"The high-profile discrimination dispute between Google and one of its former software engineers has quietly come to an end," reports USA Today. "Ex-Google employee James Damore has moved to dismiss his lawsuit against the internet giant two years after alleging discrimination against conservative white men." Damore worked as an engineer at Google before being fired in 2017 after criticizing the company's efforts to improve diversity among its workforce... On Thursday, Damore and three other men involved in the suit made a written request to the Santa Clara Superior Court in California to drop the charges. Google also signed the motion, which was first spotted by Bloomberg. "This matter is dismissed in its entirety," Judge Brian Walsh wrote in the order. A lawyer for the men told Bloomberg his clients are prohibited from saying anything beyond what's in the court filing. Bloomberg provides some context: In 2018, Damore suffered a setback when a National Labor Relations Board attorney concluded the engineer's use of biological stereotypes in his widely circulated memo was offensive enough to cause disruption in the workplace, making his firing lawful... In August Google posted internal rules that discourage employees from debating politics, a shift away from the company's famously open culture.

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"Mobile phone masts in the UK are still being attacked by arsonists on a daily basis," reports Wired, "because of a conspiracy theory linking 5G to the spread of coronavirus." New data seen by WIRED UK reveals that dozens of attacks have taken place in the last fortnight, with conspiracy theorists targeting both infrastructure and key workers in the misguided belief that they are somehow spreading coronavirus... Since March 30, there have been 77 arson attacks on mobile phone masts across the UK, with staff working on mobile infrastructure also reporting 180 incidents of abuse. There have been 13 additional incidents of sabotage reported, ranging from failed arson attacks to attempts to damage mobile network infrastructure in other ways. From April 20 through May 5, more than a week after the supposed peak of attacks in early April, there were 16 arson or sabotage attacks on mobile phone masts. When failed or attempted attacks are added to the tally, that number increases to 74... The continued abuse of key workers and attacks on critical infrastructure hint at how widely this conspiracy theory continues to circulate online. In the last seven days alone, more than 54,000 posts referencing 5G and coronavirus have appeared on Facebook, generating over two million interactions. The most popular of these posts, featuring an image of Bill Gates with devil horns, has received more than 4,600 shares, comments and interactions. Two posts protesting the removal of conspiracy theorist David Icke's Facebook page have together generated more than 7,000 shares, comments and other interactions. The response from social networks has been spasmodic at best. While figures such as Icke have been banned, other Facebook groups with huge followings that peddle similar conspiracy theories are still active... On YouTube, conspiracy theory videos revealing "the truth" about 5G and coronavirus are still getting tens of thousands of views. The worry for industry figures is that despite a widespread and concerted effort to debunk the dangerous 5G coronavirus conspiracy theory, it continues to thrive both online and in the real world.

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In just the first three months of 2020, cable broadcasting's so-called "Pay TV" services have already lost 1.7 million paying subscribers, reports Variety: Comparing the losses against Q1 2019 paints a grim picture for most providers, but especially for AT&T, who lost a massive 3.6 million video customers in a year. Comcast has the second highest losses, down by 900k, with Dish down 600k and Charter losing 400,000 customers versus Q1 2019.... [R]ecall that COVID-19 only began to hit the country in a big way in the last 2-3 weeks of Q1. If Coronavirus is to blame for the declines, then Q2 will be appalling, with the industry well on track to meet Variety Intelligence Platform's estimate of 8 million subscribers lost across 2020. While the 1.7 million cancellations represents just 2.3% of the 72.1 million paying subscribers that cable TV services had enjoyed at the start of the year, satellite TV witnessed a higher 14.3% drop in paying subscribers in just those same three months, according to Broadcasting & Cable. In the same article Craig Moffett of MoffettNathanson Research predicts "With sports off the air, and with the pain of the tsunami of unemployment just beginning to hit as the quarter ended, all these numbers will get worse in Q2." He also notes that YouTube TV and Sling TV lost 341,000 subscribers in the same 13 weeks, while subscriber numbers also dropped at AT&T Now and fubo. Barron's says Moffett extrapolated the trends to a grim conclusion: Moffett adds that while it is a little early to declare the cable sector dead, he says it isn't actually too early to draft the industry's obituary. So he wrote one: "The cable network business, once among the world's most profitable industries, succumbed today after a long and painful slide into irrelevance ...When the coronavirus crisis hit in early 2020, sports went off the air, and that was the beginning of the end. By the time sports came back, the damage had been done. The patient was unresponsive. The deceased is survived by Disney+ and Peacock. A shiva will be held over Zoom..." Netflix, meanwhile, signed up more than 15 million new subscribers in the first quarter.

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Because a California county is preventing Tesla from reopening its plant, "The County's position left us no choice but to take legal action," Tesla announced Saturday. Reuters reports: Tesla filed a lawsuit against the county in San Francisco federal court on Saturday, calling the continued restrictions a "power-grab" by the county since California's governor had said on Thursday that manufacturers in the state would be allowed to reopen.... The county said it does not consider Tesla an essential business. County officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the lawsuit. The outspoken Musk also took to Twitter on Saturday to complain and threatened to leave the state. "If we even retain Fremont manufacturing activity at all, it will be dependen (sp) on how Tesla is treated in the future," he tweeted, referring to the San Francisco Bay area facility that is Tesla's only U.S. vehicle factory. One member of the California state government's Assembly tweeted a three-word response: "F*ck Elon Musk." Then they followed it up with a longer tweet. "I'm tired of subsidizing a company that continues to put workers at risk, union busts & bullies public servants." And an Inc. magazine columnist argues "Elon Musk is bluffing... Tesla isn't going anywhere," calling Musk's remarks "mostly a personality-driven publicity stunt by a tech billionaire." Building a new manufacturing facility from the ground up, or even retrofitting an existing plant isn't something that happens quickly... [Reuters cited an analyst at Wedbush who estimated that relocating Tesla's production would take between 12 and 18 months.] Obviously, no one can fault Musk for being frustrated that Tesla is unable to reopen its factory. Continuing as a business when you're unable to actually build the products you sell is no easy task. And Tesla's founder and CEO hasn't been shy about his feelings towards the Covid-19 lockdown... Right now, however, Tesla's biggest problem isn't that it can't turn the assembly lines back on. Right now, its biggest problem is that it's hard to tell when to take its leader seriously. If, for example, GM's CEO, Mary Barra, said that the company was frustrated with how Michigan was handling the coronavirus pandemic and was moving the company's HQ out of the state as a result, it would be astonishing news. Thousands of people would worry about their jobs; the state would have seek to address the comment. In other words, people would take it seriously. Not so, Musk's tweets, which are met with head shakes and smirks. That's a big deal, now more than ever.

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Tom's Hardware "put five of the most popular desktop environments up against each other in a no-holds-barred, seven-round face-off. We've rated GNOME, KDE, Cinnamon, Awesome and Regolith on a 10-point scale based on Installation, Applications, User Experience, User Documentation, Performance, Extensions and Configurability." It's a good read, with a detailed and thoughtful 3,700-word analysis, especially about memory performance: When you use the standard desktops, Gnome and KDE, you will likely notice that you are using a lot of memory... If you haven't noticed yet, try running htop in a separate window while you try out your choices. You should see a substantial difference with Awesome, i3 and, if you are elite, dwm. The difference in memory footprint is staggering when you start measuring. GNOME starts with somewhere in the region of 3GB at boot. This can be trimmed down by serious tweaking, but not very much. In comparison, the Awesome window manager weighs in at around 600MB... You can put a lot of eye candy and daemons before you weigh down your system as much as the others... Getting the advantage comes at a cost, though: you need to learn a few new habits to use Awesome desktop environment. Among GNOME, KDE, and Cinnamon, the article ultimately calls KDE "the most polished... decorative and versatile of the bunch. This comes at a cost, though." Cinnamon has the best balance between extensions and ease of use, while it is also fast and responsive. At the same time, it is not that heavy on resources. You can also add a wide range of extensions in the shape of widgets that send you ongoing and updated information. Regolith requires a bit more training, but it does set itself up for you so you can continue as you did with GNOME. Adding extensions and other gadgets is a bit more tricky, however... With Awesome you have to set up and practice to use it! It's easily the hardest in the group to get started with. When you are up and running, Awesome does deliver the most benefits from a resource point of view... Overall Winner: Cinnamon...because of its strong combination of user experience, performance and customization. Click through to read reactions and share your own thoughts. (And to see a short list of some of the article's other highlights.)

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An anonymous reader writes: You really can't make this stuff up, but Americans across the country, out of fear of "murder hornets," have begun killing all kinds of bees en masse. According to Doug Yanega, senior museum scientist for the Department of Entomology at UC Riverside, a national panic has led to the needless slaughter of native wasps and bees, beneficial insects whose populations are already threatened... "Folks in China, Korea and Japan have lived side by side with these hornets for hundreds of years, and it has not caused the collapse of human society there. My colleagues in Japan, China and Korea are just rolling their eyes in disbelief at what kind of snowflakes we are..." "I don't want to downplay this — they are logistically dangerous insects. But having people in Tennessee worry about this is just ridiculous. The only people who should be bothering experts with concerns about wasp IDs are living in the northwest quadrant of Washington (state). And really, right now, nobody else in the country should even be thinking about this stuff," he continued. "The facts are, experts said, two dead hornets were found in Washington last December, a lone Canadian live nest was found and wiped out last September and no live hornets have yet been seen this year," reports the Associated Press. And when they spoke to the Washington Agriculture Department entomologist working on the state's response, he issued an additional correction for all the journalists covering this story. "They are not 'murder hornets.' "They are just hornets."

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In a thread on Twitter, Ethan Weiss was with a group of 25 nurses and doctors working in NYC hospitals for the past 2-4 weeks. They are going home. He says United flew them to NYC for free, got lots of great PR, and took great care of them going out.

United wrote them 10 days ago to say the middle seats would all be empty. Clearly they are not empty.

This is the departure board for United at Newark yesterday.

I think this is what everyone fears about flying.

The United Airlines flight yesterday.

Podcast about where we're at with the virus. It's been a while since I checked in on this.

Long-time Slashdot reader gollum123 quotes CNBC: Nearly 43% of full-time American employees say they want to work remotely more often even after the economy has reopened, according to a survey released by business publishing company getAbstract. Of the more than 1,200 employees surveyed between April 16 and April 17, nearly 20% said their employer is actively discussing how they can make remote work more of an option in the future... Andrew Savikas, chief strategy officer at getAbstract, says one of the biggest reasons why employees prefer to work remotely is because they get to save time on their daily commute. On average, Americans spent roughly 27 minutes on their one-way commute to work in 2018, according to the Census Bureau. This equates to over 200 hours spent commuting per year... "People like having that time back," Savikas says, while adding that employees also like the flexibility of working remotely because they can "structure the day how they want." According to a joint CNBC/Change Research survey of more than 5,000 voters in swing states, 47% said the time they would normally spend on commuting has now been used to spend more time with their family. The survey, which gathered responses between April 17 and April 18, also found that employees have been spending the time they save on their commute to sleep more, focus on various hobbies and get more work done.

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I'd bet money that the things that are "opening" now are going to be closed quickly at great cost to: 1. damage to the economy, 2. human bodies and 3. morale.

"France is integrating new AI tools into security cameras in the Paris metro system to check whether passengers are wearing face masks," reports the Verge: The software, which has already been deployed elsewhere in the country, began a three-month trial in the central Chatelet-Les Halles station of Paris this week, reports Bloomberg. [Alternate source] French startup DatakaLab, which created the program, says the goal is not to identify or punish individuals who don't wear masks, but to generate anonymous statistical data that will help authorities anticipate future outbreaks of COVID-19... "The goal is just to publish statistics of how many people are wearing masks every day." The pilot is one of a number of measures cities around the world are introducing as they begin to ease lockdown measures and allow people to return to work. Although France, like the US, initially discouraged citizens from wearing masks, the country has now made them mandatory on public transport. It's even considering introducing fines of €135 ($145) for anyone found not wearing a mask on the subway, trains, buses, or taxis.... The software is lightweight enough to work on location wherever installed, meaning no data is ever sent to the cloud or to DatakaLab's offices. Instead, the software generates statistics about how many individuals are seen wearing masks in 15-minute intervals. The company has already integrated the software into buses in the French city of Cannes in the south of the country. It added small CPUs to existing CCTV cameras installed in buses, which process the video in real time. When the bus returns to the depot at night, it connects to Wi-Fi and sends the data on to the local transport authorities.

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Now that my parents have been gone for some considerable time, our differences come into focus.

I felt that my life was dispensable, temporary, so I was ready to take risks that they didn't want me to take.

If you took them at face value, they were sure I was going to fail and be dependent on them. That I would fail at what I was trying to do, and then be a failure at life. That could have been the outcome. I was certainly close a few times! ;-)

Why I was willing to take such risks is something I don't know. I have theories about it but I'm too close to have a good idea. I am what I am, it never was in question that I would do risky things. I wanted to do big things from a very young age.

My parents on the other hand valued security above all else. They had steady jobs, savings accounts, were very careful with their money.

Funny thing was that both my grandfathers were pretty sure I was doing the right thing.

Even though I overcame their objections, I don't think either of my parents ever forgot the judgement they formed years earlier, that I was a failure. On a personal level I still took big risks even if I had established myself from a productivity standpoint. (This was my mother's biggest value, that we be productive.)

They were depression era refugees in World War II.

I am a Boomer.

I think that explains a bunch of it, btw.

Who would have guessed that drive-in movie theaters would become the new essential art and business form factor.

Microsoft has begun rolling out a new feature in Office 365 to help IT staff stop the scourage that is "Reply-All email storms." ZDNet reports: The feature started rolling out this week to all Office 365 users worldwide. In its current form, Microsoft says the "Reply All Storm Protection" feature will block all email threads with more than 5,000 recipients that have generated more than 10 Reply-All sequences within the last 60 minutes. Once the feature gets triggered, Exchange Online will block all replies in the email thread for the next four hours, helping servers prioritize actual emails and shut down the Reply-All storm. Microsoft said it would also continue working on the feature going forward, promising to add controls for Exchange admins so they can set their own storm detection limits.Other planned features also include Reply-All storm reports and real-time notifications to alert administrators of an ongoing email storm so that they can keep an eye on the email server's status for possible slowdowns or crashes. The article notes Microsoft has experienced two different "Reply-All email storms" internally witin the last 18 months which included more than 52,000 employees, "who ended up clogging the company's internal communications for hours." A post on Microsoft's Exchange blog now says "We're already seeing the first version of the feature successfully reduce the impact of reply all storms within Microsoft."

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My mother was a regular reader of this blog. Maybe she still reads it, where ever she is, whatever form she is in. I have women friends who read the blog, I think in a similar way to the way she read it.

She was a very smart person, lots of brain power, but also very wounded, and the wounds, which we shared in a way, made it hard for us to be close. Maybe toward the end of her life she opened up a bit, but she had a fear of men, given to her by her parents, and she passed that on to her children, in the weird way that parents give their agony to their children. But she read the blog. That was something.

The author and his mother with the author's newborn brother.

I dream about her every night. They are not happy dreams, they are dreams of unresolved anger, disloyalty. But I also feel for her in ways I didn't when she was alive. I wish I had protected her, which is ridiculous because she was the mother and I was the child. But it's there nonetheless.

I wish we could talk, but then I remember, we never accomplished anything with talk. Yet, she is the one who fed me, taught me, read to me, gave me her values, and ultimately was proud of me.

She was my mother and all that came with it. I hope she can read this and I hope she's happy.