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DrMundane writes:

In a 5-4 decision, the United States Supreme Court has ruled that states can not prevent same-sex couples from marrying and must recognize their marriages from other states. In the majority opinion by Justice Kennedy it is stated:

The Court, in this decision, holds same-sex couples may exercise the fundamental right to marry in all States. It follows that the Court also must hold—and it now does hold—that there is no lawful basis for a State to refuse to recognize a lawful same-sex marriage performed in another State on the ground of its same-sex character.

...and:

It would misunderstand these men and women to say they disrespect the idea of marriage. Their plea is that they do respect it, respect it so deeply that they seek to find its fulfillment for themselves. Their hope is not to be condemned to live in loneliness, excluded from one of civilization's oldest institutions. They ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law. The Constitution grants them that right. The judgment of the Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit is reversed. It is so ordered.

HughPickens.com writes:

Reuters reports that the US Supreme Court has ruled 6 - 3 in favor of the nationwide availability of tax subsidies that are crucial to the implementation of President Barack Obama's signature healthcare law, handing a major victory to the President. It marked the second time in three years that the high court ruled against a major challenge to the law brought by conservatives seeking to gut it. "Congress passed the Affordable Care Act to improve health insurance markets, not to destroy them," wrote Chief Justice Roberts, who added that nationwide availability of the credits is required to "avoid the type of calamitous result that Congress plainly meant to avoid." The ruling will come as a major relief to Obama as he seeks to ensure that his legacy legislative achievement is implemented effectively and survives political and legal attacks before he leaves office in January 2017.

Justice Antonin Scalia took the relatively rare step of reading a summary of his dissenting opinion from the bench. "We really should start calling the law SCOTUScare," said Scalia, referencing the court's earlier decision upholding the constitutionality of the law (SCOTUS is the acronym for the Supreme Court of the United States).

takyon writes:

From EFF:

The U.S. Senate has paved the way for the passage of Fast Track legislation, to give the White House and the U.S. Trade Representative almost unilateral power to negotiate and finalize secret anti-user trade deals like the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). Yesterday a "cloture" vote was held—this was a vote to end debate on Fast Track and break any possibility for a filibuster, and it passed by the minimum votes needed—60 to 37. Today, the Senate voted to pass the legislation itself. TPP proponents only needed 51 votes, a simple majority, to actually pass the bill, and they got it in a 60 to 38 vote. Following months and months of campaigning, Congress has ultimately caved to corporate demands to hand away its own constitutional mandate over trade, and the President is expected to the sign the bill into law as early as tonight or later this week.

Here's the previous story.

tonyPick writes:

According to the BBC the Philae lander has just re-established contact:

Philae was dropped on to the surface of Comet 67P by its mothership, Rosetta, last November.

It worked for 60 hours before going to sleep when its solar-powered battery ran flat.

BBC Science Correspondent Jonathan Amos says the comet has since moved nearer to the sun and Philae has enough power to work again.

kaszz writes:

The European Space Agency (ESA) space mission to a Comet using the Rosetta spacecraft and it's comet lander Philae has awaken again now that it can absorb more sunlight. The European Space Operations Centre in Darmstadt, Germany received a signal from Philae lander at 22:28 CEST on 2015-06-13. The status is currently 300 received data packets, operating temperature of -35 °C and 24 watts available. The lander is ready for operations. According to historical data inside the lander, it must have been awake earlier but had not been able to make contact. Another 8000 data packets await in Philae's mass memory which will give information on what happened to the lander in the past few days on Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. Philae worked for 60 hours the last time but shut down on 2014-11-15 at 01:15 CET because a lack of sunlight to run its electronics.

BBC also reports on this and the lander has supposedly tweeted too.

takyon writes:

The Office of Personnel Management has confirmed that around 4 million current and past employees have been affected by a data breach, potentially exposing personal data. Unnamed U.S. officials say that the hackers were from China.

Here is the U.S. Office of Personnel Management's statement:

The U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) recently became aware of a cybersecurity incident affecting its systems and data that may have compromised the personal information of current and former Federal employees.

Within the last year, OPM has undertaken an aggressive effort to update its cybersecurity posture, adding numerous tools and capabilities to its networks. As a result, in April 2015, OPM became aware of the incident affecting its information technology (IT) systems and data that predated the adoption of these security controls.

Since the incident was identified, OPM has partnered with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT), and the Federal Bureau of Investigation to determine the impact to Federal personnel. OPM immediately implemented additional security measures to protect the sensitive information it manages.

Beginning June 8 and continuing through June 19, OPM will be sending notifications to approximately 4 million individuals whose Personally Identifiable Information was potentially compromised in this incident. The email will come from opmcio@csid.com and it will contain information regarding credit monitoring and identity theft protection services being provided to those Federal employees impacted by the data breach. In the event OPM does not have an email address for the individual on file, a standard letter will be sent via the U.S. Postal Service.

In order to mitigate the risk of fraud and identity theft, OPM is offering affected individuals credit monitoring services and identity theft insurance with CSID, a company that specializes in identity theft protection and fraud resolution. This comprehensive, 18-month membership includes credit report access, credit monitoring, identity theft insurance, and recovery services and is available immediately at no cost to affected individuals identified by OPM.

Additional information is available beginning at 8 a.m. CST on June 8, 2015 on the company's website, www.csid.com/opm, and by calling toll-free 844-222-2743 (International callers: call collect 512-327-0700).

Congress has sent legislation to the president reviving and remaking a disputed post-9/11 surveillance program two days after letting it temporarily expire.

The vote in the Senate Tuesday was 67-32. The House already has passed the bill, and President Barack Obama plans to sign it quickly.

The legislation will phase out, over six months, the once-secret National Security Agency bulk phone records collection program made public two years ago by agency contractor Edward Snowden.

It will be replaced by a program that keeps the records with phone companies but allows the government to search them with a warrant.

Senate Republican leaders opposed the House bill but were forced to accept it unchanged after senators rejected last-ditch attempts to amend it.

The story is being covered live by The Guardian.

Senator Dianne Feinstein, one of the most voluble defenders of the NSA in the past two years, has offered a more measured endorsement of Tuesday’s vote. She says she voted for the bill because it was “the best opportunity to quickly get [surveillance] programs back up and running.”

She emphasizes that the bill will allow “this and two other important counterterrorism programs to continue,” an allusion to Section 215 and the “lone-wolf” and “roving wiretap” provisions of the Patriot Act.

“I believe these programs are necessary to protect American lives and prevent terrorist attacks in our country,” she said in a statement.

Deputy legal director Jameel Jaffer of the ACLU, which did not back the USA Freedom Act, has nonetheless described the bill as “a milestone”.

“This is the most important surveillance reform bill since 1978, and its passage is an indication that Americans are no longer willing to give the intelligence agencies a blank check,” Jaffer said in a statement.

Chemical leak at Apple's NC Data Center

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Around 2:00 PM EDT on Monday, Apple's Maiden, NC, data center suffered a chlorine leak that injured five people. It remains unclear whether the injured were Apple data center employees or construction workers.

Last week, a fire broke out among the solar panels atop the Mesa, AZ, sapphire manufacturing facility that Apple recently bought from GT Advanced. No injuries were reported.

The two events do not seem to be linked, except that Apple is having a bad run of luck with site safety.

Chlorine Gas Leak at Apple Data Center Puts 5 in Hospital

"gewg_" writes:

El Reg reports

Emergency crews received a call [June 1] about 2pm local time from the Apple facility on Startown Road, in Maiden, North Carolina. Local news helicopters captured footage of people being given medical attention and oxygen masks outside the facility.

The Catawba emergency services said initially two unknown chemicals were involved in the alert, later stating that it was a chlorine gas leak.

[...] It is speculated that the chlorine was a key component in the facility's water-cleaning facility, perhaps for its water-cooled components.

Two members of our community have submitted information on the Intel purchase of Altera:

Intel To Buy Altera For 16.7 billion USD

kaszz writes:

Intel bought chipmaker Altera for 16.7 billion US$. This follows another huge purchase in the semiconductor industry last week, when Avago snapped up Broadcom for $37 billion US$. This has been a record year for consolidation within the industry, as companies struggle to deal with slowing growth and stagnating stock prices. Altera had already rejected an offer from Intel, but shareholders pressured them to reconsider. "Acquiring Altera may help Intel defend and extend its most profitable business: supplying server chips used in data centers. While sales of semiconductors for PCs are declining as more consumers rely on tablets and smartphones to get online, the data centers needed to churn out information and services for those mobile devices are driving orders for higher-end Intel processors and shoring up profitability. Altera has a huge FPGA business.

Perhaps this will impact Altera FPGA Linux support?

Intel Acquires Altera for $16.7 Billion

takyon writes:

Intel Corporation has announced that it is buying Altera Corporation for $16.7 billion in cash. The deal will allow Intel to access potentially valuable field-programmable gate array (FPGA) revenue streams and integrate FPGAs into Xeon chips to try and maintain its dominance in datacenters. Altera has already been using Intel's 14nm process to make its Stratix FPGAs.

The Platform has more in-depth analysis of the deal:

The first hedge that Intel is making with the Altera acquisition is that a certain portion of the compute environment that it more or less owns in the datacenter will shift from CPUs to FPGAs.

In the conference call announcing the deal for Altera, Intel CEO Brian Krzanich said that up to a third of cloud service providers – what we here at The Platform call hyperscalers – could be using hybrid CPU-FPGA server nodes for their workloads by 2020. (This is an Intel estimate.) Intel's plan is to get a Xeon processor and an Altera FPGA on the same chip package by the end of 2016 – Data Center Group general manager Diane Bryant showed off a prototype of such a device in early 2014 – and ramp its production through 2017, with a follow-on product that actually puts the CPU and the FPGA circuits on the same die in monolithic fashion "shortly after that."

Intel plans to create a hybrid Atom-FPGA product aimed at the so-called Internet of Things telemetry market, and this will be a monolithic design as well, according to Krzanich; the company is right now examining whether it needs an interim Atom and FPGA product that shares a single package but are not etched on a single die.