Non-IT News Thread
-
Eskom crisis: Why the lights keep going out in South Africa
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-47232268 -
The mythos and meaning behind Pokémon’s most famous glitch
What started as a programming error is now a fascinating part of fan culture.
The utter strangeness of MissingNo fascinated me, my childhood friends, and a bunch of other kids on the Internet at the time. But what I didn’t know then was that it would eventually also catch the interest of sociologists, who were intrigued by the mythology players had created around the Pokémon and the way that the glitch changed our relationship to the games.
-
A 5km asteroid may briefly occult the brightest star in the sky
Unfortunately, the path for this event will occur mostly over water.
On Monday night, for a few areas of South and Central America, as well as the Caribbean, Sirius will probably briefly disappear. This will occur as a small asteroid passes in front of the star, occulting it for up to 1.6 seconds, according to the International Occultation Timing Association. (Yes, the acronym is IOTA).
-
@mlnews said in Non-IT News Thread:
A 5km asteroid may briefly occult the brightest star in the sky
Unfortunately, the path for this event will occur mostly over water.
On Monday night, for a few areas of South and Central America, as well as the Caribbean, Sirius will probably briefly disappear. This will occur as a small asteroid passes in front of the star, occulting it for up to 1.6 seconds, according to the International Occultation Timing Association. (Yes, the acronym is IOTA).
And that's just one... iota... of news for the day.
I should jot that down.
-
@scottalanmiller said in Non-IT News Thread:
@mlnews said in Non-IT News Thread:
A 5km asteroid may briefly occult the brightest star in the sky
Unfortunately, the path for this event will occur mostly over water.
On Monday night, for a few areas of South and Central America, as well as the Caribbean, Sirius will probably briefly disappear. This will occur as a small asteroid passes in front of the star, occulting it for up to 1.6 seconds, according to the International Occultation Timing Association. (Yes, the acronym is IOTA).
And that's just one... iota... of news for the day.
I should jot that down.
You're so punny today.
-
Netflix makes it official, canceling Punisher and Jessica Jones
Color us not surprised, but we're still gonna miss all our favorite Defenders.
It was only a matter of time, but today Netflix finally made it official, announcing the cancelation of its two remaining Marvel Defenders series, The Punisher and Jessica Jones. The latter's third season hasn't even aired yet, although Deadline Hollywood reports that Netflix will air season 3 as planned. Nobody who has followed the axing of Iron Fist, Luke Cage, and Daredevil over the last few months was expecting The Punisher to get a third season, even though season 2 was an under-appreciated gem.
-
@mlnews said in Non-IT News Thread:
Netflix makes it official, canceling Punisher and Jessica Jones
Color us not surprised, but we're still gonna miss all our favorite Defenders.
It was only a matter of time, but today Netflix finally made it official, announcing the cancelation of its two remaining Marvel Defenders series, The Punisher and Jessica Jones. The latter's third season hasn't even aired yet, although Deadline Hollywood reports that Netflix will air season 3 as planned. Nobody who has followed the axing of Iron Fist, Luke Cage, and Daredevil over the last few months was expecting The Punisher to get a third season, even though season 2 was an under-appreciated gem.
duh.. Disney has to get them stopped now so that they can make new stuff on their own platform in a year or four, after Netflix's contracts expire.
-
Alec Baldwin suggests Trump's latest attack on 'SNL' could be 'a threat to my safety'
New York (CNN Business)Alec Baldwin, the actor who plays President Trump on "SNL," is responding to the president's latest shot at the show.
Baldwin is asking if Trump's tweet "constitutes a threat" to his family's safety.
On Saturday night Baldwin reprised his Trump impersonation for an "SNL" skit that recreated the president's Friday morning speech about the border, the budget, and assorted other subjects. -
Patrick Stewart “Turned On” To Play Picard Again, Says New Star Trek Show Will Be Binge-Worthy
Sir Patrick Stewart’s publicity tour for The Kid Who Would Be King appears to have wrapped up, but there are a couple more anecdotes to tease out from his mentions of Star Trek and his upcoming Picard series.
-
Facebook is a law-breaking “digital gangster,” UK government report says
UK shouldn't let Facebook "evade all editorial responsibility," lawmakers say.
Facebook yesterday said it is willing to face "meaningful regulation" after UK lawmakers accused the company of acting like a "digital gangster" that has knowingly violated laws and helped spread Russian misinformation during elections.
A House of Commons committee that oversees media policy chastised Facebook in a report on "disinformation and 'fake news.'"
"Companies like Facebook should not be allowed to behave like 'digital gangsters' in the online world, considering themselves to be ahead of and beyond the law," the report said.
"Facebook's handling of personal data, and its use for political campaigns, are prime and legitimate areas for inspection by regulators, and it should not be able to evade all editorial responsibility for the content shared by its users across its platforms," the report also said.
-
If you call this firm a “patent troll,” it might sue for defamation
New Hampshire defamation case has significant free speech implications.
We're not going to say that Automated Transactions LLC is a "patent troll," but several others have. The American Bankers Association has called ATL a troll. The Credit Union National Association called ATL a troll—they even illustrated the accusation with a picture of a troll. Individual lawyers, legal commentators, and banks have all described ATL as a troll.
Inventor and ATL founder David Barcelou got so fed up with people labeling his firm a patent troll that he sued about a dozen individuals and organizations for libel in 2016. Last year, a New Hampshire state judge dismissed Barcelou's lawsuit.
And on Thursday, February 14, the New Hampshire Supreme Court heard oral arguments about whether to overrule the lower court's decision and allow the lawsuit to move forward.
-
Georgia Tech scientists figured out how maggots can eat so much, so fast
A video shows 10,000 maggots consuming a 16-inch pizza in just two hours.
How do the larvae of black soldier flies eat so much, so fast, despite their tiny size? Scientists at Georgia Tech have been studying this "collective feeding" behavior and found that one strategy for maximizing the larvae's feeding rate involves forming maggot "fountains." The scientists described the results in a recent paper in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface, along with an entertaining video showing a swarm of larvae consuming an entire pizza in just two hours.
"This is the first time, as far as I know, that we've really tried to quantify how much they were able to eat, and how they are able to do it," said graduate student and co-author Olga Shishkov, who demonstrated the research on Saturday at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Washington, DC. It's not the first time she's had fun demonstrating the maggots' hearty appetite in creative ways: last year, she videotaped the critters devouring a heart-shaped donut for Valentine's Day.
-
High-tech toilet seat monitors your heart as you sit on the can
Everybody poops. Cardiologists are counting on it.
Engineers at Rochester Institute of Technology have designed a high-tech toilet seat that effortlessly flushes out data on the state of your cardiovascular system. The tricked-out porcelain throne measures your blood pressure, blood oxygen level, and the volume of blood your heart pumps per beat (stroke volume)—taking readings every time you sit down to catch up on some reading of your own. The engineers, led by David Borkholder, recently published a prototype of the seat in the open-access journal JMIR mHealth and uHealth.
-
@mlnews said in Non-IT News Thread:
Engineers at Rochester Institute of Technology ....
That's my old university.
-
Inside the DNSpionage hacks that hijack domains at an unprecedented scale
KrebsOnSecurity details how attackers took control of sensitive domains around the world.
Since the beginning of the year, the US government and private security companies have been warning of a sophisticated wave of attacks that’s hijacking domains belonging to multiple governments and private companies at an unprecedented scale. On Monday, a detailed report provided new details that helped explain how and why the widespread DNS hijackings allowed the attackers to siphon huge numbers of email and other login credentials.
-
Nasty code-execution bug in WinRAR threatened millions of users for 14 years
If you're one of the 500 million utility users, now would be a good time to patch.
The vulnerability was the result of an absolute path traversal flaw that resided in UNACEV2.DLL, a third-party code library that hasn’t been updated since 2005. The traversal made it possible for archive files to extract to a folder of the archive creator’s choosing, rather than the folder chosen by the person using the program. Because the third-party library doesn’t make use of exploit mitigations such as address space layout randomization, there was little preventing exploits.
-
@mlnews said in Non-IT News Thread:
Nasty code-execution bug in WinRAR threatened millions of users for 14 years
Who actually uses WinRAR?
-
@DustinB3403 said in Non-IT News Thread:
@mlnews said in Non-IT News Thread:
Nasty code-execution bug in WinRAR threatened millions of users for 14 years
Who actually uses WinRAR?
I keep forgetting that it was a thing.
-
@scottalanmiller said in Non-IT News Thread:
@DustinB3403 said in Non-IT News Thread:
@mlnews said in Non-IT News Thread:
Nasty code-execution bug in WinRAR threatened millions of users for 14 years
Who actually uses WinRAR?
I keep forgetting that it was a thing.
Right? It's like people who actually bought WinZip.
http://thedoghousediaries.com/dhdcomics/2012-10-29-1c3a818.png
-
@scottalanmiller said in Non-IT News Thread:
@DustinB3403 said in Non-IT News Thread:
@mlnews said in Non-IT News Thread:
Nasty code-execution bug in WinRAR threatened millions of users for 14 years
Who actually uses WinRAR?
I keep forgetting that it was a thing.
Dell still uses it on self extracting files sometimes...
