115328180
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PolygamousRanchKid writes:
Politicians in Berlin are calling for a city-centre ban on “tank-like” 4x4s after a driver reportedly lost control of his car and hit a group of pedestrians in the German capital, killing four people. Police have opened an involuntary manslaughter investigation into the 42-year driver of a Porsche Macan who reportedly overtook cars waiting at a traffic light in the central Mitte area at 7.10 pm on Friday, before mounting the pavement on the other side of the road.
A 64-year-old woman, her three-year-old grandson, a Briton and a Spanish national, both in their 20s, died at the scene. Stephan von Dassel, the district mayor of Berlin-Mitte, said “armour-like” 4x4s did not belong in the city, as every driving error put the lives of people at risk. “These [cars] are also climate killers. They are a threat even without an accident,” he said. Oliver Krischer, a deputy leader of the Green party in the German parliament, called for size restrictions on 4x4s allowed into city centres. “The best solution would be a nationwide rule that allowed local authorities to set size limits,” Krischer told Der Tagesspiegel newspaper.Link to Original Source
115103504
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PolygamousRanchKid writes:
Democratic presidential candidate Marianne Williamson posted and then deleted a tweet Wednesday morning that suggested the "power of mind" could deter Hurricane Dorian from slamming into the US. "The Bahamas, Florida, Georgia and the Carolinas...may all be in our prayers now. Millions of us seeing Dorian turn away from land is not a wacky idea; it is a creative use of the power of the mind. Two minutes of prayer, visualization, meditation for those in the way of the storm," her now-deleted post read.
She replaced the tweet with a post offering prayer for "people of the Bahamas, Florida, Georgia and the Carolina's. May the peace of God be upon them and their hearts be comforted as they endure the storm," she wrote.
A spiritual guru and author, Williamson, who announced her campaign in January, has called for a "moral and spiritual awakening" for America and promised to "harness love for political purposes" to defeat President Donald Trump.
Sorry Ms. Williamson . . . the power of my mind is focused on porn tonight.
I wish you good luck with your hurricane.Link to Original Source
114978716
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PolygamousRanchKid writes:
With Hurricane Dorian churning as a Category 4, people who plan to evacuate are taking some unique precautions. Brittany Vidal of the Davis Shores neighborhood is plastic wrapping her home, securing it with close to 300 sand bags and Duct tape.
"Hopefully our barricade will do something for us this year, but at least we can immediately start getting fans, get things going," said Vidal.Link to Original Source
114785918
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PolygamousRanchKid writes:
Another leading hotel company is eliminating tiny toiletries from its rooms.
Marriott (MAR) announced it's replacing travel-sized tubes of shampoo, conditioner and bath gel with larger bottles in an attempt to reduce plastic waste.
Marriott said the small bottles currently used aren't usually recycled. Once the change is fully implemented, the hotel chain said it expects to reduce its plastic disposal by 30%, or nearly 2 million pounds of plastic it sends to landfills annually.
Marriott said that one pump-topped bottle contains as much liquid as a dozen single-use bottles. The new bottles will be made from recyclable materials.
Marriott's rivals have also been making changes to benefit the environment. Businesses are facing disruption from climate change and customers are increasingly demanding that products and services are environmentally friendly.
Do you really want to touch something that the previous guests handled . . . ? After all, you never know where their hands have been.Link to Original Source
114613486
submission
PolygamousRanchKid writes:
Donald Trump has reportedly suggested on more than one occasion that the US military should bomb hurricanes in order to disrupt them before they make landfall.
According to US news website Axios, the US president said in a meeting with top national security and homeland security officials about the threat of hurricanes: “I got it. I got it. Why don’t we nuke them?”
“They start forming off the coast of Africa, as they’re moving across the Atlantic, we drop a bomb inside the eye of the hurricane and it disrupts it. Why can’t we do that?”
114493314
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PolygamousRanchKid writes:
A floating Russian nuclear power station that environmentalists are calling a potential “Chernobyl on ice” set sail Friday on a 3,000-mile journey across the Arctic.
The Akademik Lomonosov, which left the port of Murmansk and is destined for Pevek, is carrying highly radioactive fuel and two tsunami-proof nuclear reactors on board, according to the BBC. Three tugs are pulling the ship east so it can provide power to a remote, Siberian mining complex.
Environmentalists have been sounding the alarm about the risks of a ship like the Akademik Lomonosov traveling through a part of the world known for harsh and unpredictable weather.
An article about the vessel posted on Greenpeace’s website says “the next nuclear catastrophe could well be a Chernobyl on ice or a Chernobyl on-the-rocks.”
113500726
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PolygamousRanchKid writes:
ON BALANCE, it seems implausible that a committee—let alone a committee run by grey-suited Communist Party commissars—could design anything as odd as the new research campus of Huawei, the Chinese telecommunications giant. Comprising 12 replica European “towns” spread across lush subtropical hills near the southern city of Dongguan, the campus houses 18,000 scientists, designers and other boffins in turreted German castles, Spanish mansions and Italian palazzi, connected by an antique-style red train.
After 30 years spent largely shunning publicity, Huawei has turned into one of the world’s chattier high-technology firms, inviting journalists into once-secret research laboratories and smartphone assembly lines.
Broadly speaking, when Chaguan visited the firm’s headquarters this week, senior Huawei officers advanced two different solutions to the problem of high-tech globalisation in a low-trust age. Only one of those solutions is very persuasive.
That persuasive idea is to treat distrust in global supply chains as a technical challenge, rather than a political one. In this model, distrust can never be eliminated but may be mitigated.
Huawei’s second, unpersuasive solution involves trying to convince outsiders that, given the right written and verbal assurances from the state, firms from China can, as it happens, be trusted not to help Chinese spies steal secrets. Thus Huawei bosses note assurances from the Chinese foreign ministry that no law exists that could make Chinese firms install backdoors in digital devices, for spies to use.
A more convincing approach would see Huawei admit that China is different and concede that some party commands cannot be defied. That agreed, Huawei could then focus on making high-tech products and systems designed for use in a world of low or non-existent trust. Huawei bosses cannot make that argument, because party leaders would be incensed. Those turreted castles are impressive. But outside those manicured grounds is China.
113054868
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PolygamousRanchKid writes:
French inventor Franky Zapata has successfully crossed the Channel on a jet-powered hoverboard for the first time, after a failed attempt last month. Zapata took off from Sangatte, northern France early on Sunday morning and landed in St. Margarets Bay, near Dover in England. The journey took just over 20 minutes, according to Reuters news agency.
In an interview after he completed his journey across the Channel, Zapata said that for his next challenge he was working on a flying car and had signed contracts, but for now he "was tired" and "wants a vacation," he told BFMTV. The inventor captured the world's imagination when he took to the skies above Paris at Bastille Day parade in July with the board that can reach an altitude of nearly 500 feet — with the potential to go much higher — and a speed of 87mph.
Zapata has worked with the US and French militaries, with the French investing $1.4 million to pay for tests of the board. French special forces are interested in the flying board for several uses, including as a possible assault device, said Armed Forces Minister Florence Parly, according to CNN affiliate BFMTV.
112607196
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PolygamousRanchKid writes:
The moon has been a junkyard for all sorts of objects since the Soviet Union crash-landed a spacecraft on its surface in 1959. But it’s not just moon buggies that astronauts left behind, they also left a lot of poo too.
In an article for the BBC’s Science Focus magazine, astrophysics professor Dr Alastair Gunn, said the poo will have had ‘no permanent effect on the lunar environment’. He wrote: ‘Any microorganisms present in the human waste could not have grown under the harsh conditions of the lunar surface.
"What was the name of that book . . . ?"
"The Moon is a Harsh Toilet . . . ?"
112607058
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PolygamousRanchKid writes:
The mobile tech revolution is barely a decade old, and it brings special challenges to parents and caregivers, says pediatrician Jenny Radesky, who sees patients at the University of Michigan and is one of the top researchers in the field of parents, children and new media.
"The telephone took decades to reach 50 million global users, and we had Pokemon Go do that within, like, two and a half weeks," Radesky says. "So we all feel like we've been blown over by a tidal wave of all this new stuff."Most of us feel like we're failing, at least at times, to manage the competing bids for attention that come from work, kids, partners, and from our digital devices.
While she doesn't want to come off as "judgy of parents," Radesky and other experts shared four takeaways from the research that can guide parents who want to improve their relationships both with their kids and with technology.
Put your phone away whenever possible when you're with your kids.
Stop using the phone as a pacifier — for you or your kid.
. . . and many more tips
112459766
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PolygamousRanchKid writes:
Soon, there will be no more manholes in the city of Berkeley, California. There will also be no chairmen, no manpower, no policemen or policewomen.
No, that doesn't mean a whole city will be without committee leaders and law enforcement. It means that words that imply a gender preference will be removed from the city's codes and replaced with gender-neutral terms, according a recently adopted ordinance.
The city voted Tuesday night to replace gendered terms in its municipal codes, like "manhole" and "manpower," with gender-neutral ones like "maintenance hole" and "human effort."
The revised city documents also will replace instances of gendered pronouns, such as "he" and "she" with "they," according to the ordinance.
112305676
submission
PolygamousRanchKid writes:
New documents obtained exclusively by CNN reveal that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange received in-person deliveries, potentially of hacked materials related to the 2016 US election, during a series of suspicious meetings at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. The documents build on the possibility, raised by special counsel Robert Mueller in his report on Russian meddling, that couriers brought hacked files to Assange at the embassy. The surveillance reports also describe how Assange turned the embassy into a command center and orchestrated a series of damaging disclosures that rocked the 2016 presidential campaign in the United States.
112257464
submission
PolygamousRanchKid writes:
A proposal to prevent big technology companies from functioning as financial institutions or issuing digital currencies has been circulated for discussion by the Democratic majority that leads the House Financial Services Committee, according to a copy of the draft legislation seen by Reuters. In a sign of widening scrutiny after Facebook Inc’s (FB.O) proposed Libra digital coin aroused widespread objection, the bill proposes a fine of $1 million per day for violation of such rules.
Last week, U.S. President Donald Trump criticized Libra and other cryptocurrencies and demanded that companies seek a banking charter and make themselves subject to U.S. and global regulations if they wanted to “become a bank.” His comments came after Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell told lawmakers that Facebook’s plan to build a digital currency called Libra could not move forward unless it addressed concerns over privacy, money laundering, consumer protection and financial stability.
112216356
submission
PolygamousRanchKid writes:
Over 300,000 people have signed on to a Facebook event pledging to raid Area 51 in Nevada in a quest to "see them aliens."
The event, titled "Storm Area 51, They Can't Stop All of Us," is inviting users from around the world to join a "Naruto run" — a Japanese manga-inspired running style featuring arms outstretched backwards and heads forward — into the area.
The mysterious Area 51 has been the focus of conspiracy theories for decades, and many people think it's where the US government stores its secrets about aliens and UFOs.
111978170
submission
PolygamousRanchKid writes:
IBM closed its $34 billion acquisition of Red Hat, the companies announced Tuesday. The acquisition of Red Hat, an open source, enterprise software maker, marks the close of IBM’s largest deal ever. It’s one of the largest in U.S. tech history. Under the deal, Red Hat will now be a unit of IBM’s Hybrid Cloud division, according to the original announcement.
IBM previously said it hopes its acquisition of Red Hat will help it do more work in the cloud, one of its four key growth drivers, which also include social, mobile and analytics. The company lags behind Amazon and Microsoft in the cloud infrastructure business.
In an April note, Nomura Instinet analysts led by Jeffrey Kvaal said, “OpenShift [a Red Hat product] should help IBM win new customers and new workloads as enterprises begin to usher mission-critical applications from on-premise to public or private clouds.”
