152525221
submission
Tablizer writes:
Possible entries:
* Microsoft
* Oracle
* SCO
* Google
* Apple
* IBM
* Comcast
* Other: __________
145957482
submission
Tablizer writes:
On Tuesday, the Nasdaq exchange ceased transmitting information about the stock on its website and in feeds to brokers and other financial organizations. The webpage for the stock simply says: "Data is currently not available."
Berkshire Hathaway is an investment group known not just for being run by billionaire tycoon Warren Buffett, but also because its BRK.A stock is ridiculously priced: at time of writing, $435,120.00 (£312,818.65) apiece. It is listed on the New York Stock Exchange, which is unaffected by the following bug...the BRK.A [stock] value exceeded the maximum value that at least some parts of Nasdaq's software can safely handle.
And this is all because it turns out Nasdaq uses 32-bit unsigned integers to record and send quotes for shares. The maximum value of such a 32-bit variable is 2^32 — 1, or 0xffffffff in hexadecimal, or 4,294,967,295 in decimal.
143930998
submission
Tablizer writes:
Why is it so difficult to get a new pair of glasses or contacts in this country? It’s easier pretty much everywhere else...
As Barbara Horn, O.D., the president of the American Optometric Association (AOA), told me, "Today, at least 2.2 billion people around the world have a vision impairment, of whom at least 1 billion have a vision impairment that could have been prevented or has yet to be addressed That’s why it’s clear to health experts, policymakers, the media, and the public that increased access to eye exams and eye doctors are needed to safeguard health and vision."
But this argument rather begs the question. After all, the added cost of having to see an optometrist presumably stops many Americans from accessing the corrective lenses they need to improve their vision. Is the desirability of an eye exam performed by a medical professional a sufficient reason to prevent Americans who would rather not—or cannot—visit an optometrist from buying glasses and contacts? We can only answer this question by acknowledging a trade-off between competing goods.
On the one hand, some number of Americans who visit an optometrist to get a new prescription will indeed discover that they have a serious condition that requires immediate care. On the other hand, it is likely that a much greater number keep wearing glasses that are too weak--or won’t wear glasses at all--because they want to avoid the cost, time, or stress of a visit to a doctor.
139037820
submission
Tablizer writes:
Bill Gates slammed coronavirus testing in the US in an interview with CNBC, saying that most tests are a "complete waste" because it takes too long for the results to come back.
Gates, the former CEO and founder of Microsoft, believes that people need to get results back sooner so that they're able to "change their behavior so they're not infecting other people."
"The simplest thing, which has to do with such insanity, is you should not reimburse somebody for getting a test that it takes more than 48 hours to get the result back," Gates said on Tuesday.
"That test is a complete waste. And to all these numbers about how much we test, the majority is just complete waste," he added, calling it "insane" to have to pay for test results that could take more than three days and up to a full week.
128647722
submission
Tablizer writes:
"The Great Depression was nothing less than a worldwide catastrophe. Its effects were felt literally everywhere, from the shores of the New World to the ancient cobblestone streets of European cities and everywhere in between.
In many ways, this is one of the only true worldwide disasters that resulted in genuine life or death survival situations for a long period of time that we can study from the 20th century. We should learn what lessons we can from it so we are better prepared to survive the harshest of times in the future.
[Here are] 50 survival tips gleaned from the hard-won lessons of those who lived through the Great Depression."
(Note that the article has a slight religious tilt.)
121118718
submission
Tablizer writes:
Microsoft still dominates cubicle-land. Google is making a push into that domain, but it's unclear how far or how fast they can go. Most "serious" applications still run on only Windows and that doesn't seem to be changing much. What's keeping others out? Do we need new desktop-oriented cross-platform standards? It seems everyone "went web" and forgot about the desktop niche, but it's a big niche still.
116441302
submission
Tablizer writes:
CNN.com cites a cartoon from the geek-popular site XKCD:
"On Tuesday morning, President Donald Trump tweeted a 2016 map with the words "Try to impeach this" written across it. [The map] is a county-by-county rendering of the 2016 election. And it is, as far as it goes, accurate. Trump won 2,626 counties to Hillary Clinton's 487 in the last presidential election, according to the Associated Press. But the map is also quite misleading...
When you allow for actual population in the country, the map looks a lot different. This one, by cartoonist Randall Munroe on his XKCD website, is a much more accurate depiction of what the 2016 election actually looked like."
114696222
submission
Tablizer writes:
SFGate: "Visitors to Disney's new Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge attraction, can choose from more than 1,000 unique items to take home as souvenirs.
But if they plan on flying home, they'll have to leave at least one behind — a specially designed "thermal detonator" Coca-Cola bottle the company made especially for the new attraction.
TSA has told fans that the bottle, which retails for $5, looks too much like a replica explosive and therefore won't be allowed in carry-on or checked baggage. Fans, not surprisingly are not pleased with the decision."
I hope they don't take away my lightsaber.
114256252
submission
Tablizer writes:
Vice.com reports: "When two robots face off in a concrete ring to battle to their brutal, oily deaths, no animals are harmed in the process. But YouTube has been taking down videos of Battlebots and issuing strikes against their creators, citing animal cruelty.
As first spotted by YouTuber Maker's Muse, YouTube has taken down videos of robots doing combat after mistaking them for videos that show "deliberate infliction of animal suffering." YouTube has confirmed to Motherboard that it removed the videos in error, that the videos have already been restored, and that YouTube has no policy against videos of robots fighting."
It seems bots can't recognize bots.
113200852
submission
Tablizer writes:
SpaceFlightNow reported: "With the drill feed mechanism no longer reliably working, managers decided to keep the drill bit in its extended position. That raised concerns over the stability of the drill while in use because the prong-like extensions on each side of the bit will no longer be in contact with the rock.
“We had to do a big pivot in the mission thinking about how we could drill without the feed motor,” said Ashwin Vasavada, the Curiosity mission’s project scientist at JPL, in a presentation to the Mars Exploration Program Analysis Group in April.
Controllers devised a way to use force applied by the robotic arm to null out forces generated by the drill, a role the arm was never designed to fill.
Engineers used a replica of the Curiosity rover at JPL’s “Mars Yard” to test out the new drilling techniques, and the rover drilled a test hole in a rock on Mars in February. That test did not produce a scientifically useful rock sample — it used only the drill’s rotary mechanism, not its hammer-like percussion capability — but yielded important data for engineers to continue refining the updated drilling technique...
110449602
submission
Tablizer writes:
'"I told them I wasn’t going to snitch," says one person, who was surprised to find two [FBI] agents at his back door one afternoon. They told him not to discuss the encounter, says the person, who asked not to be named, and inquired about joint research projects in China. He tried to explain that there are no secrets in basic science, because everything gets published. Over their two-hour talk, he says, the agents were less focused on national security issues--say, espionage or trade secret theft--than on the more soul-searching subject of loyalty. They wanted to know, in effect, are you now or have you ever been more committed to curing cancer in China than in the U.S.?'
108145806
submission
Tablizer writes:
A former Mozilla executive [Johnathan Nightingale] last week claimed Google...purposefully undermined Firefox's development even as the company denied compatibility problems were anything but accidental...
"Over and over. Oops. Another accident. We'll fix it soon. We want the same things. We're on the same team. There were dozens of oopses. Hundreds maybe? I'm all for 'don't attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence,' but I don't believe Google is that incompetent.'
"I think they were running out the clock. We lost users during every oops. And we spent effort and frustration every clock tick on that instead of improving our product. We got outfoxed for a while and by the time we started calling it what it was, a lot of damage had been done."
105430488
submission
Tablizer writes:
"The new images — taken from as close as 17,000 miles (27,000 kilometers) on approach — revealed Ultima Thule as a "contact binary," consisting of two connected spheres. End to end, the world measures 19 miles (31 kilometers) in length. The team has dubbed the larger sphere "Ultima" (12 miles/19 kilometers across) and the smaller sphere "Thule" (9 miles/14 kilometers across).
The team says that the two spheres likely joined as early as 99 percent of the way back to the formation of the solar system, colliding no faster than two cars in a fender-bender...
Data from the New Year's Day flyby will continue to arrive over the next weeks and months, with much higher resolution images yet to come.
103068002
submission
Tablizer writes:
There's something mysterious coming up from the frozen ground in Antarctica, and it could break physics as we know it.
Physicists don't know what it is exactly. But they do know it's some sort of cosmic ray — a high-energy particle that's blasted its way through space, into the Earth, and back out again. But the particles physicists know about — the collection of particles that make up what scientists call the Standard Model (SM) of particle physics — shouldn't be able to do that. Sure, there are low-energy neutrinos that can pierce through miles upon miles of rock unaffected. But high-energy neutrinos, as well as other high-energy particles, have "large cross-sections." That means that they'll almost always crash into something soon after zipping into the Earth and never make it out the other side...
Penn State researchers calculated that, whatever particle is bursting up from the Earth, it has much less than a 1-in-3.5 million chance of being part of the Standard Model. (In technical, statistical terms, their results had confidences of 5.8 and 7.0 sigma, depending on which of their calculations you're looking at.)
100808990
submission
Tablizer writes:
Cowardice? Maybe not. A group-effort Hanlan's razor seems sharp in this account of the Parkland, Florida High School shooting:"But now he stood against the wall, holding his radio in one hand and his gun in the other. He remembered wondering why he could not locate the shots. Trees, roof, windows, courtyard. The fire alarm was still blaring. Police sirens were closing in from all directions. From Peterson’s position, he could see only the east side entrance to the 1200 building. Meanwhile, on the west side, at least one victim was already down.
Students inside the 1200 building were at that very moment flooding 911 with calls describing the exact location and description of the shooter, but it turned out that those calls were being routed not to the Broward County Sheriff’s Office but instead to the bordering Coral Springs Police Department. Coral Springs officers were not yet on the scene, and even once they arrived, they communicated on a separate radio system from Peterson and the rest of Broward County. The only information being relayed to him was coming out of his Broward County radio, a soundtrack first of silence and then of mounting confusion as the shooting continued into its fourth minute."
