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Comment Re: Having your cake and eating it too (Score 4, Interesting) 36

by hwihyw (#66154960) Attached to: Thousands of Zillow Listings In Chicago Have Vanished

You shouldn't get to list a home "privately" to limit competition while still demanding access to Zillow's massive public traffic.
But that is exactly the hustle MRED and Compass are pulling. They want to hide listings in their "private network" of 43,000 insiders so they can keep transactions "in-house" and represent both the buyer and the sellerâ"pocketing both sides of the commission. Yet, they still expect public portals to advertise them.
Zillow's rule is basic common sense: if you want to hide a listing from the open market, you don't get to use the open market's biggest megaphone to do it. MRED retaliating by cutting Zillow's access and plummeting Chicago listings from 5,000 to 1,700 isn't about "seller choice." It's a coordinated boycott designed to force buyers back into a closed, high-commission gatekeeper system.

Comment Re:Just in Time business models (Score 2) 412

by hwihyw (#59884396) Attached to: NYT Investigates America's 'Lost Month' for Coronavirus Testing

And one of the reasons for the spread of "Just in Time" business models is price gouging laws. If a supplier stockpiles bunch of N95 masks for a pandemic and the pandemic never comes, he has to throw out expired masks and lose money. If the pandemic does come, due to price gouging laws he can't raise the price of each mask to compensate him for the risk that he took to store them. So the supplier never stockpiles, and here we are.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Submission + - Bitcoin drops 25% to under $5,900 in Coronavirus panic (forbes.com)

Submitted by Draconi
Draconi writes: The price of Bitcoin dropped from it's March 6th, 2020 high of $9,126 (https://www.coindesk.com/price/bitcoin) to under $5,900 today as market sell-offs accelerated with the S&P and Dow Jones dropping 7% in early hours trading.

Bitcoin, long considered to be a safe-haven during times of economic stress, currently costs at least $4,313 in electricity per coin to generate (https://www.trinsicoin.com). The latest drop has wiped out all 2020 gains for Bitcoin and sent a ripple effect across other cryptocurrencies, with Ethereum down nearly 30%.

Submission + - Modern RAM used for computers, smartphones still vulnerable to Rowhammer attacks (zdnet.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: According to new research published today, modern RAM cards are still vulnerable to Rowhammer attacks despite extensive mitigations that have been deployed by manufacturers over the past six years. These mitigations, collectively referred to as Target Row Refresh (TRR), are a combination of software and hardware fixes that have been slowly added to the design of modern RAM cards after 2014 when academics disclosed the first-ever Rowhammer attack.

But in a new research paper titled today and titled "TRRespass: Exploiting the Many Sides of Target Row Refresh," a team of academics from universities in the Netherlands and Switzerland said they developed a generic tool named TRRespass that can be used to upgrade the old Rowhammer attacks to work on the new-and-improved TRR-protected RAM cards. The new upgraded attacks work on both DIMM and LPDDR4 memory types, and can be used to retrieve encryption keys from memory, or escalate an attacker's access right to sudo/SYSTEM-level.

Submission + - Elon Musk's Battery Farm Is An Undeniable Success (popularmechanics.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: More than two years after winning an electricity bet, Elon Musk’s resulting Australian solar and wind farm is an almost total success. The facility powers rural South Australia, whose population density falls between Wyoming and Alaska, the two least dense U.S. states. In 2016, South Australia experienced a near total blackout after “an apocalyptic storm— involving 80,000 lightning strikes and at least two tornadoes,” Vox explains. In the aftermath, a Conservative politician blamed the push for renewable energy for the extent of the blackouts. For those even passingly familiar with Musk and Tesla’s online presence, the rest won’t be surprising. The head of batteries at Tesla said he was sure the company could do better, an Australian billionaire asked if he was serious, and Musk jumped in to promise his team was. The rest is history. Musk reached his goal 40 days early, and the Australian billionaire funded the project as promised. We can argue about whether or not private citizens should have to rely on a billionaire angel investor to get a steady supply of power or make the shift to renewable energy, but in this case, the bet benefited a shortchanged rural population beginning almost immediately.
[...]
Just 1.7 million people live in South Australia, which is a nice size to consider a test market for technology like this. Rural grids tend to be left behind, because the ratio of required hardware and infrastructure is still so high per consumer—much more-so than in a big city, where the same short length of wiring could power thousands of homes. And building a facility that acts as a battery can help smooth out the natural ebbs and flows that come both from renewable energy technology and from the spread out, failure-prone nature of more rural grid sections. This smoothing has saved South Australians a ton of money, already much more than the $50 million cost that Tesla passed on to its Australian investor. The battery facility “reduced network costs by about A$116 million ($76 million) in 2019,” Bloomberg explains, “savings [Garth] Heron, [Neoen’s head of development in Australia] said would be passed on to businesses and households in the state. The battery’s introduction also slashed the cost to regulate South Australia’s grid by 91 [percent], bringing it in line with other regions in the nation."

Submission + - Study confirms 14 day quarantine for COVID 19 (annals.org)

Submitted by RNLockwood
RNLockwood writes: A study in Annals of Internal Medicine confirms the recommended 14 day quarantine period for those suspected having been infected by COVID 19 virus.

"Results:
There were 181 confirmed cases with identifiable exposure and symptom onset windows to estimate the incubation period of COVID-19. The median incubation period was estimated to be 5.1 days (95% CI, 4.5 to 5.8 days), and 97.5% of those who develop symptoms will do so within 11.5 days (CI, 8.2 to 15.6 days) of infection. These estimates imply that, under conservative assumptions, 101 out of every 10 000 cases (99th percentile, 482) will develop symptoms after 14 days of active monitoring or quarantine.

Limitation:
Publicly reported cases may overrepresent severe cases, the incubation period for which may differ from that of mild cases.

Conclusion:
This work provides additional evidence for a median incubation period for COVID-19 of approximately 5 days, similar to SARS. Our results support current proposals for the length of quarantine or active monitoring of persons potentially exposed to SARS-CoV-2, although longer monitoring periods might be justified in extreme cases."

I'm going to stock up on essentials.

Comment Re:A dangerous trend if you favour patents. (Score 2) 206

by hwihyw (#59755338) Attached to: City Sues Drug Manufacturer Mallinckrodt Over 97,500% Price Increase

Lot of these drugs as off patent. A patent has a duration of 17 years, hence, such "simple drugs from 1933" are off patent. Same with Epipen, Acthar, etc.

So what is the issue then? I'm tired of explaining it to people, so go to Walmart and see what the drugs off the shelf cost. Go to your pharmacy and see what prescription drugs cost. Keep in mind there are many new drugs at Walmart that are patented, and many prescription drugs at the pharmacy that are off patent (Epipen, Acthar, etc).

Comment Ah yes, Google style BS interview questions... (Score 1) 283

that Google already admitted was BS back in 2013. BS always repeats itself.

--"We found that brainteasers are a complete waste of time," Laszlo Bock, Google's Senior VP of People Operations, tells The New York Times. "How many golf balls can you fit into an airplane? How many gas stations in Manhattan? A complete waste of time. They don’t predict anything. They serve primarily to make the interviewer feel smart."

https://finance.yahoo.com/news...

Comment Re: But no money for teachers (Score 0) 117

by hwihyw (#57847288) Attached to: Kansas is Trying to Unload $10M in Unused Computer Equipment

Speaking of Google, you can now choose from endless online courses, universities, academies, and learn anything you want without forcing poor teachers to slave for peanuts (except maybe recording the initial lectures). They are now free, if not will soon be, to pursue their deserved high paying jobs in the private sector.

Comment Re:But no money for teachers (Score 1, Interesting) 117

by hwihyw (#57847074) Attached to: Kansas is Trying to Unload $10M in Unused Computer Equipment

Average Kansas teacher gets paid $53,314 (https://www1.salary.com/KS/Public-School-Teacher-Salary.html), before benefits. There are an average 180 days in a school year, with 6.64 hours in a school day, so 180*6.64=1195.2/$53,314=$44/hour. Raise your hand if you make close to $44/hour before benefits.

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