BS is exactly it. A "physicist" should know better. The 2nd law of thermodynamics states that the overall entropy of a closed system will always increase. But when you're talking about genetics, you need to include the entropy of the sun because its radiation is what makes life on earth (and therefore genetic changes) possible. External energy sources make possible a localized decrease in entropy, such as with air conditioners and heat pumps. The same is true with information systems that are powered by the electrical grid. This guy either slept through his thermodynamics course or is deliberately being deceiving. This is not really news for nerds (plenty of charlatans out there) and it definitely isn't stuff that matters.

When idiots rely on facial recognition and arrest someone and don't notice that they are 8 months pregnant and the robber/hijacker in the video can't be. Even though the "suspect" point it out to them. It took a month for the prosecutor to dismiss the charges.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/0...

Despite a tendency to run on, at least he had both a subject and a verb in all his sentences and most of his subordinate clauses.

Since the premise of Children of Men is that women globally become infertile, there is nothing in the Net Zero Agenda that would do that. There may be a very slight chance that paleo viruses thawing out of the permafrost from unaddressed Climate Change might cause an infertility plague. However there is a very strong chance that unaddressed climate change will cause hundreds of millions of climate refugees from tropical areas rendered uninhabitable by excess heat or increasingly violent weather.

Really? My impression is that SAP has been pushing large customers to move to using SAP HANA as the back-end database for quite a few years now. Yes, even before this project started.

In fact it sure sounds like Undersherriff Sung solicited a bribe, and it's unfortunate for the Apple security folks that they weren't recording the conversation at the time (although that may have been illegal in California where all parties need to consent to a private conversation being recorded). When it's a he-said-she-said situation with the police, especially the top of the hierarchy, the courts will nearly always side with the police. So Moyer effectively had a choice, pay the solicited bribe or leave his staff unable to properly defend against death threats. Hopefully, if they don't get charged, at least Sung and Smith won't get re-elected.

It's also worth noting that one of the things they mention in corporate anti-phishing training is that fostering a sense of urgency is a common technique in social engineering attacks. That approach would probably trigger spam/phishing flags in modern email-sanitizing software trained for that phishing tactic, no matter who was using it. It would be trivial to take that same email, swap DNC for RNC and white supremacy or police brutality where Republican mail outs use LGBTQ or some other evangelical/Trumpist hot button, and the email likely would still get spam filtered.

Seriously? No wonder they get blackholed/spam-binned. If that was what was triggering it, it's widespread industry best practice for spam control. They may as well have been Nigerian princes looking to transfer millions to the USA.

They probably went to a fly-by-night lowest bidder for their mass e-mail service. No wonder alt-right social networks appear to be security sieves if the RNC can't even get that right.

Yeah, that's not "a bad decision". That's a "how the heck did this completely moronic idea of using peoples' private conversations, potentially containing corporate secrets, to train AIs to regurgitate similar info make it past approval by multiple layers of management?" How did someone not stand up and say "This is going to blow up in our faces and alienate our customer base"? That's the real reason why people should seriously think twice about ever using their product again - lots of people in the Zoom corporate hierarchy thought this was a good money-making idea. Our company was already working to eliminate using Zoom for cost containment, but if there was any pushback from any users about doing so, this will drive the nail in that coffin and accelerate the process.

Yeah, in 22.04 LTS I regularly have the Firefox and Chromium snaps get messed up and prevent the applications from starting up. The only way to fix it is to remove the snap, reboot, and reinstall the snap. That was already the case in 20.04. It's currently the biggest pain point for me in Ubuntu. Switching the whole O/S to run on snaps is the last thing I would trust/want to do. Even if they've they've fixed that problem in 22.10 or 23.04, I won't trust it until at least one 2-year cycle on 24.04 where I've not snap had problems with either Firefox or Chromium.

Or I may jump to Mint since they've apparently added support for version upgrades since I last looked into it.

Some of these activists are Jews, LGBTQ, PoC, or close friends of same. They know that if they don't stop these guys, they're at risk of getting deplatformed from life anyways if the fascists and N.a.z.i.s get control. They would rather do something, fight the good fight, and go down fighting than cower in fear. If the people running these web sites are going to try to kill the activists over shutting down a site enabling hate speech, then they made the right decision. If all your life is about enabling hate speech to attack minorities that you're bigoted against, and you can't imagine doing anything else with those skills, then yeah the activists hit the right target. A new generation is picking up the torch from Simon Wiesenthal, and that's a good thing when there's so many neo-N.a.z.i.s running around, flying their flag high and proud.

Net Neutrality wouldn't have changed AWS' ability to cut them off. Net Neutrality means that an ISP can't throttle or block the bandwidth of a customer, whether that involves slowing down the service of a competitor (such as Netflix or YouTube when many large US ISPs also own media services) or throttling specific traffic (such as Peer-to-peer file sharing protocols). It also says you can't discriminate and make some customers pay more for the same amount of bandwidth than what you charge other customers.

This was choosing who to do business with, which is protected by the 1st amendment's clause on freedom of association (and implicitly freedom of non-association). The exceptions to that clause are for discriminating against specific classes based on religion, ethnicity/racism, sexual orientation, ageism, etc. none of which applied here. Even with Net Neutrality, AWS still could have said, "We choose not to do business with other businesses that, through their lack of action before and after the fact, tacitly approved and are passively complicit in one of the greatest insurrectionist, domestic terrorist attacks on US soil in the last 150 years. A continued business relationship is harmful to our reputation because it implies that we also support that criminal action". If Ajit Pai had tried to bring them to heel, they would have had a very strong case in court.

Yes, it's people in their 60s or older who are most at risk. Also those with risk factors like obesity, diabetes, undergoing cancer treatment, etc. You really think there are none of those working for Charter? And that's not counting those who may die from heart attacks, strokes, or car accidents because they can't get treatment if the medical system gets overloaded by COVID-19. The CEO is setting the company up for some serious wrongful death suits and the board should call him on the carpet.

Um track, cycling, and baseball are notorious for being sports where many, or most, top-tier athletes use forbidden substances or techniques like blood doping to boost performance over natural potential. Why didn't you throw in professional American football while you were at it?

https://www.macleans.ca/societ...

If those organizational standards are ones you hold up as effective for dealing with cheating, then you probably also think that Trump is draining the swamp.

Benford says Minsky told him that he had turned her down. What I've seen reported of the deposition so far makes it unclear whether she actually had sex with him or was just groomed to approach him.

In the mid 90s I was told that there apparently were a few young women at major SF cons like Worldcons who would attempt to build collections of famous authors that they had slept with. The person who told me this apparently spied one sneaking out of an older well-known author's room and told the collector "Hey girl, it's tacky to sleep with an author you haven't read!". No, that author was most definitely not Benford, but Benford may have been confronted with similar (consensual) advances since he was already similarly well known at the time. That would make him quite susceptible to believing Minsky's version of the events.

If Epstein's sexual exploitation victim makes a clear statement that she did in fact sleep with Minsky (and wasn't just groomed to do so), implying that Minsky lied to Benford, then I'll believe her that Benford got duped. I hope that's not the case since that would cast a deep shadow over Minsky's pioneering career. The reporting of the testimony to date seems to have the victim leaving unsaid whether Minsky actually participated in anything sexual, so for now I'll assume he was targeted but not compromised, and a reporter jumped to a bad conclusion. There is no excuse however if he did participate and covered it up (because a cover-up would show he knew he did something wrong).