text:
It is always a memorable experience to drive down a country road on a beautiful fall day, suddenly round a corner, and come upon a landmark slate roof. The 1880 barn shown above sits by itself on a lonely rural road near Brandon, Vermont. It has silently impressed passers-by for 124 years at the time of this writing (2003) and is still looking gooda mix of Vermont purple and unfading green slates.
One of the unique characteristics of slate roofs is that they can be installed in decorative styles using slates of various colors. These decorative roofs can be inscribed with installation dates or with words, names, or abstract designs. The "Harmony Barn" shown below is on the campus of Slippery Rock University in Pennsylvania at the "Harmony Homestead" (also known as the Macoskey Center), located on Harmony Road. The slates are Vermont recycled sea green slates with a Pennsylvania black design. The black slates were generously donated by Williams and Sons Slate and Tile of Wind Gap, PA (phone: 610-863-4161).
The easiest procedure to use when installing an inscription or design on a slate roof is to draw a schematic of the roof beforehand. Make sure the schematic shows every slate in its proper proportion. The dimensions of the roof as well as the size of the slates must be known beforehand in order to do thisa job made easier by the use of a computer (although a computer was obviously not available in the 1800s when many dates were installed on slate roofs). Once the schematic has been created, the artist can play around with various designs until he or she has settled on one that looks good. Then it is only a matter of referring closely to the schematic during installation while using slates of contrasting colors in order to make the design appear on the roof. This doesn't add a lot of time to the job, but it does create a lifetime landmark roof that can live long after the craftsmen who installed it have quietly passed away.
Read an article about Liam Tower's moose inscription roof.
Read more about roof designs in the Slate Roof Bible, 3rd edition!

lowercased:
it is always a memorable experience to drive down a country road on a beautiful fall day, suddenly round a corner, and come upon a landmark slate roof. the 1880 barn shown above sits by itself on a lonely rural road near brandon, vermont. it has silently impressed passers-by for 124 years at the time of this writing (2003) and is still looking gooda mix of vermont purple and unfading green slates.
one of the unique characteristics of slate roofs is that they can be installed in decorative styles using slates of various colors. these decorative roofs can be inscribed with installation dates or with words, names, or abstract designs. the "harmony barn" shown below is on the campus of slippery rock university in pennsylvania at the "harmony homestead" (also known as the macoskey center), located on harmony road. the slates are vermont recycled sea green slates with a pennsylvania black design. the black slates were generously donated by williams and sons slate and tile of wind gap, pa (phone: 610-863-4161).
the easiest procedure to use when installing an inscription or design on a slate roof is to draw a schematic of the roof beforehand. make sure the schematic shows every slate in its proper proportion. the dimensions of the roof as well as the size of the slates must be known beforehand in order to do thisa job made easier by the use of a computer (although a computer was obviously not available in the 1800s when many dates were installed on slate roofs). once the schematic has been created, the artist can play around with various designs until he or she has settled on one that looks good. then it is only a matter of referring closely to the schematic during installation while using slates of contrasting colors in order to make the design appear on the roof. this doesn't add a lot of time to the job, but it does create a lifetime landmark roof that can live long after the craftsmen who installed it have quietly passed away.
read an article about liam tower's moose inscription roof.
read more about roof designs in the slate roof bible, 3rd edition!


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Pistol ammo is for sale every day at GunBroker.com. You can buy handgun ammo through one of the many sellers listing their products here at GunBroker.com, the world’s largest gun auction site. Handgun ammo can range from popular 9mm to 45 ACP cartridges and beyond. Revolver and pistol ammunition is made by a huge variety of manufacturers like Smith & Wesson, Federal, Remington and Winchester, among many others. GunBroker.com sellers update their auction listings frequently, so if you’re looking to buy pistol ammo or ammo storage, check back often.
Speer Lawman .41 Action Express 25 Count.

lowercased:
pistol ammo is for sale every day at gunbroker.com. you can buy handgun ammo through one of the many sellers listing their products here at gunbroker.com, the world’s largest gun auction site. handgun ammo can range from popular 9mm to 45 acp cartridges and beyond. revolver and pistol ammunition is made by a huge variety of manufacturers like smith & wesson, federal, remington and winchester, among many others. gunbroker.com sellers update their auction listings frequently, so if you’re looking to buy pistol ammo or ammo storage, check back often.
speer lawman .41 action express 25 count.


text:
Country singer Daryle Singletary died suddenly Monday morning.
Singletary died at his home in Nashville. The cause of death is not immediately known, but it was unexpected.
Daryle had 5 Top 40 hits, including "I Let Her Lie" and "Amen Kind of Love." He also scored a number 4 song with "Too Much Fun."
He performed Friday in Alabama at The Rodeo Club and as far as we can tell there were no signs of trouble or health complications.
He was not a Bro Country guy ... his roots were more traditional country. He once said, "I've been fortunate to be able to always keep it real and not have to compromise."

lowercased:
country singer daryle singletary died suddenly monday morning.
singletary died at his home in nashville. the cause of death is not immediately known, but it was unexpected.
daryle had 5 top 40 hits, including "i let her lie" and "amen kind of love." he also scored a number 4 song with "too much fun."
he performed friday in alabama at the rodeo club and as far as we can tell there were no signs of trouble or health complications.
he was not a bro country guy ... his roots were more traditional country. he once said, "i've been fortunate to be able to always keep it real and not have to compromise."


text:
This product had a total of 1,617 reviews as of our last analysis date on Apr 6 2019.
Love the price use every day in my smoothies for many benefits!!
Still seeing bugs but less of them.
Boxed was fine and the product busted everywhere inside.
However, this would make it so they wouldn’t come back.
The proof is in the pudding, i’ll have to wait and see.
If anyone suspects they are having issues long-term for some reason, please be checked out by a provider to make sure nothing else could be wrong in your system and you can safely use de or bentonite clay.
Did not come with a scoop.
The bag looks like it got repackaged since it does not look like the picture.
However it when it was packaged some got loose and there was powder all over the bag.
I dust everything, let it sit for a few hours then vacuum it up.

lowercased:
this product had a total of 1,617 reviews as of our last analysis date on apr 6 2019.
love the price use every day in my smoothies for many benefits!!
still seeing bugs but less of them.
boxed was fine and the product busted everywhere inside.
however, this would make it so they wouldn’t come back.
the proof is in the pudding, i’ll have to wait and see.
if anyone suspects they are having issues long-term for some reason, please be checked out by a provider to make sure nothing else could be wrong in your system and you can safely use de or bentonite clay.
did not come with a scoop.
the bag looks like it got repackaged since it does not look like the picture.
however it when it was packaged some got loose and there was powder all over the bag.
i dust everything, let it sit for a few hours then vacuum it up.


text:
Xmport Global Trading is an international trading company deeply involved in the export and import of a wide range of products include chemicals, building materials, dairy products, leather, commercial kitchenwares and fabric. As a private company based in Melbourne, Australia, we are always eager to develop new trading partners by negotiating with Buyers and manufacturers to achieve a common goal.
While we continue to maintain healthier relationships, we make it our core responsibility to help our clients—buyers and manufacturers– locate high-quality products that will be of immense value.
We possess the global strength to source for high-quality products and at the right prices too from different parts of the world—China, Vietnam, Turkey, Thailand, UK, Iran, India, etc.
Our expert trading teams have several years of experience sourcing products from a wide range of international origins, and finding the lowest prices is one of the easiest on their list of to-do.
Most of our traders are natives of the countries with which we have existing business relationships with, which gives them an edge to supply the right products for our clients’ needs.
We extend our frontiers by allowing new investors come on board from any country and have a discussion we us, concerning their products and also explore opportunities to gain exposure.
We are a solution-based enterprise and our business is hinged on the trust and support of our trading partners.

lowercased:
xmport global trading is an international trading company deeply involved in the export and import of a wide range of products include chemicals, building materials, dairy products, leather, commercial kitchenwares and fabric. as a private company based in melbourne, australia, we are always eager to develop new trading partners by negotiating with buyers and manufacturers to achieve a common goal.
while we continue to maintain healthier relationships, we make it our core responsibility to help our clients—buyers and manufacturers– locate high-quality products that will be of immense value.
we possess the global strength to source for high-quality products and at the right prices too from different parts of the world—china, vietnam, turkey, thailand, uk, iran, india, etc.
our expert trading teams have several years of experience sourcing products from a wide range of international origins, and finding the lowest prices is one of the easiest on their list of to-do.
most of our traders are natives of the countries with which we have existing business relationships with, which gives them an edge to supply the right products for our clients’ needs.
we extend our frontiers by allowing new investors come on board from any country and have a discussion we us, concerning their products and also explore opportunities to gain exposure.
we are a solution-based enterprise and our business is hinged on the trust and support of our trading partners.


text:
Australia is considered one of the most highly developed nations in the world, according to the Human Development Index, and thanks to its well-educated population and burgeoning middle class, it’s a territory that more and more businesses are considering. If you’re thinking about expanding your business globally, then the nation should certainly be on your list, as it is known for its impressive economic growth, high standards of living and demand for quality produce.
Here, we offer an overview of the country’s thriving economy and share advice and information on how to start a business in Australia, whether you’re an entrepreneur looking to expand or a local businessperson ready to take on the challenge of starting up their own Aussie company.
Australia’s economy has grown every year for the past 26 years and shows no sign of slowing down.
Unlike some of the world’s biggest players, such as the United States, the United Kingdom, and China, Australia has unparalleled levels of economic growth. In fact, the country’s economy has grown every year for the past 26 years and shows no sign of slowing down. Managing to avoid the recession ten years ago, the country is now home to the world’s 13th largest economy, in part thanks to business and government spending, whilst large-scale exports of its agricultural produce and aggressive financial sector have allowed Australia to remain buoyant for decades.
The country saw inflation levels rise to 1.9% in 2017, but real-time wages also grew by 2.1%, which is rare in the Western world, however, a high level of household debt (which currently stands at around 100% of GDP) has been criticized by the IMF. Unemployment is relatively low in the country at just 5.6%, and the rate continues to fall year on year, but the country’s aging population some climate change issues (like the Great Coral Reef, which has lost 20% of its color due to bleaching) which must be addressed, and those challenges will no doubt be costly.
Nevertheless, if you’re thinking about starting a new business venture, then Australia remains a popular choice, particularly for investors from LATAM markets, thanks to generous trade agreements, like the newly-forged relationship between Peru and Australia. In addition, Australia is one of the world’s best-connected countries in terms of trade, with close relationships with Asia and the Middle East, allowing for significant trade deals and exports.
Incorporating a business in Australia is straightforward, and requires you to register as a sole trader, a partnership, a company or a trust.
Incorporating a business in Australia is straightforward, and requires you to register as a sole trader, a partnership, a company or a trust, depending on the size, scope, and nature of your operations. The good news is that business structures can be changed, so you’re not tied into one – businesses are free to change their business structure as their organization develops.
If you want to form a business in Australia, then you’ll need to apply for a VISA, either a Business Innovation and Investment visa or a Business Talent visa if you already own a business overseas and have an annual business turnover of at least AU$3 million. You can apply for these VISAs through the Department of Home Affairs’ SkillSelect website, or use an agent to apply on your behalf to increase your chances of acceptance. Once you have been approved, you will be able to enjoy the same benefits as Australian nationals when launching a business within the territory, though you may be required to pay additional tax if you’re planning to take an income out of the country. Do your research and work with an accountant to be sure.
Whilst there is no minimum capital requirement to register a business in Australia, other than a couple of hundred dollars to register your business with the ASIC, it pays to have the funds to hire staff and market your business from day one. According to Payscale, the average salary for a business development manager in Australia is around A$80,000 per year, but you may choose to hire an expert remotely, or even consider working with a Professional Employer Organisation (PEO) to employ talent on behalf without the upfront costs of recruitment and human resources.
A business bank account is essential for accounting and tax purposes, although sole traders may choose to bank from their personal account instead. In order to open an account, your business must be registered in Australia and hold an ABN/ACN registration number, and you will need to visit a banking branch with Proof of ID (such as a passport, photo ID card, driving license, etc), a certificate of incorporation or business registration, and an ABN/ACN registered office address. You do not need to be a resident of Australia to open an account, or even be in Australia to open a bank account, although the company must be registered in the country.
The four most popular banks within the country are the National Australian Bank, the Commonwealth Bank, the ANZ Bank, and Westpac. We recommend comparing each to see which offers the lowest banking fees, charges and interest rates before getting started.
Once you have set up your business, you’ll need to think about ways in which you can find new customers and boost your presence within the territory. Networking in the country differs to that in other nations, as Australians are known for their laid-back attitudes and relaxed mentalities. It is important to get to grips with the cultural differences between your nation and Australia so that you can forge meaningful business relationships and sell more of your products or services.
Foreign investment in Australia has exploded in recent years, and according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, Australia’s foreign direct investment (FDI) stock reached A$849 billion last year. As more businesses from the United States, Asia, and Europe enter the market, we will no doubt see Australia become a more competitive nation – so marketing products and services to appeal to as wide an audience as possible is important. Hiring a professional who understands the market is key to your business development, so consider incorporating your company as soon as possible, and get to work on growing your brand awareness and selling your products.
Australia is one of the most exciting territories to form a company, and its ever-growing economy is attractive to many entrepreneurs. From its thriving agricultural sector to growing FinTech market, expanding into Australia unlocks real opportunities for businesses just like your own.
If you have any questions about expanding into Australia, or would like assistance in doing so, do not hesitate to contact our Australian CEO Craig Dempsey at [email protected] or visit our site to learn about our range of services, including company formation, accounting, and visa processing.

lowercased:
australia is considered one of the most highly developed nations in the world, according to the human development index, and thanks to its well-educated population and burgeoning middle class, it’s a territory that more and more businesses are considering. if you’re thinking about expanding your business globally, then the nation should certainly be on your list, as it is known for its impressive economic growth, high standards of living and demand for quality produce.
here, we offer an overview of the country’s thriving economy and share advice and information on how to start a business in australia, whether you’re an entrepreneur looking to expand or a local businessperson ready to take on the challenge of starting up their own aussie company.
australia’s economy has grown every year for the past 26 years and shows no sign of slowing down.
unlike some of the world’s biggest players, such as the united states, the united kingdom, and china, australia has unparalleled levels of economic growth. in fact, the country’s economy has grown every year for the past 26 years and shows no sign of slowing down. managing to avoid the recession ten years ago, the country is now home to the world’s 13th largest economy, in part thanks to business and government spending, whilst large-scale exports of its agricultural produce and aggressive financial sector have allowed australia to remain buoyant for decades.
the country saw inflation levels rise to 1.9% in 2017, but real-time wages also grew by 2.1%, which is rare in the western world, however, a high level of household debt (which currently stands at around 100% of gdp) has been criticized by the imf. unemployment is relatively low in the country at just 5.6%, and the rate continues to fall year on year, but the country’s aging population some climate change issues (like the great coral reef, which has lost 20% of its color due to bleaching) which must be addressed, and those challenges will no doubt be costly.
nevertheless, if you’re thinking about starting a new business venture, then australia remains a popular choice, particularly for investors from latam markets, thanks to generous trade agreements, like the newly-forged relationship between peru and australia. in addition, australia is one of the world’s best-connected countries in terms of trade, with close relationships with asia and the middle east, allowing for significant trade deals and exports.
incorporating a business in australia is straightforward, and requires you to register as a sole trader, a partnership, a company or a trust.
incorporating a business in australia is straightforward, and requires you to register as a sole trader, a partnership, a company or a trust, depending on the size, scope, and nature of your operations. the good news is that business structures can be changed, so you’re not tied into one – businesses are free to change their business structure as their organization develops.
if you want to form a business in australia, then you’ll need to apply for a visa, either a business innovation and investment visa or a business talent visa if you already own a business overseas and have an annual business turnover of at least au$3 million. you can apply for these visas through the department of home affairs’ skillselect website, or use an agent to apply on your behalf to increase your chances of acceptance. once you have been approved, you will be able to enjoy the same benefits as australian nationals when launching a business within the territory, though you may be required to pay additional tax if you’re planning to take an income out of the country. do your research and work with an accountant to be sure.
whilst there is no minimum capital requirement to register a business in australia, other than a couple of hundred dollars to register your business with the asic, it pays to have the funds to hire staff and market your business from day one. according to payscale, the average salary for a business development manager in australia is around a$80,000 per year, but you may choose to hire an expert remotely, or even consider working with a professional employer organisation (peo) to employ talent on behalf without the upfront costs of recruitment and human resources.
a business bank account is essential for accounting and tax purposes, although sole traders may choose to bank from their personal account instead. in order to open an account, your business must be registered in australia and hold an abn/acn registration number, and you will need to visit a banking branch with proof of id (such as a passport, photo id card, driving license, etc), a certificate of incorporation or business registration, and an abn/acn registered office address. you do not need to be a resident of australia to open an account, or even be in australia to open a bank account, although the company must be registered in the country.
the four most popular banks within the country are the national australian bank, the commonwealth bank, the anz bank, and westpac. we recommend comparing each to see which offers the lowest banking fees, charges and interest rates before getting started.
once you have set up your business, you’ll need to think about ways in which you can find new customers and boost your presence within the territory. networking in the country differs to that in other nations, as australians are known for their laid-back attitudes and relaxed mentalities. it is important to get to grips with the cultural differences between your nation and australia so that you can forge meaningful business relationships and sell more of your products or services.
foreign investment in australia has exploded in recent years, and according to the australian bureau of statistics, australia’s foreign direct investment (fdi) stock reached a$849 billion last year. as more businesses from the united states, asia, and europe enter the market, we will no doubt see australia become a more competitive nation – so marketing products and services to appeal to as wide an audience as possible is important. hiring a professional who understands the market is key to your business development, so consider incorporating your company as soon as possible, and get to work on growing your brand awareness and selling your products.
australia is one of the most exciting territories to form a company, and its ever-growing economy is attractive to many entrepreneurs. from its thriving agricultural sector to growing fintech market, expanding into australia unlocks real opportunities for businesses just like your own.
if you have any questions about expanding into australia, or would like assistance in doing so, do not hesitate to contact our australian ceo craig dempsey at [email protected] or visit our site to learn about our range of services, including company formation, accounting, and visa processing.


text:
Moo is one of my favorite online stores for printed materials. I have ordered business cards from them and was so impressed – their graphics are out of this world and their customer service is amazing.
Right now, through ShopAtHome.com, you can get a free sample pack of 10 business cards, plus free standard shipping anywhere Moo.com ships to, which is the U.S., U.K, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Netherlands, Australia & Ireland!
When you order the MOO Business Card Sampler, you’ll be going through the same customization process as a normal order, but you’ll be sampling just 10 cards. It’s quick and easy, and the cards are the same professional quality as a regular Business Card order.
To start creating your FREE business card sample pack now, just click on the Free Moo Samples box (top left) on the ShopAtHome list of free samples.

lowercased:
moo is one of my favorite online stores for printed materials. i have ordered business cards from them and was so impressed – their graphics are out of this world and their customer service is amazing.
right now, through shopathome.com, you can get a free sample pack of 10 business cards, plus free standard shipping anywhere moo.com ships to, which is the u.s., u.k, canada, france, germany, italy, spain, netherlands, australia & ireland!
when you order the moo business card sampler, you’ll be going through the same customization process as a normal order, but you’ll be sampling just 10 cards. it’s quick and easy, and the cards are the same professional quality as a regular business card order.
to start creating your free business card sample pack now, just click on the free moo samples box (top left) on the shopathome list of free samples.


text:
In Mercer’s recent Global Talent Trends Study, only five percent of HR leaders reported that HR is seen as a strategic partner in their organization. Furthermore, over 80 percent indicated that their talent processes need an overhaul. How did the gulf between what HR intends to be (a strategic partner) and how HR is perceived (an undervalued resource) get so big?
Thank you for your interest in Mercer’s "HR Transformation - Why HR Needs to Change" article. If you do not have your pop-up blocker enabled, you will be prompted by your browser to download the report or to view it in a new window. In addition, you will receive an email from Mercer shortly with a link to access the article.
To receive the complete "HR Transformation - Why HR Needs to Change" whitepaper, please fill out the form below.

lowercased:
in mercer’s recent global talent trends study, only five percent of hr leaders reported that hr is seen as a strategic partner in their organization. furthermore, over 80 percent indicated that their talent processes need an overhaul. how did the gulf between what hr intends to be (a strategic partner) and how hr is perceived (an undervalued resource) get so big?
thank you for your interest in mercer’s "hr transformation - why hr needs to change" article. if you do not have your pop-up blocker enabled, you will be prompted by your browser to download the report or to view it in a new window. in addition, you will receive an email from mercer shortly with a link to access the article.
to receive the complete "hr transformation - why hr needs to change" whitepaper, please fill out the form below.


text:
TechCrunch is reporting that GraphQL, the Facebook-incubated data query language, is moving into its own open-source foundation. "Like so many other similar open-source foundations, the aptly named GraphQL Foundation will be hosted by the Linux Foundation." From the report: Facebook announced GraphQL back in 2012 and open sourced it in 2015. Today, it's being used by companies that range from Airbnb to Audi, GitHub, Netflix, Shopify, Twitter and The New York Times . At Facebook itself, the GraphQL API powers billions of API calls every day. At its core, GraphQL is basically a language for querying databases from client-side applications and a set of specifications for how the API on the backend should present this data to the client. It presents an alternative to REST-based APIs and promises to offer developers more flexibility and the ability to write faster and more secure applications. Virtually every major programming language now supports it through a variety of libraries.
"GraphQL has redefined how developers work with APIs and client-server interactions. We look forward to working with the GraphQL community to become an independent foundation, draft their governance and continue to foster the growth and adoption of GraphQL," said Chris Aniszczyk, vice president of Developer Relations at the Linux Foundation. As Aniszczyk noted, the new foundation will have an open governance model, similar to that of other Linux Foundation projects. The exact details are still a work in progress, though. The list of founding members is also still in flux, but for now, it includes Airbnb, Apollo, Coursera, Elementl, Facebook, GitHub, Hasura, Prisma, Shopify and Twitter.
Microsoft is using Minecraft to help employees get acquainted with a refresh of the company's campus in Redmond, Washington. CNBC reports: Earlier this year, Microsoft enlisted Blockworks, a company that uses Minecraft's digital building blocks for designing real-world projects, to create a miniature rendering of the campus facelift, which is scheduled for completion in 2022. They're using graphics that are far more immersive than two-dimensional photos and videos. While Minecraft was designed for gamers, its immersive nature and the ability to quickly move around and construct edifices makes it easy to see how new buildings will look when inserted into an existing landscape. [James Delaney, a managing director at Blockworks] said Minecraft forces designers to sacrifice some accuracy because structures in real life don't always have the game's squared-off look, but the speed and ease of use more than made up for those deficiencies. It might take just 10 minutes to wrap up a single building, he said. Microsoft employees -- and anyone else with the education edition of Minecraft -- can now take a digital tour of the new campus and see how plans are developing. Outside of Microsoft, that access requires a subscription to Office 365 Education.
Corporate Vice President of Cortana Javier Soltero is leaving the company after being in charge of Cortana for less than a year. "Soltero joined Microsoft when it bought at the end of 2014 Acompli, a mobile mail startup in San Francisco which he co-founded and led," reports ZDNet. "After joining Microsoft four years ago, Soltero spearheaded Outlook Mobile, then all of Outlook." Before being appointed to run Cortana in March of this year, he was the head of strategy for Office. From the report: Last month, Microsoft officials confirmed that Cortana was one of the technologies that management was moving from AI + Research to the Experiences & Devices team, which is under Executive Vice President Rajesh Jha. Microsoft is in the midst of trying to reposition Cortana from a standalone digital assistant to more of an assistance aide. Given the strong focus on home and work productivity by the Microsoft 365 and Office teams, officials seemingly decided it made sense for Cortana to be situated in that group. I've heard Soltero is going to go back to doing entrepreneurial activities once he leaves by year-end. Perry Clarke is going to be working with Soltero on transition plans in the next couple of months, sources are telling me. Clarke has been with Microsoft engineering since 1996, when he led Exchange. He also has been a Microsoft Distinguished Engineer for the past several years. I've heard talk that Microsoft ultimately is looking to bring Cortana and Search together into a single engineering team.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: If you talk to experts on election security (I studied with several of them in graduate school) they'll tell you that we're nowhere close to being ready for online voting. "Mobile voting is a horrific idea," said election security expert Joe Hall when I asked him about a West Virginia experiment with blockchain-based mobile voting back in August. But on Tuesday, The New York Times published an opinion piece claiming the opposite. "Building a workable, scalable, and inclusive online voting system is now possible, thanks to blockchain technologies," writes Alex Tapscott, whom the Times describes as co-founder of the Blockchain Research Institute. Tapscott is wrong -- and dangerously so. Online voting would be a huge threat to the integrity of our elections -- and to public faith in election outcomes.
Tapscott focuses on the idea that blockchain technology would allow people to vote anonymously while still being able to verify that their vote was included in the final total. Even assuming this is mathematically possible -- and I think it probably is -- this idea ignores the many, many ways that foreign governments could compromise an online vote without breaking the core cryptographic algorithms. For example, foreign governments could hack into the computer systems that governments use to generate and distribute cryptographic credentials to voters. They could bribe election officials to supply them with copies of voters' credentials. They could hack into the PCs or smartphones voters use to cast their votes. They could send voters phishing emails to trick them into revealing their voting credentials -- or simply trick them into thinking they've cast a vote when they haven't.
A Wall Street Journal article published this morning reported that Foxconn is looking to transfer some of its Chinese workers to Wisconsin in time for its new factory opening in Racine. The article says that these workers would likely be engineers and would fill a gap in prospective talent due to a tight labor market. Foxconn has since denied these claims. The Verge reports: In a comment to Gizmodo, Foxconn denied that it was recruiting Chinese workers. The company said: "We can categorically state that the assertion that we are recruiting Chinese personnel to staff our Wisconsin project is untrue. Our recruitment priority remains Wisconsin first and we continue to focus on hiring and training workers from throughout Wisconsin. We will supplement that recruitment from other U.S. locations as required."
In November 2017, Wisconsin pledged $3 billion in subsidies for the Taiwan-based company if it opted to open the factory in Wisconsin. In return, Foxconn said it would create 13,000 jobs and invest $10 billion. (The state subsidy came out to $230,000 per job.) The Wall Street Journal report suggests that the company is struggling to find qualified engineers in the area, though, as the unemployment rate in the state reached a record low at 3 percent, along with a recent national low at 3.7 percent.
The cybercrime wing of Pakistan's Federal Investigation Agency has said data from "almost all" Pakistani banks was stolen in a recent security breach. FIA Cybercrimes Director retired Capt Mohammad Shoaib told Geo News that hackers based outside the country had breached the security systems of several local banks. "The hackers have stolen large amounts of money from people's accounts," he added. From a report: He said the FIA has written to all banks, and a meeting of the banks' heads and security managements is being called. The meeting will look into ways the security infrastructure of banks can be bolstered. "Banks are the custodians of the money people have stored in them," Shoaib said. "They are also responsible if their security features are so weak that they result in pilferage." It wasn't immediately clear when exactly the security breach took place. According to Shoaib, more than 100 cases are being investigated by the agency in connection with the breach.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire's efforts to rally his European Union colleagues around a new tax on tech giants fell short, as countries skeptical of the plan doubled down on their opposition, and others, including Italy, said they'll push ahead with their own plans. Ministers from Denmark, Ireland and Sweden said they couldn't support the tax in its current form, casting doubt on the proposal's future, since unanimity is required to pass taxes in the EU. The plan on the table would impose a 3 percent levy on the European sales of the likes of Amazon and Facebook. A number of countries are already imposing taxes of their own, increasing the risk of fragmentation in the single market. Finance Minister Giovanni Tria said an Italian tax will kick in next year if there's no broader agreement by then. Spain and the U.K. have already announced their own levies.
AT&T will alert a little more than a dozen customers within the next week or so that their service will be terminated due to copyright infringement, news outlet Axios reported, citing sources familiar with its plans. From the report: It's the first time AT&T has discontinued customer service over piracy allegations since having shaped its own piracy policies last year, which is significant given it just became one of America's major media companies. AT&T owns a content network after its purchase of Time Warner earlier this year, an entity now called WarnerMedia. Content networks are typically responsible for issuing these types of allegations to internet service providers (ISPs) for them to address with their customers.
Oracle's Internet Intelligence division has confirmed today the findings of a recently published academic paper that accused China of "hijacking the vital internet backbone of western countries." From a report: The research paper was authored by researchers from the US Naval War College and Tel Aviv University and it made quite a few waves online after it was published. Researchers accused China Telecom, one of China's biggest state-owned internet service providers, of hijacking and detouring internet traffic through its normally-closed internet infrastructure. Some security experts contested the research paper's findings because it didn't come from an authoritative voice in the world of internet BGP hijacks, but also because the paper touched on many politically sensitive topics, such as China's cyber-espionage activities and how China used BGP hijacks as a way to circumvent the China-US cyber pact of 2015. But today, Doug Madory, Director of Oracle's Internet Analysis division (formerly Dyn), confirmed that China Telecom has, indeed, engaged in internet traffic "misdirection." "I don't intend to address the paper's claims around the motivations of these actions," said Madori. "However, there is truth to the assertion that China Telecom (whether intentionally or not) has misdirected internet traffic (including out of the United States) in recent years."
A lump of metal in a building near Paris has long served as the global standard for the kilogram. That's about to change. From a report: Later this month, at the international General Conference on Weights and Measures, to be held in France, delegates are expected to vote to get rid of this single physical specimen and instead plump to use a fundamental measurement -- to be defined in terms of an electric current -- in order to define the mass of an object. The king of kilograms is about to be dethroned. And crucially much of the key work that has led to the toppling of the Paris kilogram has been carried out at the National Physical Laboratory where the late Bryan Kibble invented the basic concepts of the device that will replace that ingot in the Pavillon de Breteuil. The Kibble balance works by measuring the electric current that is required to produce an electromagnetic force equal to the gravitational force acting on a mass. A second stage allows the electromagnetic force to be determined in terms of a fundamental constant known as the Planck constant which will, in future, be used to define a kilogram. These machines will provide the standard for weighing objects -- and that means no more dusting of old lumps of alloy to ensure they stay pure and accurate. [...] "One key reason for doing this work is to provide international security," says Robinson. "If the Pavillon de Breteuil burned down tomorrow and the kilogram in its vaults melted, we would have no reference left for the world's metric weights system. There would be chaos. The current definition of the kilogram is the weight of that cylinder in Paris, after all." [...] Another major motivation for the replacement of le grand K is the need to be able to carry out increasingly more and more precise measurements. "Pharmaceutical companies will soon be wanting to use ingredients that will have to be measured in terms of a few millionths or even billionths of a gram," says Prior. "We need to be prepared to weigh substances with that kind of accuracy." Suggested reading: A thread on Twitter which discusses SI units and the redefinition of the kilogram.
If extraterrestrial intelligence exists somewhere in our galaxy, a new MIT study proposes that laser technology on Earth could, in principle, be fashioned into something of a planetary porch light -- a beacon strong enough to attract attention from as far as 20,000 light years away. From a report: The research, which author James Clark calls a "feasibility study," appears today in The Astrophysical Journal. The findings suggest that if a high-powered 1- to 2-megawatt laser were focused through a massive 30- to 45-meter telescope and aimed out into space, the combination would produce a beam of infrared radiation strong enough to stand out from the sun's energy. Such a signal could be detectable by alien astronomers performing a cursory survey of our section of the Milky Way -- especially if those astronomers live in nearby systems, such as around Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to Earth, or TRAPPIST-1, a star about 40 light-years away that hosts seven exoplanets, three of which are potentially habitable. If the signal is spotted from either of these nearby systems, the study finds, the same megawatt laser could be used to send a brief message in the form of pulses similar to Morse code.
AMD on Monday revealed the Zen 2 architecture for the family of processors that it will launch in the coming years, starting with 2019. The move is a follow-up to the competitive Zen designs that AMD launched in March 2017, and it promises two-times improvement in performance throughput. From a report: AMD hopes the Zen 2 processors will keep it ahead of or at parity with Intel, the world's biggest maker of PC processors. The earlier Zen designs enabled chips that could process 52 percent more instructions per clock cycle than the previous generation. Zen has spawned AMD's most competitive chips in a decade, including Ryzen for the desktop, Threadripper (with up to 32 cores) for gamers, Ryzen Mobile for laptops, and Epyc for servers. In the future, you can expect to see Zen 2 cores in future models of those families of chips. AMD's focus is on making central processing units (CPUs), graphics processing units (GPUs), and accelerated processing units (APUs) that put the two other units together on the same chip.
Machine learning algorithms don't yet understand things the way humans do -- with sometimes disastrous consequences. Melanie Mitchell, a professor of Computer Science at Portland State University, writes: As someone who has worked in A.I. for decades, I've witnessed the failure of similar predictions of imminent human-level A.I., and I'm certain these latest forecasts will fall short as well. The challenge of creating humanlike intelligence in machines remains greatly underestimated. Today's A.I. systems sorely lack the essence of human intelligence: understanding the situations we experience, being able to grasp their meaning. The mathematician and philosopher Gian-Carlo Rota famously asked, "I wonder whether or when A.I. will ever crash the barrier of meaning." To me, this is still the most important question. The lack of humanlike understanding in machines is underscored by recent cracks that have appeared in the foundations of modern A.I. While today's programs are much more impressive than the systems we had 20 or 30 years ago, a series of research studies have shown that deep-learning systems can be unreliable in decidedly unhumanlike ways. I'll give a few examples. "The bareheaded man needed a hat" is transcribed by my phone's speech-recognition program as "The bear headed man needed a hat." Google Translate renders "I put the pig in the pen" into French as "Je mets le cochon dans le stylo" (mistranslating "pen" in the sense of a writing instrument). Programs that "read" documents and answer questions about them can easily be fooled into giving wrong answers when short, irrelevant snippets of text are appended to the document. Similarly, programs that recognize faces and objects, lauded as a major triumph of deep learning, can fail dramatically when their input is modified even in modest ways by certain types of lighting, image filtering and other alterations that do not affect humans' recognition abilities in the slightest. One recent study showed that adding small amounts of "noise" to a face image can seriously harm the performance of state-of-the-art face-recognition programs. Another study, humorously called "The Elephant in the Room," showed that inserting a small image of an out-of-place object, such as an elephant, in the corner of a living-room image strangely caused deep-learning vision programs to suddenly misclassify other objects in the image.
A look at VoteWithMe and OutVote, two new political apps that are trying to use peer pressure to get people to vote. From a story: The apps are to elections what Zillow is to real estate -- services that pull public information from government records, repackage it for consumer viewing and make it available at the touch of a smartphone button. But instead of giving you a peek at house prices, VoteWithMe and OutVote let you snoop on which of your friends voted in past elections and their party affiliations -- and then prod them to go to the polls by sending them scripted messages like "You gonna vote?" "I don't want this to come off like we're shaming our friends into voting," said Naseem Makiya, the chief executive of OutVote, a start-up in Boston. But, he said, "I think a lot of people might vote just because they're frankly worried that their friends will find out if they didn't." Whom Americans vote for is private. But other information in their state voter files is public information; depending on the state, it can include details like their name, address, phone number and party affiliation and when they voted. The apps try to match the people in a smartphone's contacts to their voter files, then display some of those details. The data's increasing availability may surprise people receiving messages nudging them to vote -- or even trouble them, by exposing personal politics they might have preferred to keep to themselves. Political campaigns have for years purchased voter files from states or bought national voter databases from data brokers, but the information has otherwise had little public exposure outside of campaign use. Now any app user can easily harness such data to make inferences about, and try to influence, their contacts' voting behavior.
An anonymous reader shares a report: In Idaho, Nebraska, and Utah, voters will directly decide whether their states should expand their Medicaid programs. In Wisconsin, they could elect a candidate for governor who has pledged to sharply curtail drug prices. And across the country, Democratic congressional candidates are running on platforms highlighting their support for protecting insurance coverage for those with pre-existing conditions and lowering drug prices. Health care is on the ballot across the country, with issues ranging from medical marijuana to abortion rights to insurance coverage dominating the conversation.
Digitization promises to make medical care easier and more efficient. But are screens coming between doctors and patients? Here's an excerpt by Atul Gawande of The New Yorker, which talks about the deployment of Epic, a new medical software which cost Partners HealthCare a staggering $1.6 billion, panned out: On May 30, 2015, the Phase One Go-Live began. My hospital and clinics reduced the number of admissions and appointment slots for two weeks while the staff navigated the new system. For another two weeks, my department doubled the time allocated for appointments and procedures in order to accommodate our learning curve. This, I discovered, was the real reason the upgrade cost $1.6 billion. The software costs were under a hundred million dollars. The bulk of the expenses came from lost patient revenues and all the tech-support personnel and other people needed during the implementation phase. In the first five weeks, the I.T. folks logged twenty-seven thousand help-desk tickets -- three for every two users. Most were basic how-to questions; a few involved major technical glitches. Printing problems abounded. Many patient medications and instructions hadn't transferred accurately from our old system. My hospital had to hire hundreds of moonlighting residents and pharmacists to double-check the medication list for every patient while technicians worked to fix the data-transfer problem. Many of the angriest complaints, however, were due to problems rooted in what Sumit Rana, a senior vice-president at Epic, called "the Revenge of the Ancillaries." In building a given function -- say, an order form for a brain MRI -- the design choices were more political than technical: administrative staff and doctors had different views about what should be included. The doctors were used to having all the votes. But Epic had arranged meetings to try to adjudicate these differences. Now the staff had a say (and sometimes the doctors didn't even show), and they added questions that made their jobs easier but other jobs more time-consuming. Questions that doctors had routinely skipped now stopped them short, with "field required" alerts. A simple request might now involve filling out a detailed form that took away precious minutes of time with patients.
Ask Slashdot: How To Fix an Outdated College Tech Curriculum?
An anonymous reader writes: As a student, what's the best way to bring change to an outdated college tech curriculum? The background on this is that I have 15 years of experience in the field and a very healthy amount of industry-recognized training and certifications. I'm merely finishing up my degree to flesh out my resume -- I haven't learned much from the program that I don't already know. However, the program would have benefited me greatly 15 years ago. It's a great program, except for a biometrics class that is absolutely behind the curve. The newest publication on the syllabus is from 2009. This is simply teaching the students outdated and often wrong information. Additionally, a lot of the material seems like it was stretched to make a full semester class in biometrics in the first place -- most of the material, honestly, could be compressed to about two hours of lecture and still be delivered at a reasonable rate. What's the best way for a student in my situation to get this fixed so the school stops wasting student's time with outdated and wrong information?
A new proof from the Australian science fiction writer Greg Egan and a 2011 proof anonymously posted online are now being hailed as significant advances on a puzzle mathematicians have been studying for at least 25 years. Erica Klarreich, writing for Quanta Magazine: On September 16, 2011, an anime fan posted a math question to the online bulletin board 4chan about the cult classic television series The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya . Season one of the show, which involves time travel, had originally aired in nonchronological order, and a re-broadcast and a DVD version had each further rearranged the episodes. Fans were arguing online about the best order to watch the episodes, and the 4chan poster wondered: If viewers wanted to see the series in every possible order, what is the shortest list of episodes they'd have to watch? In less than an hour, an anonymous person offered an answer -- not a complete solution, but a lower bound on the number of episodes required. The argument, which covered series with any number of episodes, showed that for the 14-episode first season of Haruhi, viewers would have to watch at least 93,884,313,611 episodes to see all possible orderings. "Please look over [the proof] for any loopholes I might have missed," the anonymous poster wrote. The proof slipped under the radar of the mathematics community for seven years -- apparently only one professional mathematician spotted it at the time, and he didn't check it carefully. But in a plot twist last month, the Australian science fiction novelist Greg Egan proved a new upper bound on the number of episodes required. Egan's discovery renewed interest in the problem and drew attention to the lower bound posted anonymously in 2011. Both proofs are now being hailed as significant advances on a puzzle mathematicians have been studying for at least 25 years. Mathematicians quickly verified Egan's upper bound, which, like the lower bound, applies to series of any length. Then Robin Houston, a mathematician at the data visualization firm Kiln, and Jay Pantone of Marquette University in Milwaukee independently verified the work of the anonymous 4chan poster. Now, Houston and Pantone, joined by Vince Vatter of the University of Florida in Gainesville, have written up the formal argument. In their paper, they list the first author as "Anonymous 4chan Poster."
A strange interstellar object that invaded our solar system and passed close to Earth in the fall of 2017 could have been an artificial object, a piece of a spacecraft from an alien civilization, Harvard researchers are suggesting in a new paper [PDF]. From a report: "There is data on the orbit of this object for which there is no other explanation. So we wrote this paper suggesting this explanation," said Professor Avi Loeb, chairman of the Harvard astronomy department. "The approach I take to the subject is purely scientific and evidence-based. As far as I know, there is no other explanation. You can rule it out or in, based on additional data." He said the study had been accepted for publication in the The Astrophysical Journal Letters on Nov. 12. The paper, written by Loeb and postdoctoral researcher Shmuel Bialy, suggests the object might be a light sail, or solar sail -- a proposed method of powering spacecraft that uses a sail to catch radiation pressure and propel the spacecraft, just as a normal sail uses the wind to propel a boat. The object 'Oumuamua -- Hawaiian for "messenger from afar arriving first" -- is the first ever observed intruding in the orbits of our planets. It was picked up by telescopes in October 2017 at the University of Hawaii's Haleakala Observatory, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration said. It is on its way out of the solar system and expected to never return. Scientists say other "interstellar" objects may have sailed by in the past, undetected. The object raised eyebrows. It was monitored for signs of radio signals as weak as one-tenth of a cellphone-strength signal, but nothing was detected. Researchers said in December 2017 that it appeared to be a naturally formed, icy object covered with a dry crust. Further reading: Interstellar Visitor 'Oumuamua Is a Comet After All (June 2018), Scientists say mysterious 'Oumuamua' object could be an alien spacecraft, and Cigar-shaped interstellar object may have been an alien probe, Harvard paper claims.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The amount of energy required to "mine" one dollar's worth of bitcoin is more than twice that required to mine the same value of copper, gold or platinum, according to a new paper, suggesting that the virtual work that underpins bitcoin, ethereum and similar projects is more similar to real mining than anyone intended. One dollar's worth of bitcoin takes about 17 megajoules of energy to mine, according to researchers from the Oak Ridge Institute in Cincinnati, Ohio, compared with four, five and seven megajoules for copper, gold and platinum.
Other cryptocurrencies also fair poorly in comparison, the researchers write in the journal Nature Sustainability, ascribing a cost-per-dollar of 7MJ for ethereum and 14MJ for the privacy focused cryptocurrency monero. But all the cryptocurrencies examined come off well compared with aluminium, which takes an astonishing 122MJ to mine one dollar's worth of ore. [...] To account for the wild fluctuations in cryptocurrency price, and therefore effort expended by miners, the researchers used a median of all the values between January 1, 2016 and June 30, 2018, and attempted to account for the geographic dispersal of bitcoin miners. "Any cryptocurrency mined in China would generate four times the amount of CO2 compared to the amount generated in Canada," they write, highlighting the importance of such country-dependent accounting.

lowercased:
techcrunch is reporting that graphql, the facebook-incubated data query language, is moving into its own open-source foundation. "like so many other similar open-source foundations, the aptly named graphql foundation will be hosted by the linux foundation." from the report: facebook announced graphql back in 2012 and open sourced it in 2015. today, it's being used by companies that range from airbnb to audi, github, netflix, shopify, twitter and the new york times . at facebook itself, the graphql api powers billions of api calls every day. at its core, graphql is basically a language for querying databases from client-side applications and a set of specifications for how the api on the backend should present this data to the client. it presents an alternative to rest-based apis and promises to offer developers more flexibility and the ability to write faster and more secure applications. virtually every major programming language now supports it through a variety of libraries.
"graphql has redefined how developers work with apis and client-server interactions. we look forward to working with the graphql community to become an independent foundation, draft their governance and continue to foster the growth and adoption of graphql," said chris aniszczyk, vice president of developer relations at the linux foundation. as aniszczyk noted, the new foundation will have an open governance model, similar to that of other linux foundation projects. the exact details are still a work in progress, though. the list of founding members is also still in flux, but for now, it includes airbnb, apollo, coursera, elementl, facebook, github, hasura, prisma, shopify and twitter.
microsoft is using minecraft to help employees get acquainted with a refresh of the company's campus in redmond, washington. cnbc reports: earlier this year, microsoft enlisted blockworks, a company that uses minecraft's digital building blocks for designing real-world projects, to create a miniature rendering of the campus facelift, which is scheduled for completion in 2022. they're using graphics that are far more immersive than two-dimensional photos and videos. while minecraft was designed for gamers, its immersive nature and the ability to quickly move around and construct edifices makes it easy to see how new buildings will look when inserted into an existing landscape. [james delaney, a managing director at blockworks] said minecraft forces designers to sacrifice some accuracy because structures in real life don't always have the game's squared-off look, but the speed and ease of use more than made up for those deficiencies. it might take just 10 minutes to wrap up a single building, he said. microsoft employees -- and anyone else with the education edition of minecraft -- can now take a digital tour of the new campus and see how plans are developing. outside of microsoft, that access requires a subscription to office 365 education.
corporate vice president of cortana javier soltero is leaving the company after being in charge of cortana for less than a year. "soltero joined microsoft when it bought at the end of 2014 acompli, a mobile mail startup in san francisco which he co-founded and led," reports zdnet. "after joining microsoft four years ago, soltero spearheaded outlook mobile, then all of outlook." before being appointed to run cortana in march of this year, he was the head of strategy for office. from the report: last month, microsoft officials confirmed that cortana was one of the technologies that management was moving from ai + research to the experiences & devices team, which is under executive vice president rajesh jha. microsoft is in the midst of trying to reposition cortana from a standalone digital assistant to more of an assistance aide. given the strong focus on home and work productivity by the microsoft 365 and office teams, officials seemingly decided it made sense for cortana to be situated in that group. i've heard soltero is going to go back to doing entrepreneurial activities once he leaves by year-end. perry clarke is going to be working with soltero on transition plans in the next couple of months, sources are telling me. clarke has been with microsoft engineering since 1996, when he led exchange. he also has been a microsoft distinguished engineer for the past several years. i've heard talk that microsoft ultimately is looking to bring cortana and search together into a single engineering team.
an anonymous reader quotes a report from ars technica: if you talk to experts on election security (i studied with several of them in graduate school) they'll tell you that we're nowhere close to being ready for online voting. "mobile voting is a horrific idea," said election security expert joe hall when i asked him about a west virginia experiment with blockchain-based mobile voting back in august. but on tuesday, the new york times published an opinion piece claiming the opposite. "building a workable, scalable, and inclusive online voting system is now possible, thanks to blockchain technologies," writes alex tapscott, whom the times describes as co-founder of the blockchain research institute. tapscott is wrong -- and dangerously so. online voting would be a huge threat to the integrity of our elections -- and to public faith in election outcomes.
tapscott focuses on the idea that blockchain technology would allow people to vote anonymously while still being able to verify that their vote was included in the final total. even assuming this is mathematically possible -- and i think it probably is -- this idea ignores the many, many ways that foreign governments could compromise an online vote without breaking the core cryptographic algorithms. for example, foreign governments could hack into the computer systems that governments use to generate and distribute cryptographic credentials to voters. they could bribe election officials to supply them with copies of voters' credentials. they could hack into the pcs or smartphones voters use to cast their votes. they could send voters phishing emails to trick them into revealing their voting credentials -- or simply trick them into thinking they've cast a vote when they haven't.
a wall street journal article published this morning reported that foxconn is looking to transfer some of its chinese workers to wisconsin in time for its new factory opening in racine. the article says that these workers would likely be engineers and would fill a gap in prospective talent due to a tight labor market. foxconn has since denied these claims. the verge reports: in a comment to gizmodo, foxconn denied that it was recruiting chinese workers. the company said: "we can categorically state that the assertion that we are recruiting chinese personnel to staff our wisconsin project is untrue. our recruitment priority remains wisconsin first and we continue to focus on hiring and training workers from throughout wisconsin. we will supplement that recruitment from other u.s. locations as required."
in november 2017, wisconsin pledged $3 billion in subsidies for the taiwan-based company if it opted to open the factory in wisconsin. in return, foxconn said it would create 13,000 jobs and invest $10 billion. (the state subsidy came out to $230,000 per job.) the wall street journal report suggests that the company is struggling to find qualified engineers in the area, though, as the unemployment rate in the state reached a record low at 3 percent, along with a recent national low at 3.7 percent.
the cybercrime wing of pakistan's federal investigation agency has said data from "almost all" pakistani banks was stolen in a recent security breach. fia cybercrimes director retired capt mohammad shoaib told geo news that hackers based outside the country had breached the security systems of several local banks. "the hackers have stolen large amounts of money from people's accounts," he added. from a report: he said the fia has written to all banks, and a meeting of the banks' heads and security managements is being called. the meeting will look into ways the security infrastructure of banks can be bolstered. "banks are the custodians of the money people have stored in them," shoaib said. "they are also responsible if their security features are so weak that they result in pilferage." it wasn't immediately clear when exactly the security breach took place. according to shoaib, more than 100 cases are being investigated by the agency in connection with the breach.
an anonymous reader quotes a report from bloomberg: french finance minister bruno le maire's efforts to rally his european union colleagues around a new tax on tech giants fell short, as countries skeptical of the plan doubled down on their opposition, and others, including italy, said they'll push ahead with their own plans. ministers from denmark, ireland and sweden said they couldn't support the tax in its current form, casting doubt on the proposal's future, since unanimity is required to pass taxes in the eu. the plan on the table would impose a 3 percent levy on the european sales of the likes of amazon and facebook. a number of countries are already imposing taxes of their own, increasing the risk of fragmentation in the single market. finance minister giovanni tria said an italian tax will kick in next year if there's no broader agreement by then. spain and the u.k. have already announced their own levies.
at&t will alert a little more than a dozen customers within the next week or so that their service will be terminated due to copyright infringement, news outlet axios reported, citing sources familiar with its plans. from the report: it's the first time at&t has discontinued customer service over piracy allegations since having shaped its own piracy policies last year, which is significant given it just became one of america's major media companies. at&t owns a content network after its purchase of time warner earlier this year, an entity now called warnermedia. content networks are typically responsible for issuing these types of allegations to internet service providers (isps) for them to address with their customers.
oracle's internet intelligence division has confirmed today the findings of a recently published academic paper that accused china of "hijacking the vital internet backbone of western countries." from a report: the research paper was authored by researchers from the us naval war college and tel aviv university and it made quite a few waves online after it was published. researchers accused china telecom, one of china's biggest state-owned internet service providers, of hijacking and detouring internet traffic through its normally-closed internet infrastructure. some security experts contested the research paper's findings because it didn't come from an authoritative voice in the world of internet bgp hijacks, but also because the paper touched on many politically sensitive topics, such as china's cyber-espionage activities and how china used bgp hijacks as a way to circumvent the china-us cyber pact of 2015. but today, doug madory, director of oracle's internet analysis division (formerly dyn), confirmed that china telecom has, indeed, engaged in internet traffic "misdirection." "i don't intend to address the paper's claims around the motivations of these actions," said madori. "however, there is truth to the assertion that china telecom (whether intentionally or not) has misdirected internet traffic (including out of the united states) in recent years."
a lump of metal in a building near paris has long served as the global standard for the kilogram. that's about to change. from a report: later this month, at the international general conference on weights and measures, to be held in france, delegates are expected to vote to get rid of this single physical specimen and instead plump to use a fundamental measurement -- to be defined in terms of an electric current -- in order to define the mass of an object. the king of kilograms is about to be dethroned. and crucially much of the key work that has led to the toppling of the paris kilogram has been carried out at the national physical laboratory where the late bryan kibble invented the basic concepts of the device that will replace that ingot in the pavillon de breteuil. the kibble balance works by measuring the electric current that is required to produce an electromagnetic force equal to the gravitational force acting on a mass. a second stage allows the electromagnetic force to be determined in terms of a fundamental constant known as the planck constant which will, in future, be used to define a kilogram. these machines will provide the standard for weighing objects -- and that means no more dusting of old lumps of alloy to ensure they stay pure and accurate. [...] "one key reason for doing this work is to provide international security," says robinson. "if the pavillon de breteuil burned down tomorrow and the kilogram in its vaults melted, we would have no reference left for the world's metric weights system. there would be chaos. the current definition of the kilogram is the weight of that cylinder in paris, after all." [...] another major motivation for the replacement of le grand k is the need to be able to carry out increasingly more and more precise measurements. "pharmaceutical companies will soon be wanting to use ingredients that will have to be measured in terms of a few millionths or even billionths of a gram," says prior. "we need to be prepared to weigh substances with that kind of accuracy." suggested reading: a thread on twitter which discusses si units and the redefinition of the kilogram.
if extraterrestrial intelligence exists somewhere in our galaxy, a new mit study proposes that laser technology on earth could, in principle, be fashioned into something of a planetary porch light -- a beacon strong enough to attract attention from as far as 20,000 light years away. from a report: the research, which author james clark calls a "feasibility study," appears today in the astrophysical journal. the findings suggest that if a high-powered 1- to 2-megawatt laser were focused through a massive 30- to 45-meter telescope and aimed out into space, the combination would produce a beam of infrared radiation strong enough to stand out from the sun's energy. such a signal could be detectable by alien astronomers performing a cursory survey of our section of the milky way -- especially if those astronomers live in nearby systems, such as around proxima centauri, the nearest star to earth, or trappist-1, a star about 40 light-years away that hosts seven exoplanets, three of which are potentially habitable. if the signal is spotted from either of these nearby systems, the study finds, the same megawatt laser could be used to send a brief message in the form of pulses similar to morse code.
amd on monday revealed the zen 2 architecture for the family of processors that it will launch in the coming years, starting with 2019. the move is a follow-up to the competitive zen designs that amd launched in march 2017, and it promises two-times improvement in performance throughput. from a report: amd hopes the zen 2 processors will keep it ahead of or at parity with intel, the world's biggest maker of pc processors. the earlier zen designs enabled chips that could process 52 percent more instructions per clock cycle than the previous generation. zen has spawned amd's most competitive chips in a decade, including ryzen for the desktop, threadripper (with up to 32 cores) for gamers, ryzen mobile for laptops, and epyc for servers. in the future, you can expect to see zen 2 cores in future models of those families of chips. amd's focus is on making central processing units (cpus), graphics processing units (gpus), and accelerated processing units (apus) that put the two other units together on the same chip.
machine learning algorithms don't yet understand things the way humans do -- with sometimes disastrous consequences. melanie mitchell, a professor of computer science at portland state university, writes: as someone who has worked in a.i. for decades, i've witnessed the failure of similar predictions of imminent human-level a.i., and i'm certain these latest forecasts will fall short as well. the challenge of creating humanlike intelligence in machines remains greatly underestimated. today's a.i. systems sorely lack the essence of human intelligence: understanding the situations we experience, being able to grasp their meaning. the mathematician and philosopher gian-carlo rota famously asked, "i wonder whether or when a.i. will ever crash the barrier of meaning." to me, this is still the most important question. the lack of humanlike understanding in machines is underscored by recent cracks that have appeared in the foundations of modern a.i. while today's programs are much more impressive than the systems we had 20 or 30 years ago, a series of research studies have shown that deep-learning systems can be unreliable in decidedly unhumanlike ways. i'll give a few examples. "the bareheaded man needed a hat" is transcribed by my phone's speech-recognition program as "the bear headed man needed a hat." google translate renders "i put the pig in the pen" into french as "je mets le cochon dans le stylo" (mistranslating "pen" in the sense of a writing instrument). programs that "read" documents and answer questions about them can easily be fooled into giving wrong answers when short, irrelevant snippets of text are appended to the document. similarly, programs that recognize faces and objects, lauded as a major triumph of deep learning, can fail dramatically when their input is modified even in modest ways by certain types of lighting, image filtering and other alterations that do not affect humans' recognition abilities in the slightest. one recent study showed that adding small amounts of "noise" to a face image can seriously harm the performance of state-of-the-art face-recognition programs. another study, humorously called "the elephant in the room," showed that inserting a small image of an out-of-place object, such as an elephant, in the corner of a living-room image strangely caused deep-learning vision programs to suddenly misclassify other objects in the image.
a look at votewithme and outvote, two new political apps that are trying to use peer pressure to get people to vote. from a story: the apps are to elections what zillow is to real estate -- services that pull public information from government records, repackage it for consumer viewing and make it available at the touch of a smartphone button. but instead of giving you a peek at house prices, votewithme and outvote let you snoop on which of your friends voted in past elections and their party affiliations -- and then prod them to go to the polls by sending them scripted messages like "you gonna vote?" "i don't want this to come off like we're shaming our friends into voting," said naseem makiya, the chief executive of outvote, a start-up in boston. but, he said, "i think a lot of people might vote just because they're frankly worried that their friends will find out if they didn't." whom americans vote for is private. but other information in their state voter files is public information; depending on the state, it can include details like their name, address, phone number and party affiliation and when they voted. the apps try to match the people in a smartphone's contacts to their voter files, then display some of those details. the data's increasing availability may surprise people receiving messages nudging them to vote -- or even trouble them, by exposing personal politics they might have preferred to keep to themselves. political campaigns have for years purchased voter files from states or bought national voter databases from data brokers, but the information has otherwise had little public exposure outside of campaign use. now any app user can easily harness such data to make inferences about, and try to influence, their contacts' voting behavior.
an anonymous reader shares a report: in idaho, nebraska, and utah, voters will directly decide whether their states should expand their medicaid programs. in wisconsin, they could elect a candidate for governor who has pledged to sharply curtail drug prices. and across the country, democratic congressional candidates are running on platforms highlighting their support for protecting insurance coverage for those with pre-existing conditions and lowering drug prices. health care is on the ballot across the country, with issues ranging from medical marijuana to abortion rights to insurance coverage dominating the conversation.
digitization promises to make medical care easier and more efficient. but are screens coming between doctors and patients? here's an excerpt by atul gawande of the new yorker, which talks about the deployment of epic, a new medical software which cost partners healthcare a staggering $1.6 billion, panned out: on may 30, 2015, the phase one go-live began. my hospital and clinics reduced the number of admissions and appointment slots for two weeks while the staff navigated the new system. for another two weeks, my department doubled the time allocated for appointments and procedures in order to accommodate our learning curve. this, i discovered, was the real reason the upgrade cost $1.6 billion. the software costs were under a hundred million dollars. the bulk of the expenses came from lost patient revenues and all the tech-support personnel and other people needed during the implementation phase. in the first five weeks, the i.t. folks logged twenty-seven thousand help-desk tickets -- three for every two users. most were basic how-to questions; a few involved major technical glitches. printing problems abounded. many patient medications and instructions hadn't transferred accurately from our old system. my hospital had to hire hundreds of moonlighting residents and pharmacists to double-check the medication list for every patient while technicians worked to fix the data-transfer problem. many of the angriest complaints, however, were due to problems rooted in what sumit rana, a senior vice-president at epic, called "the revenge of the ancillaries." in building a given function -- say, an order form for a brain mri -- the design choices were more political than technical: administrative staff and doctors had different views about what should be included. the doctors were used to having all the votes. but epic had arranged meetings to try to adjudicate these differences. now the staff had a say (and sometimes the doctors didn't even show), and they added questions that made their jobs easier but other jobs more time-consuming. questions that doctors had routinely skipped now stopped them short, with "field required" alerts. a simple request might now involve filling out a detailed form that took away precious minutes of time with patients.
ask slashdot: how to fix an outdated college tech curriculum?
an anonymous reader writes: as a student, what's the best way to bring change to an outdated college tech curriculum? the background on this is that i have 15 years of experience in the field and a very healthy amount of industry-recognized training and certifications. i'm merely finishing up my degree to flesh out my resume -- i haven't learned much from the program that i don't already know. however, the program would have benefited me greatly 15 years ago. it's a great program, except for a biometrics class that is absolutely behind the curve. the newest publication on the syllabus is from 2009. this is simply teaching the students outdated and often wrong information. additionally, a lot of the material seems like it was stretched to make a full semester class in biometrics in the first place -- most of the material, honestly, could be compressed to about two hours of lecture and still be delivered at a reasonable rate. what's the best way for a student in my situation to get this fixed so the school stops wasting student's time with outdated and wrong information?
a new proof from the australian science fiction writer greg egan and a 2011 proof anonymously posted online are now being hailed as significant advances on a puzzle mathematicians have been studying for at least 25 years. erica klarreich, writing for quanta magazine: on september 16, 2011, an anime fan posted a math question to the online bulletin board 4chan about the cult classic television series the melancholy of haruhi suzumiya . season one of the show, which involves time travel, had originally aired in nonchronological order, and a re-broadcast and a dvd version had each further rearranged the episodes. fans were arguing online about the best order to watch the episodes, and the 4chan poster wondered: if viewers wanted to see the series in every possible order, what is the shortest list of episodes they'd have to watch? in less than an hour, an anonymous person offered an answer -- not a complete solution, but a lower bound on the number of episodes required. the argument, which covered series with any number of episodes, showed that for the 14-episode first season of haruhi, viewers would have to watch at least 93,884,313,611 episodes to see all possible orderings. "please look over [the proof] for any loopholes i might have missed," the anonymous poster wrote. the proof slipped under the radar of the mathematics community for seven years -- apparently only one professional mathematician spotted it at the time, and he didn't check it carefully. but in a plot twist last month, the australian science fiction novelist greg egan proved a new upper bound on the number of episodes required. egan's discovery renewed interest in the problem and drew attention to the lower bound posted anonymously in 2011. both proofs are now being hailed as significant advances on a puzzle mathematicians have been studying for at least 25 years. mathematicians quickly verified egan's upper bound, which, like the lower bound, applies to series of any length. then robin houston, a mathematician at the data visualization firm kiln, and jay pantone of marquette university in milwaukee independently verified the work of the anonymous 4chan poster. now, houston and pantone, joined by vince vatter of the university of florida in gainesville, have written up the formal argument. in their paper, they list the first author as "anonymous 4chan poster."
a strange interstellar object that invaded our solar system and passed close to earth in the fall of 2017 could have been an artificial object, a piece of a spacecraft from an alien civilization, harvard researchers are suggesting in a new paper [pdf]. from a report: "there is data on the orbit of this object for which there is no other explanation. so we wrote this paper suggesting this explanation," said professor avi loeb, chairman of the harvard astronomy department. "the approach i take to the subject is purely scientific and evidence-based. as far as i know, there is no other explanation. you can rule it out or in, based on additional data." he said the study had been accepted for publication in the the astrophysical journal letters on nov. 12. the paper, written by loeb and postdoctoral researcher shmuel bialy, suggests the object might be a light sail, or solar sail -- a proposed method of powering spacecraft that uses a sail to catch radiation pressure and propel the spacecraft, just as a normal sail uses the wind to propel a boat. the object 'oumuamua -- hawaiian for "messenger from afar arriving first" -- is the first ever observed intruding in the orbits of our planets. it was picked up by telescopes in october 2017 at the university of hawaii's haleakala observatory, the national aeronautics and space administration said. it is on its way out of the solar system and expected to never return. scientists say other "interstellar" objects may have sailed by in the past, undetected. the object raised eyebrows. it was monitored for signs of radio signals as weak as one-tenth of a cellphone-strength signal, but nothing was detected. researchers said in december 2017 that it appeared to be a naturally formed, icy object covered with a dry crust. further reading: interstellar visitor 'oumuamua is a comet after all (june 2018), scientists say mysterious 'oumuamua' object could be an alien spacecraft, and cigar-shaped interstellar object may have been an alien probe, harvard paper claims.
an anonymous reader quotes a report from the guardian: the amount of energy required to "mine" one dollar's worth of bitcoin is more than twice that required to mine the same value of copper, gold or platinum, according to a new paper, suggesting that the virtual work that underpins bitcoin, ethereum and similar projects is more similar to real mining than anyone intended. one dollar's worth of bitcoin takes about 17 megajoules of energy to mine, according to researchers from the oak ridge institute in cincinnati, ohio, compared with four, five and seven megajoules for copper, gold and platinum.
other cryptocurrencies also fair poorly in comparison, the researchers write in the journal nature sustainability, ascribing a cost-per-dollar of 7mj for ethereum and 14mj for the privacy focused cryptocurrency monero. but all the cryptocurrencies examined come off well compared with aluminium, which takes an astonishing 122mj to mine one dollar's worth of ore. [...] to account for the wild fluctuations in cryptocurrency price, and therefore effort expended by miners, the researchers used a median of all the values between january 1, 2016 and june 30, 2018, and attempted to account for the geographic dispersal of bitcoin miners. "any cryptocurrency mined in china would generate four times the amount of co2 compared to the amount generated in canada," they write, highlighting the importance of such country-dependent accounting.


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Braemore Sales & Lettings have announced the immediate availability of a virtual reality property tour for all property sale listings, enabling prospective property purchasers and house hunters the opportunity to easily and seamlessly view properties from the comfort of their own home via their computers, tablets or smartphones, regardless of where they are located geographically in the world. Powered by MiDigs 360|VR, the virtual reality property tour will be taken for each property sale listed with Braemore Sales & Lettings, as well as to promote featured districts throughout Edinburgh to provide additional information from property buyers who maybe are not as familiar with Edinburgh. Braemore have even created tours of their three City Centre office locations in Edinburgh and use this to encourage clients to stop by and discuss all things property.
“Here at Braemore, we are always looking for cutting edge tools to help market our client’s properties and, with that in mind, we are now adding high definition a 360 Virtual Reality Property Tour to our property marketing package for all property sale listings. This tour allows you to view the property as if you were there in person, from your place of work or from the comfort of your own home. An ideal solution for buyers with busy schedules or live-away investors. This is just one of the many reasons why Braemore offer one of the best sales packages available in the market today” said Scott Webster, Director of Estate Agency at Braemore Sales & Lettings.
Being the first estate agent in Edinburgh to offer a 360 Virtual Reality Property Tour for residential property sales, many Braemore sellers and buyers have already seen the benefits. Listed on the market for sale, 2 (2F3) Springwell Place is a spacious two-bedroom second floor flat in the popular area of Dalry. This property received an acceptable offer just 48 hours after the virtual reality property tour went live.
Having a virtual reality property tour for all property sales listings with Braemore is an update driven by customer feedback received from clients, specifically, for the Off-Market Sales & Purchase product that Braemore have available where there is not always the traditional marketing photographs and floor plans available. This is part of Braemore Sales & Lettings’ commitment to deliver the latest technology to help property sellers and buyers.
With over 25 years’ experience in the Edinburgh property market, Braemore Sales & Lettings is the premiere sales and lettings agent in Edinburgh. The company offers a fully-managed estate agency service complete with property dressing and staging services, as well as accompanied viewings 7 days a week at no additional cost to property sellers.
Click HERE to view all of the 360 Virtual Reality Property Tour with Braemore Sales & Lettings.

lowercased:
braemore sales & lettings have announced the immediate availability of a virtual reality property tour for all property sale listings, enabling prospective property purchasers and house hunters the opportunity to easily and seamlessly view properties from the comfort of their own home via their computers, tablets or smartphones, regardless of where they are located geographically in the world. powered by midigs 360|vr, the virtual reality property tour will be taken for each property sale listed with braemore sales & lettings, as well as to promote featured districts throughout edinburgh to provide additional information from property buyers who maybe are not as familiar with edinburgh. braemore have even created tours of their three city centre office locations in edinburgh and use this to encourage clients to stop by and discuss all things property.
“here at braemore, we are always looking for cutting edge tools to help market our client’s properties and, with that in mind, we are now adding high definition a 360 virtual reality property tour to our property marketing package for all property sale listings. this tour allows you to view the property as if you were there in person, from your place of work or from the comfort of your own home. an ideal solution for buyers with busy schedules or live-away investors. this is just one of the many reasons why braemore offer one of the best sales packages available in the market today” said scott webster, director of estate agency at braemore sales & lettings.
being the first estate agent in edinburgh to offer a 360 virtual reality property tour for residential property sales, many braemore sellers and buyers have already seen the benefits. listed on the market for sale, 2 (2f3) springwell place is a spacious two-bedroom second floor flat in the popular area of dalry. this property received an acceptable offer just 48 hours after the virtual reality property tour went live.
having a virtual reality property tour for all property sales listings with braemore is an update driven by customer feedback received from clients, specifically, for the off-market sales & purchase product that braemore have available where there is not always the traditional marketing photographs and floor plans available. this is part of braemore sales & lettings’ commitment to deliver the latest technology to help property sellers and buyers.
with over 25 years’ experience in the edinburgh property market, braemore sales & lettings is the premiere sales and lettings agent in edinburgh. the company offers a fully-managed estate agency service complete with property dressing and staging services, as well as accompanied viewings 7 days a week at no additional cost to property sellers.
click here to view all of the 360 virtual reality property tour with braemore sales & lettings.


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RU? Instant Reaction Review Podcast Ep. 121 - Fury Review - Are You Screening?
Fury left us in such a strange place that I ultimately called it a kind of anti-movie. Despite agreeing with most of my problems with the film, Shane ended up rating it quite a bit higher, and actually, I didn’t rate it that low myself.
If you listen to us regularly, you probably know that we are becoming famous for spending a lot of our time talking about the negatives of movies we rate highly, and the positives of movies we give very low scores, but with Fury, the movie was so odd that I don’t think we knew where to go with our dissection of it.
We both agreed that Brad Pitt did an impressive job with the role, though we disagreed on some of the other actors, but some of the steps along this character’s path didn’t make a lot of sense.
In the end, it becomes odd heaped upon odd, and that didn’t work for me as a final product. When it starts to seem like you’re being odd just for the sake of being odd, I lose interest.
It’s odd for a war film. It’s odd for a character study (because it’s hard to like anyone). It’s odd for… having laser fire… or whatever. It’s odd for sticking so many cliches in. It’s just odd.
Give us a listen below, and please remember to share, subscribe, rate us on iTunes, etc., etc.

lowercased:
ru? instant reaction review podcast ep. 121 - fury review - are you screening?
fury left us in such a strange place that i ultimately called it a kind of anti-movie. despite agreeing with most of my problems with the film, shane ended up rating it quite a bit higher, and actually, i didn’t rate it that low myself.
if you listen to us regularly, you probably know that we are becoming famous for spending a lot of our time talking about the negatives of movies we rate highly, and the positives of movies we give very low scores, but with fury, the movie was so odd that i don’t think we knew where to go with our dissection of it.
we both agreed that brad pitt did an impressive job with the role, though we disagreed on some of the other actors, but some of the steps along this character’s path didn’t make a lot of sense.
in the end, it becomes odd heaped upon odd, and that didn’t work for me as a final product. when it starts to seem like you’re being odd just for the sake of being odd, i lose interest.
it’s odd for a war film. it’s odd for a character study (because it’s hard to like anyone). it’s odd for… having laser fire… or whatever. it’s odd for sticking so many cliches in. it’s just odd.
give us a listen below, and please remember to share, subscribe, rate us on itunes, etc., etc.


text:
"Nature may reach the same result in many ways."
" Nature may reach the same result in many ways. "
" A point of great importance would be first to know: what is the capacity of the earth? And... "
" Let the future tell the truth and evaluate each one according to his work and accomplishme... "
" To conquer by sheer force is becoming harder and harder every day. Defensive is getting co... "
" Fights between individuals, as well as governments and nations, invariably result from mis... "
" For a while I gave myself up entirely to the intense enjoyment of picturing machines and d... "
" We crave for new sensations but soon become indifferent to them. The wonders of yesterday ... "

lowercased:
"nature may reach the same result in many ways."
" nature may reach the same result in many ways. "
" a point of great importance would be first to know: what is the capacity of the earth? and... "
" let the future tell the truth and evaluate each one according to his work and accomplishme... "
" to conquer by sheer force is becoming harder and harder every day. defensive is getting co... "
" fights between individuals, as well as governments and nations, invariably result from mis... "
" for a while i gave myself up entirely to the intense enjoyment of picturing machines and d... "
" we crave for new sensations but soon become indifferent to them. the wonders of yesterday ... "


text:
* If you can't find what you are after please call the store on 9545 0700 to double check or to see if we can order it for you.
* Not all titles listed may be available at all times, if you find something you'd like to hire please call the store on 9545 0700 to confirm it's availability.
* We do not count "the" or "a" at the beginning of a title, search by the first letter of the second word in the title. Example; if you're looking for "The Shawshank Redemption" search under "S".
* The lists are accurate at the time of posting, however they are subject to change.

lowercased:
* if you can't find what you are after please call the store on 9545 0700 to double check or to see if we can order it for you.
* not all titles listed may be available at all times, if you find something you'd like to hire please call the store on 9545 0700 to confirm it's availability.
* we do not count "the" or "a" at the beginning of a title, search by the first letter of the second word in the title. example; if you're looking for "the shawshank redemption" search under "s".
* the lists are accurate at the time of posting, however they are subject to change.