Japan is set to fire up its nuclear power plants as it looks to expand its renewable energy offering amid a push to slash its emissions, its new industry minister has said today.
The efforts are a bid to cut 46 per cent of its carbon output from 2013 levels by 2030, while the country has also pledged to be carbon neutral by 2050.
“I would like to promote the maximum adoption of renewable energy, thorough energy conservation and the restart of nuclear power plants with the highest priority on safety,” newly appointed economy, trade and industry minister, Koichi Hagiuda, told his first news conference.
It comes amid a cabinet shuffle in Japan, as its government makes way for new prime minister Fumio Kishida.
The operator of the Wayback Machine allows Wikipedia's users to check citations from books as well as the web. //
Wikipedia is the arbiter of truth on the internet. It's what settles arguments at bars. It supplies answers for the information snippets you see on your Google or Bing search results. It's the first stop for nearly everyone doing online research.
The reason people rely on Wikipedia, despite its imperfections, is that every claim is supposed to have citations. Any sentence that isn't backed up with a credible source risks being slapped with the dreaded "citation needed" label. Anyone can check out those citations to learn more about a subject, or verify that those sources actually say what a particular Wikipedia entry claims they do—that is, if you can find those sources.
It's easy enough when the sources are online. But many Wikipedia articles rely on good old-fashioned books. The entry on Martin Luther King Jr., for example, cites 66 different books. Until recently, if you wanted to verify that those books say what the article says they say, or if you just wanted to read the cited material, you'd need to track down a copy of the book.
Now, thanks to a new initiative by the Internet Archive, you can click the name of the book and see a two-page preview of the cited work, so long as the citation specifies a page number. You can also borrow a digital copy of the book, so long as no else has checked it out, for two weeks—much the same way you'd borrow a book from your local library. (Some groups of authors and publishers have challenged the archive's practice of allowing users to borrow unauthorized scanned books. The Internet Archive says it seeks to widen access to books in “balanced and respectful ways.”)
So far the Internet Archive has turned 130,000 references in Wikipedia entries in various languages into direct links to 50,000 books that the organization has scanned and made available to the public. The organization eventually hopes to allow users to view and borrow every book cited by Wikipedia, with the ultimate goal being to digitize every book ever published.
“Our goal is to be a library that’s useful and reachable by more people,” says Mark Graham, director of the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine service. //
Of course, the Internet Archive hasn’t scanned all the books cited by Wikipedia yet. It’s working hard to digitize collections from libraries around the world, along with donations from companies like Better World Books. Graham says the organization scans more than 1,000 books per day. But it has plenty more work to do.
Using clues from Sean Connery's six official James Bond films, a fan makes the case that 1996's The Rock is 007's last adventure. //
A fan on Reddit believes they have proven the fan theory that 1996's The Rock isn't just an action thriller -- it's a James Bond movie. //
Directed by Michael Bay, The Rock stars Connery as John Mason, a former SAS captain renowned as the only inmate who ever escaped from the federal prison on Alcatraz Island. Mason is recruited to join a band of Navy SEALs to slip onto the island and defeat a terrorist threatening to destroy San Francisco with missiles if he isn't paid a $100 million ransom for the civilians on the site.
Connery debuted as Bond in 1962's Dr. No, and a line of dialogue in The Rock states Mason was "incarcerated on Alcatraz in 1962… escaped in '63." Dr. No ended with Bond destroying the title villain's headquarters in Jamaica and drifting off with Honey Ryder rather than join CIA contact Felix Leiter, who brings the U.S. Marines to mop up operations. The theory posits that in the confusion, Bond was captured by a Navy patrol and, being undercover with no credentials, was sent to prison. In the next Bond film, From Russia With Love, there's a line of dialogue that Bond went missing for six months after that adventure -- the time Bond-as-Mason would have been behind bars.
The US Navy sold two old aircraft carriers for a cent each to a ship-breaking firm.
The USS Kitty Hawk and USS John F. Kennedy had been decommissioned for years.
They are due to be broken up by a firm in Texas, which can make money from the scrap metal.
Good artists copy. Great artists steal. Greatest artists copy, then paste.
Simplicity. Elegance. Form. Function.
Today marks a new beginning for programmers around the world. Stack Overflow is proud to unveil our first venture into hardware, The Key™.
They say good artists copy, but great artists steal. They were wrong. Great artists, developers, and engineers copy. Then they paste.
Every day, millions of innovators and creators across the globe move society and industry forward by copy-pasting code from Stack Overflow. But for too long, this process has been stuck in the past. //
Our keyboard is made of 100% machine milled plastic sourced from the rarest polyurethane plants.
The switches underneath each keycap have been rigorously tested to ensure the optimal finger feel and smooth action.
What happens when you press a keyboard? It clicks. Every day you’re working on a computer, you’re hearing thousands of clicks. Millions of clicks shape your experience each year.
Our click’s volume and tone were crafted by sampling the natural wonder of song bird chirps. We run that audio data through cutting edge deep learning systems to produce a sound that is optimized to improve productivity and mood.
Each key cap has been precisely etched using industrial grade lasers normally reserved for diamond cutting and quantum fusion drives.
The Key™ is compatible with virtually any computing device. From a Raspberry Pi to a high end gaming rig, cutting edge copy-paste is within your reach. //
UPDATE 2: The Key is actually, for real available for pre-order. Our original production line sold out in six hours, so please be patient.
3-key configurable macropad
QMK programmable
Case material: CNC-machined aluminum with an anodized black finish
Switches: Kailh Black Box switches
Keycaps: Custom Stack Overflow-branded XDA profile keycaps
$29
Examples of data problems include the following:
Pool or file system space is missing
Transient I/O errors due to a bad disk or controller
On-disk data corruption due to cosmic rays
Driver bugs resulting in data being transferred to or from the wrong location
A user overwriting portions of the physical device by accident
Radio History PDFs etc
ELWA - A Voice Under Every Palm Tree
Microsoft has traditionally made installing WSL more of a hassle than it should be, but the company finally got the process right in Windows 10 build 2004. Just open an elevated Command prompt (start --> type cmd --> click Run as Administrator), type wsl --install at the prompt, and you're good to go. Windows 11, thankfully, carries this process forward unchanged.
A simple wsl --install with no further arguments gets you Hyper-V and the other underpinnings of WSL, along with the current version of Ubuntu. If you aren't an Ubuntu fan, you can see what other easily installable distributions are available with the command wsl --list --online. If you decide you'd prefer a different distro, you can install it instead with—for example—wsl --install -d openSUSE-42.
If you're not sure which distribution you prefer, don't fret. You can install as many as you like, simply by repeating wsl --list --online to enumerate your options and wsl --install -d distroname to install whichever you like.
Installing a second distribution doesn't uninstall the first; it creates a separate environment, independent of any others. You can run as many of these installed environments as you like simultaneously, without fear of one messing up another. //
Finally, Ubuntu's excellent baked-in OpenZFS support is missing. You can apt install zfsutils-linux without difficulty, but that package depends on Canonical's in-house kernel with built-in ZFS support, which Microsoft has not picked up in its own WSL2 kernel.
Qantas performed its longest-ever commercial passenger flight this week, repatriating Australian citizens from South America on behalf of the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. The flight departed Buenos Aires, Argentina bound for Darwin, the location of one of Australia’s supervised quarantine facilities. The 787-9 carried 107 passengers, 4 pilots, and 17 cabin crew and other staff, including engineers and ground staff. En route the flight passed over Antarctica, reaching just north of 75 degrees southern latitude. //
The actual flight path, in red, shows the flight’s path hewing closely to the Antarctic coast to avoid the small area outside the ETOPS allowable area. Over the Southern Ocean between Antarctica and Australia the flight made use of favorable winds and avoided adverse weather, adding distance, but reducing time in flight. The Great circle distance between Buenos Aires and Darwin is 14,683 km, while the actual distance flown was 15,037 km. As the flight progressed, the 787 also increased its cruising altitude to maintain maximum efficiency. Beginning with a maximum fuel load of 126,000 liters, QF14 climbed to an initial cruising altitude of 34,000 feet and then step climbed to 40,000 feet as it burned fuel and reduced weight.
I dare anyone to tell me that this flight isn’t ridiculously cool.
In this post:
Qantas’ Buenos Aires to Darwin flight
This Qantas flight flew over Antarctica
Hello folks,
For my Linux server backups, i really love BorgBackup but i'm looking now for something that natively support S3. I've heard few good things about Kopia and feel like it's the way i may go. I would prefer something free so Duplicacy, which i use and like a lot for my home personnal usage, is not an option. I also want to use encryption, compression and dedup.
What do you use for your backups that support S3 as backend?
On the side i've read few discussions regarding encryption methods, looks like some use good encryption, some others use double encryption which sounds a bad idea (and also use of OpenSSL) regarding some people with security interest, some use also homemade encryption while there is existing good encryption algorithms. I'm not that used to advanced security like that but as most of us i try to make the best choices for long term use.
In the past i've used a lot BackupPC. Useful frontend when your team is not that advanced with SSH, you can keep the compression locally to the BackupPC server even if you get file from remote, etc.
What's your input?
Thanks a lot for all your advices and app sharing!
Encrypted backups made easy.
Backups with strict access controls, strong encryption, data deduplication, incremental uploads and offline decryption keys.
Encrypted Backup Shootout (acha.ninja)
https://acha.ninja/blog/encrypted_backup_shootout/
aDfbrtVt 9 months ago [–]
I get that performance is interesting to graph, but it's very much secondary in importance when compared to the backup solution being bulletproof. I've found encrypted Borg very difficult to get wrong and setup is very simple. I've also successfully recovered two systems with the tool without issue.
Not saying that Borg is necessarily the best solution, just that we should evaluate the important metrics. ///
Good discussion re: backup software, including comments from tarsnap author cperciva
Bupstash is a tool for encrypted backups - if you need secure backups, Bupstash is the tool for you.
Bupstash was designed to have:
- Efficient deduplication - Bupstash can store thousands of encrypted directory snapshots using a fraction of the space encrypted tarballs would require.
- Strong privacy - Data is encrypted client side and the repository never needs has access to the decryption keys.
- Offline decryption keys - Backups do not require the decryption key be anywhere near an at-risk server or computer.
- Key/value tagging with search - all while keeping the tags fully encrypted.
- Great performance on slow networks - Bupstash really strives to work well on high latency networks like cellular and connections to far-off lands.
- Secure remote access controls - Ransomware, angry spouses, and disgruntled business partners will be powerless to delete your remote backups.
- Efficient incremental backups - Bupstash knows what it backed up last time and skips that work.
- Fantastic performance with low ram usage - Bupstash won't bog down your production servers.
- Safety against malicious attacks - Bupstash is written in a memory safe language to dramatically reduce the attack surface over the network.
Stability and Backwards Compatibility
Bupstash is alpha software, while all efforts are made to keep bupstash bug free, we currently recommend using bupstash for making REDUNDANT backups where failure can be tolerated.
Recently I have been spending time on improving the performance of bupstash (my encrypted backup tool), and wanted to compare it to some existing tools to try and find its relative performance in the backup tool landscape.
This post compares bupstash, restic, borg backup and plain old tar + gzip + GPG across a series of simple benchmarks.
What do all these tools have in common?
- They encrypt data at rest.
- They compress data.
- They have some form of incremental and/or deduplicated snapshotting.
- They are all pretty great backup systems.
There are more than 100 types of malaria parasite. The RTS,S vaccine targets the one that is most deadly and most common in Africa: plasmodium falciparum.
Trials, reported in 2015, showed the vaccine could prevent around four in 10 cases of malaria, three in 10 severe cases and lead to the number of children needing blood transfusions falling by a third.
However, there were doubts the vaccine would work in the real world as it requires four doses to be effective. The first three are given a month apart at five, six and seven months old, and a final booster is needed at around 18 months.
The findings of the pilots were discussed by two expert advisory groups at the WHO on Wednesday.
The results, from more than 2.3 million doses, showed:
- the vaccine was safe and still led to a 30% reduction in severe malaria
- it reached more than two-thirds of children who don't have a bed-net to sleep under
- there was no negative impact on other routine vaccines or other measures to prevent malaria
- the vaccine was cost-effective
"From a scientific perspective, this is a massive breakthrough, from a public health perspective this is a historical feat," said Dr Pedro Alonso, the director of the WHO Global Malaria Programme.
"We've been looking for a malaria vaccine for over 100 years now, it will save lives and prevent disease in African children." //
Having just seen the world develop Covid vaccines in record time, you might be wondering why it has taken so long with malaria?
Malaria is caused by a parasite which is far more insidious and sophisticated than the virus that causes Covid. Comparing them is like comparing a person and a cabbage.
The malaria parasite has evolved to evade our immune system. That's why you have to catch malaria time and time again before starting to get even limited protection.
It has a complicated life cycle across two species (humans and mosquitoes), and even inside our body it morphs between different forms as it infects liver cells and red blood cells.
Developing a malaria vaccine is like nailing jelly to a wall and RTS,S is only able to target the sporozoite form of the parasite (this is the stage between being bitten by a mosquito and the parasite getting to the liver).
It is why the vaccine is 'only' 40% effective. However, this is still a remarkable success and paves the way for the development of yet more potent vaccines.
Just because you got pulled over doesn’t mean that you’re going to wind up with a ticket, says Hamburger. “As soon as you realize you’ve caught a traffic cop’s attention, you’re going to want to slow down, stay calm, and think polite thoughts because there’s a right way to talk to a policeman, and a wrong way. The right way is to be unfailingly polite. The wrong way is any other way.”
A few rules of thumb:
- Don’t get out of your car. No matter how long it takes the officer to make his way to your car, just stay put—because whatever you might be feeling when you’re stopped by a cop, you should assume the cop is concerned for his own safety. Being a law enforcement officer is a dangerous job. “Even with a weapon, every traffic stop a police officer makes could be the last,” Hamburger explains.
- Follow instructions to the letter. This shows you’re making an effort cooperate, and it goes a long way to alleviating the police officer’s own worries concerning the stop.
- Don’t confess. Anything you say can be used against you in traffic court. Instead, as politely as possible, talk about how safe of a driver you generally are and how you understand that driving safely is of critical importance. “You have 30 seconds to convey that you’re a safe-driving, law-abiding citizen,” so use it wisely, Hamburger emphasizes. If whatever you did had a safety reason attached to it, let the officer know.
- Ask politely to be released with just a warning. It can’t hurt as long as you don’t flirt or otherwise act smarmy. The key phrase here is “ask politely.”
We spoke with police officers around the country, and their answers offer a glimpse into the great highs and debilitating lows they experience as they try to serve our communities. Their jobs have been put under a spotlight in recent years––here's what they want you to know.