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Submission + - Major Media Outlets Banned from White House (bbc.com)

Submitted by hadleyburg
hadleyburg writes: BBC is reporting that "US President Donald Trump has announced that he is "immediately" banning CNN, MS NOW and Politico from the White House".

"Trump said that the outlets "constantly write or report fiction or lies" about his administration, although he provided no examples".

Submission + - AI has found a way to kill us (cnn.com)

Submitted by stabiesoft
stabiesoft writes: Made the link to CNN, but saw it first on TMZ. https://www.tmz.com/2026/09/18...
"The United States military almost started a war with China based on a faulty intelligence report ... which turned out to be completely bogus because A.I. screwed up big time.

Here's the deal ... according to a new report from CNN, an intelligence report claiming a Chinese ship in the Middle East was carrying the components to build a nuclear weapon began to circulate earlier this year amid the ongoing tensions with Iran."

Submission + - Pentagon Acknowledges Weapons in Space, Must Prepare for War in Cislunar Space (defenseone.com)

Submitted by Koreantoast
Koreantoast writes: During the annual Air Force Association Air, Space, and Cyber Conference outside Washington D.C., senior U.S. military officials publicly acknowledged on-orbit weapons in orbit and laid out the need to be prepared for conflict out to cislunar space. In a speech to senior US Air Force and US Space Force officers, allied officers, and senior defense industry officials, Air Force Secretary Troy Meink acknowledged the orbital weapons in a speech, saying “Today, we continue to ensure we remain ready to meet the challenges of evolving threats wherever they exist... This is why the United States now has, on orbit, space-control weapons, capable of defending the joint force against hostile adversaries.” In a separate speech, General Dan Caine, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, acknowledged the expanding battlefield the U.S. military must be prepared to fight in: “Our task, my friends, is to adapt right now, so the Joint Force is prepared to fight, endure, and win, in global contested environments, from the seabed to cislunar space."

One article notes that "while top Space Force officials have provided few details about how U.S. forces would fight between the Earth and its moon, they have been vocal about adding sensors and capabilities to watch adversary movements there." Aaron Brynildson, a professor of space law at the University of Mississippi notes that US military officials are motivated by peer competitor activities, particularly China. “There’s a fear that recent Chinese activity on the moon and in cislunar space might outpace the United States,” Brynildson said. “China has a relay satellite in cislunar space and is performing robotic missions on the far side of the moon.” Lt. Gen. Gregory Gagnon, the head of Combat Forces Command at US Space Force, acknowledges that concern, saying “Our adversaries, our potential adversaries, such as the PRC, are actively pursuing activities in the cislunar parts of space. So that's sort of the expansion, if you will, of I would say the end zone, if you will, in the football game..."

Brynildson raises concerns about the current ambiguity around the lack of laws and policy governing space weapons. “It’s unclear what the legal restraints on the use of kinetic or non-kinetic weapons in space might be. The Outer Space Treaty doesn’t give us great answers to what factors a military action must consider,” he said. “The DoD Law of War Manual is also non-committal on the unique aspects of the space domain. At a minimum, general principles from the law of armed conflict would apply, such as only striking military-related satellites, avoiding collateral damage to civilians, etc... Ultimately, I think the first space conflict might be the time when most of these rules get written."

Comment Re:How effective is IR floodlighting? (Score 2) 179

It's possible: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Flickering might work just as well, or better. Less energy and heat needed, and might screw up exposure or auto levelling. I have not tried it.

The problem is that if you walk around in public with a high brightness IR LED on your head, sooner or later some minimum wage security goon is going to notice their camera is blinded and get upset.

Submission + - Why can't M$ get any UI/UX changes right? (pcmag.com) 1

Submitted by golem100
golem100 writes: A couple weeks ago PCMag, and others, wrote articles along the lines of: "Microsoft Finally Backs Down: The Windows 11 Taskbar Update You've Been Waiting For". This is currently implemented with CU KB5120998 and since M$ has elected to defer "activation" of this feature--some two weeks later for most users it still needs to be enabled by the ViVe tool: vivetool /enable /id:59213768,61090762

Um, No...

The fundamental set of [lost] attributes that this "We brought Movable TaskBar back" lacks:

You can not control the position of the TaskBar on each desktop monitor--example: I have four displays on my desktop, three Landscape & one of which is in a Portrait orientation for reading documents.

With Windows7/8/10 you could position the TaskBar so that it was "Out of the way" and each display--on the right side of the right-most Landscape, on the left for the left-most Landscape display, & on the top/bottom for the Portrait. [same as my desktop on my Linux workstation]
Now you still get the same Taskbar alignment on all desktops.

You can not "resize" the taskbar. (well, you can--it has three sizes: too big, too small, and really way too small) For the previous three generations of the OS you could "Drag-Select" and resize the TaskBar to be the correct size for your needs on your desktop. [...just as I can on my KDE Desktop!]
With this implementation, 1/3 of the Taskbar real estate is consumed with "TaskBar-Tray Notification Icons."

Nobody asked for a partial, broken, re-implementation. The ask was: "Put it Back as it was!"
Dealing with M$ is pretty much like getting your 15 year old to do their chores on garbage night.

Comment Re:The best AI movies look as bad as mid-90s CGI (Score 1) 123

by AmiMoJo (#66339640) Attached to: While Hollywood Fears an AI Future, China's Film Industry is Embracing It

Punches very obviously not connecting suggests it's been trained on Hollywood fight scenes. The other giveaway is rapid hard cuts and shaky camera so you can't see how badly the punches are not connecting. Everything feels weightless and fake.

There is a lot of AI slop, but I wouldn't discount it being able to do something decent with the right person at the helm.

Submission + - Hackers Stole Flockâ(TM)s Camera Software, Revealing How the Company Tracks (404media.co)

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: While much of the automatic license plate readerâ(TM)s (ALPR) most sensitive storage remained encrypted and inaccessible, the joint analysis of the recovered data shows that software running on the device explicitly detects people as well as vehicles, license plates, and bicycles. The camera can produce dozens of images of a single passing vehicle and, according to several weeks of recovered logs, generated more than a million images. Its computer-vision software also sometimes isolated bumper stickers and other graphics, including, in one case, an American flag patch on a motorcyclistâ(TM)s saddlebag.

Comment Re:The effort is the point... (Score 5, Interesting) 123

by AmiMoJo (#66339404) Attached to: While Hollywood Fears an AI Future, China's Film Industry is Embracing It

Most entertainment has always been slop, this is nothing new at all. A decade ago it was reality TV, before that it was gameshows and daytime soap operas.

The interesting story here is how this demonstrates the basic different in attitude between the US and China when it comes to new technology. In the US the established players are very concerned that new tech will affect their business model, so they try to hold it back as much as possible. In China it gets embraced and there is a rush to adopt it.
Space

Scientists Discover Mysterious New X-Ray Objects 'Unlike Any They Have Seen Before' (space.com) 17

Posted by BeauHD from the hide-and-seek dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Space.com: NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory has found a brand new type of an otherwise familiar object -- compact binary systems that steal gas from other stars, but which do so while emitting very low-energy X-rays but copious amounts of ultraviolet. Chandra spotted 84 suspicious object emitting very low-energy X-rays in six galaxies -- four evolved ellipticals and two spirals, namely our near-neighbor the Andromeda Galaxy (M31) and the Pinwheel Galaxy (M101). "We've never encountered a group of objects that act like this," said Mustafa Muhibullah of the University of Alabama in a statement.

Compact objects, in the form of black holes, neutron stars and white dwarfs, are the remains of stars that have died. Their small size and powerful gravity means that they're adept at getting close to orbiting companion stars and ripping the stars' outer layers of gas away. The gas swirls around the compact object, falling onto its surface, and this accretionary process usually produces torrents of high-energy X-rays because the stolen gas becomes superheated by the compact object's gravitational vice-like grip.

Because of their weak X-rays, Muhibullah's team refer to them as 'hypersoft X-ray sources'. Since low-energy X-rays and ultraviolet light are next to each other on the electromagnetic spectrum, Muhibullah and his team suspect that the low-energy X-rays are spillover from objects emitting prodigious amounts of ultraviolet. Moreover, they think that these objects are lower-level compact binaries. They're hard to find though, because the interstellar medium of hydrogen and helium gas between the stars absorbs ultraviolet light. This could be why we have yet to find any hypersoft X-ray sources in our own galaxy, because we have to look through the interstellar medium through the plane of the Milky Way. Consequently, there could be a large population of hypersoft X-ray sources that remain undiscovered and they could have an important effect on the universe around them. The findings have been published in the journal Nature Astronomy.

Comment Re:Summer vs Winter (Score 1) 200

Seeing some very negative prices in the mid west (I think that's the right term) states too. Not even free electricity, people are being paid to use it.

Can you get a tariff that pays you to use energy in the US? Here in Europe we have some, and if you play the game right with a home battery your energy can be pretty much free.

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