McGruber writes: Joe Manchin, the senior Senator from West Virginia, has inserted language in the FY19 Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, and Related Agencies appropriations bill that will force Amtrak to employ at least one ticketing agent in every state that it serves. His reasoning? "Amtrak has told me that most of their sales are now online, but West Virginians buy far more tickets at the Charleston station than most places around the country. That's not surprising, as nearly 30% of West Virginia is without internet access, and mobile broadband access is also difficult in my state's rugged, mountainous terrain, making online ticket sales difficult." Manchin continued: "Our population includes many working class families and elderly residents who are less likely to have a credit card or another means to purchase tickets remotely, but rely heavily on the train as an alternative to driving or flying. Although Matt Crouch's job was terminated today, once the bill is passed by the House and Senate and signed by the President, Amtrak will have to reinstate a position in the state and I will do everything over the next few months to make sure that happens."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Better start saving up for that PlayStation 5, Xbox Two, or Nintendo Swatch (that last follow-up name idea is a freebie, by the way). That generation of consoles might be the last one ever, according to Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot. After that, he predicts cheap local boxes could provide easier access to ever-evolving high-end gaming streamed to the masses from cloud-based servers. "I think we will see another generation, but there is a good chance that step-by-step we will see less and less hardware," Guillemot said in a recent interview with Variety. "With time, I think streaming will become more accessible to many players and make it not necessary to have big hardware at home. There will be one more console generation and then after that, we will be streaming, all of us."

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The WWF calls for measures to clean up one of the world's worst affected bodies of water.

Foreign minister accuses UN agency of 'spreading fear' and discouraging Syrian refugees from returning home.

The US Department of Energy on Friday unveiled Summit, a supercomputer capable of performing 200 quadrillion calculations per second, or 200 petaflops. Its performance should put it at the top of the list of the world's fastest supercomputers, which is currently dominated by China. From a report (thanks to reader cb_abq for the tip): Summit, housed at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), was built for AI. IBM designed a new heterogeneous architecture for Summit, which combines IBM POWER9 CPUs with Nvidia GPUs. It has approximately 4,600 nodes, with six Nvidia Volta Tensor Core GPUs per node -- that's more than 27,000. The last US supercomputer to top the list of the world's fastest was Titan, in 2012. ORNL, which houses Titan as well, says Summit will deliver more than five times the computational performance of Titan's 18,688 nodes.

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Localization support for DateTime.pm

Parse AMEX transaction files: EPRAW, EPPRC, EPTRN, CBNOT, GRRCN

A Handy Debugging Module With Colorized Output and Formatting

Leaders of seven of the world's biggest economies are in Canada for what could be most acrimonious G7 summit in years.

Death toll from Fuego's most violent eruption in four decades has been gradually rising and now stands at 109.

Ellen Nakashima and Paul Sonne, reporting for The Washington Post: Chinese government hackers have compromised the computers of a Navy contractor, stealing massive amounts of highly sensitive data related to undersea warfare -- including secret plans to develop a supersonic anti-ship missile for use on U.S. submarines by 2020, according to American officials. The breaches occurred in January and February, the officials said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation. The hackers targeted a contractor who works for the Naval Undersea Warfare Center, a military organization headquartered in Newport, R.I., that conducts research and development for submarines and underwater weaponry. The officials did not identify the contractor. Taken were 614 gigabytes of material relating to a closely held project known as Sea Dragon, as well as signals and sensor data, submarine radio room information relating to cryptographic systems, and the Navy submarine development unit's electronic warfare library. The Washington Post agreed to withhold certain details about the compromised missile project at the request of the Navy, which argued that their release could harm national security.

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For the fourth time this year, Cisco has removed hardcoded credentials that were left inside one of its products, which an attacker could have exploited to gain access to devices and inherently to customer networks. From a report: This time around, the hardcoded password was found in Cisco's Wide Area Application Services (WAAS), which is a software package that runs on Cisco hardware that can optimize WAN traffic management. This backdoor mechanism (CVE-2018-0329) was in the form of a hardcoded, read-only SNMP community string in the configuration file of the SNMP daemon. SNMP stands for Simple Network Management Protocol, an Internet protocol for collecting data about and from remote devices. The community string was there so SNMP servers knowing the string's value could connect to the remote Cisco device and gather statistics and system information about it.

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Since its inception, Open Iftar has hosted 50,000 guests in seven universities across four continents.

UN raises the spectre of mass casualties in the port city of Hudaida as fresh fighting erupts at Yemen's Marib province.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Memes, remixes and other user-generated content could disappear online if the EU's proposed rules on copyright become law, warn experts. Digital rights groups are campaigning against the Copyright Directive, which the European Parliament will vote on later this month. The legislation aims to protect rights-holders in the internet age. But critics say it misunderstands the way people engage with web content and risks excessive censorship. The Copyright Directive is an attempt to reshape copyright for the internet, in particular rebalancing the relationship between copyright holders and online platforms. Article 13 states that platform providers should "take measures to ensure the functioning of agreements concluded with rights-holders for the use of their works." Critics say this will, in effect, require all internet platforms to filter all content put online by users, which many believe would be an excessive restriction on free speech. There is also concern that the proposals will rely on algorithms that will be programmed to "play safe" and delete anything that creates a risk for the platform.

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