Non-IT News Thread
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Just a reminder...
https://www.thecut.com/2018/11/thanksgiving-is-the-least-sexy-holiday.html
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GM poised to close plants in Michigan, Ohio, Maryland, will cut 15% of salaried workers
Big news here in MI this morning.
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@bnrstnr said in Non-IT News Thread:
GM poised to close plants in Michigan, Ohio, Maryland, will cut 15% of salaried workers
Big news here in MI this morning.
In Ohio as well. The Lordstown plant that's closing has it's own zip code.
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@bnrstnr said in Non-IT News Thread:
GM poised to close plants in Michigan, Ohio, Maryland, will cut 15% of salaried workers
Big news here in MI this morning.
Wow
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Six4Three exec “panicked” in UK MP’s office, gave up Facebook internal files
App maker had been ordered to not share docs obtained via discovery, but did anyway.
...a California county judge is irked that documents that he ordered kept secret under a protective order have now been shared abroad.
The years-long legal dispute between Facebook and the tiny app company Six4Three has now intersected with an ongoing British investigation into Facebook's privacy practices—resulting in a strange twist.
A new Monday court filing indicates that Six4Three's managing director, Ted Kramer, met with MP Damian Collins in the parliamentarian's London office on November 20. According to the filing, MP Collins told Kramer that he was in contempt of Parliament. There, Kramer "panicked" and began frantically searching his Dropbox account for relevant files obtained under civil discovery. He eventually copied some of them to a USB stick, which he gave to Collins....
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GM axes Volt, Cruze, and Impala for North America in cost-cutting move
GM is cutting jobs and car models despite earning healthy profits.
GM is laying off thousands of workers and closing five plants, the company announced on Monday. The company is aiming to reduce its salaried headcount by 15 percent in the coming months.
The sobering news comes at a time when GM as a whole is doing relatively well. The company is profitable and beat Wall Street's expectations with its most recent quarterly earnings results.
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Chinese customers hate “new car smell,” so Ford files a patent to bake it out
A premium smell to one country is a disgusting distraction to another.
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Report: Uber self-driving team was preparing for CEO demo before fatal crash
Engineers were reportedly encouraged to limit "bad experiences" to one per trip.
We've known since May that serious flaws in Uber's self-driving software contributed to the fatal crash that killed pedestrian Elaine Herzberg in Tempe, Arizona, back in March. For example, Uber had disabled emergency braking on its vehicles to make its cars' driving behavior less erratic. A new report from Business Insider's Julie Bort sheds light on why Uber's software may have been so flawed at the time of the March crash.
In early 2018, Uber's Advanced Technology Group—the team developing self-driving cars—was focused on getting ready for a forthcoming demo ride with Uber's recently hired CEO, Dara Khosrowshahi. Business Insider reports that in November 2017, Uber circulated a document asking engineers on the self-driving car team to think about "rider experience metrics." Engineers were encouraged to try to limit the number of "bad experiences" to one per ride.
Two days later, another email went out announcing that Uber was "turning off the car's ability to make emergency decisions on its own like slamming on the brakes or swerving hard."...
...Hard braking was still disabled in March when Elaine Herzberg stepped into the Tempe roadway ahead of an Uber vehicle. According to the NTSB's report, "at 1.3 seconds before impact, the self-driving system determined that an emergency braking maneuver was needed to mitigate a collision." However, "emergency braking maneuvers" were "not enabled." Even worse, "the system is not designed to alert" the safety driver about an imminent collision.
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The Boring Company’s first tunnel is all dug up
Tunnel reportedly ends on property The Boring Company recently bought.
On Friday night, Boring Company CEO Elon Musk tweeted images of his tunnel-boring machine appearing to emerge from the dirt into a cavernous hole, with bystanders at the hole's edge watching the spinning boring head.
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Mom jailed after child misses 26 days of school
https://abcnews.go.com/US/mom-jailed-child-misses-26-days-school/story?id=59468167 -
@black3dynamite said in Non-IT News Thread:
Mom jailed after child misses 26 days of school
https://abcnews.go.com/US/mom-jailed-child-misses-26-days-school/story?id=59468167This is really sad but it sounds like the mom just really doesn't care, about her daughter or anything.
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@black3dynamite said in Non-IT News Thread:
Mom jailed after child misses 26 days of school
https://abcnews.go.com/US/mom-jailed-child-misses-26-days-school/story?id=59468167Well we might not have the entire story. Maybe mom needed help with her crack farm?
Do kids still get exclusions if "working on a farm"?
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George H.W. Bush, 41st president of the United States, dies at 94
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/george-hw-bush-41st-president-of-the-united-states-dies-at-94/2018/11/30/42fa2ea2-61e2-11e8-99d2-0d678ec08c2f_story.html -
Alaska earthquake: Anchorage rocked by aftershocks
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@black3dynamite said in Non-IT News Thread:
George H.W. Bush, 41st president of the United States, dies at 94
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/george-hw-bush-41st-president-of-the-united-states-dies-at-94/2018/11/30/42fa2ea2-61e2-11e8-99d2-0d678ec08c2f_story.htmlWe were notified by an alert from a Japanese news site to my wife’s phone about 60 seconds before NBC broke into the tonight show with the news.
I dont allow any news apps or such to send notifications on my phone. I did pop open my google news feed and it was not there yet. I went to CNN and they had the banner, and that was when NBC broke in.
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Verizon/AOL helped advertisers track kids online, must now pay $5M fine
AOL knowingly violated children's privacy law with billions of targeted ads.
Verizon-owned AOL helped advertisers track children online in order to serve targeted ads, in violation of a federal children's privacy law, and has agreed to pay a fine of $4.95 million, New York Attorney General Barbara Underwood announced today.
"The Attorney General's Office found that AOL conducted billions of auctions for ad space on hundreds of websites the company knew were directed to children under the age of 13," Underwood's announcement said. "Through these auctions, AOL collected, used, and disclosed personal information from the websites' users in violation of COPPA [Children's Online Privacy Protection Act], enabling advertisers to track and serve targeted ads to young children."
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Facebook chief's emails exposed by MPs
Damian Collins MP, the chair of the parliamentary committee involved, highlighted several "key issues" in an introductory note.
He wrote that:
- Facebook allowed some companies to maintain "full access" to users' friends data even after announcing changes to its platform in 2014/2015 to limit what developers' could see. "It is not clear that there was any user consent for this, nor how Facebook decided which companies should be whitelisted," Mr Collins wrote
- Facebook had been aware that an update to its Android app that let it collect records of users' calls and texts would be controversial. "To mitigate any bad PR, Facebook planned to make it as hard as possible for users to know that this was one of the underlying features," Mr Collins wrote
- Facebook used data provided by the Israeli analytics firm Onavo to determine which other mobile apps were being downloaded and used by the public. It then used this knowledge to decide which apps to acquire or otherwise treat as a threat
- there was evidence that Facebook's refusal to share data with some apps caused them to fail
- there had been much discussion of the financial value of providing access to friends' data
