Alterslash, the unofficial Slashdot digest

Time 2020-11-02 14:05:30

Web Name: Alterslash, the unofficial Slashdot digest

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The continent of Australia, where nearly 25 million people live, " has recorded its first day of no local cases of Covid-19 in almost five months," reports the BBC: Zero cases were reported in the 24 hours between 20:00 on Friday and 20:00 on Saturday - the first time this has happened since 9 June. The state of Victoria - epicentre of Australia's second wave - recorded zero cases for the second day in a row after a 112-day lockdown. Health officials say more restrictions may be eased in the coming days. "Thank you to all of our amazing health public health workers above all else the Australian people," Health Minister Greg Hunt said on his Twitter account. Australia combined lockdowns with "proactive testing and tracing," the article reports, adding that in addition Victoria "imposed some of the severest stay-at-home and curfew rules in the world." This is kind of proof that it doesn't have to be about liberalism vs conservatism. It's about saving lives, and working together. This time, it just happens that in America, the conservatives, despite having complete control of most of the government, are completely against using that government to work together against the disease, because of their imagination about how it may possibly effect stock market values. Meanwhile, in this case, Australia and New Zealand and its surrounding Asian nations are also concerned with their economies - but use that same concern to work together and contact trace, and use a comprehensive healthcare system to keep their economy healthy between all political parties. That's what I mean when I say it doesn't have to be a liberal or conservative thing. Sometimes, it's the liberal groups that get a bug up their butt about vaccinations or some other utterly insane thing - but now it's the conservatives here. It doesn't have to be either of them though - we CAN all take our shared health as a bigger priority, AND win better economically for it. We just have to understand that when a political 'side' gets as batshit crazy as the Trump political era - that you have to work as hard as you can, whatever your 'side' to get past that insanity. No politics is worth the number of dead we've had, for so little reason other than misguided politics in an insane political cycle. Ryan Fenton Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: Writing in the November Communications of the ACM, MIT's Mitchel Resnick and Natalie Rusk explain that the educational use of coding in schools is at a crossroads. The good news? "School systems and policymakers are embracing the idea that coding can and should be for everyone." The bad news? "In many places, coding is being introduced in ways that undermine its potential and promise. If we do not think carefully about the educational strategies and pedagogies for introducing coding, there is a major risk of disappointment and backlash." To address this, Resnick and Rusk argue, the design of technologies, activities, curriculum, communities, and spaces to support coding and learning should be guided by the "Four Ps" of Creative Learning: Projects, Passion, Peers, and Play: "To us, it seems natural to introduce coding to young people in a project-oriented way, so that they learn to express themselves creatively as they learn to code. But many introductions to coding take a very different approach, presenting students with a series of logic puzzles in which they need to program animated characters to move from one location to another. When students successfully solve one puzzle, they can move on to the next. Students undoubtedly learn some useful computational concepts while working on these puzzles. But learning to code by solving logic puzzles is somewhat like learning to write by solving crossword puzzles. That's not the way to become truly fluent. Just as students develop fluency with language by writing their own stories (not just playing word games), students develop fluency with coding by creating projects (not just solving puzzles)." Putting the Four Ps into practice, the authors concede, is easier said than done. "From our observations of Scratch activities around the world over the past decade, we have seen the value of Projects, Passion, Peers, and Play in supporting the development of computational fluency. But we have also seen that it is not easy to put these four principles into practice within the realities of today's standards-based, assessment-driven classrooms." Both. Is this really intro to programming starting with hello world where you are learning things like if-thens, loops, what arrays are, etc or is this "how to teach [java|C++|whatever] development" ? Intro to programming levels, puzzles with rules and constraints that force the student into using certain tools (ie, as part of the grading rubric "use at least 4 arrays, one of which has to be 2 dimensional") or as looking for alternate ways of solving the problem (do 2 variations of fizzbuzz, one of which must use a switch/case statement) can be good to learn specific programming concepts. If this is more of a "how to program in java" then projects with clearly defined requirements (which then act as a grading rubric) are almost essential. Unless you are one of those people that think that attendance and participation are worth 20% of the grade and multiple choice exams should be used for another 50% of the grade. No thanks, I'd like to keep my high income that arises from artificial scarcity. When training children, we should focus on the Four I's: Ignorance, Indolence, Illiteracy, and Incomprehension Cointelegraph reports: While many children dressed as ghosts, goblins, and witches last night may have been disappointed to find an inedible thin piece of cardboard left out in a goodie bag, a lucky few recognized the treat as a Bitcoin prize. According to an October 31 tweet from Brad Mills, the crypto user filled a Halloween candy box with more than just chocolates and sweets — he also added $200 in Bitcoin (BTC) cards. Mills posted a video of him adding the two gift cards, each worth roughly 0.007 BTC following the coin's rise to $14,000, and filmed the reactions of trick or treaters in his Canadian neighborhood. One boy in a white costume was the first to meticulously dig through the box before saying to his group of friends, "I just got a $100 Bitcoin gift card!" I saw the video of those kids digging through that box. Dude, you just got Coronavirus. I did the PVC pipe out the window trick last night. The neighborhood parents appreciated it. I guess these kids will have to buy their own candy.You can buy very interesting candy online with Bitcoin... Or so I heard. The BBC reports: Slovakia has begun an ambitious project to test everyone over the age of 10 for Covid-19, but the president has said she thinks the idea is "unfeasible". The operation to test four million people is to last over two weekends. Infections have soared in Slovakia and officials argue the only alternative would be a total lockdown. President Zuzana Caputova called for a rethink of the plan after armed forces chiefs said there were not enough trained health workers to carry it out. So far only 70% of the 20,000 staff needed to administer the nasal swab tests have been recruited, according to the defence minister... From dawn on Saturday, soldiers and medics were due to fan out across the country, from the vast Petrzalka housing estates of Bratislava, to tiny hamlets in the shadows of the Tatra Mountains, to the mostly Hungarian-speaking towns dotted along the Danube plain.... The plan is to test almost four-fifths of the population, using rapid antigen testing that has an estimated 30% false negative rate. Results will be delivered in a sealed envelope within 30 minutes. "It's the army's biggest logistical operation since the country became independent," said Defence Minister Jaro Nad... Slovakia's numbers are far lower but government modelling predicts a catastrophic overload of hospitals by mid-November if nothing is done. "There's no alternative — it's either mass testing or harsh lockdown," Mr Nad told the BBC.... While testing is voluntary, those who refuse must self-isolate for 10 days. Breaking that quarantine will be punished with a hefty fine. A negative test result, however, will serve as a "free pass" from a curfew due to be introduced from Monday... If it works, other countries might soon follow suit. ...get infected while doing the test. Or you are already infected but not yet positive. And you go out and continue infecting people. Totally useless.Ignore every spreader under 10, 30% false negative rate, still need 5000+ testers, and their president thinks it's unfeasible. Not sure there's a point in following that due to the false negatives alone. We'll see. Best of luck to them, and the rest of us humans. On the U.K. political scene, support may be growing for new tests of a Univerisal Basic Income. The Guardian reports: A cross-party group of MPs has called on the government to allow councils to run universal basic income trials in response to mass unemployment triggered by the Covid-19 pandemic. A letter to the chancellor, Rishi Sunak, signed by more than 500 MPs, lords and local councillors says pilot schemes are urgently needed as the pandemic unleashes widespread economic disruption and drives up redundancies at the fastest rate on record this winter... "We must trial innovative approaches which create an income floor for everyone, allowing our families and communities to thrive. The pandemic has shown that we urgently need to strengthen our social security system. The creation of a universal basic income (UBI) — a regular and unconditional cash payment to every individual in the UK — could be the solution," the letter states. One UBI option flagged by the group would be to launch an initial £48 per week payment. [Roughly $62.08 in U.S. dollars] Demands for such an intervention have gathered pace since the onset of Covid-19 as governments around the world increase spending to help businesses and workers. There have been UBI trials in Finland and Scotland in recent years. I already get this amount per month from the Universal Credit system, approx 50 a week as a basic level (no children etc) from being made unemployed. When I was last unemployed 20 years ago it was around 35 a week. Now I am also homeless I can get around 380 a month for housing benefit on top once I find a place. I don't particularly understand how this is a universal income except it just goes to everyone instead of those needing it, but I also don't understand people from other countries thinking we can only fund this by scrapping other subsidies. During the first lockdown I was twice given money by the government to cover lost self employed earnings based on referring to last year's tax data, averaging a 3 month period and paying out 80% - considering I didn't expect anything that was a pretty sweet deal. Like, I'm not complaining, I find the stories interesting. It just seems a bit off brand and I imagine that there's an interesting story behind the tendency of slashdot to cover UBI news.So you tell a single mother with a severely sick child that WIC, SDI, and Sec-8 are going away and she is going to get $500 per month instead, about 20% of what she can live on? The problem with "scrapping welfare" is that there are people who depend on those programs for "reasons". Disclaimer: Yes, I know that the UK doesn't have WIC, SDI, or Sec-8. Substitute the Limey equivalent. You may be right but we already tried trickle-down economics so why shouldn't we try trickle-up? Collect some data and take it from there. There is nothing new about UBI. There are many worldwide examples of it over the centuries. Here in America, Alaskans get it, many of our native Indian tribes have some form of it, the Earned Income Tax Credit was a compromise form of it we added when we had this same discussion again in the 70s, and it has been actively discussed as long ago as 1797 when one of our most vocal founders, Thomas Paine, argued for something similar. In other parts of the world there are several countries that enjoy it to some extent due usually to some shared natural resource wealth. In general though, the current discussion is a reaction to inequities. If you don't want UBI, fix the inequities. Make sure the lowest-paid workers have a living wage that requires absolutely no supplements. UBI discussions often sprout from disrespect for the workers who work the hardest. On Tuesday Massachusetts will vote on expanding the state's right-to-repair law to include more access to car data, in an initiated state statute known as "Question 1." Wired reports: The measure is meant to address how data sharing will work as cars start to suck in and share more wireless data. The Coalition for Safe and Secure Data, backed by giant automakers, is urging state residents to vote No, arguing that easier access to this data poses security risks. At the core of the issue is the not-insignificant question of what expanded access to wireless car data might look like and how secure that is. It's not just a question of who can repair a car and access the data, but who owns the data in the first place. The answer could ripple across the industry for years to come, which is why both sides of Question 1 have poured millions of dollars into the fight. And because the U.S. has been slower to address these issues in federal legislation, Question 1 could have impact beyond Massachusetts state lines. Ultimately, the measure "could set the national standard for cars," according to Kyle Wiens, the founder of California-based iFixit and a vocal right-to-repair advocate... If a majority of Massachusetts residents vote Yes on Question 1 this fall, carmakers would have to install standardized, open data-sharing platforms on any cars with telematics systems starting with model year 2022. "Owners of motor vehicles with telematics systems would get access to mechanical data through a mobile device application," the ballot summary reads... Early polling suggests the state of Massachusetts will vote overwhelmingly in favor Question 1... "Hopefully this means we have an open-standard development process," Wiens tells Wired, "with all cars in the U.S. using the same standard, and a new world of innovation around mobile apps." Some clarification needed.1) What if the same car will drive over to Canada.2) What if a car from Canada will drive over border to US.3) What if a car was made in Germany - will the same standards apply?4) Or in China or Russia?5) Are U.S. lawmakers okay approving the same government access for US cars driving in said China or Russa? NPR reports: An astonishing 14 million to 23 million Americans intend to relocate to a different city or region as a result of telework, according to a new study released by Upwork, a freelancing platform. The survey was conducted Oct. 1 to 15 among 20,490 Americans 18 and over. The large migration is motivated by people no longer confined to the city where their job is located. The pandemic has shifted many companies' view on working from home... Another study conducted by United Van Lines, a major household moving company, found that people wanted to relocate out of New York state at a higher rate than the national average. And, by the beginning of September, the requests to leave San Francisco had grown to more than double the U.S. average. The survey was conducted between March and August. Nationally, there is a 32% increase in moving interest compared with this time last year, the United Van Lines survey found. Interestingly, currently San Francisco actually has the lowest positivity rate from coronavirus testing of any major metropolitan area in America — suggesting the migrations aren't motivated by a flight from the pandemic itself. Instead Upwork's chief economist calls their data "an early indicator of the much larger impacts that remote work could have in increasing economic efficiency and spreading opportunity." I think the most interesting paradox in this exodus is the fact that many of the people who take great care to escape the urban areas then proceed to proudly and aggressively vote for politicians to pursue the same policies that turned their previous homes unlivable.Just wait until big tech leaves, and their money stream dries up. Once they're done taxing everyone that works for their money, they'll have to tax the only ones left: homeless and drug addicts. It's difficult to argue that one way or another given all the agendas involved. It will be an interesting experiment to see rich CEOs having less power to drag employees into their headquarters cities. And if this middle management layer is no longer available to subsidize those cities, will they give the rich executives the same tax breaks for locating there? If not, will the CEOs even stay put? Interestingly, currently San Francisco actually has the lowest positivity rate from coronavirus testing of any major metropolitan area in America — suggesting the migrations aren't motivated by a flight from the pandemic itself. When you've got human shit on the sidewalks you don't really need another reason. Your first linked chart doesn't show subsidies to states. It claims to, but really mostly shows payments to individuals within states. So that includes things like military pensions, social security retirement, tax credits, and means-tested programs. The states themselves aren't the ones receiving the money. The fact that people prefer to retire to blue states doesn't mean red states are subsidizing them. The other large differences are driven by cost-of-living and means testing. In the one-size-fits-all federal scheme, income taxation and welfare benefits are based on income. So in higher cost of living/corresponding higher income states, that works against individuals. It's inherent in the policy design preferred by progressives. But sure, those of us in blue states are fine with the red states joining them in voting to eliminate federal government reallocations of the wealth. Wonder why the red states aren't willing, though.... Your second link is talking about the amounts of taxes collected from older neighborhoods vs. newer more "upscale" neighborhoods. They're the same cities in this case, so you're not comparing them to Republican run places. All that shows is that the Democrats running those cities suck at planning/improving them, because the "newer" portions they've planned out cost more and provide less in taxes. From the "strong cities" perspective (your link), that's because of the insane zoning regulations in place for the newer developments, not coincidentally similar to some of the ones which are causing lots of people to relocate out of places like SF when they're now able to. In August the U.S. announced restrictions aimed at preventing Huawei from obtaining semiconductors without a special license. It might work, reports Engadget: Huawei might have a way to avoid some of the worst consequences of tightening U.S. trade restrictions, provided it's willing to be patient. Financial Times sources claim Huawei is planning a dedicated chip factory in Shanghai that would make parts for its core telecom infrastructure business. It would be run by a partner, the city-backed Shanghai IC R D Center, and would be considered experimental until it's ready to make chips Huawei can use. The plant would start by making chips based on a very old 45-nanometer process before moving to 28nm chips by late 2021. That would be advanced enough to make chips for smart TVs and Internet of Things devices, the tipsters said. It would reach 20nm by late 2022, when it could make "most" of its 5G cellular hardware. Between this and a stockpile of chips, Huawei could theoretically keep its telecom hardware business running with relatively little disruption. Won't they just ban ICs manufactured in this facility too? I don't think working around trade restrictions is as easy as this. Is it? I guess this is not about selling phones in the USA, but in the rest of the world. TSMC stopped selling CPUs and Samsung LG stopped selling screens to Huawei. If Huawei can buy or build their components in China, they at least can continue to sell phones in Asia, Europe, Africa and South America - i.e. they can survive outside of the USA. See this article (in Dutch) about Huawei's flagship phone launch and their troubles in Belgium. China will build their own if supply from the US is interfered with. All the US has done with these sanctions and bans is make China more independent and cost US chipmakers sales to China SMIC Is a chinese semiconductor fab/foundry, the biggest in china, and partialy state owned. They already have a solid 14nm, but is a publicly listed company, and with some important international clients. And that's why SMIC will not accept a commision from Huawei to manufacture ICs, lest it be put in the USoA's black liost, and lose those customers. therefore, Huawei's slow hard road of financing a fab from almost scratch... Apple's "System Status" page indicates 14 current issues, some of which began nearly five hours ago. CNET reports the services affected "include Find My, iCloud Account Sign In, iCloud Backup, iCloud Bookmarks Tabs, iCloud Calendar, iCloud Contacts, iCloud Drive, iCloud Keychain, iCloud Mail, iCloud Storage Upgrades, Photos and Screen Time." Engadget writes " the timing is less than ideal, even if this is likely to be a small interruption in the grander scheme of things." The issue comes weeks after an outage that affected both iCloud and Apple's media services. It also follows mere days after the debut of Apple One, where iCloud storage (also affected by the outage) plays an important role. I've been waiting for the day hackers get into the iCloud system, remotely lock everyone's devices, and scramble all iCloud account passwords. This does nothing to people who have generated their bypass code and stored it in a safe place. There's an optional escrow option in place for bypassing the system and detaching it from Activation Lock and iCloud entirely. If Apple hadn't implemented this, their devices would never have been deemed safe or acceptable for corporate use. The question of how many people have bothered to do this remains. I wonder if the daylight saving time switch is to blame. It's not the first time something like this has affected a cloud service. NASA's 322-foot rocket "Space Launch System" rocket "would be the most powerful rocket ever flown, eclipsing both the Saturn V that flew astronauts to the moon and SpaceX's Falcon Heavy," reports the Washington Post. But "it's not the rocket's engines that concern officials but the software that will control everything the rocket does, from setting its trajectory to opening individual valves to open and close." Computing power has become as critical to rockets as the brute force that lifts them out of Earth's atmosphere, especially rockets like the SLS, which is really an amalgamation of parts built by a variety of manufacturers: Boeing builds the rocket's "core stage," the main part of the vehicle. Lockheed Martin builds the Orion spacecraft. Aerojet Rocketdyne and Northrop Grumman are responsible for the RS-25 engines and the side boosters, respectively. And the United Launch Alliance handles the upper stage. All of those components need to work together for a mission to be successful. But NASA's Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel recently said it was concerned about the disjointed way the complicated system was being developed and tested... Also troubling to the safety panel was that NASA and its contractors appeared not to have taken "advantage of the lessons learned" from the botched flight last year of Boeing's Starliner spacecraft, which suffered a pair of software errors that prevented it from docking with the International Space Station as planned and forced controllers to cut the mission short. NASA has since said that it did a poor job of overseeing Boeing on the Starliner program, and has since vowed to have more rigorous reviews of its work, especially its software testing... NASA pushed back on the safety panel's findings, saying in a statement that "all software, hardware, and combination for every phase of the Artemis I mission is thoroughly tested and evaluated to ensure that it meets NASA's strict safety requirements and is fully qualified for human spaceflight." The agency and its contractors are "conducting integrated end-to-end testing for the software, hardware, avionics and integrated systems needed to fly Artemis missions," it said. The Most Powerful Rocket Ever Flown was the Saturn V (N1 was bigger but didn't fly successfully). SLS has not flown yet, and may be beaten to first launch by the much larger Superheavy/Starship at the rate things are slipping. Why aren't we putting funds towards developing re-usable rockets? This rocket isn't as powerful as the one SpaceX is building, but even worse it's not reusable. Nasa should insist on re-usable rockets, or we should just give Blue Origin or SpaceX funding for their R D instead of this maximum wasteof moneu The Space Shuttle was a death trap from day one, theres your "normalisation of deviance" - its the only crewed launch vehicle without a survivable escape option during 100% of the launch (astronauts had something like a 30% window during the entire launch where they could potentially survive and even then only by doing untested manoeuvres to turn the craft around etc - the failure conditions which resulted in death with no option of escape made up the remaining window, plus the Space Shuttle was the only crewed vehicle to date where the heat shield is not protected during launch, resulting in unsurvivable damage being possible on ascent). Thats the Nasa we are talking about here - things might have changed with retirements etc, but overall the goals havent, and the budget restrictions and timescale pressures are still there. NASA's 322-foot rocket "Space Launch System" rocket "would be the most powerful rocket ever flown So, this is a rocket, right? ZDNet reports: Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg told analysts on a conference call Thursday evening that the company plans to post notices at the top of users' news feeds on November 3rd discrediting any claims by either candidate in the U.S. presidential election that they have won the election if the site deems the claim premature... The move, said Zuckerberg, is being made because "There is a risk of civil unrest across the country, and given this, companies like ours need to go well beyond what we've done before." The conference call with analysts followed a third-quarter earnings report Thursday afternoon in which Facebook's results topped expectations, helped by gains in active users that also were higher than Wall Street expected. Zuckerberg said Facebook "helped 4.4 million people register [to vote] exceeding the goal that we set for ourselves this summer." Let's be fair: so-called 'Social Media' *overall* did all this. 'Social Media' is a failed experiment, and it failed because our entire species is too immature and irresponsible overall to be trusted with something that powerful, it got subverted into a weapon against civilization in general. All 'social media' was supposed to be was a place for people to chat virtually, share their kids and grandkids photos, and talk about their vacation in Barbados. It was NEVER supposed to be a political tool. It's been twisted into this ugly, disgusting, filthy thing that does nothing but cause heartache and sorrow. 'Social media' needs to DIE and go away FOREVER. Failed. Experiment. KIll. It. With. Fire. He's sowing FUD about the election because his team knows he cannot win a fair election. Honestly why this isn't raising more right-wing eyebrows is beyond me, you undoubtedly would never want the opposition to behave this way. Not sure whether to respond or mod you down. Peaceful right wingers you say? A hundred MAGA trucks on the highway would beg to differ. Deliberately endangering themselves while trying to run a Biden tour bus full of people off the road. Clearly violating a large raft of both traffic laws and possibly qualifying for some sort of attempted homicide charge? In the past, it was the far left groups that were more dangerous, but thats changed. Right wing violence is very possible of Trump decides to incite it. I can only assume that Zuckerberg meant that there will be civil unrest BY THE DEMOCRATS, because nobody is going to riot if Trump loses. This is accurate, according to the current psychological model. The "Big 5" personality trait model was derived objectively(*), is stable across languages and time, and accurately predicts a huge portion of personality variation. It's been validated numerous times, and is now widely accepted as the correct model. Conservatives score high on trait conscientiousness, and liberals score high on trait openness. The traits each form a normal distribution. On average, the differences are minor: if you chose a random person and tried to predict their political alignment from their traits you'd be right 65% of the time, with 50% being a coin flip. That's not a lot of difference between any two randomly chosen people. The extremes are a different matter: someone very high in Conscientiousness is almost certainly an avid conservative (over 95% likelihood) and similarly someone high in openness is almost certainly a liberal. Thus, the ones most likely to feel personally affected by the election outcome are the outliers. Conscientiousness is associated with discipline, duty, playing by the rules, and reliability (and several others). Openness is associated with emotion, adventure, and variety of experience (among several others) Thus, if Biden wins the conservatives who care - outlier Conscientiousness folks - will grumble and accept the outcome. If Trump wins, the liberals who cars - outlier Openness people - will very likely deal with the loss by emotionally acting out. This is backed up by history: Nothing much happened when Obama was elected (high Conscientiousness people), but after the 2016 elections it was liberals who were demonstrating and rioting (high Openness). All of this is solid science and history available to anyone who cares to look it up. You can start with the "Big 5 Personality Traits" entry on Wikipedia. If Biden wins, everything will be peaceful. If Trump wins, there demonstrations and riots will be everywhere. (*) I.e. - not by someone guessing, as is done with Meyers Briggs In sequence you have tried to throw in: - A Fox News opinion column by Adonis Hoffman, a particularly ugly anti-LGBT bigot. - "The Federalist", a website founded by white supremacist Ben Domenech. - The personal site of "Jonathon Turley", a right-wing hack known best for his outlandish legal theories about presidential supremacy (which curiously only apply when the president is white). - The Daily Fail, a website of such little repute that we don't need to go any further. - "Townhall", a site created to be another front-group for the white supremacist "Heritage Foundation", with an article by Beth Baumann, who... well... one look at her twitter feed says yeah, she's white supremacist slime. And then you keep trying to push a bunch of discredited narratives based on this garbage put out by white supremacist propagandists. The problem here isn't that "people don't listen to conservatives" as you kept lying previously, it's that we hear you constantly and we know what you cross burners are up to every time you try out a new load of lies and gaslighting. "The Linux Foundation has formed a new group to provide public health authorities with free technology for tracking the spread of the coronavirus and future epidemics," writes Business Insider. Launched in July, the group has already released two apps "that notify users if they've been in contact with someone who has tested positive with COVID-19." Since these apps are open source, people can contribute code and customize them, allowing regions with similar needs to collaborate, general manager at Linux Foundation Public Health, Dan Kohn, told Business Insider. Developers that want to build an app off these projects can access or download the source code. These apps take advantage of technology launched by Apple and Google, which can be integrated into any app, that uses Bluetooth on people's smartphones to track who a user has been in close proximity with, without identifying the specific people. If anyone tests positive for COVID-19 and uploads that information to a database run by a local public health authority, any user who has been in close contact with that person will get a notification through their app saying they may have been exposed — again, without identifying who has COVID-19. If someone knows that they may have been exposed, they can either self-quarantine or get tested. "Essentially we think exposure notification could have a big impact on reducing the overall rate of exposure," Kohn said. An Oxford University study in April said that if about 60% of the population used a contact tracing app, it could grind the diseases spread to a halt. Researchers on the team also found that digital contact tracing can cut down spread even at much lower levels of usage. Many people have serious trust issues putting a government 'tracking app' on their phone anyway, and considering the current administration's constant mis-truths about this pandemic, I don't blame them for not trusting any tracing apps. And that's a damned shame and a disgrace. So this article contained a linked to a BI article which mentioned a Linux Foundation initiative which had been running since July. The things I was really interested in were link to the actual initiative and the code for their projects. Linux Foundation Public Health Covid Green Covid Shield Near as I can tell, this app is basically emulating an approach that has already been tested. Can anybody point at the differences in this version that will prevent it from also flopping? Looks to me like an insane attempt to do the same thing hoping for different results. Actually worse than that, since they are doing the same thing, but more feebly (in terms of resources). Which comes first? The problems or the solutions? I'll be traditional and go with the main problem: The incentive structure is wrong. You are supposed to go to a lot of hassle to set it up, then it drains your battery, and finally it fails to detect people infected with Covid-19 who haven't gone to the trouble of setting it up. Even if you're using it, the most likely outcome is going to be false alarms as the app cries wolf when you weren't infected (especially if the person with Covid-19 was just wearing a mask). My currently favored solution approach: A simpler exposure counting app that lets me adjust my behavior to reduce my risk. Just count all the smartphones that come close to me, when and where, and help me adjust my schedule and movements to increase my social distance. Add little incentives and rewards for taking fewer risks. Maybe some rich companies with big cash reserves will even feel like buying favorable publicity by funding small lotteries for the people who keep their exposure low or who change their behaviors from risky to less risky. Cue the incoherent naysayers of Slashdot 2020. Or is it conceivable you have a better idea? I think there are probably plenty of better ideas, but it's barely conceivable one will appear in such an environment as Slashdot has become. since the epidemic is pretty much over already. Yes, completely over. No need to worry about anything. It's so over the CDC put out a notice that the country is approaching a "critical phase" in the COVID-19 pandemic. "Unfortunately, we're seeing a distressing trend here with COVID-19 in the United States, with COVID-19 cases increasing in nearly 75% of the country," CDC Deputy Director Jay Butler, MD, told reporters in Atlanta. "The past week, we've seen nearly 60,000 cases a day on average, as well as 700 deaths." Covid-positive white nationalism would indeed be a way forward. It would get rid of at least some of those assholes. UPI reports: Space Force's vice chief of space operations tested positive for COVID-19 Wednesday, Space Force announced. According to a press release issued jointly by the Space Force and the Air Force, Gen. David D. Thompson took a test for the virus after learning that a close family member had tested positive. Air Force spokeswoman Ann Stefanek said Thompson has not shown symptoms of COVID-19 so far and was on leave last week, but returned to the Pentagon for work on Monday and Tuesday to address a virtual symposium for the National Defense Industrial Association and Texas A M University. He is now self-isolating and working from home... As of Thursday morning a total of 55,443 COVID-19 cases had been reported in the [U.S.] military since the beginning of the pandemic, with 8,839 of those reported among Air Force personnel. Is that a lot? A little? What's the rate of infection vs. the general population? I was listening to something on the radio just a week ago that the military was taking Covid very seriously and that the rate of infection was lower than the general population because strict protocols were mandated and the military generally follows rules very well. Yup, pretty much meaningless. Exactly. Over 230,000 dead in a few months (that we know of) is no big deal. It's only the most infectious disease we've had in this country for over a century. Let's keep ignoring it as hospitals once again are flirting with full capacity, where the state of Utah sent an emergency alert message to every phone warning people of the surging number of infections and deaths along with hospital utilization, where places such as Fuck You Idaho have repealed mask mandates as hospitals are having to send patients elsewhere because they're near or at capacity, where in an effort to show it's not really that bad, Florida is reviewing all covid deaths so they can lower the number even after they were caught previously manipulating the numbers, and where the U.S. is now number one in reported cases which means in the next few weeks we will see a similar rise in deaths. So yeah, no big deal. In other other news, 100 right-wing neckbeards on slashdot engage in an increasingly absurd game of mental gymnastics to dismiss the seriousness of a global pandemic because their golden calf in the Oval Office continuously handled it wronger than anyone thought remotely possible in a first-world country, and actually admitting that would spike their blood pressure so bad their bacne would all pop simultaneously. 55000 cases eh? Whatever. Considering that 0.003% of the population dies in alcohol-related car crashes each year, we might as well scrap those laws. We're about 7 months into covid in earnest, and on average there were fewer than 6200 American casualties (including wounded) per 7 months we were involved in the Vietnam war, so we can absolutely disregard that as a non-event, amiright? Anything else we can pretend isn't a big deal using arbitrary comparisons? So a vast number of national, regional and municipal governments in the world, the vast majority of the world's medical professionals, tons of media outlets are involved in a coordinated conspiracy to get people to wear face masks, avoid close quarters and reduce economic activity. To what end? Also, there's strong evidence of a casual link between the number of people involved in a conspiracy and the amount of time it takes to to be exposed by someone on the inside. This is among the largest conspiracies in human history and not one leaked document. Remind me what the point is? And remind me how the nations of the world all agreed to cooperate. Not a conspiracy. However, certain national-level politicians have learned that they benefit by pushing the most dire narrative they can get away with. COVID is super contagious. The average person has a very low probability of dying if contracting it. However, elderly with other health problems are terribly vulnerable. These are the facts. These facts support arguments for public health interventions aimed at mitigating the risks to those that are most vulnerable. They also support the logic behind public policies aimed at preventing COVID infections from overwhelming our healthcare infrastructure. The facts do not support "dark winter" or other such hysterical narratives. Moreover, they don't support additional lockdown focused public policies. In fact, such policies make matters worse. COVID will not go away even with the most draconian lockdown interventions. The virus will just hang out until lockdown policies are rolled back a bit and then start spreading again. At some point (like now) citizens get fed up and start conflating bad policies with good. They start resisting reasonable, helpful interventions such as social distancing. There you have it. Mod this down as flamebait if you wish. Silencing rational debate doesn't help the cause, however. It only makes it worse for everyone. "As promised, SiFive has unveiled a new computer featuring the company's SiFive FU740 processor based on RISC-V architecture," reports Liliputing: The company, which has been making RISC-V chips for several years, is positioning its new SiFive HiFive Unmatched computer as a professional development board for those interested in working with RISC-V. But unlike the company's other HiFive boards, the new Unmatched model is designed so that it can be easily integrated into a standard PC... SiFive says the system can support GNU/Linux distributions including Yocto, Debian, and Fedora. "SiFive is releasing the HiFive Unleashed in an effort to afford developers the ability to build RISC-V based systems, using readily available, off-the-shelf parts," explains Forbes: SiFive says it built the board to address the market need for easily accessible RISC-V hardware to further advance development of new platforms, products, and software using the royalty-free ISA... A short video demo shows the HiFive Unmatched installed in a common mid-tower PC chassis, running the included Linux distro, with an AMD Radeon graphics card pushing the pixels. In the video, the HiFive Unmatched is compiling an application and is shown browsing the web and opening a PDF. SiFive also notes that video playback is accelerated in hardware with the included version of Linux. "At the moment, these development PCs are early alternatives, most likely targeted at hobbyists and engineers who may snap them up when they become available in the fourth quarter for $665," notes VentureBeat. But they add that "While it's still early days, it's not inconceivable that RISC-V processors could someday be alternatives to Intel-based PCs and PC processors." The startup has raised $190 million to date, and former Qualcomm executive Patrick Little recently joined SiFive as CEO. His task will be to establish the company's RISC-V processors as an alternative to ARM. This move comes in the wake of Nvidia's $40 billion acquisition of the world's leading processor architecture. If Little is also looking to challenge Intel and AMD in PCs, he'll have his work cut out for him. For starters, SiFive is currently focused on Linux-based PCs, not Microsoft Windows PCs. Secondly, SiFive wouldn't build these processors or computers on its own. Its customers — anyone brave enough to take on the PC giants — would have to do that. "I wouldn't see this as SiFive moving out of the box. It's more like they're expanding their box," said Linley Group senior analyst Aakash Jani. "They're using their core architecture to enable other chip designers to build PCs, or whatever they plan to build." Isn't the RISC V architecture highly prone to fragmentation, with each vendor adding its own extensions? That could doom it. Yeah, this particular product is dead on arrival. The market of "I want Raspberry Pi level performance but in a giant PC formfactor that requires an expensive PSU at a price point that exceeds even the cost of an 8-core 3.6 GHz AMD processor + motherboard + 32GB of RAM that also has more PCIe and that PCIe being Gen 4". In terms of whether a RISC-V product could emerge to disrupt servers, desktops, cell phones, and/or embedded? Probably not server (several have tried with ARM and despite having a relatively nice head-start working from ARM, none have really seen success). Almost certainly not desktop/laptop (Microsoft would have to invest to even stand a chance). It would be hard to imagine displacing ARM in mobile devices, since there's a large ecosystem of compiled for ARM out there that RISC-V would screw up. So we have embedded, where there's always a hope as device makers are generally game to try different things to shave a few cents off a chip. It could extend into the 'Raspberry Pi' space at an attractive price point in theory. The question is whether a sufficiently well resourced vendor would see a point in migrating from ARM (nVidia might drive people away depending on their strategy) into an architecture with less likelihood of being a trap down the line (RISC-V). You are right that it's behind ARM right now, but the royalty-free nature of the ISA is attractive to a lot of companies. Well, than it's a direct competitor for the 8051! Seriously tons of embedded chips use 8051 cores because it's completely royalty free. Some of the higher performance ones have moved to Cortex M0 and M4 cores, but the tradeoff is higher cost due to license fees. How/why would an INTEL 8051 be "royalty free" - do you make them yourself? No one's getting them from Intel any more. All the patents have long since expired so every one and their dog can make them now, and there's loads of implementations out there, including royalty free ones because ain't no one paying royalties with that much competition around. The margins aren't up to that. Clock speed is largely irrelevant when talking about CPU performance. All it tells you is how many clock cycles per second it has to work with, but how many instructions can it execute per clock cycle on various workloads? Modern CPUs treat machine code as a kind of intermediate language, re-ordering instructions on the fly and doing live performance profiling to optimize flow control. Now we are well into the age of multi-core too performance also depends on the ability of multiple cores to work together and of threads to be dynamically allocated to them. Access to resources like cache and RAM are key. ARM also makes power consumption a key metric. On the software side a lot of effort is put into improving compilers to produce better machine code, tuned for different families of CPUs and for different profiles (performance, power consumption, small executable size, debugability). RISC-V can potentially compete on all these fronts but it's a very big and expensive hill to climb. "Its that time of year again," writes long-time Slashdot reader rufey: Millions of people around the world will be adjusting (or have already adjusted) their clocks... Over the years it is apparent that most people who have spoken about the twice-yearly clock change oppose it. So I ask, why are we still changing clocks in the year 2020? Long-time Slashdot reader thegreatbob believes the answer is: inertia. Personally, I am less opposed, and much more indifferent to its continued existence. One thing (arguably good) that it does do is provide distinct, specific temporal reference points that the gradual changing of seasons does not, by forcing people to take some sort of irregular action. Do I think this in any way helps cancel out the harm caused by upsetting the sleep cycles of a huge portion of the population? Absolutely not. But Slashdot reader Anonymouse Cowtard argues they're grateful for the time change — because " I was sick of the sun waking me at 5 a.m." Since it is that time of year again, share your own thoughts in the comments. And why do we keep setting our clocks back an hour? ...why slashdot insists on repeating this conversation twice yearly, as if anybody's opinions have changed since the last time, or the last 30 times... Twice a year, the same question is asked. How much time is wasted asking that same question over and over? Over the years it is apparent that most people who have spoken about the twice-yearly clock change oppose it. That's because the people who don't oppose it had no reason to "speak about" it. Duh. That time of the year again, when whiners looking for a cause gang up over DST. Since you didn't include the whole story, the House approved the bill easily, then it went to the Senate where Mitch McConnell decided not to advance it. Fuck Mitch McConnell. Alterslash is developed by Jonathan Hedley. All content is owned by its original poster.

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