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Comment why wait (Score 5, Interesting) 71

I'm curious why Meta and Google are waiting until the law comes into effect before blocking news.

Why not start blocking news immediately when this government first started discussing the bill?
If the consequences would be immediately apparent, maybe the Liberal government would have changed course before it was too late.

Oh well, at least we get to be an example of what not to do for other countries.

Comment agree to compromize (Score 3, Insightful) 230

I think employers and workers should reach a compromise:

They can force you to go to the office, but they must pay your full hourly wage for the duration of the commute, rounded up to the nearest hour.
And if they don't send a driver to collect you in the morning, they pay for your vehicle, insurance and fuel as well.

Comment Re:Golden Age? (Score 2) 86

Decades ago, we were presented with multi channel high definition digital audio. People went for mp3 players and earbuds instead.

The market has spoken People want convenience, not quality.

This is frustrating, since storage has grown to the point where we could just use FLAC for everything and have both.

Submission + - Life Cycle Emissions For EVs Are Already 60-68% Lower Than Gasoline, Study Finds (arstechnica.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Today in the US market, a medium-sized battery EV already has 60–68 percent lower lifetime carbon emissions than a comparable car with an internal combustion engine. And the gap is only going to increase as we use more renewable electricity. That finding comes from a white paper (PDF) published by Georg Bieker at the International Council on Clean Transportation. The comprehensive study compares the lifetime carbon emissions, both today and in 2030, of midsized vehicles in Europe, the US, China, and India, across a wide range of powertrain types, including gasoline, diesel, hybrid EVs (HEVs), plug-in hybrid EVs (PHEVs), battery EVs (BEVs), and fuel cell EVs (FCEVs).

The study takes into account the carbon emissions that result from the various fuels (fossil fuels, biofuels, electricity, hydrogen, and e-fuels), as well as the emissions that result from manufacturing and then recycling or disposing of vehicles and their various components. Bieker has also factored in real-world fuel or energy consumption—something that is especially important when it comes to PHEVs, according to the report. Finally, the study accounts for the fact that energy production should become less carbon-intensive over time, based on stated government objectives.

Submission + - SPAM: Report: Blizzard Once Slapped With 'Misogyny Tax'

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A cybersecurity company whose security researcher had once been harassed by Blizzard employees at a hacking conference charged the game developer a 50 percent “misogyny tax” when it sought a quote for security services, according to a new report from Waypoint. The researcher, Emily Mitchell, told Waypoint that she approached the Blizzard booth during the annual Black Hat USA cybersecurity conference in 2015 to see if the major video game company had any open positions. Her shirt, which referenced [to] a security process known as “penetration testing,” prompted two unnamed Blizzard employees to ask her questions laced with misogyny and sexual double entendre. “One of them asked me when was the last time I was personally penetrated, if I liked being penetrated, and how often I got penetrated,” Mitchell said. “I was furious and felt humiliated, so I took the free swag and left.”

Two years later, Blizzard approached cybersecurity firm Sagitta HPC (now known as Terahash) to request a quote on one of Sagitta HPC’s password-cracking boxes. Mitchell, who was Sagitta HPC’s chief operating officer at the time, saw Blizzard’s request and immediately remembered what occured at Black Hat USA 2015. After learning of the incident from Mitchell, Sagitta HPC founder and chief executive officer Jeremi M. Gosney responded to Blizzard’s inquiry with a lengthy message decrying her treatment at the hands of Blizzard’s employees. “[R]ather than dismiss you and tell you that we will not do business with you, we’d like to give Blizzard the opportunity to redeem themselves,” Gosney wrote. (He eventually shared the email on Twitter with Blizzard’s name redacted.) “We are committed to combating inequality, and I am calling on Blizzard to do the same. As you may or may not know, today is International Women’s Day. And in honor of this day, we are attaching a few conditions if Blizzard wishes to do business with us.”

These conditions included a 50 percent “misogyny tax” on any business Sagitta HPC did with Blizzard (to be used as a donation to three different organizations devoted to support girls and women in the tech industry), Blizzard becoming a Gold-level sponsor of the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing conference, and a formal letter of apology from Blizzard executives to Mitchell in which they’d further dedicate themselves to supporting equality for women and sexual harassment training. [...] In 2017, the organizers of Black Hat USA, the Las Vegas hacking conference at which Mitchell was originally accosted, promised her that they would not allow Blizzard back as a sponsor for future events. As far as Kotaku can tell from historical information, neither Blizzard nor Activision have had a presence at the cybersecurity event since the year Blizzard staff harassed Mitchell.
Link to Original Source

Submission + - SPAM: New Exotic Matter Particle, a Tetraquark, Discovered

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Today, the LHCb experiment at CERN is presenting a new discovery at the European Physical Society Conference on High Energy Physics (EPS-HEP). The new particle discovered by LHCb, labeled as Tcc+, is a tetraquark—an exotic hadron containing two quarks and two antiquarks. It is the longest-lived exotic matter particle ever discovered, and the first to contain two heavy quarks and two light antiquarks. Quarks are the fundamental building blocks from which matter is constructed. They combine to form hadrons, namely baryons, such as the proton and the neutron, which consist of three quarks, and mesons, which are formed as quark-antiquark pairs. In recent years a number of so-called exotic hadrons—particles with four or five quarks, instead of the conventional two or three—have been found. Today's discovery is of a particularly unique exotic hadron, an exotic exotic hadron if you like.

The new particle contains two charm quarks and an up and a down antiquark. Several tetraquarks have been discovered in recent years (including one with two charm quarks and two charm antiquarks), but this is the first one that contains two charm quarks, without charm antiquarks to balance them. Physicists call this "open charm" (in this case, "double open charm"). Particles containing a charm quark and a charm antiquark have "hidden charm"—the charm quantum number for the whole particle adds up to zero, just like a positive and a negative electrical charge would do. Here the charm quantum number adds up to two, so it has twice the charm! The quark content of Tcc+, has other interesting features besides being open charm. It is the first particle to be found that belongs to a class of tetraquarks with two heavy quarks and two light antiquarks. Such particles decay by transforming into a pair of mesons, each formed by one of the heavy quarks and one of the light antiquarks. According to some theoretical predictions, the mass of tetraquarks of this type should be very close to the sum of masses of the two mesons. Such proximity in mass makes the decay "difficult," resulting in a longer lifetime of the particle, and indeed Tcc+, is the longest-lived exotic hadron found to date.
Link to Original Source

Comment what can people do. (Score 1) 311

I was one of those people doing things like buying CFLs at $30 each back in the 90's to try to reduce my consumption.
But that's just a drop in the bucket compared to everything else going on on the plant. It's immensely frustrating to have spent 30 years trying to help the planet, only to see it's decline accelerating.
Fortunately, I don't have children, so I don't have to care about leaving a decent world for the next generations.
Let's hope AI and machines replace us before this planet becomes too hostile for human life, so something intelligent can remain.

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