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18 Jul 17:12

There May Be a Quadrillion Tons of Diamond Buried Deep Inside the Earth

by Sarah Emerson
Petr Tvaruzek

Could not happen with Bitcoin...

It’s diamonds all the way down. That’s according to new research suggesting more than a quadrillion tons of diamond are nestled within the Earth’s interior—1000 times more than previously thought.

A study published on Monday estimates that one to two percent of “craton roots” contain the glittery stuff, approximately 90 to 150 miles beneath the Earth’s surface. These roots are the deepest sections of “cratons,” which are rock layers extending upwards of 200 miles through the Earth’s crust and mantle.

The estimate is that “there is much more diamond there than we have ever thought before,” Ulrich Faul, co-author and research scientist at MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences, told MIT News.

The team looked at decades of global seismic data from the US Geological Survey. For years, seismic receivers have been collecting sound wave data—caused by earthquakes, tsunamis, and other phenomena—noting their speeds and intensities, MIT News reports. From this data, seismologists can map the origin point of an earthquake. They can also chart virtual maps of the Earth’s interior by analyzing the speed at which sound waves move through it. Different speeds relate to varying densities, temperatures, and rock compositions, which is how scientists determined that Earth possesses a liquid core, Discover Magazine notes.

But it was an anomaly that caught the team’s attention. Basically, that sound waves have a habit of speeding up when traveling through craton roots.

“The velocities that are measured are faster than what we think we can reproduce with reasonable assumptions about what is there,” Faul told MIT News. “Then we have to say, ‘There is a problem.’ That’s how this project started.”

After generating a 3D model of this scenario, the team virtually compiled rocks to test how sound waves would move through them. According to the study, rock containing 1 to 2 percent diamond (in addition to peridotite and eclogite) produced a match. “Cratons are a tiny bit less dense than their surroundings,” Faul explained. “So we found that you just need [this percentage] for cratons to be stable and not sink.”

This theory would also make sense, as diamonds are naturally formed by the conditions present in craton roots.

Faul called the results “circumstantial evidence,” but described them as the only logical conclusion to the various possibilities they tested.

The study was published in the journal Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems, and led by Joshua Garber, an earth science professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

11 Jul 08:54

Stateless and Poor, Some Boys in Thai Cave Had Already Beaten Long Odds

by HANNAH BEECH
Petr Tvaruzek

"Three of the trapped soccer players, as well as their coach, Ekkapol Chantawong, are stateless ethnic minorities" - so in the US they would be detained for several months. Makes two weeks in a cave look like the better option.

Several of the boys stuck in a Thai cave already knew hardship as refugees from Myanmar. One multilingual boy acted as interpreter with rescuers.
09 Jul 22:39

U.S. to reunite only half of young migrant children by Tuesday deadline

Petr Tvaruzek

maybe they also need a kid-sized submarine

The U.S. government is struggling to reunite immigrant families it separated at the border with Mexico and only about half the children under age 5 will be back with their parents by a court-ordered deadline of Tuesday, a government attorney told a judge on Monday.
08 Jul 08:03

Game Company Fires Two Employees Who Complained About 'Mansplaining' on Twitter

by EditorDavid
Petr Tvaruzek

if you call "allow me to disagree slightly" an online harassment, then you haven't really seen online harassment

An anonymous reader quotes the Verge: On July 3rd, narrative designer Jessica Price tweeted a 29-tweet thread dissecting the challenges of writing player characters in an MMORPG. A streamer who goes by Deroir responded, "Really interesting thread to read! However, allow me to disagree slightly," and shared a three-tweet explanation of how narrative design influences player expression in the sort of games that Price narratively designs. Price both replied directly to Deroir, tweeting "thanks for trying to tell me what we do internally, my dude," and retweeted his response with the caption "today in being a female game dev: 'Allow me -- a person who does not work with you -- to explain to you how you do your job....'" Price's suggestion that Deroir was mansplaining game development -- an area where he does not have the same knowledge or experience -- sparked anger among the ArenaNet community. She subsequently responded to those criticizing her on Twitter. [Here's the first lines of that tweet. "Since we've got a lot of hurt manfeels today, lemme make something clear: this is my feed. I'm not on the clock here. I'm not your emotional courtesan just because I'm a dev. Don't expect me to pretend to like you here. The attempts of fans to exert ownership over our personal lives and times are something I am hardcore about stopping."] Price was fired shortly after. Although many fans are comparing this to something like working in a restaurant -- be polite to the customer, or get fired -- Price says it's impossible to talk about this incident without larger context about systematic online harassment, particularly the sometimes abusive relationship between fans and game developers and the failure of game companies to address it. "Game companies are generally unwilling to be honest with themselves about how they're complicit in creating and sustaining that environment," she tells The Verge... Price adds that she believes her firing was an emotional reaction on the part of ArenaNet co-founder Mike O'Brien. "He fired me personally, and the meeting was mostly him venting his feelings at me," she says. "I understand being afraid when you see the Reddit mob coming for you, but if people with less power can weather it -- and we do, regularly -- so can he...." "We can probably fire anyone on the GW2 dev team as long we make a big enough stink," wrote one user on the Guild Wars 2 subreddit. "Nobody at Arenanet is safe from the hand of reddit. We're literally running the company now..." ArenaNet also fired Peter Fries, a writer who'd worked for them for 12 years, apparently for defending Price in a series of now-deleted tweets. (For example, "Here's a bit of insight that I legitimately hope [Deroir] reflects on: she never asked for his feedback.") "The message is very clear, especially to women at the company," Jessica Price tells the Verge. "If Reddit wants you fired, we'll fire you. The quality of your work doesn't matter."

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07 Jul 11:26

Contributing Op-Ed Writer: Why Scarlett Johansson Shouldn’t Play a Trans Man

by JENNIFER FINNEY BOYLAN
Petr Tvaruzek

next: if you want to play a role of a lawyer, you have to be an actual lawyer. If you want to play a murderer, you have to be an actual murderer..

It’s not about creativity. It’s about letting us tell our own stories.
02 Jul 21:05

AT&T promised lower prices after Time Warner merger—it’s raising them instead

by Jon Brodkin
Petr Tvaruzek

oh wow, nobody expected that.. /s

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson)

AT&T is raising the base price of its DirecTV Now streaming service by $5 per month, despite promising in court that its acquisition of Time Warner Inc. would lower TV prices.

AT&T confirmed the price increase to Ars and said it began informing customers of the increase this past weekend. "The $5 increase will go into effect July 26 for new customers and varies for existing customers based on their billing date," an AT&T spokesperson said.

The $5 increase will affect all DirecTV Now tiers except for a Spanish-language TV package, AT&T told Ars. That means the DirecTV Now packages that currently cost $35, $50, $60, and $70 a month will go up to $40, $55, $65, and $75.

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02 Jul 13:56

Would you pay $700, plus a monthly fee, for a digital license plate?

by Cyrus Farivar
Petr Tvaruzek

of course nobody is worried that this will get hacked and display random fake license plate numbers at will.. sure..

Enlarge / Reviver CEO Neville Boston poses with the Rplate, a new digital license plate that is now available in California. (credit: Cyrus Farivar)

FOSTER CITY, Calif.—It's been a few weeks now since a Bay Area startup put a digital license plate on my car.

So far, nobody seems to have noticed. I haven't yet been pulled aside by police or civilians asking what it is. At first glance, this electronic device looks exactly like a traditional, stamped metal license plate. The new digital plate has the same scripted CALIFORNIA icon up top and uses the exact same size and font to show the numbers and letters.

But in actuality, what I have is an "Rplate," a $700 plate-sized Kindle-like screen on the back of my car—high-contrast grayscale e-ink and all.

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01 Jul 10:43

Ask Slashdot: Have You Ever 'Ghosted' an Employer?

by EditorDavid
"Suddenly, calls and texts went unreturned," writes LinkedIn's editor at large, describing a recruiter who suddenly discovered the candidate she'd wanted to hire failed to respond to 12 messages, including emails like "Please let me know that you have not been kidnapped by aliens. I'm worried about you," and even a snail-mailed greeting card. Recruiters complain that prospective employees are now borrowing a practice from dating -- and "ghosting" recruiters and employers to let them know that they're not interested. "Candidates agree to job interviews and fail to show up, never saying more. Some accept jobs, only to not appear for the first day of work, no reason given, of course. Instead of formally quitting, enduring a potentially awkward conversation with a manager, some employees leave and never return. Bosses realize they've quit only after a series of unsuccessful attempts to reach them.... Meredith Jones, an Indianapolis-based director of human resources for a national restaurant operator, now overbooks interviews, knowing up to 50 percent of candidates for entry-level roles likely won't show up." Long-time Slashdot reader NormalVisual writes, "It'd be interesting to hear Slashdotters' experience with this." Have you ever ghosted a potential employer, or perhaps more relevant, have you ever been ghosted by a potential employer during the hiring process? Do you feel it's unprofessional, or simple justice for the behavior of some companies when the balance of power was more on their side? Inc. magazine blames the low unemployment rate and "the effects technology have had on the communication style of younger generations." But leave your own thoughts in the comments. Does ghosting show a lack of professionalism, or is it simple payback for the way corporations treated job-seekers in the past? And have you ever "ghosted" an employer?

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01 Jul 08:53

Data From Open-Source Ancestry Site Leads to More Arrests

by EditorDavid
Petr Tvaruzek

How does that work? Is murder "written" in the DNA? Or did they have DNA sample from the crime scene and the murderer was stupid enough to get an ancestry report? Or did they inferr their identity from the ancestry reports of their close relatives? Or people in the same area? Neighbours? What if they made a mistake?

schwit1 tipped us off to new arrests made with genealogical evidence -- and growing interest in open source genealogy databases. Fast Company reports: In the last week, police have arrested two suspects in unrelated cold cases thanks to data gleaned from open-source ancestry site GEDMatch, reports the New York Times. That's the same open-source ancestry site that was used to track down the alleged Golden State Killer earlier this year. One of the arrests this week was of a 66-year-old nurse who is suspected of killing a 12-year-old girl in 1986. The other arrest is of a 49-year-old DJ who strangled a schoolteacher in 1992. Thanks to data from GEDMatch, Texas law enforcement also thinks that a man who was executed in 1999 for killing a 9-year-old girl was now also behind the murder of a 40-year-old realtor in 1981. It all reminds me of that scene in "The Circle" where they demo technology that finds "a randomly-selected fugitive from justice -- a proven menace to our global community" -- within 20 minutes. Last month DNA-based investigations also led to the arrest of the suspected murderer of two vacationers in 1987, and helped identify a suicide cold case from 2001. Now an Ohio newspaper reports: Emboldened by that breakthrough, a number of private investigators are spearheading a call for amateur genealogists to help solve other cold cases by contributing their own genetic information to the same public database. They say a larger array of genetic information would widen the pool to find criminals who have eluded capture. The idea is to get people to transfer profiles compiled by commercial genealogy sites such as Ancestry.com and 23andMe onto the smaller, public open-source database created in 2010, called GEDmatch. The commercial sites require authorities to obtain search warrants for the information; the public site does not. But the push is running up against privacy concerns.

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29 Jun 16:16

Treasury chief Mnuchin slams report that Trump wants to exit WTO

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin said on Friday a report by the Axios news website, that cited sources as saying President Donald Trump wanted the United States to withdraw from the World Trade Organization, was wrong.
23 Jun 06:27

News Analysis: President Trump, Deal Maker? Not So Fast

by PETER BAKER
Petr Tvaruzek

Yet, he already broke some big ones... Iran, Paris Accord, NAFTA, Net Neutrality, healthcare, now UN Human Rights...

After 17 months in office, President Trump has yet to seal many major deals on trade, security, health care, immigration or gun control.
22 Jun 11:10

Contributing Op-Ed Writer: Trickle Down Trumpsters and the Debasement of Language

by TIMOTHY EGAN
Petr Tvaruzek

"The body temperature of a chicken..."

Constant repetition of the lie makes truth meaningless. Say a falsehood over and over and it takes on the shape of reality.
21 Jun 22:40

A CO2 Shortage is Causing a Beer and Meat Crisis in Britain

by msmash
Petr Tvaruzek

you mean.. the same CO2 that is the waste product of all coal and gas plants and whose overproduction causes some itsy-bitsy worries about the survival of human race?

Carbon dioxide (CO2) is used in the production of a wide variety of food and drink products. But with at least five CO2 producers across northern Europe offline, a shortfall in the gas is causing shortages in beer, fizzy drinks, and meat. From a report: Britain is particularly affected because the seasonal shutdown of the plants has meant that the UK has only one big plant producing CO2 left. The British Beer and Pub Association, along with individual beer producers and pubs, has warned of the crisis caused by the shortage. Without naming companies, the trade association said the shortfall has caused beer production shortages. Heineken, the UK's biggest brewer, said its CO2 supplier was facing "a major issue" in the UK. Meanwhile, one of Britain's biggest pub chains, Wetherspoons, said it'll be forced to pull a number of beers and fizzy drinks from its menu soon.

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21 Jun 13:48

Hungary Criminalizes Aiding Illegal Immigrants

by PATRICK KINGSLEY
Petr Tvaruzek

the similarity with treating Jews just before the war is totally coincidental...

Prime Minister Viktor Orban campaigned on a nationalist, anti-immigrant platform. Providing help to those who enter the country illegally will now be punishable by up to a year in jail.
20 Jun 16:41

GitHub, Medium, and Twitter Scrubbed a Database of ICE Agents

by Corin Faife
Petr Tvaruzek

well, there is always torrent, zeronet, and other decentralised options...

A database listing the names and locations of employees working for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)—pulled from publicly-available information on LinkedIn—was removed from major web platforms on Tuesday, just hours after its publication by programmer and artist Sam Lavigne.

GitHub, a site for coders to collaborate on open source projects, removed Lavigne’s repository, which featured a user interface for scanning the scraped data, including ICE employees’ self-provided photos, job descriptions, and work history. "We removed the project because it violates our community guidelines,” a GitHub spokesperson wrote Motherboard in an email. “In general, we have policies against use of GitHub for doxxing and harassment, and violating a third party's privacy."

Medium also removed Lavigne's original blog post, which linked to the database and explained the rationale behind the project. Lavigne told Motherboard on Tuesday that he created the database in an effort to increase transparency about the individuals carrying out the Trump administration’s family separation and child detention program, which has drawn fire from the UN Human Rights Commission. Lavigne’s use of public data mirrors a 2015 project by Transparency Toolkit, which scraped LinkedIn for information about National Security Agency employees. Medium spokespeople did not immediately respond to Motherboard’s request for comment.

Read More: This Programmer Scraped LinkedIn to Find People Who Work at ICE

A Twitter account named "ICE Human Resources," which tweeted out names, job descriptions and profile pictures taken from Lavigne's database, was suspended by Twitter, according to a screenshot shared on Twitter by its creator Russel Neiss. Twitter spokespeople were not immediately available to comment.

The information was taken from public LinkedIn profiles using a custom script, and so did not include street addresses or telephone numbers, although frequently did include location information at the town or city level. Critics on Twitter accused Lavigne of "doxxing" the employees and called his project “misguided.” Fox News even covered the response.

ICE spokespeople were not immediately available to comment.

GitHub also appears to be taking down repositories that mirror Lavigne’s database, not just Lavigne’s own page. While Lavigne's original GitHub repository was online, I "forked" it, or made my own copy on GitHub This morning my own copy of the repository was deactivated. When I reached out to GitHub support to question the removal of data—which was of use for journalistic research—I received a response stating simply: "In general, whenever a repository is disabled for a Terms of Service violation, its forks are also disabled. "

A mirror of Lavigne’s original repository was posted to GitLab, an alternative code hosting website, but at the time of writing that repository is offline. GitLab spokespeople were not immediately available to comment.

LinkedIn—the social network for employment where Lavigne sourced his data—is currently engaged in a legal battle to prevent third parties from scraping information on its site.

“We oppose how US immigration authorities are separating families at the border, but we can’t allow the illegal use of our member data,” LinkedIn spokesperson MK Juric wrote Motherboard in an email. “We will take appropriate action to ensure our members’ data is protected and used properly." Juric clarified that LinkedIn did not request that Lavigne’s database be taken offline, and that GitHub and Medium acted on their own.

Online commentators remarked on the speed with which action was taken against Lavigne’s pages, while forms of abuse against him were allowed to persist. In the wake of the publication of the database, many tweets addressed to Lavigne contained threats of violence.

Additional reporting by Jordan Pearson.

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13 Jun 20:30

Customer Rewards

Petr Tvaruzek

i'd be totally ok if this was the common practice

We'll pay you $1.47 to post on social media about our products, $2.05 to mention it in any group chats you're in, and 11 cents per passenger each time you drive your office carpool past one of our billboards.
04 Jun 14:49

Microsoft snaps up GitHub for $7.5 billion

by Peter Bright
Petr Tvaruzek

full frontal attack by the traditional strategy "Embrace, extend, and extinguish".. GVFS, Microsoft <3 Linux, sure..

Enlarge

Microsoft has reached an agreement to buy GitHub, the source repository and collaboration platform, in a deal worth $7.5 billion. The all-stock deal is expected to close by the end of the year, subject to regulatory approval in the US and EU.

Decade-old GitHub is built on Git, the open source version control software originally written by Linux creator Linus Torvalds. Git is a distributed version control system: each developer has their own repository that they make changes to, and these changes can be propagated between repositories to share those changes. GitHub provides a repository hosting service: a place to put those repositories so that other developers can readily access them. Since its inception, it has become a mainstay of the open source world, with countless projects—including Microsoft projects such as the Visual Studio Code text editor and the .NET runtime—using GitHub repositories as a place to publish their code to the world and coordinate collaborative development. In total, some 28 million developers use GitHub, and there are 85 million code repositories.

On top of its core Git foundation, GitHub has built its own workflows ("pull requests") to ease the merging of changes from one repository to another. It also has integrated issue tracking, a Web front-end for browsing repositories, and a marketplace for a wide range of commercial add-ons and extensions.

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04 Jun 09:06

Microsoft Sticks With Controversial 'GVFS' Name Despite Backlash

by BeauHD
Petr Tvaruzek

backlash on github will be over as soon as microsoft aquires it

New submitter DuroSoft writes: It has been over a year since Microsoft unveiled its open source GVFS (Git Virtual File System) project, designed to make terabyte-scale repositories, like it's own 270GB Windows source code, manageable using Git. The problem is that the GNOME project already has a virtual file system by the name of GVfs that has been in use for years, with hundreds of threads on Stack Overflow, etc. Yet Microsoft's GVFS has already surpassed GVfs in Google and is causing confusion. To make matters worse, Microsoft has officially refused to change the name, despite a large public backlash on GitHub and social media, and despite pull requests providing scripts that can change the name to anything Microsoft wants. Is this mere arrogance on Microsoft's part, laziness to do a quick Google search before using a name, or is it something more sinister?

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02 Jun 07:08

Trump Orders a Lifeline for Struggling Coal and Nuclear Plants

by BRAD PLUMER
Petr Tvaruzek

Make America Unprofitable Again!

The president instructed Energy Secretary Rick Perry to “prepare immediate steps” to stop the closing of unprofitable plants around the country.
31 May 13:41

Missouri governor offered to resign if charges dropped

Petr Tvaruzek

is that how law works?

(Reuters) - Missouri Governor Eric Greitens, who resigned on Tuesday, had offered to leave office in exchange for dismissal of a felony computer tampering charge against him in a wider scandal, a prosecutor's spokeswoman said on Wednesday.
31 May 13:37

Parkland killer boasted of mass murder plans in cell phone videos

Petr Tvaruzek

and all the NSA illegal spying and backdoors and malware and gag orders failed to prevent this? Are they any useful then?

(Reuters) - The teen charged with shooting 17 people dead at his former high school in Parkland, Florida, boasted of plans to commit mass murder in a series of cell phone videos recorded by him before the rampage and released on Wednesday by prosecutors.
25 May 17:07

Skipping School for Cheap Flights? You Could Be Fined in Germany

by CHRISTOPHER F. SCHUETZE
Petr Tvaruzek

say what??

Officers in Germany recently caught 21 families trying to travel a few days before official vacations, when tickets often cost less. The fine is up to $1,200.
20 May 14:48

U.S., China putting trade war on hold, Treasury's Mnuchin says

Petr Tvaruzek

So many tables flipped at ZTE right now

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. trade war with China is "on hold" after the world's largest economies agreed to drop their tariff threats while they work on a wider trade agreement, U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said on Sunday.
08 May 06:43

What Will New York Do About Its Uber Problem?

by THE EDITORIAL BOARD
Petr Tvaruzek

Why didn't the taxi drivers start working for Uber? If there are so many other Uber drivers happily doing the same work, it would seem they get paid enough.. otherwise they wouldn't be doing it

Ride-hailing apps are convenient for city residents, but they’ve had devastating effects on the livelihood of taxi drivers and on the streets.
07 May 18:12

26 Years Later, Justice for Men Imprisoned for a Bogus Rape

by JAN RANSOM
Petr Tvaruzek

shouldn't this get it's own hashtag like #metoo? some people might be surprised how widespread this is

Gregory Counts and VanDyke Perry were found guilty of a rape that the woman now says “never happened.”
23 Apr 15:03

Misinterpretation

Petr Tvaruzek

so when will the "Soft skills" trainings at the job address this problem?

"But there are seven billion people in the world! I can't possibly stop to consider how ALL of them might interpret something!" "Ah, yes, there's no middle ground between 'taking personal responsibility for the thoughts and feelings of every single person on Earth' and 'covering your eyes and ears and yelling logically correct statements into the void.' That's a very insightful point and not at all inane."
20 Apr 02:42

Trump launches effort to boost U.S. weapons sales abroad

Petr Tvaruzek

Sure, first turn everyone into an enemy with immigration crackdown and import tarifs, then sell them your guns. For economic profit?

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Trump administration rolled out a long-awaited overhaul of U.S. arms export policy on Thursday aimed at expanding sales to allies, saying it will bolster the American defense industry and create jobs at home.
12 Apr 05:12

"If you want to be wrong, follow the masses" - Socrates - Always think of this quote when everything gets negative on bitcoin when it falls...

by /u/Crevative
Petr Tvaruzek

But also.. "Being wrong in a herd hurts you less"

10 Apr 03:52

[N] SenseTime (Hong Kong-based CV startup) is now worth $3bn, the most valuable AI startup in the world.

by /u/wei_jok
Petr Tvaruzek

“It will not affect privacy because only authorized persons can access it,” - funnies statement in a long time

08 Apr 07:58

Op-Ed Contributors: Polluters on the High Seas

by HILDA HEINE and CHRISTIANA FIGUERES
Petr Tvaruzek

actually.. AFAIK container ships produce orders of magnitude lower emissions per kg transported than any other existing mode of transport

The International shipping industry is a major emitter of greenhouse gases but has been slow to address the problem.