Sanders is a obviously prank candidate for president. He's designed to lose the election in a huge landslide even though Hitler 2.0 is currently in the White House. You have to work realllly hard to be as bad as Sanders is.

How unwanted food is processed to produce electricity and fertiliser.

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: On Sunday, The Simpsons aired The Miseducation Of Lisa Simpson, an episode in which Marge — with the help of a song from John Legend ("STEM, it's not just for dorks, dweebs and nerds / It'll turn all your dumb kids to Zuckerbergs") — convinces Springfield to use a windfall the town reaped by seizing shipwreck treasure to build the Springfield STEM Academy to "prepare kids for the jobs of tomorrow." All goes well initially — both Lisa and Bart love their new school — until Lisa realizes there's a two-tiered curriculum. While children classified as "divergent pathway assimilators" (i.e., gifted) like Lisa study neural networks and C+++ upstairs, kids like Bart are relegated to the basement where they're prepared via VR and gamified learning for a life of menial, gig economy side-hustles — charging e-scooters, shopping for rich people's produce, driving ride-share. The school's administrator was even played by Silicon Valley actor Zach Woods, who delivered one of the episode's harshest lines, notes The A.V. Club. "Staging a Norma Rae-style revolt at how the 'non-gifted' students are being trained to do everyone else's dirty work, Lisa's brought up short with a startled 'Eep' by Woods' administrator asking, 'Isn't that the point of a gifted class?'"

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Baldrson (Slashdot reader #78,598) writes: First announced on Slashdot in 2006, AI professor Marcus Hutter has gone big with his challenge to the artificial intelligence [and data compression] community. A 500,000€ purse now backs The Hutter Prize for Lossless Compression of Human Knowledge... Hutter's prize incrementally awards distillation of Wikipedia's storehouse of human knowledge to its essence. That essence is a 1-billion-character excerpt of Wikipedia called "enwik9" -- approximately the amount that a human can read in a lifetime. And 14 years ago, Baldrson wrote a Slashdot article explaining how this long-running contest has its roots in a theory which could dramatically advance the capabilities of AI: The basic theory, for which Hutter provides a proof, is that after any set of observations the optimal move by an AI is find the smallest program that predicts those observations and then assume its environment is controlled by that program. Think of it as Ockham's Razor on steroids. Writing today, Baldrson argues this could become a much more sophisticated Turing Test. Formally it is called Algorithmic Information Theory or AIT. AIT is, according to Hutter's "AIXI" theory, essential to Universal Intelligence. Hutter's judging criterion is superior to Turing tests in 3 ways: 1) It is objective2) It rewards incremental improvements3) It is founded on a mathematical theory of natural science. Detailed rules for the contest and answers to frequently asked questions are available.

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Long-time Slashdot reader Garabito writes: The Department of Homeland Security has revealed that an unnamed U.S. natural gas compression facility was forced to shut down operations for two days after becoming infected with ransomware. The plant was targeted with a phishing e-mail, that allowed the attacker to access its IT network and then pivot to its Operational Technology (OT) control network, where it compromised Windows PCs used as human machine interface, data historians and polling servers, which led the plant operator to shut it down along with other assets that depended on it, including pipelines. According to the DHS CISA report, the victim failed to implement robust segmentation between the IT and OT networks, which allowed the adversary to traverse the IT-OT boundary and disable assets on both networks.

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Long-time Slashdot reader sandbagger shared this report from the Hugo award-winning science fiction fanzine File 770: North Bellmore, New York fan Elyse Rosenstein, 69, died suddenly on February 20th. She had been undergoing rehabilitation after suffering a broken leg. At the time of her death, she was a retired secondary school science teacher. With Joyce Yasner, Joan Winston, Linda Deneroff and Devra Langsam, she organized the very first Star Trek convention, held in New York City in 1972. The convention was not only the very first media convention, it was also the biggest science fiction convention to date by a considerable margin... At the time, Star Trek fans were often looked down on by many science fiction fans, who were more into books and magazines than TV shows. The pair hoped that a convention specifically geared towards Star Trek would do a lot to bring fans together. The rest, as they say, is fan history.... Elyse Rosenstein had a BS in physics and math, and an MS in physics, and taught science for more than two decades. She was a member of the New York Academy of Sciences and the Long Island Physics Teachers Association... She was nicknamed "The Screaming Yellow Zonker" by Isaac Asimov.

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I just saw pictures of a friend's teenage sons in current passport pictures. I've been following their travels via Facebook for years. They were always boys, but now you can see the men. There's a gravitas in the outward view. Thought. These boys were raised to be men. What a great word, raised. I don't think I was actually raised myself. Maybe here and there. Fed. Sometimes cared for. Mostly left to figure it out for myself.

Loyalty to Trump is, today, an issue for people who work in the US government. Soon it will be an issue for everyone who lives in the US. You will have to sign a loyalty oath. We're way past the time when anyone should be working just for themselves.

Today I learned that Sanders will be the presumptive Democratic Party nominee in eleven days, unless something happens to shake that up. If you don't believe it, read this piece.

This piece is so chock-full of smarts, it should be a Twitter thread.

Personal information from more than 10.6 million people was published online this week, reports ZDNet -- all from people who'd stayed at MGM Resorts hotels (which include the Bellagio, Mandalay Bay, and ARIA): Besides details for regular tourists and travelers, included in the leaked files are also personal and contact details for celebrities, tech CEOs, reporters, government officials, and employees at some of the world's largest tech companies. ZDNet verified the authenticity of the data today, together with a security researcher from Under the Breach, a soon-to-be-launched data breach monitoring service. A spokesperson for MGM Resorts confirmed the incident via email. According to our analysis, the MGM data dump that was shared today contains personal details for 10,683,188 former hotel guests. Included in the leaked files are personal details such as full names, home addresses, phone numbers, emails, and dates of birth... These users now face a higher risk of receiving spear-phishing emails, and being SIM swapped, Under the Breach told ZDNet. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, pop star Justin Bieber, and DHS and TSA officials are some of the big names Under the Breach spotted in the leaked files. While the data appears to be several years old, Irina Nesterovsky, Head of Research at threat intel firm KELA, tells ZDNet that the data has been shared in "hacking forums" since last July. MGM blames the breach on "unauthorized access to a cloud server" last summer -- pointing out that at least no credit card information was stolen, and that they notified all affected customers. But NBC News "spoke to a man with a Secret Service email address who was surprised to learn that he had been hacked. He said MGM never notified him about to breach." MGM told ZDNet that "we take our responsibility to protect guest data very seriously, and we have strengthened and enhanced the security of our network to prevent this from happening again."

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Singaporean company Shiok Meats aims to grow artificial shrimp to combat the negative environmental effects associated with farmed shrimp. An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from The Economist: For a long time, beef has been a target of environmentalists because of cattle farming's contribution to global warming. But what about humble shrimp and prawns? They may seem, well, shrimpy when compared with cows, but it turns out the tasty decapods are just as big an environmental problem. The issue is not so much their life cycle: shrimp (as UN statisticians refer to all commonly eaten species collectively) do not belch planet-cooking methane the way cows do. But shrimp farms tend to occupy coastal land that used to be covered in mangroves. Draining mangrove swamps to make way for aquaculture is even more harmful to the atmosphere than felling rainforest to provide pasture for cattle. A study conducted in 2017 by CIFOR, a research institute, found that in both these instances, by far the biggest contribution to the carbon footprint of the resulting beef or shrimp came from the clearing of the land. As a result, CIFOR concluded, a kilo of farmed shrimp was responsible for almost four times the greenhouse-gas emissions of a kilo of beef. Eating a surf-and-turf dinner of prawn cocktail and steak, the study warned, can be more polluting than driving across America in a petrol-fuelled car. All this has given one Singaporean company a brain wave. "Farmed shrimps are often bred in overcrowded conditions and literally swimming in sewage water. We want to disrupt that -- to empower farmers with technology that is cleaner and more efficient," says Sandhya Sriram, one of the founders of Shiok Meats. The firm aims to grow artificial shrimp, much as some Western firms are seeking to create beef without cows. The process involves propagating shrimp cells in a nutrient-rich solution. Ms Sriram likens it to a brewery, disdaining the phrase "lab-grown." Since prawn-meat has a simpler structure than beef, it should be easier to replicate in this way. Moreover, shrimp is eaten in lots of forms and textures: whole, minced, as a paste and so on. The firm is already making shrimp mince which it has tested in Chinese dumplings. It hopes the by-product of the meat-growing can be used as a flavoring for prawn crackers and instant noodles. Eventually it plans to grow curved "whole" shrimp -- without the head and shell, that is. While producing shrimp this way currently costs $5,000 a kilo, Shiok Meats thinks it can bring the price down dramatically by using less rarefied ingredients in its growing solution.

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Amazon's Ring doorbell cameras just added two new privacy and security features "amid rising scrutiny on the company," reports The Hill, including "a second layer of authentication by requiring users to enter a one-time code shared via email or SMS when they try to log in to see the feed from their cameras starting this week... "Until recently the company did not notify users when their accounts had been logged in to, meaning that hackers could have accessed camera feeds without owners being aware." But CBS News reports that the changes appeared "two weeks after a study showed the company shares customers' personal information with Facebook, Google and other parties without users' consent." In late January, an Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) study found the company regularly shares user data with Facebook, including that of Ring users who don't have accounts on the social media platform... EFF claims the company shares a lot of other user data, including people's names, email addresses, when the doorbell app was being used, the number of devices a user has, model numbers of devices, user's unique internet addresses and more. Such information could allow third parties to know when Ring users are at home or away, and potentially target them with advertising for services based on that info... The change will let Ring users block the company from sharing most, but not all, of their data. A company spokesperson said people will be able to opt out of those sharing agreements "where applicable." The spokesperson declined to clarify what "where applicable" might mean. Evan Greer, deputy director of digital rights organization Fight for the Future, shared a skeptical response with The Hill. "No amount of security updates will change the fact that these devices are enabling a nationwide, for-profit, surveillance empire. Amazon Ring is fundamentally incompatible with democracy and human rights."

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Boeing has found debris in the fuel tanks of 35 of their 737 Max aircraft. After inspecting just 50 of the 400 planes which were awaiting delivery to customers, Boeing found debris in "about two-thirds" of them reports the Wall Street Journal, citing both federal and aviation-industry officials. "The revelation comes as the plane maker struggles to restore public and airline confidence in the grounded fleet." Materials left behind include tools, rags and boot coverings, according to industry officials familiar with the details... [T]he new problem raises fresh questions about Boeing's ability to resolve lingering lapses in quality-control practices and presents another challenge to Chief Executive David Calhoun, who took charge in January... Last year, debris was found on some 787 Dreamliners, which Boeing produces in Everett, Washington... Boeing also twice had to halt deliveries of the KC-46A military refueling tanker to the U.S. Air Force after tools and rags were found in planes after they had been delivered from its Everett factory north of Seattle. Their report include this observation from an Air Force procurement chief last summer. "It does not take a rocket scientist to deliver an airplane without trash and debris on it. It just merely requires following a set of processes, having a culture that values integrity of safety above moving the line faster for profit." But "This isn't an isolated incident either," argues long-time Slashdot reader phalse phace. "The New York Times reported about shody production and weak oversight at Boeing's North Charleston plant which makes the 787 Dreamliner back in April." A New York Times review of hundreds of pages of internal emails, corporate documents and federal records, as well as interviews with more than a dozen current and former employees, reveals a culture that often valued production speed over quality. Facing long manufacturing delays, Boeing pushed its work force to quickly turn out Dreamliners, at times ignoring issues raised by employees... Safety lapses at the North Charleston plant have drawn the scrutiny of airlines and regulators. Qatar Airways stopped accepting planes from the factory after manufacturing mishaps damaged jets and delayed deliveries. Workers have filed nearly a dozen whistle-blower claims and safety complaints with federal regulators, describing issues like defective manufacturing, debris left on planes and pressure to not report violations. Others have sued Boeing, saying they were retaliated against for flagging manufacturing mistakes.

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XXongo writes: According to a yet-to-be-published study from Brown University of the origin of 6.5 million tweets about climate and global warming, a quarter of all tweets about climate on an average day are produced by bots, disproportionately skeptical of climate science and action. The Brown University study wasn't able to identify any individuals or groups behind the battalion of Twitter bots, nor ascertain the level of influence they have had on the climate debate. "On an average day during the period studied, 25% of all tweets about the climate crisis came from bots," reports The Guardian. "This proportion was higher in certain topics -- bots were responsible for 38% of tweets about 'fake science' and 28% of all tweets about the petroleum giant Exxon. Conversely, tweets that could be categorized as online activism to support action on the climate crisis featured very few bots, at about 5% prevalence."

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