SoylentNews

Phoenix666 writes:

Officials in Oregon have approved construction permits for the first all-wood high-rise building in the nation.

Construction on the 12-story building, called Framework, will break ground this fall in Portland's trendy and rapidly growing Pearl District and is expected to be completed by the following winter.

The decision by state and local authorities to allow construction comes after months of painstaking testing of the emerging technologies that will be used to build it, including a product called cross-laminated timber, or CLT.

To make CLT, lumber manufacturers align 2-by-4 boards in perpendicular layers and then glue them together like a giant sandwich before sliding the resulting panels into a massive press for drying. The resulting panels are stronger than traditional wood because of the cross-hatched layers; CLT can withstand horizontal and vertical pressures similar to those from a significant earthquake with minimal damage.

They are also lighter and easier to work with than regular timber, resulting in lower cost and less waste.

For this project, scientists at Portland State University and Oregon State University subjected large panels of CLT to hundreds of thousands of pounds of pressure and experimented with different methods for joining them together.

Could cross-laminated timber revive the timber industry?

Previously: Can You Build A Safe, Sustainable Skyscraper Out Of Wood?
The Case for Wooden Skyscrapers

Original Submission

The Mighty Buzzard writes:

El Reg has an interesting read on an OSS developers survey:

Most of the negative behaviour is explained as "rudeness", which has been experienced witnessed by 45 per cent of participants and experienced by 16 per cent. GitHub's summary of the survey says really nasty stuff like "sexual advances, stalking, or doxxing are each encountered by less than five per cent of respondents and experienced by less than two per cent (but cumulatively witnessed by 14%, and experienced by three per cent)." Twenty five per cent of women respondents reported experiencing "language or content that makes them feel unwelcome", compared to 15 per cent of men.

This stuff has consequences: 21 per cent of those who see negative behaviour bail from projects they were working on.

Now I take an entirely different conclusion than El Reg on this. To me this says that two or three percent of respondents have valid reason to bitch about bad behavior but a further eighteen or nineteen percent above that simply are not capable of working with other people. Come on, who here has never held a job where someone on staff was a dickhead/bitch but you kept on working anyway? Me, I've not once held a job where there were zero personality conflicts. In my less than humble opinion, part of being an adult is being able to deal professionally or at least civilly with other human beings who do not cater to your every sensitivity.

Maybe I'm just a relic of the past though. Maybe the future really is a bunch of snowflakes crying to $boss to get you fired if you say or do anything they dislike.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

An eight-year investigation into Dish Networks, a direct-broadcast satellite service provider, resulted Monday in the largest fine ever levied for privacy invasion, with Dish facing a $280m bill.

The US Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission brought the case after multiple complaints that people trying to sell the pay-per-view TV provider's services were ignoring the Do Not Call registry and disturbing people who really didn't appreciate the interruption. After investigating the case, the FTC handed it to the DoJ, which filed suit in 2009.

"The National Do Not Call Registry is a popular federal program for the public to reduce the number of unwanted sales calls," said acting assistant attorney general Chad Readler of the Justice Department's Civil Division.

"This case demonstrates the Department of Justice's commitment to smart enforcement of consumer protection laws, and sends a clear message to businesses that they must comply with the Do Not Call rules."

In a 475-page ruling [PDF], US District Judge Sue Myerscough of the Central District of Illinois detailed how Dish Network had run a telemarketing campaign to persuade new customers to sign up and also to call former customers in an attempt to convince them to resubscribe.

Initially Dish ran the calling systems itself, but then outsourced some of the work to retail third-party call centers. Some of these played fast and loose with the rules and called people on the federal Do-Not-Call list who had specified that they didn't want to receive telemarketing calls.

"Dish's reckless decision to use anyone with a call center without any vetting or meaningful supervision demonstrates a disregard for the consuming public," the judge wrote.

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Terrorists have attacked the Ayatollah Khomeini mausoleum and Iranian parliament in two nearly simultaneous incidents:

There have been multiple attacks in the Iranian capital of Tehran, according to state media. A woman was arrested after a bomb attack and shooting spree wounded two people at the Ayatollah Khomeini mausoleum south of the city Wednesday, the semi-official Fars news agency reports. The news agency reported that a second attacker is currently surrounded by security officers.

That attack occurred at the same time as a shooting in the Iranian parliament, in which at least three people were injured after an attacker stormed the building in central Tehran, according to state-run Press TV.

Also at Washington Post, BBC, Reuters, Al Jazeera, and Tehran Times.

Original Submission

-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

TechDirt reports

[...] The past few USPTO directors had been cut from the "more patents is always a good thing" mold, whereas Lee actually recognized that bad patents harmed innovation. And even though the last time the Patent Office got concerned about bad patents it allowed the patent approval backlog to fill up, under Lee the backlog has reached its lowest point in a decade.[paywall]

[...] For all the craziness going on in the government right now, having competent leadership at the USPTO would be one less thing to worry about. But... now it's being reported that Lee has suddenly resigned and sent a goodbye email to staff. That's bad news on the patent front.

Of course, it may be ages before any new director is appointed. As I type this, of the 559 key positions requiring Senate confirmation, Trump hasn't even named a nominee for 431 of them. [...] Adding the new USPTO director to that pile may mean no new USPTO director for.... who the hell knows how long.

Original Submission

-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

The Associated Press reports via the Bangkok Post

Cartivator, a startup group of about 30 engineers including some young Toyota employees, started to develop their SkyDrive vehicle in 2014 with the help of crowdfunding.

The head of Cartivator, Tsubasa Nakamura, said that while the car was still at an early stage of development, the group expected to conduct the first manned flight by the end of 2018.

During the demonstration on [June 4], the current test model, a primitive-looking assembly of aluminium framing and propellers, was able to get off and float on the ground for a few seconds. Nakamura said the design needed more stability so the prototype would be able to fly long and high enough to reach the Olympic flame.

The engineers are aiming to make their flying car the world's smallest electric vehicle, which can be used in small urban areas, and hopes to commercialise the car in 2025.

Pre-flight photo

The Inquirer put it this way:

A startup backed by the Japanese automaker has developed a test model that engineers hope will eventually develop into a tiny car with a driver who'll be able to light the Olympic torch in the 2020 Tokyo games. For now, however, the project is a concoction of aluminum framing and eight propellers that barely gets off the ground and crashes after several seconds.

Photo of device hovering

Original Submission

n1 writes:

Cryptocurrencies, as a whole, now hold over $100 billion in market cap for the first time. While bitcoin (BTC) leads the pack at just over $46.6 billion, or 47.9 percent of all cryptocurrencies, the recent surge in these other coins has helped to push the total cap over the top.

Since the Bitfinex hack low on August 2, bitcoin has traded better than JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, Tesla, Apple, Google and gold. One of the few stocks to match the frenetic pace of bitcoin has been Nvidia, which is up over 200 percent since July of last year.

[...] Although China, Japan and South Korea are trading at a ~$100-plus premium compared to the exchanges in the United States, most of the volume [on June 5th] has been driven by USD.

Source: Bitcoin Magazine

Original Submission

"exec" writes:

Verizon and a union representing its workers have reached a settlement requiring the company to fix thousands of problems in areas of Pennsylvania where it hasn't upgraded its copper network to fiber.

The settlement of the union's complaint "will require the company to repair and replace bad cable, defective equipment, faulty back-up batteries, and to take down 15,000 double telephone poles," the Communications Workers of America (CWA) said Friday.

Double poles occur when "Verizon has failed to move its equipment from an old pole that was replaced with a new one by another utility (e.g., the electric company)," the CWA said. "In many cases, these are dangerous conditions—poles are falling, leaning, rotting, partially cut off, etc."

How many double poles are in the state is not clear. The settlement requires Verizon to fix "at least" 15,000 within three years. There are also "dangling pieces of old poles" resulting from Verizon doing "everything it can to avoid the expense of moving its facilities to a new pole," as shown in the pictures above and detailed in the union's complaint against Verizon.

"When VZPA does nothing, and the electric utility must remove the pole from the base, it may leave the portion of the old pole containing VZPA facilities just dangling over the right of way, tied to the new pole by a single cable or a make-shift wooden support," the union complaint said.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/06/verizon-grudgingly-agrees-to-fix-thousands-of-copper-network-problems/

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

The Facebook messaging group was at one point titled "Harvard memes for horny bourgeois teens."

It began when about 100 members of Harvard College's incoming freshman class contacted each other through the university's official Class of 2021 Facebook group. They created a messaging group where students could share memes about popular culture — a growing trend on the Internet among students at elite colleges.

But then, the exchanges took a dark turn, according to an article published in the Harvard Crimson on Sunday. Some of the group's members decided to form an offshoot group in which students could share obscene, "R-rated" memes, a student told the Crimson. The founders of the messaging group demanded that students post provocative memes in the main group chat to gain admittance to the smaller group.

The students in the spinoff group exchanged memes and images "mocking sexual assault, the Holocaust and the deaths of children," sometimes directing jokes at specific ethnic or racial groups, the Crimson reported. One message "called the hypothetical hanging of a Mexican child 'piñata time'" while other messages quipped that "abusing children was sexually arousing," according to images of the chat described by the Crimson.

Then, university officials caught on. And in mid-April, after administrators discovered the offensive, racially charged meme exchanges, at least 10 incoming students who participated in the chat received letters informing them that their offers of admission had been revoked.

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

At least one national insurer, AAA, is raising rates on Tesla vehicles based on data showing that the Model S and Model X had abnormally high claim frequencies and high costs of insurance claims compared with other cars in the same classes.

AAA said premiums for Tesla vehicles could go up 30 percent based on data from the Highway Loss Data Institute and other sources.

Tesla is disputing the analysis.

"This analysis is severely flawed and is not reflective of reality," the electric-vehicle maker said in a statement emailed to Automotive News. "Among other things, it compares Model S and X to cars that are not remotely peers, including even a Volvo station wagon."

Anthony Ptasznik, chief actuary of AAA, said the group noticed the anomaly in company data and then investigated other data sources, primarily relying on the Highway Loss Data Institute because of its scope, to confirm its analysis. "Looking at a much broader set of countrywide data, we saw the same patterns observed in our own data, and that gave us the confidence to change rates," he said.

Other large insurance companies, including State Farm and Geico, said that claims data is a major factor in calculating premiums, but would not disclose if their Tesla-owning customers would also see rates rise.

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

n1 and takyon wrote:

Barely an hour after a news organization published an article about a Top Secret National Security Agency document on Russian hacking, the Justice Department announced charges against a 25-year-old government contractor who a senior federal official says was the leaker of the document.

The May 5, 2017 intelligence document published by The Intercept, an online news organization, describes new details about Russian efforts to hack voting systems in the U.S a week prior to the 2016 presidential election. While the document doesn't say the hacking changed any votes, it "raises the possibility that Russian hacking may have breached at least some elements of the voting system, with disconcertingly uncertain results."

Even as the document was ricocheting around Washington, the Justice Department announced that a criminal complaint was filed in the Southern District of Georgia charging Reality Leigh Winner, 25, a federal contractor, with removing classified material from a government facility and mailing it to a news outlet.

Source: NBC News

Once investigative efforts identified Winner as a suspect, the FBI obtained and executed a search warrant at her residence. According to the complaint, Winner agreed to talk with agents during the execution of the warrant. During that conversation, Winner admitted intentionally identifying and printing the classified intelligence reporting at issue despite not having a "need to know," and with knowledge that the intelligence reporting was classified. Winner further admitted removing the classified intelligence reporting from her office space, retaining it, and mailing it from Augusta, Georgia, to the news outlet, which she knew was not authorized to receive or possess the documents.

Source: Department of Justice

While the document provides a rare window into the NSA's understanding of the mechanics of Russian hacking, it does not show the underlying "raw" intelligence on which the analysis is based. A U.S. intelligence officer who declined to be identified cautioned against drawing too big a conclusion from the document because a single analysis is not necessarily definitive.

Source: The Intercept

How The Intercept Outed Reality Winner

Julian Assange: Alleged NSA leaker 'must be supported'

Bad tradecraft: How the Intercept may have outed its own leaker

WikiLeaks tweet #1: "Suspected Intercept reporter gave US government NSA whistleblower Reality Leigh Winner's post code, printout and her report number" and tweet #2: "WikiLeaks issues a US$10,000 reward for information leading to the public exposure & termination of this 'reporter'".

Original Submission #1  Original Submission #2 

takyon writes:

A newly discovered gas giant exoplanet has a surface that is hotter than red dwarf stars (>4000 K):

With a day-side temperature peaking at 4,600 Kelvin (more than 7,800 degrees Fahrenheit), the newly discovered exoplanet, designated KELT-9b, is hotter than most stars and only 1,200 Kelvin (about 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit) cooler than our own sun. In fact, the ultraviolet radiation from the star it orbits is so brutal that the planet may be literally evaporating away under the intense glare, producing a glowing gas tail.

The super-heated planet has other unusual features as well. For instance, it's a gas giant 2.8 times more massive than Jupiter but only half as dense, because the extreme radiation from its host star has caused its atmosphere to puff up like a balloon. Because it is tidally locked to its star—as the moon is to Earth—the day side of the planet is perpetually bombarded by stellar radiation and, as a result, it is so hot that molecules such as water, carbon dioxide and methane can't form there.

[...] In 2014 astronomers spotted the exoplanet using one of two telescopes specially designed to detect planets orbiting bright stars—one in the northern and one in the southern hemisphere—jointly operated by Ohio State, Vanderbilt and Lehigh universities. The instruments, "Kilodegree Extremely Little Telescopes" or KELTs, fill a large gap in the available technologies for finding extrasolar planets. They use mostly off-the-shelf technology to provide a low-cost means of planet hunting. Whereas a traditional astronomical telescope costs millions of dollars to build, the hardware for a KELT telescope runs less than $75,000. Where other telescopes are designed to look at very faint stars in small sections of the sky at very high resolution, KELTs look at millions of very bright stars at once, over broad sections of sky, at relatively low resolution.

"Hot Jupiters", aka "epistellar jovians".

Also at NPR, CNN, and CNBC.

A giant planet undergoing extreme-ultraviolet irradiation by its hot massive-star host (DOI: 10.1038/nature22392) (DX)

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

NASA has posted freely available e-books on aeronautics on their website that might be of interest to flight enthusiasts.

Titles include:

• Unlimited Horizons: Design and Development of the U-2. Over the span of more than six decades, the U-2 evolved from a relatively basic, high-altitude camera platform for performing clandestine reconnaissance missions into a complex, multisensor platform that has been adapted for a multitude of civil and military roles. Variants in more than a dozen configurations have been used for intelligence gathering, strategic and tactical reconnaissance, communications relay, battle-damage assessment, treaty monitoring and verification, disaster relief, environmental and Earth resources studies, and a wide variety of scientific research.
• Elegance in Flight: A comprehensive History of the F-16XL Experimental Prototype and its Role in NASA Flight Research
• Probing the Sky: Selected NACA Research Airplanes and Their Contributions to Flight
• Flying Beyond the Stall
• Cave of the Winds
• A New Twist in Flight Research: The F-18 Active Aeroelastic Wing Project

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Oculus co-founder Palmer Luckey, who left Facebook in March, wants to build a wall... with LIDAR sensors:

Palmer Freeman Luckey was the kind of wunderkind Silicon Valley venerates. When he was just 21, he made an overnight fortune selling his start-up, a company called Oculus VR that made virtual-reality gear, to Facebook for $2 billion in 2014.

But the success story took a sideways turn this year when Mr. Luckey was pressured to leave Facebook months after news spread that he had secretly donated to an organization dedicated to spreading anti-Hillary Clinton internet memes.

[...] And he has a new start-up in the works, a company that is developing surveillance technology that could be deployed on borders between countries and around military bases, according to three people familiar with the plan who asked for anonymity because it's still confidential. They said the investment fund run by Peter Thiel, a technology adviser to Mr. Trump, planned to support the effort.

In an emailed statement, Mr. Luckey confirmed that he was working on a defense-related start-up. "We are spending more than ever on defense technology, yet the pace of innovation has been slowing for decades," he wrote. "We need a new kind of defense company, one that will save taxpayer dollars while creating superior technology to keep our troops and citizens safer."

Also at BBC, CNET, Boing Boing, PCMag, and Engadget.

Original Submission

NotSanguine writes:

U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (DVA) secretary David Shulkin announced a major overhaul of the department's Electronic Health Records (EHR) systems.

The department will scrap its in-house developed EHR systems, known as VistA in favor of MHS GENESIS, the EHR system in use by the U.S. Department of Defense.

MHS GENESIS is based on the Cerner Millenium API. For those of you who will ask, no, Cerner Millenium is *not* open source.

VistA, the current DVA system was originally conceived as a "paperless" health records management system in the early 1970s, developed and implemented by DVA and other government agencies, both in the United States and in a number of other countries including Finland, Egypt and Germany. VistA is in the public domain

So what say you, Soylentils? Does it make sense to throw out decades of development on a platform both widely used and in the public domain? Should the government be doing its own software development?

Are you a government contractor doing software development? If so, how might this and/or similar actions affect you?

Other Coverage:
White House press briefing/announcement from Secretary Shulkin
Healthcare IT News
Defense One [behind script wall]
Kansas City Star
FCW

Original Submission