95486893
submission
rudy_wayne writes:
Bloomberg says "Tesla’s Newest Promises Break the Laws of Batteries"
"Elon Musk knows how to make promises. Even by his own standards, the promises made last week while introducing two new Tesla vehicles are monuments of envelope pushing. To deliver, according to close observers of battery technology, Tesla would have to far exceed what is currently thought possible.
The Tesla Semi, which Musk claims can haul 80,000 pounds at highway speeds for 500 miles, would require a charging system that's 10 times more powerful than one of the fastest battery-charging networks on the road today — Tesla’s own Superchargers. The Tesla Roadster is promised to be the quickest production car ever built, with a range of 600 miles. But that achievement would mean squeezing into its tiny frame a battery twice as powerful as the largest battery currently available in any electric car.
These claims are so far beyond current industry standards for electric vehicles that they would require either advances in battery technology or a new understanding of how batteries are put to use, said Sam Jaffe, battery analyst for Cairn Energy Research in Boulder, Colorado. In some cases, experts suspect Tesla might be banking on technological improvements between now and the time when new vehicles are actually ready for delivery a few years from now.
91867855
submission
rudy_wayne writes:
J.C. Penney CEO Marvin Ellison recently said that e-commerce companies' biggest challenge is that they are all expanding their businesses and pushing for faster delivery, but UPS, Fedex and especially the United States Postal Service, aren't able to keep up, at least not at same cost that exists today, because they're not increasing their delivery capacity at the same rate e-commerce is growing,
He said this will cause a supply and demand issue "that's going to be apparent here pretty soon."
88291841
submission
rudy_wayne writes:
Despite constant claims of losing billions of dollars to "piracy", the North American box office closed out 2016 with $11.4 billion in ticket sales. That marks a new record for the industry, bypassing the previous record of $11.1 billion that was established in 2015.
Disney had four of the top five highest-grossing films, including “Finding Dory,” the years top film with $486.3 million. When holdovers are taken into account, Disney had six of the year’s ten highest-grossing releases, a group that includes “Star Wars: The Force Awakens,” which debuted in 2015.
Other top films include “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story” ($408.2 million), “Captain America: Civil War” ($408.1 million),”The Secret Life of Pets” ($368.4 million), and “The Jungle Book” ($364 million).
82821407
submission
rudy_wayne writes:
A person who was using Venmo, an app that allows people to send money to each other via their phones, sent $42 to repay a friend, and jokingly labelled it "ISIS Beer Fund".
He immediately got an e-mail from Venmo questioning the purpose of the money. Although he tried to explain "The $42 was payment to a dear friend for two pitchers of Samuel Adams Boston Lager" he was informed "Due to OFAC regulations, we are not allowed to give the funds back to you or issue a refund."
The Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control is a 54 year old institution, quietly working to keep money out of the hands of America’s enemies.
80475905
submission
rudy_wayne writes:
Former Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich has launched a new Chromium-based browser called Brave.
"Brave blocks everything: initial signalling/analytics scripts that start the programmatic advertising 'dirty pipe', impression-tracking pixels, and ad-click confirmation signals," Eich wrote on the Brave site.
Former Mozilla CTO Andreas Gal said in a blog post, the web is broken, with current browser vendors unwilling to tackle the dilemma of blocking ads, while looking at alternative mechanisms for funding content. Gal said it was ironic Brave was a for-profit operation that can make money from reducing advertising.
66232845
submission
rudy_wayne writes:
Zdnet reports that a new whitepaper from antivirus company Bitdefender, which examined 850,000 Facebook scams over two years, shows that Facebook's own user experience enables these scams to flourish. The researchers found that scammers have infected millions of users with the same tricks over and over again — just repackaged.
The most common tricks, such as 'Guess who viewed your profile (45.5 percent)' and 'change your background color' (29.53 percent) rely on a combination of the obsessions encouraged by the Facebook experience, and a general lack of understanding about Facebook’s functionality — which, as most users know, is a constantly moving target. Users would be none the wiser that a given scam isn't just a new "feature" or another of Facebook's psychological experiments being done on users.
66042791
submission
rudy_wayne writes:
Following the crash of Virgin Galactic SpaceShipTwo, an opinion piece at Wired calls the project nothing more than a "millionaire boondoggle thrill ride".In the wake of this tragedy out at Mojave we’re going to hear a lot about exploration, about pioneers and frontiers. People are going to talk about Giant Leaps for Mankind and Boldly Going Where No One Has Gone Before. And we should call bullshit on that.
SpaceShipTwo is not a Federation starship. It’s not a vehicle for the exploration of frontiers. Virgin Galactic is building the world’s most expensive roller coaster, the aerospace version of Beluga caviar. It’s a thing for rich people to do.
Testing new aircraft takes a level of courage and ability beyond most humans. Those engineers and pilots are at the peak of human achievement. What they’re doing is amazing. Why Virgin is doing it is not.
When various corporate representatives eulogize those two pilots as pioneers who were helping to cross the Final Frontier, that should make you angry. That pilot died not for space but for a luxury service provider. His death doesn’t get us closer to Mars; it just keeps rich people further away from weightlessness and a beautiful view.
61803795
submission
rudy_wayne writes:
A Goldman Sachs contractor was testing internal changes made to Goldman Sachs' system and prepared a report with sensitive client information, including details on brokerage accounts. The report was accidentally e-mailed to a 'gmail.com' address rather than the correct 'gs.com' address. Google told Goldman Sachs on June 26 that it couldn't just reach into Gmail and delete the e-mail without a court order. Goldman Sachs filed with the New York Supreme Court, requesting "emergency relief" to avoid a privacy violation and "avoid the risk of unnecessary reputational damage to Goldman Sachs."
46683151
submission
rudy_wayne writes:
On Friday, Paul Hansmeier, a Minnesota attorney who has been pointed to as one of the masterminds of the Prenda copyright-trolling scheme, filed an emergency motion to stay the $81,000 sanctions order while he and his colleagues could mount an appeal. Today the appeals court flatly denied his motion.. Two appellate judges signed this order, and it gives Hansmeier the option to make a plea for delay with the district court judge. That would be US District Judge Otis Wright, the judge who sanctioned Hansmeier in the first place.
Hansmeier is also getting kicked off a case he was working on that was totally unrelated to Prenda's scheme of making copyright accusations over alleged pornography downloads. On Friday, the 9th Circuit Commissioner ordered Hansmeier, in no uncertain terms, to withdraw a the case involving Groupon since he has been referred to the Minnesota State Bar for investigation. The commissioner has delayed Hansmeier's admission to the 9th Circuit because of Wright's order, which refers to Wright's finding of "moral turpitude."
43129301
submission
rudy_wayne writes:
A federal judge in Los Angeles has suggested serious penalties for Brett Gibbs, an attorney at porn copyright trolling firm Prenda Law. Facing allegations of fraud and identity theft, Gibbs will be required to explain himself at a March 11 hearing. And if Judge Otis Wright isn't satisfied with his answers, he may face fines and even jail time.
The identity theft allegations emerged late last year, when a Minnesota man named Alan Cooper told a Minnesota court he suspected Prenda Law named him as the CEO of two litigious offshore holding companies without his permission. Worried about exposing himself to potential liability for the firms' misconduct, Cooper asked the court to investigate the situation. Cooper's letter was spotted by Morgan Pietz, an attorney who represents "John Doe" defendants in California. He notified Judge Wright of the allegations.
30452355
submission
rudy_wayne writes:
The end of Encyclopedia Brittanica has been widely reported and its demise has been blamed on Wikipedia. However, this article at Wired points out that the real reason is something entirely different.
"In 1990 Brittanica had $650 million in revenue. In 1996, long before Wikipedia existed, it was bankrupt and the entire company was sold for $135 million. What happened in between was Encarta. Even though Encarta didn't make money for Microsoft and Brittanica produced its own encyclopedia CDs, Encarta was an inexpensive, multimedia encyclopedia that helped Microsoft sell Windows PCs to families. And once you had a PC in the living room or den where the encyclopedia used to be, it was all over for Mighty Brittanica. It’s not that Encarta made knowledge cheaper, it’s that technology supplanted its role as a purchasable ‘edge’ for over-anxious parents. They bought junior a new PC instead of a Britannica. When Wikipedia emerged five years later, Brittanica was already a weakened giant. It wasn’t a free and open encyclopedia that defeated its print edition. It was the personal computer itself."
20593344
submission
rudy_wayne writes:
"The Wall Street Journal is reporting that News. Corp is trying to sell MySpace for $100 Million, a fraction of the $580 Million that it originally paid in 2005. Parties reportedly interested in acquiring MySpace include private equity firm THL Partners, Redscout Ventures and Criterion Capital, owner of social network Bebo (the company AOL bought for $850 Million and then sold for $10 Million). Chinese Internet holding company Tencent is also reportedly interested and so is Myspace co-founder Chris De Wolfe. What’s not yet clear is what any of these companies plan to do with MySpace if a sale goes through."
19208450
submission
rudy_wayne writes:
We know you can take down Web sites with Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. We know that a country, like Egypt, can shut down a country’s entire Internet access. And, we thought we knew that you can't take down the entire Internet.
It turns out we could be wrong.
In a report from New Scientist, Max Schuchard a computer science graduate student and his buddies claim they've found a way to launch DDoS attacks on Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) network routers that could crash the Internet.
18624154
submission
rudy_wayne writes:
ZDNet is reporting that Zero Day blogger and malware researcher Dancho Danchev has gone missing since August of last year. Dancho, who was relentless in his pursuit of cyber-criminals, last blogged here on August 18. His personal blog has not been updated since September 11, 2010.
At ZDNet, we made multiple attempts to contact him, to no avail. Telephone numbers are going to Bulgarian language voicemails and our attempts to reach him via a snail mail address also came up empty. Just recently, a trusted member of the malware research community reached out to us to say he had received a troubling letter from Dancho on September 9, 2010, about the threat of persecution in Bulgaria.
