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Comment Re:Poor savings habits strike again! (Score 2) 211

by managerialslime (#65174585) Attached to: The 'White Collar' Recession is Pummeling Office Workers

I, for one, have saved every chance I get, am approaching retirement age, and have nothing. I've had blue and white collar jobs but a combination of disabilities, my own mistakes (we all make them but people in my position don't recover) and misfortune has left me living hand to mouth on a wage too small to save on.

Hi Cheese. I'm now in my sixties. Look at the number of my member ID, and you'll see I have been on this website for a very long time.

Dave Ramsey (Author, Radio guy, podcaster, and personal finance guru) has made millionaires out of countless blue-collar and white-collar workers.

I'm not saying that his advice will work for everyone, but his methods work more often than not.

His books are free at your local library. He has hundreds of hours on YouTube. What he has to say may be more critical to your financial security than an MBA from Harvard.

Yes, our version of capitalism is broken. Yes, the top 1% have advantages you and I will never have. Yes, the billionaire class is ruling the rest of us.
And yes, in this country, we do a crappy job of caring for people with disabilities.

However, for most people who follow Dave's advice, financial security is not just a dream, but a probability.

What if Dave is too conservative for you? Google "fire financial plan" and see another path to financial security. (There are other approaches as well - Google is your friend.)

But whine like a victim, and you may remain a victim.

In national elections, I always vote for the progressive candidate not because of what they can do for me but for what they propose to do for the less fortunate in our society. My assumption has always been that I will never stop reading, learning, and retraining myself, as most of my technical skills at any given time will be absent from job postings in a few years. (And yes, I now only work because I love working and not because I need a paycheck. My years of working in a factory in the AM and frying chicken all evening are now but distant memories from the last century.)

Assuming you are already not wasting too much money on drugs and booze, then you might be someone who needs to train for a better-paying profession. (There are always good-paying jobs in both blue-collar and white-collar arenas.) Between trade schools, community colleges, Udemy, and free online resources, your entrance to your next profession may not even cost an arm and a leg.

You say you are approaching retirement, but depending on your disability, that might mean there are one or multiple decades of work ahead of you.

I wish you well. I wish you success.

Submission + - SPAM: Researchers Teach Human Brain Cells in a Dish to Play "Pong"

Submitted by Hmmmmmm
Hmmmmmm writes: Researchers at the biotechnology startup Cortical Labs have created “mini-brains“ consisting of 800,000 to one million living human brain cells in a petri dish, New Scientist reports. The cells are placed on top of a microelectrode array that analyzes the neural activity.

To teach the mini-brains the game, the team created a simplified version of “Pong” with no opponent. A signal is sent to either the right or left of the array to indicate where the ball is, and the neurons from the brain cells send signals back to move the paddle.

Kagan said that while the mini-brains can’t play the game as well as a human, they do learn faster than some AIs.

“The amazon aspect is how quickly it learns, in five minutes, in real time,” he told New Scientist. “That’s really an amazing thing that biology can do.”

While this is certainly some amazing Twitch fodder, the team at Cortical Labs hope to use their findings to develop sophisticated technology using “live biological neurons integrated with traditional silicon computing,” according to the outfit’s website.

Video of brain cells playing "pong": [spam URL stripped]...
Link to Original Source

Submission + - SPAM: Forget dogs: These rats could be the future of search and rescue

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: Think search and rescue animal, and you’re likely to picture a dog in an orange vest. But a Tanzanian nonprofit wants you to imagine something else: the African giant pouched rat. Donna Kean and her colleagues at APOPO, a nonprofit that trains pouched rats to save lives, have spent the past 2 decades working with the curious animals (Cricetomys ansorgei) to sniff out tuberculosis and track down land mines. Now, they’re moving on to search and rescue.

Science caught up with Kean to chat about the new project, known as RescueRats. Topics include, jus how to train a rat, what advantages they have over dogs, and whether people would be freaked out about a rodent coming to save them.
Link to Original Source

Submission + - SPAM: And the biggest scientific breakthrough of 2021 is...

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: In his 1972 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, American biochemist Christian Anfinsen laid out a vision: One day it would be possible, he said, to predict the 3D structure of any protein merely from its sequence of amino acid building blocks. With hundreds of thousands of proteins in the human body alone, such an advance would have vast applications, offering insights into basic biology and revealing promising new drug targets. Now, after nearly 50 years, researchers have shown that artificial intelligence (AI)-driven software can churn out accurate protein structures by the thousands—an advance that realizes Anfinsen’s dream and is Science’s 2021 Breakthrough of the Year.

Protein structures could once be determined only through painstaking lab analyses. But they can now be calculated, quickly, for tens of thousands of proteins, and for complexes of interacting proteins. “This is a sea change for structural biology,” says Gaetano Montelione, a structural biologist at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. David Baker, a University of Washington, Seattle, computational biochemist who led one of the prediction projects, adds that with the bounty of readily available structures, “All areas of computational and molecular biology will be transformed.”
Link to Original Source

Submission + - The war over Chinese Wikipedia (fastcompany.com)

Submitted by harrymcc
harrymcc writes: Earlier this year, the Wikimedia Foundation banned or demoted many of its editors responsible for the Chinese version of the encyclopedia. The foundation accused these volunteers of biasing it in favor of the Chinese government’s viewpoint. Over at Fast Company, we’ve published Alex Pasternack’s investigation into the story behind this incident, which involves beatings, doxxings, and harassment designed to ensure pro-Beijing content. With Wikipedia versions in other countries also under pressure of a variety of sorts, what’s happening in China is big—but hardly unique.

Comment Re:Like Anyone on /. Needed... (Score 1) 74

In response to your post:
>> Well, they mentioned there was no benefit after 3-4 cups a day. It shouldn't impact us around here.

That is NOT what the article said, The study stated that there is no ADDITIONAL BENEFIT after the fourth cup of coffee consumed daily.

If you follow the link in the article, the supporting study found that four or more cups of coffee daily are correlated with a 50% decline in death from liver disease.

Based on the alcohol consumption of some of us in the Slash Dot community, this is actually a pretty relevant article.

Comment The MacBook Air as great Windows PC (Score 1) 757

My first computer was an Apple II purchased in 1981. Armed with VisiCalc, I was a a spreadsheet warrior.

After using CP/M and MP/M in '82 and '83, I got my first MS-Dos PC in 1982.

For ten years, I loved MS-DOS, and my personal computing world included WordStar, VisiCalc, dBase, Q&A, BASIC, Forth, and 1802 Assembler.

In 1992, I transitioned to MS Windows, MS Office, Access, Oracle, and never looked back.

In 2012, I joined a company where part of my job was to support executives who were struggling to use MS Excel on MacBooks.
In 2013, I bought an 11" MacBook Air not because I wanted to, but because I couldn't convince those executives that using Windows devices did not make them look old and "out of touch."

While I had to special order it, my MacBook Air has an i7 processor, 16 GB of RAM, and a 1 TB SSD. (That size RAM and disk were not available in Apple stores at that time.) It cost almost three times more than if I had bought a Dell or HP laptop with similar specs.

For my own computing needs, I run Windows under Parallels on that MacBook Air and switch back to the Mac environment only when absolutely necessary.

So here we are in 2017. My MacBook air still looks like it is brand new. It still runs 100% of the software I need to do my job (especially Visio and MS Project). Even 3+ years later, the hardware specs are not antiquated. While I have a brand new Windows desktop at home, the Apple is in my hands the entire work day.

From a ruggedness and reliability perspective, my MacBook Air has been phenomenal.

While my next laptop will probably be a Yoga, (I bought one for my youngest son and he loves it), who knows ow many more years my 2013 MacBook Air will continue to be the machine with which I earn my living.

Obligatory XKCD Mac vs. Windows comic: https://xkcd.com/934/

Comment Re:This Means Very Little. (Score 1) 179

The very fact that Lyft's app allows for post-ride tipping shows they are less insensitive than Uber when it comes to their drivers. (As of the last time I used the Uber app, no provision for post-ride tipping existed.) While I have both apps on my phone, I use Uber only if I am in a city where Lyft is not available. If Uber ever runs out of money and leverage to artificially keep fares low, Lyft should be able to raise the fares by a couple of bucks and allow drivers to make a living wage. Until then, ethical riders should consider overly generous tipping as a way to help drivers of both services make ends meet.

Submission + - researchers develop artificial leaf that turns CO2 into fuel (chicagotribune.com)

Submitted by managerialslime
managerialslime writes: University of Illinois at Chicago researchers have developed a way to mimic plants’ ability to convert carbon dioxide into fuel, a way to decrease the amounts of harmful gas in the atmosphere and produce clean energy. The artificial leaf essentially recycles carbon dioxide. And it’s powered entirely by the sun, mimicking the real photosynthesis process.

Submission + - Backdoor encryption sneaks into UK law (theregister.co.uk)

Submitted by Coisiche
Coisiche writes: Seems that all the US companies that said any encryption backdoors would undermine global competitiveness, when such a thing was recently mooted there, can now find out if they were correct or not by watching the UK. Meanwhile various TLA agencies will be wondering if it could be as easily slipped into law in their jurisdiction.

Submission + - More Than 1 Million Android Devices Rooted by Gooligan Malware

Submitted by Trailrunner7
Trailrunner7 writes: A new version of an existing piece of malware has emerged in some third-party Android app stores and researchers say it has infected more than a million devices around the world, giving the attackers full access to victims’ Google accounts in the process.

The malware campaign is known as Gooligan, and it’s a variant of older malware called Ghost Push that has been found in many malicious apps. Researchers at Check Point recently discovered several dozen apps, mainly in third-party app stores, that contain the malware, which is designed to download and install other apps and generate income for the attackers through click fraud. The malware uses phantom clicks on ads to generate revenue for the attackers through pay-per-install schemes, but that’s not the main concern for victims.

The Gooligan malware also employs exploits that take advantage of several known vulnerabilities in older versions of Android, including Kit Kat and Lollipop to install a rootlet that is capable of stealing users’ Google credentials.Although the malware has full remote access to infected devices, it doesn’t appear to be stealing user data, but rather is content to go the click-fraud route. Most users are being infected through the installation of apps that appear to be legitimate but contain the Gooligan code, a familiar infection routine for mobile devices.

Submission + - New study shows marijuana users have low blood flow to the brain (eurekalert.org)

Submitted by cold fjord
cold fjord writes: State level marijuana legalization efforts across the US have been gaining traction driven by the folk wisdom that marijuana is both a harmless recreational drug and a useful medical treatment for many aliments. However some cracks have appeared in that story with indications that marijuana use is associated with the development of mental disorders and the long term blunting of the brain's reward system of dopamine levels. A new study has found that marijuana appears to have a widespread effect on blood flow in the brain: "Published in the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease, researchers using single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT), a sophisticated imaging study that evaluates blood flow and activity patterns, demonstrated abnormally low blood flow in virtually every area of the brain studies in nearly 1,000 marijuana users compared to healthy controls, including areas known to be affected by Alzheimer's pathology such as the hippocampus. . . . According to Daniel Amen, M.D., ... "Our research demonstrates that marijuana can have significant negative effects on brain function. The media has given the general impression that marijuana is a safe recreational drug, this research directly challenges that notion. In another new study just released, researchers showed that marijuana use tripled the risk of psychosis. Caution is clearly in order.""

Submission + - San Francisco's 58-Story Millennium Tower Seen Sinking From Space (sfgate.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Engineers in San Francisco have tunneled underground to try and understand the sinking of the 58-story Millennium Tower. Now comes an analysis from space. The European Space Agency has released detailed data from satellite imagery that shows the skyscraper in San Francisco's financial district is continuing to sink at a steady rate — and perhaps faster than previously known. The luxury high-rise that opened its doors in 2009 has been dubbed the Leaning Tower of San Francisco. It has sunk about 16 inches into landfill and is tilting several inches to the northwest. Engineers have estimated the building is sinking at a rate of about 1-inch per year. The Sentinel-1 twin satellites show almost double that rate based on data collected from April 2015 to September 2016. The satellite data shows the Millennium Tower sunk 40 to 45 millimeters — or 1.6 to 1.8 inches — over a recent one-year period and almost double that amount — 70 to 75 mm (2.6 to 2.9 inches) — over its 17-month observation period, said Petar Marinkovic, founder and chief scientist of PPO Labs which analyzed the satellite's radar imagery for the ESA along with Norway-based research institute Norut. The Sentinel-1 study is not focused on the Millennium Tower but is part of a larger mission by the European Space Agency tracking urban ground movement around the world, and particularly subsidence "hotspots" in Europe, said Pierre Potin, Sentinel-1 mission manager for the ESA. The ESA decided to conduct regular observations of the San Francisco Bay Area, including the Hayward Fault, since it is prone to tectonic movement and earthquakes, said Potin, who is based in Italy. Data from the satellite, which is orbiting about 400 miles (700 kilometers) from the earth's surface, was recorded every 24 days. The building's developer, Millennium Partners, insists the building is safe for occupancy and could withstand an earthquake.

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