Playing Coffee Talk Reminds Me Of The Quiet Joys Of Being A Barista

Life sometimes feels like it runs a mile a minute. Shit never stops, there’s always a new crisis, and your jaw is clenched in perpetuity. In those moments, it can help to focus on the little things. Like coffee. A trip to the corner shop or a dirty cup from the office kitchen is like exhaling for a moment. The new…

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Source: Kotaku – Playing Coffee Talk Reminds Me Of The Quiet Joys Of Being A Barista

FCC Says Wireless Location Data Sharing Broke the Law

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai told lawmakers Friday he intends to propose fines against at least one U.S. wireless carrier for sharing customers’ real-time location data with outside parties without the subscribers’ knowledge or consent. From a report: The FCC has been investigating for more than a year following revelations that subscriber location data from AT&T, T-Mobile and Sprint made its way to a resale market used by bounty hunters. Pai said in letters to several lawmakers that the agency’s investigation has found that “one or more wireless carriers apparently violated federal law.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.



Source: Slashdot – FCC Says Wireless Location Data Sharing Broke the Law

Vine successor Byte will share all its ad revenue to lure early creators

Now that Byte has had a chance to reel in some users, the team is outlining another part of its Vine revival: how it’ll pay its stars. The team has published initial details of a Partner Program that will pay creators who pull in large audiences for…

Source: Engadget – Vine successor Byte will share all its ad revenue to lure early creators

This Company Wants To Subsidize Your Terrible Commute With Terrible Ads

One of the biggest issues with the subway, at least here in New York, boils down to cold hard cash. Even more than the busking, the rats, and the ooze, last year’s subway fare hike caused many NYC residents to lose their damn minds. But what if—y’know, instead of reducing the fare—we just got advertising to pay for…

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Source: Gizmodo – This Company Wants To Subsidize Your Terrible Commute With Terrible Ads

io9 Roundtable: The Good Place Was a Good Show

The Good Place—NBC’s poignant, brilliant, and hilarious afterlife comedy—has ended, and last night’s series finale showed us the fates of all the characters we’d come to forking adore over the past four seasons. Dive into the chowder fountain with us while we celebrate (and mourn) one of our favorite shows.

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Source: io9 – io9 Roundtable: The Good Place Was a Good Show

Ajit Pai: Carrier sales of phone-location data is illegal, FCC plans punishment

A cell phone displays a map and directions while mounted on a car dashboard.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Nakhorn Yuangkratoke/EyeEm)

Mobile network operators who sold their customers’ real-time location data violated US law and the Federal Communications Commission will try to punish carriers that did so, FCC Chairman Ajit Pai wrote today.

“[T]he FCC’s Enforcement Bureau has completed its extensive investigation and… it has concluded that one or more wireless carriers apparently violated federal law,” Pai wrote in a letter today to Democratic members of Congress who asked for an update on the probe.

“I am committed to ensuring that all entities subject to our jurisdiction comply with the Communications Act and the FCC’s rules, including those that protect consumers’ sensitive information, such as real-time location data,” Pai’s letter continued. “Accordingly, in the coming days, I intend to circulate to my fellow Commissioners for their consideration one or more Notice(s) of Apparent Liability for Forfeiture in connection with the apparent violation(s).”

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Source: Ars Technica – Ajit Pai: Carrier sales of phone-location data is illegal, FCC plans punishment

Smooth: Little Kid Drifts Toy Car Right Into Parallel Parking Spot

This is an ultra short video of a kid drifting his toy Mustang into a parallel parking spot like there are a bunch of babes around to impress or something. It’s just your nerdy friends and dad with a video camera! Still, a nice job and with skills like that in a few years I could easily see this kid starring in Fast And Furious 10: Year Olds.

Keep going for the video.

Source: Geekologie – Smooth: Little Kid Drifts Toy Car Right Into Parallel Parking Spot

Next-Gen NVIDIA Teslas Due This Summer; To Be Used In Big Red 200 Supercomputer

Thanks to Indiana University and The Next Platform, we have a hint of what’s to come with NVIDIA’s future GPU plans, with strong signs that NVIDIA will have a new Tesla accelerator (and underlying GPU) ready for use by this summer.


In an article outlining the installation of Indiana University’s Big Red 200 supercomputer – which also happens to be the first Cray Shasta supercomputer to be installed – The Next Platform reports that Indiana University has opted to split up the deployment of the supercomputer in to two phases. In particular, the supercomputer was meant to be delivered with Tesla V100s; however the university has instead opted to hold off on delivery of their accelerators so that they can instead have NVIDIA’s next-generation accelerators, which would make them among the first institutions to get the new accelerators.


The revelation is notable as NVIDIA has yet to announce any new Tesla accelerators or matching GPUs. The company’s current Tesla V100s, based on the GV100 GPU, were first announced back at GTC 2017, so NVIDIA’s compute accelerators are due for a major refresh. However it’s a bit surprising to see anyone other than NVIDIA reveal any details about the new parts, given how buttoned-down the company normally is about such details.


At any rate, according to Indiana University the group expects to have their new accelerators installed by later this summer, with Big Red 200 running in CPU-only mode for now. The Next Platform article goes on to state that the newer accelerators will deliver “70 percent to 75 percent more performance” than NVIDIA’s current V100 accelerators, which assuming it’s accurate, would make for a hefty generational upgrade in performance. Though as always, with multiple modes of compute involved – everything from straight FP32 vector math to tensor operations to low precision operations – the devil is in the details on where those performance gains would most be realized.


In the meantime, NVIDIA’s next GTC event is scheduled for mid-March. So if NVIDIA is planning to launch a new Tesla, then I would certainly expect to see it there.



Source: AnandTech – Next-Gen NVIDIA Teslas Due This Summer; To Be Used In Big Red 200 Supercomputer

Andrew Yang Warns Against 'Slaughterbots' and Urges Global Ban on Autonomous Weaponry

Ahead of the Democratic presidential primaries that begin Monday with the Iowa caucus, presidential candidate Andrew Yang called for a global ban on the use of autonomous weaponry. In a tweet, Yang called for U.S. leadership to implement a ban on automated killing machines, then shared a link to a Future of Life Institute video titled “Slaughterbots,” which offers a cautionary and dystopian vision of the future. From a report: […] In the video, the fictional CEO promises the ability to target and wipe out “the bad guys” or people with “evil ideology” or even entire cities. The video then imagines the breaking out of partisan political warfare. The drones are used to assassinate 11 U.S. Senators of one political party at the U.S. Capitol building. In the wake of the hypothetical attack, it’s unclear after assessment from the intelligence community what state, group, or individual carried it out, but in the confusion calls for war and violent crime ratchet up.

There is some precedent in reality. Russian company Kalishnakov is developing a kamikaze drone, and though it was most likely piloted by a human, the world saw one of the first targeted political assassination attempts with a drone in history in 2018 in Venezuela. DARPA is developing ways for swarms of drones to take part in military missions, and the U.S. Department of Defense developed hardware to guard against weaponized drone attacks.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.



Source: Slashdot – Andrew Yang Warns Against ‘Slaughterbots’ and Urges Global Ban on Autonomous Weaponry

Huawei outsells Apple in 2019, becomes No. 2 global smartphone vendor

Huawei's logo seen at a technology conference.

Enlarge / Huawei’s logo at the Smart City Expo World Congress in Barcelona in November 2019. (credit: Getty Images | SOPA Images)

Market research firms Canalys and Counterpoint Research have posted their 2019 global smartphone market share reports. Both reports say the biggest mover is Huawei, which, thanks to a whopping 16-17 percent annual growth, claimed the No. 2 smartphone vendor spot in 2019, behind Samsung and ahead of Apple. Both firms have similar global market share numbers for 2019, with Samsung around 20 percent, Huawei at 16 percent, Apple at 13 percent, and Xiaomi and Oppo around eight percent each.

Counterpoint credits Huawei’s success in its hometown of China for its success, saying, “This was the result of an aggressive push from Huawei in the Chinese market, where it achieved almost 40 percent market share.” According to the firm, China makes up 60 percent of Huawei’s shipments.

Is this “Peak Huawei?”

While holding onto the No. 2 spot is a big accomplishment for Huawei, the company’s future in the smartphone market currently looks pretty murky. The Trump Administration’s Huawei export ban means US companies can no longer do business with Huawei. Huawei should be OK when it comes to hardware, as the company has aggressively cut US components out of its hardware supply line. For software, however, it has a serious problem. No US products means the Google ecosystem is off-limits to Huawei, so Huawei phones don’t have access to Gmail, YouTube, Google Maps, the Google Assistant, and the millions of apps on the Play Store. This seriously limits the appeal of Huawei phones outside of China.

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Source: Ars Technica – Huawei outsells Apple in 2019, becomes No. 2 global smartphone vendor

Intel Core i9-10900K 10-Core Comet Lake-S Monster CPU Leaks With 5.1GHz Boost Clock

Intel Core i9-10900K 10-Core Comet Lake-S Monster CPU Leaks With 5.1GHz Boost Clock
We’ve been hearing plenty of leaks regarding Intel’s next-generation Comet Lake-S desktop processor family and its supporting Z490 chipset. The rumored flagship of the family is the Core i9-10900K, which is still based on the 14nm process node.

This time around, the Core i9-10900K is making another appearance through the leak channels via

Source: Hot Hardware – Intel Core i9-10900K 10-Core Comet Lake-S Monster CPU Leaks With 5.1GHz Boost Clock

Coronavirus outbreak sparks first federal quarantine in over 50 years

A crew member of an evacuation flight of French citizens from Wuhan gives passengers disinfectant during the flight to France on February 1, 2020, as they are repatriated from the coronavirus hot zone.

Enlarge / A crew member of an evacuation flight of French citizens from Wuhan gives passengers disinfectant during the flight to France on February 1, 2020, as they are repatriated from the coronavirus hot zone. (credit: Getty | Hector Retamal)

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has issued the first federal quarantine order in more than 50 years for 195 Americans who were evacuated out of Wuhan, China, the epicenter of the 2019 novel coronavirus outbreak (2019-nCoV)

The US citizens will be held under quarantine at the March Air Reserve Base in California, where they arrived from Wuhan on Wednesday, January 29 on an aircraft chartered by the US State Department. They have remained at the base since then. The quarantine will last 14 days from the time that their flight left Wuhan. Fourteen days is considered the likely maximum time of a 2019-nCoV infection incubation period—that is the time between an exposure and onset of symptoms.

The decision to issue a quarantine comes amid the continued spread of 2019-nCoV—both within and beyond China. It also comes on the heels of a report that an asymptomatic infected person from China spread the viral illness to a 33-year-old healthy business associate in Germany. Further testing found that three other associates at the same company in Germany had also contracted the infection. All four cases were mild, and the first infected associate, who noticed symptoms on January 24, started feeling better and returned to work on the 27. The report was published yesterday, January 30, in the New England Journal of Medicine.

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Source: Ars Technica – Coronavirus outbreak sparks first federal quarantine in over 50 years

Is a Vegan Diet Best for Athletes?

A plant-based diet can be a fine way to eat, whether you’re an athlete or not. A Netflix documentary called Game Changers argues that it’s not just fine, but that it’s better and that meat is harmful in some way. That’s not what most nutrition experts say, so let’s take a look at the claims in Game Changers and what…

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Source: LifeHacker – Is a Vegan Diet Best for Athletes?