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EU Greenhouse Gas Emissions Down 24% Since 1990 Published on December 01, 2020 at 12:30PM Greenhouse gas emissions in the European Union have been reduced by 24% compared to 1990 levels, according to the bloc's annual climate report, but the EU said Monday it still needs to intensify efforts to keep to its target of making Europe the first climate-neutral continent by mid-century. The Associated Press reports: The EU's executive arm said Monday that emissions in the 27-nation bloc have decreased by 3.7% in 2019 compared to the previous year, while gross domestic product rose 1.5% over the same period. Due to the coronavirus pandemic, the commission expects "an unprecedented fall in emissions" in 2020, along the lines of 8%. "However, as experienced in the past, a swift economic recovery may lead to a strong and rapid rebound in emissions, unless policy gears its stimulus measures toward the green transition," the commission wrote in the report. In its repo...

The 'Advent of Code 2020' Event Begins Published on December 01, 2020 at 10:40AM "Need a vacation from 2020? Why not go on an adventure and learn programming at the same time?" asks developer Eric Wastl on Twitter, announcing this year's edition of the Advent of Code. From the site: Advent of Code is an Advent calendar of small programming puzzles for a variety of skill sets and skill levels that can be solved in any programming language you like. People use them as a speed contest, interview prep, company training, university coursework, practice problems, or to challenge each other. You don't need a computer science background to participate - just a little programming knowledge and some problem solving skills will get you pretty far. Nor do you need a fancy computer; every problem has a solution that completes in at most 15 seconds on ten-year-old hardware. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Engineers Are Building Huge Salt Caves To Store Huge Amounts of Hydrogen Published on December 01, 2020 at 09:00AM An anonymous reader quotes a report from Popular Mechanics: Scientists are going back to the salt mines, literally, to find a revolutionary new way to store large quantities of hydrogen for energy. Proponents say this could be a step toward unlocking hydrogen for renewables -- something that could change the energy landscape if it were resolved. "The project would initially have enough energy to power 150,000 households for one year and is scheduled to be operational by 2025," Fuel Cell Works reports. "It is being managed by Mitsubishi Hitachi Power Systems (MHPS), a maker of gas turbines, and Magnum Development, which owns salt caverns for liquid fuel storage." This works by basically repurposing existing, enormous caves to store reserves of hydrogen as well as other fuels. Salt in particular makes a great medium for storing and then continuing to ge...

Raspberry Pi Foundation Releases Case Fan To Prevent Overheating Published on December 01, 2020 at 07:32AM The Raspberry Pi Foundation has released a tiny $5 fan combined with a small heatsink for the Raspberry Pi 4. TechCrunch reports: It works with the official case, below the top cover. That accessory should prevent the Raspberry Pi from overheating. According to the foundation, the tiny fan should be enough to prevent throttling. "It draws air in over the USB and Ethernet connectors, passes it over a small finned heatsink attached to the processor, and exhausts it through the SD card slot," the Raspberry Pi Foundation says. It's a cheap stopgap solution, but I hope the Foundation will prioritize heat dissipation for the next iteration of the Raspberry Pi. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple Hires Former Venture Capitalist Josh Elman For App Store Discovery Role Published on December 01, 2020 at 06:55AM As part of Apple's ongoing efforts to improve app discovery, the company has hired former venture capitalist Josh Elman for a related role on the App Store. AppleInsider reports: In a statement Monday, Elman said he would be joining Apple to "help customers discover the best apps for them." He added that he was excited to "build ways to help over a billion customers and millions of developers connect." As part of the transition to the new role at Apple, Elman said he would be stepping back from some of his active boards and investments -- including Discord and Medium. Elman was previously a venture capitalist at Greylock Partners and led early investments in Discord and the precursor to TikTok. Until 2019, he was also the vice president of product at Robinhood. Elman's experience identifying and investing in apps that later became hits co...

Fox News Breaking News Alert EXCLUSIVE: Dr. Scott Atlas resigns as special adviser to Trump on coronavirus 11/30/20 3:55 PM

Disney Digitally Removes The Mandalorian's Accidental Crew Member Cameo Published on December 01, 2020 at 06:15AM Disney has digitally removed a lone crew member who accidentally appeared in the background of a recent Mandalorian episode. The Verge reports: The crew member, who the internet lovingly dubbed "Jeans Guy," appeared at the 18:54 mark in season 2, episode 4. Back flat against the wall, the crew member was not in the shot for very long, but they made an impact on Star Wars fans everywhere. People even made mock designs for action figures based on the crew member! You can't buy that kind of love. The Verge has reached out to Disney about the digital erasure. Upon revisiting the scene, however, the crew member is nowhere to be found, something I was worried would happen. The beauty of digital editing technology is that shows and movies can be worked on in homes around the world at a time when it's impossible to be in a shared office space. The downside i...

No One Who Got Moderna's Vaccine In Trial Developed Severe COVID-19 Published on December 01, 2020 at 05:32AM An anonymous reader quotes a report from Science Magazine: Continuing the spate of stunning news about COVID-19 vaccines, the biotech company Moderna announced the final results of the 30,000-person efficacy trial for its candidate in a press release today: Only 11 people who received two doses of the vaccine developed COVID-19 symptoms after being infected with the pandemic coronavirus, versus 185 symptomatic cases in a placebo group. That is an efficacy of 94.1%, the company says, far above what many vaccine scientists were expecting just a few weeks ago. More impressive still, Moderna's candidate had 100% efficacy against severe disease. There were zero such COVID-19 cases among those vaccinated, but 30 in the placebo group. The company today plans to file a request for emergency use authorization (EUA) for its vaccine with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FD...

Nikola Stock Plunges As Company Cancels Badger Pickup Truck Published on December 01, 2020 at 03:32AM An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Things keep going downhill for aspiring hydrogen truck-maker Nikola. Nikola's stock plunged on Monday morning as the company announced that a previously announced deal with General Motors was not going to close. Instead, the two companies signed a "non-binding memorandum of understanding" related to the use of GM's hydrogen fuel cell technology in Nikola's future semi trucks. GM will not take a stake in Nikola as originally planned. Nikola's stock is down 26 percent as I write this on Monday morning. The stock is down 58 percent since September 8, the day Nikola originally announced the GM deal. The news means that Nikola is canceling the Badger, a planned pickup truck that critics have long derided as vaporware. Under Nikola's September deal with GM, GM was supposed to design and build the Badger on...

Global Smartphone Sales Declined 5.7% in Third Quarter of 2020 Published on December 01, 2020 at 02:55AM Worldwide smartphone sales to end-users totaled 366 million units in the third quarter of 2020, down 5.7% from the third quarter of 2019, according to Gartner. Overall global mobile phone sales to end users totaled 401 million units, a decline of 8.7% year-over-year. From the report: After two consecutive quarters of a decline of 20%, quarterly smartphone sales have started to show signs of recovery sequentially. However, smartphone sales continued to remain weaker compared to the same time period in in 2019, even with vendors introducing multiple 5G smartphones and governments relaxing shelter-in-place instructions in some geographies. "Consumers are limiting their discretionary spend even as some lockdown conditions have started to improve," said Anshul Gupta, senior research director at Gartner. "Global smartphone sales experienced moderate growth from the second...

From Thailand To Indonesia, Taxes Tighten for Digital Businesses Published on December 01, 2020 at 02:15AM Governments across the Association of Southeast Asian Nations are moving to impose more taxes on digital companies, stirring unease among multinational internet businesses that have boomed amid the coronavirus pandemic. From a report: From Thailand to Indonesia, new levies have kicked in or are being introduced. They threaten to chip away at the earnings of technology companies that are reaping benefits from the rise of digitalization among the region's 650 million people. The measures are part of global moves by governments to try to bring more of the borderless digital economy into the tax net, responding to scrutiny of whether often footloose tech companies are paying appropriate dues on their earnings. Tech companies have already been the target of digital service tax nets that have progressively tightened in several European countries. Authorities in France this week st...

Fox News Breaking News Alert Arizona certifies presidential election winner. This key battleground state is expected to follow suit. 11/30/20 11:52 AM

Fox News Breaking News Alert Biden picks Yellen for Treasury secretary, Democratic operative Tanden for OMB director 11/30/20 6:55 AM

Fox News Breaking News Alert Joe Biden hurt while playing with his dog Major 11/29/20 1:18 PM

Fox News Breaking News Alert Wisconsin completes recount, Biden still ahead as certification deadline looms 11/29/20 10:58 AM

Fox News Breaking News Alert Trump slams judges' election decisions: 'What kind of a court system is this?' 11/29/20 7:50 AM

'Welcome To the PC Malaise Era' Published on December 01, 2020 at 01:35AM Long-time research analyst Wes Miller, who previously worked at Microsoft, believes that Windows-powered PCs are now stuck in the same rut that American cars grappled with in 1973 to 1983. He writes: I've said before that Windows has never escaped x86. I'm still not sure if it ever can. So the challenges then come down to three things: 1. Can Intel succeed where they've failed for the last 5+ years, at building hybrid processors? The next year to two years should answer this question. 2. Can Microsoft succeed at finally getting application developers to write platform-optimized, energy-respectful, halo applications for the PC? I've been writing about the Windows Store for a long, long time. A long time. And I'm still not sure how Microsoft can light a fire under Windows application developers when they've lost that mindshare. 3. Can Microsoft begin pushing the Surface platform fo...

Americans of All Ages Are Spending More on Video Games Published on December 01, 2020 at 12:54AM We know that time and money spent on video games is surging due to the pandemic. Now, industry-tracking firm The NPD Group is providing detail on where that growth is coming from. From a report: And it turns out that people across all age demographics are playing more games more often. That's big for mobile games, but it also includes Nintendo, PlayStation, and Xbox. In its "2020 Evolution of Entertainment" report, NPD found that 4-out-of-5 consumers in the U.S. played a game in the last six months. More important for the industry, those consumers are spending 26% more time and 33% more money on games than the same period in the previous year. But this isn't just coming from young people. Older demographics are turning to games more often as they find themselves with money they can no longer spend on dining out or attending live events. Spending on video games for Americ...

In a Major Scientific Breakthrough, AI Predicts the Exact Shape of Proteins Published on December 01, 2020 at 12:18AM Researchers have made a major breakthrough using artificial intelligence that could revolutionize the hunt for new medicines. The scientists have created A.I. software that uses a protein's DNA sequence to predict its three-dimensional structure to within an atomâ(TM)s width of accuracy. weiserfireman shares a report: The achievement, which solves a 50-year-old challenge in molecular biology, was accomplished by a team from DeepMind, the London-based artificial intelligence company that is part of Google parent Alphabet. Until now, DeepMind was best known for creating A.I. that could beat the best human players at the strategy game Go, a major milestone in computer science. DeepMind achieved the protein shape breakthrough in a biennial competition for algorithms that can be used to predict protein structures. The competition asks participants to take a protein...

Bitcoin Hits New Record, This Time With Less Talk of a Bubble Published on November 30, 2020 at 11:48PM Bitcoin is back. Again. From a report: Nearly three years after it went on a hair-bending rise and hit a peak of $19,783, the price of a single Bitcoin rose above that for the first time on Monday, according to the data and news provider CoinDesk. The cryptocurrency has soared since March, after sinking below $4,000 at the outset of the coronavirus pandemic. Bitcoin's latest climb is different from its last spike in 2017, which was driven largely by investors in Asia who had just learned about cryptocurrencies. Back then, the digital token soon lost momentum as people questioned what it could do other than allow for easy online speculating and drug and ransom payments. While those questions remain, Bitcoin is now being fueled by a less speculative fever. Buyers -- led by American investors, including companies and other traditional investors -- are treating Bitcoin as an altern...

Facebook Buys Customer-Service Software Maker Kustomer For About $1 Billion Published on November 30, 2020 at 10:59PM Facebook has acquired Kustomer, a New York-based software company that helps businesses manage customer conversations from multiple services on one dashboard. From a report: The social media giant made the deal to bolster its nascent messaging business, which is expanding to include customer-service products that help companies interact with people via chat apps, like WhatsApp and Messenger. "Any business knows that when the phone rings, they need to answer it. Increasingly, texts and messages have become just as important as that phone call -- and businesses need to adapt," Facebook executives wrote in a blog post. Kustomer also offers automated tools so companies can handle easier customer requests using bots. The deal values Kustomer at a little over $1 billion, WSJ reported. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Facebook, Google to Face New Antitrust Suits in US Published on November 30, 2020 at 10:27PM Big Tech's legal woes are expected to worsen in the coming weeks as federal and state antitrust authorities prepare to file new lawsuits against Facebook and Alphabet's Google, WSJ reported Monday, citing people familiar with the matter. From the report: The authorities are readying as many as four more cases targeting Google or Facebook by the end of January, these people said, following the Justice Department's antitrust lawsuit against Google last month. Federal and state officials are probing whether the tech giants abused their power in the internet economy-- Google to dominate search and advertising, and Facebook to dominate social media. Google and Facebook have denied doing so, saying they operate in highly competitive markets and that their services, which are mostly free, benefit consumers. If Facebook were to be sued, it would mark the first government antitrust action ...

FCC Chairman Ajit Pai Will Step Down on January 20 Published on November 30, 2020 at 10:03PM FCC Chairman Ajit Pai has announced plans to depart the commission when President-elect Joe Biden is inaugurated on January 20th. Pai has served on the FCC since 2012. From a report: "It has been the honor of a lifetime to serve at the Federal Communications Commission, including as Chairman of the FCC over the past four years," Pai said in a statement. "To be the first Asian-American to chair the FCC has been a particular privilege. As I often say: only in America." Pai was appointed chairman in 2017 and served for the duration of the Trump administration, overseeing an unusually active period in federal telecom policy. He began his term with the controversial decision to roll back Title II classification, undoing the net neutrality rules put in place under President Obama. More recently, Pai oversaw the merger of T-Mobile and Sprint, which he called "a unique opport...

The Supreme Court Will Hear Its First Big CFAA Case Published on November 30, 2020 at 09:06PM The Supreme Court will hear arguments on Monday in a case that could lead to sweeping changes to America's controversial computer hacking laws -- and affecting how millions use their computers and access online services. From a report: The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act was signed into federal law in 1986 and predates the modern internet as we know it, but governs to this day what constitutes hacking -- or "unauthorized" access to a computer or network. The controversial law was designed to prosecute hackers, but has been dubbed as the "worst law" in the technology law books by critics who say it's outdated and vague language fails to protect good-faith hackers from finding and disclosing security vulnerabilities. At the center of the case is Nathan Van Buren, a former police sergeant in Georgia. Van Buren used his access to a police license plate database to search...

Salesforce Acquires Slack Published on November 30, 2020 at 08:11PM CNBC reports: Salesforce's deal to buy Slack is expected to be announced Tuesday after markets close, sources told CNBC's David Faber. The deal is expected to be about half cash and half stock, the sources said, and will price Slack at a premium to its current price. Salesforce is set to report quarterly earnings on Tuesday. Shares of Slack rose about 8% Monday on the news. Salesforce shares fell about 1.5%. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

EU Lawmakers To Push Audio-Visual Sector on Geoblocking Published on November 30, 2020 at 07:34PM European Union lawmakers are considering whether current rules aimed at limiting the practice of geoblocking across the bloc should be extended to cover access to streaming audio-visual content. From a report: Access to services like Netflix tends to be gated to individual EU Member States, meaning Europeans can be barred from accessing libraries of content offered elsewhere in the region. So if you're trying to use your Netflix subscription to access the service after moving to another Member State, or want to access inventory offered by Netflix elsewhere in Europe, the answer is typically a big fat no, as we've reported before. This undermines the core concept of the EU's Single Market (and the Digital Single Market -- aka the frictionless ecommerce end-goal which rules such as those limiting geoblocking aim to deliver). The Commission is alive to ongoing issues around onli...

Are Tech Workers Fleeing the San Francisco Bay Area? Published on November 30, 2020 at 06:04PM NBC News reports: Many urban centers have seen residents move out in large numbers since the start of stay-at-home orders in March, but the shift has been especially dramatic for San Francisco, a city that was already experiencing rapid change because of the tech industry. Software engineers, CEOs and venture capitalists have chosen to jump from the Bay Area to places such as Denver, Miami and Austin, Texas, citing housing costs, California's relatively high income tax and the Bay Area's general resistance to rapid growth and change. The scale of the departures is visible in vacant high-end apartments, moth-balled offices and quieter streets in neighborhoods popular with tech workers. And while no one is exactly celebrating, especially as Covid-19 has devastated the incomes of many people, some residents were ready to take a break from the rich.... Rents may have fallen 20 percent o...

Bloomberg Columnist: Bitcoin is Part of a Real Monetary Revolution Published on November 30, 2020 at 01:52PM In an eloquent essay, Scottish-American historian Niall Ferguson argues that "We are living through a monetary revolution so multifaceted that few of us comprehend its full extent." The technological transformation of the internet is driving this revolution. The pandemic of 2020 has accelerated it... Covid-19 has been good for Bitcoin and for cryptocurrency generally. First, the pandemic accelerated our advance into a more digital word: What might have taken 10 years has been achieved in 10 months. People who had never before risked an online transaction were forced to try, for the simple reason that banks were closed. Second, and as a result, the pandemic significantly increased our exposure to financial surveillance as well as financial fraud. Both these trends have been good for Bitcoin.... What is happening is that Bitcoin is gradually being adopted not so much a...

Greg Kroah-Hartman: 'Don't Make Users Mad' Published on November 30, 2020 at 10:42AM From a recent report: Greg Kroah-Hartman, the Linux Foundation fellow currently responsible for stable Linux kernel releases, shared the lessons he's learned as a kernel developer that are applicable to other developers at this year's Linux App Summit. He started by showing how he could succinctly distill the essence of the talk into a single four-word slide: "Don't make your users mad...." Kroah-Hartman explains that one of Linus Torvalds' most deeply-held convictions: don't break userspace. "Other operating systems have this rule as well — it's a very solid rule — because we always want you to upgrade. And we want you to upgrade without worrying about it. We don't want you to feel scared. If you see a new release, and we say, 'Hey, this fixes a bunch of problems,' we don't want you to feel worried about taking that. That's reall...

Report Claims America's CIA Also Controlled a Second Swiss Encryption Firm Published on November 30, 2020 at 07:35AM Long-time Slashdot reader SonicSpike brings this report from AFP: Swiss politicians have voiced outrage and demanded an investigation after revelations that a second Swiss encryption company was allegedly used by the CIA and its German counterpart to spy on governments worldwide. "How can such a thing happen in a country that claims to be neutral like Switzerland?" co-head of Switzerland's Socialist Party, Cedric Wermuth, asked in an interview with Swiss public broadcaster SRF late Thursday. He called for a parliamentary inquiry after an SRF investigation broadcast on Wednesday found that a second Swiss encryption firm had been part of a spectacular espionage scheme orchestrated by U.S. and German intelligence services. A first investigation had revealed back in February an elaborate, decades-long set-up, in which the CIA and its German counterpart cr...

Tasmania Is Now 100% Powered By Renewable Electricity Published on November 30, 2020 at 05:31AM Tasmania consists of the 26th-largest island in the world and its surrounding 334 islands — an island state of Australia with a population around 540,000 people, according to Wikipedia. Friday the Tasmanian government "declared that it has become the first Australian state, and one of just a handful of jurisdictions worldwide, to be powered entirely by renewable electricity," according to one news report: Tasmania joins the Australian Capital Territory as the only two Australian jurisdictions sourcing all of their electricity from renewable energy sources, and places Tasmania alongside countries like Scotland, Iceland and Costa Rica which have also made the transition to 100 per cent renewable electricity. The milestone was welcomed by environmental groups, saying that it was another example of what is being achieved by state and territory governments that are stepping in to show...