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Comment Privatised Aged Care in Australia (Score 1) 243

Australia has privately owned 'aged care' (incl. nursing homes) for some time, to varying degrees of success and failure. A recent Royal Commission into the issues inherent in this system (triggered by a string of incidents) has certainly brought sunlight to those failures. https://agedcare.royalcommissi...

Submission + - Illinois lawmaker says GTA cause of rise in carjackings, calls for ban

Koreantoast writes: With the number of carjackings more than doubling in the city of Chicago during 2020, one lawmaker knows who to blame: the video game "Grand Theft Auto." According to Chicago ABC 7, Democratic State Representative Marcus Williams believes the video game is causing the rise in carjackings, stating that "Grand Theft Auto' and other violent video games are getting in the minds of our young people and perpetuating the normalcy of carjacking. Carjacking is not normal and carjacking must stop." He plans on introducing a bill to ban sales of the game in the state of Illinois.

Some are skeptical of Rep. Williams claims however. Columnist Joe Jurado of the Root points out that the franchise is hardly new and widely distributed, with the latest iteration, GTA V, released eight years ago and having sold 130 million copies. He adds that attempting to ban the game would be incredibly difficult writing, "Let me entertain this stupid-ass notion for a second. Say they’re successful and get the game off store shelves in Illinois. What are you going to do about digital sales? You’re telling me that the state of Illinois is willing to expend the time, money, and technical know-how to block the game off of PlayStation Network, Xbox Live, Epic Games, and the Rockstar storefront? I’ve worked for the state government, and I know damn well those Windows XP-using asses ain’t built for this life."

Submission + - Quantum computer solves decades-old problem 3Mx faster than a classical computer (zdnet.com)

schwit1 writes:

Scientists from quantum computing company D-Wave have demonstrated that, using a method called quantum annealing, they could simulate some materials up to three million times faster than it would take with corresponding classical methods.

Together with researchers from Google, the scientists set out to measure the speed of simulation in one of D-Wave's quantum annealing processors, and found that performance increased with both simulation size and problem difficulty, to reach a million-fold speedup over what could be achieved with a classical CPU.

Is this is bad news for encryption that depends on brute-force calculations being prohibitively difficult?

Submission + - Kali Linux 2021.1 released: Tweaked DEs and terminals, new tools, Silicon Macs

Finuz writes: Offensive Security has released Kali Linux 2021.1, the latest version of its popular open source penetration testing platform. You can download itor upgrade to it. Kali NetHunter, the distro’s mobile pentesting platform, now has an upgraded BusyBox engine and tools updated to the latest version (or, in some cases, completely rewritten). There are two new Kali ARM images: one that can be used with VMs on Apple Silicon Macs (Apple M1) and the other for the Raspberry Pi 400’s wireless card.

Submission + - Mars Perserverance Rover's Parachute Contained Secret Message

rufey writes: The 70 foot parachute used to help NASAS's 2020 Mars Perserverance rover land last week had unusual patterns in its nylon fabric. It turns out it was hiding a slogan. Decoded the slogan is “Dare Mighty Things” — a line from President Theodore Roosevelt — which is a mantra at JPL and adorns many of the center’s walls



Systems engineer Ian Clark used a binary code to spell out “Dare Mighty Things” in the orange and white strips of the 70-foot (21-meter) parachute. He also included the GPS coordinates for the mission’s headquarters at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. Clark, a crossword hobbyist, came up with the idea two years ago. Engineers wanted an unusual pattern in the nylon fabric to know how the parachute was oriented during descent. Turning it into a secret message was “super fun,” he said Tuesday. Only about six people knew about the encoded message before Thursday’s landing, according to Clark. They waited until the parachute images came back before putting out a teaser during a televised news conference Monday.

Submission + - The Perseverence rover CPU has similar specs to a Clamshell Ibook from 2001 1

An anonymous reader writes: NASA's Perseverence rover, which is currently exploring Mars, has as it's CPU a BAE Systems RAD 750 running at a 200 Mhz and featuring 256 Megabytes of RAM with 2 Gigabytes of storage. This is a radiation hardened version of the PowerPC G3, with specs roughly equivalent to the Clamshell Ibook that Reese Witherspoon used in Legally Blond back in 2001. This follows a tradition of old tech on space rovers — the Sojourner rover which explored Mars in 1997 used an Intel 80C85 running at 2 Mhz, similar to what could have been found in the classic Radio Shack TRS-80 model 100 portable from 1983.

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