges from stealth to launch AI software engineer Devin (venturebeat.com)

Submitted by ahbond
ahbond writes: The Doom of Man is at hand,

It will start with the low-hanging Jira tickets, and in a year or two, able to handle 99% of them..

'Today, Cognition, a recently formed AI startup backed by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund and tech industry leaders including former Twitter executive Elad Gil and Doordash co-founder Tony Xu, announced a fully autonomous AI software engineer called “Devin”.'

In the short term, software engineers may become like bot farmers, herding 10-1000 bots writing code, etc..

Welcome to the future.

Cheers,
Andrew.

Submission + - Boeing whistleblower found dead one day after testifying (npr.org)

Submitted by wgoodman
wgoodman writes: Police in Charleston, S.C., are investigating the death of John Barnett, a former Boeing quality control manager who became a whistleblower when he went public with his concerns about serious safety issues in the company's commercial airplanes.

Barnett's body was found in a vehicle in a Holiday Inn parking lot in Charleston on Saturday. One day earlier, he testified about the string of problems he says he identified at Boeing's plant where he once helped inspect the 787 aircraft before delivery to customers.

Police say officers were sent to the hotel to conduct a welfare check after people were unable to contact Barnett, who had traveled to Charleston to testify in his lawsuit against Boeing.

"Upon their arrival, officers discovered a male inside a vehicle suffering from a gunshot wound to the head," police said in a statement sent to NPR. "He was pronounced deceased at the scene."

The office of Charleston County Coroner Bobbi Jo O'Neal said that Barnett, who had been living in Louisiana after retiring from Boeing, died "from what appears to be a self-inflicted gunshot wound."

Submission + - Can you picture things in your mind? (theguardian.com)

Submitted by whoever57
whoever57 writes: The Guardian has an interesting article on aphantasia, which is the inability to picture objects in your mind. People with this condition tend to go into STEM fields and remember different aspects of objects and people. Personally, I never realized before reading this article that people could create mental images.

Try the red apple test.

Submission + - A former senior Boeing employee on why he still won't fly on a MAX plane. (politico.com)

Submitted by berghem
berghem writes: ‘I’m Not Trying to Cause a Scene. I Just Want to Get Off This Plane.’

on this interview on Politico, Ed Pierson details the concerns about Boeing and in particular about its MAX aircraft which led him to take early retirement from the firm.

from the interview:

"Last year, I was flying from Seattle to New York, and I purposely scheduled myself on a non-MAX airplane. I went to the gate. I walked in, sat down and looked straight ahead, and lo and behold, there was a 737-8/737-9 safety card. So I got up and I walked off. The flight attendant didn’t want me to get off the plane. And I’m not trying to cause a scene. I just want to get off this plane, and I just don’t think it’s safe. I said I purposely scheduled myself not to fly [on a MAX]."

“The Boeing Company is capable of building quality airplanes,” says Pierson, now the executive director for the nonprofit Foundation for Aviation Safety. “The problem is leadership, or lack thereof, and the pressure to get airplanes out the door is greater than doing the job right.”

"I have always had the greatest respect for the airplane products that The Boeing Company makes. My family was involved in it and my relatives. I had no reason ever to doubt it. And then I started working in the factory. I had been around airplanes my whole career. I flew airplanes in the Navy. You go into the production environment, and you’re like, “Oh, my God, I had no idea it was this complex.” It’s stunning how complex it is. At first, I didn’t understand how all that came together. And it gave me a great respect for the people that were building the plane — it’s incredibly impressive to see. And then everything started to change in 2017 and into 2018."

"What’s going wrong is that nothing changed. They made very superficial changes that they made a big deal of. They made a giant deal of hiring a safety officer. Big whoop. They wanted to deflect attention away."

"That’s all Boeing does is talk. The leadership doesn’t get down there and get involved with the people that are building the products. They don’t value the engineers, they think the engineers are replaceable. You can’t take a 20- or 30-year employee and just dump them off to the side and think that you’re going to find somebody off the street that’s going to be able to do what that person does."

Comment Re:I was totally fine just having a remote (Score 1) 177

by Aviation Pete (#64267332) Attached to: How 'Smart Keys' Have Fueled a New Wave of Car Thefts

I was totally fine just having a physical key to unlock my vehicle. Stick the key in the door, turn it, and boom you're unlocked. Get in the car, stick the key into the ignition, turn it, and drive away...

In colder climates a frozen lock could easily give you five or even ten minutes of frustration. Remember door lock de-icers? They came in a range of types, and with remotes the need for them thankfully disappeared. I'm quite happy to have left physical keys behind.

Submission + - Data forensic expert got election rig claimers to frame themselves in court (politico.com) 1

Submitted by Tablizer
Tablizer writes: [Mike] Lindell had given us about 50 gigabytes of additional data to plow through. There were four new files, but when I looked at them, they were essentially the same types as the first day’s files except with a spreadsheet containing 121,128 lines of generic information about internet service providers around the world plus their locations, their latitudes and longitudes, their IP addresses, and other miscellaneous information. I determined that nothing in the file was related to the 2020 presidential election, and wondered what my competitors were seeing.

Then came another giant batch of 509 files, comprising many more gigabytes. This was how Lindell planned to keep anyone from winning the [prove-us-wrong] challenge, I figured. Just inundate us with files and not nearly enough time to analyze them. That $5 million [prize] suddenly seemed to have slipped through my fingers in a way that felt very unfair...

On the third and final day of the [challenge] symposium, an idea hit me. I decided to scan the file modification dates for all of the latest files we’d been given and, lo and behold, most of the dates were August 2021, right before the symposium. In other words, the data were obviously modified right before we examined them. They could not possibly accurately represent data from the November 2020 election...

During the leadup to the hearing with the three-person arbitration panel, his witnesses gave conflicting answers to critical questions like “What exactly was in the data you provided to the experts and how was it related to the November 2020 U.S. presidential election?”...

“Mr. Zeidman,” the arbitrators stated, “proved the data Lindell LLC provided unequivocally did not reflect November 2020 election data.”...

Lindell filed an appeal of the decision...My lawyers and I will continue to fight him in court. When and if I see the money, I [Bob Zeidman] plan to donate to a nonprofit to legitimately support voter integrity laws and processes.

Comment Make no mistake ... (Score 1) 15

... this is the company behind the recent upset about the change in Unity licensing. They have invested heavily in Unity and now want their money back.

Did anyone believe that the licensing change was the sole brainchild of John Riccitiello? Of course he was instructed by Sequoia and pals to squeeze the developers and got dumped when he failed to get the message across. Unity is still on the same toxic track and will be as long as VC capital sees a chance for a payout.

As others have said, this is a PR move and a clumsy attempt to get at inside information. Very transparent.

Submission + - Leaked Emails Show Hugo Awards Self-Censoring to Appease China (404media.co) 1

Submitted by samleecole
samleecole writes: A trove of leaked emails shows how administrators of one of the most prestigious awards in science fiction censored themselves because the awards ceremony was being held in China.

The emails, which show the process of compiling spreadsheets of the top 10 works in each category and checking them for “sensitive political nature” to see if they were “an issue in China,” were obtained by fan writer Chris M. Barkley and author Jason Sanford, and published on fandom news site File 770 and Sanford’s Patreon, where they uploaded the full PDF of the emails. They were provided to them by Hugo Awards administrator Diane Lacey. Lacey confirmed in an email to 404 Media that she was the source of the emails.

“In addition to the regular technical review, as we are happening in China and the *laws* we operate under are different...we need to highlight anything of a sensitive political nature in the work,” Dave McCarty, head of the 2023 awards jury, directed administrators in an email. “It's not necessary to read everything, but if the work focuses on China, taiwan, tibet, or other topics that may be an issue *in* China...that needs to be highlighted so that we can determine if it is safe to put it on the ballot of if the law will require us to make an administrative decision about it.”

Submission + - Rogue UP address 1

Submitted by J. L. Tympanum
J. L. Tympanum writes: The following is strictly a theoretical question. I have no intention of doing any of it.

Suppose I set up a server. I set its IP address to be the same as some existing site. I connect my server to the internet. What happens?

Submission + - Slashdot Newsletter pop-ups (slashdot.org)

Submitted by ve3oat
ve3oat writes: OK, I get it. Slashdot has a newsletter to which I do not subscribe and you want me to subscribe to it.

But I am already a loyal Slashdot reader and I read Slashdot every day, usually several times a day, usually without logging in, and do not need a newsletter. Besides, my mailbox already gets stuffed with other things.

Please stop putting the pop-up ads for the Newsletter on my browser every time I visit Slashdot, which, as I mentioned above, is fairly often. Thank you.

Submission + - Appin's global censorship campaign to stop you from reading these docs (muckrock.com) 1

Submitted by v3rgEz
v3rgEz writes: Founded in 2003, Appin has been described as a cybersecurity company and an educational consulting firm. Appin was also, according to Reuters reporting and extensive marketing materials, a prolific “hacking for hire” service, stealing information from politicians and militaries as well as businesses and even unfaithful spouses.

Legal letters, being sent to newsrooms and organizations around the world, are trying to remove that story from the internet — and are often succeeding. Now, MuckRock, Techdirt and the Electronic Frontier Foundation are pushing back, helping to ensure the materials stays available. As Masnick at Techdirt notes, "This kind of censorial bullying may work on other publications, but Techdirt believes that (1) important stories, especially around surveillance and hacking, deserve to be read and (2) it’s vitally important to call it out publicly when operations like Appin seek to silence reporting, especially when it’s done through abusing the legal process to silence and intimidate journalists and news organizations."

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