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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:43 | Votes:95

posted by Fnord666 on Monday February 19 2018, @10:25PM   Printer-friendly
from the what-a-buckhead dept.

An Uber Eats driver is being sought in Atlanta, Georgia for allegedly shooting a customer after a dispute and fleeing the scene:

An UberEATS driver was on the run Monday after a man who ordered a meal from the online food delivery service was killed in a late night shooting in Atlanta over the weekend, police told local media.

The 30-year-old man was shot multiple times after exchanging words with the driver in Atlanta's Buckhead neighborhood at about 11:30 p.m. Saturday, police told Atlanta's NBC affiliate WXIA, channel 11.

Also at WSB-TV, 11Alive, and AJC.

Update: Driver accused of shooting customer had been with Uber Eats for 1 week


Original Submission

posted by Fnord666 on Monday February 19 2018, @08:04PM   Printer-friendly
from the news-about-news dept.

"There's always more of a response when I have a Trump peg," Sulome says of her pitches since Trump's election."Why are we giving in to this man's narcissistic dream?" she would like to ask editors. "When people lose sight of what's going on around the world, we allow our government to make foreign policy decisions that don't benefit us. It makes it so much easier for them to do that when we don't have the facts. Like if we don't know that the crisis in Yemen is killing and starving so many people and making Yemenis more extremist, how will people know not to support a policy in which we are attacking Yemenis?"

Applewhite agrees that this exclusive focus on Trump and other domestic issues could be detrimental to Americans' understanding of the world, and our ability to make sound political decisions.

https://www.cjr.org/covering_trump/trump-impact-foreign-reporting.php


Original Submission

posted by Fnord666 on Monday February 19 2018, @05:43PM   Printer-friendly
from the do-attack-ads-count dept.

A federal grand jury in Washington, DC has indicted 13 Russian nationals and a Kremlin-linked internet firm on charges that they had meddled in the 2016 presidential election.

The US government said Russian entities began interfering in US political processes, including the 2016 presidential election, as early as 2014, according to a court document.

[...] The charges – which include conspiracy, wire fraud, bank fraud and aggravated identity theft – are the most direct allegations to date of illegal Russian meddling in the election.

Video - http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/us-election-2016-russia-robert-mueller-investigation-fbi-latest-updates-a8214651.html

Link to the Indictment: https://www.justice.gov/file/1035477/download


Original Submission

posted by Fnord666 on Monday February 19 2018, @03:22PM   Printer-friendly
from the history-repeats-itself dept.

Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard

Today's startup companies seem to have a certain arc to them—they get some seed funding, they launch, they draw some interest for their good idea, they keep growing, and maybe they become a part of the fabric of our lives ... or a part of the fabric of a significantly larger company. Strangely, 3Dfx didn't so much draw interest as blow the lid off of a trend that redefined how we think of video games. Its graphics processing units were just the right technology for their time. And, for that reason, the company was everywhere for a few years ... until it wasn't. So, what happened—why did 3Dfx turn into a cautionary tale? Today's Tedium sifts through all the polygons and the shaded textures. — Ernie @ Tedium

Source: https://tedium.co/2018/02/14/3dfx-history-failure/


Original Submission

posted by martyb on Monday February 19 2018, @01:00PM   Printer-friendly
from the cake-for-everyone! dept.

It is my great pleasure to announce that SoylentNews has just celebrated four years of service to the community! The very first story on the site appeared on 2014-02-12 and actually went live to everyone 2014-02-17.

It all started when a story on Slashdot made reference to its "audience" which ticked off quite a number of people. Soon after came a boycott of Slashdot — aka the "Slashcott". While this was in effect, an intrepid few people somehow managed to take a years-old, out-of-date, unsupported, open-sourced version of slashcode and somehow managed to get it up to speed to run on much more recent versions of Apache, MySql, etc. Recurring crashes and outages were the norm. (See last year's anniversary story for many more details!) Further, on July 4th, 2014 our application to become a Public Benefit Corporation was approved — this set the stage for us to be able to accept funding from the community.

By the time you read this, we will have posted 20,980 stories to the site to which over 639,907 comments have been made!

We could not have done this without all of you. You (the community) submit the stories for the site. You write the comments... and moderate them, too. You made recommendations for improvements to the site. You are SoylentNews.

It has been my privilege and honor to work with a great group of folks who have done the behind-the-scenes skunk-work which has kept this site running. It does bear mentioning that this site is entirely staffed by volunteers. Nobody here has received even a penny's worth of income from the site. Like you, we have home and work responsibilities, but in our spare time we still strive to provide an environment that is conducive to discussions of predominantly tech-related matters.

Having said all that, I must add that income to the site has dropped recently. Having let my subscription lapse in the past, I know how easy that can be. Take a moment to check your subscription status. We have on the order of 100 people who have subscribed in the past, have visited the site in the past month, and whose subscription has expired. If your subscription is up-to-date, please consider either extending it or making a gift subscription (default is to UID 6 - "mcasadevall" aka NCommander). NB the dollar amounts presented are the minimum payments required for that duration -- we'll happily accept larger amounts. =)

If financial contributions are infeasible for you, we always appreciate story submissions. Submit a link, a few paragraphs from the story, and ideally a sentence or two about what you found interesting and send it to us. Any questions, please take a look at the Submission Guidelines.

Of course, the comments are where it's at. Thoughtful, well-reasoned, well-supported comments seem to do best here. Inflammatory histrionics garner attention, and usually down-mods, too. Speaking of which, if you have good Karma, and have been registered with the site for at least a month, you are invited to participate in moderation. Unlike other sites that up-mod or down-mod to infinity, we have something more like olympic-scoring here. A comment score can vary from -1 to a +5. This is how I look at scores: -1 (total waste of your time), 0 (meh), +1 (okay), +2 (good), +3 (quite good), +4 (very good), +5 (don't miss this one!).


Original Submission

posted by martyb on Monday February 19 2018, @10:36AM   Printer-friendly
from the who-needs-profits? dept.

Adjusted net revenue last quarter increased 61 percent to $2.22 billion from the same period in 2016. Meanwhile, the total value of fares grew to $11 billion that quarter. It was the first full quarter under Dara Khosrowshahi, who took over the troubled business in September.

Despite a turbulent year for the ride-hailing company, sales were $7.5 billion. But the company also posted a substantial loss of $4.5 billion. There are few historical precedents for the scale of its loss.

Uber isn't publicly traded but has chosen to release select financial information to investors and the public in recent quarters. Last month, SoftBank Group Corp. led a $9.3 billion investment deal to make itself largest shareholder in the San Francisco-based company. The Japanese firm is betting that more people will choose to book rides through an app instead of driving themselves and that the business will find a way to make up for losses today.

The latest financial report shows the company continues to increase its revenue while making progress on cutting its loss. Uber's loss is based on generally accepted accounting principles, which includes writedowns, as well as the company's enormous legal expenses, such as the cost of defending against a trade secrets lawsuit from Alphabet Inc.'s Waymo. Uber agreed to give Waymo stock valued at $245 million to settle the suit last week.

[...] Uber hasn't made it easy to compare last year's financials to years past. The company declined to disclose complete data for 2016 and over time has changed how it accounts for revenue. Uber lost billions in China before selling its business there in 2016 in exchange for a 17.5 percent stake in homegrown rival Didi Chuxing.


Original Submission

posted by Fnord666 on Monday February 19 2018, @08:15AM   Printer-friendly
from the don't-stand-in-the-way-of-profits dept.

Electronics recycler Eric Lundgren was convicted of conspiracy and copyright infringement for his efforts regarding refurbishing old PCs. His sentence would have been 15 months in prison and a $50,000 fine except that he was granted an emergency stay of the sentence by a federal appeals court. Now his appeal is pending before the 11th Circuit though it has not yet been scheduled.

[...] McGloin also testified that Microsoft charges computer refurbishers about $25 for a new license and copy of the software but didn't differentiate that from what was done by Lundgren, who was not making a new copy of the software and intended his restore discs only for computers that were already licensed.

[...] Lundgren called his own expert witness, Glenn Weadock, an author of numerous software books who testified for the government in a major antitrust case against Microsoft that was resolved in 2001. Weadock was asked, "In your opinion, without a code, either product key or COA [Certificate of Authenticity], what is the value of these reinstallation discs?"

"Zero or near zero," Weadock said.

He should have listened to the experts like Ken Starks of Reglue. However, no mention was made by The Washington Post article about whether he or the court was aware that he could have improved the situation all the way around by simply upgrading the refurbished PCs to GNU/Linux instead of using a system that is always showing new ways to cause problems. The local LUG could well host an evening event with him as guest of honor to show how to improve the users' situation while staying out of jail.

Source : Eric Lundgren, 'e-waste' recycling innovator, faces prison for trying to extend life span of PCs


Original Submission

posted by Fnord666 on Monday February 19 2018, @05:54AM   Printer-friendly
from the mail-only-accepted-from-ourselves dept.

On his blog, Peter N. M. Hansteen sometimes writes about the problems with getting certain mail service providers to up their game. This time his post provides the details on how a particularly large service not only fails at SMTP sender verification but also at many other tasks necessary for professional mail hosting.

Whenever I encounter incredibly stupid and functionally destructive configuration errors like this I tend to believe they're down to simple incompetence and not malice.

But this one has me wondering. If you essentially require incoming mail to include the contents of spf.outlook.com (currently no less than 81 subnets) as valid senders for the domain, you are essentially saying that only outlook.com customers are allowed to communicate.

If that restriction is a result of a deliberate choice rather than a simple configuration error, the problem moves out of the technical sphere and could conceivably become a legal matter, depending on what outlook.com have specified in their contracts that they are selling to their customers.

One takeaway is that spam-fighting decisions from decades past have left us with technologies that have led to the centralization of mail on fewer and fewer providers. As such it is increasingly difficult for even skilled professionals to operate their own mail hosting smoothly.

Source : A Life Lesson in Mishandling SMTP Sender Verification


Original Submission

posted by martyb on Monday February 19 2018, @03:33AM   Printer-friendly
from the Google-knows-where-your-phone-is-better-than-the-phone-company-does dept.

Google conducts test to help 911 accurately locate callers

Google has conducted a trial to test the efficiency of using its technology to help 911 operators more accurately figure out the location of cellphone callers. The test included tens of thousands of 911 calls over the span of two months in several states, and had encouraging results, as reported by The Wall Street Journal.

The test was done in conjunction with two companies that have connections into 911 centers, West Corp. and RapidSOS. Under the current 911 system, wireless carriers are normally responsible for providing location information, but it isn't very accurate. RapidSOS says that using Google's technology, about 80 percent of the 911 calls had more accurate location data within the first 30 seconds. Google's data also dramatically shrunk the estimated radius of a call's location, from 522 feet down to 121 feet and arrived faster than carrier data.

Also at Engadget.


Original Submission

posted by martyb on Monday February 19 2018, @01:12AM   Printer-friendly
from the practice-drill dept.

In November, Washington, D.C.'s Department of Transportation granted the Boring Company a permit to excavate at a parking lot within the city:

Washington, D.C., has issued a permit allowing Elon Musk's Boring Company to do preparatory and excavation work in what is now a parking lot north of the National Mall. The company says the site could become a Hyperloop station.

The permit, reported Friday by the Washington Post, was issued way back on November 29th of 2017. The permit is part of an exploratory push by the city's Department of Transportation, which according to a spokesperson is examining the feasibility of digging a Hyperloop network under the city. The Hyperloop is an as-yet theoretical proposal to use depressurized tubes and magnet-levitated pods to move passengers at very high speeds.

From The Washington Post:

Asked about the permit, issued Nov. 29, a Boring Company spokesman said Friday that "a New York Avenue location, if constructed, could become a station" in a broad network of such stops across the new system.

D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) visited the Boring Company in California this month, walking in a tunnel to learn more about the technology the company says will make tunneling faster and cheaper.

The District's Department of Transportation is figuring out what other permits the Boring Company would need to cut under city roads and other public spaces, according to Bowser's chief of staff, John Falcicchio.

Previously: Elon Musk Claims to Have "Verbal Approval" to Build New York to Washington, D.C. Hyperloop
NY-Philly-Baltimore-DC Hyperloop: Not Vaporware?

Related: Hyperloop Pod Competition Winner Exceeds 200mph (324 km/h)
Sir Richard Branson Invests in Hyperloop
Elon Musk's Boring Tunnel Near Los Angeles
Elon Musk's Boring Company Sells Flamethrowers


Original Submission

posted by Fnord666 on Sunday February 18 2018, @10:51PM   Printer-friendly
from the layers-upon-layers dept.

Picasso painted over another artist's work—and then over his own, new imaging reveals

Hidden beneath the brush strokes of Pablo Picasso's 1902 oil painting La Miséreuse accroupie (The Crouching Beggar) lies the work of another Barcelona artist. And the underlying work seems to have inspired some of Picasso's artistry. Mountains in the original painting—a landscape scene—became the outline of the back of the subject in Picasso's work, which depicts a crouching, cloaked woman.

Experts have known about the hidden image since 1992, when the underlying layers of the painting were first probed using x-ray radiography. But new work, using modern imaging techniques, is revealing more detail—not only about the original painting, but also about Picasso's. Researchers discovered another hidden layer: Under the woman's cloak, Picasso painted an image of her hand clutching a piece of bread, the team announced here today at the annual meeting AAAS, which publishes Science.

The discovery allows us "to look inside Picasso's head and get a sense of how he was making decisions as he was painting the canvas," says Marc Walton, a cultural heritage scientist at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, and a lead researcher on the study. "He reworked, he labored on painting this individual element, but then chose to abandon it at the end."

Related: The Picture Under the "Mona Lisa"
Particle Accelerator Reveals Hidden Degas Painting


Original Submission

posted by martyb on Sunday February 18 2018, @08:30PM   Printer-friendly
from the there-was-no-life-on-Earth-before-there-was-O2? dept.

The presence of large quantities of oxygen ions may be able to distinguish habitable exoplanets with life from barren exoplanets in the habitable zone (resembling Venus or Mars):

Like Earth, Venus and Mars are small rocky planets; they have permanent atmospheres like Earth, and their atmospheres are exposed to the same solar radiation as Earth's. Data from the Pioneer Venus Orbiter and the Viking descent probe on Mars show that they have very similar ionospheres to each other—which don't contain a lot of atomic O+ ions. Know what else Venus and Mars are missing? Photosynthesis.

[Astronomy PhD candidate Paul] Dalba's contention is that photosynthesis on a planet's surface, which generates a surfeit of molecular oxygen, is the only thing that can account for these atomic O+ ions in a planet's ionosphere. The mere existence of life throws a planet's atmosphere out of chemical balance. O+ would be a neat biomarker because there isn't a numerical cutoff required—just the dominance of O+ among the ionic species in the upper atmosphere would indicate "thriving global biological activity" on the planet below.

Dalba claims that Venus and Mars act as negative controls, demonstrating that planets like Earth but lacking life don't have this O+ layer. Some may think that continuous volcanic activity on the surface could also generate enough oxygen, but Dalba doesn't. Chemistry involving water and UV light [open, DOI: 10.1038/srep13977] [DX] can also release oxygen. But the amount of water on Earth is insufficient to account for the requisite oxygen content, so he thinks that the presence of water on other planets wouldn't make enough oxygen there either.

Atomic oxygen ions as ionospheric biomarkers on exoplanets (DOI: 10.1038/s41550-017-0375-y) (DX)

Related: Nitrogen in Ancient Rocks a Sign of Early Life
Oxygen Ions From Earth Escape to the Moon
Researchers Suffocate Hopes of Life Support in Red Dwarf "Habitable Zones"
Seven Earth-Sized Exoplanets, Including Three Potentially Habitable, Identified Around TRAPPIST-1
Cosmic Methyl Chloride Detection Complicates the Search for Life on Exoplanets
Mars Colonists Could Produce Oxygen by Making a Plasma Out of Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide
Analysis of Microfossils Finds that Microbial Life Existed at Least 3.5 Billion Years Ago
To Detect Life on Other Planets, Look for Methane, Carbon Dioxide, and an Absence of Carbon Monoxide


Original Submission

posted by martyb on Sunday February 18 2018, @06:09PM   Printer-friendly
from the they-don't-like-"Like"-buttons dept.

Facebook loses Belgian privacy case, faces fine of up to $125 million

A Belgian court threatened Facebook on Friday with a fine of up to 100 million euros ($125 million) if it continued to break privacy laws by tracking people on third-party websites.

In a case brought by Belgium's privacy watchdog, the court also ruled that Facebook had to delete all data it had gathered illegally on Belgian citizens, including people who were not Facebook users themselves.

Facebook, which will be fined 250,000 euros a day or up to 100 million euros if it does not comply with the court's judgment, said in a statement it would appeal the ruling.

Also at The Guardian.


Original Submission

posted by martyb on Sunday February 18 2018, @03:48PM   Printer-friendly
from the off-base-transactions dept.

[Update] There have been new developments to this story:

According to Techcrunch:

Yesterday, we wrote that Coinbase customers were being charged multiple times for past transactions.

While some speculated that the erroneous withdraws were down to a Coinbase engineering issue, Coinbase issued a statement saying it wasn’t liable for the duplicate charges. The blame, instead, rested with Visa for the way it handled a migration of merchant categories for cryptocurrencies, Coinbase said.

While you can read my post yesterday for an in-depth description of what happened, the basic gist is that about a month of old transactions were refunded and recharged under a different merchant category. Many users saw the recharge come through before the refund processed, making it look like they were double charged. Honestly, the issue was likely exacerbated by existing payment rails — it’s normal for refunds to take multiple days to show up on credit and debit statements.

Here is the joint statement by Visa and Worldpay (Coinbase):

Over the last two days, some customers who used a credit or debit card at Coinbase may have seen duplicate transactions posted to their cardholder accounts.

This issue was not caused by Coinbase.

Worldpay and Coinbase have been working with Visa and Visa issuing banks to ensure that the duplicate transactions have been reversed and appropriate credits have been posted to cardholder accounts. All reversal transactions have now been issued, and should appear on customers’ credit card and debit card accounts within the next few days. We believe the majority of these reversals have already posted to accounts. If you continue to have problems with your credit or debit card account after this reversal period, including issues relating to card fees or charges, we encourage you to contact your card issuing bank.

We deeply regret any inconvenience this may have caused customers.

The original story follows below.

A growing number of Coinbase customers are complaining that the cryptocurrency exchange withdrew unauthorized money out of their accounts. In some cases, this drained their linked bank accounts below zero, resulting in overdraft charges.

In a typical anecdote posted on Reddit, one user said they purchased Bitcoin, Ether, and Litecoin for a total of $300 on February 9th. A few days later, the transactions repeated five times for a total of $1,500, even though the user had not made any more purchases. That was enough to clear out this user's bank account, they said, resulting in fees.

"My bank account went from very comfortable to negatives balance, not to mention extra $5 charges, and overdraft fees," the user wrote. "As a result my rent check bounced, and my bank went further into negative for a NSF charge for $25. My landlord is not a nice person and is on my CASE and I have nothing to offer him. I am FREAKING OUT."

Coinbase representatives have been responding to similar complaints on Reddit for about two weeks, but the volume of complaints seems to have spiked over the last 24 hours. Similar complaints have popped up on forums and Twitter.

Source: The Verge


Original Submission

posted by martyb on Sunday February 18 2018, @01:27PM   Printer-friendly
from the improved-outlook-on-improving-outlooks dept.

New studies zero in on roots of depression and why ketamine reverses it

[There's] been significant progress in unravelling the confusion over ketamine, with researchers identifying a ketamine derivative that tackles depression with far fewer side effects. And this week, a team of researchers at China's Zhejiang University announced that they've figured out where in the brain ketamine acts when it blocks depression, a finding that gives us significant insights into the biology of the disorder.

The new studies rely on the work of a number of other labs, which have identified a specific structure deep in the brain that's associated with depression. Called the lateral habenula, it's been associated with a variety of activities, the most relevant of which seems to be the processing of unpleasant outcomes and punishment. Electrodes implanted there have been used to relieve depression in at least one instance.

To test whether this might be the site of ketamine's activity, one team of researchers infused the drug directly into the lateral habenula of rats with depression-like symptoms; it blocked them. So did a separate chemical that inhibits the same proteins that ketamine acts on. Tracking the activity in the area, the researchers were able to show that there are bursts of activity in rats with symptoms of depression that are absent in healthy rats. The drugs that blocked depression suppressed these bursts.

Ketamine blocks bursting in the lateral habenula to rapidly relieve depression (DOI: 10.1038/nature25509) (DX)

Astroglial Kir4.1 in the lateral habenula drives neuronal bursts in depression (DOI: 10.1038/nature25752) (DX)

Related: FDA Designates MDMA as a "Breakthrough Therapy" for PTSD; Approves Phase 3 Trials
Study Suggests Psilocybin "Resets" the Brains of Depressed People
Ketamine Reduces Suicidal Thoughts in Depressed Patients


Original Submission