In three months, NASA will come upon the 10th anniversary of the final space shuttle flight, a period that was surely melancholy for the space agency.
When the big, white, winged vehicles touched down for the final time in July 2011, NASA surrendered its ability to get humans into space. It had to rely on Russia for access to the International Space Station. And the space agency had to fight the public perception that NASA was somehow a fading force, heading into the sunset.
Now we know that will not be the case, and the future appears bright for the space agency and its international partners. On Friday morning, NASA and SpaceX launched the third mission of Crew Dragon that has carried astronauts into space. After nearly a decade with no human orbital launches from the United States, there have been three in less than 11 months. Another successful mission further confirmed that the combination of Falcon 9 rocket and Crew Dragon spacecraft is a reliable means of getting crews to the International Space Station. //
The "team" is a collaboration between engineers at NASA and SpaceX that have worked to develop and certify the Crew Dragon system for human spaceflight for a fixed price of about $55 million per seat. Since 2017, NASA had been paying Russia more than $80 million for an astronaut to ride into orbit.
The partnership has also been very good for SpaceX, which has sought to develop rapid, low-cost access to space through reusable vehicles. Thanks to NASA's flexibility, SpaceX launched Monday's mission on a Falcon 9 rocket that flew in November and on a Crew Dragon vehicle, Endeavour, that first went into space last May. //
With the Falcon 9 and Crew Dragon, SpaceX has gotten mostly there. However, the Falcon 9 rocket's upper stage is expended after a launch, and the Dragon capsules undergo significant refurbishment between flights. Musk sees this launch system as an interim stage to full reuse, and SpaceX is still learning lessons. The company has already flown one of its Falcon 9 first stages nine times and will soon fly it a tenth time. The plan is to push the limits of the Falcon 9 with the company's own Starlink missions, Musk said.
"There doesn’t seem to be any obvious limits to the reusability of the vehicle," he said. "We intend to fly the Falcon 9 rocket until we see some kind of failure."
These lessons will be incorporated into SpaceX's next-generation Starship and Super Heavy launch system, which is designed to be fully reusable and able to launch again within days of landing. That's the aspirational goal, at least. NASA seems intrigued, as it recently selected Starship to land its astronauts on the Moon later this decade as part of the Artemis Program.
TechFreedom, a libertarian-leaning think tank that filed a brief in the case, said the Supreme Court ruling "restores due process at the FTC." TechFreedom President Berin Szóka wrote:
The text of the Act is clear: Section 13(b) allows the agency to stop deceitful or fraudulent conduct quickly, so that the conduct is not ongoing while the agency then completes a more rigorous process for clawing back ill-gotten gains. This process ensures a balance: fraudsters' misconduct is promptly shut down, but the agency is forced to prove that its target is indeed engaged in fraud before taking money from it. Although the agency (and several Senators) have recently emphasized how important the agency's Section 13(b) authority is for obtaining consumer redress, it is only important because the agency has made it so, by convincing courts to let the agency misuse it for that purpose.
Public Knowledge said the ruling "decimates [the] FTC's ability to protect consumers through restitution" but pointed out that Congress can restore the FTC's powers by amending the law. //
As Justice [Stephen] Breyer noted in his opinion, Congress can easily fix this problem by clarifying that the FTC can seek equitable remedies along with an injunction," Petros wrote. "Given that both sides of the aisle support the agency's ability to seek restitution, it should be a priority for legislators. It's common sense for ill-gotten gains to be returned to the pockets of consumers—not kept by those that would take advantage of them."
Apple is facing two class-action lawsuits over the meaning of the words “rent” and “buy.”
In the first suit, lead plaintiff David Andino argues that Apple’s definition of the two words is deceptive since the company can terminate people’s Apple IDs and, along with them, access to content they purchased using the “buy” button. Thus, Andino is arguing that Apple allows consumers to rent content rather than purchase it outright. If he had known that his access could be cut off at any time, he says he would have not spent as much on iTunes content.
Just like Best Buy cannot come into a person’s home to repossess the movie DVD that such person purchased from it, [Apple] should not be able to remove digital content from its customers’ Purchased folders,” the suit says.
Apple countered by arguing that “no reasonable consumer would believe” that content purchased through iTunes would be available on the platform indefinitely. But US District Court Judge John Mendez wasn’t buying it, as first noticed by the Hollywood Reporter. He rejected a motion filed by Apple that sought to dismiss the suit. That means the suit can move forward with its claims of false advertising and unfair competition, though it could still be settled before going to trial.
Apple is also up against a second class-action suit related to terminating Apple IDs. In this one, lead plaintiff Matthew Price claims he lost $24,590.05 in iTunes, the App Store, and in-app purchases, along with $7.63 in account credit, which became inaccessible when Apple terminated his account. Price’s lawsuit was filed on Tuesday.
Price’s $25,000 worth of purchases is perhaps an extreme example of what many consumers may encounter when they buy content on digital platforms, only to find it unavailable when their accounts are suspended or terminated. At issue is whether digital content available through various platforms is truly owned by individuals if the platform owner can prevent them from accessing it in the future.
Amazon is defending itself against a similar lawsuit filed last April by people who claim the company falsely advertised that they would have unlimited access to content purchased through Prime Video. They are concerned that Amazon “secretly reserves the right to terminate the consumers’ access and use of the Video Content at any time,” the suit claims.
Quote:
Apple countered by arguing that “no reasonable consumer would believe” that content purchased through iTunes would be available on the platform indefinitely.
Amazing just how very many of us are unreasonable, isn't it?
If "no reasonable consumer would believe..." then shouldn't Apple be happy to have a jury verdict on it? Should be easy to have 12 "reasonable" jurists. //
I have friends who think I am silly to buy Bluray movies and rip them to my personal NAS that has redundancy. I just don't trust these companies to do right by me in the slightest. //
If this results in a digital version of the Doctrine of First Sale I will be dancing in the streets. This whole "you only license anything digital" thing has been a naked power grab from the start and the courts should never have gone along.
This week the investors that own the Global SuperTanker just informed me that they have made the difficult decision to cease operations of the company, effective this week…This is extremely disappointing as the aircraft has been configured and tuned with a new digital drop system and other upgrades to make it more safe and efficient. //
In an April 2020 letter posted on the National Wildfire Coordinating Group’s website the Chair of the National Interagency Aviation Committee, Joel Kerley of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, wrote to Global Supertanker Services saying the Committee would not issue a seventh interim approval of the aircraft’s retardant delivery system:
The Interagency Air Tanker Subcommittee does not support any further interim approvals without correcting some issues originally identified in the 2009 test of the system that included failure to meet coverage level 3 & 6, retention of retardant in the system after drop, aeration of the retardant causing trail off, and inconsistent flight profiles affecting retardant coverage.
Due to the current national situation regarding the Coronavirus (COVID-19), NIAC will issue an eighth interim approval to GSTS. However, NIAC will not support, nor issue a ninth interim until GSTS successfully passes all requirements of the 2013 IABS Criteria. This must be completed prior to December 31, 2020. //
Most large air tankers carry up to 3,000 gallons of retardant. The 747 is capable of carrying far more retardant than any other. When first introduced it was listed at 20,000 gallons. Then the federal government certified it at 19,200 gallons. More recently it was required to carry no more than 17,500 gallons. The second-largest capacity air tanker is the Russian-made Ilysushin IL-76 at 11,574 gallons. The DC-10 until a couple of years ago was allowed to hold 11,600 but federal officials now restrict it to 9,400. //
I asked a Lead Plane Pilot who has worked with Tanker 944 for his impressions of the aircraft. He is currently active and not authorized to comment publicly:
It’s a specialized tool, and as such it has a niche that it fills and in that niche there’s nothing else any better. That is, it puts out a huge amount of retardant in one pass, and that sometimes can be a great thing. It can travel halfway around the world and deliver product. Having said that it is also a specialized tool in that it isn’t very good at doing the little stuff.
I asked him about the retardant that sometimes trails off after a drop:
That trail off, that’s something they can beat them over the head with, but at the end of the day hardly anybody I know gives a s**t about it. Ok, well, it’s not a perfect tank.
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) produced the first diagrams illustrating U.S. national commodity use in the mid-1970s. The most widely recognized of these charts is the U.S. energy flow chart. LLNL has also published charts depicting carbon (or carbon dioxide potential) flow and water flow at the national level as well as energy, carbon, and water flows at the international, state, municipal, and organizational (e.g., Air Force) level. Flow charts, also referred to as Sankey Diagrams, are single-page references that contain quantitative data about resource, commodity, and byproduct flows in a graphical form. These flow charts help scientists, analysts, and other decision makers to visualize the complex interrelationships involved in managing our nation’s resources.
If you're a web developer, you've probably had to make a user account system. The most important aspect of a user account system is how user passwords are protected. User account databases are hacked frequently, so you absolutely must do something to protect your users' passwords if your website is ever breached. The best way to protect passwords is to employ salted password hashing. This page will explain why it's done the way it is.
There are a lot of conflicting ideas and misconceptions on how to do password hashing properly, probably due to the abundance of misinformation on the web. Password hashing is one of those things that's so simple, but yet so many people get wrong. With this page, I hope to explain not only the correct way to do it, but why it should be done that way. //
To make it impossible for an attacker to create a lookup table for every possible salt, the salt must be long. A good rule of thumb is to use a salt that is the same size as the output of the hash function. For example, the output of SHA256 is 256 bits (32 bytes), so the salt should be at least 32 random bytes.
A malaria vaccine has proved to be 77% effective in early trials and could be a major breakthrough against the disease, says the University of Oxford team behind it.
Malaria kills more than 400,000 people a year, mostly children in sub-Saharan Africa.
But despite many vaccines being trialled over the years, this is the first to meet the required target. //
When trialled in 450 children in Burkina Faso, the vaccine was found to be safe, and showed "high-level efficacy" over 12 months of follow-up.
Larger trials in nearly 5,000 children between the ages of five months and three years will now be carried out across four African countries to confirm the findings. //
The trials of this malaria vaccine started in 2019, long before coronavirus appeared - and the Oxford team developed its Covid vaccine (with AstraZeneca) on the strength of its research into malaria, Prof Hill said.
A malaria vaccine has taken much longer to come to fruition because there are thousands of genes in malaria compared to around a dozen in coronavirus, and a very high immune response is needed to fight off the disease.
When you can convince people racism is rampant, you ignite a flame of division and destruction that can only end with bodies on the ground and cities leveled. //
These erroneous stories aren’t flukes. Recent history shows repeatedly that corrupt media and politicians aren’t surprised or embarrassed when body cam footage or crucial details emerge that debunk their initial “reporting.”
That’s because they don’t so much report as create. They don’t get clicks and clout by uncovering and reporting what actually happened, but by feeding people and politicians’ pre-existing narratives. That’s why every lede and headline seems to be some variation of Black Lives Matter talking points.
Corrections, if issued at all, are usually stealthy and get buried instantly, and there’s no room for nuance on a protester’s poster board or in a presidential press release. Thus the narrative is set before any details emerge, and narratives are more powerful than facts in ginning up emotional responses and revolutions.
The media know this. The ruling class knows this. If they can convince enough people that America is systemically racist, they can infiltrate government schools with critical race theory — and they have.
If they can make people believe police officers are irredeemably evil, they can nationalize local law enforcement and funnel more money toward their pet social programs. If they can convince corporations that performative “antiracism” is more important than profits, they can blackmail state lawmakers into passing legislation that gives them more power — and they are. //
Make no mistake: The ruling class is absolutely inciting violence. The same crowd that insisted President Donald Trump “incited an insurrection” is the one that outrageously lies to demonstrators claiming white cops go on search-and-destroy missions against innocent black Americans. These are the people who gaslight Americans with buzzwords like “peaceful protests” while they watch their cities light up in flames.
The way to bring revolution is to provoke unrest, and the best means to do that is to convince the public that isolated instances of evil represent endemic institutional problems through inflammatory rhetoric and disproportionate attention. It’s a strategy, and it works. //
They said, “Destroying property … is not violence.” They said protests don’t need to be peaceful and called riots a “proportionate response.” They denied evidence of anarchy. They said violence works. They condemned the term “riot” as “loaded,” instead calling it “democracy.” They released a documentary claiming “Riots Built America.” And they flat-out pretended cities weren’t being ravaged, with Gov. Jay Inslee saying “That’s news to me!” when asked about the so-called Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, and Rep. Jerry Nadler calling Antifa a “myth.”
It isn’t just sins of commission either. The media transgress with omission as well. That’s why you’ll hear Ma’Khia Bryant’s name infinitely more than you’ll hear Mohammad Anwar’s. His life was stolen by two black teens when they violently carjacked him in broad daylight in D.C. last month. One story can be spun to further the narrative that foments riots. One cannot.
Back in January, left-wingers in the media, on Twitter, and in the halls of Congress breathlessly reported that Trump had incited in insurrection. He was a seditionist and a fascist, they said, and he posed such a grave threat to public safety that his social media accounts were nuked from orbit, and Democrats immediately drafted articles of impeachment again. When he urged rioters at the Capitol to go home, calling for “NO violence, NO lawbreaking and NO vandalism of any kind,” a ban on his Twitter prevented the message from going out.
Although the events of that day were awful, the ruling class lied about and amplified them to the point of repeated falsehoods, with The New York Times peddling a false story that rioters bludgeoned a Capitol Police officer to death with a fire extinguisher, and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez claiming Sen. Ted Cruz tried to have her murdered. //
The biggest lie is that the entire United States of America — with its white people, police officers, institutions, and norms — is irredeemably racist and evil to its core. The race-baiters who peddle this lie have incited more violence than Trump ever did. When you can convince people racism is rampant, and that silence about it is violence while actual physical vigilante violence is justice, you ignite a flame of division and destruction that can only end with bodies on the ground and cities leveled. //
As Shelby Steele says, “America’s original sin is not slavery. It is simply the use of race as a means to power.” While the ruling classes exploit tragedy to accrue more and more power, Americans become increasingly powerless as pawns in the race war, many paying with their sanity, others with their livelihoods, and even some with their lives.
Wiley was harsh on James, but also sternly challenged him to use his platform to talk more about his own life and the odds he overcame to become one of the greatest basketball players of all time.
I’d love to hear that story, of how you became Lebron James against all odds, instead of always professing the odds are against all people.
Lebron James says “I’m so damn tired of seeing Black people killed by police!” How about this sentence, instead of that… “I’m so damn tired of seeing Black people killed.”
How about this sentence? Even more idealistic. “I’m damn tired of just seeing people killed.” //
"Your skin is not your sin."
A prison in Malawi realised it was flushing valuable fuel down the drains – now it is using the power of poo to fuel its busy kitchens, aiding both inmates and forests. //
The prison was installed with a biogas digester, a system that converts organic matter – including human waste – into energy. Made from plastic sheets, the system has an inlet that feeds the poop and other waste into a digester, where they are submerged in water. The water creates an anaerobic environment that allows bacteria to break down the biomass into methane, which is pushed through a piping system to the gas stoves in the prison's kitchen. //
The prison's officials say that since the installation of the biogas digester the reformatory has cut its firewood consumption by around half, from 60 cubic metres a month to around 29 cubic metres. The digester has also helped to reduce the electricity bills at the prison, saving an average of MWK 310,400 (£290/$400) each month on firewood and electricity.
So apparently a ship, sailing under the Panamanian flag, owned by a Japanese company, operated by a German company, staffed by Indians and stuck in Egypt has no international guarantees of rights for its workers not to end up in a kind of floating solitary confinement. The world literally runs on this kind of shipping and it’s only possible because of these sailors that companies can apparently abandon if that’s how the spreadsheet shakes out. That’s fairly discouraging. Hopefully, the crew of the Ever Given can get some justice, and a flight home, soon.
All of the past contributions from students and faculty are also being removed
The University of Minnesota has been banned from contributing to the Linux kernel by one of its maintainers after researchers from the school apparently knowingly submitted code with security flaws.
“The implementation of these recommendations has had serious consequences for some Americans,” lawmakers wrote in a letter to the CDC director. //
The U.S. requirement that nearly all children wear masks stands out as a global outlier. Swiss children under the age of 12 are exempt from mask mandates, while children under the age of 11 in France and Great Britain also remain mask free.
The county even regulates what meets the standard of a 'bonafide meal' each group of customers is required to buy if they would like to order beer. All this, we're told, fights COVID.
In short, regardless of Chauvin’s actions, Derek Chauvin never had a chance for anything approaching a fair trial. He was tried by a jury composed of people who were well aware that the city government wanted Chauvin convicted. They were rightfully fearful for their own lives, property, and careers; if they returned anything less than guilty on all counts, their lives would never be the same…assuming that some number of jurors didn’t hide their feelings to get on the jury so they could ensure the correct verdict.
We have moved beyond the Constitutional ideal of a fair trial to something much more sinister, that is, the use of the judicial process to exact vengeance on a man not only as an oblation to the mob but as a way of moving a political narrative forward. None of us are safe because trials are no longer about guilt or innocence or justice; they are about ensuring the right outcome in the right cases. //
Mitchie
@wittywriter
The George Floyd case would've been an easy way for Republicans to bridge the gap with black voters. After all, we all saw George being murdered. But instead, the GOP let the crazy lead and found themselves on the wrong side of history AGAIN!! I give up. //
If it takes kangaroo trials to build bridges, then I’m not interested in crossing that particular canyon.
I am saying that, per training, the officer did his job, and we need to start looking at each incident as its own incident.”
Keilar, as you’ll soon see in the video, did not appear to be impressed with Barkdale’s calm logic and insight. But co-host John Berman clearly was, and in the process, he made this important admission:
“I’m so glad you said that. I’m so glad you put it that way. Because we have to be able to say that, yes, things are a tragedy. Something can be tragic and not necessarily call into question the entire way that an officer responded.
And you say, look, we’ve got to look at each of these cases differently.”
Catherine Herridge
@CBS_Herridge
#Context With federal prosecutors today predicting +50O will be charged in connection with the Capitol Riots, data from last Fall shows +300 were charged for riots/civil unrest - including breakout for Portland. //
“Of 96 cases the U.S. attorney’s office in Portland filed last year charging protesters with federal crimes, including assaulting federal officers, civil disorder, and failing to obey, prosecutors have dropped 47 of them, government documents show,” per the WSJ. “Ten people have pleaded guilty to related charges and two were ordered detained pending trial. None have gone to trial.”
“The penalties levied so far against any federal defendants, most of whom were arrested in clashes around federal buildings in Portland including the courthouse, have largely consisted of community service, such as working in a food bank or encouraging people to vote,” the outlet added.
Architecture
Development
Operations
EDGE / IOT / OPEN SOURCE
The Open Book Project: An eBook Reader You Can Build Yourself
2 Feb 2020 6:00am, by David Cassel
An amateur hardware enthusiast wants to prove it’s possible for people to build their own ebook readers.
“As a society, we need an open source device for reading,” explains the project’s page on GitHub. “Books are among the most important documents of our culture, yet the most popular and widespread devices we have for reading — the Kobo, the Nook, the Kindle and even the iPad — are closed devices, operating as small moving parts in a set of giant closed platforms whose owners’ interests are not always aligned with readers’.”
“The Open Book aims to be a simple device that anyone with a soldering iron can build for themselves.”
Classic material from one of the all-time radio comedy greats
Touch temperature is based off the limitation of human skin. Human skin can bear some higher temperatures for brief periods of time before pain and cellular damage can set in. These two limitations, pain and damage, are the last things our users want to experience with our products. NASA put out an awesome summary of a new approach to touch temperature. NASA conducted some empirical data and research on previous studies to develop their own mathematical model of what temperatures are allowable for skin constant contact. Essentially, our pain threshold for heat depends on what area of the skin is heated, but in general that ranges between 42C (sensitive skin the chest area) to 45C (on our feet).
Contact Time
Another factor for determining the maximum touch temperature is how long a user might be in contact with the surface. Skin can handle higher temperatures for a few seconds before pain or skin damage occurs. Ecma International, a body responsible for creating standards for Information and Communication Technology and Consumer Electronics, has set some ergonomic limitations for skin contact time and temperature. The Standard ECMA-287 has a table the breaks down allowable temperatures based off use and the expected time of contact. //
Continuous hold ( < 8h) -- 43C
Short period touch ( < 10s) -- 55C metallic, 65C non-metallic
May be touched ( < 1s) -- 65C metallic, 85C non-metallic