I have the Apple credit card. It's so incredibly easy to pay the bill, because the UI is right there on your iPhone. I also now have an Amazon card, and two traditional bank cards. So I know from what I'm talking about.

It's not often you know that next Tuesday the world is going to change in a profound way. There's still a chance the world will fall apart before then, as a programmer I am trained to think of all that can go wrong. But barring that, one way or the other everything will change a week from today.

Apple, Netflix and other streaming services explored the possibility of acquiring "No Time to Die," the upcoming James Bond movie that was originally slated to debut last April. From a report: The film's release has been postponed multiple times, with the Daniel Craig vehicle moving back to November before being pushed into 2021 as the number of coronavirus cases kept growing. MGM, the studio behind the film, reportedly lost between $30 million to $50 million due to the delays, insiders said. Bloomberg first reported the discussions, which have been the topic du jour in Hollywood this week. Other studios, such as Paramount and Sony, have raked in tens of millions by selling movies like "Greyhound," "Coming 2 America" and "Without Remorse" to streaming services while the exhibition sector continues to struggle during the pandemic. However, multiple insiders at rival studios and companies said that a possible Bond sale was explored overtly, and believe that MGM was at least open to the possibility of unloading their crown jewel for a princely sum. The studio was said to be looking for a deal of roughly $600 million -- a price tag that was deemed too rich for two of the free-spending streaming services. A sale of this magnitude would be led exclusively by Kevin Ulrich, the chairman and CEO of MGM's majority owner Anchorage Capital Group, insiders said.

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"TCP/IP doesn't work at interplanetary distances," 77-year-old Vinton Cerf tells Quanta magazine. "So we designed a set of protocols that do." Specifically, bundle protocols: a disruption/delay-tolerant networking (DTN) protocol with nodes that can also store information: A data packet traveling from Earth to Jupiter might, for example, go through a relay on Mars, Cerf explained. However, when the packet arrives at the relay, some 40 million miles into the 400-million-mile journey, Mars may not be oriented properly to send the packet on to Jupiter. "Why throw the information away, instead of hanging on to it until Jupiter shows up?" Cerf said. This store-and-forward feature allows bundles to navigate toward their destinations one hop at a time, despite large disruptions and delays... So, a couple decades after conceiving of bundle protocols, is the interplanetary internet up and running? We don't have to build the whole thing and then hope somebody uses it. We sought to get standards in place, as we have for the internet; offer those standards freely; and then achieve interoperability so that the various spacefaring nations could help each other. We're taking the next obvious step for multi-mission infrastructure: designing the capability for an interplanetary backbone network. You build what's needed for the next mission. As spacecraft get built and deployed, they carry the standard protocols that become part of the interplanetary backbone. Then, when they finish their primary scientific mission, they get repurposed as nodes in the backbone network. We accrete an interplanetary backbone over time. In 2004, the Mars rovers were supposed to transmit data back to Earth directly through the deep space network — three big 70-meter antennas in Australia, Spain and California. However, the channel's available data rate was 28 kilobits per second, which isn't much. When they turned the radios on, they overheated. They had to back off, which meant less data would come back. That made the scientists grumpy. One of the JPL engineers used prototype software — this is so cool! — to reprogram the rovers and orbiters from hundreds of millions of miles away. We built a small store-and-forward interplanetary internet with essentially three nodes: the rovers on the surface of Mars, the orbiters and the deep space network on Earth. That's been running ever since. We've been refining the design of those protocols, implementing and testing them. The latest protocols are running back-and-forth relays between Earth and the International Space Station... We did another test at the ISS where the astronauts were controlling a little robot vehicle in Germany.

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Millions of highly polluting, unsafe used cars from rich countries are exported to African and Asian countries.

London's Natural History Museum is set to stage one of the most ambitious exhibitions in its history.

NBC News reports that "Social media users who believe their posts have been unfairly removed from Facebook or Instagram can now file an appeal to Facebook's Independent Oversight Board, the company announced Thursday." Positioned as a "Supreme Court" for Facebook's content moderation decisions, the external panel of 20 journalists, academics, lawyers and human rights experts will weigh in — and potentially override its content moderation decisions. The board has up to 90 days to review cases submitted by users through its website after they have exhausted their content appeal options directly with Facebook. If the Board sides with the user, Facebook will restore the content and potentially re-evaluate its policies. "The Oversight Board wasn't created to be a quick fix or an all-encompassing solution," said Helle Thorning-Schmidt, co-chair of the board and former prime minister of Denmark. But it aims to "offer a critical independent check on Facebook's approach to moderating some of the most significant content issues." By announcing the board on Thursday, Facebook has launched an unprecedented model of governance that no other social media outlet has created... "The Oversight Board has the potential to revolutionize how we think about the relationship between private corporations and our public rights," said Kate Klonick, an assistant professor at the St. John's University School of Law, who has published research on the Oversight Board. "It's a step toward recognition that these transnational companies control our public rights in a way that governments don't and that we need to create a participatory and democratic mechanism to inform those companies that those rights are protected...." "Of all the criticisms that are lodged against Facebook, I think one of the biggest is that we can't trust them," Jamal Greene, a Columbia Law School professor and co-chair of the Oversight Board, said in an interview in September. "One of the aims of the Oversight Board is to try to establish an institution that can be trusted..." During test panels, there were times when board members noted that their decision could affect Facebook's commercial model. For example, being more permissive about images containing some types of nudity on the platform could deter users in parts of the world with stricter cultural norms. "The reaction has always been 'Well, that's not our problem, that's Facebook's problem,'" said board member Alan Rusbridger, former editor-in-chief of The Guardian. "So I don't think anyone is coming into this thinking we're here to help Facebook continue with life as normal."

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"Police often frame facial recognition as a necessary tool to solve the most heinous crimes, like terrorist attacks and violent assaults, but researchers have found that the technology is more frequently used for low-level offenses," reports CNET: In a recent court filing, the New York police department noted that it's turned to facial recognition in more than 22,000 cases in the last three years. "Even though the NYPD claims facial recognition is only used for serious crimes, the numbers tell a different story," said Albert Fox Cahn, the executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project. "As facial recognition continues to grow, it's being routinely deployed for everything from shoplifting to graffiti." Asked for comment, an NYPD spokeswoman pointed to a 2019 opinion article by police commissioner James O'Neill titled "How Facial Recognition Makes You Safer." In the piece, O'Neill talked about how facial recognition had been used to make arrests in murder, robbery and rape cases, but he didn't disclose how often it was used for low-level crimes. The department's facial recognition policy, established in March, allows the technology to be used for any crime, no matter the severity. Without any limits, police have more frequently used the technology for petty thefts than the dangerous crimes, privacy advocates say. Before Amazon put a moratorium on police use of its Rekognition face-identifying software, the program was used in a $12 shoplifting case in Oregon in 2018... Without any limits, police can use facial recognition however they please, and in many cases, arrested suspects don't even know that the flawed technology was used... Attorneys representing protesters in Miami didn't know that police used facial recognition in their arrests, according to an NBC Miami report. Police used facial recognition software in a $50 drug dealing case in Florida in 2016 but made no mention of it in the arrest report. The article also notes that as recently as this Tuesday, Hoan Ton-That, the CEO of facial recognition startup Clearview AI "said it isn't the company's responsibility to make sure its technology is being properly used by its thousands of police partners. "Though the company has its own guidelines, Ton-That said Clearview AI wouldn't be enforcing them, saying that 'it's not our job to set the policy as a tech company...'"

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An anonymous reader quotes Time: The United States has reached a new record high in the number of daily COVID-19 infections, surpassing the peak in mid-July during the second wave of the coronavirus pandemic's domestic toll. As of Oct. 24, there was a weekly average of 23.0 infections per 100,000 residents, up from 20.5 on July 19 and ticking rapidly upward. The country also set a new single-day record on Oct. 23 with 83,757 new cases. There have been clear signs for weeks of a third wave of the pandemic in the U.S. as the weather gets colder and the virus has migrated from metropolitan regions to more rural settings. But it was far from certain, at the beginning of October, that the resurgence would surpass that of the summer... We know now that the third wave will be worse than the second, which was far worse than the first, when cases peaked at 9.7 per 100,000 on April 7. Reuters reports that France has also "registered a record 52,010 new confirmed coronavirus infections over the past 24 hours, following a record 45,422 on Saturday, the health ministry said in a statement on Sunday... The new cases took the total to 1,138,507, with France now ahead of Argentina and Spain to register the world's fifth highest number of cases after the United States, India, Brazil and Russia. "In the past three days, France has registered over 139,000 new cases, which is more than the 132,000 cases registered during the two-month lockdown from mid-March to mid-May."

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1.76 million people live in the 983,482 square kilometer (379,725 square mile) state of South Australia. This weekend Australia's national broadcaster made a big announcement: South Australia's renewable energy boom has achieved a global milestone. The state once known for not having enough power has become the first major jurisdiction in the world to be powered entirely by solar energy. For just over an hour on Sunday, October 11, 100 per cent of energy demand was met by solar panels alone. "This is truly a phenomenon in the global energy landscape," Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) chief executive Audrey Zibelman said. "Never before has a jurisdiction the size of South Australia been completely run by solar power, with consumers' rooftop solar systems contributing 77 per cent." Large-scale solar farms, like the ones operating at Tailem Bend and Port Augusta, provided the other 23 per cent. Any excess power generated by gas and wind farms on that day was stored in batteries or exported to Victoria via the interconnector. South Australia is where Elon Musk installed Tesla's giant Powerpack battery as part of a massive solar and wind farm.

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