2024-03-21
etc
-
Banning the purchase of sex increases cases of rape: evidence from Sweden
-
Flightradar24’s new GPS jamming map | Flightradar24 Blog
As part of the ADS-B messages we receive from each aircraft, the Navigation integrity category (NIC) encodes the quality and consistency of navigational data received by the aircraft. The NIC value informs how certain the aircraft is of its position by providing a radius of uncertainty. The larger the radius value, the less certain the position update. We use the NIC values broadcast by aircraft passing through a particular area over time to calculate GPS jamming and interference.
-
(2017) Sorting 2 Metric Tons of Lego
Lego is normally assembled by childrens hands, but a bit of gravity and some moving machine parts will sometimes do an excellent job of partially assembling a car or some other object. This tendency is especially pronounced when it comes to building bridges, and I’ve yet to find a hopper configuration wide and deep enough that a random assortment of Lego could not form a pretty sturdy bridge across the span.
-
Not all cultures value happiness over other aspects of well-being
Horseshit
-
They panic-bought bidets during the pandemic. It changed their lives. - The Washington Post
Bidets — which clean you up with a stream of water, reducing the need for tissue — certainly weren’t the only items that people waited months for during that strange time. But while many have regretted buying their Pelotons or even their homes, those who installed the bathroom fixture at the height of the Great Toilet Paper Shortage of 2020 are far from remorseful. Instead, they’ve become true believers, evangelizing to family and friends and trying to help the United States catch up with the rest of the world on bidet use.
-
People Hate the Idea of Car-Free Cities–Until They Live in One
-
Deeply Unhappy Gen Z and Millennials Cause U.S. Drop in Global Happiness Ranking
-
We rely on lithium batteries – there's a growing array of alternatives
-
Record numbers of wealthy Americans are looking for ways to live overseas
-
Golfers demand that L.A. officials stop booming black market in tee times
Electric / Self Driving cars
celebrity gossip
Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering
-
Police Scotland hate crime training leaked | The Herald
Police Scotland has promised that it will investigate every hate crime complaint reported, despite the force adopting a “proportionate response” approach to other crimes.The slide from the training module deals with “how might threatening and or abusive material be communicated.” It reads: “The different ways in which a person may communicate material to another person are by: displaying, publishing or distributing the material, for example on a sign, on the internet through websites, blogs, podcasts, social media etc, either directly, or by forwarding or repeating material that originates from a third party, through printed media such as magazine publications or leaflets.” It then goes on to say “giving, sending, showing or playing the material to another person” listing examples of “through online streaming, by email, playing a video, through public performance of a play.”
Musk
-
Elon Musk reveals Twitter had FBI ‘portal that auto-deleted all comms’ after 2 weeks.
-
Musk's X Suspends Accounts That Reveal a Neo-Nazi Cartoonist's Alleged Identity
X has locked and suspended the accounts of journalists and researchers who shared the alleged identity of a neo-Nazi cartoonist known as Stonetoss after the cartoonist appealed to site owner Elon Musk. The incident, critics say, highlights once again how Musk has not only welcomed extremists onto his platform but has repeatedly boosted their conspiracies, engaged with their accounts, and seems to have protected them from scrutiny.
This policy change could possibly be in response to a post last month from Musk when he wrote, “Any doxxing, which includes revealing real names, will result in account suspension.” Still, in an interview with Don Lemon released on Monday, Musk said that moderation of hate speech is akin to “censorship.”
“This is completely arbitrary and under Twitter's own community standards it says that a name is never considered private information,” Caraballo tells WIRED. “There's an immense double standard here of the neo-Nazi comic guy being protected” by X. But then, she says, “The people that do this to anyone on the left are not only followed by [Musk] but are boosted by him. It's completely inconsistent.” To her, it seems that whoever Musk favors gets protected, and anyone else is banned. “This is also a pretext for them to be able to go after anyone that they dislike,” Caraballo says.”
Trump / War against the Right / Jan6
-
The Supreme Court declined to take up the case of Couy Griffin, former Otero County, New Mexico Commissioner and the founder of Cowboys for Trump. He was barred from holding public office again after he was convicted of trespassing on U.S. Capitol grounds. While the door for using the clause against Trump has been slammed shut, the court’s actions in Griffin’s case show that it is wide open for Democrats who want to use it against any right-leaning individual who was present at the Capitol building during the riot. There can be no doubt that Griffin will not be the last candidate to face this challenge.
-
Trump needs a $464M bond in six days. What if he can't get it?
If Mr Trump cannot find a way to pay the fraud judgement or secure a bond by 25 March, the New York Attorney General Letitia James can begin to collect the fee and take his assets. They can take any of his buildings - not just those in New York - including the 58-floor Trump Tower and his sprawling Florida club, Mar-a-Lago. Mr Epner said the state could seize multiple assets, as none of Mr Trump's properties on their own appear to be worth $450m.
-
Donald Trump may not pay bond — and instead let Letitia James seize Trump Tower: insiders
-
Take a claim where no money was lost," O'Leary said, adding, "There was no fraud here in the context of actually people losing money." He said, "This may be great for the attorney general, but this is not good for America." "Forget about Trump. Do you think this is good for business in New York? You think this is good for business in America?" he continued.
Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp
-
People with hypermobility may be more prone to long Covid, study suggests
Dr Jessica Eccles, from Brighton and Sussex Medical School, and her colleagues had been investigating a potential link between hypermobility, myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) and fibromyalgia (a condition that causes pain all over the body), when the Covid pandemic hit. “We started thinking, if hypermobility is potentially a factor in ME/CFS, is it also a factor in long Covid?” Eccles said.
The research, published in BMJ Public Health, found that people with hypermobile joints were about 30% more likely to say they hadn’t fully recovered from Covid-19 than those with normal joints, and were significantly more likely to be affected by high levels of fatigue.
Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts
Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising
-
Microsoft commits to two more non-subscription Office editions
-
Reddit power users balk at chance to participate in IPO as debut nears
-
YouTube requires disclosure of AI-generated content on the platform
-
FCC investigating Amazon over the marketing and sale of outlawed products
The FCC does not always disclose ongoing investigations. It did so in a statement to NBC News after the news organization reported that some retailers and drone technology companies were marketing jammers online, despite FCC warnings that jammers are illegal. “We have several ongoing investigations into retailers, including Amazon, for potential violations of Commission rules related to the marketing and sale of equipment without proper FCC authorization,” FCC spokesperson Jonathan Uriarte said in the statement.
TechSuck / Geek Bait
-
especially pertinent for me today as I’ve just located a classic buffer overrun bug in a client’s code, written in a memory-safe language, but using an ‘unsafe’ construct. This bug has been present for a little over a year. It was always a very intermittent thing, recently manifesting as crashes during managed garbage collection. The memory-safe language was never a suspect. We have a system where networking is done by native C++ code which hosts the memory-safe execution environment, and so it was always the C++ code where the bug had to be…
-
Five Eyes issue another China Volt Typhoon warning • The Register
The alert also encourages cyber security best practices – such as turning on logging for all applications and systems, and storing these logs in a central system. This can help security teams detect "living off the land" techniques, which involve using legitimate admin tools and software, rather than installing custom malware, to blend in and avoid being detected by security tools. Pretty much every Volt Typhoon warning we've seen, from both government agencies and private-sector threat hunters, has observed that this China state-backed cybercrime gang is especially adept at living off the land.
-
I wrote a driver for the Badger2040 e-ink and discovered unexpected things
The world of e-paper displays is one of the most undocumented you can find: this is the unfortunate side effects of patented technologies, as there is a strong incentive to avoid disclosing useful information, with the effect of slowing down software progresses towards programming these kind of displays.
-
The AMD tinybox is on hold until we can build and run the firmware on our GPUs | Hacker News
-
Nvidia turns up the AI heat with 1,200W Blackwell GPUs
reaching Blackwell's full potential will require switching over to liquid cooling. In a liquid-cooled configuration, Nvidia says the chip can output 1,200W of thermal energy when pumping out the full 20 petaFLOPS of FP4.
AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World
Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO
Crypto con games
Economicon / Business / Finance
Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making
-
Supreme Court allows Texas to enforce state deportation law - SCOTUSblog
-
Appeals Court Reinstates Hold On Texas Immigration Law
A federal appeals court issued an order late on Tuesday that reinstates a hold blocking Texas from enforcing a law that enables local law enforcement to arrest suspected illegal immigrants. This decision came from a three-judge panel of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, voting 2-1 to overturn a previous ruling made by another panel of the same court that granted an administrative stay of the law’s implementation. This came hours after the U.S. Supreme Court’s conservative majority rejected an emergency request from the Biden administration to review the administrative stay ordered by the 5th Circuit’s prior panel.
In other words, as of 10:44 EDT, less than nine hours after the Supreme Court had allowed it to go into effect, SB4 was back on hold, because the Fifth Circuit had “dissolved” the administrative stay that had been blocking Judge Ezra’s injunction. (Part of the problem with describing these developments is that words terms like “hold” and “in effect” could be describing the law itself or Ezra’s injunction against it.)
SB4 is now on hold, and is very likely to remain on hold at least through the April 3 oral argument on the merits. And for what it’s worth, I expect it to remain on hold thereafter, as well—either because the merits panel affirms Judge Ezra’s preliminary injunction, or because it stays any reversal thereof. Either way, the Supreme Court is going to eventually have to resolve this case—but it might have the luxury of doing so through an appeal that it gives plenary consideration to this fall, rather than an emergency application that forces it to act next week.
-
Couple weeks ago they were hoping to get $3.5B Intel to Receive $8.5B in Grants to Build Chip Plants (Archive)
President Biden plans to announce on Wednesday that his administration will award up to $8.5 billion in grants to Intel, a major investment to bolster the nation’s semiconductor production, during a tour of battleground states meant to sell his economic agenda.
In addition to the grants, the federal government is planning to award Intel up to $11 billion in loans on what the company characterized as generous terms. Intel is also expected to claim federal tax credits that could cover 25 percent of the expense of its U.S. expansion projects, which are expected to cost more than $100 billion over five years.
-
Joe Biden’s Interview With Special Counsel Hur Is Worse Than You’ve Heard.
Biden has simply lost touch with reality. He said these things because his mental capacity is so impaired that he is no longer capable of functioning as the chief executive of any significant organization, much less the most United States government. But his enablers continue to cover for him, endangering the Country further.
-
U.S. Announces Rules Aimed at Phasing Out Gas Cars (Archive)
The Biden administration on Wednesday issued one of the most significant climate regulations in the nation’s history, a rule designed to ensure that the majority of new passenger cars and light trucks sold in the United States are all-electric or hybrids by 2032. The rule increasingly limits the amount of pollution allowed from tailpipes over time so that, by 2032, more than half the new cars sold in the United States would most likely be zero-emissions vehicles in order for carmakers to meet the standards. The standards would also save the average American driver about $6,000 in reduced fuel and maintenance over the life of a vehicle, the E.P.A. estimated.
Former President Donald J. Trump, who is campaigning to retake the White House from Mr. Biden in November, has sought to weaponize electric vehicles, repeating false claims during campaign rallies about their performance and affordability and using increasingly heated rhetoric. Most recently, he warned of a “blood bath” in the middle of a remarks about electric vehicles.
-
Watch Live: Chaos Breaks Out As Hunter Biden Ex-Biz Partners Testify | ZeroHedge
-
Democratic cities that welcomed migrants are starting to roll back aid.
Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security
-
Iran and China may target US water supplies in cyber attacks, warns Biden administration
Jake Sullivan, Joe Biden’s national security adviser, sent a warning to state governors asking them to be on guard for potential cyber attacks on their critical infrastructure systems. The warning letter was co-authored by Michael Regan, the head of the US Environmental Protection Agency and made public on Tuesday. In it, they cited ongoing threats from hackers linked to the governments of Iran and China and warned hackers associated with both states have previously attacked water systems.
-
Mystery among the vines: Why is the FBI probing some of Napa Valley's wineries?
External Security / Militaria / Diplomania
World
Health / Medicine
-
DNA Tests Are Uncovering the True Prevalence of Incest (Archive)
In 1975, around the time of Steve’s birth, a psychiatric textbook put the frequency of incest at one in a million. But this number is almost certainly a dramatic underestimate. The stigma around openly discussing incest, which often involves child sexual abuse, has long made the subject difficult to study. In the 1980s, feminist scholars argued, based on the testimonies of victims, that incest was far more common than recognized, and in recent years, DNA has offered a new kind of biological proof. Widespread genetic testing is uncovering case after secret case of children born to close biological relatives—providing an unprecedented accounting of incest in modern society.
The geneticist Jim Wilson, at the University of Edinburgh, was shocked by the frequency he found in the U.K. Biobank, an anonymized research database: One in 7,000 people, according to his unpublished analysis, was born to parents who were first-degree relatives—a brother and a sister or a parent and a child. “That’s way, way more than I think many people would ever imagine,” he told me. And this number is just a floor: It reflects only the cases that resulted in pregnancy, that did not end in miscarriage or abortion, and that led to the birth of a child who grew into an adult who volunteered for a research study.
-
More than 50,000 Americans died by suicide in 2023–more than any year on record
Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda
-
Swept away: $500k sand dune built to protect US homes disappears in days
-
Dutch court ruling considers national airline guilty of greenwashing
-
How does perception of climate protest influence support for climate action?
-
Taxpayer-funded petrochemical plants are polluting communities, report finds
It's one of 50 plastics plants nationwide built or expanded over the last decade to take advantage of plentiful natural gas from the U.S. fracking boom. Many of those plants routinely break environmental laws, according to a new report from the nonprofit watchdog group Environmental Integrity Project – and taxpayers are often footing part of the bill. Two-thirds of the plants received tax breaks or subsidies from state or local governments to encourage companies to locate within their borders, according to the report.