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Comment Endgame (Score 2) 116

I look forward to the end game where we have no taxes. No corporate taxes. After all they just pass it on to consumers. No income taxes. Just pay for it on import tariffs. Skip that too, why not? We already run a large deficit. All the spending sits on the ever expanding national debt. Now no one has a say except those who sit on massive piles of cash that faces risks of devaluation. Sounds awesome. Even foreign holders of cash/debt. They matter more than the citizens after all. Power to the powerful!! After all, they're already in charge.
Science

Scientists Found a Way To Cool Quantum Computers Using Noise (sciencedaily.com) 7

Slashdot reader alternative_right writes: Quantum computers need extreme cold to work, but the very systems that keep them cold also create noise that can destroy fragile quantum information. Scientists in Sweden have now flipped that problem on its head by building a tiny quantum refrigerator that actually uses noise to drive cooling instead of fighting it. By carefully steering heat at unimaginably small scales, the device can act as a refrigerator, heat engine, or energy amplifier inside quantum circuits.

Comment Re:Put a price on water - tragedy of the commons (Score 1) 118

What a travesty! What a waste! Hippy nonsense! Do you realize how insane your comment is? Of course, water should reach the sea. Water should replenish aquifers. We should be careful when choosing what and how to dry land farm and what to irrigate. But we aren't, humans are wasteful and greedy.

Comment Re: What's with American presidents' ego projects? (Score 1) 163

They were called the Bush tax cuts as a disparaging term. Bush campaigned on eliminating the debt, so fast. But the economy hit a road bump, so he cut taxes. We even then went to war and didn't pay for it. So yea, he gets to wear that. Typical fiscal-cough-cough-conservative. We've been living in his dystopian "the economy sucks so keep taxes low" world view ever sense. Even the democrats couldn't buck the trend. Which is a damn shame.
Privacy

Manufacturer Remotely Bricks Smart Vacuum After Its Owner Blocked It From Collecting Data (tomshardware.com) 123

"An engineer got curious about how his iLife A11 smart vacuum worked and monitored the network traffic coming from the device," writes Tom's Hardware.

"That's when he noticed it was constantly sending logs and telemetry data to the manufacturer — something he hadn't consented to." The user, Harishankar, decided to block the telemetry servers' IP addresses on his network, while keeping the firmware and OTA servers open. While his smart gadget worked for a while, it just refused to turn on soon after... He sent it to the service center multiple times, wherein the technicians would turn it on and see nothing wrong with the vacuum. When they returned it to him, it would work for a few days and then fail to boot again... [H]e decided to disassemble the thing to determine what killed it and to see if he could get it working again...

[He discovered] a GD32F103 microcontroller to manage its plethora of sensors, including Lidar, gyroscopes, and encoders. He created PCB connectors and wrote Python scripts to control them with a computer, presumably to test each piece individually and identify what went wrong. From there, he built a Raspberry Pi joystick to manually drive the vacuum, proving that there was nothing wrong with the hardware. From this, he looked at its software and operating system, and that's where he discovered the dark truth: his smart vacuum was a security nightmare and a black hole for his personal data.

First of all, it's Android Debug Bridge, which gives him full root access to the vacuum, wasn't protected by any kind of password or encryption. The manufacturer added a makeshift security protocol by omitting a crucial file, which caused it to disconnect soon after booting, but Harishankar easily bypassed it. He then discovered that it used Google Cartographer to build a live 3D map of his home. This isn't unusual, by far. After all, it's a smart vacuum, and it needs that data to navigate around his home. However, the concerning thing is that it was sending off all this data to the manufacturer's server. It makes sense for the device to send this data to the manufacturer, as its onboard SoC is nowhere near powerful enough to process all that data. However, it seems that iLife did not clear this with its customers.

Furthermore, the engineer made one disturbing discovery — deep in the logs of his non-functioning smart vacuum, he found a command with a timestamp that matched exactly the time the gadget stopped working. This was clearly a kill command, and after he reversed it and rebooted the appliance, it roared back to life.

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader registrations_suck for sharing the article.

Comment For inquiring minds (Score 1) 42

Best I can tell there's already a classic book in this space: Earl Mindell's Herb Bible. Its a neat coffee table book. You can just read parts at a time and it is enjoyable. Super fun to look out for the herbs that specifically warn they're unsafe during pregnancy ;-) Made me wonder just how effective a cocktail of these would be to induce a miscarriage.

Comment It isn't just software (Score 3, Insightful) 187

It is likely true that software quality is dropping. But the important point I would like to make is that quality elsewhere is horrible too. Our relatively new house is on its third bathroom sink faucet in about 12 years total time. I cannot fathom how this could be so bad. Car quality, parts, engines, transmissions all of it is worse. Worse parts, worse designs, it all is bad and so much more expensive. A twenty year old car w/ only front wheel drive, a four speed transmission, a reasonable power v6 in comparison is SO solid. A little worse MPG but that is it, and sometimes that isn't so clear cut. I'm sure there are examples of things that have improved, and others that have gotten worse. But those were a couple I can think of off hand. A lot of this is driven by big government making decisions for us, even during republican administrations ironically. Fuel efficiency standards go back to Bush. Anyways, enjoy, the future is gonna suck. And be expensive.

Farmers will bitch about a def burn/regen, but still buy the new huge combine because even with sitting for 45 minutes, they get so much more done so fast it is unreal. So they buy/rent huge equipment they cannot work on because they run so many acres they really have no other options. Our government bankrolls all their risk so land/rent values keep going up and everyone is too happy to question anything. Red America complains about market access while voting in Trade War Trump. We're all so stupid. Nevermind GMO everything. If only we could make tofu w/ all this cheap soy. Nope, we gotta feed it to cows/pigs/chickens. No one cares about the river and aquifer water quality, or how expensive it is to treat for high nitrate levels. Sorry for the slightly unrelated farming rant. But I really wish our local river was cleaner. It is never a focus and so sad. But I'd refer to it as a "water quality collapse." Ironically you have to pay farmers for buffer strips and CRP, I'm not sure they'd do it on their own. Left to their own devices they're even ripping out the shelter belts around here.

EU

New Large Coral Reef Discovered Off Naples Containing Rare Ancient Corals (independent.co.uk) 13

Off the southwest cost of Italy, a remotely operated submarine made "a significant and rare discovery," reports the Independent — a vast white coral reef that was 80 metres tall (262 feet) and 2 metres wide (6.56 feet) "containing important species and fossil traces." Often dubbed the "rainforests of the sea", coral reefs are of immense scientific interest due to their status as some of the planet's richest marine ecosystems, harbouring millions of species. They play a crucial role in sustaining marine life but are currently under considerable threat...

hese impressive formations are composed of deep-water hard corals, commonly referred to as "white corals" because of their lack of colour, specifically identified as Lophelia pertusa and Madrepora oculata species. The reef also contains black corals, solitary corals, sponges, and other ecologically important species, as well as fossil traces of oysters and ancient corals, the Italian Research Council said. It called them "true geological testimonies of a distant past."

Mission leader Giorgio Castellan said the finding was "exceptional for Italian seas: bioconstructions of this kind, and of such magnitude, had never been observed in the Dohrn Canyon, and are rarely seen elsewhere in our Mediterranean". The discovery will help scientists understand the ecological role of deep coral habitats and their distribution, especially in the context of conservation and restoration efforts, he added.

The undersea research was funded by the EU.

Thanks to davidone (Slashdot reader #12,252) for sharing the article.

Comment Re:Smashing the biomedical research industry (Score 1) 321

Listen, this is barely even on topic. We should be talking about how bad tariffs are, and if the supreme court will allow the tariffs to continue and force Trump and Republicans to eat their shit sandwich. Etc.

But what he's done to medicine and research? Not really pertinent. Besides, the point I was going to make, is how can the modern medicine complex even continue? You routinely here about how people and their insurance isn't able to pay the exorbitant prices they want to charge for the output of said advances. It's so unrealistic. Can the upper 20% of consumers in America prop this up? That's probably not even accurate, I would bet it's less than 5%, so just high net worth households, that stand a chance at paying for this research. This industry is delusional and has to extend the timelines of paying back themselves for their costs. The current path for health insurance in America that we were already on was going to threaten our "world-leading biomedical research industry."

My favorite story ever I got via an anti-vaccer family member. In the process of sharing a story about vaccine safety the story led with how it was Reagan who indemnified the industry from lawsuits relating to how unsafe vaccines were. Pure political disillusion. MAGA is indeed a cult.

Comment Close the EPA (Score 1) 104

The EPA no longer wishes to even recognize the harms that may come from pollution. Their basic core function at this point is likely to be questioned and deregulated. I'm surprised Trump doesn't just close down the EPA. They should end the farm bill and stop paying for CRP while they're at it. Then we can see how many of these "stewards of the land" actually care to do so. The rivers will be pure puke at this rate. It's like mainlining libertarian dreams now. Filled with pure unadulterated vindictive hypocrisy.

Comment Re:Incorrect (Score 3, Interesting) 160

Translation incoming...
No, it's them being unable to type, spell, We don't want to onboard and train anyone.
and wanting a promotion on day 1 with no experience There's no career path here, not sorry.
while spouting off socialist bullshit in the office. Stop complaining about Israel curb stomping the poor people in Gaza.
Seriously no one knows how to spell anymore. Red squiggles please. Young people are right to be frustrated, disillusioned, and frustrated at the state of the world today. Work isn't as rewarding or as promising as it once was. Further a lot of work places probably have a mix of remote work so onboarding is harder. AI is a dual edged sword so productivity expectations are up and career hopes are very fuzzy.

Comment Re:Saved? (Score 1) 88

Reading instead of viewing isn't the problem. How many times do you see a video that's 30 minutes long that says "do these 3 things as you near retirement." They could choose to tell you all this in the first minute. Be concise. For example, move heavy into bonds to absorb 2+ years of a bad market, rebalance often, and reduce debt. Yes that is easy to read, but its also easy to say IF THEY CHOSE TO. Youtube wouldn't be able to show you as many ads though. Etc. So in review, absolutely wasting our time. It is by design structured to lengthen out content and waste time. Occasionally you get a real dude that'll talk about (for example) a fishing lure trick, show it to you right away, and then fish with it for another 30 minutes. Then you decide if you want to watch it all.
Programming

The Toughest Programming Question for High School Students on This Year's CS Exam: Arrays 65

America's nonprofit College Board lets high school students take college-level classes — including a computer programming course that culminates with a 90-minute test. But students did better on questions about If-Then statements than they did on questions about arrays, according to the head of the program. Long-time Slashdot reader theodp explains: Students exhibited "strong performance on primitive types, Boolean expressions, and If statements; 44% of students earned 7-8 of these 8 points," says program head Trevor Packard. But students were challenged by "questions on Arrays, ArrayLists, and 2D Arrays; 17% of students earned 11-12 of these 12 points."

"The most challenging AP Computer Science A free-response question was #4, the 2D array number puzzle; 19% of students earned 8-9 of the 9 points possible."

You can see that question here. ("You will write the constructor and one method of the SumOrSameGame class... Array elements are initialized with random integers between 1 and 9, inclusive, each with an equal chance of being assigned to each element of puzzle...") Although to be fair, it was the last question on the test — appearing on page 16 — so maybe some students just didn't get to it.

theodp shares a sample Java solution and one in Excel VBA solution (which includes a visual presentation).

There's tests in 38 subjects — but CS and Statistics are the subjects where the highest number of students earned the test's lowest-possible score (1 out of 5). That end of the graph also includes notoriously difficult subjects like Latin, Japanese Language, and Physics.

There's also a table showing scores for the last 23 years, with fewer than 67% of students achieving a passing grade (3+) for the first 11 years. But in 2013 and 2017, more than 67% of students achieved that passsing grade, and the percentage has stayed above that line ever since (except for 2021), vascillating between 67% and 70.4%.

2018: 67.8%
2019: 69.6%
2020: 70.4%
2021: 65.1%
2022: 67.6%
2023: 68.0%
2024: 67.2%
2025: 67.0%

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