SoylentNews

upstart writes:

Column: Exxon Mobil is suing its shareholders to silence them about global warming:

You wouldn't think that Exxon Mobil has to worry much about being harried by a couple of shareholder groups owning a few thousand dollars worth of shares between them — not with its $529-billion market value and its stature as the world's biggest oil company.

But then you might not have factored in the company's stature as the world's biggest corporate bully.

In February, Exxon Mobil sued the U.S. investment firm Arjuna Capital and Netherlands-based green shareholder firm Follow This to keep a shareholder resolution they sponsored from appearing on the agenda of its May 29 annual meeting. The resolution urged Exxon Mobil to work harder to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions of its products.

The company's legal threat worked: Days after the lawsuit was filed, the shareholder groups, weighing their relative strength against an oil behemoth, withdrew the proposal and pledged not to refile it in the future.

Yet even though the proposal no longer exists, the company is still pursuing the lawsuit, running up its own and its adversaries' legal bills. Its goal isn't hard to fathom.

"What purpose does this have other than sending a chill down the spines of other investors to keep them from speaking up and filing resolutions?" asks Illinois State Treasurer Michael W. Frerichs, who oversees public investment portfolios, including the state's retirement and college savings funds, worth more than $35 billion.

In response to the lawsuit, Frerichs has urged Exxon Mobil shareholders to vote against the reelection to the board of Chairman and Chief Executive Darren W. Woods and lead independent director Joseph L. Hooley at the annual meeting.

He's not alone. The $496-billion California Public Employees' Retirement System, or CalPERS, the nation's largest public pension fund, is considering a vote against Woods, according to the fund's chief operating investment officer, Michael Cohen.

"Exxon has gone well beyond any other company that we're aware of in terms of suing shareholders for trying to bring forward a proposal," Cohen told the Financial Times. "There doesn't seem to be anything other than an agenda of sending a message of shutting down shareholders' ability to speak their mind."

California Treasurer Fiona Ma, a CalPERS board member, backs a vote against Woods. "As the largest public pension fund in the country, we have a responsibility to lead on issues that threaten to undermine shareowners," she says.

The proxy advisory firm Glass Lewis & Co., which helps institutional investors decide how to vote on shareholder proposals and board elections, has counseled a vote against Hooley, citing Exxon Mobil's "unusual and aggressive tactics" in fighting activist investors.

Exxon Mobil's action against Arjuna and Follow This opens a new chapter in the long battle between corporate managements and shareholder gadflies.

upstart writes:

Possible evidence of glueballs found during Beijing Spectrometer III experiments:

A large international team of physicists working on the BES III collaboration has announced possible physical evidence of glueballs. In their study, published in the journal Physical Review Letters, the group analyzed decaying particles in a particle collider and uncovered what they believe to be evidence of glueballs.

Glueballs are theoretical interactions that can occur between gluons, which are carriers of the strong nuclear force. Up until this latest research, it was not known if such theories were correct.

Gluons are subatomic particles that are believed to hold quarks together. Quarks are also subatomic particles; they form the nuclei of protons. Mesons are also made from quarks, or more specifically, one quark and one antiquark. Because gluons carry the strong nuclear force, they are able to interact with quarks and other gluons. Due to this latter characteristic, researchers have suggested that gluons could form a kind of particle without involving quarks. The result would be a glueball.

For this new study, the research team was looking for evidence of glueballs. To do so, they forced mesons to collide at high speeds at the Beijing Electron-Positron Collider, located at the Institute of High Energy Physics in Beijing, China. They then studied the resulting debris field.

More specifically, they looked for and measured rare combinations of proton/antiprotons in the debris field—prior work using the same collider had found evidence of these.

The researchers were able to analyze 10 billion samples generated over the past decade, and they found evidence of particles with an average mass of 2,395 MeV/c2, which matches what theory has suggested for glueballs.

For now, they have named the particle X(2370) based on the mass of the original particles observed.

The research team acknowledges that their findings are not absolute proof of the existence of glueballs—other interactions, they note, could have led to similar findings. Thus, more work is required before a consensus can be reached.

More information: M. Ablikim et al, Determination of Spin-Parity Quantum Numbers of X(2370) as 0−+ from J/ψ→γKS0KS0η′, Physical Review Letters (2024). DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.132.181901

Original Submission

upstart writes:

'California Stop' Is Costing Californians Millions In Tickets:

The "California Stop," also known as the "California Roll," is the act of not coming to a full and complete stop at a stop sign. Whatever it's called where you live, it's illegal and can get you a $200+ ticket and can land you in hot water with your driving record when it's issued by an agency with authority. One California agency however, with no type of traffic authority has been issuing thousands of rolling stop tickets by secretly recording drivers.

KTLA reports that California's Mountains Recreation and Conservation Authority issues around 17,000 rolling stop tickets each year, bringing in over $1.1 million in revenue annually. What exactly is the Mountains Recreation and Conservation Authority? According to the agencies site, it's described as "a local public agency dedicated to the acquisition, preservation and protection of open space, wildlife habitat, and urban, mountain and river parkland that is easily accessible to the public."

[...] The problem with these tickets — aside from being issued by a state park agency with no real authority to issue them — is that they're technically not citations. It seems their sole purpose is to bring in revenue for the MRCA as one Prius driver who was ticketed discovered. "They're engaged in a deceptive practice of pretending to enforce the motor vehicle code when they don't have the authority to do that, and they're tricking people into paying these tickets," they told KTLA.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Evidence is mounting that tech companies' policies demanding staff return to the office are only serving to drive out the talent that became accustomed to remote work.

According to a Gartner-led survey of 3,500 employees in the tech industry undertaken in November 2023, 19 percent of non-executives said they'd quit over a return-to-office mandate, and an even larger proportion in management positions expressed similar sentiments.

"While 58 percent of executives with a mandate to return to the office said their organization provided a convincing reason for the decision, many senior leaders are unwilling to come back into the office," said Caroline Ogawa, director of Gartner's HR practice.

In another Gartner poll run in September of 170 HR heads, some 63 percent voiced higher expectations of staff coming back to the traditional workplace; 34 percent said a mandated return was already in place, and 13 percent warned that “consequences” of not complying had “intensified”.

Ogawa added: “An April 2024 Gartner survey of 64 HR leaders revealed 64 percent say senior leaders are concerned onsite requirements will increase attrition,” she added.

Canalys predicted more than 18 months ago that tech businesses need to re-consider the metrics they use to evaluate how productive an employee is: because being tethered to a desk is not giving an accurate picture. Proximity bias, the analysis said, would have implications for staff retention.

"dalek" writes:

A recent article on SN discussed Comcast bundling streaming services with its cable offering, and the reason for this is the precedent set during the dispute between Charter and Disney last year.

Minutes before the Florida-Utah college football game on August 31, Disney pulled their channels from Charter Spectrum's lineup over a carriage fee dispute. Disney's timing was intentional in blacking out their channels right before the start of football season, expecting fans would be angry that networks like ESPN were unavailable, and would pressure Charter into agreeing to higher fees. Although carriage fee disputes are quite common, this one seemed different, especially when Charter CEO Christopher Winfrey promptly scheduled a conference call with investors and permanently discontinue carrying Disney-owned networks.

Winfrey said that the current business model of pay TV is "broken", insisting that any resolution to the blackout address what Charter saw as more fundamental issues. ESPN receives the highest subscriber fees of any channel by a wide margin, and hoping to address the rising costs of cable, Charter indicated it would begin offering a cheaper option for TV without sports channels. Charter also objected that streaming platforms are not yet profitable, saying that higher subscriber fees were subsidizing the cost of developing streaming services, but those streaming services contained premium programming that wasn't available with a cable subscription. In other words, Charter said it was unfair for cable subscribers to pay the costs for Hulu and Disney+ without getting access to the programming on those services.

Subscriber fees for networks like ESPN are particularly high because of multi-billion dollar contracts they've entered into with sports leagues with the expectation that revenue from subscriber fees would continue to increase. Although it doesn't directly involve Disney, the bankruptcy of Diamond Sports Group and its impact on sports like baseball show the failures of this business model. In 2015, the St. Louis Cardinals signed a 22-year contract worth over a billion dollars for Fox Sports Midwest to broadcast most of their games. When many Fox properties were purchased by Disney, their regional sports networks were auctioned off to Sinclair to satisfy antitrust regulators. Contracts like the $1 billion agreement with the Cardinals were negotiated on the basis that these networks would bring in enough subscriber fee and advertising revenue to remain profitable.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

I don't remember when I first started using a floppy disk in the mid-70s. It was either installing firmware on IBM S/370 mainframes or on a dedicated library workstation to create Library of Congress catalog records. Oh, the exciting life I've led! In either case, it would have been a single-sided, 8-inch floppy disk, which held an amazing 79.7 KiloBytes (KB) of data.

[...] As personal computers gained popularity in the 1970s, the floppy disk moved from my world of mainframes and workstations to PCs. There, it found its place as an affordable and accessible storage solution. 

Then, in 1976, a guy named Steve Wozniak wanted to add a floppy drive to his next computer. His buddy, Steve Jobs, got a 5.25-inch floppy disk from Shugart's new company, Shugart Associates, in 1976, and after a lot of hacking, Woz got the first floppy drive to run on what would become the Apple II. 

[...] It wasn't just major companies, either. Floppy disks enabled anyone to create and sell programs, which sparked the freeware and shareware movements. They also enabled people to share data easily for the first time. Long before we were using modems and Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) to share programs, pictures, and data, we would share them by "sneakerware." That is, literally walking the information from one computer to another by hand carrying disks. 

[...] By the early 2000s, floppy disks had become increasingly rare, used primarily with legacy hardware and industrial equipment. Sony manufactured the last new floppy disk in 2011. 

Despite its obsolescence, the floppy disk's legacy endures. Its iconic design has become a symbol of data storage, and the floppy disk icon still appears on many computer desktops as the file-saving symbol.

owl writes:

https://www.righto.com/2013/02/looking-at-silicon-to-understanding.html

The 8085 microprocessor has two undocumented status flags: V and K. These flags can be reverse-engineered by looking at the silicon of the chip, and their function turns out to be different from previous explanations. In addition, the implementation of these flags shows that they were deliberately implemented, which raises the question of why there [sic] were not documented or supported by Intel. Finally, examining how these flag circuits were implemented in silicon provides an interesting look at how microprocessors are physically implemented.

Like most microprocessors, the 8085 has a flag register that holds status information on the results of an operation. The flag register is 8 bits: bit 0 holds the carry flag, bit 2 holds the parity, bit 3 is always 0, bit 4 holds the half-carry, bit 6 holds the zero status, and bit 7 holds the sign. But what about the missing bits: 1 and 5?

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Payments helped AT&T obtain key legislative wins in Illinois, prosecutors say:

The US government has provided more detail on how a former AT&T executive allegedly bribed a powerful state lawmaker's ally in order to obtain legislation favorable to AT&T's business.

Former AT&T Illinois President Paul La Schiazza is set to go on trial in September 2024 after being indicted on charges of conspiracy to unlawfully influence then-Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan. AT&T itself agreed to pay a $23 million fine in October 2022 in connection with the alleged illegal influence campaign and said it was "committed to ensuring that this never happens again."

US government prosecutors offered a preview of their case against La Schiazza in a filing on Friday in US District Court for the Northern District of Illinois. A contract lobbyist hired by AT&T "is expected to testify that AT&T successfully passed two major pieces of legislation after the company started making payments to Individual FR-1."

The Madigan ally referred to in the court document as "Individual FR-1" is former state Rep. Edward Acevedo, a Chicago Tribune article notes. Acevedo, who was Madigan's assistant majority leader in the Illinois House before retiring in 2017, was sentenced to six months in prison for tax evasion in 2022. Madigan left his House speaker post in 2021.

In one internal email sent to an AT&T employee, La Schiazza allegedly described the company's quid pro quo with Madigan as "the friends and family plan."

The government said the bribery scheme resulted in passage of legislation eliminating AT&T's Carrier of Last Resort (COLR) obligation to provide landline phone service, and separate legislation related to small cell deployments. Madigan, a Democrat, was House speaker when both bills were passed. The lobbyist who is expected to testify allegedly acted as an intermediary by transmitting payments to Madigan's ally.

upstart writes:

Team KeePassXC (@keepassxc@fosstodon.org):

Debian Users - Be aware the maintainer of the KeePassXC package for Debian has unilaterally decided to remove ALL features from it. You will need to switch to `keepassxc-full` to maintain capabilities once this lands outside of testing/sid.

The default install package is being changed to one where all extra functionality has been removed by default, such as networking capability and browser integration. There is a lot of arguing whether this was the proper way to handle it, or whether the default compiler options should have remained the same in the default package and a keepassxc-minimal optional package have been offered instead.

For those who rely on package managers, which approach would you have preferred?

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

One of the biggest, most iconic gaming series is almost back. Grand Theft Auto 6 is apparently on track for a fall launch next year — a little more specific than the previous release window of “2025.”

There’s no new trailer, and GTA publisher, Take-Two, is not quite ready to offer a specific release date. CEO Strauss Zelnick told Variety: “I think we’re going to leave it there for now.”

The sixth mainline installment will be set in Leonida (Rockstar’s Florida equivalent) and focused mostly on Vice City (Miami). Compared to GTA Vice City, however, it’ll be contemporary. So, I’m banking on OnlyFans pastiches, vapes, self-driving cars and everything else 2020s. Plus explosions and crime.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Auto-safety regulator is investigating 22 reports of Waymo cars malfunctioning:

Crashing into parked cars, drifting over into oncoming traffic, intruding into construction zones—all this "unexpected behavior" from Waymo's self-driving vehicles may be violating traffic laws, the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) said Monday.

To better understand Waymo's potential safety risks, NHTSA's Office of Defects Investigation (ODI) is now looking into 22 incident reports involving cars equipped with Waymo's fifth-generation automated driving system. Seventeen incidents involved collisions, but none involved injuries.

Some of the reports came directly from Waymo, while others "were identified based on publicly available reports," NHTSA said. The reports document single-party crashes into "stationary and semi-stationary objects such as gates and chains" as well as instances in which Waymo cars "appeared to disobey traffic safety control devices."

The ODI plans to compare notes between incidents to decide if Waymo cars pose a safety risk or require updates to prevent malfunctioning. There is already evidence from the ODI's initial evaluation showing that Waymo's automated driving systems (ADS) were either "engaged throughout the incident" or abruptly "disengaged in the moments just before an incident occurred," NHTSA said.

[...] Earlier this year, Waymo voluntarily recalled more than 400 self-driving cars after back-to-back collisions in Arizona. While Waymo relies on machine learning to "interpret complex object and scene semantics" that ensure self-driving cars safely navigate roads, Waymo has said it's mostly focused on responding to varied weather patterns or less predictable movements of emergency vehicles and is still learning how unpredictable navigating the road can be.

hubie writes:

https://apnews.com/article/michigan-store-rooftop-sign-homeless-0185c0d7e4cd7a2f8581e8b8e0eb01b7

Contractors curious about an extension cord on the roof of a Michigan grocery store made a startling discovery: A 34-year-old woman was living inside the business sign, with enough space for a computer, printer and coffee maker, police said.

"She was homeless," Officer Brennon Warren of the Midland Police Department said Thursday. "It's a story that makes you scratch your head, just somebody living up in a sign."

The woman, whose name was not released, told police she had a job elsewhere but had been living inside the Family Fare sign for roughly a year, Warren said. She was found April 23.

Midland, best known as the global home of Dow Inc., is 130 miles (209 kilometers) north of Detroit.

The Family Fare store is in a retail strip with a triangle-shaped sign at the top of the building. The sign structure, probably 5 feet (1.5 meter) wide and 8 feet (2.4 meters) high, has a door and is accessible from the roof, Warren said.

"There was some flooring that was laid down. A mini desk," he said. "Her clothing. A Keurig coffee maker. A printer and a computer — things you'd have in your home."

The woman was able to get electricity through a power cord plugged into an outlet on the roof, Warren said.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward has submitted the following story:

The New York Times is running a story on the difficulties of obtaining homeowner's insurance in areas of the USA affected by firestorms/storms/floods, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/05/13/climate/insurance-homes-climate-change-weather.html or non-paywalled at https://archive.is/BB8wQ

The insurance turmoil caused by climate change — which had been concentrated in Florida, California and Louisiana — is fast becoming a contagion, spreading to states like Iowa, Arkansas, Ohio, Utah and Washington. Even in the Northeast, where homeowners insurance was still generally profitable last year, the trends are worsening.

In 2023, insurers lost money on homeowners coverage in 18 states, more than a third of the country, according to a New York Times analysis of newly available financial data. That's up from 12 states five years ago, and eight states in 2013. The result is that insurance companies are raising premiums by as much as 50 percent or more, cutting back on coverage or leaving entire states altogether. Nationally, over the last decade, insurers paid out more in claims than they received in premiums, according to the ratings firm Moody's, and those losses are increasing.

[...] The turmoil in insurance markets is a flashing red light for an American economy that is built on real property. Without insurance, banks won't issue a mortgage; without a mortgage, most people can't buy a home. With fewer buyers, real estate values are likely to decline, along with property tax revenues, leaving communities with less money for schools, police and other basic services.

The link includes a number of plots to support the article.

Have you changed to higher deductible homeowner's insurance to effectively "co-insure" your house, while saving on the premium? If you are unable to buy insurance at all, are you prepared to self-insure, accepting all the financial risk--or is this even possible if your bank still holds a significant mortgage?

Original Submission

NotSanguine writes:

Ars Technica is reporting on Comcast's announcement that they are rolling out another steaming pile^W^W streaming bundle

From the article:

In an ironic twist, cable TV and Internet provider Comcast has announced that it, too, will sell a bundle of video-streaming services for a discounted price. The announcement comes as Comcast has been rapidly losing cable TV subscribers to streaming services and seeks to bring the same type of bundling that originally drew people away from cable to streaming.

Starting on an unspecified date this month, the bundle, called Streamsaver, will offer Peacock, which Comcast owns, Apple TV+, and Netflix to people who subscribe to Comcast's cable TV and/or broadband. Comcast already offers Netflix or Apple TV+ as add-ons to its cable TV, but Streamsaver expands Comcast's streaming-related bundling efforts.

Comcast didn't say how much the streaming bundle would cost, but CEO Brian Roberts said that it will "come at a vastly reduced price to anything in the market today" when announcing the bundle on Tuesday at MoffettNathanson's 2024 Media, Internet and Communications Conference in New York, per Variety. If we factor in Peacock's upcoming price hike, subscribing to Apple TV+, Netflix, and Peacock separately would cost $39.47 per month without ads, or $24.97/month with ads.

[...] One of the common reasons people abandoned cable TV were bundled packages that forced people to pay for services, like phone or Internet, or channels that they didn't want. Now, Comcast is looking to save its shrinking subscriber base by bundling its cable TV or Internet service with some of its biggest competitors. Like streaming services, Comcast is hoping that bundling its products will deter people from canceling their subscriptions since they're tied to each other.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Days after we reported that its $630 million IPO (Initial Public Offer) was just days away, Raspberry Pi has announced an "expected intention to float" on the London Stock Exchange (LSE). The announcement also contains financial reports and data for investors to inform their purchase, and gives us an insight into the company.

[...] An interesting section of the announcement states "Raspberry Pi aims to release new iterations of its core technology platform every three to four years, develop form-factor derivatives which better serve subsets of its customer base, and expand its range of first-party accessories, including cameras, displays, USB peripherals and HATs." 

New models of the core Raspberry Pi arrive every 3 years or so, but the form-factor derivatives for a sub-set of customers is an interesting snippet which could lead to more bespoke products aimed at specific use cases. An example of this is the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4S, a version of the Compute Module 4 that uses the SODIMM connector of the Compute Module 1-3. This enables legacy users to upgrade the brains of its products without buying or designing all new carrier boards.

The potential offer highlights the expectations of the IPO, and that "the Company (Raspberry Pi)  would be admitted to listing on the premium listing segment of the Official List of the FCA and to trading on the Main Market of the London Stock Exchange." The IPO is composed of new shares to be issued by Raspberry Pi and shares to be sold by existing shareholders, including Raspberry Pi Foundation (the charity) and major Raspberry Pi shareholders. The offer is expected to be targeted at "institutional investors outside of the United States".