An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Time is starting to run out for vehicles powered purely by international combustion engines, and the auto industry knows it. This week Bentley, that bastion of British luxury, became the latest OEM to set a date for that happening -- the year 2030. As the company moves into its second century, it has revealed a new plan called "Beyond 100" that it says will "reinvent every aspect of its business to become an end-to-end carbon neutral organization. Bentley already introduced a plug-in hybrid EV version of the Bentayga SUV and next year it plans to add another pair of PHEVs to its roster -- presumably the Continental GT coupe and Flying Spur sedan. In 2025, the company plans to introduce a battery electric vehicle; Bentley CEO Adrian Hallmark told Autoweek that "you've got to pick a point in time where battery power density, especially for bigger cars, is the liberator for us. We've always said that the mid-2020s is the time when you can expect to see 120-plus kilowatt-hour batteries coming through the supply chain." 2025 will also be the last year you'll be able to buy a Bentley that doesn't plug in, because in 2026 the brand is dropping everything other than PHEVs and BEVs. In 2030, those PHEVs will be gone, too, leaving just BEVs to wear the winged B badge with pride. Along the way, Bentley is also pledging to reduce its factory's environmental impact and go plastic neutral.

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As work continues on Novi, Facebook's digital wallet the company hopes will one day be used to access currencies in the blockchain-based payment system Libra, semblances of a framework have emerged from new research published in AFT '20: Proceedings of the 2nd ACM Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies. From a report: A paper coauthored by scientists at Facebook's Novi division proposes a transaction settlement system called FastPay, which they claim can be used to settle cryptocurrency payments or as infrastructure to support retail payments in fiat currencies. In experiments, the team managed to achieve "intra-continental" confirmation of less than 100 milliseconds and over 80,000 transactions per second with as many as 20 different payment authorities. [...] FastPay aims to solve this by enabling authorities to jointly maintain account balances and settle prefunded retail payments between accounts. The researchers claim it supports "subsecond" latency confirmation appropriate for physical point-of-sale payments while providing capacity comparable with peak retail card network volumes and real-time gross settlement. [...] In experiments, they claim FastPay supported up to 160,000 transactions per second under a total load of 1.5 million transactions across the 48 cores -- about seven times the peak transaction rate of the Visa payments network -- while running on commodity computers that cost less than $4,000 a month to run.

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hackingbear writes: China successfully launched the world's first 6G communication satellite by a Long March-6 carrier rocket that blasted off from the Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center, China Central Television (CCTV) reported. The 6G experimental satellite, named after the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China (UESTC), was jointly developed by Chengdu Guoxing Aerospace Technology, UESTC, and Beijing MinoSpace Technology. It will be used to verify the performance of 6G technology in space as the 6G frequency band will expand from the 5G millimeter wave frequency to the terahertz frequency. The technology is expected to be over 100 times faster than 5G, enabling lossless transmission in space to achieve long-distance communications with a smaller power output.

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Facebook plans to put the name of the winner of the US presidential election at the top of Facebook and Instagram once it's been projected by a majority of media outlets, the company says. From a report: The company also will label presidential candidates' posts with a link to its voting information center, according to Facebook spokesperson Tom Reynolds. The company plans to "show the candidate's name in notifications at the top of Facebook and Instagram that say 'A Presidential Winner Has Been Projected -- is the projected winner of the 2020 US Presidential Election,'" Reynolds explained in an email to The Verge. Facebook will rely on "a majority opinion from Reuters as well as independent decision desks at major media outlets, including ABC News, CBS News, Fox News, NBC News, CNN, and The Associated Press to determine when a presidential winner is projected," Reynolds says.

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Ransomware gangs that steal a company's data and then get paid a ransom fee to delete it don't always follow through on their promise. From a report: The number of cases where something like this has happened has increased, according to a report published by Coveware this week and according to several incidents shared by security researchers with ZDNet researchers over the past few months. These incidents take place only for a certain category of ransomware attacks -- namely those carried out by "big-game hunters" or "human-operated" ransomware gangs. These two terms refer to incidents where a ransomware gang specifically targets enterprise or government networks, knowing that once infected, these victims can't afford prolonged downtimes and will likely agree to huge payouts. But since the fall of 2019, more and more ransomware gangs began stealing large troves of files from the hacked organizations before encrypting the victims' files. The idea was to threaten the victim to release its sensitive files online if the company wanted to restore its network from backups instead of paying for a decryption key to recover its files.

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Can algorithms identify unusual medication orders or profiles more accurately than humans? Not necessarily. From a report: A study coauthored by researchers at the Universite Laval and CHU Sainte-Justine in Montreal found that one model physicians used to screen patients performed poorly on some orders. The study offers a reminder that unvetted AI and machine learning may negatively impact outcomes in medicine. Pharmacists review lists of active medications -- i.e., pharmacological profiles -- for inpatients under their care. This process aims to identify medications that could be abused, but most medication orders don't show drug-related problems. Publications from over a decade ago illustrate technology's potential to help pharmacists streamline workflows by taking on tasks like reviewing orders. But while more recent research has investigated AI's potential in pharmacology, few studies have demonstrated its efficacy. The coauthors of this latest work looked at a model deployed in a tertiary-care mother-and-child academic hospital between April 2020 and August 2020. The model was trained on a dataset of 2,846,502 medication orders from 2005 to 2018. These had been extracted from a pharmacy database and preprocessed into 1,063,173 profiles. Prior to data collection, the model was retrained every month with 10 years of the most recent data from the database in order to minimize drift, which occurs when a model loses its predictive power.

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The 50MW facility near Manchester hopes to store enough power for roughly 50,000 homes.

Amazon will invest about $2.8 billion in Telangana to set up a new AWS Cloud region in the southern state of India, a top Indian politician announced on Friday. From a report: The investment will allow Amazon to launch an AWS Cloud region in Hyderabad by mid-2022, said K. T. Rama Rao, Minister for Information Technology, Electronics & Communications, Municipal Administration and Urban Development and Industries & Commerce Departments, Government of Telangana. The new AWS Asia Region will be Amazon's second infrastructure region in India, Amazon said in a press release. It did not disclose the size of the investment. [...] There is a lot in it for Amazon as well. Jayanth Kolla, chief analyst at consultancy firm Convergence Catalyst, told TechCrunch that by having more cloud regions in India, it will be easier for Amazon to comply with the nation's data localization policy. This compliance will also help Amazon, which currently leads the cloud market in India, attract more customers.

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Ethan Siegel, writing at Medium's Starts with a Bang: Either way, the first thing that would happen would be a transition from being at rest -- where the force from the atoms on Earth's surface pushed back on us with an equal and opposite force to gravitational acceleration -- to being in free-fall: at 9.8 m/s2 (32 feet/s2), towards the center of the Earth. Unlike most free-fall scenarios we experience on Earth today, such as a skydiver experiences when jumping out of an airplane, you'd have an eerie, lasting experience. You wouldn't feel the wind rushing past you, but rather the air would accelerate down towards the center of the Earth exactly at the same rate you did. There would be no drag forces on you, and you would never reach a maximum speed: a terminal velocity. You'd simply fall faster and faster as time progressed. That "rising stomach" sensation that you'd feel -- like you get at the top of a drop on a roller coaster -- would begin as soon as free-fall started, but would continue unabated. You'd experience total weightlessness, like an astronaut on the International Space Station, and would be unable to "feel" how fast you were falling. Which is a good thing, because not only would you fall faster and faster towards the Earth's center as time went on, but your acceleration would actually increase as you got closer to that central singularity.

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The chip expected to be at the core of the first Apple Silicon Mac -- the "A14X" -- may have been benchmarked just days before the next Apple event. From a report: The alleged CPU benchmarks for the "A14X" show a 1.80GHz processor capable of turbo-boosting to 3.10GHz marking this the first custom Apple Silicon to ever clock above 3GHz. It is an 8-core processor with big-little arrangement. The GPU results show 8GB of RAM will be included with the processor. The single-core benchmark for the "A14X" scored 1634 vs the A12Z at 1118. The A14 scored 1,583 points for single-core tests, which is expected as single-core results shouldn't change much between the regular and "X" models. The multi-core benchmark for the "A14X" scored 7220 vs the A12Z at 4657. The A14 scored 4198 for multi-core, which means the "A14X" delivers a marked increase in performance in the sorts of environments that the GeekBench test suite focuses on. The additional RAM and graphics capabilities boost this result much higher than the standard iPhone processor. For comparison, a 16-inch MacBook Pro with the Intel Core-i9 processor scores 1096 for single and 6869 for multi-core tests. This means the alleged "A14X" outperforms the existing MacBook Pro lineup by a notable margin.

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Netflix has chosen France to test its first channel offering. From a report: Named Direct, the linear channel -- which is only available to subscribers -- will air French, international and U.S. feature films and TV series that are available on the streaming service. However, the channel will only be accessible via the service's web browser, unlike its streaming service, which is found on set-top boxes thanks to distribution deals with French telco groups such as Orange, Canal Plus and SFR. The initiative marks Netflix's first foray into real-time, scheduled programming. The service previously tested the option Shuffle Play, which wasn't in real time but featured recommended programming to a sample of international users, explained a source at Netflix. The difference this time around is that the test is being localized in one country, rather than a sample of users.

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Might be a good idea to stop referring to Republicans as Repubs, and call them what they are -- Trumps.

Sony says its PlayStation 5 can load virtual worlds far faster than ever before, thanks to one of the fastest solid-state drives ever made -- but it's also not a particularly big drive. Sony has confirmed to The Verge that you won't be able to expand that blazing-fast SSD storage on day one. From a report: While the PS5 features a dedicated internal slot that can theoretically fit standard stick-shaped M.2 SSDs and an easy way to access it, the slot will apparently be disabled out of the box. "[T]his is reserved for a future update," Sony tells The Verge.

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Even if the tech is old, slow and poorly organized -- Kornacki is king. He's the Batman of the United States of Gotham City.

The news should reflect what the Trumps are really doing with the lawsuits. They're going to pitch state legislatures that the election was stolen and they should appoint different electors. These lawsuits just have to get press coverage and show up in opinion polls. They wouldn't have to flip too many states with Republican legislatures. For example: Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan.