Journalists reporting on Science have virtually no scientific education so their stories typically mis-represent the results. They then publish a story on new results which offer sensational conclusions rather than the entirely non-surprising subsequent results that verify and validate the original results.

Another reason is the media only report on the first experimental results, which are wrong about 75% of the time, so for the majority of results, they're surprised because the results are invalid and cannot be verified by later attempts to confirm the results (i.e. The Scientific Method). They are surprised because the results are indeed impossible.

Quite correctly, you point out that it's the music industry that benefits, and I think it's worth mentioning that he artists are the last to be paid, in most cases they are not paid, as they owe money to the label which is recovered through royalties or full-price album sales (discount album sales earn $0 towards the artist's account with the label). Also the labels own the copyrights to all the artist's music ( signing over the copyrights is the major condition of signing with a label). If (and that's a big if, more than 95% of artists never reach the point where they've paid the label all of the money advanced to the artist as wages, costs of recording and video production, etc) the artist does pay it's obligation to the label, then they might earn money from airplay. Not before.

So it's clear then that this is all about profit to the labels and not about revenue for the artists.

Based on an interview I viewed (BBC, Top of the Pops, commenting on the "rule breaking song length" in the Who's first "Rock Opera" which featured long song lengths) Pete Townsend states (more or less) that "everybody knows a song should be two minutes fifty seconds".

But yeah, you got it basically correct.

Pretty typical of tech oriented companies, sadly. The tech is no problem, maybe even easy, but anytime robot-human interaction is required, creating a working User Interface seems beyond them.

China has recently lowered tariffs on all automobiles manufactured elsewhere. I suppose it's not "lowering any barriers" if it applies to every nation and not only the United States?

China is a signatory member of the World Trade Association.

Association members are required to enforce all IP of other association member countries, so a US Patent is effectively a China Patent as well.

Yeah, I'm a moron because I understood the sentence " Google Has a Plan To Eliminate Mosquitoes Around the World " to mean Google has a plan to eliminate mosquitoes around the world.

There are so many species that depend on mosquito larvae for survival. Alphabet is being colossally irresponsible here. Are they going to create some alternative food for fish, dragonflies, bird species? Because those will die off, and the species that rely on them for survival will then die off.

Alphabet should be looking to make harmless the mosquito-borne illnesses, and leave the bugs alone.

"Annoying" is not a valid reason to instigate wide-spread species elimination.

It sounds strange to say, in 2018, that someone "has never used a computer", but there is some merit in the argument that an executive or high ranking government leader should be earning hundreds, maybe thousands, of dollars an hour to type letters and answer eMails. There are people who can do that for him or her, and probably should be doing that for him or her.

A management job or even a government minister's job is not to do the work of his department or company himself. Maybe this particular minister achieved his non-governmental success by delegation, perhaps? And if he chooses his subordinates wisely, he can be perfectly effective.

He should be judged on the merits of his department, not on whether he can touch type. If the Japanese Cyber Security ministry does good work, then he is doing a good job. If not, then he should be replaced. Whether he uses a computer or not is misrepresenting his duty as the skill set of a minimum wage employee at the lowest pay scale.

Anyone who has participated in Winter Camping and pitched their tent on a frozen lake will tell you that ice makes weird, other-worldly sounds all the time. For some reason it isn't obvious unless it's very quiet and you're trying to sleep, so daytime forays on the ice won't reveal them to you. So no sound involving ice, Antarctic or otherwise, would surprise me.

It took a while, digging through a few websites, but I finally found something that describes what "mindfulness" actually means. The OP's summary doesn't describe what the main subject matter actully means, which is a signifcant deficiency in any cited article or /. topic.

https://medicalxpress.com/news...

Short answer: it basically means meditation, whether structured or just self-evolved (ie you do it "naturally" as part of your personality or learned behaviour).

Of course this type of system has huge Public Safety benefits, and being against Public Safety is political suicide.

But then a phenomena rises ... not sure if there is a term for it so I will coin one for this post ... "Crimesolver Creep".

Either it happens secretly, with no public information released, or you just wait for some crime where extending the scope would have "prevented this heinous act". There will always be such an example, if you wait long enough ... it's the nature of crime, basically. So the Police ask for the scope to be expanded, or they just do it and wait for some Privacy Nutjob (not really my words, but essentially theirs) to find out and complain publicly about it.

As always, it's difficult to impossible to put the Genie back in the bottle. And then it becomes Big Brother Frightening.

This leaves the only reasonable option, which accounting for "unintended consequences of change" means you say no right off the hop.

DST works well in a narrow band of latitudes; from perhaps the Mason-Dixon line north to about the 50th parallel. If you're in Florida where the day is pretty much the same length year round, or in Alaska where long summer days meet short winter ones, it's not particularly useful.

Where I live (51 N Lat) we get 15 hours of summer sunlight and DST adding an hour to evening sun just means mothers are trying to get their kids to bed as the sun goes down at 11:30 PM instead of 10:30 PM during summer vacation, and the sun comes up at 5:30 AM instead of 4:30 AM. In winter if you work a 9 to 5 job, you go to work in the dark and you go home in the dark.

Now, the problem. Because large business-oriented cities (New York, Chicago, Montreal, Toronto) are in the band where DST works, they use DST. If you want to do business with those Head Office dense metropolitan areas, everything goes smoother if you too are on DST. So we have it in areas where it does no good, so that the wheels of commerce can run smoothly. The benefits are fleeting or non-existent for the mere mortals that have to live in those areas, despite the argument for always being some benefit to working families, never that it greases the business relationships between Head Office and wherever-you-are. You know, politics.

Air Canada states they haven't detected any improper login attempts, etc since the breach was discovered.

They probably aren't going to either ... people who steal credentials from insecure servers generally wait about six months before they use the data against the victims. This makes the source of the purloined data more difficult to detect.

Unlike in the US, Canadian Social Insurance Numbers (equivalent to Social Security numbers in the US) are not generally used as ID. The Government of Canada warns citizens not to use it for that purpose, and even to never carry their SIN card with them. It is required if the other party pays the SIN holder income, such as a job or an interest paying bank account.

By law no one not legally required to obtain a SIN is prohibited from even asking for one. However with paper forms sometimes there is a space to enter it, as the SIN owner can voluntarily provide it, but that field cannot be mandatory in any way.

I have never provided mine to anyone not authorized to ask for one, and as such it is not part of my Credit File. This has never resulted in any problems in applying for Credit (eg Credit Cards) although every CC application does have the field to fill out, usually down the application a bit past the required identification fields, if the SIN card owner is unaware of the law and the requirements, so many Canadians have provided it and in that case it does appear on the Credit File.

Passport data is perhaps even more serious. I would expect that it would be valuable to certain people*, so it will be interesting to see what Air Canada suggests to those affected, and what Canada will do to deal with the breach. I would not be surprised to learn that affected individuals may be required to obtain new Passports.

* Aside from the usual criminally minded individuals who would like to exploit any credential theft for the usual reasons, certain State actors have used forged Canadian passports in the past as part of shady operations. Notably the Mossad (Israeli Intelligence) have been caught doing so.

As always, the "energy savings" touted by advocates of "Green" lighting assumes that light is the only wanted output of a light source.

The efficiency is based on light-output only, so when (for example) an incandescent is described as only 20% efficient what they mean is 20% of the energy consumed goes to light and another 80% is "wasted" as heat.

But what if you live in a climate that requires supplemental heating? In that case, the 80% is wanted output, and the incandescent is now 100% efficient (assuming the other 20% of light is wanted as well).

Where this comes into play is when (like in the OP summary) "energy savings" are proposed via a banning or switchover to "more efficient" lighting; more efficient in this case meaning more of the energy input goes to light output. What these energy savings never account for is the loss of wanted heat output in some climates or during some seasons. That lost heat must be replaced by the building's heating system, so additional energy is required to make up the shortfall.

If you're in Florida (or Portugal) then the more efficient lighting makes energy-smart sense. But what if you're in the UK (balmy 15C temperatures in August are far from rare; the BBC likes to call this "fresh" weather) or Scandinavia? Now you have cold-weather heating requirements that even an incandescent can provide, with wanted light output, at 100% efficiency.

The only study I know of that took this into account was one done by BC Hydro (Canada) that determined the amount of extra natural gas / electric / wood heat energy would be needed with a switch province-wide from incandescents to CFL bulbs. It was far from a trivial amount.