An anonymous reader quotes a report from MSN: In a draft law seen by AFP, the country's environment ministry has drawn up a number of new measures to protect insects, ranging from partially outlawing spotlights to increased protection of natural habitats. "Insects play an important role in the ecosystem...but in Germany, their numbers and their diversity has severely declined in recent years," reads the draft law, for which the ministry hopes to get cabinet approval by October. The changes put forward in the law include stricter controls on both lighting and the use of insecticides.

Light traps for insects are to be banned outdoors, while searchlights and sky spotlights would be outlawed from dusk to dawn for ten months of the year. The draft also demands that any new streetlights and other outdoor lights be installed in such a way as to minimize the effect on plants, insects and other animals. The use of weed-killers and insecticides would also be banned in national parks and within five to ten meters of major bodies of water, while orchards and dry-stone walls are to be protected as natural habitats for insects. The proposed reforms are part of the German government's more general "insect protection action plan," which was announced last September under growing pressure from environmental and conservation activists.

Airbus just completed its Autonomous Taxi, Take-Off, and Landing project that saw one of its jets perform normally pilot-flown maneuvers entirely on its own. Business Insider reports: The European manufacturer just completed flight testing for its Autonomous Taxi, Take-off, and Landing project in June after its flagship aircraft successfully navigated each phase of flight on its own as pilots simply watched. Over 500 flights were conducted with the new Airbus A350-1000 XWB that successfully utilized "image recognition technology" to essentially give the plane a pair of eyes. The technology, integrated with the A350's exterior cameras, allowed it to perform the phases of flight entirely on its own, Airbus announced. The first milestone of the flight testing campaign occurred in December when Airbus was able to successfully demonstrate autonomous take-offs from Toulouse-Blagnac Airport in France. All pilots had to do in the first test was line up the plane with the runway and then sit back and watch as the plane barreled down the runway, lifting off on its own. With Airbus proving that its jet can also land and taxi on its own, the door is now open to fully autonomous flights.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Corporate America is downsizing its real estate footprint as companies allow more employees to work from home, a growing threat to the bottom line of owners of traditional office buildings and a sign that companies are looking for ways to cut costs as a result of the coronavirus pandemic. A Reuters analysis of quarterly earnings calls over the past week revealed more than 25 large companies plan to reduce their office space in the year ahead, a move designed to reduce the second-largest expense after payrolls at corporations.

Energy company Halliburton Co said it intends to close more than 100 facilities. Financial services company State Street Corp said it is going to nearly double the workers assigned to one office before adding additional space, based on the assumption that a significant portion of its workforce will continue to work from home even after a vaccine for COVID-19 emerges. Bedding company Sleep Number Corp plans to slow the growth of its total square footage as more consumers shop online. Analysts say the plans to cut back on real estate are likely the first wave of cost-cutting measures to hit office workers as companies try to maintain margins going into what may be a long recession. So far, the majority of the 14.7 million U.S. jobs lost during the pandemic have been in hard-hit areas such as restaurants, travel and retailers. Reductions in office spending could likely be followed by layoffs and investments in technology that should help improve productivity with a reduced workforce, said Bill McMahon, chief investment officer of active equity strategies at Charles Schwab. According to Morgan Stanley, vacancy rates in New York will reach 10%-12% in the next two to five years from 8.7% now, while San Francisco will reach 7-9% from 5.8%.

"Green Street Advisors expects that office demand will be reduced by up to 15% as a result of work from home policies once the coronavirus pandemic is contained," adds Reuters. "That reduction in necessary space will most likely hurt real estate investment firms with large exposures in cities such as San Francisco and New York as workers are expected to be given more freedom by employers to live in lower-cost areas away from the coasts."

America's border-protection agency "can track everyone's cars all over the country thanks to massive troves of automated license plate scanner data, a new report reveals," reports Ars Technica.

And they didn't need to request search warrants from the courts, the article explains, since "the agency did just what hundreds of other businesses and investigators do: straight-up purchase access to commercial databases." U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has been buying access to commercial automated license plate-reader databases since 2017, TechCrunch reports, and the agency says bluntly that there's no real way for any American to avoid having their movements tracked. "CBP cannot provide timely notice of license plate reads obtained from various sources outside of its control," the agency wrote in its most recent privacy assessment. "The only way to opt out of such surveillance is to avoid the impacted area, which may pose significant hardships and be generally unrealistic...."

CBP already buys cell phone location data, even though it would not legally be able to hoover it up on a wide scale directly. Police also purchase hacked and breached data from third-party vendors that they can then use to track and identify individuals in ways that otherwise might have required a warrant.

Although hundreds of jurisdictions nationwide use automated plate-scanning technology, fewer than 20 states have laws of any kind on their books governing the collection, use, and storage of automated license plate-reader (ALPR) data. Even fewer of those laws specify what private entities can collect ALPR data and what can be done with that information. The software also seems to become more granular almost by the day.

Theoretically, CBP only has authority to operate within 100 miles of the US border. The data it purchases, however, may allow it to track any given license plate basically anywhere in the country.

Spreading rock dust on farmland could suck billions of tons of carbon dioxide from the air every year, according to the first detailed global analysis of the technique. The Guardian reports: The chemical reactions that degrade the rock particles lock the greenhouse gas into carbonates within months, and some scientists say this approach may be the best near-term way of removing CO2 from the atmosphere. The rock dust approach, called enhanced rock weathering (ERW), has several advantages, the researchers say. First, many farmers already add limestone dust to soils to reduce acidification, and adding other rock dust improves fertility and crop yields, meaning application could be routine and desirable.

Basalt is the best rock for capturing CO2, and many mines already produce dust as a byproduct, so stockpiles already exist. The researchers also found that the world's biggest polluters, China, the U.S. and India, have the greatest potential for ERW, as they have large areas of cropland and relatively warm weather, which speeds up the chemical reactions. The analysis, published in the journal Nature, estimates that treating about half of farmland could capture 2 billion tons of CO2 each year, equivalent to the combined emissions of Germany and Japan. The cost depends on local labor rates and varies from $80 per ton in India to $160 in the U.S., and is in line with the $100-150 carbon price forecast by the World Bank for 2050, the date by which emissions must reach net zero to avoid catastrophic climate breakdown.

Ars Technica's technology reporter Jim Salter tested Walmart's 11.6-inch EVOO laptop, which sells for $139 and ships with just 2GiB of RAM and a 32GB SSD, which he worries "simply is not enough room for Windows itself, let alone any applications." The first thing I noticed while looking through the Windows install is that our "internal" Wi-Fi is actually a cheap USB 2.0 Realtek adapter — and it's 2.4GHz-only 802.11n, at that. The second thing I noticed was the fact that I couldn't install even simple applications, because the laptop was in S mode. For those unfamiliar, S mode locks a system into using only the Edge browser and only apps from the Microsoft Store. Many users end up badly confused by S mode, and some unnecessarily buy a new copy of Windows trying to get out of it. Fortunately, if you click the "learn more" link in the S mode warning that pops up when you attempt to load a non-Store app, you are eventually led to a free Microsoft Store app which turns S mode off. On my first try, this app crashed. But on the second, it successfully disabled S mode, leaving me with a normal Windows install....

I verified that I was on an older version of Windows 10 — build 1903, from March 2019 — and initiated an upgrade to build 2004, from April 2020. Windows 10 was having none of it. It wanted at least 8GiB of free space on C:, and I couldn't even get to 6GiB free, after only a day of using the system.... Meaningful benchmark results were impossible to attain on this laptop, since it was too slow and quirky to even run the benchmarks reliably. But I didn't let a silly thing like "being obviously inappropriate" stop me from slogging painfully through the benchmarks and getting what numbers I could. The first suite up, PCMark 10, eventually produced a score of zero. I didn't know that a zero score was even possible. Apparently, it is... Cinebench R20 also took several tries to complete successfully, and eventually the test produced a jaw-droppingly bad score of 118...

Under Fedora 32 — selected due to its ultra-modern kernel, and lightweight Wayland display manager — the EVOO was incredibly balky and sluggish. To be fair, Fedora felt significantly snappier than Windows 10 had on this laptop, but that was a very, very low bar to hurdle. The laptop frequently took as long as 12 seconds just to launch Firefox. Actually navigating webpages wasn't much better, with very long pauses for no apparent reason. The launcher was also balky to render — and this time, with significantly lower memory usage than Windows, I couldn't just blame it on swap thrashing... [W]ith the laptop completely open, several questions are answered — the reason I hadn't heard any fan noise up until this point is because there is no fan, and the horrible CPU performance is because the CPU can't perform any better than it does without cooking itself in its own juices....

At first, I mistakenly assumed that the A4-9120 was just thermally throttling itself 24/7. After re-assembling it and booting back into Fedora, I found the real answer — the normally 2.5GHz chip is underclocked to an anemic 1.5GHz. The system BIOS confirms this clockrate but offers no room to adjust it — which is a shame, since the system never hit temperatures higher than about 62C in my testing.
His verdict? Walmart's EVOO laptop "doesn't have either the RAM or the storage to do an even vaguely reasonable job for normal people doing normal things under Windows, even when limited to S mode...

"There may be a purpose this laptop is well-suited to — but for the life of me, I cannot think what it might be."

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said he does not think social networks should be fact-checking what politicians post. From a report: Zuckerberg's comment came after CNBC asked him for thoughts on Twitter's decision to start fact-checking the tweets of President Donald Trump. Twitter's move came on Tuesday after Trump tweeted that mail-in ballots would be "substantially fraudulent." Earlier Tuesday, Twitter declined to censor or warn users after Trump tweeted baseless claims that MSNBC host Joe Scarborough should be investigated for the death of his former staffer. "I don't think that Facebook or internet platforms in general should be arbiters of truth," Zuckerberg said. "Political speech is one of the most sensitive parts in a democracy, and people should be able to see what politicians say."

Yesterday, SpaceX and OneWeb filed applications to launch tens of thousands of additional satellites into low Earth orbit. "SpaceX's application to launch 30,000 satellites -- in addition to the nearly 12,000 it already has permission for -- is consistent with SpaceX's previously announced plans for Starlink," reports Ars Technica. "OneWeb's application to launch nearly 48,000 satellites is surprising because the satellite-broadband company filed for bankruptcy in March." From the report: OneWeb is highly unlikely to launch a significant percentage of these satellites under its current structure, as the company reportedly "axed most of its staff" when it filed for bankruptcy and says it intends to use bankruptcy proceedings "to pursue a sale of its business in order to maximize the value of the company." Getting FCC approval to launch more satellites could improve the value of OneWeb's assets and give more options to whoever buys the company. "OneWeb has already secured debtor-in-possession financing and expects to soon exit the Chapter 11 process in a manner that maximizes the value of OneWeb's strategic assets and also ensures a viable path forward for its stakeholders and customers," the company said in its FCC application.

"It's important to understand that the reason OneWeb filed for so many satellites is that it will make others' efforts more difficult, especially [for Amazon subsidiary] Kuiper, and thereby potentially enhance the value of OneWeb's first gen license. Similar rationale to SpaceX's 30K satellite proposal," satellite-industry consultant Tim Farrar wrote on Twitter. FCC rules give satellite licensees six years to launch 50 percent of licensed satellites and nine years to launch all of them, unless a waiver is granted.

Saturday Elon Musk announced he'd "immediately" relocate Tesla's headquarters and "future programs" to Texas and Nevada, reports Ars Technica.

While California lifted its restrictions on manufacturers and businesses, the county of Alameda (where Tesla is located) says the company's manufacturing plant does not yet meet the county's requirements for safely reopening. "Frankly, this is the final straw," Musk tweeted. Musk also announced his intent to file a lawsuit against Alameda County officials "immediately," adding, "The unelected & ignorant 'Interim Health Officer' of Alameda is acting contrary to the Governor, the President, our Constitutional freedoms & just plain common sense!" Musk also encouraged Tesla shareholders to file a class-action suit against the county.

The latest back-and-forth between Tesla and Alameda County officials began on Thursday, when a memo sent to Tesla employees indicated that its Fremont plant would reopen "at 30% our normal headcount per shift," as reported by TechCrunch. Alameda officials responded on Friday with a firm reminder that the county's stay-in-place order would remain in effect for Tesla, and all other "non-essential" operations in the county, until May 31, with the exception of "basic" operations...

"We have informed Tesla of all of the conditions that must exist for phasing in the safe reopening of various sectors of the economy and the community. Tesla has been informed that they do not meet those criteria and must not reopen. We welcome Tesla's proactive work on a reopening plan so that once they fit the criteria to reopen, they can do so in a way that protects their employees and the community at large."

SpaceX is working with Space Adventures to launch up to four tourists into a super high orbit, possible by the end of next year. "Ticket prices are not being divulged but expected to be in the millions," reports NBC Los Angeles. From the report: For this trip, paying customers will skip the space station and instead orbit two to three times higher, or roughly 500 miles to 750 miles above Earth. It's a lofty goal that would approach the record 850-mile-high orbit achieved by Gemini 11's Pete Conrad and Dick Gordon in 1966. The tourist flight "will forge a path to making spaceflight possible for all people who dream of it," SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell said in a statement.

SpaceX will use the same kind of Dragon capsule that will launch NASA astronauts to the space station, possibly in another few months. The capsule has flown only once in space so far, making its debut last year in a successful test flight without a crew. Space Adventures spokeswoman Stacey Tearne said the tourist flight could occur in the last quarter of 2021. The company is in discussions with "several potential clients." No professional pilot or astronaut will be required, Tearne said, because the Dragon is fully autonomous. But passengers will be able to control the spacecraft if required, she said in an email.

"Google has revealed plans to initially warn Chrome users about 'insecure' downloads and eventually block them outright," reports The Verge. The warnings will begin in April: "Today we're announcing that Chrome will gradually ensure that secure (HTTPS) pages only download secure files," Joe DeBlasio of the Chrome security team wrote in a blog post. "Insecurely-downloaded files are a risk to users' security and privacy. For instance, insecurely-downloaded programs can be swapped out for malware by attackers, and eavesdroppers can read users' insecurely-downloaded bank statements."

Beginning with Chrome 82, due for release in April, Chrome will warn users if they're about to download mixed content executables from a secure website. Then, when version 83 is released, those executable downloads will be blocked and the warning will be applied to archive files. PDFs and .doc files will get the warning in Chrome 84, with audio, images, text, and video files displaying it by version 85. Finally, all mixed content downloads — a non-secure file coming from a secure site — will be blocked as of the release of Chrome 86. Right now, Google is estimating an October release for that build of the popular web browsing.

Japan's first robot bartender has begun serving up drinks in a Tokyo pub in a test that could usher in a wave of automation in restaurants and shops struggling to hire staff in an aging society. From a report: The repurposed industrial robot serves drinks in is own corner of a Japanese pub operated by restaurant chain Yoronotaki. An attached tablet computer face smiles as it chats about the weather while preparing orders. The robot, made by the company QBIT Robotics, can pour a beer in 40 seconds and mix a cocktail in a minute. It uses four cameras to monitors customers to analyze their expressions with artificial intelligence (AI) software. "I like it because dealing with people can be a hassle. With this you can just come and get drunk," Satoshi Harada, a restaurant worker said after ordering a drink. "If they could make it a little quicker it would be even better." Finding workers, especially in Japan's service sector, is set to get even more difficult.

Phoronix's Michael Larabel is doing some performance testing on Walmart's $199 Motile-branded M141 laptop (which has an AMD Ryzen 3 3200U processor, Vega 3 graphics, 4GB of RAM, and a 14-inch 1080p display).

But first he compared the performance of its pre-installed Windows 10 OS against the forthcoming Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Linux distribution.

Some highlights: - Java text rendering performance did come out much faster on Ubuntu 20.04 with this Ryzen 3 3200U laptop...

- The GraphicsMagick imaging program tended to run much better on Linux, which we've seen on other systems in the past as well.

- Intel's Embree path-tracer was running faster on Ubuntu...

- Various video benchmarks were generally favoring Ubuntu for better performance though I wouldn't recommend much in the way of video encoding from such a low-end device...

- The GIMP image editing software was running much faster on Ubuntu 20.04 in its development state than GIMP 2.10 on Windows 10...

- Python 3 performance is still much faster on Linux than Windows.

- If planning to do any web/LAMP development from the budget laptop and testing PHP scripts locally, Ubuntu's PHP7 performance continues running much stronger than Windows 10. - Git also continues running much faster on Linux.
Their conclusion? "Out of 63 tests ran on both operating systems, Ubuntu 20.04 was the fastest... coming in front 60% of the time." (This sounds like 38 wins for Ubuntu versus 25 wins for Windows 10.)

"If taking the geometric mean of all 63 tests, the Motile $199 laptop with Ryzen 3 3200U was 15% faster on Ubuntu Linux over Windows 10."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: General Motors is resurrecting the Hummer, best known as a gas-guzzling, military-style SUV, as an all-electric "super truck" with massive horsepower, acceleration and torque. The Detroit automaker confirmed the plans Thursday and released three online teaser videos for the "GMC Hummer EV" pickup ahead of a 30-second Super Bowl ad for the vehicle featuring NBA star LeBron James. The spot is scheduled to air during the second quarter of Sunday's game.

The Hummer EV pickup, according to GM, will feature 1,000 horsepower; 0 to 60 mph acceleration of three seconds; and 11,500 pound feet of torque. It didn't announce a price. The Hummer EV pickup is expected to go into production in the fall of 2021 at a plant in Detroit, followed by sales starting toward the end of the year. The teaser videos detail the specifications and preview the front of the pickup, which features a new iteration of Hummer's well-known slotted grille with "HUMMER" backlit across the front of the truck.

"The UK has officially left the European Union after 47 years of membership," reports the BBC. The historic moment, which happened at 23:00 GMT, was marked by both celebrations and anti-Brexit protests. Candlelit vigils were held in Scotland, which voted to stay in the EU, while Brexiteers partied in London's Parliament Square... Brexit parties were held in pubs and social clubs across the UK as the country counted down to its official departure.

Hundreds gathered in Parliament Square to celebrate Brexit, singing patriotic songs and cheering speeches from leading Brexiteers, including Nigel Farage... In Northern Ireland, the campaign group Border Communities Against Brexit staged a series of protests in Armagh, near to the border with the Republic of Ireland.

At 2300 GMT, Scotland's First Minister Nicola Sturgeon tweeted a picture of the EU flag, adding: "Scotland will return to the heart of Europe as an independent country."

The U.K. flag was removed from European Union institutions in Brussels, the BBC notes. And they also quote U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson as saying "For all its strengths and for all its admirable qualities, the EU has evolved over 50 years in a direction that no longer suits this country."

"The most important thing to say tonight is that this is not an end but a beginning..."