News gathered 2024-04-30
(date: 2024-04-30 19:14:41)
U.S. Department of State Open House at NASA Headquarters
date: 2024-05-01, from: NASA breaking news
https://www.nasa.gov/image-article/u-s-department-of-state-open-house-at-nasa-headquarters/
Recall election targeting Alameda County District Attorney Pamela Price could fall to November ballot
date: 2024-05-01, from: San Jose Mercury News
Tim Dupuis, the county’s Registrar of Voters, cited a lengthy list of budgetary and logistical concerns in voicing his preference for delaying the recall question until November.
SF Giants blanked in Boston as Red Sox chase Logan Webb in fourth
date: 2024-05-01, from: San Jose Mercury News
Logan Webb and the Giants opened longest road trip this season by getting shut out 4-0 against the Boston Red Sox.
CSUN baseball clinches sweep over Roadrunners, extends its winning streak to eight
date: 2024-05-01, from: The Sundail (CSUN student paper)
CSUN wrapped up its three-game home series with a triumphant sweep over Cal State Bakersfield, extending its winning streak to eight. Outfielder Will Linberg’s exceptional performance set the pace during…
San Jose man arrested on suspicion of operating a brothel
date: 2024-05-01, from: San Jose Mercury News
Two human-trafficking survivors were identified at the scene and received resources, police said.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/04/30/san-jose-man-arrested-on-suspicion-of-operating-a-brothel/
Large numbers of NYPD begin entering Columbia University campus
date: 2024-05-01, from: San Jose Mercury News
The Columbia University Chapter of the American Association of University Professors said faculty’s efforts to help defuse the situation have been repeatedly ignored by the university’s administration despite school statutes that require consultation. The group warned of potential conflict between police officers nearby and protesters on campus.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/04/30/columbia-issues-shelter-in-place-as-nypd-masses-near-campus/
COC schedules information sessions for prospective board candidates
date: 2024-05-01, from: The Signal
News release Three seats on the Santa Clarita Community College District board of trustees, which oversees College of the Canyons, will be up for election in November. To provide information about the election process and the role of the trustees well in advance of the candidate filing period, the college will host three information sessions […]
The post COC schedules information sessions for prospective board candidates appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/04/coc-schedules-information-sessions-for-prospective-board-candidates/
China’s state media support protests on US campuses but not at home
date: 2024-05-01, from: VOA News USA
washington — State media in China, where social protest is strongly discouraged or punished, have been vocally supporting the pro-Palestinian protests on U.S. campuses while decrying what they describe as a heavy-handed crackdown on free speech by authorities.
“Can blindly using violence to suppress students be able to quell domestic dissatisfaction with the government?” wrote Jun Zhengping Studio, a social media account operated by the News Broadcasting Center of the People’s Liberation Army, in an April 26 commentary.
“If American politicians really have a sense of democracy and human rights, they should stop supporting Israel, stop endorsing Israel’s actions, and do more things that are conducive to world peace. Otherwise, the only one who will suffer backlash is the United States itself.”
The People’s Daily, China’s state-owned newspaper, said in a video that American students are protesting because they “can no longer stand the double standards of the United States.”
On social media platform X, formerly Twitter, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying echoed that comment and implied the U.S. government was cracking down on protests at home while supporting protests abroad.
She posted a clip of U.S. police arresting protesters with the question, “Remember how U.S. officials reacted when these protests happened elsewhere?”
The protests this month at scores of universities, including New York’s Columbia University and George Washington University in the U.S. capital, have opposed Israel’s war against Hamas militants in Gaza over the large number of civilian casualties. The student protesters are demanding that their schools divest from companies with ties to Israel and are calling for a cease-fire in Gaza.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the protests are a symbol of American democracy, but he criticized the protesters for remaining silent on the attack by Hamas militants in October that killed more 1,200 Israelis and sparked the conflict.
Critics say antisemitic rhetoric emerged at some of the protests, and there have been clashes with police.
As of Monday, more than 900 students had been arrested, mainly for trespassing because of protest camps they erected on university property.
In an email to all faculty members and students, American University stated that the school’s policy of supporting free speech has not changed, but it explicitly prohibits “disruptive” behavior such as setting up camps.
“Any demonstration that continues to interfere with university operations or violate policies after engagement and de-escalation will not be permitted, and those responsible will face conduct actions, disciplinary sanctions, or arrest as appropriate,” the email said.
Reactions differ
The handling of the protests has been in stark contrast with the Chinese authorities’ crackdown on domestic dissent and any form of street protest.
China’s strict zero-COVID measures and censorship of critical voices during the pandemic spurred street protests in many Chinese cities in November 2022 that became known as the White Paper movement. Protesters would hold up blank sheets of white paper to symbolize support for the protests while not actually saying or doing anything, in hopes of not getting into trouble.
Nonetheless, Chinese police arrested and surveilled those caught holding up white paper. Chinese Ambassador to France Lu Shaye accused “external anti-China forces” of being behind the protests and called them a “color revolution.”
Critics were quick to point out Beijing’s double standard when Chinese state media backed U.S. college protesters.
Sean Haines, a British man who worked for Chinese state media from 2016 to 2019, told VOA that Chinese state media’s extensive coverage of Western demonstrations is a consistent policy.
“At Xinhua, when we chose the running order for news, foreign protests were always promoted,” he said, “especially if it was around election times. ‘Look how scary foreign democracies are, aren’t you glad China doesn’t have this?’”
He said footage of protests is easy to find in places with a free press, such as the United States and the West, while there are almost no images of protests in China, a one-party authoritarian state where public demonstrations are quickly stopped.
“It’s ironic.” he said. “China is using [the] West’s free speech, openness, right to protest — against itself.”
Although Chinese authorities have not declared support for any side in the Israel-Hamas war, they were reluctant to condemn the militants’ October attack and repeatedly blamed Israel and the U.S. for the conflict in Gaza.
At the same time, antisemitic and anti-Israel sentiments, including conspiracy theories, have been allowed on China’s highly censored social media.
A popular claim is that U.S. support for Israel is not because of history and democratic values but because a Jewish cabal secretly controls U.S. politics and business.
Hu Xijin, a special commentator and former editor-in-chief of China’s state-run Global Times, posted on social media site Weibo on April 19 that all walks of life in the U.S. “cannot suppress the protests of college students everywhere, which shows that the Jewish political and business alliance’s control over American public opinion has declined.”
Adrianna Zhang contributed to this report.
Salvation Army of SCV to host doughnut-eating contest
date: 2024-05-01, from: The Signal
News release The Salvation Army Santa Clarita Valley Corps is scheduled June 7 to host its inaugural Donut Day event, including a doughnut eating contest. This new event takes place on National Doughnut Day, Friday, June 7, at 3:30 p.m. at The Cube (27745 Smyth Drive), with a ticketed VIP reception following at 5 […]
The post Salvation Army of SCV to host doughnut-eating contest appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/04/salvation-army-of-scv-to-host-doughnut-eating-contest/
SCV Education Foundation honors 55 local teachers
date: 2024-05-01, from: The Signal
The Santa Clarita Valley Education Foundation celebrated the 40th annual Teacher Tribute ceremony, themed “Academy of the Stars,” and honored over 50 educators from all five local school districts for their outstanding service and contributions in the classroom promoting excellence in public education on Friday evening at College of the Canyons. Colleagues, students, community leaders […]
The post <strong>SCV Education Foundation honors 55 local teachers </strong> appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/04/scv-education-foundation-honors-55-local-teachers/
Open source programming language R patches gnarly arbitrary code exec flaw
date: 2024-05-01, updated: 2024-05-01, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
An ACE in the hole for miscreants
The open source R programming language – popular among statisticians and data scientists for performing visualization, machine learning, and suchlike – has patched an arbitrary code execution hole that scored a preliminary CVSS severity rating of 8.8 out of 10.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/05/01/r_programming_language_ace_vuln/
How exactly will a floating dock in the sea facilitate Gaza aid?
date: 2024-05-01, from: San Jose Mercury News
The relief is desperately needed, with the U.N. saying people in Gaza are on the brink of famine. But there are still widespread security concerns. And some aid groups say that with so much more needed, the focus should instead be on pushing Israel to ease obstacles to the delivery of aid on land routes.
Wilk’s illegal dumping legislation approved in Senate Public Safety Committee
date: 2024-05-01, from: The Signal
News release Sen. Scott Wilk, R-Santa Clarita, announced his measure to combat illegal dumping, by increasing penalties and closing a loophole which has enabled the problem for years, was approved in the Senate Public Safety Committee. “The High Desert has been treated as a dump for too long, but it’s not a dump. It is […]
The post Wilk’s illegal dumping legislation approved in Senate Public Safety Committee appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
State Water Project increases projected allocation
date: 2024-05-01, from: The Signal
News release The Department of Water Resources has announced an additional increase in the State Water Project water supply allocation forecast for 2024. The forecasted allocation has increased to 40%, up from 30% last month. The State Water Project provides water supplies to 27 million Californians and farmers served by 29 public water […]
The post State Water Project increases projected allocation appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/04/state-water-project-increases-projected-allocation/
COC holds resource fair for nonprofit awareness
date: 2024-05-01, from: The Signal
Nonprofits from across the Santa Clarita Valley met with students at College of the Canyons on Tuesday at the Community Resource Fair to show how these organizations can help them navigate college life. The event was held by COC’s Center for Civic and Community Engagement in collaboration with COC’s Golden Z Club, part of Zonta […]
The post <strong>COC holds resource fair for nonprofit awareness</strong> appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/04/coc-holds-resource-fair-for-nonprofit-awareness/
Developer announces Copper Hill Drive bridge work
date: 2024-05-01, from: The Signal
Roadwork is underway for the bridge widening on Copper Hill Drive between McBean Parkway and Avenida Rancho Tesoro, according to a message from the Newport Pacific Land Co. The widening, which is expected to result in portions of Copper Hill Drive being closed over the next year, will allow for three eastbound lanes, with two […]
The post Developer announces Copper Hill Drive bridge work appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/04/developer-announces-copper-hill-drive-bridge-work/
H-1B visa: Feds say they fixed loophole that opened way for massive fraud
date: 2024-05-01, from: San Jose Mercury News
Soon after the new system began, a number of employers started creating new companies and working together to submit multiple registrations for the same workers to up their lottery odds.
Jonny D. Wallis Park Closed Temporarily for Splash Pad Construction
date: 2024-05-01, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
Construction of the long-awaited Splash Pad at Jonny D. Wallis Neighborhood Park (170 S. Kellogg) continues prompting some closures. Here
The post Jonny D. Wallis Park Closed Temporarily for Splash Pad Construction appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
Schiavo Introduces Click to Cancel Bill to Protect Consumers
date: 2024-05-01, from: SCV New (TV Station)
California State Assemblywoman Pilar Schiavo has announced the introduction of AB 2863, a bill aimed at protecting consumers and putting more money back in people’s pockets by simplifying the cancellation process for subscription services.
https://scvnews.com/schiavo-introduces-click-to-cancel-bill-to-protect-consumers/
Prep baseball playoffs begin Thursday for seven SCV teams
date: 2024-05-01, from: The Signal
While the professionals are just getting their season started, the prep baseball season is beginning to wind down. Thursday marks the first round of the CIF Southern Section postseason — play-in games not withstanding — and there are seven Santa Clarita Valley teams aiming for a title. Hart and Saugus both landed home games in […]
The post Prep baseball playoffs begin Thursday for seven SCV teams appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/04/prep-baseball-playoffs-begin-thursday-for-six-scv-teams/
CSUN Women’s Basketball season ends with struggles
date: 2024-05-01, from: The Sundail (CSUN student paper)
The Matadors concluded their season with a reasonable effort, but more was needed to secure a spot in the postseason conference tournament for the third consecutive year. Through the uphill…
https://sundial.csun.edu/181263/sports/csun-womens-basketball-season-ends-with-struggles/
Man arrested on suspicion of drug possession, child cruelty
date: 2024-05-01, from: The Signal
Santa Clarita Valley Sheriff’s Station deputies arrested a 37-year-old man last week on suspicion of child cruelty and possession of a controlled substance for sale after a traffic stop led to a probation compliance check, station officials confirmed on Tuesday. Deputies conducted a traffic stop on April 23 near the intersection of Sierra Highway and […]
The post <strong>Man arrested on suspicion of drug possession, child cruelty</strong> appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/04/man-arrested-on-suspicion-of-drug-possession-child-cruelty/
Scriptnotes, Episode 637: Love and Money, Transcript
date: 2024-05-01, from: John August blog
The original post for this episode can be found here. John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August. Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin. John: And this is Episode 637 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, Cowboy Carter is the new […] The post Scriptnotes, Episode 637: Love and Money, Transcript first appeared on John August.
https://johnaugust.com/2024/scriptnotes-episode-637-love-and-money-transcript
While their peers want alternatives, some young voters endorse Biden or Trump
date: 2024-05-01, from: VOA News USA
A majority of younger voters in this U.S. presidential election say they wish they had someone other than Joe Biden or Donald Trump to choose from. Some of that has to do with the candidates’ ages. But who are the younger voters backing one of the two? VOA Correspondent Scott Stearns reports.
Organic Walnuts Linked to E. Coli Outbreak May Have Been Sold at Four Santa Barbara County Markets
date: 2024-05-01, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
FDA lists natural food and co-op stores in Santa Barbara, Isla Vista, and Solvang that may have received walnuts connected to a multistate outbreak.
The post Organic Walnuts Linked to E. Coli Outbreak May Have Been Sold at Four Santa Barbara County Markets appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
Man arrested on suspicion of drug possession, intent to sell
date: 2024-04-30, from: The Signal
A crime saturation operation conducted last week in Castaic by Santa Clarita Valley Sheriff’s Station school resource deputies resulted in a 35-year-old man being arrested on suspicion of possession of a controlled substance, station officials confirmed on Tuesday. Deputies doing a patrol check near the 31700 block of Castaic Road on April 23 noticed a […]
The post Man arrested on suspicion of drug possession, intent to sell appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/04/man-arrested-on-suspicion-of-drug-possession-intent-to-sell/
Low Cost Spay/Neuter Mobile Clinic at Newhall Community Center
date: 2024-04-30, from: SCV New (TV Station)
City of Santa Clarita residents can get low-cost spay/neuter services for your pets every Monday at the mobile clinic located in the parking lot of the Newhall Community Center
https://scvnews.com/low-cost-spay-neuter-mobile-clinic-at-newhall-community-center/
A Walmart employee allegedly called a 14-year-old ‘cute’ and got her number. Hours later she was missing from her East Bay home
date: 2024-04-30, from: San Jose Mercury News
The 31-year-old suspect now faces charges that he raped and molested the girl just a few hours after meeting her at the Walmart where he worked, and later arranging to pick her up at her family’s East Bay home.
Man shot to death Tuesday morning in Sunnyvale
date: 2024-04-30, from: San Jose Mercury News
Authorities did not announce any arrests or release a description of the suspect.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/04/30/man-shot-to-death-tuesday-morning-in-sunnyvale/
Branham athletic director saga: Landon Jacobs’ fight for old job hits another roadblock
date: 2024-04-30, from: San Jose Mercury News
Branham has narrowed its pool of candidates to replace Landon Jacobs as athletic director, sources say.
Two charged with cutting down famous tree in England
date: 2024-04-30, from: San Jose Mercury News
Daniel Graham and Adam Carruthers were arrested in October and released on bail. It took authorities more than six months to bring charges against them.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/04/30/two-charged-with-cutting-down-famous-tree-in-england/
NASA Ames Astrogram – March/April 2024
date: 2024-04-30, from: NASA breaking news
Advanced Composite Solar Sail System Successfully Launches On April 23, the Advanced Composite Solar Sail System CubeSat mission launched successfully aboard an Electron rocket launched by Rocket Lab and carried Ames’ payload from Māhia, New Zealand. The CubeSat was subsequently delivered to a Sun-synchronous orbit around Earth. Ames has pioneered the use of CubeSats and small […]
https://www.nasa.gov/centers-and-facilities/ames/nasa-ames-astrogram-march-april-2024/
Cyber-bastard jailed for stealing psychotherapy files, blackmailing patients
date: 2024-04-30, updated: 2024-04-30, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Vastaamo villain more than doubled reported crime in Nordic nation
A cyber-thief who snatched tens of thousands of patients’ sensitive records from a psychotherapy clinic before blackmailing them and then leaking their files online has been caged for six years and three months.…
May-October Fireside Nights at Vasquez Rocks
date: 2024-04-30, from: SCV New (TV Station)
The Vasquez Rocks Natural Area invites you to an evening around the campfire at the Vasquez Rocks Interpretive Center. Live music, sing-alongs, animal meet and greets, storytelling, crafts, activities, show + tell tables, s’mores and more.
https://scvnews.com/may-october-fireside-nights-at-vasquez-rocks/
Angie Ned named head coach of CSUN women’s basketball
date: 2024-04-30, from: The Sundail (CSUN student paper)
CSUN Athletic Director Shawn Chin-Farrell has announced that Angie Ned will be the next head coach for the women’s basketball team. Ned comes to Northridge from California Baptist University, where…
https://sundial.csun.edu/181258/sports/angie-ned-named-head-coach-of-csun-womens-basketball/
Strum Machine
date: 2024-04-30, from: Chris Coyier blog
I mostly play old time and bluegrass music. Particularly in old time and fiddle songs, the songs have a fairly rigid and repetitious structure. That’s not to say players don’t do interesting things with it, but unless a song is intentionally crooked, the structure of the song remains the same throughout. A typical structure is […]
https://chriscoyier.net/2024/04/30/strum-machine/
June 22: Howdown for Hope at Gilchrist Farm
date: 2024-04-30, from: SCV New (TV Station)
It’s time to kick up your heels and head on over to Gilchrist Farm for the Hoedown for Hope event Saturday, June 22, 6-10 p.m
https://scvnews.com/june-22-howdown-for-hope-at-gilchrist-farm/
Daily Ev Recap: Record-breaking Tesla megapack
date: 2024-04-30, from: Electrek Feed
Listen to a recap of the top stories of the day from Electrek. Quick Charge is now available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, TuneIn and…
https://electrek.co/2024/04/30/daily-ev-recap-record-breaking-tesla-megapack/
Lilbits: Another RISC-V laptop, a PCIe connector for the Raspberry Pi 5, and Arc browser comes to Windows 11
date: 2024-04-30, from: Liliputing
A Chinese chip design company called SpacemiT has unveiled a new laptop that will be powered by the company’s K1 processor, which is an octa-core processor that should offer better-than ARM Cortex-A55 performance, support for 4K video, and a 2 TOPS NPU for hardware-accelerated AI features. While the upcoming MUSE Book isn’t the first laptop with […]
The post Lilbits: Another RISC-V laptop, a PCIe connector for the Raspberry Pi 5, and Arc browser comes to Windows 11 appeared first on Liliputing.
May 6: Catholic Relic of St. Jude Makes Stop at St. Kateri
date: 2024-04-30, from: SCV New (TV Station)
A relic of Saint Jude has left Italy for the first time on an extended tour of the United States. Treasures of the Church, an evangelization ministry of the Catholic church, will present the Tour of the Relic of St. Jude the Apostle. The relic of St. Jude will be hosted Monday, May 6 at Saint Kateri Tekakwitha Catholic Church
https://scvnews.com/may-6-catholic-relic-of-st-jude-makes-stop-at-st-kateri/
Microsoft boss charms Indonesia with $1.7B AI, cloud injection
date: 2024-04-30, updated: 2024-04-30, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Promises to train 850,000 workers and build datacenters
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella says the company will invest $1.7 billion in expanding its presence and building datacenters in Indonesia.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/04/30/microsoft_indonesia_investment/
May 3 Vote Could Be the Beginning of a Housing Crisis Turnaround
date: 2024-04-30, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
Finding a balance between state mandates, business interests, and what the community needs.
The post May 3 Vote Could Be the Beginning of a Housing Crisis Turnaround appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
More big city newspapers drag Microsoft, OpenAI hard in copyright lawsuit
date: 2024-04-30, updated: 2024-04-30, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Publishers want ChatGPT models destroyed after ML tech trained ‘unlawfully’ on articles
Eight big-city American newspapers have banded together to sue Microsoft and OpenAI, claiming the tech duo unlawfully used the publishers’ copyrighted articles to train AI models.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/04/30/newspapers_microsoft_openai/
EDD Reminds Californians to Beware of Scammers
date: 2024-04-30, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
SACRAMENTO – The Employment Development Department (EDD) continues to urge Californians to guard against fraud. The latest round of text-message schemes
The post EDD Reminds Californians to Beware of Scammers appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2024/04/30/edd-reminds-californians-to-beware-of-scammers/
UC Santa Barbara Students Create ‘Liberated Zone’ in Solidarity with Gaza
date: 2024-04-30, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
UCSB Divest leads teach-ins and demonstration calling for divestment from companies involved in Israeli defense.
The post UC Santa Barbara Students Create ‘Liberated Zone’ in Solidarity with Gaza appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
Tesla’s Identity Crisis Gets Hardcore
date: 2024-04-30, from: Heatmap News
Chaos at Tesla is nothing new. But the company now appears to be going through something of an identity crisis, with its future at war with its past.
Let’s just recap the past few weeks: First, Tesla released first-quarter delivery numbers that came up well short of even analysts’ most cynical predictions, followed by first-quarter earnings that were, in a word, poor. In between those two events, Reuters reported that Tesla had canceled a long-promised sub-$30,000 electric vehicle (a report CEO Elon Musk denied … sorta), and the company laid off more than 10% of its workforce.
All of which brings us to today and reports of further layoffs at Tesla, this time in the company’s Supercharging division. To just about everyone who follows the company, this was shocking news. Tesla’s Supercharging network isn’t just a competitive advantage, it’s the de facto national standard for EVs in the United States. Major automakers — Ford, Toyota, General Motors — and EV startups like Rivian have signed deals with Tesla to use its charger design, known as the North American Charging Standard and designed their new vehicles (or sent adapters) so their drivers can access the network.
The Supercharging network was, however, consistent with
what might now be called the “old” model of Tesla — a company that tried
to “accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy,” as the
company’s mission statement put it, by getting as many electric cars
(ideally, but not solely, its own) on the road as possible. But that
model seems to be on its way out. As Musk told investors on the earnings
call, Tesla should be thought of “thought of as an AI or robotics
company” — not, anymore, as merely a car company.
Those Supercharging partnerships weren’t an act of charity. BloombergNEF, Bloomberg’s in-house energy research group, estimated that Tesla’s charging business could generate three-quarters of a billion dollars of profits by 2030. While it doesn’t seem like Tesla is going to rip the Superchargers from the ground, a now-former Tesla employee said on X that “further improvements to standards and engagements across the industry will suffer.” Already the company has pulled out of four planned new Supercharger locations in New York, according to Electrek.
“Tesla still plans to grow the Supercharger network, just at a slower pace for new locations and more focus on 100% uptime and expansion of existing locations,” Musk tweeted (after the market close) Tuesday afternoon.
If the future of the growth of the Supercharging network is in doubt, Tesla’s expansion of its self-driving efforts (which are still well short of rivals like Waymo’s) is full steam ahead. Close Tesla-watchers have speculated that the future of Tesla’s charging infrastructure will change as the company advances further towards truly autonomous driving and its much-heralded “robotaxi,” which Musk has promised to reveal by August 8. All of this seems to have pleased investors, who responded to the announcement by sending Tesla shares up 10% in aftermarket trading. That share price jumped again Monday, after news that Musk had paved the way for Full Self-Driving to be deployed in China.
One would think that reports of Tesla further tightening its focus on artificial intelligence and automation would have delighted these investors. The company’s burned some $2.5 billion of cash in the first quarter thanks to both its extravagant spending on developing its AI capabilities and the fact that it made too many cars for what turned out to be a soft electric vehicle market. “Hopefully these actions are making it clear that we need to be absolutely hard core about headcount and cost reduction,” Musk wrote in an email to staff about the Supercharging layoffs, according to The Information. “While some on exec staff are taking this seriously, most are not yet doing so.” And yet shares were down 5.5% by the time the market closed on Tuesday.
The investment community can’t seem to decide whether it wants Tesla to be the type of company that will devote its resources to a mass market car or throw them at a much more exciting — though by no means assured — autonomous driving play.
In its earnings presentation, Tesla said that new models were coming, but not on a whole new platform, which meant that there would less capital expenditure for a new production line. For some analysts, it was all they needed to hear, Morningstar’s Seth Goldstein wrote a note titled “Our Long-Term Growth Thesis Is Confirmed as Affordable Vehicle Still in Development.”
And some in the the analyst community were also jazzed by Musk’s China jaunt. Morgan Stanley’s Adam Jonas, a longtime Tesla bull, hailed the trip, writing “whether Tesla’s CEO is sleeping on a floor or on a plane … the message is clear: he’s back.” Dan Ives of Wedbush Securities, another Tesla optimist, said approval for FSD in China was “a watershed moment for the Tesla story.” As recently as Tuesday morning, Axios cautiously declared that the company “may be steadily regaining investor confidence after a rough patch.”
Tesla is also working on wireless charging, as was confirmed last year in a video hosted by, of all people, Jay Leno. Tesla’s design chief, Franz von Holzhausen, told Leno that “we are working on inductive charging. You don’t even need to plug anything in at that point. You just drive over the pad in your garage and you start charging.” It’s obvious why this type of charging would be more conducive to autonomous driving than the company’s exist Superchargers, as all they would require is driving over them.
Even the multiple rounds of deep layoffs are a sign to some Tesla optimists that Musk’s attention is now fully devoted to the company. When asked by an analyst on the earnings call to “talk about where your heart is at in terms of your interests,” Musk said that Tesla “constitutes a majority of my work time,” adding: I’m going to make sure Tesla is quite prosperous.”
If investors are sending mixed messages, Musk, certainly, has made his preference clear. Tesla will become a autonomous driving company or die trying — at least until he changes his mind again.
https://heatmap.news/electric-vehicles/tesla-supercharger-layoffs
Asus ExpertCenter PN65 mini PC with Intel Meteor Lake now available
date: 2024-04-30, from: Liliputing
The Asus ExpertCenter PN65 is a small desktop computer with support for up to an Intel Core Ultra 7 155H Meteor Lake processor, up to 96GB of DDR5 memory, and up to three storage devices. First unveiled in January, the computer is now available for purchase from the Asus website for $759… although the purchase page […]
The post Asus ExpertCenter PN65 mini PC with Intel Meteor Lake now available appeared first on Liliputing.
https://liliputing.com/asus-expertcenter-pn65-mini-pc-with-intel-meteor-lake-now-available/
Pro-Palestinian protesters take over Columbia building, demand university divest from Israel
date: 2024-04-30, from: VOA News USA
Ive Drives Icons
date: 2024-04-30, from: Michael Tsai
Louie Mantia (Mastodon): It’s been 15 years since the original and 12 years since the sequel. Volume 3 contains a staggering 125 hard drive icons, comprising of 25 metal colors (most—if not all—of Apple’s modern product colors), with 5 varieties of each. Beautiful external drive icons up to 1,024×1,024. I’m not sure whether there’s a […]
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2024/04/30/ive-drives-icons/
iPadOS Also a Digital Gatekeeper in EU
date: 2024-04-30, from: Michael Tsai
Tim Hardwick (Hacker News): EU antitrust officials on Monday identified iPadOS, Apple’s operating system for iPads, as a significant digital gatekeeper under the EU’s new tech regulations, which carry strict requirements that aim to promote fair competition and expand options for consumers. […]“Apple’s business user numbers exceeded the quantitative threshold elevenfold, while its end user […]
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2024/04/30/ipados-also-a-digital-gatekeeper-in-eu/
Swift Proposal: Synchronous Mutual Exclusion Lock
date: 2024-04-30, from: Michael Tsai
SE-0433: Not all code may be able (or want) to adopt actors. Reasons for this can be very varied, for example code may have to execute synchronously without any potential for other tasks interleaving with it. Or the async effect introduced on methods may prevent legacy code which cannot use Swift Concurrency from interacting with […]
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2024/04/30/swift-proposal-synchronous-mutual-exclusion-lock/
Losing Screen Time Settings
date: 2024-04-30, from: Michael Tsai
Craig Grannell: Needed to turn off Screen Time temporarily. Apple: “bollocks to you, then”. Infers the set-up is wiped and has me start from scratch. I go through the set-up, and it merges the new one with what was already there. But the block set-ups have been randomly wiped.[…]It’s astonishing that this is the way […]
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2024/04/30/losing-screen-time-settings/
Hearing for Apple Violating Epic’s Injunction
date: 2024-04-30, from: Michael Tsai
games fray (PDF, via Michael Love): Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers of the United States District Court for the Northern District of California, who presided over the 2021 Epic v. Apple trial and made the ruling in question, has now reached the preliminary conclusion that Apple is presently out of compliance with the injunction, which could […]
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2024/04/30/hearing-for-apple-violating-epics-injunction/
Google Lays Off Python Team
date: 2024-04-30, from: Michael Tsai
Sarah Perez (Reddit): Ahead of Google’s annual I/O developer conference in May, the tech giant has laid off staff across key teams like Flutter, Dart, Python and others, according to reports from affected employees shared on social media. zem: in addition to contributing to upstream python, wemaintained a stable version of python within google, and […]
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2024/04/30/google-lays-off-python-team/
US wind generation fell in 2023 for the first time since the 1990s
date: 2024-04-30, from: Electrek Feed
Annual US power generation from wind turbines declined in 2023 for the first time since the mid-1990s – here’s why.
https://electrek.co/2024/04/30/us-wind-generation-2023/
Sols 4171-4172: Scoot Over!
date: 2024-04-30, from: NASA breaking news
Earth planning date: Monday, April 29, 2024 On this two sol-planning day, the Curiosity science team logged in and found ourselves face to face with ‘Pinnacle Ridge’ (pictured above), part of the upper Gediz Vallis Ridge (uGVR). We saw two types of rocks in our workspace: light-toned layered rocks and darker toned rocks. Rocks that […]
https://science.nasa.gov/blogs/sols-4171-4172-scoot-over/
Community over Celebrity
date: 2024-04-30, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
A children’s soccer match should epitomize innocence and the love of sport, but a celebrity’s heedless urge to win became an ugly factor at Girsh Park recently.
The post Community over Celebrity appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2024/04/30/community-over-celebrity/
California Has One Fast Charging Station For Every Five Gas Stations
date: 2024-04-30, from: Inside EVs News
The state is home to about half a million home charging stations too.
https://insideevs.com/news/718038/california-fast-chargers-gas-stations/
Paying sources for news stories raises alarms
date: 2024-04-30, from: VOA News USA
At former U.S. President Donald Trump’s trial in New York, an ex-tabloid publisher testified about his efforts to help then-candidate Trump by buying negative stories about him and suppressing them. “Catch and kill” is part of a practice known as checkbook journalism. VOA’s Arash Arabasadi explains.
https://www.voanews.com/a/paying-sources-for-news-stories-raises-alarms/7592482.html
State Grant to Help Get Low-Income Riders on E-Bikes in Santa Barbara
date: 2024-04-30, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
BCycle and City Hall get $1.5 million grant to add 50 e-bikes and 100 bike docks in downtown-adjacent neighborhoods and provide vouchers.
The post State Grant to Help Get Low-Income Riders on E-Bikes in Santa Barbara appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
Australian Museum Removes Mummified Body Parts From Display
date: 2024-04-30, from: Smithsonian Magazine
“We have become so accustomed to seeing them on show that we often forget they once belonged to living people,” says Melanie Pitkin, a senior curator at the Chau Chak Wing Museum at the University of Sydney
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-04-30, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Mrs. Met is among the oldest of the MLB's mascots.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mrs._Met
Free Will Astrology
date: 2024-04-30, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
ARIES (Mar. 21-Apr. 19): The world’s record for jumping rope in six inches of mud is held by an Aries.
The post Free Will Astrology appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2024/04/30/free-will-astrology-209/
Cuyama Buckhorn Makes Santa Barbara’s High Desert a Dining Destination
date: 2024-04-30, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
This timeless roadside resort makes taste buds sing just a short drive away.
The post Cuyama Buckhorn Makes Santa Barbara’s High Desert a Dining Destination appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
You can’t just assume UTF-8
date: 2024-04-30, from: OS News
Humans speak countless different languages. Not only are these languages incompatible, but runtime transpilation is a real pain. Sadly, every standardisation initiative has failed. At least there is someone to blame for this state-of-affairs: God. It was him, after-all, who cursed humanity to speak different languages, in an early dispute over a controversial property development. However, mankind can only blame itself for the fact that computers struggle to talk to each other. And one of the biggest problems is the most simple: computers do not agree on how to write letters in binary. ↫ Cal Paterson For most users, character encoding issues are not something they have to deal with. Programmers and other people who deal with the lower levels of computing, however, deal with this way more often than they should.
https://www.osnews.com/story/139508/you-cant-just-assume-utf-8/
Tesla Has Already Canceled Four Planned Supercharger Sites In New York City
date: 2024-04-30, from: Inside EVs News
Although Musk said Supercharger growth will continue following today’s layoffs, some sites are already set to be canceled, InsideEVs has learned.
https://insideevs.com/news/718045/nyc-tesla-supercharger-sites/
May the 4th Be With Brew at the Annual Buellton Brew Fest
date: 2024-04-30, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
The 11th annual Buellton Brew Fest is set to return on Star Wars Day, May 4.
The post May the 4th Be With Brew at the Annual Buellton Brew Fest appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2024/04/30/may-the-4th-be-with-brew-at-the-annual-buellton-brew-fest/
LinuxFest Northwest 2024
date: 2024-04-30, from: Stephen Smith’s blog
Introduction LinuxFest Northwest is an annual gathering of open source enthusiasts held in Bellingham halfway between the major cities of Vancouver, BC and Seattle, Washington. Sadly, the last proper event was held in 2019, then during COVID they tried running a virtual event with limited success and then when COVID ended they were going to […]
https://smist08.wordpress.com/2024/04/30/linuxfest-northwest-2024/
COC Film Instructor to Attend Marche du Film at Cannes Film Festival
date: 2024-04-30, from: SCV New (TV Station)
College of the Canyons film instructor Bavand Karim will attend Marche du Film, one of the largest film markets in the world, at the Cannes Film Festival in May to promote the launch of a new film slate by CINE & Lost Winds Entertainment.
https://scvnews.com/coc-film-instructor-to-attend-marche-du-film-at-cannes-film-festival/
Blinken says ‘time to act is now’ for Hamas to accept cease-fire deal
date: 2024-04-30, from: VOA News USA
Amman, Jordan — U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken urged Hamas to accept a proposed cease-fire deal in its conflict with Israel, saying that there are “no more excuses” and “the time to act is now.”
“Our focus right now is on getting a cease-fire and hostages home. That is the most urgent thing, and it’s also I think what is achievable because the Israelis have put a strong proposal on the table. They’ve demonstrated that they’re willing to compromise, and now it’s on Hamas,” Blinken told reporters as he wrapped up a visit to Jordan.
He also stressed the importance of getting more humanitarian assistance to Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.
“This has been part of our work every single day. It’s also been the focus of every single one of my trips to the region,” Blinken said, adding that he will discuss the issue when he holds meetings in Israel on Wednesday.
Earlier, the top U.S. diplomat held separate talks with Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi and King Abdullah II before meeting with Sigrid Kaag, U.N. senior humanitarian and reconstruction coordinator for Gaza.
Blinken thanked Abdullah for Jordan’s leadership in facilitating the delivery of humanitarian aid, including joint U.S.-Jordan airdrops that to date have delivered over 1,000 tons of humanitarian assistance to Palestinians in Gaza.
The two leaders discussed joint efforts to expedite the flow of additional urgently needed aid to Gaza from Jordan through land routes. Blinken also commended the king’s commitment to economic modernization and vital public sector reforms.
Later on Tuesday, Blinken met with Palestinians from Gaza at the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs before meeting with Kaag. Blinken told Kaag he was anxious to hear directly from her, adding, “The entire team is doing extraordinary work to ensure that people in Gaza get the help and support and the assistance they need.”
Israel declared war on Hamas after its October 7 attack on Israel that killed 1,200 people and led to the capture of about 250 hostages.
Israel’s counteroffensive in Gaza has killed more than 34,000 people, according to the Hamas-run Health Ministry, a figure that Israel says includes several thousand Hamas fighters.
A delegation from Hamas participated in talks Monday in Egypt, which with Qatar has been seeking to broker a deal that would halt the Israeli offensive and see hostages freed.
U.S., Saudi talks
In Riyadh earlier this week Blinken said the United States is close to finishing a security agreement with Saudi Arabia that would be offered if the country makes peace with Israel.
“The work that Saudi Arabia, the United States have been doing together in terms of our own agreements, I think, is potentially very close to completion,” Blinken told an audience at the World Economic Forum on Monday.
He said the two nations have done intensive work over the last month on Israeli-Saudi normalization.
Blinken disclosed that he was scheduled to be in Saudi Arabia and Israel on October 10 last year to focus specifically on the Palestinian part of the normalization deal because that is an essential component. But it did not happen because of the Hamas terror attack on Israel.
“In order to move forward with normalization, two things will be required: calm in Gaza and a credible pathway to a Palestinian state,” Blinken said.
U.S. officials have said creating a pathway to a Palestinian state with security guarantees for Israel is key to lasting peace and security in the Middle East and to Israel’s integration in the region.
The Saudis have demanded, as a prerequisite, to see an Israeli commitment to the two-state solution.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has rejected the two-state solution and the return of the Palestinian Authority to control Gaza, demands that are widely supported by the international community.
Nimrod Goren, a senior fellow for Israeli affairs at the Middle East Institute, told VOA in an email, “Saudi Arabia has been gradually opening towards Israel for a decade. Significant progress was made in the months prior to the Hamas attack of October 7, with the hope of linking an Israeli-Saudi normalization agreement to a pre-presidential election, U.S.-Saudi defense pact. The war stalled the process, but talks are continuing and are at a decisive phase.”
If Netanyahu’s opposition to the two-state solution remains unchanged, Goren said, he might struggle to secure normalization with Saudi Arabia.
VOA’s Cindy Saine contributed to this report.
Mercedes-Benz Trucks Successfully Test 1,000 kW EV Charging
date: 2024-04-30, from: Inside EVs News
The Mercedes-Benz eActros 600 semi will have a range of up to roughly 300 miles.
https://insideevs.com/news/718026/mercedes-1000kw-ev-charging-test/
NASA Balloons Head North of Arctic Circle for Long-Duration Flights
date: 2024-04-30, from: NASA breaking news
NASA is set to begin launch operations mid-May for the 2024 Sweden Long-Duration Scientific Balloon Campaign. Four stadium-sized, scientific balloons carrying science missions and technology demonstrations are scheduled to lift off from Swedish Space Corporation’s Esrange Space Center, situated north of the Arctic Circle near Kiruna, Sweden. The campaign will continue through early July. “NASA’s […]
June 6-8: Mission Opera Performances of ‘The Merry Widow: Madonna’
date: 2024-04-30, from: SCV New (TV Station)
Santa Clarita’s opera company, Mission Opera has been selected to present ‘The Merry Widow: Madonna’ as part of the OPERA America National Conference and World Opera Forum, being held in Los Angeles in early June.
https://scvnews.com/june-6-8-mission-opera-presents-the-merry-widow-madonna/
UnitedHealth CEO: ‘Decision to pay ransom was mine’
date: 2024-04-30, updated: 2024-04-30, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Congress to hear how Citrix MFA snafu led to massive data theft, $870M+ loss
UnitedHealth CEO Andrew Witty will tell US lawmakers Wednesday the cybercriminals who hit Change Healthcare with ransomware used stolen credentials to remotely access a Citrix portal that didn’t have multi-factor authentication enabled.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/04/30/unitedhealth_ceo_ransom/
Is Musk’s decision to fire the entire supercharging team good or bad
date: 2024-04-30, from: Electrek Feed
https://electrek.co/poll-post/is-musks-decision-to-fire-the-entire-supercharging-team-good-or-bad/
US DEA proposes significant shift in marijuana policy
date: 2024-04-30, from: VOA News USA
Tesla is already pulling back Supercharger plans after firing team
date: 2024-04-30, from: Electrek Feed
Tesla is already pulling back Supercharger plans after Elon Musk came in like a wrecking ball and fired the whole charging team.
https://electrek.co/2024/04/30/tesla-pulling-back-supercharger-plans-firing-team/
A few facts about POSIX
date: 2024-04-30, from: OS News
Over 35 years ago, these problems with software portability led to the emergence of the first POSIX standard in 1988. The acronym was coined by Richard Stallman, who added “X” to the end of Portable Operating System Interface. It’s meant to provide a specification of the interface that different Unix operating systems should have in common, including programming languages and tools. It’s important to note that the interface is portable, and not the implementation. ↫ vorakl While POSIX certainly isn’t perfect, and support for it in various operating systems claiming to support POSIX even less so, there’s no denying its success. Even if the dream of 100% source code portability isn’t possible under POSIX for applications that are a little more complex than basic CLI tools, there’s enough portability that platforms like Linux, the various BSDs, macOS, and others, can share quite a bit of code. One of my favourite things about POSIX is that it shows up in the most unexpected of places. Windows, for instance, has had various options for POSIX compatibility, some of which straight from Microsoft itself, like the currently well-known Windows Subsystem for Linux, but also mostly forgotten options like the Microsoft POSIX subsystem that shipped with Windows NT until Windows 2000, or the very rudimentary POSIX compatibility in the Windows C Runtime Library and Windows Sockets API. OS/2 had POSIX compatibility as well, through EMX (Eberhard Mattes eXtender). It gave OS/2 – and MS-DOS – a POSIX API, and even provided access to native OS/2 APIs as well, and could run 32bit applications. You’d be surprised by how many more operating systems offered forms of POSIX compatibility, either out of the box or through first or third party add-ons.
https://www.osnews.com/story/139506/a-few-facts-about-posix/
Northridge Review promotes creative expression among students
date: 2024-04-30, from: The Sundail (CSUN student paper)
It’s an evening full of both excitement and nervousness. Over a dozen people filled auditorium chairs, talking and laughing with one another. Within a few minutes, the room suddenly became…
https://sundial.csun.edu/181241/news/northridge-review-promotes-creative-expression-among-students/
NASA Showcases Innovations at the 2024 FIRST Robotics World Championships
date: 2024-04-30, from: NASA breaking news
NASA engaged with fans, student robotics teams, and industry leaders at the 2024 FIRST Robotics World Championships held April 17-20, at the George R. Brown Convention Center in Houston. The exhibit highlighted the future of technology and spaceflight, attracting over 50,000 participants from across the United States and worldwide. The FIRST Robotics World Championships was […]
This Historic Photograph May Depict the Iceberg That Sank the Titanic
date: 2024-04-30, from: Smithsonian Magazine
The image, which sold for $22,000 at auction this week, was taken aboard a recovery vessel days after the famous ocean liner went down
Princess Cruises Reroutes Global Voyages Due to Middle East Uncertainty
date: 2024-04-30, from: SCV New (TV Station)
Given the ongoing uncertain situation in the Red Sea and surrounding area and following extensive consultation with global security experts and government authorities, Princess Cruises, which is headquartered in Valencia, is revising the itineraries for its two 2025 World Cruises, which will no longer visit the Middle East or Asia, and now instead, will offer new port stops in Africa and Europe.
https://scvnews.com/princess-cruises-reroutes-global-voyages-due-to-middle-east-uncertainty/
Raspberry Pi-powered ShaRPiKeebo pocket computer is almost ready to ship (two years after crowdfunding)
date: 2024-04-30, from: Liliputing
The ShaRPiKeebo is a pocket-sized computer board with a display, keyboard, game controller keys, and an incredibly geeky design: it’s basically a printed circuit board with tacked-on keys, ports, and buttons. And the board is meant to be powered by a Raspberry Pi Zero, which acts as the brains of the portable computer kit. When the developers […]
The post Raspberry Pi-powered ShaRPiKeebo pocket computer is almost ready to ship (two years after crowdfunding) appeared first on Liliputing.
Here’s Why BYD Is Charging Twice The China Price For EVs Sold Abroad
date: 2024-04-30, from: Inside EVs News
BYD wants to rake in the big bucks by adding significant markup to its EVs sold in Europe or the Americas.
https://insideevs.com/news/718036/byd-major-ev-markup-prices/
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-04-30, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
2016: How Font Awesome 5 Became Kickstarter’s Most Funded Software Project.
Autistic, Black and Proud: An interview with David Adam Tucker
date: 2024-04-30, from: The Sundail (CSUN student paper)
In this divisive year of 2024, many are divided between race, party and neurodiversity. These topics came to a head on March 9, 2024, as 15-year-old Ryan Gainer of Apple…
https://sundial.csun.edu/181234/news/autistic-black-and-proud-an-interview-with-david-adam-tucker/
Musk axes two more senior Tesla leaders, guts public policy team – report
date: 2024-04-30, updated: 2024-04-30, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
It’s not like you need wonks to put driverless robotaxis on public roads or anything
The organizational tree at Tesla keeps shedding leaves, and a surprising number keep falling from the top with two more high-profile executives reportedly leaving the firm. …
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/04/30/musk_tesla_layoff/
Extremely Rare Blue Rock Thrush Spotted in Oregon Might Be the First Ever in the United States
date: 2024-04-30, from: Smithsonian Magazine
Amateur photographer Michael Sanchez captured photos of the blue-and-chestnut bird on a beach—but he didn’t realize just how special the “mind-bending” encounter was, until later
RISC-V support in Android just got a big setback
date: 2024-04-30, from: OS News
Although Google has shown significant progress in recent weeks in improving RISC-V support in Android, it seems that we’re still quite a bit away from seeing RISC-V hardware running certified builds of Android. Earlier today, a Senior Staff Software Engineer at Google who, according to their LinkedIn, leads the Android Systems Team and works on Android’s Linux kernel fork, submitted a series of patches to AOSP that “remove ACK’s support for riscv64.” The description of these patches states that “support for risc64 GKI kernels is discontinued.” ↫ Mishaal Rahman Google provided Android Authority with a statement, claiming that Android will continue to support RISC-V. What these patches do, however, is remove support for the architecture from the Generic Kernel Image, which is the only type of kernel Google certifies for Android, which means that it is now no longer possible to ship a certified Android device that uses RISC-V. Any OEM shipping a RISC-V Android device will have to create and maintain its own kernel fork with the required patches. This doesn’t seem to align with Google’s statement. So, unless Google intends to add RISC-V support back into GKI, there won’t be any officially certified Android devices running on RISC-V. Definitely an odd chain of events here.
https://www.osnews.com/story/139504/risc-v-support-in-android-just-got-a-big-setback/
Johnson Celebrates New Opportunities for Space Industry in Texas
date: 2024-04-30, from: NASA breaking news
NASA’s Johnson Space Center was recently involved in two major announcements with important implications for the future of space exploration and the aerospace industry. On Feb. 29, 2024, NASA announced that the American Center for Manufacturing and Innovation (ACMI) signed an agreement to become a tenant at Johnson’s 240-acre Exploration Park. ACMI will lease a […]
May 4: Schivo to Host Youth, Family Festival
date: 2024-04-30, from: SCV New (TV Station)
California State Assemblywoman Pilar Schiavo will host an upcoming Youth and Family Festival, a day packed with fun, learning and community engagement. This event is free to all and will bel held on Saturday, May 4 from noon to 4 p.m. at the College of the Canyons
https://scvnews.com/may-4-schivo-to-host-youth-family-festival/
Daily Deals (4-30-2024)
date: 2024-04-30, from: Liliputing
The Acer Predator Triton 14 is a gaming laptop with a 14 inch display, discrete graphics, and a compact design: it measures less than 0.8 inches thick and weighs less than four pounds. While this portable gaming notebook may not get as much attention as the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14, right now it’s got at […]
The post Daily Deals (4-30-2024) appeared first on Liliputing.
https://liliputing.com/daily-deals-4-30-2024/
This Neolithic Monument Found in France Has No Equal
date: 2024-04-30, from: Smithsonian Magazine
A trio of interlocking enclosures, the structure may date to the time of the Bell Beaker culture, but experts are unsure of its exact age and purpose
Snapcycle 2024 R1 Pro e-bike sees first discount to $1,799 (Save $200), Anker SOLIX C800 Plus bundle $698, more
date: 2024-04-30, from: Electrek Feed
Today’s Green Deals are led by the first official discount on the new Snapcycle 2024 R1 Pro All-Terrain e-bike for $1,799, with a bundle option also being available. It is joined by the Anker SOLIX C800 Plus Portable Power Station bundled alongside a 100W solar panel for $698, as well as the AeroGarden Bounty Basic Indoor Garden falling to $144. Plus all of the other days’ Green Deals that are still going.
Head below for other New Green Deals we’ve found today and, of course, Electrek’s best EV buying and leasing deals. Also, check out the new Electrek Tesla Shop for the best deals on Tesla accessories.
https://electrek.co/2024/04/30/snapcycle-2024-r1-pro-e-bike-anker-solix-c800-plus-bundle-and-more/
NASA’s Hubble Pauses Science Due to Gyro Issue
date: 2024-04-30, from: NASA breaking news
Updated April 30, 2024 Editor’s note: On April 30, 2024, NASA announced it restored the agency’s Hubble Space Telescope to science operations April 29. The spacecraft is in good health and once again operating using all three of its gyros. All of Hubble’s instruments are online, and the spacecraft has resumed taking science observations. Published April 26, 2024 NASA […]
https://science.nasa.gov/missions/hubble/nasas-hubble-pauses-science-due-to-gyro-issue/
@IIIF Mastodon feed (date: 2024-04-30, from: IIIF Mastodon feed)
Join us Wed. May 8 at 1pm PT / 4pm ET / 9pm GMT for our next #IIIF Community Call. We'll welcome the team from Systemik Solutions to present Glycerine Image Annotation Workbench.
Zoom info: iiif.io/community
https://glammr.us/@IIIF/112361418766510286
IBM quantum system elbows into Arm-powered Fugaku supercomputer
date: 2024-04-30, updated: 2024-04-30, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Slotting in the module for ambitious next-generation compute goals
Japan’s Arm-based Fugaku supercomputer is to be paired with a newly developed quantum system from IBM as part of a project to research and develop future computing systems.…
April 29, 2024
date: 2024-04-30, from: Heather Cox Richardson blog
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/april-29-2024-aaa
Daimler is helping decarbonize logistics with expanded use of EVs
date: 2024-04-30, from: Electrek Feed
In an effort to decarbonize its own logistical operations, Daimler Trucks North America is expanding the use of electric trucks across multiple regions, including Arizona, Ohio, Michigan, and the Carolinas.
https://electrek.co/2024/04/30/daimler-is-helping-decarbonize-logistics-with-expanded-use-of-evs/
NASA Grants Support Academic Collaborations for STEM Student Success
date: 2024-04-30, from: NASA breaking news
NASA has awarded $3.9 million to 13 teams at under-resourced academic institutions across the country, to support collaborative projects with NASA that offer students mentorship and career development in science, technology, engineering, and math. This is the second round of seed funding awards given through the agency’s Science Mission Directorate (SMD) Bridge Program, which was […]
Do You Like These AI Images of Dying, Mutilated Children? Facebook Algorithm Wonders
date: 2024-04-30, from: 404 Media Group
Facebook’s recommendation engine, which is core to the company’s business model, is injecting grotesque images of AI-generated child gore into people’s feeds.
https://www.404media.co/ai-images-of-dying-drowning-mutilated-children-go-viral-on-facebook/
Tesla Axing Its Supercharger Team Puts The Entire Industry In The Dark
date: 2024-04-30, from: Inside EVs News
Most of Tesla’s Supercharger team was caught up in recent layoffs, leading to countless questions about the future of EV charging.
https://insideevs.com/news/718025/tesla-charging-layoffs-2024/
California’s Plug-In Car Sales Continued To Increase In Q1 2024
date: 2024-04-30, from: Inside EVs News
The volume exceeded 105,000, but the growth rate was alarmingly slow.
https://insideevs.com/news/717907/california-plugin-car-sales-2024q1/
NSA guy who tried and failed to spy for Russia gets 262 months in the slammer
date: 2024-04-30, updated: 2024-04-30, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Tried to sell top secret docs for the low, low price of $85K
A former NSA employee has been sentenced to 262 months in prison for attempting to freelance as a Russian spy.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/04/30/nsa_employee_guilty_sentence/
Oxy SJP and Oxy JVP stage encampment for Palestine, plan to stay ‘as long as possible’
date: 2024-04-30, from: The Occidental News (Occidental College Student Newspaper)
April 29, 4 a.m., Occidental Students for Justice in Palestine (Oxy SJP) and Occidental Jewish Voice for Peace (Oxy JVP) assembled an encampment of 17 tents on the Academic Quad, below the steps of the Arthur G. Coons Administrative Building, to show solidarity with Palestinians against Israeli occupation in the West Bank and the conflict […]
The post Oxy SJP and Oxy JVP stage encampment for Palestine, plan to stay ‘as long as possible’ appeared first on The Occidental.
Automobili Pininfarina is selling 1,900 hp electric hypercars inspired by billionaire Bruce Wayne aka Batman [Video]
date: 2024-04-30, from: Electrek Feed
If Batman’s true identity, Bruce Wayne, existed in real life, what car would you think he’d drive? Boutique electric hypercar builder Automobili Pininfarina has teamed up with Wayne Enterprises – a luxury brand based on the Batman franchise developed by Warner Brothers, to create four different bespoke EVs that will be produced in limited quantities and sold to consumers with pockets as deep as master Wayne’s.
Tech Today: Stay Safe with Battery Testing for Space
date: 2024-04-30, from: NASA breaking news
NASA battery safety exams influence commercial product testing
And the lion shall lie down with…?
date: 2024-04-30, from: Status-Q blog
From our “this may help you win a bet in the pub” collection… If you know the quiz show ‘QI’, you might imagine Stephen Fry asking “With whom will the lion lie down?”, and Alan Davies sheepishly responding “The lamb?”… before the claxons start, indicating a wrong answer. Because if you look at Isaiah chapter Continue Reading
https://statusq.org/archives/2024/04/30/12054/
ChatGPT Plus remembers everything you forgot you told it to remember
date: 2024-04-30, updated: 2024-04-30, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Unless you live in Europe or Korea
OpenAI’s Memory feature is now broadly available for ChatGPT Plus users, meaning many more can feel vaguely uncomfortable about how much the chatbot is “remembering” about their preferences.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/04/30/openai_chatgpt_memory/
Stellantis sees Q1 2024 drop in revenue, but EV sales were up
date: 2024-04-30, from: Electrek Feed
Stellantis Q1 2024 revenue fell 12%, but global EV sales were up, and it’s optimistic about growth and profitability in H2 2024.
https://electrek.co/2024/04/30/stellantis-sees-q1-2024-drop-in-revenue-but-ev-sales-were-up/
Democrats say they will save Speaker Mike Johnson’s job if Republicans try to oust him
date: 2024-04-30, from: VOA News USA
WASHINGTON — House Democrats will vote to save Republican Speaker Mike Johnson’s job should some of his fellow GOP lawmakers seek to remove him from the position, Democratic leaders said Tuesday, avoiding a repeat of when eight Republicans joined with Democrats to oust his predecessor, former Rep. Kevin McCarthy.
Johnson, R-La., has come under heavy criticism from some Republicans for moving forward with aid for Ukraine as part of a $95 billion emergency spending package that passed this month. It would take only a handful of Republicans to remove Johnson from the speakership if the Democratic caucus went along with the effort.
But Democratic leaders took that possibility off the table.
“At this moment, upon completion of our national security work, the time has come to turn the page on this chapter of Pro-Putin Republican obstruction,” said a statement from the top three House Democrats, Reps. Hakeem Jeffries, Katherine Clark and Pete Aguilar. “We will vote to table Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Motion to Vacate the Chair. If she invokes the motion, it will not succeed.”
Greene, R-Ga., earlier this month filed a resolution with the House clerk — called a motion to vacate — that would remove Johnson from office if approved by the House. And while Greene did not force the resolution to be taken up immediately, she told reporters she was laying the groundwork for future consideration. She had two co-sponsors, Reps. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., and Paul Gosar, R-Ariz.
Johnson was quick to distance himself from Democrats on the issue, saying he had no conversations with Jeffries or anyone else about saving his job.
“I was laser-focused on getting the supplemental done,” Johnson said, referring to the aid package. “I’ve had colleagues from both parties come up to me on the floor, of course, and say we won’t stand for this. … I’ve not requested assistance from anyone. I’m not focused on that at all.”
Many House Republicans are eager to move past the divisions that have tormented their ranks ever since taking the majority last January. At a closed-door session Tuesday morning, much of the discussion focused on how to create unity in the party heading into the November elections.
Rep. Andy Barr, R-Ky., said Republicans heard from Michael Whatley, the new chairman of the Republican National Committee, who emphasized that Donald Trump, the presumptive GOP presidential nominee, wants to unify the majority in the House. He said that’s a message that certainly helps Johnson.
“What he wants is a unified Republican majority, so my message is singing from the same song sheet as President Trump,” Barr said.
Still, Greene indicated she may still move forward with the effort to remove Johnson, tweeting on X that she believes in recorded votes to put “Congress on record.” She also called Johnson “officially the Democratic Speaker of the House” and questioned “what slimy deal” he made for Democratic support.
“Americans deserve to see the Uniparty on full display. I’m about to give them their coming out party!” Greene tweeted. “Uniparty” is a derisive term some Republicans use to describe cooperation between some fellow Republicans and Democrats.
Comedian in the Cross-Hairs: The FBI Investigation into Mort Sahl
date: 2024-04-30, from: National Archives, Text Message blog
Today’s post was written by Gregory Tavormina, Archivist with the Special Access and FOIA Program (RF) at the National Archives in College Park, MD. Mort Sahl was considered one of the first “modern” comedians. A contemporary of Lenny Bruce, he greatly influenced later stand-up comics ranging from George Carlin and Richard Pryor to Woody Allen … Continue reading Comedian in the Cross-Hairs: The FBI Investigation into Mort Sahl
Volvo EX30: 9 Things You Might Hate About This Compact Electric SUV
date: 2024-04-30, from: Inside EVs News
There’s a lot to love about the EX30, but it does have some negatives too.
https://insideevs.com/news/717750/volvo-ex30-9-things-hate-electric-suv/
Tesla Semi spotted being used by another customer
date: 2024-04-30, from: Electrek Feed
A Tesla Semi was spotted being used by a customer that is not PepsiCo or Tesla as the electric semi truck program continues to expand.
https://electrek.co/2024/04/30/tesla-semi-spotted-used-another-customer-sysco/
What Characters Know
date: 2024-04-30, from: John August blog
John and Craig investigate what characters know and how we know they know what they know. It’s something that can be as confusing as that last sentence was, but they offer clear guidance on building informed characters, audience expectations, and how to get everybody on the same page. We also look at how ad breaks […] The post What Characters Know first appeared on John August.
https://johnaugust.com/2024/what-characters-know
Judge holds Trump in contempt of court for violating gag order
date: 2024-04-30, from: VOA News USA
FBI: Scammers stole more than $3.4 billion from older Americans last year
date: 2024-04-30, from: VOA News USA
Washington — Scammers stole more than $3.4 billion from older Americans last year, according to an FBI report released Tuesday that shows a rise in losses through increasingly sophisticated criminal tactics to trick the vulnerable into giving up their life savings.
Losses from scams reported by Americans over the age of 60 last year were up 11% over the year before, according to the FBI’s report. Investigators are warning of a rise in brazen schemes to drain bank accounts that involve sending couriers in person to collect cash or gold from victims.
“It can be a devastating impact to older Americans who lack the ability to go out and make money,” said Deputy Assistant Director James Barnacle of the FBI’s Criminal Investigative Division. “People lose all their money. Some people become destitute.”
The FBI received more than 100,000 complaints by victims of scams over the age of 60 last year, with nearly 6,000 people losing more than $100,000. It follows a sharp rise in reported losses by older Americans in the two years after the 2020 coronavirus pandemic, when people were stuck at home and easier for scammers to reach over the phone.
Barnacle said investigators are seeing organized, transnational criminal enterprises targeting older Americans through a variety of schemes, like romance scams and investment frauds.
The most commonly reported fraud among older adults last year was tech support scams, in which criminals pose over the phone as technical or customer service representatives. In one such scam authorities say is rising in popularity, criminals impersonate technology, banking and government officials to convince victims that foreign hackers have infiltrated their bank accounts and instruct them that to protect their money they should move it to a new account — one secretly controlled by the scammers.
Federal investigators saw an uptick between May and December of scammers using live couriers to take money from victims duped into believing their accounts had been compromised, according to the FBI. In those cases, scammers tell victims that their bank accounts have been hacked and that they need to liquidate their assets into cash or buy gold or other precious metals to protect their funds. Then the fraudsters arrange for a courier to pick it up in person.
“A lot of the the fraud schemes are asking victims to send money via a wire transfer, or a cryptocurrency transfer. When the victim is reluctant to do that, they’re given an alternative,” Barnacle said. “And so the bad guy will use courier services.”
Earlier this month, an 81-year-old Ohio man fatally shot an Uber driver he thought was trying to rob him after receiving scam phone calls, according to authorities.
The man had been receiving calls from someone pretending to be an officer from the local court who demanded money. The Uber driver had been told to retrieve a package from the man’s home, a request authorities say was possibly made by the same scam caller or an accomplice.
The staggering losses to older Americans are likely an undercount. Only about half of the more than 880,000 complaints reported to the FBI’s Internet Crime Compliance Center last year included information on the age of the victim.
Reality check: AI Hardware is experimental
date: 2024-04-30, from: Om Malik blog
Tech’s past tells us that the future doesn’t unfold along a predetermined timeline. Despite the rocky starts of Humane’s AI Pin & Rabbit’s R1 device, we’re heading to a promising era where invisible information interfaces become as commonplace as screens.
https://om.co/2024/04/30/the-reality-optimism-of-ai-hardware/
Enterprise browser maker Island says it’s now worth $3B
date: 2024-04-30, updated: 2024-04-30, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Big rise in valuation… for browser that won’t let you Control-V any data copied inside it
Insta-unicorn Island, with its browser built for the enterprise, has some interesting funding news: it just hit a $3 billion valuation in an era where it’s AI or bust in the VC world. …
FIREBAT A8 is a Ryzen 7 8845HS mini PC
date: 2024-04-30, from: Liliputing
The FIREBAT A8 is a compact desktop computer with an AMD Ryzen 7 8845HS processor featuring 8 Zen 4 CPU cores, Radeon 780M graphics with 12-core RDNA 3 graphics, and a Ryzen AI NPU with up to 16 TOPS of AI performance. It also features dual 2.5 GbE LAN ports and support for up to four […]
The post FIREBAT A8 is a Ryzen 7 8845HS mini PC appeared first on Liliputing.
https://liliputing.com/firebat-a8-is-a-ryzen-7-8845hs-mini-pc/
Survey: US consumer confidence at lowest level since 2022
date: 2024-04-30, from: VOA News USA
Washington — U.S. consumers appear less optimistic about the jobs market and more worried about future financial conditions, bringing a closely watched confidence metric to its lowest level since July 2022, a survey showed Tuesday.
The consumer confidence index fell to 97.0 in April, said The Conference Board, significantly below the 104.0 reading that analysts anticipated.
This marks the third straight month consumer confidence has worsened, the report said, and comes as President Joe Biden struggles to boost perceptions about the economy as his reelection campaign ramps up.
“Consumers became less positive about the current labor market situation, and more concerned about future business conditions, job availability, and income,” said Dana Peterson, chief economist at The Conference Board.
But she added that despite the slip, “optimism about the present situation continues to more than offset concerns about the future.”
The biggest worries surrounded “elevated price levels, especially for food and gas,” said Peterson.
Meanwhile, politics and global conflicts were “distant runners-up,” she added.
While consumers rated current business conditions “positively,” their views of the labor market weakened with more reporting that jobs are hard to get, said The Conference Board.
Consumers also became less upbeat about their families’ financial situations, both currently and in the future.
“Perceptions about the labor market deteriorated even as job growth remains robust, and the unemployment rate is historically low,” noted Rubeela Farooqi, chief U.S. economist at High Frequency Economics.
“A deteriorating trend in sentiment could persist,” she cautioned.
This risks bogging down spending and growth, given that inflation remains persistent and interest rate cuts are “not imminent,” she said.
Car Tracking Can Enable Domestic Abuse. Turning It Off Is Easier Said Than Done
date: 2024-04-30, from: The Markup blog
Internet-connected cars allow abusers to track domestic violence survivors after they leave
Razer made to pay $1.2M over ‘N95’ face mask that wasn’t
date: 2024-04-30, updated: 2024-04-30, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Customers to get their light-up cyberpunk respirators refunded
Remember when Razer, better known for overpriced peripheral hardware with RGB blinkenlights aimed at gamers, released an overpriced “N95-grade” face mask?…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/04/30/ftc_razer_face_mask/
NASA’s Commitment to Safety Starts with its Culture
date: 2024-04-30, from: NASA breaking news
NASA works on projects that often have never been done, or perhaps the way they are being done has never been tried. Living on the edge of innovation requires a high degree of risk. After organizational silence led to the loss of space shuttle Challenger and its crew in 1986, NASA vowed to change the […]
What do future business leaders learn about climate change?
date: 2024-04-30, from: Marketplace Morning Report
Corporations play a major role in emitting climate-altering greenhouse gases, and businesses need to be fully on board if the world is going to avoid the worst of the climate crisis. But lessons on climate change’s effects on business aren’t always taught in MBA programs. Now, a group of educators is trying to change that. Plus: a major FCC fine for cell companies and a preview of the Federal Reserve’s meeting this week.
Men Use Fake Livestream Apps With AI Audiences to Hit on Women
date: 2024-04-30, from: 404 Media Group
“I downloaded this app called Parallel Live which makes it look like you have tens of thousands of people watching. Instantly, I became the life of the party.”
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-04-30, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Gogoro Eeyo: An ultralight ebike that rides like nothing else.
Florida Democrats hope abortion, marijuana issues draw young voters
date: 2024-04-30, from: VOA News USA
WEST PALM BEACH, FLORIDA — Jordan Vassallo is lukewarm about casting her first presidential ballot for President Joe Biden in November. But when the 18-year-old senior at Jupiter High School in Florida thinks about the things she cares about, she says her vote for the Democratic incumbent is an “obvious choice.”
Vassallo will be voting for a constitutional ballot amendment that would prevent the state of Florida from prohibiting abortion before a fetus can survive on its own — essentially the standard that existed nationally before the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the constitutional protections to abortion and left the matter for states to decide.
Passage of the amendment would wipe away Florida’s six-week abortion law, which Vassallo says makes no sense.
“Most people don’t know they are pregnant at six weeks,” she said.
Biden, despite her reticence, will get her vote as well.
In Florida and across the United States, voters in Vassallo’s age group could prove pivotal in the 2024 election, from the presidency to ballot amendments and down-ballot races that will determine who controls Congress. She is likely to be among more than 8 million new voters eligible to vote this November since the 2022 elections, according to Tufts University Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement.
While some of those voters share Vassallo’s priorities of gun violence prevention and abortion rights, recent protests on college campuses about the war between Israel and Hamas, including at some Florida campuses, have thrown a new element of uncertainty into the mix. In Florida and elsewhere, observers across the political spectrum are looking on with intense interest.
Florida Democrats hope young voters will be driven to the polls by ballot amendments legalizing marijuana and enshrining abortion rights. They hope the more tolerant views of young voters on those issues will reverse an active voter registration edge of nearly 900,000 for Republicans in Florida, which has turned from the ultimate swing state in 2000 to reliably Republican in recent years.
According to AP VoteCast, an expansive survey of the electorate, about 8 in 10 Florida voters under age 45 in the 2022 midterm elections said the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade had an impact on their decision to vote and who to support. The youngest voters, under age 30, appeared more likely than others to say the decision was the single most important factor in their votes, with about 3 in 10 saying that, compared with about 2 in 10 older voters.
Nathan Mitchell, president of Florida Atlantic University’s College Republicans, questions how impactful abortion will be in the election.
According to AP VoteCast, relatively few Florida voters in the 2022 midterms believed abortion should be either completely banned or fully permitted in all cases. Even among Republicans, just 12% said abortion should be illegal in all cases. About half of Republicans said it should be banned in most cases.
Voters under 45 were slightly more likely than others to say abortion should always be legal, with 30% taking that position.
Mitchell said while abortion is a strong issue, especially for women, he doesn’t think it will drive many younger voters to the polls.
“I think other amendments will probably do that, especially the recreational marijuana amendment,” Mitchell said. “I think that’s going to bring out a lot more voters than abortion will.”
The AP VoteCast survey lends some credence to his thinking. About 6 in 10 Florida voters in the 2022 elections favored legalizing the recreational use of marijuana nationwide, the survey found. Among voters under 45, that was 76%. Still, it’s unclear how important that issue is for younger voters compared with other issues.
The big question is whether other issues can override Biden’s enthusiasm problem among young Florida voters and elsewhere.
Six in 10 adults under 30 nationally said in a December AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll that they would be dissatisfied with Biden as the Democratic Party nominee in 2024. About 2 in 10 said in a March poll that “excited” would describe their emotions if Biden were reelected.
Young voters were crucial to the broad and racially diverse coalition that helped elect Biden in 2020. About 6 in 10 voters under 30 backed Biden nationally, according to AP VoteCas. A Pew Research Center survey showed that those under age 30 made up 38% of new or irregular voters in that election.
In Florida, Biden won 64% of young voters — similar to his national numbers.
New issues that concern young voters have emerged this year. Biden’s handling of the Israel-Hamas war has sparked protests at college campuses across the country, and Biden’s inability to deliver broad-based student loan forgiveness affects many young voters directly. Concern about climate change also continues to grow. AP-NORC data from February shows that majorities of Americans under 30 disapprove of how Biden is handling a range of issues, including the conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians, immigration, the economy, climate change and abortion policy.
But in Florida, it will be abortion rights and marijuana that give voters actual control over issues beyond a presidential rematch most did not want but got anyway, said Trevian Briskey, a 21-year-old FAU student.
Tony Figueroa, president of Miami Young Republicans, said the abortion issue is important to many young voters, regardless of where they stand. He noted, however, that Florida “is a very conservative state.” That means some of the young voters motivated by the issue favor stricter abortion laws.
“Given how Florida has become so much more red over the past couple of years, really it’s more of a way to galvanize or mobilize young voters where this is an important issue for them,” Figueroa said. “It’s really a way to get them to come out in droves.”
Matheus Xavier, 21, who studies biology at Florida Atlantic University, said he considered voting for Trump at some point, but changed his mind since Biden fell more in line with the things he cares about, including the preservation of abortion rights.
“At the end of the day, you got to go with what you support,” he said. “I guess Biden kind of shows more of that. If there was another option that was actually good, I’d probably go for that.”
EU duties might not be enough to hold off flood of Chinese EVs
date: 2024-04-30, updated: 2024-04-30, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
15 to 30% won’t touch the sides… 50%? Now you’re talking
Import duties of 40 to 50 percent will be needed to shield the European auto industry from China-based producers, according to a new report.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/04/30/report_eu_duties_electric_vehicles/
‘Hardcore’ New Tesla Layoffs Leave You Wondering What Tesla Even Is Anymore
date: 2024-04-30, from: Inside EVs News
Plus, Tesla’s Full Self-Driving gets tentative approval for China and NHTSA requires cars to have automatic emergency braking by 2029.
https://insideevs.com/news/717981/tesla-new-layoffs-supercharging-team/
Mercedes-Benz’s Q1 2024 report shows revenues are down, but its share of EV sales is growing
date: 2024-04-30, from: Electrek Feed
Mercedes-Benz joins a growing list of EU-based automakers publishing their Q1 2024 financial reports today, and the German brand is relaying a similar story of staggering profits.
https://electrek.co/2024/04/30/mercedes-benz-q1-2024-report-revenues-down-share-of-ev-sales-growing/
Tesla Megapack to power new massive record-breaking 1.3 GWh battery system
date: 2024-04-30, from: Electrek Feed
Tesla Megapack has been selected to power a massive new record-breaking 1,3 GWh battery system from Neoen in Australia.
Even Chinese EV Companies Are Struggling
date: 2024-04-30, from: Inside EVs News
BYD’s first-quarter profits were down 47% thanks to a serious EV price war in the Chinese market.
https://insideevs.com/news/717977/china-byd-ev-sales-struggling/
To Pack Spheres Tightly, Mathematicians Throw Them at Random
date: 2024-04-30, from: Quanta Magazine
Four mathematicians broke a 75-year-old record by finding a denser way to pack high-dimensional spheres.The post To Pack Spheres Tightly, Mathematicians Throw Them at Random first appeared on Quanta Magazine
https://www.quantamagazine.org/to-pack-spheres-tightly-mathematicians-throw-them-at-random-20240430/
Satellite of love: SES and Intelsat finally tie the knot in $3.1B acquisition
date: 2024-04-30, updated: 2024-04-30, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Second time lucky as competition from Starlink and pals increases
Satellite operator SES is to acquire Intelsat for $3.1 billion, creating an entity with more than 100 Geostationary Earth Orbit (GEO) and 26 Medium Earth Orbit (MEO) satellites.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/04/30/ses_intelsat_acquisition/
Article Spotlight: Carnivore coexistence without competition
date: 2024-04-30, from: PeerJ blog
Mercedes Says ‘No Thanks’ To The Apple CarPlay Takeover
date: 2024-04-30, from: Inside EVs News
But that’s only part of the story. In a new interview, Mercedes’ CEO explains where the German automaker’s software game is headed.
https://insideevs.com/news/717991/mercedes-carplay-apple-ceo-interview/
Open Source world’s Bruce Perens emits draft Post-Open Zero Cost License
date: 2024-04-30, updated: 2024-04-30, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Software doyen hopes to achieve a third impossible thing
Interview Bruce Perens believes he can do three impossible things, having already accomplished two of them.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/04/30/bruce_perens_post_open_license/
Ultraviolette’s F77 Mach 2 EV-Moto Should Come to the US
date: 2024-04-30, from: Ride Apart, Electric Motorcycle News
We sure hope it makes its way to other markets soon.
https://www.rideapart.com/news/717769/ultraviolette-f77-mach2-launch-india/
Volkswagen Group’s profits dropped 20% in Q1, but it remains confident in hitting 2024 targets
date: 2024-04-30, from: Electrek Feed
Volkswagen Group released its financial numbers for Q1 2024 today, following similar trends from other EU-based automakers. The numbers detail a slowing of sales and a drop in profits. Despite a 20% decrease, the Group remains optimistic that it will end the year at its financial targets.
3D printing a Raspberry Pi 5 in resin
date: 2024-04-30, from: Raspberry Pi News (.com)
The first job for our new resin 3D printer was an oversized Raspberry Pi 5, naturally. Here’s how we went about it.
The post 3D printing a Raspberry Pi 5 in resin appeared first on Raspberry Pi.
https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/3d-printing-a-raspberry-pi-5-in-resin/
Elon Musk’s latest brainfart is to turn Tesla cars into AWS on wheels
date: 2024-04-30, updated: 2024-04-30, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
There are many reasons why this is likely more trouble than it’s worth
EV carmaker Tesla is considering a wonderful money-making wheeze – use all of that compute power in its vehicles to process workloads for cash, like a kind of AWS on wheels.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/04/30/tesla_ai_workloads/
Bagnaia And Marquez Dueling In Spain Is Exactly Why We Love MotoGP
date: 2024-04-30, from: Ride Apart, Electric Motorcycle News
It doesn’t get any more top-notch, edge-of-your-seat than this matchup. Brilliant.
https://www.rideapart.com/news/717917/bagnaia-marquez-spanish-motogp-2024/
European Commission starts formal probe of Meta over election misinformation
date: 2024-04-30, updated: 2024-04-30, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Europe takes action after Facebook parent withdraws monitoring tool
The European Commission has launched formal proceedings against Meta, alleging failure to properly monitor distribution by “foreign actors” of political misinformation before June’s European elections.…
Did Elon Musk Just Sack Tesla’s Entire Supercharger Team?
date: 2024-04-30, from: Heatmap News
Current conditions: Floods in Saudi Arabia forced some schools to close • Nearly 50 fires were reported in Greece over 24 hours • Tornado alley could see more severe storms this afternoon.
THE TOP FIVE
- Biden finalizes permitting reform rule
The Biden administration today finalized changes to an old environmental law, a move that could speed up the arduous permitting process for new clean energy projects. The 1969 National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) requires that all major federal infrastructure projects undergo an environmental review, but these reviews can run thousands of pages long and take years to finish, explained Heatmap’s Robinson Meyer, adding that “it takes 4.5 years on average to finish an environmental-impact statement.” Through the new Bipartisan Permitting Reform Implementation Rule, Biden seeks to make the process more efficient by:
- setting one- and two-year deadlines by which agencies must complete environmental reviews
- introducing page limits for the reviews
- creating a unified federal review process
- establishing one lead agency for handling reviews
The new rule says federal agencies must consider a project’s impacts on climate change, as well as environmental justice. It also reverses a 2020 overhaul carried out by former President Trump that the Biden administration called “legally questionable.” Brenda Mallory, chair of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, said the changes “will help speed infrastructure and permitting, but without losing sight of the environmental and health benefits we need to protect.”
- Report: Tesla eliminates entire Supercharger team
Two weeks after announcing it would slash 10% of its global workforce, Tesla appears to be making more cuts. According to The Information, CEO Elon Musk sent an email to senior staffers last night with the news that several high-level employees would be departing. Among them is Rebecca Tinucci, senior director of EV charging, along with her 500-person Supercharger team. Tinucci led the rollout effort of Tesla’s Supercharger network, positioning it as the predominant charging infrastructure in North America. Daniel Ho, director of vehicle programs and new product initiatives, is also out, and the public policy team is no more.
“Hopefully these actions are making it clear that we need to be absolutely hard core about headcount and cost reduction,” Musk reportedly wrote in the email. “While some on exec staff are taking this seriously, most are not yet doing so.”
“It makes absolutely no sense to lay off the Supercharger team,” said Jameson Dow at Electrek. “Supercharging is an incredible opportunity for Tesla, especially now that everyone else has adopted NACS. … This move, alone, would erode any confidence I had left in Tesla’s CEO – if I still had any.”
- Major UK mortgage lender will deny home loans over flooding
A prominent mortgage lender in the United Kingdom will no longer offer loans on homes that are at risk of flooding, Bloomberg reported. Nationwide Building Society is UK’s the second-biggest mortgage provider, and is worried that flood-prone homes will become uninsurable and therefore unsellable. Weather-related insurance claims have been on the rise in the UK as climate change brings more frequent storms and severe flooding. The last 18 months have been the UK’s wettest on record. A new report finds that harvests of crops like wheat, barley, and oats in the country could drop by a fifth this year due to excessive rainfall.
- Plastic treaty talks end with no production cap in sight
The latest meeting on a global plastics treaty has come to an end in Canada. While there was some meaningful progress on the draft text of an agreement (which must be finalized by the end of the year), deep divisions remain over whether the final text should include a cap on how much plastic can be manufactured. Environmental groups point out that plastic production has doubled in just 20 years and is set to triple in coming decades. Fossil fuel companies and oil-producing nations, naturally, prefer to promote plastic recycling instead of plastic reduction. As AFP explained, “plastic production is a significant driver of global warming because most plastic is made from fossil fuels.”
- G7 nations tentatively agree to phase out coal plants by 2035
Energy and climate ministers from the Group of Seven wealthy nations have agreed to shut down their coal-fired power plants by 2035. The deal is expected to be finalized in Turin, Italy, today. It could afford some wiggle room to countries that remain heavily reliant on coal, allowing them to propose a timeline that is “consistent with keeping a limit of 1.5 Celsius temperature rise within reach.” Still, the move is seen as historic. “To have the G7 nations come around the table and send that signal to the world, that we, the advanced economies of the world, are committing to phasing out coal by the early 2030s is quite incredible,” said the UK’s Minister for Nuclear and Renewables Andrew Bowie. As CNN noted, G7 decisions often “trickle down or influence the wider G20, which includes other big emitters, like China and India, as well as major fossil fuel producers, such as Saudi Arabia and Russia.”
THE KICKER
The land that makes up the Permian Basin, America’s biggest oil field, has subsided by as much as 11 inches since 2015 due to extraction operations.
https://heatmap.news/tesla-supercharger-layoff-elon-musk
Spy Shots: This Could Be the 2026 Triumph Street Triple
date: 2024-04-30, from: Ride Apart, Electric Motorcycle News
Forget your SuperDukes and Panagalies because in the real world, what’s more exciting than a new Street Triple?
https://www.rideapart.com/news/717723/spied-2026-triumph-street-triple/
The long history of student divestment protests
date: 2024-04-30, from: Marketplace Morning Report
Students nationwide are pushing colleges and universities to sell off investments in companies they say profit from the war in Gaza. We’ll chart the history of calls for divestment, including student protests more than 30 years ago demanding colleges cut ties with any company that did business in apartheid South Africa. Also, new federal regulation is expected to save hundreds of lives each year, and inflation indexes aren’t one size fits all.
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-04-30, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Killington is the East’s largest ski resort. A developer wants to expand on that in a big way.
Millions Rely on an Affordable Internet Subsidy. It Ends This Month
date: 2024-04-30, from: The Markup blog
Roughly half of Affordable Connectivity Program recipients are military families, one in four live in rural communities, and one in five are households with people who are 65 or older
Dakar Will No Longer Feature ATVs
date: 2024-04-30, from: Ride Apart, Electric Motorcycle News
After decades of riding, the series says goodbye.
https://www.rideapart.com/news/717895/dakar-atv-ban-quad/
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-04-30, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Threads aims to be as spam-infested as Twitter.
HOG Rally Aims to Be Harley -Davidson’s European Sturgis
date: 2024-04-30, from: Ride Apart, Electric Motorcycle News
Tons of music, bikes, food, and fun.
https://www.rideapart.com/news/717792/2024-european-hog-rally-additonal-details/
Xubuntu 24.04: A minimal install that does what it says on the tin
date: 2024-04-30, updated: 2024-04-30, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
This nearly Snap-free Ubuntu remix may be about about to win friends and influence people
Xubuntu 24.04 is out, and offers a minimal installation option that is considerably more minimal than the other official flavors.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/04/30/xubuntu_2404_snapless_ubuntu/
Columbia University threatens to expel student protesters occupying building
date: 2024-04-30, from: VOA News USA
DJI’s New Avata 2 FPV Drone Is Ready To Capture Your Daringest Rides
date: 2024-04-30, from: Ride Apart, Electric Motorcycle News
It comes with DJI Goggles 3 and RC Motion 3 for a fully immersive flying experience.
https://www.rideapart.com/news/717767/new-dji-avata2-fpv-drone/
#ArchivesGames: Bowling and the National Archives
date: 2024-04-30, from: National Archives, Pieces of History blog
On May 3, 2024, we’re having another #ArchivesHashtagParty with this month’s focus on #ArchivesGames. Today we’re rolling in with a post on bowling and the National Archives that we hope is right up your alley. So we don’t cross the line, we promise to spare you of any more bowling puns! National Archives employee organizations … Continue reading #ArchivesGames: Bowling and the National Archives
https://prologue.blogs.archives.gov/2024/04/30/archivesgames-bowling-and-the-national-archives/
China’s EV price war hits BYD profits
date: 2024-04-30, from: Marketplace Morning Report
From the BBC World Service: Tesla’s China-based rival BYD became the world’s best-selling electric vehicle maker in January, but has since seen profits drop as slower demand and more competition take a bite. We’ll hear more. Also on this morning’s program: How will England’s Premier League soccer competition — home to giants like Manchester United, Liverpool and Chelsea — change if it adopts a proposed squad spending cap?
https://www.marketplace.org/shows/marketplace-morning-report/chinas-ev-price-war-hits-byd-profits
Novel vitrimer plastics promise greener PCBs
date: 2024-04-30, updated: 2024-04-30, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Even the least recyclable part of the process could be recovered 91 percent of the time
A recent study proposes that vitrimer could potentially be used for making printed circuit boards (PCBs) that are much more repairable and recyclable than the ones we use today.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/04/30/pcb_vitrimer_recycling/
Teaching a generation of AI innovators in Malaysia with Experience AI
date: 2024-04-30, from: Raspberry Pi (.org)
Today’s blog is from Aimy Lee, Chief Operating Officer at Penang Science Cluster, part of our global partner network for Experience AI. Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming the world at an incredible pace, and at Penang Science Cluster, we are determined to be at the forefront of this fast-changing landscape. The Malaysian government is actively…
The post Teaching a generation of AI innovators in Malaysia with Experience AI appeared first on Raspberry Pi Foundation.
Oracle Fusion rollout costs 15 times council’s estimates in SAP rip-’n-replace
date: 2024-04-30, updated: 2024-04-30, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
No it’s not Birmingham this time. West Sussex County Council ERP replacement price to hit £40M
A local authority on the southern coast of England expects the cost of swapping its ERP system from SAP to Oracle to go from £2.6 million ($3.26 million) to nearly £40 million ($50 million), as the council seeks a new implementation partner for a project that began nearly five years ago.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/04/30/uk_council_sees_cost_of/
Vantage enters crowded Irish datacenter market with new Dublin site
date: 2024-04-30, updated: 2024-04-30, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
On-site generation plant aims to ‘alleviate pressure on energy demand from the grid’
Vantage Data Centers is joining the crowded Irish datacenter market with its first site in the Emerald Isle due to come online in 2024. In view of ongoing power constraints in the country, the project is to include on-site power generation.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/04/30/vantage_dublin_datacenter/
What to say to a Republican who complains about the federal debt.
date: 2024-04-30, from: Robert Reich on Substack
Friends, Republicans are attacking Biden for expanding the federal debt, and the House “Freedom Caucus” is livid that Speaker Mike Johnson has agreed to more funds for Ukraine, claiming it will expand the debt even further. Can we just have some sanity here?
https://robertreich.substack.com/p/what-to-say-to-a-republican-who-complains
Apple’s ‘incredibly private’ Safari is not so private in Europe
date: 2024-04-30, updated: 2024-04-30, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Infosec eggheads find iGiant left EU iOS 17 users open to being tracked around the web
Apple’s grudging accommodation of European antitrust rules by allowing third-party app stores on iPhones has left users of its Safari browser exposed to potential web activity tracking.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/04/30/apple_safari_europe_tracking/
Today in SCV History (April 30)
date: 2024-04-30, from: SCV New (TV Station)
1973 – Watergate figure H.R. “Bob” Haldeman, a former CalArts board member, resigns from Nixon White House. [link
https://scvnews.com/today-in-scv-history-april-30/
China to launch sample return mission to the far side of the Moon – maybe next week
date: 2024-04-30, updated: 2024-04-30, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
And hatches 2030 plan to beat US for Mars rock retrieval
China’s space program will next week launch mission that aims to land on the Moon, take samples, and bring them back to Earth.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/04/30/chang_e6_china_moon_mission/
Politicians call for ban on ‘killer robots’ and the curbing of AI weapons
date: 2024-04-30, updated: 2024-04-30, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
‘This is the Oppenheimer moment of our generation’
Video Austria’s foreign minister on Monday likened the rise of military artificial intelligence to the existential crisis faced by the creators of the first atomic bomb, and called for a ban on “killer robots”.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/04/30/kill_killer_robots_now/
Tesla conducting more layoffs, including entire Supercharger team
date: 2024-04-30, from: Electrek Feed
Just after laying off “more than 10%” of its global workforce, Tesla is laying off even more employees – including senior executives and long-time veterans of the company, most notably the entire Supercharging team and the executive responsible for negotiating NACS adoption across the industry.
https://electrek.co/2024/04/29/tesla-conducting-more-layoffs-including-entire-supercharger-team/
Issue 9 – April 2024
date: 2024-04-30, from: The Sundail (CSUN student paper)
Letter from the Editor: Issue 9 Volume 64 Staff Highlight: The students who make the Sundial possible Sundial Alumni Advice: Where they are and how they got there Passionately accessible:…
https://sundial.csun.edu/181223/print-editions/issue-9-april-2024/
April 29, 2024
date: 2024-04-30, from: Heather Cox Richardson blog
In December 2020, when the pandemic illustrated the extraordinary disadvantage created by the inability of those in low-income households to communicate online with schools and medical professionals, then-president Trump signed into law an emergency program to provide funding to make internet access affordable. In 2021, Congress turned that idea into the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP) and made it part of the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (also known as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law).
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/april-29-2024
Here’s another thing AI can do: Return Samsung’s memory biz to profit
date: 2024-04-30, updated: 2024-04-30, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
HBM will help too. Foundry biz? On track for 2nm but bruised
Samsung Electronics’ Device Solutions unit reported on Tuesday a 68 percent year-on-year increase in sales for Q1 2024, largely thanks to its memory sales – a result that confirms what many had predicted: an AI and server boom has brought the chip shop out of the lows experienced in 2023.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/04/30/samsung_q1_2024/
Netanyahu says Rafah offensive will happen with or without cease-fire and hostage release deal
date: 2024-04-30, from: VOA News USA
Pro-Palestinian encampment protesters hold ground on both US coasts
date: 2024-04-30, from: VOA News USA
Campus protests of the war in Gaza continue, despite college administrations’ warnings — and new ones are being launched. VOA Natasha Mozgovaya reports from an encampment set up Monday at the University of Washington in Seattle.
Australia to fund $620M quantum computer claimed to be first at ‘utility-scale’
date: 2024-04-30, updated: 2024-04-30, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
PsiQuantum’s coming home
Australian researchers pioneered the development of solar panels, but the nation now imports them in huge quantities – a situation that’s become emblematic of the nation’s poor record of turning local innovation into jobs and profits across the supply chain.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/04/30/australia_psiquantum_investment/
Without Israel-Hamas cease-fire, Washington pursues humanitarian aid, hostage deal
date: 2024-04-30, from: VOA News USA
While Washington has so far failed to get Israel and Hamas to agree to a cease-fire in the Gaza conflict, Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited the Middle East on Monday to try to improve the humanitarian situation and lay the groundwork for what happens in Gaza — and the region — after the war ends. VOA’s Anita Powell reports from the White House.
@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed (date: 2024-04-30, from: Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed)
https://mastodon.social/@Migueldeicaza/112357825714391011
Gogoro announces major partnership to help accelerate global expansion
date: 2024-04-30, from: Electrek Feed
Gogoro, the global leader in battery-swapping for light electric vehicles like scooters and motorcycles, just can’t seem to slow down. After a week full of major news, the company is back with perhaps its biggest announcement lately: a plan for a major partnership that will see the company greatly expand the use of its swappable battery standard.
Oh, and not just for light electric vehicles anymore.
The hiring frenzy is over at India’s services giants
date: 2024-04-30, updated: 2024-04-30, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Headcounts are down for the first time in ages, margins are up, and CEOs are happy
When India’s top four outsourcers – Wipro, HCL Tech, Infosys and Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) – announce their results, they often mention plans to hire thousands of new workers to both grow headcount and replace departed workers. But across 2023 and into 2024, that changed.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/04/30/hcl_tcs_wipro_infosys_results/
Rolling Stones show no signs of slowing down as they begin their latest tour
date: 2024-04-30, from: VOA News USA
houston — Time marches on and all good things must come to an end. But don’t tell that to The Rolling Stones.
What many believe to be the greatest rock ‘n’ roll band in the world showed no signs of slowing down anytime soon as they kicked off their latest tour Sunday night at NRG Stadium in Houston, Texas.
The Stones have been touring for more than 60 years. Frontman Mick Jagger and lead guitarist Keith Richards are both 80, with guitarist Ronnie Wood not far behind at 76. Their tour is being sponsored in part by AARP.
But during a vibrant two-hour show, the Stones played with the energy of a band that was on tour for the first time.
“It’s great to be back in the Lone Star State,” Jagger told the packed stadium, filled with longtime fans, many wearing faded concert shirts from previous tours.
Jagger often strutted up and down the stage with seemingly boundless energy while Richards and Wood played many familiar guitar riffs beloved by fans. Jagger often led the audience in sing-alongs.
“The energy level is up and it’s always up with them. The age doesn’t show,” Dale Skjerseth, the Stones’ production director, said Friday before the concert.
The Stones have hit the road to support the release of their latest album, “Hackney Diamonds,” the band’s first record of original music since 2005.
Houston was the first stop on the band’s 16-city tour across the U.S. and Canada. Other cities on the tour include New Orleans, Philadelphia and Vancouver, British Columbia. The tour ends on July 17 in Santa Clara, California.
During Sunday’s 18-song concert set list, the Stones played several tracks off the new record, including the lead single, “Angry.” They also played classics including “Sympathy for the Devil,” “Gimme Shelter,” “Honky Tonk Women” and “Start Me Up.”
After playing “Beast of Burden,” Jagger said that concertgoers in Houston had voted to include it on the set list.
“You can’t go wrong with that,” one man in the audience could be heard screaming.
The Stones also played some unexpected choices, including “Rocks Off,” from their 1972 double album “Exile on Main St.” and “Out of Time,” a 1966 song that Jagger said during the concert had not ever been played by the band in the U.S.
With the 2021 death of drummer Charlie Watts, the Stones are now comprised of the core trio of Jagger, Richards and Wood. On Sunday, they were backed by various musicians including two keyboardists, a new drummer, backup singers and a brass section.
While the stage was surrounded by a large collection of video screens projecting images throughout the show, the main focus of the concert was the band and their songs.
Before Sunday’s concert, Jagger spent time on Friday touring NASA’s Johnson Space Center in suburban Houston, posting photos on his Instagram account of him with astronauts inside Mission Control.
“I had an amazing trip to the space center,” Jagger said.
When asked if the band might be thinking about retiring, Skjerseth said he doubts that will happen.
“This is not the end. They’re very enthused,” he said.
Campus Gaza protests are new political flashpoint in US
date: 2024-04-30, from: VOA News USA
https://www.voanews.com/a/campus-gaza-protests-are-new-political-flashpoint-in-us/7590047.html
Columbia suspends pro-Palestinian protesters after encampment talks stall
date: 2024-04-30, from: VOA News USA
NEW YORK — Columbia University on Monday began suspending pro-Palestinian activists who refused to dismantle a tent encampment on its New York City campus after the Ivy League school declared a stalemate in talks seeking to end the polarizing protest.
University President Nemat Minouche Shafik said in a statement that days of negotiations between student organizers and academic leaders had failed to persuade demonstrators to remove the dozens of tents set up to express opposition to Israel’s war in Gaza.
The crackdown at Columbia, at the center of Gaza-related protests roiling university campuses across the U.S. in recent weeks, came as police at the University of Texas at Austin arrested dozens of students whom they doused with pepper spray at a pro-Palestinian rally.
Columbia sent a letter on Monday morning warning that students who did not vacate the encampment by 2 p.m. ET and sign a form promising to abide by university policies would face suspension and become ineligible to complete the semester in good standing.
“We have begun suspending students as part of this next phase of our efforts to ensure safety on our campus,” said Ben Chang, a university spokesperson, at a briefing on Monday evening.
“The encampment has created an unwelcoming environment for many of our Jewish students and faculty and a noisy distraction that interferes with the teaching, learning and preparing for final exams,” Chang said.
Earlier, Shafik said Columbia would not divest from finances in Israel, a key demand of the protesters. Instead, she offered to invest in health and education in Gaza and make Columbia’s direct investment holdings more transparent.
Protesters have vowed to keep their encampment on the Manhattan campus until Columbia meets three demands: divestment, transparency in university finances, and amnesty for students and faculty disciplined for their part in the protests.
“These repulsive scare tactics mean nothing compared to the deaths of over 34,000 Palestinians. We will not move until Columbia meets our demands or we are moved by force,” leaders of the Columbia Student Apartheid Divest coalition said in a statement read at a news conference following the deadline.
Hundreds of demonstrators, many wearing traditional Palestinian keffiyeh scarves, marched in circles around the exterior of the encampment chanting, “Disclose! Divest! We will not stop, we will not rest.”
Shafik faced an outcry from many students, faculty and outside observers for summoning New York City police two weeks ago to dismantle the encampment.
After more than 100 arrests were made, students restored the encampment on a hedge-lined lawn of the university grounds within days of the April 18 police action.
Since then, students at dozens of campuses from California to New England have set up similar encampments to demonstrate their anger over the Israeli operation in Gaza and the perceived complicity of their schools in it.
The pro-Palestinian rallies have sparked intense campus debate over where school officials should draw the line between freedom of expression and hate speech
Students protesting Israel’s military offensive in Gaza, including some Jewish peace activists, have said they are being censured as antisemitic merely for criticizing the Israeli government or for expressing support for Palestinian rights.
“The movement itself is not antisemitic,” said Nicholas Fink, a freshman history major at Columbia who has not participated in the protests.
He is among a few dozen Jewish students who met privately with U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Mike Johnson during a campus visit by Republican members of Congress last week. Johnson and other congressional Republicans have claimed that Columbia and other universities have turned a blind eye to antisemitic hostility and harassment on campus.
Some Jewish groups argue that anti-Israel rhetoric frequently delves into or feeds overt forms of anti-Jewish hatred and calls for violence, and thus should not be tolerated
Student protests abound
At the University of California, Los Angeles, where opposing sides clashed over the weekend, pro-Israeli activists set up a large screen and loudspeakers to play a tape loop of the Oct. 7 attack on Israel by Hamas militants. The video appears aimed at countering pro-Hamas chants that seeped into campus protests in support of Palestinian civilians besieged in Gaza.
UCLA also stepped-up security around a pro-Palestinian encampment, consisting of more than 50 tents surrounded by metal fencing near the main administration building on campus.
Civil rights groups have criticized law enforcement tactics on some campuses, such as Atlanta’s Emory University and the University of Texas at Austin, where police in riot gear and on horseback moved against protesters last week, taking dozens into custody before charges were dropped for lack of probable cause.
Protests, and arrests, flared anew on the Austin campus on Monday.
Campus police backed by Texas state troopers attempted to break up a large student protest using pepper spray and flash-bang charges, arresting at least 43 people, according to defense attorney George Lobb, who said he confirmed the number with court and jail staff processing the detentions.
Video posted on social media showed police pulling individual students from a gathering on a grassy area where demonstrators sat and locked arms, some of them shouting, “Let them go!” State troopers in riot gear stood guard behind the uniformed police.
Virginia Tech said on Monday that 91 protesters arrested on Sunday night at a student-led encampment had been charged with trespassing. Video posted on social media showed demonstrators chanting, “Shame on you” as some were taken into custody.
Winner of $1.3 billion Powerball jackpot is an immigrant from Laos who has cancer
date: 2024-04-30, from: VOA News USA
SALEM, Oregon — One of the winners of a $1.3 billion Powerball jackpot this month is an immigrant from Laos who has had cancer for eight years and had his latest chemotherapy treatment last week.
Cheng “Charlie” Saephan, 46, of Portland told a news conference held by the Oregon Lottery on Monday that he and his 37-year-old wife, Duanpen, are taking half the money, and the rest is going to a friend, Laiza Chao, 55, of the Portland suburb of Milwaukie. Chao had chipped in $100 to buy a batch of tickets with them. They are taking a lump sum payment, $422 million after taxes.
“I will be able to provide for my family and my health,” he said, adding that he’d “find a good doctor for myself.”
Saephan, who has two young children, said that as a cancer patient, he wondered, “How am I going to have time to spend all of this money? How long will I live?”
After they bought the shared tickets, Chao sent a photo of the tickets to Saephan and said, “We’re billionaires.” It was a joke before the actual drawing, he said, but the next day they won.
Chao, 55, was on her way to work when Saephan called her with the news: “You don’t have to go anymore,” he said.
Saephan said he was born in Laos and moved to Thailand in 1987, before immigrating to the U.S. in 1994. He wore a sash at the news conference identifying himself as Iu Mien, a southeast Asian ethnic group with roots in southern China. Many Iu Mein were subsistence farmers and assisted American forces during the Vietnam war; after the conflict, thousands of Iu Mien families fled to Thailand to avoid retribution and eventually settled in the U.S.
Tens of thousands of Iu Mien people live along the West Coast, with a sizeable and active community in Portland.
Saephan graduated from high school in 1996 and has lived in Portland for 30 years. He worked as a machinist for an aerospace company.
In the weeks leading up to the drawing, he wrote out numbers for the game on a piece of paper and slept with it under his pillow, he said. He prayed that he would win, saying, “I need some help — I don’t want to die yet unless I have done something for my family first.”
The winning Powerball ticket was sold in early April at a Plaid Pantry convenience store in Portland, ending a winless streak that had stretched more than three months. The Oregon Lottery said it had to go through a security and vetting process before announcing the identity of the person who came forward to claim the prize.
Under Oregon law, with few exceptions, lottery players cannot remain anonymous. Winners have a year to claim the top prize.
The jackpot had a cash value of $621 million before taxes if the winner chose to take a lump sum rather than an annuity paid over 30 years, with an immediate payout followed by 29 annual installments. The prize is subject to federal taxes and state taxes in Oregon.
The $1.3 billion prize is the fourth-largest Powerball jackpot in history, and the eighth largest among U.S. jackpot games, according to the Oregon Lottery.
The biggest U.S. lottery jackpot won was $2.04 billion in California in 2022.
US, Mexican presidents discuss illegal migration
date: 2024-04-30, from: VOA News USA
https://www.voanews.com/a/us-mexican-presidents-discuss-illegal-migration/7590378.html
Daily EV Recap: US to phase out coal by 2030s
date: 2024-04-30, from: Electrek Feed
Listen to a recap of the top stories of the day from Electrek. Quick Charge is now available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, TuneIn and…
https://electrek.co/2024/04/29/daily-ev-recap-us-to-phase-out-coal-by-2030s/
pgvector 0.7.0 Released!
date: 2024-04-30, from: PostgreSQL News
pgvector, an open-source PostgreSQL extension that provides vector similarity search capabilities, has released v0.7.0. This new release includes many new functional and performance features for supporting vector similarity search workloads in PostgreSQL.
This latest version of pgvector adds new vector types, including
halfvec (2-byte floats; indexing up to 4,000 dimensions)
and sparsevec (indexing up to 1,000 nonzero dimensions),
and includes indexing support for binary vectors using the
bit type (indexing up to 64,000 dimensions). Additionally,
this release adds support for quantizing vectors using expression
indexes, including from 4-byte to 2-byte floats and binary quantization
using binary_quantize function. pgvector 0.7.0 also adds
new distance functions, including hamming_distance and
jaccard_distance for bit vectors, and now
supports HNSW indexing for L1 distance operations. pgvector 0.7.0 also
includes additional support for SIMD with CPU dispatching for Linux
x86-64 architectures.
For more information, please see the CHANGELOG for 0.7.0:
https://github.com/pgvector/pgvector/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md#070-2024-04-29
For more information about pgvector, including how to get started, please visit the project repository on GitHub:
https://github.com/pgvector/pgvector
https://www.postgresql.org/about/news/pgvector-070-released-2852/
PGConf.dev 2024 - Registration selling out - please register ASAP!
date: 2024-04-30, from: PostgreSQL News
PostgreSQL Development Conference 2024 (PGConf.dev 2024) (May 28, 2024 - May 31, 2024; Vancouver, Canada) is where users, developers, and community organizers come together to focus on PostgreSQL development and community growth. Meet PostgreSQL contributors, learn about upcoming features, and discuss development problems with PostgreSQL enthusiasts!
Given the overwhelming support from the PostgreSQL community, we’re already almost at the capacity of our venue for this year and are close to selling out. If you have not already registered for PGConf.dev 2024, please do so today:
https://2024.pgconf.dev/registration/
Once we have reached our registration capacity, we will open up a first-come, first-serve waitlist.
We’re thrilled to have a wonderful lineup of talks that highlight topics on PostgreSQL development and community growth, featuring stories from users, developers, and community organizers. You can find out more about the PGConf.dev 2024 schedule here:
https://www.pgevents.ca/events/pgconfdev2024/schedule/
PGConf.dev 2024 is not possible without the generous support of our sponsors. Sponsorship helps us bring together the worldwide PostgreSQL community to focus on upcoming development and community building topics. You can find out more about sponsorship opportunities here:
https://2024.pgconf.dev/sponsor-levels/
We look forward to seeing you in Vancouver in May!
Datasentinel 2024.04 released
date: 2024-04-30, from: PostgreSQL News
We’re pleased to announce that the latest edition of Datasentinel for PostgreSQL is now available
Role Based Access Enhancement
Administrators can now assign multiple roles to Datasentinel users either directly through the UI or programmatically via the API. This enhancement significantly simplifies user management, especially in large-scale environments with hundreds of PostgreSQL instances.
Datasentinel 2024 Updates
Datasentinel’s 2024 updates include full compatibility with PostgreSQL 16 and the introduction of I/O Insights, a new feature that uses the pg_stat_io view to provide detailed I/O metrics. Additionally, we have enhanced our agentless service startup, ensuring quicker launch times and improved performance. This is particularly beneficial in large-instance environments during system boots or post-upgrade reboots. Together, these enhancements further bolster Datasentinel’s robust PostgreSQL monitoring capabilities
Refer to Release Notes for more details.
Datasentinel team
https://www.postgresql.org/about/news/datasentinel-202404-released-2843/
This Month in Redox - April 2024
date: 2024-04-30, from: Redox OS News
April was a very exciting month for Redox! Here’s all the latest news. Donate to Redox If you would like to support Redox, please consider donating or buying some merch! Donate Merch Self-Hosting Improvements Jeremy fixed a “copy-on-write” bug in his recent RedoxFS performance optimizations, where small data chunks could truncate records. This was causing page faults on small executables built inside of Redox (like a Hello World program).
https://www.redox-os.org/news/this-month-240430/
EV Car Show brings sustainability to CSUN
date: 2024-04-29, from: The Sundail (CSUN student paper)
The CSUN Institute for Sustainability hosted the third annual EV Car Show on Wednesday, April 17, 2024 from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. The cars were lined up on the…
https://sundial.csun.edu/181212/news/ev-car-show-brings-sustainability-to-csun/
Nevada put big battery energy storage where a coal plant used to be
date: 2024-04-29, from: Electrek Feed
Nevada utility NV Energy’s largest battery energy storage system sits on a former coal-fired power plant site and will save customers a lot of money.
https://electrek.co/2024/04/29/nevada-battery-energy-storage-where-a-coal-plant-used-to-be/
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-04-29, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
We Need To Rewild The Internet.
https://longreads.com/2024/04/29/we-need-to-rewild-the-internet/
AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, T-Mobile US fined $200M for selling off people’s location info
date: 2024-04-29, updated: 2024-04-30, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Carriers claim real culprits are getting away with it - the data brokers
The FCC on Monday fined four major US telcos almost $200 million for “illegally” selling subscribers’ location information to data brokers.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/04/29/fcc_telecom_fines/
Singleboard Alpha is an ESP32 pocket computer from the creator of Arduboy
date: 2024-04-29, from: Liliputing
The Singleboard Alpha is a tiny portable computer that’s… built around a single board (you probably guessed that from the name. But unlike some of the so-called single-board PCs we’ve seen in recent years (I’m looking at you Raspberry Pi), this little computer has a built-in keyboard, display, and battery connector. In other words, you can use it […]
The post Singleboard Alpha is an ESP32 pocket computer from the creator of Arduboy appeared first on Liliputing.
https://liliputing.com/singleboard-alpha-is-an-esp32-pocket-computer-from-the-creator-of-arduboy/
Congress May Cancel Your Automatic Flight Refunds
date: 2024-04-29, from: The Lever News
Airline-bankrolled lawmakers just added language to a bill that could undermine Biden’s promise of automatic refunds on canceled or delayed flights.
https://www.levernews.com/congress-may-cancel-your-automatic-flight-refunds/
Google blocked 2.3M apps from Play Store last year for breaking the G law
date: 2024-04-29, updated: 2024-04-29, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Third of a million developer accounts kiboshed, too
Google says it stopped 2.28 million Android apps from being published in its official Play Store last year because they violated security rules.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/04/29/google_rejected_apps/
Forbidden Links
date: 2024-04-29, from: Chris Coyier blog
Malcolm Coles: 10+ years ago I created an annual list of websites that FORBADE you from linking to them, DEMANDED you write to ask for permission or LIMITED links to only their home page. Royal Mail even promised to post me a paper licence. Now a decade has passed, let’s see who’s still doing it … And […]
https://chriscoyier.net/2024/04/29/forbidden-links/
Americans Are Open To Cheap Chinese Cars. That’s ‘Scary’ For The Rest Of The Auto Industry
date: 2024-04-29, from: Inside EVs News
Many EV buyers would buy a Chinese car if it was cheap enough, according to a recent survey.
https://insideevs.com/news/717912/americans-chinese-ev-survey/
Ford just opened orders for its enhanced-range E-Transit
date: 2024-04-29, from: Electrek Feed
Ford Pro is now taking orders for the newest version of its commercial EV, the E-Transit, with up to 32% more range and faster charge times.
https://electrek.co/2024/04/29/ford-just-opened-orders-for-its-enhanced-range-e-transit/
Scriptnotes, Episode 636: Whispering Loudly, Transcript
date: 2024-04-29, from: John August blog
The original post for this episode can be found here. John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and this is Episode 636 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. (Whispers:) Today on the show, what’s with all the whispering in movies? Is it a deliberate narrative […] The post Scriptnotes, Episode 636: Whispering Loudly, Transcript first appeared on John August.
https://johnaugust.com/2024/scriptnotes-episode-636-whispering-loudly-transcript
In This Ancient Cemetery, Romans Left Fine Glass Vessels, Platforms for Feasting and Phallic Pendants
date: 2024-04-29, from: Smithsonian Magazine
Archaeologists in Narbonne, France, have been studying the necropolis since 2017
Ford’s BlueCruise driving assistant probed by US watchdog after deaths
date: 2024-04-29, updated: 2024-04-29, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Electric Mustang tech active right up to moment of crashes
The US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is investigating an electric car maker whose self-driving-ish software was involved in a pair of fatal collisions. It’s not Tesla this time, instead it’s Ford’s turn in the hot seat.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/04/29/ford_bluecruise_nhtsa_investigation/
Personalized Melanoma Vaccine Could Be a ‘Game Changer’ by Teaching the Body to Fight Cancer Cells
date: 2024-04-29, from: Smithsonian Magazine
The mRNA therapy, designed to prevent treated skin cancer from returning, is entering its third phase of trials
Tornado-battered towns in Oklahoma clean up after deadly storms
date: 2024-04-29, from: San Jose Mercury News
The storms, part of an outbreak of severe weather across the middle of the U.S., began in Oklahoma late Saturday and killed four people, including an infant, and left at least 100 others injured, authorities said. The deadly weather in Oklahoma followed dozens of tornadoes that raked Iowa and Nebraska on Friday, killing one person.
The First Major Line-Up Announcement Is Kenny Loggins for September’s One805LIVE! Event
date: 2024-04-29, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
Santa Barbara, CA, April 29, 2024 — One805 is thrilled to announce the 2024 One805LIVE! concert supporting Santa Barbara’s First Responders.
The post The First Major Line-Up Announcement Is Kenny Loggins for September’s One805LIVE! Event appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
Pacifica Graduate Institute Welcomes Deneatrice A. Lewis, MS, as Vice President of People, Culture, and Belonging
date: 2024-04-29, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
Santa Barbara, CA — 4/29/2024— With Diversity Equity and Inclusion policies, programs, and initiatives under the microscope of legislative and
The post Pacifica Graduate Institute Welcomes Deneatrice A. Lewis, MS, as Vice President of People, Culture, and Belonging appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
Guatemala becoming tourism hot spot for young travelers
date: 2024-04-29, from: San Jose Mercury News
Guatemala is a friendly country that remains largely unexplored by many Americans.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/04/29/guatemala-tourism-guide-trendy-young-travelers/
Noah and Tish Cyrus ignite fascination with lurid mother-daughter triangle
date: 2024-04-29, from: San Jose Mercury News
Over the weekend, Noah Cyrus slammed someone who asked her on Instagram about her mother getting ‘sexy’ with her reported ex-lover, actor Dominic Purcell.
Cash-strapped election offices have fewer resources after bans on private grants
date: 2024-04-29, from: San Jose Mercury News
The debate over the role of outside money reveals a broader worry among election experts, who say there are significant shortcomings in local government funding of election offices.
Original ‘Star Trek’ Enterprise Model Resurfaces Decades After It Went Missing
date: 2024-04-29, from: Smithsonian Magazine
The model used in the original series’ opening credits is now back with Eugene Roddenberry Jr., the son of the show’s creator
Sale closed in Palo Alto: $3.5 million for a three-bedroom home
date: 2024-04-29, from: San Jose Mercury News
A house located in the 300 block of Iris Way in Palo Alto has new owners. The 1,284-square-foot property, built in 1948, was sold on April 9, 2024, for $3,460,000, or $2,695 per square foot.
Open source Z80 clone seeks to help bring classic chip back from the dead
date: 2024-04-29, updated: 2024-04-29, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Whether the project will bear fruit is perhaps questionable
Zilog’s classic Z80 chip is soon to be dead, though it might not be gone forever if one open source project succeeds in its goal to clone the legendary processor.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/04/29/open_source_z80_clone/
On the move: Former Saint Mary’s guard Aidan Mahaney commits to UConn
date: 2024-04-29, from: San Jose Mercury News
Aidan Mahaney has transferred to UConn, he announced Monday.
Vote now: Bay Area News Group girls athlete of the week
date: 2024-04-29, from: San Jose Mercury News
Make your choice for the top performance among girls high school athletes from April 22-27
https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/04/29/vote-now-bay-area-news-group-girls-athlete-of-the-week-113/
The path to a better tuberculosis vaccine runs through Montana
date: 2024-04-29, from: San Jose Mercury News
While it is 40% to 80% effective in young children, its efficacy is very low in adolescents and adults, leading to a worldwide push to create a more powerful vaccine.
How Intelligent Was T. Rex? Scientists Suggest the Dinosaurs Were Like ‘Smart, Giant Crocodiles’
date: 2024-04-29, from: Smithsonian Magazine
A new paper refutes the idea that T. rex was as brainy as a baboon, furthering the debate on the extinct reptile’s intellect
New star putting her own stamp on ‘Funny Girl’: ‘No universe in which I will be Barbra Streisand’
date: 2024-04-29, from: San Jose Mercury News
Katerina McCrimmon takes Broadway by storm with performance in iconic role in revived “Funny Girl.”
Rivian Reveals New Charger Design That Works With Other EVs
date: 2024-04-29, from: Inside EVs News
The new Rivian charger works with both 400- and 800-volt EVs and features CCS connectors with no native NACS support.
https://insideevs.com/news/717894/rivian-adventure-network-new-charger/
Vote now: Bay Area News Group boys athlete of the week
date: 2024-04-29, from: San Jose Mercury News
Make your choice for the top performance among boys high school athletes from April 22-27
https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/04/29/vote-now-bay-area-news-group-boys-athlete-of-the-week-116/
San Jose’s Los Tigres del Norte still going strong after more than 50 years
date: 2024-04-29, from: San Jose Mercury News
Ever wonder how Los Tigres del Norte got its name? Here’s that story and so much more about this incredible San Jose band.
Doobie Brothers star goes from San Jose State to Rock & Roll Hall of Fame
date: 2024-04-29, from: San Jose Mercury News
We chat with vocalist-guitarist Tom Johnston, the former San Jose State University student who helped form the Doobie Brothers.
Brentwood: Police suspected couple of $50,000 liquor store burglary when they stumbled upon DMT lab
date: 2024-04-29, from: San Jose Mercury News
A Brentwood man and woman made headlines when police found a suspected drug lab at their home, but it was a burglary at Hops and Scotch in Walnut Creek that led them there.
Unsheltered people are losing Medicaid in redetermination mix-ups
date: 2024-04-29, from: San Jose Mercury News
There’s no public data on how many unhoused people nationwide have lost Medicaid, but homeless service providers and experts say it’s a big problem.
Review | Surveying the Rhiannon Landscape
date: 2024-04-29, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
Rhiannon Giddens’s Arlington concert from UCSB Arts & Lectures gave an overview of her brilliant career in motion.
The post Review | Surveying the Rhiannon Landscape appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2024/04/29/review-surveying-the-rhiannon-landscape/
Haiku Stairs hikers arrested during last-chance trek to Hawaii’s ‘Stairway to Heaven’
date: 2024-04-29, from: San Jose Mercury News
“Due to rampant illegal trespassing, Haiku Stairs is a significant liability and expense for the city,” councilmember Esther Kiaʻāina said.
Best of the West: The top prospects for the 2025 NFL Draft (Oregon, Colorado and Arizona are loaded)
date: 2024-04-29, from: San Jose Mercury News
In a twist, Arizona and Colorado have more high-round talent than USC and Washington. Meanwhile, Oregon is loaded.
FTC orders Razer to refund customers who bought its Zephyr face mask
date: 2024-04-29, from: Liliputing
Remember when gaming hardware company Razer decided it was a good idea to launch a face mask with RGB lighting effects, a clear window that let people see your face while you talk, and “N95 grade filters?” And remember how it turned out the Razer Zephyr face mask didn’t actually filter out 95% of airborne […]
The post FTC orders Razer to refund customers who bought its Zephyr face mask appeared first on Liliputing.
https://liliputing.com/ftc-orders-razer-to-refund-customers-who-bought-its-zephyr-face-mask/
Gaza Solidarity Encampment opens at UC Riverside; Cal Poly Pomona protest planned
date: 2024-04-29, from: San Jose Mercury News
The sit-in is announced via social media posts that demand the university’s action as Cal Poly Pomona student plan protest.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/04/29/gaza-solidarity-encampment-opens-at-uc-riverside/
Musk schmoozes Chinese Premier as Tesla Full Self-Driving remains parked
date: 2024-04-29, updated: 2024-04-29, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Automaker could really do with the training data
Tesla boss Elon Musk met with Chinese Premier Li Qiang in Beijing to discuss electric vehicles and self-driving cars.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/04/29/elon_musk_china_visit/
Get Blix’s Ultra e-bike with free accessories from $1,399, Anker PowerCore Reserve Power Station $110, and more
date: 2024-04-29, from: Electrek Feed
Kicking off this week’s Green Deals is a new Spring Savings sale from Blix Bikes that is taking up to $700 off its e-bike models and also giving you up to $465 in free add-on accessories, with the Ultra Fat-Tire All-Terrain e-bike hitting a new $1,399 low. It is joined by the return of the Anker PowerCore Reserve 60,000mAh Power Station to $110, as well as the Bosch Tronic 4000 6.5kW Electric Tankless Water Heater at $158. Plus all of the other green deals that have dropped today or are still hanging on from last week.
Head below for other New Green Deals we’ve found today and, of course, Electrek’s best EV buying and leasing deals. Also, check out the new Electrek Tesla Shop for the best deals on Tesla accessories.
The Home Page | Everything’s Blooming for Earth Day
date: 2024-04-29, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
A plethora of plants, purple doors, and poppies.
The post The Home Page | Everything’s Blooming for Earth Day appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2024/04/29/the-home-page-everythings-blooming-for-earth-day/
2024 high school grads could face nearly $37,000 in college debt
date: 2024-04-29, from: San Jose Mercury News
Amid financial aid delays stretching months beyond what’s typical, some students are feeling pressured to make college decisions without even knowing how much they’ll be required to pay.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/04/29/2024-high-school-grads-could-face-nearly-37k-in-college-debt/
Student from California killed at party near University of Arizona
date: 2024-04-29, from: San Jose Mercury News
Three other people — a teenage girl, a man and a woman — were treated at a hospital early Sunday for injuries.
San Jose airport passenger rebound shows signs of losing altitude
date: 2024-04-29, from: San Jose Mercury News
Passenger travel at San Jose International Airport is showing signs of fading.
DeSantis, Trump meet to make peace, plan fundraising
date: 2024-04-29, from: San Jose Mercury News
DeSantis has a deep network of donors from his runs for governor and president. Though he endorsed Trump when he dropped his bid for the GOP nomination in a video after failing to gain traction, he has yet to campaign or fundraise on Trump’s behalf.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/04/29/desantis-trump-meet-to-make-peace-plan-fundraising/
Truck driver charged with misdemeanor in fatal Pleasanton crash
date: 2024-04-29, from: San Jose Mercury News
The driver was determined to be speeding, according to police.
More Bay Area Rite Aids closing, including one in San Jose
date: 2024-04-29, from: San Jose Mercury News
Drugstore chain Rite Aid added three Bay Area stores this month to its growing list of nationwide store closures.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/04/29/more-bay-area-rite-aids-closing-including-one-in-san-jose/
London Drugs closes all of its pharmacies following ‘cybersecurity incident’
date: 2024-04-29, updated: 2024-04-29, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Canadian stores shuttered ‘until further notice’
Updated Canadian pharmacy chain London Drugs closed all of its stores over the weekend until further notice following a “cybersecurity incident.”…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/04/29/canada_london_drugs/
Review | Lizzy McAlpine’s ‘The Older Tour’
date: 2024-04-29, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
The Philly-raised singer-songwriter is unabashedly herself on opening night of her new tour.
The post Review | Lizzy McAlpine’s ‘The Older Tour’ appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2024/04/29/review-lizzy-mcalpines-the-older-tour/
San Jose: Driver died due to injuries from February collision
date: 2024-04-29, from: San Jose Mercury News
The driver was initially stabilized after the Feb. 23 crash at the intersection of Saratoga Avenue and Moorpark Avenue.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/04/29/san-jose-driver-died-due-to-injuries-from-february-collision/
NASA Sets Coverage for Boeing Starliner’s First Crewed Launch, Docking
date: 2024-04-29, from: NASA breaking news
NASA will provide live coverage of prelaunch and launch activities for the agency’s Boeing Crew Flight Test, which will carry NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams to and from the International Space Station. Launch of the ULA (United Launch Alliance) Atlas V rocket and Boeing Starliner spacecraft is targeted for 10:34 p.m. EDT Monday, […]
Santa Barbara Fishermen and Enviros Team Up to Remove Lobster Traps from Local Beaches
date: 2024-04-29, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
Twenty-five volunteers with Santa Barbara Channelkeeper and members of the Commercial Fishermen of Santa Barbara and Tidy Seas remove thousands of pounds’ worth of traps and debris from the coastline.
The post Santa Barbara Fishermen and Enviros Team Up to Remove Lobster Traps from Local Beaches appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
The Horse’s Mane
date: 2024-04-29, from: NASA breaking news
This image of part of the Horsehead Nebula, captured by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope and released on April 29, 2024, shows the nebula in a whole new light, capturing the region’s complexity with unprecedented spatial resolution. Located roughly 1,300 light-years away, the nebula formed from a collapsing interstellar cloud of material, and glows because […]
https://www.nasa.gov/image-article/the-horses-mane/
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-04-29, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Florida’s 6-Week Abortion Ban Is Taking Effect This Week.
https://truthout.org/articles/floridas-6-week-abortion-ban-is-taking-effect-this-week/
US House, Senate agree on bill to boost safety of air travel
date: 2024-04-29, from: VOA News USA
Five Productions Filming in Santa Clarita
date: 2024-04-29, from: SCV New (TV Station)
The city of Santa Clarita’s Film Office released the list of five productions currently filming in the Santa Clarita Valley for the week of Monday, April 29 - Sunday, May
https://scvnews.com/five-productions-filming-in-santa-clarita/
California now has 1 EV fast charging station for every 5 gas stations
date: 2024-04-29, from: Electrek Feed
Governor Gavin Newsom (D-CA) announced on Saturday that there is now one EV fast charging station for every five gas stations in California.
https://electrek.co/2024/04/29/california-1-dc-fast-charging-station-for-every-5-gas-stations/
Tesla Wants To Turn Cars Into ‘Amazon Web Services’ On Wheels. Here’s How
date: 2024-04-29, from: Inside EVs News
Tesla envisions turning its future cars into mobile distributed data centers where it can monetize a car’s onboard computing power like Amazon AWS.
https://insideevs.com/news/717206/tesla-distributed-datacenter-on-wheels/
NASA Sets Coverage for Dragon Spacecraft Relocation on Space Station
date: 2024-04-29, from: NASA breaking news
In preparation for the arrival of NASA’s Boeing Crew Flight Test, four crew members aboard the International Space Station will relocate the SpaceX Dragon crew spacecraft to a different docking port Thursday, May 2, to make way for Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft. NASA will provide live coverage of the move beginning at 7:30 a.m. EDT on […]
Climate Investors Aren’t Buying Your AI Startup
date: 2024-04-29, from: Heatmap News
At San Francisco Climate Week, everyone wanted to talk about artificial intelligence.
“I was looking through all of the events on SF Climate Week, and it seemed like every single one of them had AI somewhere in the name,” joked (sort of) Rohan Nuttell of OpenAI last week, while moderating a panel called AI for Climate.
Sure, with over 300 events, there were opportunities for climate nerds to learn about carbon dioxide removal or sustainable fashion or grid infrastructure. But AI was inescapable. I heard from companies using AI to monitor flood risk, model forest carbon sequestration, and help utilities identify vulnerabilities from climate threats. I even learned about a company using AI to decarbonize pet food.
Yet one notable section of the climate world wasn’t buying the hype: Investors. In my one-on-one conversations with venture capitalists and other financiers throughout the week, the prevailing approach was wait and see. It was a striking departure from the rest of Silicon Valley, where 6-month-old AI startups are getting multi-billion-dollar valuations.
“I think there are very few large business opportunities that have single-handedly been unlocked,” Sophie Purdom, managing Partner at climate tech VC Planeteer Capital, told me, with regards to AI. “Maybe they make it better or faster or whatnot. But I don’t think we’ve seen a whole lot of new large markets that have suddenly been uniquely unlocked in climate.”
One problem is that AI can mean anything from “we have a machine learning algorithm” to “we use a large language model to help write your climate grant applications,” as this company does. But that distinction is important. Generative AI, which takes in reams of data and spits out brand-new content (think ChatGPT or DALL-E), is what’s been driving the AI hype machine since OpenAI released ChatGPT in November 2022. Eventually, generative AI could have powerful climate implications — think the development of novel EV battery chemistries or synthesis of new, more climate-friendly proteins.
But not quite yet, Shawn Xu, a partner at climate tech VC Lowercarbon Capital, told me.
Xu said he was left disappointed after a Climate AI hackathon that Lowercarbon hosted with OpenAI last year. “To be honest there was a lag between the number of interesting AI engineers and founders who wanted to go build real climate applications coming out of that hackathon.”
In the last couple of months though, Xu has been excited to see AI companies proposing “foundational models” for sectors like materials science and biology. These are generative models trained on large datasets that can perform a wide variety of tasks, like a ChatGPT for meteorology or architecture that could build weather models or design green buildings. “But I don’t think that there has been a slam dunk case on a company that we’re excited about yet,” Xu said.
This doesn’t mean that Lowercarbon and other climate tech investors are avoiding AI investments. There are plenty of well-funded climate tech companies using increasingly powerful machine learning models and algorithms to analyze patterns in large datasets and predict outcomes. It’s just that this isn’t exactly new. Companies across many industries have been using this type of predictive AI for much of the last decade. Now incorporating generative AI in the form of large language models is becoming relatively common too.
“Anything that’s solving workflow inefficiencies, anything that’s helping you get context from somewhere else, anything that’s helping you understand more data,” are well understood applications of AI that Juan Muldoon, a partner at climate software VC Energize Capital, told me he’s excited about.
“I think you’re going to see it materially impact long-running operational costs for [energy] projects,” Scott Jacobs, co-founder and CEO of the sustainable infrastructure investment firm Generate Capital, told me. “It’s just another use of technology replacing humans.”
That doesn’t always make for a particularly flashy business. Muldoon cited one of Energize’s portfolio companies, Jupiter Intelligence, which “takes very, very large amounts of climate, weather, and terrain data to be able to more accurately predict asset level risks associated with particular climate events,” he explained. “So that’s a data AI company. But it’s not really marketed that way.”
Maybe that’s because in this era, the term is almost self-evident. As an old editor once told me, writing that a tech company uses “machine learning” or “AI” to perform data analysis can be as mundane and obvious as advertising that a company uses “the internet.” But as generative AI moves beyond advanced chatbots and towards the type of broader foundational models that Xu is most excited about, investment could heat up.
Xu told me that Lowercarbon has made a yet-unannounced investment in a company that gathers vast amounts of earth observation data, which could hopefully one day be used to create a “foundational model for earth science.” This model could potentially do things such as generate custom maps to track natural disasters or the climate risks to crops and built infrastructure. Xu says a company like this would be “a holy grail.”
Yet the main holdup to some of these “holy grail” companies is that we often lack not only enough data but a comprehensive understanding of how to characterize that data, said Clea Kolster, partner and head of science at Lowercarbon.
“We’ve seen a lot of pitches on AI for chemistry,” she told me. And while AI could spit out new atomic and molecular combinations for use in novel battery cells, “the amount of those new things that are actually going to be good is probably very small until you actually start to have a better understanding of how many of these materials work in different structures and environments.”
Even if scientists and researchers get a better handle on the datasets they’re working with, Purdom told me she’s generally skeptical of investing in companies that use AI to do basic R&D, citing the buzzy example of AI being used in critical minerals exploration and extraction “The competency of the prospecting and the R&D approach seems distinct to me from the actual value extraction, physical resource extraction part of the business,” she told me. The same could be said of using AI for battery design or protein development. “I have seen few examples where the platform approach of just the research and identification part is where there’s been a big standalone business.”
Not to say everyone takes that point of view. Bay Area-based KoBold Metals, an AI-enabled minerals exploration company, has raised over a billion dollars, with Bill Gates’ climate tech VC, Breakthrough Energy Ventures as a leading investor.
But overall, the potential for novel applications of AI in the climate space is still largely being figured out. And in these early stages, many climate investors are treading carefully.
“I have talked to a number of these AI companies,” Jacobs told me. “They’re talking about climate impacts and they have real value propositions that they’re going after. Great! But they don’t have real success stories yet.”
https://heatmap.news/technology/climate-tech-venture-capital-ai
Mission: Impossible’s Motorcycle Stunt Rig is Something You Have to See
date: 2024-04-29, from: Ride Apart, Electric Motorcycle News
That’s one way to film your actors.
https://www.rideapart.com/news/717757/mission-impossible-rogue-nation-motorcycle-stunt-rig/
May 2: Parks Commission to Discuss Rink Sports Pavilion
date: 2024-04-29, from: SCV New (TV Station)
The Santa Clarita Parks, Recreation and Community Services Commission will hold its regular meeting Thursday, May 2, at 6 p.m., in Council Chambers at City Hall
https://scvnews.com/may-2-parks-commission-to-discuss-rink-sports-pavilion/
Smartphone builder Xiaomi rolls 10,000 units of its flagship SU7 off assembly line in just 32 days
date: 2024-04-29, from: Electrek Feed
Just over a month after launching its first-ever BEV, smartphone developer, Xiaomi is touting some big production numbers for the SU7. Better yet, such output supports encouraging orders to date as the Chinese tech company is off to a hot start in its newly entered vehicle manufacturing segment.
Cloudflare CEO sues over free-roaming fidos at his ski resort paradise
date: 2024-04-29, updated: 2024-04-29, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Who let the dogs out?
When regular people have disputes with neighbors, the more reasonable party will grit their teeth, bite their tongue, and try to avoid conflict as much as possible. When billionaires have disputes with millionaire neighbors, they’ll see you in court.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/04/29/cloudflare_ceo_dog_lawsuit/
Reuniones comunitarias de SB Esencial
date: 2024-04-29, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
Únase a nosotros en una serie de reuniones comunitarias dedicadas a debatir las finanzas y el estado de los servicios
The post Reuniones comunitarias de SB Esencial appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2024/04/29/reuniones-comunitarias-de-sb-esencial/
Bringing Russia to Its Knees
date: 2024-04-29, updated: 2024-04-29, from: RAND blog
Russia’s President Vladimir Putin rants that the West seeks to “dismember and plunder” his country. By accusing the West of plotting against Russia, the Kremlin likely hopes to distract Russian citizens from its own flawed actions. But the true damage to Russia has been self-inflicted.
https://www.rand.org/pubs/commentary/2024/04/bringing-russia-to-its-knees.html
HAPPY ELECTION DAY
date: 2024-04-29, from: The California Tech (Caltech student paper)
Voting for all ASCIT positions is now OPEN on Donut! Article contains more details on ASCIT presidential candidates’ plans and campaign platforms.
https://tech.caltech.edu/2024/04/26/happy-election-day/
Peaceful Sit-In for Palestine
date: 2024-04-29, from: The California Tech (Caltech student paper)
Caltech students plan to hold a peaceful protest about the ongoing Israel-Palestine conflict to take place Monday April 29th 10:30am–12:00pm.
https://tech.caltech.edu/2024/04/26/palestine-sit-in/
Essential SB Community Town Hall Events
date: 2024-04-29, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
Join us for a series of Community Town Halls dedicated to discussing the City’s finances and the status of essential
The post Essential SB Community Town Hall Events appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2024/04/29/essential-sb-community-town-hall-events/
Moulin Rouge Windmill Blades Fall Off in the Middle of the Night
date: 2024-04-29, from: Smithsonian Magazine
The iconic Paris landmark has never experienced such a mishap in its 135-year history
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/moulin-rouge-windmill-blades-fall-off-180984235/
NASA Scientists Gear Up for Solar Storms at Mars
date: 2024-04-29, from: NASA breaking news
The Sun will be at peak activity this year, providing a rare opportunity to study how solar storms and radiation could affect future astronauts on the Red Planet. In the months ahead, two of NASA’s Mars spacecraft will have an unprecedented opportunity to study how solar flares — giant explosions on the Sun’s surface — […]
https://www.nasa.gov/solar-system/planets/mars/nasa-scientists-gear-up-for-solar-storms-at-mars/
Arc Search iPhone App Now Syncs Arc Sidebar Tabs
date: 2024-04-29, from: TidBITS blog
An update to the Arc Search app for the iPhone gives Arc users using macOS and Windows access to all their tabs and the ability to save pages from the iPhone to the Arc sidebar.
https://tidbits.com/2024/04/29/arc-search-iphone-app-now-syncs-arc-sidebar-tabs/
Banker in key transaction testifying Tuesday at Trump trial
date: 2024-04-29, from: VOA News USA
https://www.voanews.com/a/banker-in-key-transaction-testifying-tuesday-at-trump-trial/7589508.html
NASA Administrator Names New Stennis Space Center Director
date: 2024-04-29, from: NASA breaking news
NASA Administrator Bill Nelson on Monday named John Bailey as director of the agency’s Stennis Space Center near Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, effective immediately. Bailey had been serving as acting director since January. “John will build on his nearly 35 years of federal service to lead our talented workforce at Stennis,” said Nelson. “So much […]
https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-administrator-names-new-stennis-space-center-director/
Memorial Service Announced for Slain Idaho Deputy, TMU Alum
date: 2024-04-29, from: SCV New (TV Station)
Tobin Bolter, a 2017 graduate of The Master’s University, was killed earlier this month in the line of duty working as a deputy for the Ada County Sheriff’s Office in Boise, Idaho
https://scvnews.com/memorial-service-announced-for-slain-idaho-deputy-tmu-alum/
Tesla unveils new Cybertruck off-roading features, Cybertent mode, and more
date: 2024-04-29, from: Electrek Feed
Tesla has unveiled a new Cybertruck software update coming to bring new off-roading features to the electric pickup truck, as well as Cybertent mode, and more.
https://electrek.co/2024/04/29/tesla-cybertruck-off-roading-features-cybertent-mode/
Intel tells mobo makers to go easy on the BIOS settings amid CPU instability reports
date: 2024-04-29, updated: 2024-04-29, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Do not disable safeguards by default, says chipmaker
Intel is reportedly telling motherboard manufacturers to use its recommended BIOS settings by default to stop CPU instability issues with 13th and 14th Generation chips.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/04/29/intel_cpu_instability_motherboards/
CrytoChameleon Phishing Kit Targets LastPass, Others
date: 2024-04-29, from: TidBITS blog
If you have a LastPass account, beware of voice phishing calls that will warn about your account being accessed from a new device. Are we on the cusp of being targeted by AI-driven phishing calls?
https://tidbits.com/2024/04/29/crytochameleon-phishing-kit-targets-lastpass-others/
CryptoChameleon Phishing Kit Targets LastPass, Others
date: 2024-04-29, from: TidBITS blog
If you have a LastPass account, beware of voice phishing calls that will warn about your account being accessed from a new device. Are we on the cusp of being targeted by AI-driven phishing calls?
https://tidbits.com/2024/04/29/cryptochameleon-phishing-kit-targets-lastpass-others/
A Case for Community
date: 2024-04-29, from: Tilde.news
https://h-i.works/2024/04/a-case-for-community.html
Watch Volvo EX30 Twin Motor Drag Race A Tesla Model Y Performance
date: 2024-04-29, from: Inside EVs News
Except for a quirk in the EX30’s throttle response, these two high performance vehicles are very evenly matched at the drag strip.
https://insideevs.com/news/717768/race-volvo-ex30-tesla-model-y/
Major Martian Milestones
date: 2024-04-29, from: NASA breaking news
There’s good news from NASA’s Cloudspotting on Mars project! That’s the project that invites you to help identify exotic clouds high in the Martian atmosphere. Congratulations to the Cloudspotting on Mars team and all the volunteers who have helped spot Martian clouds!
https://science.nasa.gov/get-involved/citizen-science/major-martian-milestones/
The Public Finally Has Access to an Accurate List of Japanese Americans Detained During World War II
date: 2024-04-29, from: Smithsonian Magazine
Researchers who spent years fixing errors in shoddy government records have partnered with Ancestry to make a wide selection of historical documents related to the period available for free
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-04-29, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
My family lost the Civil War. Last year they finally lost this symbol of power.
NIO begins public trials of its 150 kWh semi-solid-state battery packs ahead of a full rollout
date: 2024-04-29, from: Electrek Feed
Less than a month after beginning mass production of its new semi-solid-state battery packs, NIO has opened the technology to the public in China to trial this month, ahead of a full rollout of official operations.
https://electrek.co/2024/04/29/nio-begins-public-trials-150-kwh-semi-solid-state-battery-packs/
Breaking: US, other G7 countries to phase out coal by early 2030s
date: 2024-04-29, from: Electrek Feed
In a historic agreement, the G7 just agreed to phase out coal in the first half of the 2030s, according to statements made today.
https://electrek.co/2024/04/29/us-g7-countries-to-phase-out-coal-by-early-2030s/
New Audiobook Anthology Highlights Public Domain Folktales from 1928
date: 2024-04-29, from: Internet Archive Blog
After Laura Gibbs retired from teaching mythology and folklore at the University of Oklahoma, she wanted to continue sharing her love of storytelling with digital learners everywhere. Following her own […]
Apple’s pleas ineffective: iPadOS on EU’s gatekeeper list
date: 2024-04-29, updated: 2024-04-29, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
iFought the law, but the law wasn’t particularly interested in my line of reasoning
The European Commission just brought months of legal wrangling to an end with a decision to add Apple’s iPadOS to the Digital Markets Act’s list of gatekeepers. …
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/04/29/apple_ipados_dma_gatekeeper/
I went to China to test drive Yadea’s electric scooters, e-bikes, and A LOT more!
date: 2024-04-29, from: Electrek Feed
I recently took a trip to China to visit Yadea’s sprawling Anhui factory, which is just one of the company’s eight worldwide manufacturing centers. Together, they produced over 16 million electric vehicles last year, more than all of the big electric car manufacturers combined.
Since these pint-sized electric vehicles are so massively popular, I wanted to go there and try them myself and see what all the fuss was about. As it turns out, there’s a good reason why these are the best-selling little EVs in the world! And now that several of the models are coming to Europe and North America, Yadea’s lineup is looking even more interesting.
https://electrek.co/2024/04/29/test-drive-yadea-electric-scooters-e-bikes/
Rescuers Save 130 Beached Pilot Whales in Western Australia After Mass Stranding
date: 2024-04-29, from: Smithsonian Magazine
An additional 29 whales died, officials reported last week, while the reason behind the stranding remains unknown
What does it mean to be a red state or a blue state?
date: 2024-04-29, from: VOA News USA
Here’s a look at how the tradition of calling states that usually favor Republicans “red” and Democrats “blue” came about.
https://www.voanews.com/a/what-does-it-mean-to-be-a-red-state-or-a-blue-state-/7589354.html
ACEMAGIC F2A Mini PC with Intel Meteor Lake now available for $699 and up
date: 2024-04-29, from: Liliputing
The ACEMAGIC F2A is a small desktop computer with dual HDMI ports, a 2.5 GbE LAN port, and support for WiFi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4. It’s also the first mini PC from ACEMAGIC powered by an Intel Meteor Lake processor, which brings Intel Arc integrated graphics and an NPU for hardware-accelerated AI features. That’s why […]
The post ACEMAGIC F2A Mini PC with Intel Meteor Lake now available for $699 and up appeared first on Liliputing.
https://liliputing.com/acemagic-f2a-mini-pc-with-intel-meteor-lake-now-available-for-699-and-up/
Consumers, jobs and interest rates — oh my!
date: 2024-04-29, from: Marketplace Morning Report
This week, we’re getting important insights on how the U.S. economy is doing. We’ll receive reports on consumer confidence, the unemployment rate and how many jobs are out there. And in the middle of it all, the Federal Reserve is meeting to discuss what to do with interest rates. We’ll sort through it all. Plus, musicians love the sounds of nature. Now, those sounds can help support environmental causes.
https://www.marketplace.org/shows/marketplace-morning-report/consumers-jobs-and-interest-rates-oh-my
Jill On Money: What’s your retirement number?
date: 2024-04-29, from: San Jose Mercury News
What will it take for you to retire comfortably? For years, people would contact me to help them figure out their “NUMBER,” as if there were one, magic number that anybody could use. A recent oft-quoted survey from Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance tried to boil the results down to one number and (drum roll, please) it is […]
https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/04/29/jill-on-money-whats-your-retirement-number/
WROCC comes face to face with Doom, thanks to Gerph
date: 2024-04-29, from: RiscOS Story
Okay, it’s a talk, and it’ll also feature Hexen and Heretic Coming just days after this year’s Wakefield Show, the next Wakefield RISC OS Computer Club (WROCC) meeting will take place on Wednesday, 1st May, and the guest speaker will be Charles Ferguson, aka Gerph. He’ll be talking about the work he did to port Doom to RISC OS, which was during his university days, and later became the enhanced Doom+, which was then followed by ports of Heretic and Hexen. And more recently, updated versions of the games, allowing…
https://www.riscository.com/2024/wrocc-comes-face-to-face-with-doom-thanks-to-gerph/
An emergency slide falls off a California-bound Delta plane, forcing pilots to return to New York
date: 2024-04-29, from: San Jose Mercury News
Delta said the plane was removed from service for evaluation and it was cooperating with investigators and supporting efforts to find the slide.
VirtuDesk 1.14 released
date: 2024-04-29, from: RiscOS Story
If you sometimes find your RISC OS desktop a bit cluttered (which speaking personally would make it much like my real desktop) one solution is to close a few windows (or in the case of my actual desk, put some stuff away). Another solution is to run a piece of software that expands the size of the desktop beyond the visible area shown on screen, and move some of your windows into other spaces, ready for access when necessary. One such piece of software is VirtuDesk, by David Llewellyn-Jones, aka…
https://www.riscository.com/2024/virtudesk-1-14/
San Jose: Family courthouse closes again Monday amid power struggle with PG&E
date: 2024-04-29, from: San Jose Mercury News
Family Justice Center is dark for first half of Monday after another generator fails, continuing electricity problems since an initial equipment failure in March.
BusyCal 2024.2.1
date: 2024-04-29, from: TidBITS blog
https://tidbits.com/watchlist/busycal-2024-2-1/
Python, Flutter teams latest on the Google chopping block
date: 2024-04-29, updated: 2024-04-29, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Never mind the record revenues, costs must be cut
Updated Google’s latest round of layoffs have hit engineers working on its Flutter and Python teams.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/04/29/google_python_flutter_layoffs/
Two wounded in separate Oakland shootings hours apart
date: 2024-04-29, from: San Jose Mercury News
Motives and suspects are being sought in the shooting of two men in East Oakland Sunday night and Monday morning.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/04/29/two-wounded-in-separate-oakland-shootings-hours-apart/
Long Lost Song Hunted By Thousands Found in 80s Porno
date: 2024-04-29, from: 404 Media Group
The search is over for ‘Everyone Knows That,’ also known as ‘Ulterior Motives’ by Christopher Saint Booth, when it was found in the pornographic film “Angels of Passion.”
https://www.404media.co/ekt-everyone-knows-that-song-ulterior-motives-christopher-booth-porn/
Elon Musk Goes To China, Brings Home A Win For Tesla’s Full Self-Driving
date: 2024-04-29, from: Inside EVs News
Musk’s meeting with officials in China goes a long way toward his autonomy dreams. Meanwhile, Ford faces an investigation too.
https://insideevs.com/news/717826/musk-china-critical-materials/
Polestar shows off 5 GT charging capabilities, replenishing 10-80% in just ten minutes [Video]
date: 2024-04-29, from: Electrek Feed
Polestar is showcasing the charging capabilities of the upcoming Polestar 5 sports sedan using a prototype model and StoreDot’s Extreme Fast Charging (XFC) technology. This is the first EV to test StoreDot’s ultra-fast charging technology, and the initial tests are quite promising.
https://electrek.co/2024/04/29/polestar-5-gt-charging-capabilities-10-80-ten-minutes-video-ev/
April 28, 2024
date: 2024-04-29, from: Heather Cox Richardson blog
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/april-28-2024-2e2
How Slack used Deno to save months of engineering effort in launching their new platform
date: 2024-04-29, updated: 2024-04-29, from: Deno blog
Learn how building with Deno helped Slack launch their new development platform in weeks and not months.
https://deno.com/blog/slack-saves-engineering-effort-with-deno
California is joining with a New Jersey company to buy a generic opioid overdose reversal drug
date: 2024-04-29, from: San Jose Mercury News
Amneal Pharmaceuticals will sell naloxone to California for $24 per pack, or about 40% cheaper than the market rate. California will give away the packs for free to first responders, universities and community organizations through the state’s Naloxone Distribution Project.
Innovation that Impacts All NASA Missions: Improving How We Engineer Our Systems
date: 2024-04-29, from: NASA breaking news
Download PDF: Innovation that Impacts All NASA Missions: Improving How We Engineer Our Systems John F. Kennedy set the tone for NASA’s culture in 1961 during his famous speech on going to the Moon, “We choose to go to the Moon not because it’s easy, but because it’s hard; because that goal will serve to […]
Many Russian immigrants in California buy propaganda that Nazis thrive in Ukraine
date: 2024-04-29, from: San Jose Mercury News
Russian propaganda is strong. It can convince Russian ex-pats in California that Ukrainians are nationalists and Nazis.
Twilio cofounder buys The Onion
date: 2024-04-29, updated: 2024-04-29, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Satirical news site asks everyone for a buck
The former CEO of web comms tools provider Twilio has bought The Onion, the US satirical magazine that saw its popularity boom in the early days of the web.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/04/29/extwilio_ceo_buys_the_onion/
MSI 1P17 is a slim fanless desktop PC with Alder Lake N and 2.5 GbE LAN
date: 2024-04-29, from: Liliputing
The MSI 1P17 is a small fanless computer with an Intel Alder Lake-N processor that packs dual 2.5 GbE Lan ports, two video outputs, six USB ports and a COM port into a slim chassis that measures just 197 x 163 x 25mm (7.8″ x 6.4″ x 1″). Part of MSI’s line of industrial computers […]
The post MSI 1P17 is a slim fanless desktop PC with Alder Lake N and 2.5 GbE LAN appeared first on Liliputing.
https://liliputing.com/msi-1p17-is-a-slim-fanless-desktop-pc-with-alder-lake-n-and-2-5-gbe-lan/
Vespa World Days Welcomed Over 20,000 Fans To Italy
date: 2024-04-29, from: Ride Apart, Electric Motorcycle News
What’s more, an estimated 15,000 scooters spanning the entire range of Vespa’s history rode in the parade.
https://www.rideapart.com/news/717691/vespa-world-days-2024-photos/
Russia Clones Wikipedia, Censors It, Bans Original
date: 2024-04-29, from: 404 Media Group
Ruviki is intended to be a more “trustworthy” source of information for Russians by editing out anything that makes the Russian government look bad.
https://www.404media.co/russia-clones-wikipedia-censors-it-bans-original/
How a NASA Probe Solved a Scorching Solar Mystery
date: 2024-04-29, from: Quanta Magazine
The outer layers of the sun’s atmosphere are a blistering million degrees hotter than its surface. The hidden culprit? Magnetic activity.The post How a NASA Probe Solved a Scorching Solar Mystery first appeared on Quanta Magazine
https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-a-nasa-probe-solved-a-scorching-solar-mystery-20240429/
Polestar 5 Prototype Charges 10-80% In 10 Minutes At Over 370 KW
date: 2024-04-29, from: Inside EVs News
The Polestar prototype had a special 77-kWh battery pack with experimental silicon-dominant cells provided by StoreDot.
https://insideevs.com/news/717837/polestar-5-prototype-charging-test/
Why are two Sunnyvale dogs eating dirt and is it bad for them?
date: 2024-04-29, from: San Jose Mercury News
And what happened to all the hummingbirds in my garden?
TasteFood: Make carnitas for Cinco de Mayo tacos and tasty leftovers
date: 2024-04-29, from: San Jose Mercury News
This festive, flavorful recipe for Pork Carnitas is great for any feast.
Wish You Were Here: Japanese adventures in Kyoto, Tokyo
date: 2024-04-29, from: San Jose Mercury News
A Union City couple reports back on their Japanese adventures, from sea urchin tastings to a towering bamboo forest.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/04/29/wish-you-were-here-japanese-adventures-in-kyoto-tokyo/
9 classic Bay Area concert halls — and what to listen to when you’re there
date: 2024-04-29, from: San Jose Mercury News
Peek inside Antioch’s El Campanil, Lafayette’s pre-World War I Town Hall, San Jose’s magnificent California Theater and more with us.
OpenAI slapped with GDPR complaint: How do you correct your work?
date: 2024-04-29, updated: 2024-04-29, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Irresistible magical tech runs headlong into immovable personal data regulations
Privacy activist group noyb (None of Your Business) has filed a complaint against OpenAI, alleging that the ChatGPT service violates GDPR rules since its information cannot be corrected if found inaccurate.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/04/29/openai_hit_by_gdpr_complaint/
Fork it! It’s time for a Mastodon hard fork
date: 2024-04-29, from: Tilde.news
https://privacy.thenexus.today/mastodon-hard-fork/
Tesla (TSLA) surges on reports China is approving Full Self-Driving deployment
date: 2024-04-29, from: Electrek Feed
Tesla’s stock (TSLA) is surging this morning on several reports that China is going to approve the automaker’s deployment of its Full Self-Driving package in the country.
Tech Companies Promise to Try to Do Something About All the AI CSAM They’re Enabling
date: 2024-04-29, from: 404 Media Group
The biggest tech companies in the world pledge to do something about the harmful AI images they are actively enabling.
Here’s How Yamaha Fakes a Throttle Blip In Its EV-Motocross Bike
date: 2024-04-29, from: Ride Apart, Electric Motorcycle News
Why would an electric bike need a clutch? For very good reasons, actually.
https://www.rideapart.com/news/717689/yamaha-electric-motocross-transmission-patent/
France willing to buy key Atos assets to keep them French
date: 2024-04-29, updated: 2024-04-29, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Finance minister says government has interests in IT giant’s ‘sovereign activities’
The French government has tabled an offer to buy key assets of ailing IT giant Atos after the company late last week almost doubled its estimate of the cash it will need to stay afloat in the near future.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/04/29/france_buy_atos_assets/
Tornadoes Torment Central States
date: 2024-04-29, from: Heatmap News
Current conditions: An orange alert for severe thunderstorms is in effect across China’s southern provinces • More rain is expected in Kenya, where extreme flooding has killed at least 70 people • Bangladesh reopened its schools despite an ongoing heat wave.
THE TOP FIVE
- Hundreds of tornadoes rip through central U.S.
Devastating severe thunderstorms wreaked havoc across the Midwest and Southern Plains over the weekend, spawning hundreds of tornadoes and threatening 47 million people. More than 80 tornadoes were reported across five states on Friday alone. Twisters tore through several towns in Nebraska and Iowa, damaging homes and leaving at least one person dead. An outbreak of some 22 tornadoes in Oklahoma killed at least four people and leveled neighborhoods Saturday and Sunday. In the town of Sulphur, Oklahoma, “it seems like every business downtown has been destroyed now,” said Gov. Kevin Stitt.
- House heads into ‘natural resources week’
The House is voting this week on a bunch of legislation coming out of the Natural Resources Committee, E&E News reported. On the docket during “natural resources week” are bills that would give the green light to canceled Alaskan oil and gas leases, remove federal protections for the gray wolf, and let hunters use lead ammunition and tackle on public lands. The full list is here.
- G7 leaders reportedly eyeing 2035 for closing coal-fired power
plants
Environmental ministers from G7 nations (the United States, Britain, Italy, France, Germany, Canada, and Japan) meet in Turin, Italy, this week to “make the course set out by COP28 practical, real, concrete,” said Italy’s Environment and Energy Security Minister Gilberto Pichetto Fratin. The 2024 Meeting on Climate, Energy, and Environment is the first major political meeting since last year’s climate summit in Dubai, where nations pledged to accelerate the transition away from fossil fuels. The hope is that the talks in Turin will serve as a “strategic link” between COP28 and this year’s COP29 in Azerbaijan. Already there are signs of progress:
- Ministers have reportedly “agreed in principle” to a goal of increasing electricity storage capacity sixfold to 1,500 gigawatts by 2030, in part by boosting battery storage development and supply chains, according to the Financial Times. Such a commitment would help fulfill the COP28 pledge to triple renewable energy capacity by 2030.
- Ministers are considering a target of 2035 for G7 nations to shutter their coal-fired power plants, Reuters reported. Japan “has pushed back against an ambitious shift away from coal,” the FT added.
Other topics up for discussion include new financing models for climate change adaptation, the future roles of nuclear and biofuels in the energy mix, and power grid investments. A report out last week found that no G7 nation is on track to meet 2030 emissions reduction targets.
- Latest round of global plastics treaty talks end today
In Canada, talks on a global plastics treaty come to an end today. The nation’s environment minister Steven Guilbeault said delegates have been “making strides” toward hammering out the details of the international, legally binding treaty, ahead of a final meeting on the text in November of this year. “The treaty could include provisions for what kind of plastics would be controlled, how control measures would be implemented and paid for, and timelines for restricting or banning certain substances,” reported The Globe and Mail. Guilbeault hoped these talks would result in about 70% of the treaty’s text being agreed. Most plastic is made from fossil fuels, and major oil and gas producers see the plastics market as a “plan B” as the world looks to reduce the use of fossil fuels in energy production. According to analysis from the Center for International Environmental Law, nearly 200 fossil fuel and chemical lobbyists registered for this round of talks, a 37% increase from the last meeting in November 2023.
- Red Sea conflict leads to rise in shipping emissions
More than 13 million tons of extra CO2 has been emitted from the shipping sector over the last four months as ocean freighters use longer routes to avoid Houthi attacks in the Red Sea, Bloomberg reported. That’s about the same as the emissions from 9 million cars over the same time period. The statistics come from a report produced by consultancy INVERTO. “The extra emissions resulting from this crisis will increase companies’ carbon footprints – making it very hard to hit their net zero targets,” said Sushank Agarwal, a managing director at the company. About 80% of the world’s goods are traded by ship, and international shipping accounts for about 3% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Iranian-backed Houthi rebels have been attacking ships in the region in response to the Israel-Hamas war.
THE KICKER
In response to the recent deluge in Dubai, the crown prince, Sheikh Hamdan bin Mohammed al-Maktoum, has approved an ambitious (and expensive) upgrade to the city’s drainage infrastructure.
https://heatmap.news/tornadoes-iowa-nebraska-oklahoma
Watch the Cboys Attempt Hell’s Gate on Three Mini Bikes
date: 2024-04-29, from: Ride Apart, Electric Motorcycle News
Hell’s Gate is the proving ground for any serious off-road vehicle. So there’s no way wannabe Groms could ascend it… right?
https://www.rideapart.com/news/717653/cboys-hells-gate-mini-bikes/
Tesla Model 3 Performance’s $1,000 Price Jump Suggests Strong Demand
date: 2024-04-29, from: Inside EVs News
The first examples of the 510 horsepower electric sport sedan are expected to arrive this June.
https://insideevs.com/news/717784/tesla-model3-performance-instant-price-hike/
Hubble Space Telescope has gyro problems again
date: 2024-04-29, updated: 2024-04-29, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
At 34, things don’t seem to work how they used to
The Hubble Space Telescope has celebrated the 34th anniversary of its launch in the traditional way: by entering safe mode due to an ongoing gyroscope issue.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/04/29/hubble_space_telescope_has_gyro/
Watch This Scooter Rider Carry An Entire Wardrobe
date: 2024-04-29, from: Ride Apart, Electric Motorcycle News
Moving day just got a lot more interesting.
https://www.rideapart.com/news/717683/scooter-rider-carries-furniture-alone/
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-04-29, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Remarks by President Biden at the White House Correspondents' Dinner. Scroll to the end where he talks about the role of journalism in protecting our freedom.
JMP: this week’s sponsor
date: 2024-04-29, from: OS News
JMP is a fully FOSS service providing a way to get a real phone number that operates over the internet using XMPP. They provide numbers in the USA and Canada with everything you need to access SMS/MMS/etc. and voice calls using your XMPP (or SIP) clients of choice across all your devices. They are committed to growing the use of open communications technology such as XMPP, ultimately working to help people move their communication off the unencrypted telephone network and onto the federated, encrypted, and diverse Jabber network. We thank JMP for sponsoring OSNews this week, and they even offer a discount code for OSNews readers who sign up for the service. Use the code OSNEWS for one free month after paying for your account initially.
https://www.osnews.com/story/139475/jmp-this-weeks-sponsor/
9front “DO NOT INSTALL” released
date: 2024-04-29, from: OS News
There’s a new 9front release! So, what exactly is 9front, you may ask? Well, after it became clear that Bell Labs wasn’t doing much with plan9, a group of developers took matters into their own hands and created 9front, a fork of plan9. Their latest release is called DO NOT INSTALL, and brings things like more USB audio support, DNS over TLS, WiFi support for the Raspberry Pi, I2C support, and much more. I’m not particularly well-versed in the world of plan9, and more often than not it feels like a form of high-level programming performance art that I’m just not smart enough to understand. The whole community and its associated web sites have a very unique feel to it, and I always feel like I’m just not cool enough to be part of it. That’s not a dig at the plan9 community – it’s more of an indictment of my lack of coolness. Which really shouldn’t come as a surprise.
https://www.osnews.com/story/139493/9front-do-not-install-released/
run0: a systemd-based, more secure replacement for sudo
date: 2024-04-29, from: OS News
Lennart Poettering, main developer of systemd, has announced run0, a systemd-based replacement for the well-known sudo command that fixes many of he inherent issues with the widely used tool to gain temporary elevated privileges. There are various problems with sudo, which basically come down to that it’s a large SUID binary, meaning it consists of privileged code that unprivileged users can run from their own context. This makes sudo a fairly large attack surface, and why OpenBSD uses doas instead; while doas suffers from the same main problem, it’s much smaller and reduces the attack surface considerably. SUID processes are weird concepts: they are invoked by unprivileged code and inherit the execution context intended and controlled by unprivileged code. By execution context I mean the myriad of properties that a process has on Linux these days, from environment variables, process scheduling properties, cgroup assignments, security contexts, file descriptors passed, and so on and so on. A few of these settings the kernel is nice enough to clean up automatically when a SUID binary is invoked, but much of it has to be cleaned up by the invoked suid binary. This has to be done very very carefully, and history has shown that SUID binaries are generally pretty shit at that. ↫ Lennart Poettering Poettering wants to address this problem, and has come up with run0, which behaves like sudo, but works entirely differently and is not SUID. Run0 asks the services manager to create a shell or command under the target user’s ID, creating a new PTY, sending data back and forth from the originating TTY and the new PTY. Or in other words: the target command is invoked in an isolated exec context, freshly forked off PID 1, without inheriting any context from the client (well, admittedly, we do propagate $TERM, but that’s an explicit exception, i.e. allowlist rather than denylist). One could say, “run0” is closer to behaviour of “ssh” than to “sudo”, in many ways. Except that it doesn’t bother with encryption or cryptographic authentication, key management and stuff, but instead relies on the kernel’s local identification mechanisms. run0 doesn’t implement a configuration language of its own btw (i.e. no equivalent of /etc/sudoers). Instead, it just uses polkit for that, i.e. how we these days usually let unpriv local clients authenticate against priv servers. ↫ Lennart Poettering This approach addresses a whole slew of attack vectors on sudo, and it comes with fun additional features like being able to give your terminal a different background tint when using it, or displaying a little red dot in the terminal window title to further indicate you’re using elevated privileges. It will ship as part of the upcoming release of systemd 256.
https://www.osnews.com/story/139490/run0-a-systemd-based-more-secure-replacemen-for-sudo/
This Company Turned Evel Knievel’s Final Stunt Bike Into a Watch
date: 2024-04-29, from: Ride Apart, Electric Motorcycle News
Wear history on your wrist.
https://www.rideapart.com/news/717673/evel-knievel-stunt-motorcycle-watch/
UK lays down fresh legislation banning crummy default device passwords
date: 2024-04-29, updated: 2024-04-29, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
New laws mean vendors need to make clear how long you’ll get updates too
Smart device manufacturers will have to play by new rules in the UK as of today, with laws coming into force to make it more difficult for cybercriminals to break into hardware such as phones and tablets.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/04/29/uk_lays_password_legislation/
A copper gold rush courtesy of the energy transition
date: 2024-04-29, from: Marketplace Morning Report
A copper mining company recently turned down a $39 billion takeover bid because it was too low. Right now, the price of copper is near a 2-year high and headed higher. And the metal is critical in many clean energy technologies. Plus, the Federal Reserve is expected to hold interest rates steady at its latest policy meetings. When might that change? We also examine the fallout of a strong U.S. dollar.
Harley-Davidson Motorcycle Sales Stayed Flat For 2024 Q1
date: 2024-04-29, from: Ride Apart, Electric Motorcycle News
Revenue was also down by three percent as compared to the same period in 2023.
https://www.rideapart.com/news/717665/harley-motorcycle-sales-q1-2024/
Bechele 3.0 puppet | #MagPiMonday
date: 2024-04-29, from: Raspberry Pi News (.com)
Keen to delight family members, maker Rolf Jethon used Raspberry Pi to animate a puppet.
The post Bechele 3.0 puppet | #MagPiMonday appeared first on Raspberry Pi.
https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/bechele-3-0-puppet-magpimonday/
What’s behind Elon Musk’s surprise China trip?
date: 2024-04-29, from: Marketplace Morning Report
From the BBC World Service: Tesla CEO Elon Musk paid a visit to China, where he’s been trying to clear regulatory hurdles that have hindered the company’s self-driving technology roll-out there. Then, Sweden’s police have been inundated with reports from people who have been swindled out of their gold belongings. And later, musicians who sample nature can now split their profits with environmental causes through a new United Nations-backed project.
Ubuntu 24.04, Fedora 40, EndeavourOS, and TrueNAS 24.04 all arrive at once
date: 2024-04-29, updated: 2024-04-29, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Sometimes Linux releases are like buses… frequently clustered together, and rarely as reliable as you might ideally want
FOSS round-up Last week was a busy one for the open source community: EndeavourOS and TrueNAS Scale arrived on Tuesday, Fedora landed on Wednesday, and Ubuntu on Thursday.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/04/29/ubuntu_2404_fed_40_et_al/
Oklahoma towns hit by tornadoes begin cleanup after 4 killed in weekend storms
date: 2024-04-29, from: VOA News USA
Microsoft At Work
date: 2024-04-29, from: OS News
Well, this was a wild goose chase of a read. J. B. Crawford dove into the history of something I’ve never heard of – Microsoft At Work – and came away with a story that’ while clearer thanks to his research, is still frustratingly nebulous. I’m still not entirely sure what Microsoft At Work really was, but I think it had the goal of running Windows on communications devices like faxes, to make it easier to share and work on documents across various devices. Crawford did a lot of digging, and eventually settles on what he thinks might be a description of what MAW really consisted of. I am being a bit dismissive for effect. MAW was more ambitious than just installing Windows on a grape. The effort included a unified communications protocol for the control of office machines, including printers, for which a whole Microsoft stack was envisioned. This built on top of the Windows Printing System, a difficult-to-search-for project that apparently predated MAW by a short time, enough so that Windows Printing System products were actually on the market when MAW was announced—MAW products were, we will learn, very much not. MAW devices like the Ricoh IFS77 ran 16-bit Windows 3.1 with a new GUI intended to appear more modern while reducing resource requirements. Some reporters at the time noted that Microsoft was cagey about the supported architectures, I suspect they were waiting on ports to be completed. The fax machine was probably x86, though, as there’s little evidence MAW actually ran on anything else. ↫ J. B. Crawford The ’90s were a wild time, especially as Microsoft, and this MAW project seems to have ’90s written all over it, but I’d still love to learn a lot more about this. I hope this article will bring out some former Microsoft execs or employees who can give us more details, and possibly even some code. I want to know how this works and what it did.
https://www.osnews.com/story/139488/microsoft-at-work/
Blinken: Hamas should accept ‘extraordinarily generous’ Israeli truce offer
date: 2024-04-29, from: VOA News USA
Riyadh, Saudi Arabia — U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Monday he is hopeful Hamas will accept what he characterized as Israel’s “extraordinarily generous” offer for a cease-fire in Gaza in return for the release of hostages.
“In this moment, the only thing standing between the people of Gaza and a cease-fire is Hamas,” Blinken said in Riyadh, on a trip to the Mideast for more talks on halting the nearly seven-month-old Israel-Hamas war.
“They have to decide — and they have to decide quickly,” Blinken said of the militants that Israel declared war on after their October 7 attack on Israel killed 1,200 people and led to the capture of about 250 hostages. “I’m hopeful that they will make the right decision.
“We can have a fundamental change in the dynamic,” Blinken said.
A delegation from Hamas was due Monday in Egypt, which with Qatar has been seeking to broker a deal that would halt the Israeli offensive and see hostages freed. Israel’s counter-offensive in Gaza has killed more than 34,000 people, according to the Hamas-run health ministry, a figure that Israel says includes several thousand Hamas fighters it has killed.
Meanwhile, Blinken said in Riyadh that the U.S. is close to finishing a security agreement with Saudi Arabia that would be offered if the country makes peace with Israel.
“The work that Saudi Arabia, the United States have been doing together in terms of our own agreements, I think, is potentially very close to completion,” Blinken told an audience at the World Economic Forum.
He added the two nations have done intensive work together over the last month on Israeli-Saudi normalization.
Blinken disclosed that he was scheduled to be in Saudi Arabia and Israel on October 10 last year to focus specifically on the Palestinian part of the normalization deal because that is an essential component. But it did not happen because of the Hamas terror attack on Israel.
“In order to move forward with normalization, two things will be required: Calm in Gaza and a credible pathway to a Palestinian state,” Blinken said.
U.S. officials have said creating a pathway to a Palestinian state with security guarantees for Israel is key to lasting peace and security in the Middle East and to Israel’s integration in the region.
Blinken met Monday with Saudi Crown Prince and Prime Minister Mohammed bin Salman for nearly an hour to discuss the Gaza conflict and ongoing tensions in the Mideast. He then headed to Jordan before another stop in Israel, where he is expected to meet with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other senior officials.
The Biden administration continues to work on a potential security agreement with Saudi Arabia that could lead to normalization of Saudi relations with Israel, even as some officials and analysts consider it a remote possibility.
Last week, White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan said he plans to return to Saudi Arabia soon. Sullivan had earlier postponed his trip to the Middle East due to a cracked rib.
Prime Minister Netanyahu has rejected the two-state solution and the return of the Palestinian Authority to control Gaza, demands that are widely supported by the international community.
The Saudis have demanded, as a prerequisite, to see an Israeli commitment to the two-state solution.
Nimrod Goren, a senior fellow for Israeli affairs at the Middle East Institute, told VOA in an email, “Saudi Arabia has been gradually opening towards Israel for a decade. Significant progress was made in the months prior to the Hamas attack of October 7, with the hope of linking an Israeli-Saudi normalization agreement to a pre-presidential election, U.S.-Saudi defense pact. The war stalled the process, but talks are continuing and are at a decisive phase.”
If Netanyahu’s opposition to the two-state solution remains unchanged, Goren added, he might struggle to secure normalization with Saudi Arabia.
Humanitarian assistance
Speaking at a meeting with the Gulf Cooperation Council in Riyadh earlier Monday, Blinken said the best way to ease the humanitarian crisis in Gaza is for there to be a cease-fire.
Blinken is visiting Riyadh, Amman, and Tel Aviv through Wednesday — his seventh diplomatic mission to the Middle East region since the Israel-Hamas war began more than six months ago.
Some analysts said the United States needs to fully enforce its law and arms policy on Israel to ensure accountability and adequate humanitarian aid delivery.
Ari Tolany, director of the Center for International Policy’s security assistance monitor, told VOA, “U.S. law and policy will need to hold its largest recipient of security assistance to account for a meaningful peace.”
White House national security spokesperson John Kirby on Sundat told ABC’s “This Week” that the United States is continuing to push for a six-week cease-fire. He said Israel has assured U.S. officials it will not send ground troops into the southern Gaza city of Rafah without fully hearing U.S. concerns that such an attack would endanger the lives of more than 1 million Palestinians who are sheltering there.
Kirby said that a makeshift Mediterranean Sea pier being constructed on the Gaza shoreline could be completed in two or three weeks so that more humanitarian aid can be transported into the narrow territory to help feed many starving Palestinians.
Ken Bredemeier and Chris Hannas contributed to this report.
Watchdog reveals lingering Google Privacy Sandbox worries
date: 2024-04-29, updated: 2024-04-29, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Ad tech rewrite to replace web cookies still not to regulatory taste
The UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) still has privacy and competition concerns about Google’s Privacy Sandbox advertising toolkit, which explains why the ad giant recently again delayed its plan to drop third-party cookies in Chrome until 2025.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/04/29/uk_cma_google/
LEVER TIME PREMIUM: How Reagan Created Today’s Monopoly Crisis
date: 2024-04-29, from: The Lever News
On this week’s bonus episode of Lever Time, we explore how lax enforcement of antitrust laws allowed big companies to rob the middle class.
https://www.levernews.com/lever-time-premium-how-reagan-created-todays-monopoly-crisis/
The Hidden Cost of EV Ownership: Your Time
date: 2024-04-29, from: Heatmap News
My wife used to speedrun to San Francisco. A full tank of gas powered the little truck from Los Angeles to the halfway-point pit stop near Coalinga, California, where the L.A. radio stations have faded into static and the “Mr. Brightside” broadcasts from the Bay Area have yet to reach over the horizon. With just that single stop, the trip could be completed in under six hours.
It’s not that way these days in the EV. We stop twice for half-hour recharging sessions — maybe three times if we leave home with a less-than-full battery, and climbing over the Grapevine mountain pass punishes the range. Altogether, it makes the journey seven hours or longer.
I don’t mind too much. Frankly, I’d rather take the occasional break from holding my place in an endless line of cars all headed to the same destination and all trying to pass the same tomato truck than make slightly better time. If the day is already dedicated to a road trip, then it doesn’t really change my life to arrive in six hours rather than seven. Still, every time I undertake the I-5 marathon, the experience makes it clear: the true cost of owning an electric vehicle is your time.
Posts on platforms like Reddit about the hidden costs of EV ownership make me think I’m not alone in this notion.
In strictly monetary costs, one can make a straightforward case that EV life is better. Government rebates and tax credits bring down the upfront front cost to be closer to or nearly competitive with combustion cars. Some recurring routine maintenance costs, like oil changes, are absent. And depending on where you live and the current state of the ever-changing calculus of gas vs. electricity costs, going electric could save you a lot when prices soar at the pump. A New York Times graphic from 2021 illustrates that EV owners really can have it all: lower emissions and lower lifetime cost of ownership at the same time.
There are hidden EV costs in terms of dollars and cents, yes. States have begun to institute extra fees to register an electric car, which is nominally to offset the fact that EVs don’t pay the highway tax built into the price of gasoline yet smacks of political theater. Serious repairs can be expensive. EVs, because they’re powerful and heavy, seem to burn through tires at a faster rate. While the cost of a gallon of gas varies relatively little across town, the price of a kilowatt-hour of electricity can vary wildly from overnight residential electricity to the surge pricing one pays at a Los Angeles Supercharger in the middle of day. If you don’t have home charging, you’re stuck paying the higher rate — or going to get cheap electricity at odd hours, which is another tax on your time.
A lot of those extra financial costs can be strategically mitigated. The time penalty, not so much. While it mostly doesn’t matter, at least for those who can plug in at home and keep their batteries always full enough for their local driving, stopping on a long trip still takes far longer than simply topping up a gas tank. Fast-charging has seen technological leaps forward; whereas a lot of Tesla’s early Superchargers built in the 2010s maxed out at 72 kilowatts, many DC fast-chargers can now provide 250 or 350 kilowatts. But it still takes 15 to 20 minutes to refill the battery from nearly empty back to the 80% or 90% you’ll want for the next leg of a road trip.
Then there’s the not-insignificant time you spend thinking about charging. Some people who haven’t driven an EV seem to think range anxiety is an all-consuming cloud of negative energy, that every mile is driven in a panic about where the next plug will be. Yes, I’ve had my share of worried drives, mostly because I pushed my older standard-range Tesla Model 3 to its limit by trying to jump between distant chargers in the boonies of Arizona or Utah. In truth, worrying about the battery is more of a low-level mental white noise — something you must always be slightly aware of, as opposed to the old days of just noticing the needle is a little close to E and pulling off the freeway. (Again, the penalty here is higher on renters and those without home charging.)
Some of this, I’m afraid, may be unavoidable. To break free from burning fossil fuels in your car is to give up the deal with the devil that gave us the freedom to rarely think about energy.
The good news: As time goes on, these time penalties are fading. My Model 3 that started life with (an over-promised) 240 miles of range requires a lot of extra stops on a very long trip. As the range of a decent EV creeps up to 300 miles or more, we’re approaching a world where you’re not stopping much more than you would in a gas-burning car, unless you’re one of those drivers who refuses to take bathroom breaks to make good time. With range and the number of fast-chargers on the road both ticking upward, the anxiety of not making it to the next plug is dissipating, too, giving you back some of your brain time to think about something else.
EVs may never reach the two minutes it takes to fill a gas tank. They may always ask just a little more of you than a hybrid or plug-in hybrid that conserves the gas engine to keep the range worries at bay. But they might get close enough to gas-pump speed that, by the time you stretch your legs, relieve yourself, and buy another colossal can of Monster Energy, the car says it’s ready for you to resume your trip.
Besides, if those few extra minutes make you feel a little saner while also reducing the emissions of your road trip, then that’s time well spent.
https://heatmap.news/electric-vehicles/ev-charge-time
People’s CDC COVID-19 Weather Report
date: 2024-04-29, from: Peoples CDC blog
This is the @PeoplesCDC weekly update for April 29, 2024! This Weather Report from the People’s CDC sheds light on the ongoing COVID situation in the US.
https://peoplescdc.org/2024/04/29/peoples-cdc-covid-19-weather-report-73/
NASA Uses Small Engine to Enhance Sustainable Jet Research
date: 2024-04-29, from: NASA breaking news
Located inside a high-tech NASA laboratory in Cleveland is something you could almost miss at first glance: a small-scale, fully operational jet engine to test new technology that could make aviation more sustainable. The engine’s smaller size and modestly equipped test stand means researchers and engineers can try out newly designed engine components less expensively […]
https://www.nasa.gov/aeronautics/nasa-uses-small-engine-for-sustainable-jet-research/
UK government faces £17.5M shortfall from UKCloud liquidation
date: 2024-04-29, updated: 2024-04-29, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Cabinet Office letter also reveals department lost money on unfinished database project
The UK Cabinet Office has confirmed it is £17.5 million out of pocket after underwriting the official receiver of UKCloud, which went into liquidation in 2022.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/04/29/uk_government_ukcloud_costs/
The chip that changed my world – and yours
date: 2024-04-29, updated: 2024-04-29, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Zed 80 is dead baby, Zed 80 is dead…. vulture claws over the astounding tech
Opinion It lasted 50 years, but history finally claimed it. Zilog has called time on the Z80 CPU. Readers may have owned one in an 8-bit microcomputer or showered coins on one in an early arcade video game.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/04/29/opinion_z80/
The most important litmus test of all
date: 2024-04-29, from: Robert Reich on Substack
Every Republican House election denier must pledge to certify the 2024 presidential election results
https://robertreich.substack.com/p/the-most-important-litmus-test-of
The first video game, Spacewar!, on the DEC PDP-1 in your browser
date: 2024-04-29, from: OS News
This is a virtual DEC PDP-1 (emulated in HTML5/JavaScript) running the original code of “Spacewar!”, the earliest known digital video game. If available, use gamepads or joysticks for authentic gameplay — the game was originally played using custom “control boxes”. Spacewar! was conceived in 1961 by Martin Graetz, Stephen Russell, and Wayne Wiitanen. It was first realized on the PDP-1 in 1962 by Stephen Russell, Peter Samson, Dan Edwards, and Martin Graetz, together with Alan Kotok, Steve Piner, and Robert A Saunders. ↫ Norbert Landsteiner It’s wild to me that even for the very first video game, they already made what are effectively controllers anyone today could pick up and use. Note that this emulator can run more than just Spacewar!.
https://www.osnews.com/story/139485/the-first-video-game-spacewar-on-the-dec-pdp-1-in-your-browser/
Software support chap survived breaking his customer
date: 2024-04-29, updated: 2024-04-29, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Sometimes there’s more than enough blame to go around
Who, Me? Welcome once again, gentle reader, to the safe space we like to call Who, Me? wherein Reg readers may unburden themselves with tales of times their tech prowess might have let them down.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/04/29/who_me/
April 28, 2024
date: 2024-04-29, from: Heather Cox Richardson blog
On Friday, in an interview with CNN anchor Kaitlan Collins, Trump’s former attorney general William Barr brushed off the recent news that Trump, furious that the story he had taken refuge in a bunker during the Black Lives Matter protests in summer 2020 had leaked, called for the White House leaker to be executed.
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/april-28-2024
Alibaba Yitian 710 rated fastest Arm server CPU in the cloud (for now)
date: 2024-04-29, updated: 2024-04-30, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Researcher finds it beats Intel’s Xeons for speed on one database-related tests, joins AWS Gravitons in cost-efficiency win
The homebrew Yitian 710 CPU developed in 2021 and deployed by Alibaba Cloud is the fastest Arm server processor for rent in hyperscale clouds when handling database-related tasks, according to research published this week in the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers journal Transactions on Cloud Computing.…
Today in SCV History (April 29)
date: 2024-04-29, from: SCV New (TV Station)
2002 – LASD Deputy David March, Canyon grad and Saugus resident, murdered during traffic stop. [story
https://scvnews.com/today-in-scv-history-april-29/
US lawmakers strike deal to boost aviation safety, will not raise pilot retirement age
date: 2024-04-29, from: VOA News USA
WASHINGTON — U.S. House and Senate negotiators said early Monday they had reached a deal to boost air traffic controller staffing and boost funding to avert runway close-call incidents, but will not increase the airline pilot retirement age to 67 from 65.
The U.S. House of Representatives in July voted 351-69 on a sweeping bill to reauthorize the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) that would also raise the mandatory pilot retirement age to 67 but the Senate Commerce Committee had voted in February to reject the retirement age increase. International rules would have prevented airline pilots older than 65 from flying in most countries outside the United States.
Congress has temporarily extended authorization for the FAA through May 10 as it works on a new $105 billion, five-year deal. The Senate is set to vote this week on the more than 1,000-page bipartisan proposal.
The bill prohibits airlines from charging fees for families to sit together and requires airlines to accept vouchers and credits for at least five years, but did not adopt many stricter consumer rules sought by the Biden administration.
The bill also requires airplanes to be equipped with 25-hour cockpit recording devices and directs the FAA to deploy advanced airport surface technology to help prevent collisions.
Efforts to boost aviation safety in the United States have taken on new urgency after a series of near-miss incidents and the Jan. 5 Alaska Airlines Boeing 737 MAX 9 door plug mid-air emergency.
Senate Commerce Committee chair Maria Cantwell, the panel’s top Republican, Ted Cruz, House Transportation Committee chair Sam Graves and the committee’s top Democrat, Rick Larsen, in a joint statement announced the agreement and said, “now more than ever, the FAA needs strong and decisive direction from Congress to ensure America’s aviation system maintains its gold standard.”
The proposal raises maximum civil penalties for airline consumer violations from $25,000 per violation to $75,000 and aims to address a shortage of 3,000 air traffic controllers by directing the FAA to implement improved staffing standards and to hire more inspectors, engineers and technical specialists.
Congress will not establish minimum seat size requirements, leaving that instead to the FAA. The bill requires the Transportation Department to create a dashboard that shows consumers the minimum seat size for each U.S. airline.
The bill boosts by five the number of daily direct flights from Washington Reagan National Airport.
Cantwell said the agreement — including a five-year reauthorization for the National Transportation Safety Board — demonstrates aviation safety and stronger consumer standards are a big priority.
Teardown confirms Huawei’s Pura 70 contains SMIC 7nm process node
date: 2024-04-29, updated: 2024-04-29, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
‘Remarkably similar’ to the Kirin 9000 processor that shocked many last year
A teardown of Huawei’s Pura 70 smartphone by an IC research firm revealed the Chinese tech giant is relying on Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp’s (SMIC) HiSilicon Kirin 9010 processor, likely because US sanctions mean the Chinese company can’t buy from other sources.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/04/29/teardown_confirms_huaweis_pura_70/
Snacks, Scenery, and Sunshine Spell Success
date: 2024-04-29, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
Enjoying a day trip to the Carrizo Plain National Monument.
The post Snacks, Scenery, and Sunshine Spell Success appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2024/04/28/snacks-scenery-and-sunshine-spell-success/
Westmont Students Move with the Earth
date: 2024-04-29, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
The 2024 Fringe Festival ‘Earth on Motion’ took place at SBCAW and on Montecito Campus.
The post Westmont Students Move with the Earth appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2024/04/28/westmont-students-move-with-the-earth/
Alex Cuba Embraces His Original Sound
date: 2024-04-29, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
The Grammy Award–Winning artist is set to perform at SOhO Restaurant & Music Club on May 8.
The post Alex Cuba Embraces His Original Sound appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2024/04/28/alex-cuba-embraces-his-original-sound/
Rossier commencement speakers withdraw from ceremonies
date: 2024-04-29, from: The Daily Trojan (USC Student Paper)
The decision comes in protest of USC’s response to the “Gaza Solidarity Occupation” and for having “censored” Valedictorian Asna Tabassum by canceling her main stage commencement address.
The post Rossier commencement speakers withdraw from ceremonies appeared first on Daily Trojan.
https://dailytrojan.com/2024/04/28/210120/
First Ariane 6 rocket ready to assemble as Europe begins final countdown
date: 2024-04-29, updated: 2024-04-29, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Core and boosters are on the pad ahead of (maybe) June launch
The European Space Agency is ready to put together the first Ariane 6 rocket, and has declared the campaign to get it into orbit is under way.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/04/29/ariane_6_campaign_begins/
Discord dismantles Spy.pet site that snooped on millions of users
date: 2024-04-29, updated: 2024-04-29, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
ALSO: Infostealer spotted hiding in CDN cache, antivirus update hijacked to deliver virus, and some critical vulns
Updated - Infosec in brief They say sunlight is the best disinfectant, and that appears to have been true in the case of Discord data harvesting site Spy.pet – as it was recently and swiftly dismantled after its existence and purpose became known.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/04/29/infosec_in_brief/
Arrests roil campuses nationwide ahead of graduation
date: 2024-04-29, from: VOA News USA
Japan’s space junk cleaner prototype closes in on its target
date: 2024-04-29, updated: 2024-04-29, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
PLUS: Huawei returns to top Chinese smartphone market; China’s new IPv6 goals; Malaysia’s golden VC Visa
Asia In Brief Japan’s effort to start a business disposing of space junk is off to a promising start, after the ADRAS-J satellite spotted its first target and sent back images.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/04/29/asia_tech_news_roundup/
Blinken speaks to Azeri, Armenian leaders about peace talks
date: 2024-04-29, from: VOA News USA
https://www.voanews.com/a/blinken-speaks-to-azeri-armenian-leaders-about-peace-talks/7588897.html
NLnet Co-founder Frances Brazier Knighted For Exceptional Contribution to Society
date: 2024-04-29, updated: 2024-04-29, from: nlnet feed
https://nlnet.nl/news/2024/20240429-Brazier-Knighted.html
HypoPG 1.4.1 is out!
date: 2024-04-29, from: PostgreSQL News
Taipei, Taiwan - April 28th, 2024
HypoPG 1.4.1
I’m pleased to announce the release of the version 1.4.1 of HypoPG, an extension adding support for Hypothetical Indexes, compatible with PostgreSQL 9.2 and above.
Bug fixes: - Fix hypothetical index names when its Oid is more than 1 billion (Julien Rouhaud, thanks to github user sylph520 for the report) - Fix hypothetical index deparsing when attributes need quoting (Julien Rouhaud, thanks to Daniel Lang for the report)
Misc: - Add support for PostgreSQL 17 (Georgy Shelkovy, Julien Rouhaud)
Links & Credits
Thank to the users who reported bugs, they are all cited in the CHANGELOG file.
HypoPG is an open project. Any contribution to build a better tool is welcome. You just have to send your ideas, features requests or patches using the github repository at https://github.com/HypoPG/hypopg.
Links :
- Download: https://github.com/HypoPG/hypopg/releases
- Bug tracker: https://github.com/HypoPG/hypopg/issues
https://www.postgresql.org/about/news/hypopg-141-is-out-2851/