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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:108

posted by martyb on Sunday October 07 2018, @10:44PM   Printer-friendly

A couple of years ago the Ukraine was looking for investors to help build a renewable energy power plant inside the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. On October 5th, about 100 meters (330 feet) from the remains of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, Solar Chernobyl flipped the switch on their 1MW facility:

This first stage occupies about 4 acres, and authorities have offered over 6,000 acres (about 10 square miles) for solar farms. Ultimately, as much as 100 MW of solar power could be constructed. The area is already well set up with connections to the power grid. The four nuclear reactors could produce up to 4,000 MW.

Two previous solar-energy farms—with 82 and 100 MW capacity—were built in the Crimea region of Ukraine, which has been annexed by Russia, cutting off Ukraine's supply. Russia and Ukraine have long-running disputes over natural-gas supplies that are so extensive, there's a Wikipedia page devoted to them. Ukraine still relies on Russian[sic] for nuclear fuel for other power plants, and for coal, which remains a significant energy source in the country.

Also at Gizmodo, Phys.org.


Original Submission

posted by chromas on Sunday October 07 2018, @08:23PM   Printer-friendly
from the Look!-Up-in-the-sky! dept.

[Update: launch occurred on time, first stage separation and landing were successful, satellite release into orbit successful. And it IS rocket science that they made look easy. --martyb]

Spacex Will Attempt to Make a Historic West Coast Landing Sunday Night:

This will be SpaceX's 17th launch attempt this year.

[...] On Sunday night, SpaceX is scheduled to launch a Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, which is a couple of hours north of Los Angeles. While the company has landed several first stage boosters on a drone ship offshore from California, until now it has not attempted to land at a site along the coast. But now it has completed the "Landing Zone 4" facility and received the necessary federal approvals for rockets to make a vertical landing there.

[...] This will be SpaceX's 17th launch attempt this year, bringing the company close to tying its record-setting pace of 18 launches last year. With as many as half a dozen launch attempts left this year, SpaceX should easily surpass its 2017 total, barring a major accident.

This Block 5 first stage of the Falcon 9 rocket has previously flown once before, launching 10 Iridium NEXT satellites into a polar orbit 625km above the Earth. It returned to a drone ship off the West Coast after that flight. The payload launching Sunday night, the SAOCOM 1A satellite for Argentina's Space Agency, weighs less than a lot of the Falcon 9 payloads launched into a Sun synchronous orbit several hundred kilometers above the Earth. Therefore, the first stage will have ample fuel to return to the new coastal landing site.

SpaceX is also likely to try and retrieve one-half of the Falcon 9 rocket's payload fairing. It has come close to catching these before with its large, catcher's-mitt shaped net attached to a boat, but it has yet to succeed.

SpaceFlightNow reports:

Launch time: Approx. 0221 GMT on 8th (10:22 p.m. EDT; 7:22 p.m. PDT on 7th)
Launch site: SLC-4E, Vandenberg Air Force Base, California
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket will launch the SAOCOM 1A for CONAE, Argentina's space agency. SAOCOM 1A is the first of two SAOCOM 1-series Earth observation satellites designed to provide radar imagery to help emergency responders and monitor the environment, including the collection of soil moisture measurements.

Launch will be live streamed on YouTube starting approximately 15 minutes before launch. Backup launch time is on Thursday.


Original Submission

posted by martyb on Sunday October 07 2018, @06:02PM   Printer-friendly
from the go-£-sand dept.

Banksy Painting Self-Destructs After Fetching $1.4 Million at Sotheby's

The British street artist Banksy pulled off one of his most spectacular pranks on Friday night, when one of his trademark paintings appeared to self-destruct at Sotheby's in London after selling for $1.4 million at auction.

The work, "Girl With Balloon," a 2006 spray paint on canvas, was the last lot of Sotheby's "Frieze Week" evening contemporary art sale. After competition between two telephone bidders, it was hammered down by the auctioneer Oliver Barker for 1 million pounds, more than three times the estimate and a new auction high for a work solely by the artist, according to Sotheby's.

"Then we heard an alarm go off," Morgan Long, the head of art investment at the London-based advisory firm Fine Art Group, who was sitting in the front row of the room, said in an interview on Saturday. "Everyone turned round, and the picture had slipped through its frame." The painting, mounted on a wall close to a row of Sotheby's staff members, had been shredded, or at least partially shredded, by a remote-control mechanism on the back of the frame.

[...] Perhaps the shredded "Girl With Balloon" might eventually also prove a lucrative investment. Banksy pronounced the painting "going, going, gone" on his Instagram account, quoting Picasso: "The urge to destroy is also a creative urge." (The quote is often attributed to Picasso, but also to Mikhail Bakunin, the Russian anarchist who died five years before Picasso was born.) But the painting was neatly shredded and could easily be backed on another canvas by a competent conservator. Thanks to the publicity of this stunt, could the painting now be even more desirable as a piece of auction history?

According to the artist, a shredder was secretly installed into the frame a few years ago in case the painting was ever put up for auction.

"Banksy is an anonymous England-based street artist, vandal, political activist, and film director."

Also at NPR and Engadget.


Original Submission

posted by chromas on Sunday October 07 2018, @03:41PM   Printer-friendly
from the privatize-the-public dept.

The Globe and Mail has an editorial about the many disadvantages of the upcoming Sidewalk Toronto surveillance project. If one sets aside the repeated conflation of copyright, patents, trademarks, and trade secrets under a single, misleading moniker, the editorial covers how much control over public resources and public spaces is being relinquished to private companies without transparency or accountability, especially in regards to surveillance data collected.

With politicians rushing to show Canada's innovation chops, "smart cities" have emerged as their new frontier. Most consequential of these is a high-profile agreement between Waterfront Toronto and Sidewalk Labs, a subsidiary of Google's parent company Alphabet. A year ago, Canadians were treated to an announcement involving the leaders of all three levels of government gushing and fawning about an enlightened urban partnership with a foreign company whose business model is built exclusively on the principle of mass surveillance.

The most insightful comments during the public announcement came when Eric Schmidt, Google's former executive chair, said they had realized their long-running dream for "someone to give us a city and put us in charge." He also thanked Canadian taxpayers for paying, creating and transferring the core artificial-intelligence technology he credits for Alphabet's success, making it the world's third most valuable corporation. The Google parent's past and future growth are based on the intellectual property (IP) they own and the data they control.


Original Submission

posted by martyb on Sunday October 07 2018, @01:14PM   Printer-friendly
from the have-you-ever-programmed-a-6502? dept.

Adafruit visited the history of the LOGO "turtle graphics" language not long ago.

Now on Twitter, folks have found the source code for the LOGO program used on Apple II computers. Source on GitHub.

It turns out that the program was written on a DEC PDP-10 minicomputer running the Incompatible Timesharing System (ITS).

I'd take it that the code is in 6502 assembly and the program works the whole Apple II memory map for functionality. Did ITS have a 6502 cross-compiler or did the MIDAS program have separate target environments?

Very interesting programming archaeology – see the source code yourself along with the full PDP-10 ITS image still maintained today.

-- submitted from IRC


Original Submission

posted by mrpg on Sunday October 07 2018, @10:53AM   Printer-friendly
from the sorry-me-please-banks dept.

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

'Desperate' North Korea turns to bank hacking sprees to rake in much-needed dosh

Hackers backed by the North Korea government are attempting to ransack foreign banks to raise funds for the cash-strapped hermit nation.

Researchers at FireEye say that a gang dubbed APT38* are trying to pull off a billion-dollar money grab, and are working separate from the infamous Nork-sponsored Lazarus group.

According to FireEye, the APT38 group is apparently operating as a subset of a larger North Korean hacking operation known as TEMP.Hermit. The bank-focused group is thought to be behind North Korean cyber-attacks on the 2016 Bank of Bangladesh heist and the 2018 Banco de Chile attack, and others, incidents that had previously only been believed to have been TEMP.Hermit operations.


Original Submission

posted by mrpg on Sunday October 07 2018, @08:32AM   Printer-friendly
from the our-fortune-looks-bleak dept.

Following up on our story from Thursday — Chinese Spy Chips Allegedly Inserted Into Amazon, Apple, etc. Datacenters by Super Micro — there is a report from Ars Technica Bloomberg stands by Chinese chip story as Apple, Amazon ratchet up denials:

On Thursday morning, Bloomberg published a bombshell story claiming that the Chinese government had used tiny microchips to infiltrate the data centers of Apple and Amazon. Apple and Amazon, for their part, responded with unusually specific and categorical denials. It's clear that someone is making a big mistake, but 24 hours later, it's still not clear whether it's Bloomberg or the technology companies.

On Thursday afternoon, Apple laid out its case against the story in a lengthy post on its website. The post specifically disputed a number of Bloomberg's claims. For example, Bloomberg says that after discovering a mysterious chip in one of its servers, Apple "reported the incident to the FBI," leading to an investigation. Apple flatly denies that this occurred.

"No one from Apple ever reached out to the FBI about anything like this," Apple writes. "We have never heard from the FBI about an investigation of this kind."

Amazon's response has been equally emphatic and detailed. "There are so many inaccuracies in ‎this article as it relates to Amazon that they're hard to count," Amazon wrote on Thursday. "We never found modified hardware or malicious chips in servers in any of our data centers."

Yet Bloomberg reporter Jordan Robertson, one of the article's co-authors, has stood by his story. In a Thursday afternoon appearance on Bloomberg TV, Robertson said that he talked to 17 anonymous sources—both in US intelligence agencies and at affected companies—who confirmed the story.

So what's going on? It's clear that someone isn't telling the truth, but it's hard to tell what the real story is.

A comment to that story on Ars noted:

The (alleged) chip is associated with the BMC (baseboard management controller). It has indirect access to everything that the BMC can touch, which is pretty much everything in the system.

See, also, coverage on Hackaday where a comment identifies the particular board in question as being a MicroBlade MBI-6128R-T2. A link to a tweet reveals a picture of the board in question and a followup picture showing where the extra device would be located.


Original Submission

posted by mrpg on Sunday October 07 2018, @06:11AM   Printer-friendly
from the inner-beauty dept.

Heavily Littered Yellowstone Geyser Spews Tons of Trash Into Air During Eruption

Ear Spring geyser, located in Yellowstone National Park, had long been engorged by years of trash left inside of it by ill-mannered tourists. So naturally when the geyser erupted in September, unleashing its usual blast of searing-hot water and air, a nasty wave of dreck followed.

[...] The garbage had clearly been building within the geyser for a while, as evidenced by the breadth of the objects retrieved. A pyrex funnel, a rather large cement block, three cigarette butts, a no.2 pencil, a plastic spoon, a Solo jazz cup, a baby pacifier and various other things were found after Ear Spring's 30-foot belch on September 15.

The garbage blast was also historic: Some of the objects are believed to date back to the 1930s and are primed to be "inventoried by curators and may end up in Yellowstone's archives," per the NPS.

Also at Motherboard.


Original Submission

posted by martyb on Sunday October 07 2018, @03:51AM   Printer-friendly
from the worth-a-thousand-words? dept.

Selfie deaths: 259 people reported dead seeking the perfect picture

The quest for extreme selfies killed 259 people between 2011 and 2017, a 2018 global study has revealed.

Researchers at the US National Library of Medicine recommend that 'no selfie zones' should be introduced at dangerous spots to reduce deaths.

These would include the tops of mountains, tall buildings and lakes, where many of the deaths occurred.

Drowning, transport accidents and falling were found to be the most common cause of death.

But death by animals, electrocution, fire and firearms also appeared frequently in reports from around the world.

Also at The Hill and CNBC.

Selfies: A boon or bane? (open, DOI: 10.4103/jfmpc.jfmpc_109_18) (DX)


Original Submission

posted by chromas on Sunday October 07 2018, @01:30AM   Printer-friendly
from the the-doorstop-what-came-from-outer-space dept.

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Doorstop turns out to be meteorite worth $100K

A Michigan man curious about a rock he'd used for decades as a doorstop now knows its secret: it's a meteorite worth $100,000.

In fact, the nearly 23-pound hunk of iron and nickel is the sixth largest meteorite found in Michigan, according to the Smithsonian Museum and Central Michigan University.

David Mazurek said he took his doorstop to the university for examination after seeing reports in January of meteorite pieces selling for thousands of dollars.

[...] Mazurek said the meteorite came with a barn he bought in 1988 in Edmore. He said the farmer who sold him the property told him it landed in his backyard in the 1930s.

Also at CMU News; YouTube video


Original Submission

posted by martyb on Saturday October 06 2018, @11:09PM   Printer-friendly
from the further-privatizing dept.

Afghan officials reject push to privatize war

Afghan officials have rejected a proposal by Blackwater founder Erik Prince to have his private military contracting company take over the training and advising of the Afghan armed forces.

Prince lobbied several Afghan politicians on a recent trip to the country and has been discussing his proposal to privatize parts of the U.S. military mission in the country for over a year, according to Reuters.

But Afghan President Ashraf Ghani has repeatedly dismissed the idea. "Under no circumstances will the Afghan government and people allow the counterterrorism fight to become a private, for-profit business," Ghani's national security adviser said in a statement to Reuters Thursday.

U.S. Secretary of Defense James Mattis has also rejected the proposal, saying in August, "When Americans put their nation's credibility on the line, privatizing it is probably not a wise idea."

See also: The Last Americans Fighting in Afghanistan
17 years later, Americans tend to consider Afghanistan a failure


Original Submission

posted by chromas on Saturday October 06 2018, @09:25PM   Printer-friendly

Lawsuit seeks to stop FEMA's "Presidential Alert" system to cellphones citing First Amendment violation

A new lawsuit filed in New York is seeking to stop the implementation of FEMA's new "Presidential Alert" messaging system, an alert used for national emergencies that can be deployed by President Trump. Plaintiffs in Manhattan are suing Mr. Trump and FEMA Administrator Brock Long, claiming the alert system is a "violation of Americans' First and Fourth Amendment rights to be free from Government-compelled listening, as well as warrantless, non-consensual trespass into and seizure of their cellular devices."

Plaintiffs compare the alert system to "hijacking private property for the purpose of planting a Government-controlled loudspeaker in the home and on the person of every American." This new presidential alert is nationwide and only used for advance warning of national crises.

According to FEMA, the alert is not a text or SMS (short message service) but an audio and text warning that will display as a notification across a user's cellphone -- similar to the ones carriers receive during Amber Alerts and weather emergencies.

Previously: FEMA Emergency Test Message to be Sent to Most U.S. Cell Phones on Sept. 20 (or Oct. 3)
What to Expect From the U.S. Wireless Emergency Alert Test Today


Original Submission

posted by takyon on Saturday October 06 2018, @08:10PM   Printer-friendly
from the let-'er-rip dept.

Brett Kavanaugh has been confirmed as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. The vote was 50-48 in favor of Kavanaugh.

Senators Collins, Flake, and Manchin had already announced their intentions to confirm Kavanaugh before the vote was held. Senator Lisa Murkowski, who was previously ready to vote "no", agreed to vote "present" instead so that Senator Steve Daines could attend his daughter's wedding instead of being present in the Senate to support Kavanaugh.

SCOTUSBlog: Kavanaugh confirmed as 114th justice
Nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court

Previously: SCOTUS's Justice Anthony Kennedy to Retire
President Trump Nominates Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the US Supreme Court
Trump's Supreme Court Pick: ISPs Have 1st Amendment Right to Block Websites

posted by chromas on Saturday October 06 2018, @06:12PM   Printer-friendly
from the Do-you-want-the-wizard-or-the-skull? dept.

The Mormon Church and Governor Gary Herbert have come out in favor of medical cannabis legalization in Utah. However, the legislative compromise would be more restrictive for Utahans than a November 2018 ballot initiative:

The Mormon church joined lawmakers, the governor and advocates to back a deal on Thursday that would legalize medical marijuana in conservative Utah after months of fierce debate. The compromise comes as people prepare to vote in November on an insurgent medical marijuana ballot initiative that held its ground despite opposition from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

[...] The Utah-based faith had opposed the ballot proposal over fears it could lead to more broad use, but its ranking global leader, Jack Gerard, said leaders were "thrilled" to be a part of the effort to "alleviate human pain and suffering".

Though it still must go to a vote, the deal has the key backing of both the church and leaders of the Republican-dominated state legislature, who said the regulations in the hard-won agreement had their seal of approval. Unlike the ballot initiative, the compromise won't allow people to grow their own marijuana if they live too far from a dispensary. It also doesn't allow certain types of edible marijuana that could appeal to children, like cookies and brownies.

Some medical cannabis advocates are not on board with the deal:

Medical marijuana advocates are backing the deal to avoid wrangling and uncertainty that could continue if the ballot initiative passes. "There will be medical cannabis here in our day in Utah," said the advocate DJ Schanz. The two sides agreed to scale back media campaigns supporting and opposing the ballot measure known as Proposition 2.

Not all medical marijuana advocates were convinced: Christine Stenquist with the group Truce said she remained skeptical about the deal and urged continued support for the ballot proposal. Smoking marijuana would not be allowed under the ballot proposal. It instead allows edible forms, lotions or electronic cigarettes.


Original Submission

posted by takyon on Saturday October 06 2018, @03:41PM   Printer-friendly
from the remember-me? dept.

The Verge reports Microsoft pulls Windows 10 October 2018 Update after reports of documents being deleted:

Microsoft has stopped distributing its latest Windows 10 October 2018 Update. The software giant started rolling out the update during the company's Surface event earlier this week, but some Windows 10 immediately noticed their documents were being deleted. "We have paused the rollout of the Windows 10 October 2018 Update (version 1809) for all users as we investigate isolated reports of users missing some files after updating," says Microsoft on its support site for Windows Update.

Microsoft is now recommending that affected users contact the company directly, and if you've manually downloaded the October update then "please don't install it and wait until new media is available." Other Windows 10 users have been complaining that the Microsoft Edge browser and other store apps have been unable to connect to the internet after the October 2018 Update, and the update was even blocked on certain PCs due to Intel driver incompatibilities.

The "Ask Woody" blog notes:

My Recuva trick for restoring deleted data doesn't work all the time. Recuva itself doesn't work all the time, even in the best circumstances (particularly on solid state drives). This isn't one of those best circumstances.

Note the strategic timing of the announcement. Microsoft has known about this bug since October 2. I reported on it[*], along with a workaround that works most of the time, on October 4. They waited until early Saturday morning, October 6, to acknowledge the problem and pull the plug.

[*] It may not happen to all users, but the bug is especially nasty; here's the full title and subtitle of the above-linked story:

Did you upgrade to Win10 1809 and lose all of your documents and pictures? There's a fix for that. — If, in spite of my warnings, you upgraded to the latest version of Win10, and you lost all of your \Documents, \Pictures, \Music, \Videos or other folders, DON'T DO ANYTHING until you've tried this fix.

takyon: A user in our IRC channel says that the update deleted the contents of the user's Documents folder.

Also at ZDNet.


Original Submission