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Submission + - IBM settles SCO case after 18 years for $14.5MM

Submitted by rkhalloran
rkhalloran writes: Papers filed 26 Aug by IBM & SCOXQ in US Bankruptcy Court in Delaware for a proposed settlement:

Case 07-11337-BLS Doc 1501

By the Settlement Agreement, the Trustee has reached a settlement with IBM that resolves all of the remaining claims at issue in the Utah Litigation (defined below). The Settlement Agreement is the culmination of extensive arm’s length negotiation between the Trustee and IBM. Under the Settlement Agreement, the Parties have agreed to resolve all disputes between them for a payment to the Trustee, on behalf of the Estates, of $14,250,000. For the reasons set forth more fully below, the Trustee submits the Settlement Agreement and the settlement with IBM are in the best interests of the Estates and creditors, are well within the range of reasonableness, and should be approved.

Interesting note in the justification:
Such could be the case should a jury find that (1) the amount of damage SCO sustained as a result of IBM’s conduct is less than SCO has alleged, (2) SCO’s damages are limited by a $5 million damage limitation provision in the Project Monterey agreement, or (3) some or all of IBM’s Counterclaims, alleging millions of dollars in damages related to IBM’s Linux activities and alleged interference by SCO, are meritorious.

Submission + - SPAM: 'Swiss Re' Signs World's First Long-Term Carbon Capture Deal

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Reinsurance giant Swiss Re announced Wednesday that it had signed the world’s first long-term agreement to take carbon directly out of the air. The contract with Climeworks AG, one of the world’s leading direct air-capture startups, will net the climate technology company $10 million over 10 years. Mischa Repmann, a senior environmental management specialist with Swiss Re, said the deal would not only help his company reach its goal of becoming carbon neutral by 2030, it could inspire other business considering the use of carbon capture technology. “It’s a call for action, and we’re hoping that others will follow,” he said.

Climeworks, a Switzerland-based company, is set to open a plant in Iceland in September that will filter CO from ambient air using geothermal energy. The captured CO will then be dissolved in water and pumped deep underground for permanent storage in nearby rock layers. While underground, the gas reacts naturally with its surroundings to form rock, preventing the carbon from reentering the atmosphere. The company says the facility will have the capacity to capture and store 4,000 tons of CO per year. [...] Swiss Re and Climeworks didn’t specify how much carbon would be removed in fulfillment of their contract and were vague about the cost, saying only it would be several hundred dollars per ton. Climeworks says the average price will decline as its operations grow, and may be as low as $200 a ton by 2030.
Link to Original Source

Submission + - SPAM: More And More Humans Are Growing an Extra Artery, Showing We're Still Evolving

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: An artery that temporarily runs down the center of our forearms while we're still in the womb isn't vanishing as often as it used to, according to researchers from Flinders University and the University of Adelaide in Australia. That means there are more adults than ever with what amounts to be an extra channel of vascular tissue flowing under their wrist. "Since the 18th century, anatomists have been studying the prevalence of this artery in adults and our study shows it's clearly increasing," Flinders University anatomist Teghan Lucas said in 2020. "The prevalence was around 10 percent in people born in the mid-1880s compared to 30 percent in those born in the late 20th century, so that's a significant increase in a fairly short period of time, when it comes to evolution."

To compare the prevalence of this persistent blood channel, Lucas and colleagues Maciej Henneberg and Jaliya Kumaratilake from the University of Adelaide examined 80 limbs from cadavers, all donated by Australians of European descent. The donors raged from 51 to 101 on passing, which means they were nearly all born in the first half of the 20th century. Noting down how often they found a chunky median artery capable of carrying a good supply of blood, the research team compared the figures with records dug out of a literature search, taking into account tallies that could over-represent the vessel's appearance. Their results were published in 2020 in the Journal of Anatomy. The fact the artery seems to be three times as common in adults today as it was more than a century ago is a startling find that suggests natural selection is favoring those who hold onto this extra bit of bloody supply.
Link to Original Source

Submission + - SPAM: Western Digital Caught Bait-and-Switching Customers With Slow SSDs

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: According to a report from Chinese tech site Expreview, the WD SN550 Blue — which is currently one of the best-reviewed budget SSDs on the market — has undergone a NAND lobotomy. While the new SSD variant performs on-par with the old drive that WD actually sampled for review, once you exhaust the SLC NAND cache, performance craters from 610MB/s to 390MB/s. The new drive offers just 64 percent of the performance of the old drive.

This is unacceptable. It is unethical for any company to sample and launch a product to strong reviews only to turn around and sell an inferior version of that hardware at a later date without changing the product SKU or telling customers that they’re buying garbage. I do not use the term “garbage” lightly, but let me be clear: If you silently change the hardware components you use in a way that makes your product lose performance, and you do not disclose that information prominently to the customer (ideally through a separate SKU), you are selling garbage. There’s nothing wrong with selling a slower SSD at a good price, and there’s nothing right about abusing the goodwill of reviewers and enthusiasts to kick bad hardware out the door.

As a reviewer of some twenty years, I do not care at all about the fact that SLC cache performance is identical. While I didn’t realize it at the time I wrote up the Crucial bait-and-switch on August 16, I’ve actually been affected by this problem personally. The 2TB Crucial SSD I purchased for my own video editing work is one of the bait-and-switched units, and it’s always had a massive performance problem — as soon as it empties the SLC cache, it falls to what I’d charitably call hard drive-level performance. Performance can drop as low as 60MB/s via USB3.2 (and ~150MB/s when directly connected via NVMe) and it stays there until the copy task is done. The video upscaling projects I work on regularly generate between 300-500GB of image data per episode, per encode. Achieving ideal results can require weaving the output of 3-5 models together. That means I generate up to 1.5TB of data to create a single episode. God help you if you need to copy that much information to or from one of these broken SSDs. It’s not literally as bad as a spinning disk from circa 2003, but it’s nowhere near acceptable performance.
Link to Original Source

Submission + - Microsoft wants help to edge browser to Linux (zdnet.com) 1

Submitted by think_nix
think_nix writes: An article posted on Zdnet Microsoft is asking Linux developers on what requirements would be for bringing Edge to Linux. Microsoft has also setup the survey here https://www.zdnet.com/article/.... The article mentions Microsoft

no technical blockers to keep us from creating Linux binaries

Is Microsoft a little late to the wrong party ?

Submission + - Twitter's Middle East Executive Is Part Of British Army's Psy-Warfare Unit

Submitted by dryriver
dryriver writes: Middle East Eye reportys: The senior Twitter executive with editorial responsibility for the Middle East is also a part-time officer in the British Army’s psychological warfare unit, Middle East Eye has established. Gordon MacMillan, who joined the social media company's UK office six years ago, has for several years also served with the 77th Brigade, a unit formed in 2015 in order to develop “non-lethal” ways of waging war. The 77th Brigade uses social media platforms such as Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, as well as podcasts, data analysis and audience research to wage what the head of the UK military, General Nick Carter, describes as “information warfare”. Carter says the 77th Brigade is giving the British military “the capability to compete in the war of narratives at the tactical level”; to shape perceptions of conflict. Some soldiers who have served with the unit say they have been engaged in operations intended to change the behaviour of target audiences. What exactly MacMillan is doing with the unit is difficult to determine, however: he has declined to answer any questions about his role, as has Twitter and the UK’s Ministry of Defence (MoD). Twitter would say only that “we actively encourage all our employees to pursue external interests”, while the MoD said that the 77th Brigade had no relationship with Twitter, other than using it for communication.

Submission + - China Confirms New Hypersonic Nuclear Missile on 70th Anniversary (aljazeera.com)

Submitted by hackingbear
hackingbear writes: In a large military parade led by President Xi Jinping to mark the 70th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic, China's military has shown off a new hypersonic ballistic nuclear missile believed capable of breaching all existing anti-missile shields deployed by the United States and its allies. The DF-17, as the new missile is known, uses hypersonic glide vehicle technology also permits it to fly on a highly maneuvrable trajectory, at extremely fast speed, at a much lower altitude just before delivering its warhead, defeating attempts to detect and intercept the weapon. The DF-17 is believed to be the first of its kind to reach operation status. In addition to DF-17, China also showed off a number of new weapons including the first official revealing of DF-41 intercontinental ballistic missile, with a reach of between 12,000 and 15,000 kilometers (7,400-9,320 miles), reportedly the longest in the world. "China with strong military strength is conducive to curb the strategic impulse of external powers towards China," Hu Xijin, editor-in-chief of the state-owned Global Times newspaper, wrote on social media.

Submission + - Now any Florida resident can challenge what is taught in public Florida schools

Submitted by zantafio
zantafio writes: Any resident in Florida can now challenge what kids learn in public schools, thanks to a new law that science education advocates worry will make it harder to teach evolution and climate change.

The legislation requires school boards to hire an "unbiased hearing officer" who will handle complaints about instructional materials, such as movies, textbooks and novels, that are used in local schools. Any parent or county resident can file a complaint, regardless of whether they have a student in the school system. If the hearing officer deems the challenge justified, he or she can require schools to remove the material in question.

Submission + - Amazon Granted Patent That Prevents In-Store Shoppers From Online Price Checking (theverge.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Amazon’s long been a go-to for people to online price compare while shopping at brick-and-mortars. Now, a new patent granted to the company could prevent people from doing just that inside Amazon’s own stores. The patent, titled “Physical Store Online Shopping Control,” details a mechanism where a retailer can intercept network requests like URLs and search terms that happen on its in-store Wi-Fi, then act upon them in various ways. The document details in great length how a retailer like Amazon would use this information to its benefit. If, for example, the retailer sees you’re trying to access a competitor’s website to price check an item, it could compare the requested content to what’s offered in-store and then send price comparison information or a coupon to your browser instead. Or it could suggest a complementary item, or even block content outright. Amazon’s patent also lets the retailer know your physical whereabouts, saying, “the location may be triangulated utilizing information received from a multitude of wireless access points.” The retailer can then use this information to try and upsell you on items in your immediate area or direct a sales representative to your location.
Space

Submission + - WISE Discovers 95 New Near-Earth Asteroids (discovery.com)

Submitted by
astroengine
astroengine writes: "NASA's Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) has turned up 25,000 new asteroid discoveries, 95 of which are near-Earth objects (NEOs). This mission is as fascinating as it is frightening. Capable of spotting any cosmic object glowing in infrared wavelengths, WISE has become an expert asteroid hunter, seeing these interplanetary vagabonds, some of which get uncomfortably close to our planet."
Open Source

Open Source Developer Knighted 101

Posted by samzenpus from the knights-who-say-free dept.
unixfan writes "Georg Greve, developer of Open Document Format and active FOSS developer, has received a knighthood in Germany for his work. From the article: 'Some weeks ago I received news that the embassy in Berne had unsuccessfully been trying to contact me under FSFE's old office address in Zurich. This was a bit odd and unexpected. So you can probably understand my surprise to be told by the embassy upon contacting them that on 18 December 2009 I had been awarded the Cross of Merit on ribbon (Verdienstkreuz am Bande) by the Federal Republic of Germany. As you might expect, my first reaction was one of disbelief. I was, in fact, rather shaken. You could also say shocked. Quick Wikipedia research revealed this to be part of the orders of knighthood, making this a Knight's Cross.'"

Comment Re:Don't blow shit up - problem solved (Score 0, Flamebait) 409

by CAIMLAS (#31995460) Attached to: Obama To Decide On New Weapons

I could have told you that on 9/12.
In fact I did tell people that, saying going to war is not the solution,
but at the time people were thinking like animals. All they could see was "red" and revenge.

How very astute of you.

I'm sorry to say, but it's not possible to prove something's validity through the failure of your opposition. Yes, it's a start, but as the history of rulers and political systems of the 20th century can attest, it's also a good way to bring a bitter end to things: Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, and many others said "their ways don't work, follow me" and there was even more suffering than under the previous rule.

The reality is that there are many other ways in which those wars could have been fought - indeed, there are many ways which many people wanted to see those wars fought which never occurred. The actual people who were "thinking like animals" wanted to carpet bomb their countries and utterly destroy them. Between them and your irrationally passive approach, we came up with what we got.

As for the 9/11 bombers, people seem to forget that it was diversity and open-minded political correctness which brought them here. We've known since the 1970s that their type (affluent Arabic Muslim men) are the stereotype for Islamic terrorism, yet we continued to let them in.

It's more complex than just "better locks"; significantly more so. I and most sane people would agree that is a necessary first step, but it's one step of many.

Proactively ruling out retributive attacks against enemies is just as, if not more, foolish than throwing an inappropriate level of force at a problem. But just because that level of force is ineffective does not mean that force was not the solution you were looking for.

Comment Re:Yea but (Score 0, Insightful) 1204

by Michael Kristopeit (#31995392) Attached to: Police Seize Computers From Gizmodo Editor
i had excellent karma, then suggested that educators paying children cash to read books was a cowardly last ditch effort by teachers unable or unwilling to do their jobs.

i defended my position and was further moderated into karma:terrible land... makes me wonder if this moderation system is broken. there should be a limit to the negative potential per thread or even per story... otherwise, discussion on hot topic issues is too dangerous if you at all respect the "karma" variable.

anyways, in the late 90s i ran a few 1M+ daily sites and even then $10+ CPM was unheard of. i always used a 3rd party though, so maybe direct sales have higher rates, but i suspect it all evens out after you are done paying your sales team and lawyers and chasing advertisers down to pay their bills, etc...

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