feed on feeds - 2019/12/27 - items 0 to 15

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Turkey unveiled its first fully domestically-produced car on Friday, saying it aimed to eventually produce up to 175,000 a year of the electric vehicle in a project expected to cost $3.7 billion over 13 years. The project has been a long-time goal of President Tayyip Erdogan and his ruling AK Party as a demonstration of the country's growing economic power. Speaking at the unveiling ceremony, Erdogan said Turkey aimed not only to sell the car domestically but also wanted it to become a global brand, starting with Europe. Erdogan said the charging infrastructure for electric cars would be ready nationwide by 2022. The new project, launched in October, will receive state support such as tax breaks, and establish a production facility in the automotive hub of Bursa in northwest Turkey, according to a presidential decision in the country's Official Gazette. Five models of the car will be produced, the statement said, adding the government had guaranteed to buy 30,000 of the vehicles by 2035. "We're all together witnessing Turkey's 60-year-old dream become reality," Erdogan said, referring to failed plans in the past to build a fully home-produced car. "When we see this car on roads around the whole world, we will have reached our goal."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes: Last month, news broke that Microsoft was killing off Cortana for Android and iOS and was removing Cortana from its Launcher app for Android. On January 31, 2020, Microsoft will end support for the Cortana app in Australia, Canada, China, Germany, India, Mexico, Spain, and the U.K. Microsoft refocusing Cortana for the enterprise, and specifically for Windows and Office, is not new. Nonetheless, killing off the Cortana app was a bold move. VentureBeat sat down with Andrew Shuman, who has been leading the Cortana team since Javier Soltero's departure last year, to find out why Cortana for Android and iOS is being killed off, what to expect with Cortana for Windows, his thoughts on natural language and typing, what's going on with the Alexa integration, and more.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

From a report: Calculate Linux 20, a Gentoo-based operating system, is ready to be installed on your computer. Calculate Linux 20 is based on Gentoo 17.1 and comes with several desktop environment choices, such as Cinnamon, KDE, Xfce, MATE, and more. Unfortunately for some users, the operating system is now 64-bit only. Yes, with version 20, the developers have chosen to kill the 32-bit variants. While some people will be upset, it is definitely the correct choice -- 32-bit only processors are very old at this point. You can likely get a better 64-bit machine for a steal at a thrift store these days.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The four-day exercise in the Indian Ocean and Gulf of Oman comes at a time of heightened tensions between US and Iran.

Iraq's president Barham Salih says he would rather resign than appoint a PM nominee rejected by protesters.

For the time-being I've set aside the project to try to rebuild the original 1998 XML-RPC site from xmlRpc.root. I'm taking an inventory of what we have and what we are missing first.

Here's a list of the docs we have.

And the ones we don't have yet.

There are other stories on the sites, but these are the ones that have paths defined for them.

Not sure what the next steps are going to be.

Protesters want an independent candidate to be nominated as the country's new prime minister.

A single wild tree on a New Zealand island could soon get some neighbors -- and that's a good thing. From a report: After seven decades of cuttings, failures, plant enzymes, a little coaxing, and a Maori blessing, one of the world's rarest trees -- which lives on a tiny island 40 miles off the northern edge of New Zealand -- might lose its title. And that's a good thing. A team of scientists and Ngati Kuri, the regional Maori tribe, recently returned from the island, where they scoped out potential conservation plans. Ngati Kuri members even planted 80 kaikomako saplings on the mainland this year. Yet those positive developments happened only by answering two important questions. How do you rescue a tree with no mate, and who shares that task? The story of the kaikomako resembles its home: rocky, with a generous dose of luck. Botanists identified one wild specimen in 1945 on the largest of the Three Kings Islands, Manawatawhi in Maori, which is a little bigger than Manhattan's Central Park. The tree isn't simply remote. It's completely alone. Blame the goats. Four were released on the island in 1889 as a food source for possible shipwreck victims, and the population increased one hundredfold until the invasive animals were eradicated in 1946. Goats ate several island plant species out of existence, but the kaikomako survived by way of the classic real estate maxim. Location. In this case, it lived out of reach in a steep boulder field 700 feet above the ceaseless swells. Some scientists recognized the kaikomako as invaluable, a piece of New Zealand's biological heritage one calamitous storm away from vanishing. Others questioned whether it really was alone; perhaps it was a far-flung individual of an ordinary tree type that didn't require extra concern. You can read rest of the story on National Geographic website.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

If you want to sign up for Facebook Messenger, you can no longer escape Big Blue -- you'll need an account from now on. From a report: The company has stopped allowing new users to join using a phone number. "We found that the vast majority of people who use Messenger already log in through Facebook and we want to simplify the process," a spokesperson told VentureBeat. "If you already use Messenger without a Facebook account, no need to do anything." Facebook has said that Messenger has over 1.3 billion users. The company spun messaging out of its main app in order to create Messenger, and in 2015 began allowing users to join without a Facebook account. The app has slowly begun featuring advertising, and businesses can provide customer service through Messenger as well.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The saga continues. Now they're delivering packages to the local post office. The packages are clearly addressed to my home, not to a post office. This is kind of okay at least they're indoors and the postmaster there is okay with it, but they are dropping the packages off on the front desk after the post office is closed. Leaving them in the open is like leaving your wallet on the counter in the post office. People are honest, but that's too much of a temptation imho. At some point someone is going to take the packages before I can get to the PO.

I've told the UPS people in Kingston this is not acceptable but they say it's the driver's call.

As a comparison, I had a package delivered by Fedex a few weeks ago, when the road to the house was fairly covered in snow, and they just drove the truck to the house and made the delivery.

It is actually what they're supposed to do, in other words and it's not unreasonable. The road is not on a hill, it's flat, and easy to drive on. I understand if there's a foot of snow, but so far that has never been the issue with UPS.

A bingeing update. I wrote that I really liked The Morning Show on Apple, but when I picked it up again, starting with episode 4, I couldn't stand it. It was like a bad soap opera. One word: Insipid. Too bad because the actors are great and they had lots of money to do it right. The story is childish and the dialog is embarrassing. Those are also some of my criticisms of The Newsroom (see above) but there is substance in that show and the writing is pure Sorkin, so it's funny to think the actors are just saying what Sorkin told them to say. Like Leo and Bartlet, Josh and CJ. Except not them, other people. And lots of lessons about journalism. For example Chuck Todd is lying when he says he didn't get that the Repubs were always lying on his air. How do I know? Because the fourth episode of The Newsroom is all about Repubs openly lying. And that was a non-journalist writing, at least nine years ago. If Sorkin could figure it out, so could Chuck Todd. He's playing us, badly and we'd be foolish to accept him at face value.

Mexico says it will appeal to international court to mediate dispute over nine Bolivians in the Mexican embassy.

One student has died and dozens of people have been blinded after riot police fire rubber bullets at protesters during national strike.

Packages leave a trail of pollution, and some end up in landfills. From a report: The biggest flood of returns will come on January 2nd as people head back to work after the holidays, when UPS expects to handle nearly 2 million return packages. That's a more than 25 percent jump from the packages it handled the previous year on January 2nd, which UPS has dubbed "National Returns Day." Amazon, which has driven the new shopping trends, just expanded its free return policy and is also delivering more of its own packages than ever. Luckily, there are things both individuals and companies can do to cut back on the boomeranging packages. [...] About half of the "uglies" that American consumers return go back on sale again, according to research by Optoro, a company that helps retailers like Ikea streamline their returns processes. Retailers might send things back to the manufacturer that they can't put up for sale again, or they might try to unload it to other companies who sell it at deep discounts. Wherever the unwanted purchase goes, taking it there means more trucks pumping out more planet-warming carbon emissions and other harmful pollutants. Hauling around returned inventory in the US creates over 15 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions annually, Optoro found. That's more than what 3 million cars might put out in one year. Then there's the trash. Five billion pounds of returned goods end up in US landfills each year. Even if something was in good condition when the buyer put it in the mailbox, shipping it back can damage the item. Sometimes retailers realize that throwing out a returned item is the most cost-effective way to deal with the thing, instead of paying for it to be cleaned, repaired, and returned to the shelves. Further reading: The Painful, Costly Journey of Returned Goods -- and How You End Up Purchasing Some of Them Again.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Asylum seeker, who arrived with her husband and two children, had paperwork documenting a 'previous medical condition'.