Hallelujah, there will be dogs in the White House again. And for the first time, a shelter dog: Major, who was a pretty damned adorable puppy, even soaking wet:

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Meet Major Biden, the first shelter dog to make it all the way to the White House 🐕 (In partnership with @Dodo)

You can help Delaware Humane Association save more dogs by donating to: https://t.co/P1R9gYZvPs. You can also check them out on Instagram: https://t.co/3mMWcCEhZK pic.twitter.com/QhN45uzQKx

— NowThis (@nowthisnews) November 25, 2020

Major was surrendered to a shelter in Delaware along with his littermates in 2018. He was fostered and then adopted by Joe and Jill Biden. Patrick Carroll, the executive director of the Delaware Humane Association, remembered Major’s adoption day in an interview with The New York Times. He said Biden came in, professing he was in a hurry to get through the process, but ended up being there more than an hour hanging out with the shelter staff, telling stories and taking selfies with them. “He was very kind and engaging, as he always is,” Carroll said.

Major will join Champ, the Bidens’ senior dog, in their new home in January. Champs’s already familiar with the White House. The 12-year-old grew up there.

Tasmania consists of the 26th-largest island in the world and its surrounding 334 islands — an island state of Australia with a population around 540,000 people, according to Wikipedia. Friday the Tasmanian government "declared that it has become the first Australian state, and one of just a handful of jurisdictions worldwide, to be powered entirely by renewable electricity," according to one news report: Tasmania joins the Australian Capital Territory as the only two Australian jurisdictions sourcing all of their electricity from renewable energy sources, and places Tasmania alongside countries like Scotland, Iceland and Costa Rica which have also made the transition to 100 per cent renewable electricity. The milestone was welcomed by environmental groups, saying that it was another example of what is being achieved by state and territory governments that are stepping in to show leadership on energy policy in a vacuum left by ongoing conflict both between and within political parties at a federal level... Tasmanian energy minister Guy Barnett added that the Tasmanian government would continue to support an expansion of the state's renewable energy capabilities, as the state looks to grow its role as a supplier of zero emissions energy to both mainland Australia and of green hydrogen into international export markets. "But there is more to do, which is why we have set a target to double our renewable generation to a global-leading target of 200 per cent of our current needs by 2040 — which we recently passed into law following the passing of legislation through both Houses of Parliament," Barnett added.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

NBC News calls it "the ghostly signal that reveals the engine of the universe." Long-time Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot shares their report: In research published Wednesday in the journal Nature, scientists reported that they've made the first detection of almost-ethereal particles called neutrinos that can be traced to carbon-nitrogen-oxygen fusion, known as the CNO cycle, inside the sun. It's a landmark finding that confirms theoretical predictions from the 1930s, and it's being hailed as one of the greatest discoveries in physics of the new millenium. "It's really a breakthrough for solar and stellar physics," said Gioacchino Ranucci of the Italian National Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN), one of the researchers on the project since it began in 1990. The scientists used the ultrasensitive Borexino detector at the INFN's Gran Sasso particle physics laboratory in central Italy — the largest underground research center in the world, deep beneath the Apennine Mountains, about 65 miles northeast of Rome. The detection caps off decades of study of the sun's neutrinos by the Borexino project, and reveals for the first time the main nuclear reaction that most stars use to fuse hydrogen into helium... Scientists calculate that the CNO cycle is the primary type of fusion in the universe. But it's hard to spot inside our relatively cool sun, where it accounts for only 1 percent of its energy... Ranucci said the Borexino detector has spent decades measuring neutrinos from the sun's main proton-proton chain reaction, but detecting its CNO neutrinos has been very difficult — only about seven neutrinos with the tell-tale energy of the CNO cycle are spotted in a day. The discovery required making the detector ever more sensitive over the last five years, Ranucci said, by shielding it from outside sources of radioactivity so that the inner chamber of the detector is the most radiation-free place on Earth.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

For at least a century and a half, capitalism has been so intrinsically tangled together with America’s government that it’s hard to think to think of an America that’s not ruled by the market. Democracy and capitalism are often taught as two sides of the same coin. Except, of course, they’re not.  

Capitalism has proven that it can do splendidly well under multiple forms of government. Capitalist systems flourished in Europe under monarchies. In more recent times, they’ve worked hand in black leather glove with fascist rulers, and proven themselves perfectly capable of operating with single-party dictatorships. In fact, as China has demonstrated over the last three decades, capitalism can grow at an enormous rate when enabled by a government where civil rights, worker safety, and pollution are considered issues barely worthy of notice. So what happens when capitalism decides that democracy … is holding it back?

Substitute version 2.0 for the checkra1n and unc0ver jailbreaks has been announced, promising substantial speed improvements along with a smaller footprint with regard to system resources.

Another fine two minutes of outstanding legal mentoring for Jenna Ellis from Deboruh McClintauwk from The Statue of Libuhtee.

I am the law mentor for Jenna Ellis good luck Jenna pic.twitter.com/gAJRyKmktP

— Sarah Cooper (@sarahcpr) November 29, 2020

Open Thread below.

ABC News tells the story of Indonesia-based budget airline Lion Air, which had ordered over 200 Boeing 737 MAX 8s at a cost of $22 billion — and what happened on a flight the day before a fatal crash on October 29th, 2018: [A]fter its first flight in May 2017, the 737 MAX 8 went 17 months without incident. Then, on Oct. 28, 2018, Lion Air Flight 610 from Bali to Jakarta experienced an in-flight emergency as the plane suddenly began to nosedive after take-off. "All of us were screaming like we are in a roller coaster," said Rakhmat Robbi, a passenger on the flight. "To be honest, I [was] think[ing] it's almost like my last flight and this is my last day." The aircraft nosedived four times as the pilots struggled to regain control, according to Indonesia's National Transportation Safety Committee (NTSC). A third pilot who just happened to be in the cockpit was able to help the two pilots resolve the situation and the plane landed safely in Jakarta. However, according to the NTSC, the crew left incomplete notes about the details of the emergency. "The pilot reported that he had a problem with the speed and altitude indicated on [the] captain's side," said Capt. Nurcahyo Utomo, senior safety investigator of the NTSC. Nurcahyo said the captain failed to mention the plane's trim system had suddenly activated, causing it to repeatedly nose dive. "The pilots were able to control it," said aviation attorney Steven Marks. "They knew they had a problem. But they didn't understand exactly what the nature of the problem was." Early the next morning, on Oct. 29, 2018, the same plane departed from Jakarta to Pangkal Pinang, Indonesia. Just 13 minutes after takeoff, Lion Air Flight 610 plummeted into the Java Sea. Authorities launched a search and rescue mission immediately, but all 189 people on board died. The flight data recorder from Lion Air 610 revealed that the plane had gone out of control — it had moved up and down over 24 times before it finally dove into the sea at full speed. "I never knew... any case of the [sic] aircraft that fly down and up and up and down like this," Nurcahyo said. "I knew that the pilot was fighting with the plane." Nurcahyo said the NTSC asked Boeing about the kind of system on the 737 MAX that could have caused it to behave in such a manner. He said investigators were surprised to learn that Boeing had installed a flight control software program that could force the plane into a dive without the pilots' knowledge... MCAS was accidentally triggered on both Lion Air flights because a defective angle of attack (AOA) sensor had transmitted incorrect information about the position of the plane's nose. Although there are two AOA sensors on the 737 MAX, MCAS was only connected to one of them. "It's a lack of redundancy that appears to me to be unacceptable in airplane design," said aviation journalist Christine Negroni, author of the book "The Crash Detectives..." Boeing later told the pilots union of American Airlines it hadn't revealed the existence of MCAS in the 737 flight manual "on the grounds that it didn't want to inundate pilots with unnecessary information," according to the article. ABC also points out that a later investigation by the U.S. Congress "uncovered internal Boeing emails that showed some employees had raised concerns about the 737 MAX while it was still in development, and that they had questioned the safety culture of the company as well."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

ABC News tells the story of Indonesia-based budget airline Lion Air, which had ordered over 200 Boeing 737 MAX 8s at a cost of $22 billion — and what happened on a flight the day before a fatal crash on October 29th, 2018: [A]fter its first flight in May 2017, the 737 MAX 8 went 17 months without incident. Then, on Oct. 28, 2018, Lion Air Flight 610 from Bali to Jakarta experienced an in-flight emergency as the plane suddenly began to nosedive after take-off. "All of us were screaming like we are in a roller coaster," said Rakhmat Robbi, a passenger on the flight. "To be honest, I [was] think[ing] it's almost like my last flight and this is my last day." The aircraft nosedived four times as the pilots struggled to regain control, according to Indonesia's National Transportation Safety Committee (NTSC). A third pilot who just happened to be in the cockpit was able to help the two pilots resolve the situation and the plane landed safely in Jakarta. However, according to the NTSC, the crew left incomplete notes about the details of the emergency. "The pilot reported that he had a problem with the speed and altitude indicated on [the] captain's side," said Capt. Nurcahyo Utomo, senior safety investigator of the NTSC. Nurcahyo said the captain failed to mention the plane's trim system had suddenly activated, causing it to repeatedly nose dive. "The pilots were able to control it," said aviation attorney Steven Marks. "They knew they had a problem. But they didn't understand exactly what the nature of the problem was." Early the next morning, on Oct. 29, 2018, the same plane departed from Jakarta to Pangkal Pinang, Indonesia. Just 13 minutes after takeoff, Lion Air Flight 610 plummeted into the Java Sea. Authorities launched a search and rescue mission immediately, but all 189 people on board died. The flight data recorder from Lion Air 610 revealed that the plane had gone out of control — it had moved up and down over 24 times before it finally dove into the sea at full speed. "I never knew... any case of the [sic] aircraft that fly down and up and up and down like this," Nurcahyo said. "I knew that the pilot was fighting with the plane." Nurcahyo said the NTSC asked Boeing about the kind of system on the 737 MAX that could have caused it to behave in such a manner. He said investigators were surprised to learn that Boeing had installed a flight control software program that could force the plane into a dive without the pilots' knowledge... MCAS was accidentally triggered on both Lion Air flights because a defective angle of attack (AOA) sensor had transmitted incorrect information about the position of the plane's nose. Although there are two AOA sensors on the 737 MAX, MCAS was only connected to one of them. "It's a lack of redundancy that appears to me to be unacceptable in airplane design," said aviation journalist Christine Negroni, author of the book "The Crash Detectives..." Boeing told the pilots union of American Airlines it hadn't revealed the existence of MCAS in the 737 flight manual "on the grounds that it didn't want to inundate pilots with unnecessary information," according to the article. ABC also points out that a later investigation by the U.S. Congress "uncovered internal Boeing emails that showed some employees had raised concerns about the 737 MAX while it was still in development, and that they had questioned the safety culture of the company as well."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Among the first White House senior officials to be publicly announced by President-elect Joe Biden are three Latinos who previously served in the Obama administration and have now been asked to return to a new White House in roles including chief of staff to Jill Biden. 

NBC News reports that both Julissa Reynoso Pantaleon and Anthony Bernal will return to the Biden administration to work for the future first lady as chief of staff and senior adviser, respectively. Julie Chávez Rodríguez, who also worked on Vice President-elect Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign, will return as director of the White House Office of Intergovernmental Affairs. 

Apple is preparing to open its second retail store in South Korea. Located in Seoul’s main finance district, Apple Yeouido will make direct sales and support accessible to a whole new community.

more…

The post South Korea’s second Apple Store opens soon in Yeouido appeared first on 9to5Mac.

RockDoctor (Slashdot reader #15,477) is a professional geologist, and asks: Did anyone feel a sudden wind through their hair at about 17:19+00:00 on Monday, particularly in the mid Pacific? No? Good. Nobody else did. Nobody noticed the asteroid whizzing past just above the Earth's atmosphere (for certain values of "above" including "not very far" and "373km above ground"). That's the closest natural body (i.e., not a spacecraft) documented in near-Earth space which hasn't actually hit the thick-enough parts of the atmosphere to glow, fragment, make sonic booms and dent automobiles. So, we dodged another bullet, and no windows were broken. This one probably wouldn't have done significant damage even if it had touched down in fire and fury — it was about half the size of the 2013 Chelyabinsk meteor, and so around one eighth of the energy (and potential damage). Everyone can go back to bed and sleep easy. Right? But one tiny thing to disturb your sleep : we didn't see this one coming until after it had gone past us. Nor did we see it in it's close approaches on 2014-10-26.60152 or 2017-11-06.57008. And with another 39 projected Earth approaches before the next turn-of-century, it's pretty obvious that one day this is going to hit us. For those who know what an MPEC is [a Minor Planet Electronic Circular], Bill Grey has written up one of his "pseudo-MPECs" with links to other work on this object here, while the actual discovery record is here. The object has been given a formal name of 2020 VT4 unless the discoverers at the ATLAS Mauna Loa Observatory choose to give it a name ("COVID", or "hair-parter", or "hats-off", perhaps. Or just "Rupert".) Wikipedia has caught up too. There will be another close-pass, and an impact, one day. This doesn't change the odds of that happening (probability 1), but it might make it feel a little more immediate.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Months away from President-elect Joe Biden taking office, in the heart of a global pandemic and mass unemployment rates, there are countless reasons to critique and call out Republicans. Not least among them, Donald Trump. Selfish leadership, hateful rhetoric, and policies that leave countless Americans in the dust are the name of Trump’s game. There’s a whole lot about him to call out. Unfortunately, a lot of people go the quickest and easiest route: his weight. 

Criticizing someone’s weight is easy. It takes almost no effort or mental gymnastics to pull it off. It’s almost certain to get you some ‘likes’ on Twitter. Why? Because fatphobia is very, very ingrained in our collective understanding of humor. But it doesn’t have to be. 

Remember when Microsoft was criticized for enabling "workplace surveillance" over "productivity scores" in its Microsoft 365 office software which gave managers highly detailed profiles of each individual employee's activity. Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: The Microsoft 365 Productivity Score apparently has roots in another Microsoft patent application for Systems, Methods, and Software for Implementing a Behavior Change Management Program, which also lays out plans for as yet unimplemented features to automatically schedule hundreds of employees for months of productivity re-education, including preventing employees from scheduling meetings with others if the service deems it counter-productive. So, could the HAL 9000's "I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that" be considered prior art? But Microsoft "has even bigger ideas for using technology to monitor workers in the interest of maximizing organizational productivity," reports GeekWire: Newly surfaced Microsoft patent filings describe a system for deriving and predicting "overall quality scores" for meetings using data such as body language, facial expressions, room temperature, time of day, and number of people in the meeting. The system uses cameras, sensors, and software tools to determine, for example, "how much a participant contributes to a meeting vs performing other tasks (e.g., texting, checking email, browsing the Internet)." The "meeting insight computing system" would then predict the likelihood that a group will hold a high-quality meeting. It would flag potential challenges when an organizer is setting the meeting up, and recommend alternative venues, times, or people to include in the meeting, for example... A patent application made public Nov. 12 notes, "many organizations are plagued by overly long, poorly attended, and recurring meetings that could be modified and/or avoided if more information regarding meeting quality was available." The approach would apply to in-person and virtual meetings, and hybrids of the two... The filings do not detail any potential privacy safeguards. A Microsoft spokesperson declined to comment on the patent filings in response to GeekWire's inquiry. To be sure, patents are not products, and there's no sign yet that Microsoft plans to roll out this hypothetical system. Microsoft has established an internal artificial intelligence ethics office and a companywide committee to ensure that its AI products live by its principles of responsible AI, including transparency and privacy. However, the filings are a window into the ideas floating around inside Microsoft, and they're consistent with the direction the company is already heading.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot reader Iwastheone quotes CNN: A tall, silver, shining metal monolith discovered in the desert in southeastern Utah — which prompted theories of alien placement and drew determined hikers to its secret location — has now disappeared, the state's Bureau of Land Management said Saturday. The monolith was removed by an "unknown party" sometime Friday night, the agency said in a Facebook post. "We have received credible reports that the illegally installed structure, referred to as the 'monolith,' has been removed" from BLM public lands, the post said. "The BLM did not remove the structure, which is considered private property." The monolith was first discovered November 18 by officers from the Utah Department of Public Safety's Aero Bureau. They were flying by helicopter, helping the Division of Wildlife Resources count bighorn sheep in southeastern Utah, when they spotted something that seemed right out of "2001: A Space Odyssey..." Pilot Bret Hutchings guessed it was "between 10 and 12 feet high..." In an official statement, the Utah Department of Public Safety emphasized that it's still illegal to install structures or art on public lands, "no matter what planet you're from."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

If someone were to describe Talia Lavin’s general thesis in Culture Warlords: My Journey Into the Dark Web of White Supremacy in simple terms—namely that it’s not only okay to punch Nazis, it may actually be desirable—ordinary nonactivists or dedicated pacificists might balk.

People who take the time to sit down and read the book, on the other hand, are likely not only to agree heartily with her, but go out looking for some white supremacists to punch all on their own once they’ve finished it.

President Donald Trump has paid $3 million for a partial recount of Wisconsin that expanded President-elect Joe Biden's lead by 87 votes.

On Sunday, Dane County became the final Wisconsin county to complete its recount. According to The Washington Post, over 800,000 ballots were recounted at the request of the Trump campaign.

"As a result of the recount, Biden’s lead over Trump in Wisconsin grew by 87 votes," the report said. "Under Wisconsin law, Trump was required to foot the bill for the partial recount — meaning his campaign paid $3 million only to see Biden’s lead expand."

Each new vote in Biden's lead cost the Trump campaign around $34,000.

Wisconsin state law requires the Wisconsin Election Commission chairwoman, a Democrat, to certify the results by Tuesday.

President Donald Trump isn’t even listening to himself these days. He tweeted on Saturday how Fox News daytime is “virtually unwatchable, especially during the weekends.” Then, in the spirit of true hypocrisy, he gave Fox News his first televised interview since he lost the election against President-elect Joe Biden 26 days ago on November 3.

In a phone interview on Sunday with host Maria Bartiromo, the soon-to-be-former president used the opportunity to tote his usual baseless allegations of voter fraud. He went from suggesting that the FBI and Department of Justice (DOJ) are involved in a conspiracy against him to alleging that dead people applied for mail-in ballots and poll watchers were thrown out of counting rooms by “thugs” in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, Arizona, Wisconsin, and Nevada.

Donald Trump must have really liked losing the presidential election, because he's determined to keep reliving the experience as many times as he can manage. The Trump-demanded recount of the two largest (and most heavily Democratic-voting counties) in Wisconsin has now concluded. The results? Joe Biden's victory over Trump grew by an additional 87 votes.

Under state law, the partial recount in Milwaukee and Dane counties to prove that Joe Biden's victory was a few dozen votes more victorious than we thought will cost the Trump campaign $3 million. It's highly likely Trump's team of grifters, liars and con artists will try to skip out on that bill, citing even more outlandish claims than the current ones, so Wisconsin might want to start preparing for those lawsuits next!

Reuters reports: David Prowse, the English actor who played Darth Vader in the original Star Wars films, has died aged 85, his management company said on Sunday... The champion weightlifter-turned-actor starred as the body, but not the voice, of one of cinema's best-known villains. Director George Lucas opted to dub another voice onto Prowse's portrayal of the towering, masked antagonist Darth Vader in "Star Wars", "The Empire Strikes Back" and "Return of the Jedi". More from the Los Angeles Times: Born in Bristol, southwest England, in 1935, Prowse represented England in weightlifting at the Commonwealth Games in the 1950s before breaking into movies with roles that emphasized his commanding size, including Frankenstein's monster in a pair of horror films [and also in the 1967 comedy Casino Royale]. Director George Lucas saw Prowse in a small part in "A Clockwork Orange" and asked the 6-foot-6-inch actor to audition for the villainous Vader or the Wookiee Chewbacca in "Star Wars." Prowse later told the BBC he chose Darth Vader because "you always remember the bad guys." Physically, Prowse was perfect for the part. His lilting English West Country accent was considered less ideal, and his lines were dubbed by actor James Earl Jones. Prowse was also known to a generation of British children as the Green Cross Code Man, a superhero in a series of road safety advertisements. An anonymous reader writes: In 2011 he authored an autobiography titled Straight from the Force's Mouth (with a foreword by bodybuilder/Incredible Hulk actor Lou Ferrigno), and his differences with Lucasfilm are chronicled in a 2015 documentary about his career titled I Am Your Father. (You can watch its trailer on its page on Amazon Prime, though the full documentary is currently listed as "unavailable.") Wikipedia lists some of Prose's other roles, including: A Minotaur in the Doctor Who serial The Time Monster The Black Knight in the Terry Gilliam film JabberwockyA small role as Hotblack Desiato's bodyguard in the 1981 BBC TV adaptation of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Donald Trump joined Maria Bartiromo on FOX News on Sunday morning to talk about his brilliant conspiracy theories regarding how the election was stolen from him due to fraud and hacking of election machines. The answer is, obviously, to just ignore the 6 swing states from the final electoral college calculations, AND to delete all the votes from primarily Black cities, like Detroit, Minneapolis and Philadelphia.

Twitter was all over this, and some of the comments were hilarious.

Let's cut out the states that don't like me!

"If you take out the contested swing states electoral votes" -- this is what Maria Bartiromo has reduced herself to pic.twitter.com/uvh0GHVHV8

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) November 29, 2020

Bashing the Governor of the state that still has 2 Senate seats up for grabs is not a great plan!

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