Non-IT News Thread
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@NerdyDad said in Non-IT News Thread:
@scottalanmiller said in Non-IT News Thread:
@NerdyDad said in Non-IT News Thread:
@mlnews said in Non-IT News Thread:
I’ll be drone for Christmas: London airport closed for day by drone harassment
Gatwick CEO says drone flights designed to "bring maximum disruption" for Christmas.
In what appears to be the first intentional use of drones to disrupt civil aviation, continued sightings of two remotely piloted aircraft flying over and around the airfield at London's Gatwick Airport starting the evening of December 19 have forced the airport to remain closed to flights for over a day. In a letter posted to Gatwick's website, Gatwick Airport's CEO called the continued drone activity "a highly targeted activity which has been designed to close the airport and bring maximum disruption in the run up to Christmas." He also said the airport is cooperating with law enforcement to end the "criminal activity."
Turrents stationed through out the perimeter of the property with an adequate supply of 40 caliber ammunition and the problem should begin to go away.
That's the exact problem that they have. Can't be dropping random 40 cal round down all over London! That's why they can't open fire right now.
Okay, so it doesn't have to be 40 cal, but enough to deter drones.
Anything with lead you want to avoid raining down on one of the world's largest metro areas, though.
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@NerdyDad said in Non-IT News Thread:
@scottalanmiller said in Non-IT News Thread:
@NerdyDad said in Non-IT News Thread:
@mlnews said in Non-IT News Thread:
I’ll be drone for Christmas: London airport closed for day by drone harassment
Gatwick CEO says drone flights designed to "bring maximum disruption" for Christmas.
In what appears to be the first intentional use of drones to disrupt civil aviation, continued sightings of two remotely piloted aircraft flying over and around the airfield at London's Gatwick Airport starting the evening of December 19 have forced the airport to remain closed to flights for over a day. In a letter posted to Gatwick's website, Gatwick Airport's CEO called the continued drone activity "a highly targeted activity which has been designed to close the airport and bring maximum disruption in the run up to Christmas." He also said the airport is cooperating with law enforcement to end the "criminal activity."
Turrents stationed through out the perimeter of the property with an adequate supply of 40 caliber ammunition and the problem should begin to go away.
That's the exact problem that they have. Can't be dropping random 40 cal round down all over London! That's why they can't open fire right now.
Okay, so it doesn't have to be 40 cal, but enough to deter drones.
Hawks and Falcons are being specifically trained for this type of shit. They also have a RF jamming "gun" to combat it... but that of course will mess up just about everything in the area.
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Fortnite’s paid outfits, dances have made it a target for lucrative account theft
Unsurprisingly, it's all script-kiddie stuff—and easily beaten with one obvious option.
A Thursday BBC report takes a look at the state of Epic Games' mega-popular game Fortnite through the eyes of a particular audience: its black market of account thieves. After speaking with "about 20" perpetrators, reporter Joe Tidy put together a report that breaks down what's being stolen and resold, how it's happening, and what the game's players can do to shore up their own accounts.
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US government just went to a partial shutdown after failing to come to an agreement on the budget.
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@scottalanmiller said in Non-IT News Thread:
US government just went to a partial shutdown after failing to come to an agreement on the budget.
Does that mean we now only have to pay partial taxes?
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All we want for Christmas is the first trailer for Jordan Peele’s Us
Oscar-winning screenwriter is back with what looks like a truly terrifying film.
Get Out was one of our favorite films of 2017—a subtle exploration of racial tensions that quietly builds to reveal its horrifying premise and inevitably bloody conclusion. It was a surprise box office hit, raking in more than $250 million globally, and snagging multiple Oscar nominations, including for Best Picture. Peele won the Oscar for best original screenplay—the first time the award has gone to a black recipient
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Japan restarting commercial whaling, ignoring global moratorium
Leaves International Whaling Commission, gives up pretense of "scientific" whaling.
On Wednesday, Japan announced that it was pulling out of the International Whaling Commission (IWC), a step that will allow it to restart commercial whaling in the spring. The move comes after a failed attempt to get the IWC to set legal quotas for legal hunting by its members. For whales, the news is good and bad: the move with shift Japan's hunting to its territorial waters, and away from the healthier populations in the Antarctic.
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You can now download the long-lost (and unfinished) SimCity NES port
ROM is playable enough; hobbyists are already posting more bug fixes at Github.
This year, we learned that a long-lost version of the classic gaming series SimCity, originally meant for the NES, had found its way from Nintendo's archives to the hands of collectors. That story got a tidy Christmas update this week in the form of a comprehensive data dump, complete with stories, videos, and—perhaps most important—a ROM download of the working, incomplete game.
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The best films, with and without superheroes, of 2018
Documentaries, superheroes, giant monsters, tiny desktop windows: Here are our picks.
Agree or disagree all you want, but our list of favorite 2018 films already has a ton of quality fare without those big-ticket entries. Like last year, we're mostly skipping the numbered list, especially since we are not a comprehensive film-review site. Our list, like our usual coverage, blends Ars' love of science, tech, data, research, huge beasts, faithful comic adaptations, and lasers. Let's dig in. (Thanks to Ars' Nathan Mattise for contributing to this list.)
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Evidence continues to mount about how bad Denuvo is for PC gaming performance
Analysis series began earlier in 2018, has grown as more publishers patch DRM out.
One of the biggest arguments against anti-piracy checks built into video games (commonly known as "digital rights management," or DRM) is that they punish paying customers with stuttering, loading times, and other detractive gameplay issues. While leading DRM vendor Denuvo has long claimed that its tools don't hamper video games, the stats keep piling up to suggest otherwise
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BBC News - Richard Overton, US oldest veteran and oldest man, dies aged 112
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-46699175 -
Urban farms could be incredibly efficient—but aren’t yet
Casual farmers overwork, buy fertilizer, and use municipal water.
The green revolution that transformed modern agriculture has generally increased its scale. There's tremendous potential for efficiencies in the large-scale application of mechanization, fertilization, and pesticide use. But operating at that level requires large tracts of land, which means sources of food have grown increasingly distant from the people in urban centers who will ultimately eat most of it.
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Why does flat Earth belief still exist?
Our latest video looks at what can motivate people to believe the impossible.
There's no shortage of strange beliefs out there, and not all of them involve having a firm grip on reality. But it's truly bizarre to see one from the latter camp have a sudden surge in popularity and attention millennia after we knew it was wrong. But when it comes to the idea that the Earth is flat, centuries of:thu accumulating evidence don't make much of a difference—its adherents have centuries of history of ignoring it, along with at least one not-nearly-as-famous-as-it-should-be instance of threatening a prominent scientist along the way.
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New Horizons set for humanity’s first ever Kuiper Belt rendezvous
Closest flyby will come just after midnight in its operators' time zone.
If you want your New Year celebrations to be truly out of this world, then you might consider stopping by the New Horizons website. Following on from its phenomenally successful flyby of Pluto, the spacecraft will perform its closest flyby of a small Kuiper Belt object at just after midnight in the US Eastern time zone—the one where the operations center of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory is located.
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BBC News - Cyber-attack disrupts distribution of multiple US newspapers
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The NHS says, 'Binge drinking usually refers to drinking lots of alcohol in a short space of time or drinking to get drunk.'
Um.... drinking to get drunk is binge drinking? I don't think the British have any idea what American drinking is like. Or European drinking.
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@scottalanmiller said in Non-IT News Thread:
Why not - they can make almost as much (new teachers at least) at McDonalds with little to no responsibility.
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@Dashrender said in Non-IT News Thread:
@scottalanmiller said in Non-IT News Thread:
Why not - they can make almost as much (new teachers at least) at McDonalds with little to no responsibility.
Yup, exactly. Although in reality they can't. McD's doesn't pay nearly as much. Teachers get typically at least $40K for part time work. And most make way more. Teachers work around 72% of the year for wages normally above local averages, and even on the days that they work, most teachers have shorter days than many jobs. Most work something like 7-3, which is eight hours, but that's typically the max average. But the professional day is ten hours in the US.
So if they work 72% of the year, at 80% of the hours. That's only 58% of a professional working year. Even if a teacher gets only $35K. Per hour, that's like making $65K in a normal profession.
Teachers are underpaid, but not to the degree that people say at all. And certain make way, way more per hour than McDonald's workers.
Normal McDonald's jobs are under $9/hr. Typical teachers are around double that or more, for work that is drastically less demanding, and way harder to get fired from. The McD's jobs are the more stressful, one trivial mistake and you are fired. Teachers don't live that way.
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Even McDonald's STORE managers, which are about three levels above the normal workers and have way more stress, earn only slightly above what average teachers make, but have to work in tough conditions year round to do it.
