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Comment Re:So... (Score 1) 157

by vague disclaimer (#60429315) Attached to: Epic To Host a Tournament With Anti-Apple Prizes

Taking the piss out of huge megalocorps is a fantasy shared by many, but only possible for other magalocorps.

I'm pretty sure anybody can take the piss. It is a free pastime. Being good at it is a different matter.

Out of curiosity, what do mature people such as yourself do for fun?

Odd question, but since you ask: watch anything with, in no particular order, Kristen Bell, Anna Kendrick or Aubrey Plaza. Three of the most naturally gifted comic actors alive.

Submission + - Blockchain, the amazing solution for almost nothing.

Submitted by leathered
leathered writes: Blockchain technology has been hyped ever since the creation of Bitcoin in 2008, and despite some evangelists claiming that it can solve a multitude of the world's problems, adoption outside of cryptocurrencies has been almost non-existent. The Correspondent explores the reasons for the non-adoption of Blockchain.
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"Blockchain technology is going to change everything: the shipping industry, the financial system, government in fact, what won’t it change? But enthusiasm for it mainly stems from a lack of knowledge and understanding. The blockchain is a solution in search of a problem."

Submission + - Why New Zealand might never know how virus came back (nzherald.co.nz)

Submitted by Thelasko
Thelasko writes: Having ruled out the possibility of the virus entering the country through frozen goods at Americold, scientists and authorities are now more or less settled on the explanation of a hidden, person-to-person chain of infection.

"I still think the most likely source of the cluster is that it came in via a border worker somewhere — whether at an airport, a port, or a quarantine facility — and it's then gone a few more steps in a chain before it arrived with the worker at Americold," University of Canterbury mathematician and modeller Professor Michael Plank said.

  Dr Jemma Geoghegan, an evolutionary biologist and virologist at the University of Otago and ESR, remained confident the outbreak wasn't linked to New Zealand cases from months ago.

"We did have this lineage in New Zealand way back in April, but both the genomic and epidemiological data we have doesn't link this new cluster to those old cases," she said.

"We know that there are a substantial number of people around the world who get really sick with this disease, and in my view it's very unlikely it could have gone undetected for several months."

Genomic sequencing of the latest samples revealed the lineage — called B.1.1.1 — as one with strong connections to coronavirus in Australia, the UK and other countries.

Submission + - SPAM: Fossil leaves prove elevated CO2 triggered greening 23M years ago

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: The links between rising carbon dioxide levels, global warming and greening trends have been confirmed by fossilized leaves from a 23 million-year-old forest.

The leaves were found preserved in the sediment layers that once formed the bottom of a New Zealand lake.

"The amazing thing is that these leaves are basically mummified, so we have their original chemical compositions, and can see all their fine features under a microscope," lead author Tammo Reichgelt, an adjunct scientist at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, said in a news release.

Paleontologists previously unearthed a diversity of plants, algae, spiders, beetle, flies and fungi from the ancient lake bed, found inside an ancient crater called Foulden Maar.

Their analysis showed atmospheric CO2 levels rose as high as 450 parts per million during the Miocene.

The analysis also showed trees in the Foulden Maar forest were able to absorb larger amounts of CO2 without requiring the same levels of water absorption, allowing them to grow in marginal areas — places previously too dry to host large plants.

Today, CO2 levels in the atmosphere measure 415 ppm. By 2040, they will likely reach 450 ppm. Researchers suggest the latest study will help climate scientists improve the accuracy of their models.
Link to Original Source

Submission + - Greenland Lost 586 Billions Tons of Ice In 2019 (apnews.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Greenland lost a record amount of ice during an extra warm 2019, with the melt massive enough to cover California in more than four feet (1.25 meters) of water, a new study said. After two years when summer ice melt had been minimal, last summer shattered all records with 586 billion tons (532 billion metric tons) of ice melting, according to satellite measurements reported in a study Thursday. That’s more than 140 trillion gallons (532 trillion liters) of water. That’s far more than the yearly average loss of 259 billion tons (235 billion metric tons) since 2003 and easily surpasses the old record of 511 billion tons (464 billion metric tons) in 2012, said a study in Communications Earth & Environment. The study showed that in the 20th century, there were many years when Greenland gained ice.

“Not only is the Greenland ice sheet melting, but it’s melting at a faster and faster pace,” said study lead author Ingo Sasgen, a geoscientist at the Alfred Wegener Institute in Germany. Last year’s Greenland melt added 0.06 inches (1.5 millimeters) to global sea level rise. That sounds like a tiny amount but “in our world it’s huge, that’s astounding,” said study co-author Alex Gardner, a NASA ice scientist. Add in more water from melting in other ice sheets and glaciers, along with an ocean that expands as it warms — and that translates into slowly rising sea levels, coastal flooding and other problems, he said.

Submission + - SPAM: Steve Bannon arrested for fraud in connection to borderwall fundraising.

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Steve Bannon was arrested on a boat Thursday morning off the Eastern coast of Connecticut, according to a law enforcement official.

The former Trump campaign adviser was indicted, along with three others, in connection with an alleged scheme to defraud donors of hundreds of thousands of dollars in a border wall fundraising campaign.
Link to Original Source

Submission + - Facebook's "independent" fact checks face quiet political, financial pressures (fastcompany.com) 1

Submitted by tedlistens
tedlistens writes: Facing questions about a mysterious series of changes to some fact-check labels, Facebook recently wrote to a group of senators with an assurance: its fact checkers can and do label "opinion" content if it crosses the line into falsehood.

What Facebook didn't tell the senators: the company draws that line, and can pressure changes to fact checks & misinformation penalties. And it does. Facebook acknowledged to me that it may ask fact checkers to change their ratings, and that it exercises control over pages' internal misinformation strikes.

In one case—a video containing misinformation about climate change published by PragerU—Facebook downgraded a fact-check label from "false" to "partly false," and removed the page's misinformation strikes.

Was the change warranted? "Let me put it this way," says Scott Johnson, an editor at Climate Feedback, one of Facebook's third-party fact checking organizations. "Our reviewers gave it a -2 rating on our +2 to -2 scale and our summary describes it as 'incorrect and misleading to viewers,' so we had selected the 'false' label accordingly."

In some cases the video now carries no apparent label at all. After an update that Facebook announced last week, the company is using what it calls a "lighter-weight warning label" for "partly false" content in the U.S.: an unobtrusive box below the video under "related articles" that says "fact check," with a link. Meanwhile, older versions of the video appeared to evade labels completely: A handful of other PragerU posts containing the video appear without any labeling, a review by Fast Company found. Versions of the labeled and unlabeled video have now racked up millions of views since April 2016, when it was first published.

Submission + - Deep learning helps future Mars Rovers go farther, faster, and do more science (utexas.edu) 1

Submitted by aarondubrow
aarondubrow writes: NASA JPL are developing autonomous capabilities that could allow future Mars rovers to go farther, faster and do more science. Training machine learning models on the Maverick2 supercomputer at the Texas Advanced Computing Center, their team developed and optimized models for Drive-By Science and Energy-Optimal Autonomous Navigation. The team presented results of their work at the IEEE Aerospace Conference in March 2020. The project was a finalist for the NASA Software Award.

Submission + - SPAM: Ignorance About Covid-19 Risk Is 'Nothing Short of Stunning,' Research Report

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: A leading financial firm, Franklin Templeton, figured that people’s behavioral response to the pandemic will play a crucial role in shaping the economic recovery, so they teamed up with Gallup, the polling outfit, to find out what people know and don’t know.

“These results are nothing short of stunning,” concluded the firm. “Six months into this pandemic, Americans still dramatically misunderstand the risk of dying from COVID-19.”

That’s no exaggeration, and the implications go far beyond the economic behavior Franklin Templeton was interested in.

Here is what they found:

First, the Franklin Templeton-Gallup survey found that the general population has a little understanding how heavily the pandemic is focused on the older population. It is not broad-based. From the report:

On average, Americans believe that people aged 55 and older account for just over half of total COVID-19 deaths; the actual figure is 92%. Americans believe that people aged 44 and younger account for about 30% of total deaths; the actual figure is 2.7%. Americans overestimate the risk of death from COVID-19 for people aged 24 and younger by a factor of 50; and they think the risk for people aged 65 and older is half of what it actually is (40% vs 80%).
Link to Original Source

Submission + - With the most deaths in 150 years, Swedes are to trace their own contacts. (theguardian.com)

Submitted by AleRunner
AleRunner writes: In the first half of 2020 Sweden has recorded it's highest death total in 150 years. the Guardian writes "In total, 51,405 Swedes died in the six-month period, a higher number than in any year since 1869, when 55,431 people died," in what may be a reaction to this failure, which makes Sweden the worst coronavirus country in Scandinavia, Sweden has announced a change to their new contact tracing policy — thelocal.se explains: "If you test positive for the coronavirus you may now be given instructions to call people with whom you have been in contact and may have infected, instead of healthcare staff doing the job for you, or it not being done at all.". In early June Sweden switched from it's failed "herd immunity" strategy to a contact tracing strategy and has since seen a strong fall in new infections though with a recent slight increase. Whether the new contact tracing strategy will be critical for the return of the Swedish economy with Sweden currently facing travel restrictions from Scandinavian neighbours such as Finland whilst other Scandinavian and Baltic countries are already open for trade and tourism. Swedes will be hoping that the adjustment of their new Coronavirus strategy will be a signpost for other countries rather than the warning of their old strategy.

Not so long ago, in June, we discussed how Sweden's old strategy had made Sweden a Piriah state and in May we had discussed how Sweden's old strategy caused many deaths whilst failing to deliver immunity

Submission + - NASA Is Tracking a Vast, Growing Anomaly in Earth's Magnetic Field (sciencealert.com)

Submitted by fahrbot-bot
fahrbot-bot writes: NASA is actively monitoring a strange anomaly in Earth's magnetic field: a giant region of lower magnetic intensity in the skies above the planet, stretching out between South America and southwest Africa.

This vast, developing phenomenon, called the South Atlantic Anomaly, has intrigued and concerned scientists for years, and perhaps none more so than NASA researchers. The space agency's satellites and spacecraft are particularly vulnerable to the weakened magnetic field strength within the anomaly, and the resulting exposure to charged particles from the Sun.

The primary source is considered to be a swirling ocean of molten iron inside Earth's outer core, thousands of kilometres below the ground.

A huge reservoir of dense rock called the African Large Low Shear Velocity Province, located about 2,900 kilometres (1,800 miles) below the African continent, disturbs the field's generation, resulting in the dramatic weakening effect – which is aided by the tilt of the planet's magnetic axis.

It's not just moving, however. Even more remarkably, the phenomenon seems to be in the process of splitting in two ...

Submission + - Great Barrier Reef Losing Its Ability To Recover From Bleaching (cnn.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Successive ocean heat waves are not only damaging Australia's Great Barrier Reef, they are compromising its ability to recover, raising the risk of "widespread ecological collapse," a new study has found. The 2,300-kilometer-long (1,500 mile) reef has endured multiple large-scale "bleaching" events caused by above-average water temperatures in the last two decades, including back-to-back occurrences in 2016 and 2017. The new study, released Wednesday in the journal Nature, examined the number of adult corals which survived these two events and how many new corals they created to replenish the reef in 2018.

The answer was as bleak as it was stark: "Dead corals don't make babies," the study's lead author, Terry Hughes, said in a press release. Scientists working on the study found the loss in adult corals caused a "crash in coral replenishment" on the reef, as heat stresses brought about by warming ocean temperatures impacted the ability of coral to heal. "The number of new corals settling on the Great Barrier Reef declined by 89% following the unprecedented loss of adult corals from global warming in 2016 and 2017," said Hughes. Scientists working on the report say they would expect coral recruitment to recover over the next 5 to 10 years, as more corals reach sexual maturity, but only in the absence of another bleaching event. However, with sea temperatures continuing to rise this seems a near-impossiblity.

Submission + - House Democrats Refuse To Weaken Net Neutrality Bill, Defeat GOP Amendments (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives yesterday rejected Republican attempts to weaken a bill that would restore net neutrality rules. The House Commerce Committee yesterday approved the "Save the Internet Act" in a 30-22 party-line vote, potentially setting up a vote of the full House next week. The bill is short and simple—it would fully reinstate the rules implemented by the Federal Communications Commission under then-Chairman Tom Wheeler in 2015, reversing the repeal led by FCC Chairman Ajit Pai in 2017.

Commerce Committee Republicans repeatedly introduced amendments that would weaken the bill but were consistently rebuffed by the committee's Democratic majority. "The Democrats beat back more than a dozen attempts from Republicans to gut the bill with amendments throughout the bill's markup that lasted 9.5 hours," The Hill reported yesterday. Republican amendments would have weakened the bill by doing the following: Exempt all 5G wireless services from net neutrality rules; Exempt all multi-gigabit broadband services from net neutrality rules; Exempt from net neutrality rules any ISP that builds broadband service in any part of the U.S. that doesn't yet have download speeds of at least 25Mbps and upload speeds of at least 3Mbps; Exempt from net neutrality rules any ISP that gets universal service funding from the FCC's Rural Health Care Program; Exempt ISPs that serve 250,000 or fewer subscribers from certain transparency rules that require public disclosure of network management practices; and Prevent the FCC from limiting the types of zero-rating (i.e., data cap exemptions) that ISPs can deploy.

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