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What was highest label on your first car speedometer?

  • 80 mph
  • 88 mph
  • 100 mph
  • 120 mph
  • 150 mph
  • it was in kph like civilized countries use you insensitive clod
  • Other (please specify in comments)

[ Results | Polls ]
Comments:45 | Votes:100

posted by martyb on Thursday July 29 2021, @10:28PM   Printer-friendly
from the too-many-small-satellites dept.

The Porsche dynasty is taking on Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk in space

Porsche SE, the family holding company that controls Volkswagen Group, is the latest big investor to bet on space's crucial role in developing future technologies.

The company, controlled by the related Porsche and Piëch families that turned Volkswagen into a global powerhouse, on Wednesday unveiled an investment into Germany's Isar Aerospace, a space startup attempting to rival Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin and Elon Musk's SpaceX with rocket production and satellite launch services.

While Blue Origin and SpaceX are backed by billionaires and already racing ahead with manned space missions, Isar Aerospace believes it can compete in the growing market for launching small satellites into Earth's orbit. It's planning its first test flight for next year.

[....] "The funding will allow Isar Aerospace to further invest in its launch, testing, and manufacturing infrastructure for its largely automated rocket production and commercial operations," Isar Aerospace said in a statement on Wednesday.

[....] Commercial demand for the launch of small satellites is expected to grow significantly in the coming years, as companies in traditional and emerging industries come to rely more heavily on satellite technology to run software applications.

[....] Although a relatively small deal for Porsche SE, it's a notable move for a business that's invested overwhelmingly in automotive businesses and is the latest example of the space race taking hold between private companies and their billionaire backers.

Will space become the next gold rush?


Original Submission

posted by martyb on Thursday July 29 2021, @07:38PM   Printer-friendly

MLM Nauka makes triumphant docking to ISS - NASASpaceFlight.com:

Russia’s Multipurpose Laboratory Module (MLM) Nauka, meaning “science,” has defied the odds to successfully dock to the ISS after a long and arduous journey dating back over 20 years and a problematic propulsion system after launch which had threatened the success of the mission.

The docking was not without issue, with Russian cosmonauts noting that Nauka wasn’t on the correct course less than an hour before docking; however, a retro burn quickly corrected the issue. After also troubleshooting an issue with the TORU manual docking system, which was used for the final seconds of the module’s approach, Nauka successfully docked to the Zvezda service module’s nadir port at 09:29 EDT / 13:29 UTC, marking the first major expansion to the Russian segment for over 20 years.

[...] Nauka had been chasing down the International Space Station (ISS) for the last eight days after being launched atop a Proton-M booster from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on 21 July.

Immediately after a successful orbit insertion of 190 x 350.1 km, issues with the module’s communications and propulsion systems were noted. Initial troubleshooting was complicated by limited communications during brief periods when the module came within range of Russian ground stations.

The communications issues were resolved in initial orbits; however, the propulsion system issue was more troublesome and believed to be related to a part of the module’s fuel supply being rendered unusable due to gases becoming mixed with the fuel for the main engine.

Reports indicated that pressure in the main engine’s propulsion tanks had risen to unacceptable levels due to an earlier-than-planned equalization of pressure between the tanks. Thus, use of the smaller engines would be needed to relieve tank pressure to a point where the main engine could be used.

[...] That, coupled with continuous limited communications, resulted in several of the initially-planned orbit raising burns being cancelled and then later conducted using the module’s secondary engines.

These replanned first burns were enough to prevent Nauka from reentering the atmosphere within a few days, as was the fear given the low perigee insertion of 190 km. With those first burns, Russian controllers were able to stabilize Nauka, get the main engine working, and keep the module on track for a 29 July arrival at the Station as originally planned.

Also at: phys.org, www.nytimes.com, and AP News.


Original Submission

posted by on Thursday July 29 2021, @04:57PM   Printer-friendly
from the watch-upstart-the-robot-post-about-robots dept.

Watch Cassie the bipedal robot run a 5K:

Cassie, a bipedal robot that's all legs, has successfully run five kilometers on a single charge, all without having a tether. The machine serves as the basis for Agility Robotics' delivery robot Digit, as TechCrunch notes, though you may also remember it for "blindly" navigating a set of stairs. Oregon State University engineers were able to train Cassie in a simulator to enable it to go up and down a flight of stairs without the use of cameras or LIDAR. Now, engineers from the same team were able to train Cassie to run using a deep reinforcement learning algorithm.

According to the team, Cassie teaching itself using the technique gave it the capability to stay upright without a tether by shifting its balance while running. The robot had to learn to make infinite subtle adjustments to be able to accomplish the feat.

YouTube video (1m48s).


Original Submission

posted by martyb on Thursday July 29 2021, @02:16PM   Printer-friendly
from the some-plants-are-much-bigger-(and-dirtier)-than-others dept.

5% of Earth's Power Plants Create 73% of the Energy Sector's Emissions:

A group of researchers at the University of Colorado at Boulder analyzed 2018 data from 29,000 fossil fuel power plants in 221 countries and located the top emitters in the world.

They mapped plants by their carbon dioxide emissions and identified the top 10 "worst-of-the-worst" power plants, which are clustered around Europe, East Asia, and India.

The world's "super-emitters" have a few qualities in common: They are all coal-powered, they are primarily located in the global north and they all operate inefficiently for the amount of energy they generate. Focusing policy responses on mitigating the handful of the worst offenders would go a long way to curbing the climate crisis, the authors find.

[...] Emissions from electricity generation would fall by 17 to 49 percent if these plants were updated for efficiency, offset by carbon capture, or shut off entirely.

Switching from coal and oil to natural gas would be a start, the authors say. Grant notes that he and his fellow researchers "also embrace renewables," but are also wary that "some countries are not yet ready or willing to adopt that strategy." Though widely cited by the industry as a "bridge fuel," many environmentalists are now ditching the notion that natural gas is a clean alternative to other fossil fuels. Many believe shutting off fossil fuel power plants and switching to renewables is the only way to curb emissions enough to meet the International Panel on Climate Change's 1.5-degree warming restriction recommendation to limit the worst effects of climate change.

Journal Reference:
Don Grant, David Zelinka, and Stefania Mitova. Reducing CO2 emissions by targeting the world's hyper-polluting power plants - IOPscience, Environmental Research Letters (DOI: 10.1088/1748-9326/ac13f1)


Original Submission

posted by martyb on Thursday July 29 2021, @11:27AM   Printer-friendly
from the What-about-bittorrent? dept.

There are many different alternative video platforms out there but the quality varies greatly. Reclaim the Net writes about the TubeShift browser extension that helps you rescue videos censored by YouTube. From the article:

TubeShift makes it easy to find censored YouTube videos on Odysee, Rumble, BitChute and more. It also simplifies the process of staying up to date with creators on alternative platforms. When YouTube censors videos, it also scrubs the video title and the name of the channel that uploaded the video from the page. All that remains is white space and a notice stating: "This video has been removed for violating YouTube's terms of service." This means that if all you have is a link to a YouTube video that was censored before you had a chance to watch it, you can't search for the video title or the creator on alternative platforms.

[...] The open-source TubeShift browser extension fixes this problem by finding alternative versions of censored YouTube videos and making links to these alternative videos available to you with a single click. In addition to helping you find censored videos, TubeShift also finds alternative versions of non-censored videos across a variety of platforms. So if you're watching a video on YouTube, TubeShift will let you know if the video's also available on BitChute, Odysee, and the other platforms it supports.

[...] While TubeShift is great for finding alternative versions of YouTube videos, you can also use it to find alternatives while browsing the other supported sites. For example, if you're on Odysee and want to see if the creator also uploads to Rumble, TubeShift will let you know with a single click. Currently, TubeShift supports five video-sharing platforms – BitChute, Odysee, Rumble, YouTube, and Dailymotion. It also plans to add support for the free speech video sharing platform Gab TV after it makes a planned change to its website.


Original Submission

posted by martyb on Thursday July 29 2021, @08:42AM   Printer-friendly
from the Brains!-Do-not-eat! dept.

Tale can be found at Science Magazine.

PARIS—Five public research institutions in France have imposed a 3-month moratorium on the study of prions—a class of misfolding, infectious proteins that cause fatal brain diseases—after a retired lab worker who handled prions in the past was diagnosed with Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD), the most common prion disease in humans. An investigation is underway to find out whether the patient, who worked at a lab run by the National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and Environment (INRAE), contracted the disease on the job.

If so, it would be the second such case in France in the past few years. In June 2019, an INRAE lab worker named Émilie Jaumain died at age 33, 10 years after pricking her thumb during an experiment with prion-infected mice. Her family is now suing INRAE for manslaughter and endangering life; her illness had already led to tightened safety measures at French prion labs.

The aim of the moratorium, which affects nine labs, is to "study the possibility of a link with the [new patient's] former professional activity and if necessary to adapt the preventative measures in force in research laboratories," according to a joint press release issued by the five institutions yesterday.

Prion and Creutzfeldt–Jakob_disease entries on Wikipedia.


Original Submission

posted by martyb on Thursday July 29 2021, @05:51AM   Printer-friendly
from the Google-Stadia-Lobbying-Group dept.

California and Five Other States Ban... Gaming Computers?

"Six states, led by California's fulltime climate alarmists, this week enacted a ban on the sales of high-end gaming computers.

Niche Gamer reports that Dell is already following the 2017 law that just went into effect. According to the gamer-focused site, Dell has "pulled the sale of seven of its eight Alienware gaming desktops" from California, Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Vermont, and Washington.

Trying to order one of the banned machines will alert buyers, "This product cannot be shipped to the states of California, Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Vermont or Washington due to power consumption regulations adopted by those states. Any orders placed that are bound for those states will be canceled."

The offending component would seem to be the power-hungry NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 graphics card, but it's no problem to order the card separately and install it yourself. I tried ordering one from Amazon without any hassle.

Gamers, you might have guessed, aren't happy."

Also at PC Gamer and The Register.


Original Submission

posted by martyb on Thursday July 29 2021, @03:08AM   Printer-friendly

Lucasfilm hires deepfake YouTuber who fixed Luke Skywalker in The Mandalorian:

The season 2 finale of The Mandalorian saw the titular lone bounty hunter complete his mission by delivering Grogu (formerly known as Baby Yoda) to the open arms of a Jedi. But not just any Jedi. A young Luke Skywalker showed up to the excitement, then disappointment of fans who raised eyebrows at his VFX-heavy look.

Enter the YouTuber known as Shamook, whose The Mandalorian deepfake, published in December, has earned nearly 2 million views for improving the VFX used to de-age Mark Hamill. It was so good Shamook then earned a new gig with Lucasfilm and its visual effects division Industrial Light and Magic.

[...] "[Industrial Light and Magic is] always on the lookout for talented artists and have in fact hired the artist that goes by the online persona 'Shamook,'" a Lucasfilm representative said in a statement.


Original Submission

posted by chromas on Thursday July 29 2021, @01:18AM   Printer-friendly

Forget Smart Cities, ‘Stupid’ Infrastructure Is The Solution For Future Transportation:

In 1997, David Isenberg published the important essay, “The Rise of the Stupid Network,” in which he details how the internet took over the world by being as simple as possible. Name derives from the 1980s marketing name the telephone companies had for their new systems, “Intelligent Network” or “IN.” The IN tried to put the intelligence for new phone functionality in the network, in the infrastructure. The phone company designed, built and managed innovation in telecoms. You connected with your standard plain old phone. (Younger readers may not know it, but everybody back then had a basic phone on their desks with wires coming out of it which you used to talk to other people.)

When the smarts were in the infrastructure, we relied on the infrastructure for the innovation. And why not, the Bell Labs scientists were among the best in the world?

The internet flipped that upside-down. The core design of the network is dead-simple. In fact, it’s essentially the same design today as 40 years ago! Even so, we’ve seen the greatest period of innovation in human history on top of that stupid infrastructure, and it’s not a coincidence. On the internet, all the smarts are in the edge devices. Your phone. Your laptop. The web server that sent you this web page. Everything is there, even the negotiation of network link quality and speed which you might imagine should be in the infrastructure, which is much closer to those factors. The internet itself just delivers postcards from A to B, really fast. Its only job is to figure how to move those postcards.

When the smarts moved to the edges, they got a lot smarter. Anybody could innovate. Nobody needed the phone company’s permission, the way it used to be. A few folks in Europe wrote a program called Skype which took over most the world’s long distance business for a while. They didn’t ask the network companies to get involved or even give permission to eat their lunch, and they certainly would not have received it.

As noted above, the problem is that today, you can’t know the future. People in the computer industry have gotten used to that idea, where the capabilities of the computers and networks have been doubling in performance every 1.5 years for over 5 decades. You can’t plan for 2030 in 2021 so you don’t. Instead, you keep what you must build simple and put as much as possible into software. That’s because you can change all your software in 2030 when you learn the reality of the future, and it’s free to deploy it, even though not to write it.

The internet’s design of stupid network and smart devices comes to transportation through both the robocar and the mobile phone in the car. Stupid roads and smart cars, not smart roads.


Original Submission

posted by martyb on Wednesday July 28 2021, @10:33PM   Printer-friendly
from the Business dept.

Activison Blizzard Employees Walk Out In Protest Over Sexism, Harassment:

Activision Blizzard employees will stop work on Wednesday in protest of an "abhorrent and insulting" response from company leadership to a lawsuit that exposed serious allegations of sexism and harassment at the game publisher.

The lawsuit, filed July 22 by the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing (DFEH), described a company culture that allowed for gender-based discrimination and "constant sexual harassment." A two-year investigation into the company alleged that women were held back from promotions for various reasons, including the possibility that they may eventually take maternity leave, and that female employees were subject to "derogatory comments about rape" and other demeaning behaviors.

An official response from Activision Blizzard said the lawsuit "includes distorted, and in many cases false, descriptions of Blizzard's past."

More than 2,600 current and former Activision Blizzard employees have since signed an open letter in support of the DFEH lawsuit. (Sources told Polygon that includes at least 1,600 current employees and 400 former employees, by the last available count.) In it, the employees said they don't trust leadership to "hold abusers accountable for their actions," and that the official statements "damaged our ongoing quest for equality inside and outside of our industry." Now, employees will walk out of work — both virtually and at the Blizzard campus in Irvine, California — to protest executive response.

"We believe that that our values as employees are not being accurately reflected in the words and actions of our leadership," protest organizers said in a statement sent to Polygon. Current employees at Activision Blizzard are demanding that executives "improve conditions for employees at the company, especially women, and in particular women of color and transgender women, nonbinary people, and other marginalized groups."

The group of Activision Blizzard employees is demanding that leadership end its mandatory arbitration clauses in contracts, create new, inclusive hiring and promotion processes, publish a report regarding salary breakdowns to ensure marginalized groups are fairly compensated, and to hire a third-party to audit "[Activision Blizzard King]'s reporting structure, HR department, and executive staff."

Also at CNN and The Washington Post.


Original Submission

posted by chromas on Wednesday July 28 2021, @07:42PM   Printer-friendly
from the oh-good dept.

An AI-Based Lie Detector for Call Center Conversations:

Researchers in Germany have used machine learning to create an audio analysis system intended primarily to act as an AI-based lie detector for customers in audio communications with call center and support staff.

The system uses a specially-created dataset of audio recordings by 40 students and teachers during debates on contentious subjects, including the morality of the death penalty and tuition fees. The model was trained on an architecture that uses Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), and achieved a reported accuracy rate of 98%.

Though the stated intent of the work cites customer communications, the researchers concede that it effectively operates as a general purpose lie-detector:

[...] In the absence of a suitable publicly available dataset in the German language, the researchers – from Neu-Ulm University of Applied Sciences (HNU) – created their own source material. Fliers were posted at the university and at local schools, with 40 volunteers selected with a minimum age of 16. Volunteers were paid with a 10 euro Amazon voucher.

The sessions were conducted on a debate club model designed to polarize opinion and arouse strong responses around incendiary topics, effectively modeling the stress that can occur in problematic customer conversations on the phone.

Journal Reference:
Fabian Thaler, Stefan Faußer, Heiko Gewald. Put your money where your mouth is: Using AI voice analysis to detect whether spoken arguments reflect the speaker's true convictions, (DOI: https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.11175)[pdf]


Original Submission

posted by chromas on Wednesday July 28 2021, @04:50PM   Printer-friendly

Hubble Finds First Evidence of Water Vapor at Jupiter’s Moon Ganymede:

For the first time, astronomers have uncovered evidence of water vapor in the atmosphere of Jupiter's moon Ganymede.

[...] Scientists used new and archival datasets from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope to make the discovery, published in the journal Nature Astronomy.

Previous research has offered circumstantial evidence that Ganymede, the largest moon in the solar system, contains more water than all of Earth's oceans. However, temperatures there are so cold that water on the surface is frozen solid. Ganymede's ocean would reside roughly 100 miles below the crust; therefore, the water vapor would not represent the evaporation of this ocean.

Astronomers re-examined Hubble observations from the last two decades to find this evidence of water vapor.

Journal Reference:
Lorenz Roth, Nickolay Ivchenko, G. Randall Gladstone, et al. A sublimated water atmosphere on Ganymede detected from Hubble Space Telescope observations, Nature Astronomy (DOI: 10.1038/s41550-021-01426-9)


Original Submission

posted by martyb on Wednesday July 28 2021, @02:05PM   Printer-friendly
from the it-just-works dept.

Apple patches zero-day vulnerability in iOS, iPadOS, macOS under active attack:

Apple on Monday patched a zero-day vulnerability in its iOS, iPadOS, and macOS operating systems, only a week after issuing a set of OS updates addressing about three dozen other flaws.

The bug, CVE-2021-30807, was found in the iGiant's IOMobileFrameBuffer code, a kernel extension for managing the screen frame buffer that could be abused to run malicious code on the affected device.

CVE-2021-30807, credited to an anonymous researcher, has been addressed by undisclosed but purportedly improved memory handling code.

"An application may be able to execute arbitrary code with kernel privileges," the iDevice maker said in one of its duplicative advisories. "Apple is aware of a report that this issue may have been actively exploited."

Apple did not, however, say who might be involved in the exploitation of this bug. Nor did the company respond to a query about whether the bug has been exploited by NSO Group's Pegasus surveillance software.

[...] Shortly after Apple's advisory was published, PoC exploit code was posted via Twitter


Original Submission

posted by martyb on Wednesday July 28 2021, @11:16AM   Printer-friendly
from the Not-being-so-evil? dept.

America's largest retailer will cover 100% of college tuition for its workers:

New York (CNN Business) Walmart will pay for full college tuition and book costs at some schools for its US workers, the latest effort by the largest private employer in the country to sweeten its benefits as it seeks to attract and retain talent in a tight job market.

The program includes 10 academic partners ranging from the University of Arizona to Southern New Hampshire University. Participants must remain part-time or full-time employees at Walmart to be eligible.

The company said Tuesday that it will drop a previous $1 a day fee paid by Walmart and Sam's Club workers who want to earn a degree and also begin covering the costs of their books. Around 28,000 workers participate in the program, which Walmart began in 2018. Walmart has around 1.5 million workers.

Well, blow me down, knock me over with a feather.

"We feel that eliminating the dollar a day investment removes the financial barriers to enrollment, and it will increase access," Lorraine Stomski, senior vice president of learning and leadership at Walmart (WMT), said on a call with reporters Tuesday.

Walmart also said it was adding four new academic partners, bringing the total to 10, and offering more degree and certificate options in areas like business administration, supply chain and cybersecurity.

Walmart has incentive to expand the program. Employees who have participated in the program are twice as likely to get promoted and are retained at a "significantly higher rate" than other workers, Stomski said.


Original Submission

posted by martyb on Wednesday July 28 2021, @08:31AM   Printer-friendly
from the who-wants-to-see-research-funding-request dept.

Study Shows Why Beer Mats Do Not Fly In A Straight Line — University Of Bonn:

Anyone who has ever failed to throw a [circular] beer mat into a hat should take note: physicists at the University of Bonn have discovered why this task is so difficult. However, their study also suggests how to significantly increase accuracy and range.

[...] Physicists at the Helmholtz Institute of Radiation and Nuclear Physics and the Argelander Institute for Astronomy at the University of Bonn have now investigated this question. According to them, the behavior of the beer mat is inevitable, at least when employing the usual throwing technique: it unavoidably begins to drift off after 0.45 seconds at most. Playing cards go awry after just 0.24 seconds, CDs after 0.8 seconds.

The reason for this is the interaction between gravity, lift, and the conservation of angular momentum: the mat tips backwards shortly after being thrown due to gravity. This gives it an angle of attack, similar to a landing aircraft. This angle creates lift in the airflow. “However, the lifting force is not applied in the center of the mat, but rather in the front third,” explains PhD student Johann Ostmeyer, who came up with the idea for the study.

This would normally soon make the round cardboard flip over. And it actually does – but only if it is thrown in a rather unconventional manner. “A beer mat is usually rotated when thrown, similar to a frisbee,” says Ostmeyer’s colleague Christoph Schürmann from the Argelander Institute for Astronomy at the University of Bonn. “This turns it into a kind of spinning top.” This rotation stabilizes the flight and prevents flipping over. Instead, the lifting force causes the mat to drift off to the side – to the right, if it is rotated counterclockwise; otherwise to the left.

At the same time, it straightens up – so it is no longer parallel with the ground but instead stands upright in the air like a rotating wheel. In this position, the mat has a backspin – if it were to actually stand up like a wheel on the ground, it would thus travel back to its starting point. While in flight, it quickly loses height and falls to the ground. This process is characteristic of all flat, round objects.

The researchers actually constructed an automated beer-mat throwing machine and recorded flights with a high-speed camera. Now that is the scientific method at work!

Video (3m9s in German) on YouTube.

Journal Reference:
Johann Ostmeyer, Christoph Schürmann, Carsten Urbach. Beer mats… - The European Physical Journal Plus [open], The European Physical Journal Plus (DOI: 10.1140/epjp/s13360-021-01732-1)


Original Submission