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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:46 | Votes:100

posted by martyb on Thursday July 19 2018, @10:45PM   Printer-friendly
from the We-could-keep-this-up-forever dept.

Aeon has an interesting article on bullshit:

We live in the age of information, which means that we also live in the age of misinformation. Indeed, you have likely come across more bullshit so far this week than a normal person living 1,000 years ago would in their entire lifetime. If we were to add up every word in every scholarly piece of work published prior to the Enlightenment, this number would still pale in comparison with the number of words used to promulgate bullshit on the internet in the 21st century alone.

If you find your head nodding, start shaking it. I’m bullshitting you.

Ha! I knew it!

How could I possibly know how much bullshit you have come across this week? What if you’re reading this on a Sunday? Who is a ‘normal’ person living 1,000 years ago? And how could I know how much bullshit they had to deal with?

It was very easy to construct this bullshit. Once I set out to impress rather than inform, a burden was lifted from my shoulders and placed onto yours. My opening statements could very well be true, but we have no way of knowing. Their truth or falsity were irrelevant to me, the bullshitter.

[...] In his book, On Bullshit (2005), Frankfurt noted that ‘most people are rather confident of their ability to recognise bullshit and to avoid being taken in by it’. However, more than 98 per cent of our participants rated at least one item in our bullshit receptivity scales to be at least somewhat profound. We are not nearly as good at detecting bullshit as we think.

So, how might you – the reader – vaccinate yourself against it? For a non-spiritualist, it might be relatively easy to recognise when Chopra or Oz are concerned less with the truth than selling books or entertaining viewers. But think back to my opening paragraph. Bullshit is much harder to detect when we want to agree with it. The first and most important step is to recognise the limits of our own cognition. We must be humble about our ability to justify our own beliefs. These are the keys to adopting a critical mindset – which is our only hope in a world so full of bullshit.


Original Submission

posted by mrpg on Thursday July 19 2018, @09:08PM   Printer-friendly
from the yes dept.

Phys.org:

[...] Recently, security researchers have found that some innovations have let secrets flow freely out of computer hardware the same way software vulnerabilities have led to cyberattacks and data breaches. The best known recent examples were the chip flaws nicknamed Spectre and Meltdown that affected billions of computers, smartphones and other electronic devices. On July 10, researchers announced they discovered new variants of those flaws exploiting the same fundamental leaks in the majority of microprocessors manufactured within the last 20 years.

This realization has led to calls from microchip industry leaders, including icons John Hennessy and David Patterson, for a complete rethinking of computer architecture to put security first. I have been a researcher in the computer architecture field for 15 years – as a graduate student and professor, with stints in industry research organizations – and conduct research in power-management, microarchitecture and security. It's not the first time designers have had to reevaluate everything they were doing. However, this awakening requires a faster and more significant change to restore users' trust in hardware security without ruining devices' performance and battery life.

Is Open Hardware the answer?


Original Submission

posted by mrpg on Thursday July 19 2018, @07:30PM   Printer-friendly
from the now-it-looks-like-the-20st-century dept.

VR rivals come together to develop a single-cable spec for VR headsets

Future generations of virtual reality headsets for PCs could use a single USB Type-C cable for both power and data. That's thanks to a new standardized spec from the VirtualLink Consortium, a group made up of GPU vendors AMD and Nvidia and virtual reality rivals Valve, Microsoft, and Facebook-owned Oculus.

The spec uses the USB Type-C connector's "Alternate Mode" capability to implement different data protocols—such as Thunderbolt 3 data or DisplayPort and HDMI video—over the increasingly common cables, combined with Type-C's support for power delivery. The new headset spec combines four lanes of HBR3 ("high bitrate 3") DisplayPort video (for a total of 32.4 gigabits per second of video data), along with a USB 3.1 generation 2 (10 gigabit per second) data channel for sensors and on-headset cameras, along with 27W of electrical power.

That much video data is sufficient for two 3840×2160 streams at 60 frames per second, or even higher frame rates if Display Stream Compression is also used. Drop the resolution to 2560×1440, and two uncompressed 120 frame per second streams would be possible.

Framerate is too low, and it's not wireless. Lame.

VirtualLink website. Also at The Verge.


Original Submission

posted by mrpg on Thursday July 19 2018, @06:02PM   Printer-friendly
from the now-it-looks-like-the-21st-century dept.

From Tufts University:

[...] "We've been able to take a new approach to bandages because of the emergence of flexible electronics," said Sameer Sonkusale, Ph.D. professor of electrical and computer engineering at Tufts University's School of Engineering and corresponding co-author for the study. "In fact, flexible electronics have made many wearable medical devices possible, but bandages have changed little since the beginnings of medicine. We are simply applying modern technology to an ancient art in the hopes of improving outcomes for an intractable problem."

The pH of a chronic wound is one of the key parameters for monitoring its progress. Normal healing wounds fall within the range of pH 5.5 to 6.5, whereas non-healing infected wounds can have pH well above 6.5. Temperature is also an important parameter, providing information on the level of inflammation in and around the wound. While the smart bandages in this study combine pH and temperature sensors, Sonkusale and his team of engineers have also developed flexible sensors for oxygenation – another marker of healing – which can be integrated into the bandage. Inflammation could also be tracked not just by heat, but by specific biomarkers as well.

Could smart bandages be re-usable?


Original Submission

posted by mrpg on Thursday July 19 2018, @04:39PM   Printer-friendly
from the AreYouDense.Com dept.

engadget taking on a piece of news from motherboard

Internet domains are becoming increasingly desirable, especially as the web becomes crowded and it becomes harder to find memorable addresses. However, one man unfortunately took this to a violent extreme. Iowa resident Sherman Hopkins Jr. has been sentenced to 20 years in federal prison for attempting to steal control of doitforstate.com (which doesn't currently point anywhere) in an armed robbery.

Hopkins pleaded guilty to invading a home in June 2017 and demanding that that [sic] the victim (Ethan Deyo) transfer the domain through GoDaddy while pointing a pistol at his head. When Deyo asked for the mailing address and phone number he needed to complete the domain, Hopkins pistol-whipped and tased him several times. Deyo managed to get control of the gun and shoot Hopkins, but only after Hopkins had shot him in the leg.

Domain name armed hijacking?

[Updated to correct typo in title: replaced "Robery" with "Robbery"... glad you had some fun at our expense in the comments!]


Original Submission

posted by mrpg on Thursday July 19 2018, @03:00PM   Printer-friendly
from the to-study dept.

NY Times:

A quarter-century ago, there were 56 teenagers in the labor force for every "limited service" restaurant — that is, the kind where you order at the counter.

Today, there are fewer than half as many, which is a reflection both of teenagers' decreasing work force participation and of the explosive growth in restaurants.

But in an industry where cheap labor is an essential component in providing inexpensive food, a shortage of workers is changing the equation upon which fast-food places have long relied. This can be seen in rising wages, in a growth of incentives, and in the sometimes odd situations that business owners find themselves in.

Too many restaurants, not enough teens to work in them.


Original Submission

posted by mrpg on Thursday July 19 2018, @01:33PM   Printer-friendly
from the 200-million???? dept.

Motherboard:

Back in 2012, developer Roberts Space Industries (RSI) launched a Kickstarter asking for money to fund Star Citizen—an ambitious space game in the mold of Wing Commander. It's 2018, and while parts of the game are playable in various forms, it's far from achieving what it set out to accomplish. So far, it's collected more than $200 million in funding from fans eager to play it.

Ken Lord was one of those fans, and an early backer of Star Citizen. He's got a Golden Ticket, a mark on his account that singles him out as an early member of the community. In April of 2013, Lord pledged $4,496 to the project. Five years later, the game still isn't out, and Lord wants his money back. RSI wouldn't refund it, so Lord took the developer to small-claims court in California.

It's a simple case of an investor who's upset he didn't get his money back, isn't it?


Original Submission

posted by mrpg on Thursday July 19 2018, @11:59AM   Printer-friendly
from the ratio dept.

El Reg:

The shape of the smartphone is changing as a fad turns into a long-term trend, a business analyst has noted.

Analyst outfit IHS Markit said it expected wide aspect ratios – either 18:9 or 18+:9 – to make up two-thirds of new device sales in Q3 of this year. At the start of 2017, the "traditional" 16:9 ratio display was seen on over 95 per cent of phones sold.

The taller, narrower shape is no longer a flagship feature, the company noted.

"Smartphone makers are now aggressively applying 18:9 aspect ratio of TFT LCD to their 2018 models even for mid-end and entry-level smartphones, instead of using high-priced flexible AMOLED panels," said IHS Markit's Hiroshi Hayase.

Still no slide-out keyboards. Lame.


Original Submission

posted by mrpg on Thursday July 19 2018, @10:30AM   Printer-friendly
from the RIP dept.

DW:

New DNA tests on bones of Russia's last czar, Nicholas II, and his family confirm they are authentic. Researchers exhumed Nicholas's father Alexander III — himself assassinated in 1881 — to prove "they are father and son."

The test results could lead to the Russian Orthodox Church recognizing the remains for a full burial. It said it would consider the findings and commended the progress of the investigation.

Nicholas II, his German-born wife and their five children were shot by Bolsheviks as a consequence of the October Revolution of 1917. The bodies of the last members of the Romanov dynasty were thrown into a mineshaft, before being burned and hurriedly buried by the killers. They were first tracked down by amateur historians in 1979, although the discovery was only revealed in 1991. The Russian Orthodox Church had recognized the ex-tsar as a martyred saint in 1981.

[Ed. note: Anastasia's supposed escape and possible survival was one of the most popular historical mysteries of the 20th century, False reports of survival]


Original Submission

posted by mrpg on Thursday July 19 2018, @09:09AM   Printer-friendly
from the nobody-thinks-of-the-doctors dept.

Bloomberg:

Americans may soon be able to get cholesterol-lowering medications and other widely used prescription drugs without seeing a doctor, a first step in what could amount to sweeping changes to how patients access treatments for chronic conditions.

The Food and Drug Administration in a draft guideline on Tuesday outlined how such a status, which the agency said could help lower health-care costs, would work. Patients could answer questions on a mobile-phone app to help determine whether they should be able to access a medication without a prescription.

"Our hope is that the steps we're taking to advance this new, more modern framework will contribute to lower costs for our health care system overall and provide greater efficiency and empowerment for consumers by increasing the availability of certain products that would otherwise be available only by prescription," FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb said in a statement.

Order your drugs from a smartphone app.


Original Submission

posted by mrpg on Thursday July 19 2018, @07:33AM   Printer-friendly
from the please-dont-adapt-anime dept.

BBC:

Video streaming services such as Netflix and Amazon Prime now have more subscribers than traditional pay TV services in the UK, new data from Ofcom has revealed.

The media regulator says British TV will have to change the way it operates if it wants to compete with the internet giants.

Sharon White, Ofcom's chief executive, says: "We'd love to see broadcasters such as the BBC work collaboratively with ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5 so that they have got that scale to compete globally, making shows together, co-producing great shows that all of us can watch.

"I think it would be great to see a British Netflix."

BrexitFlix?


Original Submission

posted by mrpg on Thursday July 19 2018, @06:02AM   Printer-friendly
from the z dept.

Phys.org:

Sawtooth swings—up-and-down ripples found in everything from stock prices on Wall Street to ocean waves—occur periodically in the temperature and density of the plasma that fuels fusion reactions in doughnut-shaped facilities called tokamaks. These swings can sometimes combine with other instabilities in the plasma to produce a perfect storm that halts the reactions. However, some plasmas are free of sawtooth gyrations thanks to a mechanism that has long puzzled physicists.

Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) have recently produced complex simulations of the process that may show the physics behind this mechanism, which is called "magnetic flux pumping." Unraveling the process could advance the development of fusion energy.

[...] In the PPPL simulations, magnetic flux pumping develops in "hybrid scenarios" that exist between standard regimes—which include high-confinement (H-mode) and low-confinement (L-mode) plasmas—and advanced scenarios in which the plasma operates in a steady state. In hybrid scenarios, the current remains flat in the core of the plasma while the pressure of the plasma stays sufficiently high.

This combination creates what is called "a quasi-interchange mode" that acts like a mixer that stirs up the plasma while deforming the magnetic field. The mixer produces a powerful effect that maintains the flatness of the current and prevents the sawtooth instability from forming. A similar process maintains the magnetic field that protects the Earth from cosmic rays, with the molten liquid in the iron core of the planet serving as mixer.

Will it bottle the lightning?


Original Submission

posted by mrpg on Thursday July 19 2018, @04:33AM   Printer-friendly
from the hack-the-planet-hack-the-DB dept.

Submitted via IRC for BoyceMagooglyMonkey

The US Department of Justice, Apple, and game maker Supercell, have been warned of a money laundering ring that uses fake Apple accounts and gaming profiles to make transactions with stolen credit/debit cards and then sells these game premiums on online sites for the group's profit.

This operation came to light in mid-June when security researchers from Kromtech Security came across a MongoDB database that had been left exposed online without authentication.

"As we examined the database we rapidly became aware that this was not your ordinary corporate database," said Kromtech researcher Bob Diachenko.

"This database appeared to belong to credit card thieves (commonly known as carders) and that it was relatively new, only a few months old," he added.

Source: Open MongoDB Database Exposes Mobile Games Money Laundering Operation


Original Submission

posted by mrpg on Thursday July 19 2018, @03:00AM   Printer-friendly
from the with-a-virus? dept.

Submitted via IRC for BoyceMagooglyMonkey

LabCorp, the US' biggest blood testing laboratories network, announced on Monday that hackers breached its IT network over the weekend.

"At this time, there is no evidence of unauthorized transfer or misuse of data," the company said. "LabCorp has notified the relevant authorities of the suspicious activity and will cooperate in any investigation."

[...] "LabCorp made the wise decision to shut down their entire network while determining the extent of the breach," Kothari added, suggesting that the hacker(s) could have very easily propagated through this interconnected network to reach other organizations.

Healthcare organizations are often the targets of hackers mainly due to the highly sensitive data they work with, which is worth more when crooks sell it online, rather than classic username-email-password combos.

Source: Hackers Breach Network of LabCorp, US' Biggest Blood Testing Laboratories


Original Submission

posted by mrpg on Thursday July 19 2018, @01:11AM   Printer-friendly
from the sim-pin dept.

A lot of companies, some quite big and prominent, fool people into thinking that a phone is a second authentication factor. Due to the transferability of the phone number associated with a random SIM card and the ease with which social engineering and even conspirators inside the carrier itself can be used to gain control of that number, it is not and can never be "something you have". That does not stop companies from pretending nor marks from playing along. Motherboard has an article about how the weaknesses around the SIM cards are becoming all the more frequently exploited to perpetrate massive fraud.

First, criminals call a cell phone carrier's tech support number pretending to be their target. They explain to the company's employee that they "lost" their SIM card, requesting their phone number be transferred, or ported, to a new SIM card that the hackers themselves already own. With a bit of social engineering—perhaps by providing the victim's Social Security Number or home address (which is often available from one of the many data breaches that have happened in the last few years)—the criminals convince the employee that they really are who they claim to be, at which point the employee ports the phone number to the new SIM card.

From Motherboard : The SIM Hijackers


Original Submission