“Waymo is one step closer to charging passengers for fully driverless rides in San Francisco,” reports Engadget:

The California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) has granted the company a Driverless Pilot permit, which allows it to pick up passengers in a test vehicle without a driver behind the wheel. It’s only the second participant in the CPUC’s Driverless Permit program, with Cruise being the first.

By securing the permit, Waymo now has the authority to offer driverless rides throughout San Francisco, portions of Daly City, as well as in portions of Los Altos, Los Altos Hills, Mountain View, Palo Alto and Sunnyvale. Its vehicles are allowed to go as fast as 65 miles per hour and can operate 24/7, but the company can’t charge for the rides just yet. Waymo told Engadget that it will begin offering free rides without a driver to select members of the public in the coming weeks. To note, the company has been offering free driverless rides to the public in Phoenix since 2020.Â

In a statement the CPUC’s Commissioner said that “We are seeing momentum build in this space and are working to assure the safe expansion of the driverless pilot program.” The state agency says their permit “Represents a milestone for driverless passenger service, expanding the potential availability of driverless AV rides to more Californians and increasing opportunities for public engagement in the pilot.”

But the agency also points out that Waymo “may not charge passengers for any rides in test AVs.” (The ability to charge for driver-less rides requires a separate permit…)

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Source: Slashdot – Waymo Will Soon Offer Some (Free) Fully Driverless Rides in San Francisco

ABC News reports:

The cryptocurrency exchange FTX owes creditors $3.1 billion, according to court documents filed late Saturday night….

Creditors’ names were not listed on the court filing, but the largest is owed $226,280,579, .

As part of its bankruptcy proceedings, FTX was required to list to the court its 50 largest creditors — either individuals or corporations — who are owed money. The second largest entity is owed $203,292,504, the court filing shows.

A video at the top of the article from ABC News adds that several celebrities “are being sued by a man who invested in the now-bankrupt crypto exchange… The lawyer behind the class claims that FTX was a massive ponzi scheme, only successful because it had a boost from celebrities.”

Meanwhile CNN adds that FTX “owes about $1.45 billion to its top ten creditors, it said in a court filing on Saturday, without naming them.”

The crypto exchange said on Saturday it has launched a strategic review of its global assets and is preparing for the sale or reorganization of some businesses. A hearing on FTX’s so-called first-day motions is set for Tuesday morning before a US bankruptcy judge, according to a separate court filing….

There could be more than 1 million creditors in the US cases that are already filed, FTX Group said, adding that it has been in touch with “dozens” of US and international regulatory agencies including the US Attorney’s Office, the US Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

Meanwhile, authorities in the Bahamas — where FTX is based — are investigating whether any criminal misconduct occurred related to the company’s implosion, the Royal Bahamas Police Force said in a statement last Sunday. The Bahamian authorities have also taken control of cryptocurrency assets held by FTX Digital Markets, The Bahamas-based FTX unit that filed for Chapter 15 bankruptcy protection Tuesday.

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Source: Slashdot – FTX Owes Nearly .1 Billion to Top 50 of Its 1M Creditors. Celebrity Endorsers Sued

Long-time Slashdot reader gordm shares an interesting video from the United Nations Climate Change Conference. “At COP27, Tobias Holle (activist with Youth Strike for Climate) debated Mark Nelson (founder of Radiant Energy Fund) as to whether nuclear power can help us tackle climate change.”

The event took place at the International Atomic Energy Agency’s “Atoms for Climate” pavillion, where the IAEA’s climate advisor presented the debate’s topic as “Nuclear Energy: Climate Friend or Foe?” (and introduced the two debaters as “enthusiastic young climate champions”). The Youth Strike for Climate activist objected to commiting humanity to 1 million years of maintaining nuclear waste. But he also argued that extreme weather was creating additional security risks, that the per-kilowatt hour cost was economically prohibitive, that nuclear plants were politically unpopular — and that anyways, they take too long to build giving our current climate crisis. “We need fast solutions.”

The Radiant Energy founder disagreed, arguing over specific statistics and insisting that nuclear energy should be considered a low-carbon energy solution, and also safe. (He pointed out that Chernobyl’s nuclear plant actually continued operating for 14 years after its 1986 nuclear accident.) Interestingly he also argued that in the Netherlands there’s a museum of nuclear waste — a science museum attached to their nuclear facility — “where they don’t just have the high-level waste, they have the highest part of high-level waste, the most dangerous isotopes, separated from the nuclear fuel. The most radioactive stuff — very hot for 500 years — and they have a tour where you can walk over it, and you can feel the warmth from the floor from the radioactive isotopes….

“You can absolutely manage the safe, secure, and even educational storage of the most radioactive isotopes… We know very well how to manage it.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Debate at COP27: Nuclear Energy, Climate Friend or Foe?

Through 2020 America’s professional lives “had taken on the overtones of a secular religion,” argues a writer in the Washington Post, with jobs forming “a primary way to find meaning in the world and a crucial part of our identity…. Even precarious, low-paying gigs were valorized as ‘hustle culture,’ representing freedom to perform labor on our terms.”

But then…

Fast-forward to fall 2022. The number of people quitting, while down from the peak, remains at the highest level since the 1970s. White-collar workers don’t want to give up working remotely. Low-paying sectors such as the hospitality industry can’t find enough people willing to work for the wages on offer. Union organizing and strikes have been on an upswing…. [W]hat’s increasingly clear is that the March 2020 decision to partially close down the American economy shattered Americans’ dysfunctional, profoundly unequal relationship with work like nothing in decades. And even if there was great discomfort in a shutdown that severed almost every one of us from assumptions about how we earn a living, we also found an unexpected opportunity: to remake our relationship with the labor that fills our days….

All of it — the lockdowns, the disease, the sudden change in household functioning and how or whether we worked at all — amounted to a massive psychological shock, leading many to ask why labor looms so large in our psyches. “It really was an opportunity — an unwelcome opportunity — to take a look at the mad scramble that many of us have just assumed was normal,” said Kate Shindle, who as president of the Actors’ Equity Association represents a particularly hard-hit industry. Then, when the economy unexpectedly boomed back, Americans were poised to pivot. As many had recognized, it was one thing to seek meaning in work but another to see our lives subsumed by it — and for what? A less-than-adequate paycheck? A job that could literally kill you? “Maybe the poor safety net really kept people from analyzing the role of work in their lives,” David Blustein, author of “The Importance of Work in an Age of Uncertainty” and a professor at Boston College’s Lynch School of Education and Human Development, told me. “Maybe the American work ethic was a form of survival….”

Over and over, when people spoke to journalists, including me, about why they made changes in their professional lives since March 2020, they told us they liked receiving better wages when they switched employers. But even more, they wanted greater control over the terms of their labor…. An increased level of remote work, likely in a hybrid format, is almost certainly here to stay, says Nick Bloom, a professor of economics at Stanford University, who has studied the topic for decades. Employees want it, technological advances continue to make it easier, and companies that forbid it completely are likely to find themselves at a disadvantage….

The past two and a half years brought immense upheaval, and we’ll be struggling to process the resulting changes for years. But it’s undeniable that some of these shifts were long overdue. Workers are highly unlikely to forget what we learned: namely, that our jobs are much more flexible than we thought.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Did the Pandemic Change Our Attitudes About Work?

The BBC reports:
Leprosy bacteria may hold the secret to safely repairing and regenerating the body, researchers at the University of Edinburgh say. Animal experiments have uncovered the bacteria’s remarkable ability to almost double the size of livers by stimulating healthy growth.

It is a sneakily selfish act that gives the bacteria more tissue to infect. But working out how they do it could lead to new age-defying therapies, the scientists say….

The bacterium that causes [leprosy], Mycobacterium leprae, has other, unusual properties, including the ability to perform “biological alchemy”, converting one type of bodily tissue into another, which are fascinating scientists. So the researchers turned to another animals that catches the disease — armadillos. The experiments, which were performed in the US, showed the infection heads to the armoured animals’ livers, where it performed a controlled hijacking of the organ to reprogram it for its own purpose…. You might expect such growth to be defective or even cancerous — but detailed analysis showed it was both healthy and functional, complete with the usual array of blood vessels and bile ducts.

“It is kind of mind-blowing,” Prof Rambukkana said. “How do they do that? There is no cell therapy that can do that.”
The bacteria appears to be “rewinding the developmental clock” on the liver cells, the BBC writes, transforming them into a younger, faster-growing state. “The hope is the approach can be harnessed for repairing the livers of people waiting for a transplant — or even to reverse some of the damage caused by ageing elsewhere in the body.”

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader Z00L00K for submitting the story!

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Leprosy Bacteria Might Be Able To Regenerate Organs

NVIDIA has responded to a class action lawsuit over melting RTX 4090 GPU adapters. The Verge reports:

Weeks after Nvidia announced that it was investigating reports that the power cables for its RTX 4090 graphics card were melting and burning, the company says it may know why: they just weren’t plugged in all the way.

In a post to its customer support forum on Friday, Nvidia says that it’s still investigating the reports, but that its findings “suggest” an insecure connector has been a common issue. It also says that it’s gotten around 50 reports of the issue.
Nvidia’s flagship card uses what’s known as a 12VHPWR power connector, a new standard that isn’t natively supported by most of the power supplies that people already have in their PCs. Because of that, it ships an adapter — or “power dongle,” as Friday’s post calls it — in the box. Users’ initial reports blamed the adapter, with some saying that the melting cable had damaged their $1,599 GPU as well….

GamersNexus, an outlet that’s respected in the PC-building community for its rigorous testing, basically came to the same conclusion earlier this week. A video posted on Wednesday by the outlet, which inspected damaged adapters sent in by viewers and done extensive testing and reporting on the issue, showed that the connectors had wear lines, implying that they hadn’t been completely inserted into the slot. GamersNexus even says that some people seem to have missed a full connection by several millimeters. Its video shows that a loose connection could cause the plug to heat up dramatically, if it were plugged in poorly and tilted at an angle…..

[A]n unnamed spokesperson for the company told GamersNexus on Friday that “any issues with the burned cable or GPU, regardless of cable or GPU, it will be processed” for a replacement.

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot for submitting the article.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Nvidia on Melting RTX 4090 Cables: You’re Plugging It In Wrong