2024-01-28
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Humans can get their pets sick: Reverse zoonoses more common than once thought
- If a microbe goes one way, it will go both ways. When I worked at pet shops in the 1980s; this was known. Bird catch colds from people, fish are subject to stomach complaints: if you were sick you got told to avoid the animals. There was bird heavy places wouldn't hire me cuz of a chronic cough.
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Aviation sector sees no fast tech solution to GPS interference problem | Reuters
Global regulators, aviation security specialists and manufacturers failed to reach an agreement on a quick technical fix to the problem of GPS spoofing near war zones at meeting on Thursday, instead calling for better training of pilots to deal with the issue, according to two sources briefed on the talks. The first international meeting bringing together the sector was held on Thursday in Cologne, Germany,
The sector needs to keep some of the older technology in place as an alternative to worsening GPS challenges, officials said at the meeting, according to the sources. As GPS interference attacks become more sophisticated, technical solutions would have to be consistently updated, creating a game of cat-and-mouse, one of the sources said. A long-term solution also discussed was developing a second layer of authentication that would help check whether a GPS location is being spoofed. This technology has been developed under Europe's Galileo program, the sources said, but is not yet in broad use.
used by military Global Positioning System receivers to allow decryption of precision GPS observations, while the accuracy of civilian GPS receivers may be reduced by the United States military through Selective Availability (SA) and anti-spoofing (AS). However, on May 1, 2000 it was announced that SA was being discontinued, along with a United States Presidential Directive that no future GPS programs will include it. Before the advent of L2C, AS was meant to prevent access to dual-frequency observations to civilian users. allows satellite authentication, over-the-air rekeying, and contingency recovery.
Future GPS upgrades, such as M-Code, will provide additional improvements to anti-jam capabilities
- how long before Starlink is a viable location constellation?
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Depopulation and Decadence - by Brink Lindsey
I struggle to find the words to convey the scale of the failure, to express adequately what a dispiriting abdication and surrender this represents. After thousands of generations in which the lot of ordinary people was to eke out existence in the ever-present shadow of privation, hemmed in by the harsh constraints of disease and ignorance, we have finally reached the point where most people have the freedom and resources to shape their lives, at least to some extent, according to their own values and preferences – and now, here, at the cusp of a world unimaginably richer and fairer and more open with possibility than we have ever known, we collectively decide that we do not care enough to make this future come true. We do not care enough, indeed, to make any future come true.
Horseshit
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California Bill Calls for Tech to Make New Cars Unable to Speed
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(Jan 2021) Executed Chinese prisoners likely used in 'Real Bodies' exhibition
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Pleasure cruises, golf and tracing the family tree are not that fulfilling
Electric / Self Driving cars
celebrity gossip
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Kat Von D wins trial over unlicensed use of Miles Davis photo for tattoo
Celebrity tattoo artist Kat Von D prevailed in the copyright infringement trial over her unlicensed use of a photo of Miles Davis for the tattoo she inked on the arm of a friend. The jury in downtown LA on Friday took only a few hours to reject the claims by photographer Jeff Sedlik. He sued Von D because she hadn't approached him for a license to use the photo he took in 1989
Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering
Musk
- Don't do that, then: Tesla battery explodes in Cary home after being removed and charged inside
Trump / War against the Right / Jan6
Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp
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Measles is "growing global threat," CDC tells doctors in alert message
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COVID-19 pandemic perceived as less serious than other health problems, suggests 7-country survey.
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(Dec 2023) We are witnessing the mass memory-holing of the lockdown era
Very few, if any of the people in government today continue to defend the policies they put in place from 2020 to 2022. Some of them are indeed hooting and hollering about issues we’re all passionate about, but in a way that seeks to redirect attention away from their actions during this time.
The ugly truth is that a vast majority of our fellow Americans embraced the hysteria, and many took to aligning with the people in charge to target and demonize the small minority who spoke out against the collective overreaction to the “pandemic.” This is an era that most would simply rather not relitigate. For both the people in the halls of power and most of the population, they benefit by both recalibrating their politics to the current majority view, but also by sweeping this multi-year disgrace under the rug.
- Lest we forget: (Dec 2021) The unvaccinated are 'looking at a winter of severe illness and death': White House - ABC News
Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation
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The Domestic Terrorists of Tomorrow are Blocking Traffic Today
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Abortion investigations causing women 'life-changing harm', says UK expert
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What is the point of ESG ratings?
Some jurisdictions are moving to redefine ESG ratings. In the EU, funds can only be labelled as “green” if they invest in companies that follow the bloc’s own rules for clean investment and operations. Regulators around the world, including in the UK, are working to improve methodologies and transparency. Yet the very concept of a broad-brush industry “methodology” lends itself to imperfect results. The future, surely, will rest on rating agencies providing reliable raw data that investors can then integrate into their view of a company’s prospects.
- Like the "Credit Rating Agencies" that brought us the 2008 Crash?
Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts
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Five-year plan on decolonizing and Indigenizing curriculum and pedagogy
The strategic priorities provide the framework of the five-year strategic implementation plan for decolonizing and Indigenizing Concordia’s curriculum and pedagogy.
Decolonize and Indigenize curriculum and pedagogy university-wide: To critically evaluate and decentre Eurocentric knowledge systems across all academic programs university-wide; reconceptualize curriculum in ways that centre, weave and privilege Indigenous ways of knowing, lived experiences, histories and perspectives across the curriculum respectfully and meaningfully.
Cultural safety across diverse learning spaces – curriculum and pedagogical practices: To provide training and support for faculty development that focus on Indigenous pedagogical practices and intervention strategies to address ongoing systemic racism, tokenism, harmful stereotypes and micro-aggressions in the classroom and their impact on Indigenous students.
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Shunned in computer age, cursive makes a comeback in California
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Some Families Are Breaking the Rules to Apply for Financial Aid
Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising
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The FCC Is Taking Steps to Wind Down the Affordable Connectivity Program
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Disney Unveils the HoloTile Floor, Inching Us Closer to a Real-Life Holodeck
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Beeper pulls the plug on iMessage in response to Apple banning users
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Microsoft Teams went down around the world for over eight hours
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Apple's punitive compliance will burn its political and developer goodwill
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The important part is the linked GitHub comment from the primary maintainer (and owner) of Nitter. To save readers a click
Guest accounts have been removed, they weren't just led to believe that. With real accounts getting rate limited immediately and likely banned, I don't see any path forward for Nitter.
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The News Business Really Is Cratering - POLITICO
The cause of the business’ decline is simple. As tech analyst Benedict Evans succinctly put it in a post this week, “There’s very little you can say about the finances of the newspaper industry that you couldn’t have said 15 or 20 years ago. The old model went away: you had an oligopoly over both advertisers & readers, and real-estate agents and car dealers paid for your social purpose. Now they don’t need you.” Targeted advertising on the web has diminished the old advertisers’ complaint that 50 percent of their ad budgets are wasted and they just didn’t know which half. Now they do, and they avoid newspapers and magazines. Unless a publisher creates something so essential that readers are willing to pay for it — like the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal or POLITICO, which gets more than half of its revenue from paid subscribers — the sledding will be more than rough. It will be ruinous.
TechSuck / Geek Bait
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What are all those files? Answered: Inside .git
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I looked through attacks in my access logs. Here's what I found
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In major gaffe, hacked Microsoft test account was assigned admin privileges
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The first rolling-ball mouse · e-basteln
in parallel with the SRI developments, engineers at Telefunken in Konstanz, Germany, were also working on user interface devices. The trackball was known from radar workstations: A large, stationary ball that was rotated by hand, and needed to be permanently installed in the operating console. The Telefunken team was looking for a device that could be used with computer terminals, on a regular desk. In 1966, according to this interview, Rainer Mallebrein suggested to invert the trackball: Let a small ball roll across the desk and track its movements via two friction wheels – the invention of the ball mouse.
AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World
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AI’s Greatest Danger? The Humans Who Use It - Bloomberg
AI may severely limit, for instance, the status and earnings of the so-called “wordcel” class. It will displace many jobs that deal with words and symbols, or make them less lucrative, or just make those who hold them less influential. Knowing how to write well won’t be as valuable a skill five years from now, because AI can improve the quality of just about any text. Being bilingual (or tri- or quadrilingual, for that matter) will also be less useful, and that too has been a marker of highly educated status. Even if AIs can’t write better books than human authors, readers may prefer to spend their time talking to AIs rather than reading.
It is worth pausing to note how profound and unprecedented this development would be. For centuries, the Western world has awarded higher status to what I will call ideas people — those who are good at developing, expressing and putting into practice new ways of thinking. The Scientific and Industrial revolutions greatly increased the reach and influence of ideas people. AI may put that trend into reverse. It is not hard to imagine a world, less than 20 years from now, in which a skilled carpenter is seen to have better prospects — professional and otherwise — than an articulate lawyer.
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People are worried that AI will take everyone's jobs. We've been here before
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Following lawsuit, rep admits "AI" George Carlin was human-written
Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO
Crypto con games
Economicon / Business / Finance
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Business Insider CEO Barbara Peng announced that the company is laying off 8% of its staff
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Record number of Americans are homeless amid nationwide surge in rent
In December 2023, the U.S. median rent continued to see a year-over-year decline for the eighth month in a row, down -0.4% for 0-2 bedroom properties across the top 50 metros, a pace slightly slower than the -0.6% seen in November. The median asking rent was $1,713, down by $4 from last month and $63 (-3.5%) less than the peak seen in July 2022. However, it was still $309 (22.0%) higher than the same time in 2019 (pre-pandemic).
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Defying Inflation, Americans Have Kept Spending Money | ZeroHedge
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Remote employees are more likely to be laid off than in-office peers
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Nearly 25,000 tech workers were laid off in the first weeks of 2024. Why?
Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making
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Dave Simpson: So WE'RE Extreme? Are You Kidding Me? | Your Wyoming News Source
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US Aims to Announce Big Grants for Chip Plants by End of March
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(Dec 2023) China tried to influence the 2022 midterms, U.S. intelligence report says
There was no sign that foreign adversaries used cyberattacks to try to gain access to or tamper with U.S. election infrastructure or ballot counting, the report said.
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Bet that was the entire point: White House calls for legislation to stop Taylor Swift AI fakes
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Proposed Missouri Rule Change – Allow Senators to Challenge Each Other to a Duel
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Garry Tan tech CEO and campaign donor wishes death upon SF politicians
Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security
External Security / Militaria / Diplomania
Israel
Russia Bad / Ukraine War
China
Health / Medicine
Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda
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Texas cold leaves alligators 'frozen' underwater, but still alive
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Scale of methane leaks from fossil fuel production and landfills exposed
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White House rule dramatically deregulates wetlands, streams and drinking water
New research led by a team at the University of California, Berkeley, used machine learning to more accurately predict which waterways are protected by the Act. The analysis found that a 2020 Trump administration rule removed Clean Water Act protection for one-fourth of U.S. wetlands and one-fifth of U.S. streams, and also deregulated 30% of watersheds that supply drinking water to household taps. The research was published in Science.
The researchers trained a machine learning model to predict 150,000 jurisdictional decisions by the Army Corps. Each Corps decision interprets the Clean Water Act for one site and rule. The model predicts regulation across the U.S. under the Trump rule and its predecessor, the Supreme Court's "Rapanos" ruling, which had previously guided Corps decisions.
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Washington D.C. reaches record-breaking 80°F a week after snow
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Alligators freeze themselves in solid ice to survive US cold snap
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Hermit crabs are using trash as shells
- Except: Hermit crabs choose and often swap shells. Who knows, this could just be a fad. The more conservative crabs probably mock these youngsters for their flashy colors, even though human castoff glass and aluminum are probably lighter, stronger, objectively better for the purpose the crabs have. The old ways, living in the corpses of your neighbors, were better.