“Federal prosecutors plan to criminally charge a former Boeing Co. pilot they suspect of misleading aviation regulators about safety issues blamed for two fatal crashes of the 737 Max,” reports the Wall Street Journal, citing “people familiar with the …
Boston Dynamics’ Spot Becomes a Robotic Watchdog for Hyundai
CNET’s Roadshow reports that a safety-oriented version of Boston Dynamics’ headless dog-shaped robot “Spot” will begin patrolling a Kia plant in South Korea, “to survey industrial areas remotely and help identify issues before they happen.”
For exampl…
Mozilla Experiment: Set Default Search Engine to Bing for 1% of Firefox Users
“Mozilla is running an experiment on 1% of the Firefox desktop population currently, which sets the default search engine to Bing in the web browser,” reports Ghacks:
[I]n most regions, it is Google Search. Mozilla and Google extended the search deal i…
Is Python About to Become the Most Popular Programming Language?
“According to one measure, Python is potentially on the verge of becoming the most popular computer programming language,” reports ZDNet, joining C and Java as the only other two languages to attain the #1 spot.
Of course, it depends on who’s making t…
FDA Approves Human Clinical Trials of a Possible CRISPR-Based HIV Cure
“A CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing technology that has shown promise in clearing HIV from mice is headed into human testing,” reports Fierce Biotech:
We don’t like to throw the word “cure” around here. But Excision BioTherapeutics thinks the therapy could rep…
Global Computing’s Carbon Footprint Is Bigger Than Previously Estimated
An anonymous reader quotes a report from UPI: According to a new study, published Friday in the journal Patterns, information and communications technology, or ICT for short, is responsible for a greater share of greenhouse gas emissions than previousl…
Richard Stallman Shares His Concerns About GitHub’s Copilot — and About GitHub
destinyland writes: A newly-released video at GNU.org shows an hour-long talk given by free software advocate Richard Stallman for the BigBlueBotton open source conference (which was held online last July). After a 14-minute clip from an earlier speech…
WSJ: Facebook’s 2018 Algorithm Change ‘Rewarded Outrage’. Zuck Resisted Fixes
This week the Wall Street Journal reported that a 2018 algorithm change at Facebook “rewarded outrage,” according to Facebook’s own internal memos. But the Journal says the memos showed “that CEO Mark Zuckerberg resisted proposed fixes,” and that the m…
Despite ‘Economic Distress’, Two US Nuclear Power Plants Saved From Closing Through Subsidies
Slashdot reader oumuamua writes that two U.S. nuclear plants owned by Exelon “were almost shutdown prematurely…but were saved at the last minute by the Illinois Senate.”
The Illinois Senate has approved a clean energy deal which includes a subsidy f…
El Salvador’s Bitcoin Rollout Marred by Technical Glitches in Digital Wallets
Slashdot has been following El Salvador’s pioneering adoption of Bitcoin as legal tender last week.
But by Friday Reuters was reporting that “For a fourth day in a row technical glitches have beset the Salvadoran government’s bitcoin digital wallet C…