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Comment Re:Inevitability. (Score 2) 285

by ABEND (#59521736) Attached to: More Small Tests Are Happening For Universal Basic Incomes

You are proving your point but not in the way you think you are. Obsession with Trump's Twitter feed is "Idiocracy." Do you not know that US DOJ Inspector General Horowitz's report release last week confirmed that the FBI made multiple errors and falsified evidence to obtain FISA warrants against Carter Page? Of course, when multiple errors all tend to benefit the FBI's case against Trump and associates, it looks more like bias than "Idiocracy."

Review of Four FISA Applications and Other Aspects of the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane Investigation

Trump's Twitter feed ... it's pretty tame compared to some of the stuff I've seen on CNN, MSNBC, etc. these past twenty years or so.

Comment Re:Inevitability. (Score 1) 285

by ABEND (#59520538) Attached to: More Small Tests Are Happening For Universal Basic Incomes

Governments providing the most basic needs of people has been an inevitable outcome. It's not a question of if but merely when and how. Automation is reducing the cost of providing for everyone's necessities while the avarice of the ultra-rich is once again causing unrest. I don't claim it will happen anytime soon (i.e. this century), only that it will happen eventually.

Institutionalized "charity" from a theoretically bottomless pit: how do we prevent "Idiocracy" from ensuing from this? That is, assuming we do not want our civilization to descend into "Idiocracy."

Comment Re:Why is Russian Hysteria turned up to eleven aga (Score 1) 107

by ABEND (#59497268) Attached to: Why Is Russia's Suspected Internet Cable Spy Ship In the Mid-Atlantic?

You should put a disclaimer next to the link for that video! The globalism-uber-alles types who down-rated my preceding comment will be triggered by that video.

Anyhow, right from the Steele Dossier we have an idea what that economic super power Russia is spending for its intelligence operations: "Tens of thousands of dollar." http://thesteeledossier.com/

Submission + - Firefox turns 15 (fastcompany.com)

Submitted by harrymcc
harrymcc writes: On November 9 2004, a new version of Mozilla’s browser called Firefox shipped. It was taking on one of the most daunting monopolies in tech: Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, which had more than 90 percent market share. But Firefox was really good, and it became an instant hit, ending Microsoft’s dominance of the web. Over at Fast Company, Sean Captain took a look at the browser’s original rise, the challenges it faced after Google’s Chrome arrived on the scene, and the moves it’s currently making to put user privacy first.

Submission + - Ransomware, Data Breaches at Hospitals tied to Uptick in Fatal Heart Attacks (krebsonsecurity.com)

Submitted by byteme01
byteme01 writes: Researchers at Vanderbilt University‘s Owen Graduate School of Management took the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) list of healthcare data breaches and used it to drill down on data about patient mortality rates at more than 3,000 Medicare-certified hospitals, about 10 percent of which had experienced a data breach.

As PBS noted in its coverage of the Vanderbilt study, after data breaches as many as 36 additional deaths per 10,000 heart attacks occurred annually at the hundreds of hospitals examined.

The researchers found that for care centers that experienced a breach, it took an additional 2.7 minutes for suspected heart attack patients to receive an electrocardiogram.

Submission + - First New HIV Strain In 19 Years Identified (scientificamerican.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A research group at the medical devices and health care giant Abbott has discovered a new strain of human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV — the first to be identified in 19 years. Abbott continues to look for potential new HIV strains to ensure that diagnostic tests for blood screening and detecting infectious diseases remain up to date, says Mary Rodgers, senior author of the paper announcing the finding and head of the company’s Global Viral Surveillance Program. The new strain, called HIV-1 group M subtype L, is extremely rare and can be detected by Abbott’s current screening system, Rodgers says. The company’s tests screen more than 60 percent of the global blood supply, she adds, noting it must detect every strain and “has to be right every time.”

The most recent of the three samples used to identify HIV-1 group M subtype L has been sitting in an Abbott freezer since 2001. The amount of virus in the sample was too low to read back then, but new technology recently made it possible. Comparing that sequence with the others made available by the research community, Abbott researchers found two additional examples of the strain—in samples from 1983 and 1990, also from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, hinting that it has been around for a while. “Now that we know it exists, it’ll change how we look for it,” Rodgers says. The company’s tests focus on the part of the viral genome that does not change very much from generation to generation, which is why it was able to detect the new strain. The finding also suggests there are more strains to be found, Rodgers says. “The full diversity has not been characterized. We’re going to continue to look.”

Submission + - Uber Allegedly Paid $100K Ransom and Had Hackers Sign NDAs After Data Breach (cbsnews.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: New details about how Uber responded to a massive hack attack in 2016 raise questions about the way it handled sensitive customer information. Instead of reporting the hackers to police, the company allegedly paid $100,000 in exchange for a promise to delete 57 million user files the men stole off a third party server, prosecutors said. Within weeks of paying the ransom, Uber employees showed up at Brandon Glover's Winter Park, Florida, home and found Vasile Mereacre at a hotel restaurant in Toronto, Canada, the Justice Department said. The pair admitted their crimes, but Uber didn't turn them over to the cops. Instead, they had the hackers sign non-disclosure agreements, promising to keep quiet. The two hackers pleaded guilty on Wednesday.

But there was a third person involved who was unknown to Uber, U.S. attorney for Northern California Dave Anderson told CBS News correspondent Kris Van Cleave in an exclusive interview. Anderson, who investigated the hack, said there's "no way to know definitively" what actually happened to the stolen data. [...] The hackers also targeted a company owned by LinkedIn in December of 2016, but prosecutors say LinkedIn did not pay and promptly reported the hack to police. Uber eventually did as well — a year after the hack, when new CEO, Dara Khosrowshahi, publicly disclosed the attack. The two known hackers were eventually arrested and pleaded guilty on Wednesday to conspiracy to commit extortion charges. They face a maximum of five years in prison. The third person involved remains at large.

Submission + - Ducted fuel injection promises cleaner combustion (sandia.gov)

Submitted by Thelasko
Thelasko writes: Ducted fuel injection, developed by Chuck Mueller at Sandia’s Combustion Research Facility, is able to fine-tune the amount of diesel used in an engine to the point of eliminating between 50 and 100% of the soot.

Nitrogen oxides are also atmospheric pollutants, and the soot/NOx trade-off meant that truck, car and equipment makers couldn’t meet current legislated limits without adding exhaust-gas aftertreatment systems (analogous to catalytic converters on spark-ignition engines, but significantly larger and more expensive). But remove one of those pollutants almost entirely — like DFI does with soot — and Chuck said you have changed the game.

“Now that we’ve got soot out of the way, there’s no more soot/NOx trade-off,” he said. “So we can add dilution — taking some of the engine exhaust and routing it back to the intake — to get rid of NOx without soot emissions becoming a problem. It’s like a two-for-one deal on reducing pollutants.”

YouTube Video

Submission + - Country of Georgia Hit By Massive Cyberattack (bbc.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A huge cyber-attack has knocked out more than 2,000 websites — as well as the national TV station — in the country of Georgia. Court websites containing case materials and personal data have also been attacked. In many cases, website home pages were replaced with an image of former President Mikheil Saakashvili, and the caption "I'll be back." The origin of the attack is not yet known. BBC Caucasus correspondent Rayhan Demytrie said people on social media were speculating that Russia might be behind it. She added that she had been told by cyber-security experts that Georgian government websites were "poorly protected and vulnerable to attack." More than 15,000 pages were affected, including the presidential website, non-government organizations and private companies.

Comment Re:First derivative of the polls? (Score 1) 308

It's funny how, when Bill Clinton was elected president two times without a majority of the popular vote, that no-one was attempting to subvert the electoral college. Then in 2000, GWB was elected with less than a majority and the Democrats and media screamed bloody murder. It's been even worse since 2016. Those of us who are not screaming bloody murder about the electoral college are very wary of any Democrat assuming power.

The electoral college allows a more even playing field for less populous states in presidential elections. The founders wanted to prevent presidential elections from being decided by a small number of populous states.

Comment Re:The Democrats have Justice Democrats (Score 1) 95

by ABEND (#59246338) Attached to: Study Proves the FCC's Core Justification For Killing Net Neutrality Was False

Nothing will change until we vote them ALL out.

Never going to happen. If one considers high intelligence to be a rare commodity and not a common one, then it follows that there are fewer intelligent people than stupid people. This means that in democracy, where everyone's vote counts exactly the same - the stupid people always win the election by outvoting the smart people. Democracy is biased towards stupid. Which is why people always end up being screwed by their government no matter how well designed it may have started out as. The candidate who can successfully appeal to emotion and manipulate the dumb masses with well sounding but fake promises will always triumph over the rational, reasonable candidate.

That is true when "democracy" becomes "mob rule." Since, in the U.S., there are few impediments to voting, we've got a mob rule problem and the mob is ruled by inflammatory rhetoric from "mainstream" media and "social" media. That is, the mob is ruled by whomever is producing the inflammatory content that is being propagated in the various forms of media.

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"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid" -- the artificial person, from _Aliens_

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