Long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 shared this article from Sky.com: Dr. Fatima Ebrahimi "has invented a new fusion rocket thruster concept which could power humans to Mars and beyond," writes Sky.com Long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 shared their report: The physicist who works for the U.S. Department of Energy's Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory designed the rocket which will use magnetic fields to shoot plasma particles — electrically charged gas — into the vacuum of space. According to Newton's second and third laws of motion, the conservation of momentum would mean the rocket was propelled forwards — and at speeds 10 times faster than comparable devices. While current space-proven plasma propulsion engines use electric fields to propel the particles, the new rocket design would accelerate them using magnetic reconnection... Dr. Ebrahimi's new concept performs much better than existing plasma thrusters in computer simulations — generating exhaust with velocities of hundreds of kilometres per second, 10 times faster than those of other thrusters. That faster velocity at the beginning of a spacecraft's journey could bring the outer planets within reach of astronauts, the physicist said.... "The next step is building a prototype!"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot reader DevNull127 writes: This week a security researcher discovered a bot on Telegram that sold the phone numbers of Facebook users for $20 apiece. "The security researcher who found this vulnerability, Alon Gal, says that the person who runs the bot claims to have the information of 533 million users, which came from a Facebook vulnerability that was patched in 2019," reported the Verge. Motherboard reported the bot was also offering "bulk" pricing, selling 10,000 phone numbers for $5,000. Telegram told the New York Post that they'd blocked the bot Tuesday morning, while Facebook downplayed the incident, reminding the Post "This is old data." But the Post notes that Facebook already had more than 1.6 billion daily active users in September 2019, and security researcher Alon Gal posted a count of the millions of affected users in each country, finding 32,315,282 in America, 11,522,328 in the United Kingdom, 7,320,478 in Australia, and 3,494,385 in Canada. But the Verge points out the most ominous message of the breach: that ""the data is still out there on the web" — and that it's already resurfaced, more than once, in the days since it was initially scraped.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Bay Area Newsgroup reports: Despite high salaries and world-class amenities, San Jose is the least affordable place for tech workers to buy a home. [Alternate URL here] A new analysis by the American Enterprise Institute found the typical tech worker and his or her partner — with two incomes totaling $200,000 — can afford just 12 percent of the homes for sale in the San Jose metro area. The picture in San Francisco and the East Bay is nearly as bad, with just 21 percent of homes for sale fitting in the budget of an average tech couple. The high-hurdles to home ownership are fueling a Bay Area exodus that has contributed to the state's sluggish population growth in recent years, researchers say. Study author Ed Pinto, director of the AEI Housing Center, said tech workers can afford their pick of homes in almost every other U.S. city. "But in those places like San Jose, San Francisco and Los Angeles," he said, "that is not the case." The analysis gives another explanation for the Bay Area exodus. And it's not only workers who are leaving. Tech heavyweights HPE and Oracle have announced moves of their headquarters from Silicon Valley to Texas. Pinto believes the spread of remote work will only accelerate migration from the Bay Area. With new workplace flexibilities, tech workers have a choice between high-cost regions near their offices and low-cost regions with bigger houses and remote work. "Work from home is winning," he said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Long-time Slashdot reader cusco quotes a new report from IEEE Spectrum: In August 2018, a passenger aircraft in Idaho, flying in smoky conditions, reportedly suffered GPS interference from military tests and was saved from crashing into a mountain only by the last-minute intervention of an air traffic controller. "Loss of life can happen because air traffic control and a flight crew believe their equipment are working as intended, but are in fact leading them into the side of the mountain," wrote the controller. "Had [we] not noticed, that flight crew and the passengers would be dead...." There are some 90 reports on NASA's Aviation Safety Reporting System forum detailing GPS interference in the United States over the past eight years, the majority of which were filed in 2019 and 2020. Now IEEE Spectrum has new evidence that GPS disruption to commercial aviation is much more common than even the ASRS database suggests. Previously undisclosed Federal Aviation Administration data for a few months in 2017 and 2018 detail hundreds of aircraft losing GPS reception in the vicinity of military tests. On a single day in March 2018, 21 aircraft reported GPS problems to air traffic controllers near Los Angeles. These included a medevac helicopter, several private planes, and a dozen commercial passenger jets. Some managed to keep flying normally; others required help from air traffic controllers. Five aircraft reported making unexpected turns or navigating off course. In all likelihood, there are many hundreds, possibly thousands, of such incidents each year nationwide, each one a potential accident. The vast majority of this disruption can be traced back to the U.S. military, which now routinely jams GPS signals over wide areas on an almost daily basis somewhere in the country. The military is jamming GPS signals to develop its own defenses against GPS jamming. Ironically, though, the Pentagon's efforts to safeguard its own troops and systems are putting the lives of civilian pilots, passengers, and crew at risk... Todd E. Humphreys, director of the Radionavigation Laboratory at the University of Texas at Austin, says. "When something works well 99.99 percent of the time, humans don't do well in being vigilant for that 0.01 percent of the time that it doesn't."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It's so cold that my fingers and toes become numb when I go for a 40-minute walk.

"The same legalese that can ban Donald Trump from Twitter can bar users from joining class-action lawsuits," warns the official Editorial Board of the New York Times, urging "It's time to fix the fine print." [Alternate URL here] [M]ost people have no idea what is signed away when they click "agree" to binding terms of service contracts — again and again on phones, laptops, tablets, watches, e-readers and televisions. Agreeing often means allowing personal data to be resold or waiving the right to sue or join a class-action lawsuit... Because corporations and their lawyers know most consumers don't have the time or wherewithal to study their new terms, which can stretch to 20,000 words — about the length of Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar" — they stuff them with opaque provisions and lengthy legalistic explanations meant to confuse or obfuscate. Understanding a typical company's terms, according to one study, requires 14 years of education, which is beyond the level most Americans attain. A 2012 Carnegie Mellon study found that the average American would have to devote 76 work days just to read over tech companies' policies. That number would probably be much higher today. At its core, the arrangement is unbalanced, putting the burden on consumers to read through voluminous, nonnegotiable documents, written to benefit corporations in exchange for access to their services. It's hard to imagine, by contrast, being asked to sign a 60-page printed contract before entering a bowling alley or a florist shop... Though courts have held terms of service contracts to be binding, there is generally no legal requirement that companies make them comprehensible. It is understandable, then, that companies may feel emboldened to insert terms that advantage them at their customers' expense. That includes provisions that most consumers wouldn't knowingly agree to: an inability to delete one's own account, granting companies the right to claim credit for or alter their creative work, letting companies retain content even after a user deletes it, letting them gain access to a user's full browsing history and giving them blanket indemnity. More often than not, there is a clause (including for The New York Times's website) that the terms can be updated at any time without prior notice. Some terms approach the absurd. Food and ride-share companies, like DoorDash and Lyft, ask users to agree that the companies are not delivery or transportation businesses, a sleight of hand designed to give the companies license to treat their contract drivers as employees while also sheltering the companies from liability for whatever may happen on a ride or delivery. Handy, an on-demand housecleaning service, once sought in its terms of service to put customers on the hook for future tax liabilities should their contract workers' job classification be changed to employee... "This is one of the tools used by corporations to assert themselves over their customers and whittle away their rights," said Nancy Kim, a California Western School of Law professor who studies online contracts. "With their constant updates to terms and conditions, it amounts to a massive bait-and-switch...." "We have become so beaten down by this that we just accept it," said Woodrow Hartzog, a Northeastern University law professor. "The idea that anyone should be expected to read these terms of service is preposterous — they are written to discourage people from reading them...." The Board urges the U.S. Congress to consider requiring greater transparency about terms and their changes — as well as simpler explanations. "If a company's online service is open to 13-year-olds, as many are, then the terms of use need to be written so an eighth grader can understand them."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Biden sought unity, but he should not have connected it to bipartisanship. Unity means solving problems for the whole country, not just states that voted for him. That was Trump's CrazyTown USA. A total loser for Repubs. But the Repubs are the party built around one race supreme, über alles. They left a wide open field for the Dems. The Repub politicians, every one of them, are vestigial, members of a party with nowhere to go. Lost souls. You don't get bipartisan with dead people. We're in a loop here. Whites, if you insist on ruling, you lose. The "others" are even stronger in 2021 than they were in 1865.

I'm writing too much today.

A nonprofit watchdog news site in Tulsa, Oklahoma reports: The Oklahoma Attorney General's Office has been tasked with attempting to return a $2 million stockpile of a malaria drug once touted by former President Donald Trump as a way to treat the coronavirus. In April, Gov. Kevin Stitt, who ordered the hydroxychloroquine purchase, defended it by saying that while it may not be a useful treatment for the coronavirus, the drug had multiple other uses and "that money will not have gone to waste in any respect." But nearly a year later the state is trying to offload the drug back to its original supplier, California-based FFF Enterprises, Inc, a private pharmaceutical wholesaler... It's unclear yet how much of the initial $2 million investment in the hydroxychloroquine the state could recoup. "While governments in at least 20 other states obtained more than 30 million doses of the drug through donations from the federal reserve or private companies, Oklahoma and Utah bought them from private pharmaceutical companies," notes ABC News: Then-Utah Gov. Gary Herbert, a Republican, initially defended the state's $800,000 purchase of 20,000 packets of hydroxychloroquine compounded with zinc, but later canceled an additional plan to spend $8 million more to buy 200,000 more treatments. The state then managed to secure a refund on the $800,000 no-bid contract it signed with a local pharmacy company that had been promoting the drugs. The CEO of the pharmacy company has since pleaded guilty to a federal misdemeanor for mislabeling the drug imported from China.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Maybe our first vacations after the pandemic should be one of the following.

1. Charitable.
2. About learning.
3. Spiritual.
4. Meditative.
5. Creating peace.

And not drunken rituals.

Maybe we should turn a new leaf when this is over, if it ever is.

I lost one of my AirPods. I can replace it for $89, or try something new, which is what I'll do. I'll let you know. In the meantime, I solved the problem with the crappy UI for the LG screen I bought last month. I bought the top-of-the-line Roku device, plugged it in, and it gives the same great picture, and lets me control everything from the much more elegant Roku remote. I loaded on all the apps I need, including Fubo, which is not available for the LG, and after a few hours I realized why the Roku remote is so superior. There are so few buttons, and they're big enough, that I don't have to look at the remote to operate the UI. This is important for a TV where you use it in a dark room, ideally. Roku is the best. People say it's dated, I think it's really that it works, and that's what I want. ;-)

Today's song: Sweet Child O' Mine.

The government's climate change advisors say it will compromise the UK’s legally binding carbon budgets.

Jalopnik reports: The United States government operates a fleet of about 645,000 vehicles, from mail delivery trucks to military vehicles and passenger cars. On Monday, President Joe Biden announced that his administration intends to replace them all with American-made, electric alternatives... In 2015, the government operated 357,610 gasoline vehicles and 3,896 electric ones; in 2019, those numbers grew to 368,807 and 4,475, respectively. That's excluding the tens of thousands of E-85 ["flex fuel"] and diesel-based vehicles on the road, which, together, comprise nearly a third of the 645,047 total. So, yeah, there's certainly a lot of work to do... The Washington Post reports: The declaration is a boon to the fledgling electric vehicle industry, which has grown exponentially in the past decade but still represents less than 2 percent of automobiles sold in the United States... "It's important as a symbolic thing," said Timothy Lipman, co-director of the Transportation Sustainability Research Center at the University of California at Berkeley. "But I think it also will have a way of helping to jolt the industry forward at a time when it kind of needed that...." One of the biggest issues: Just three automakers currently manufacture electric vehicles in the United States, and none of those cars meet Biden's criteria of being produced by union workers from at least 50 percent American-made materials. The closest is the Chevrolet Bolt, assembled at a General Motors plant in Lake Orion, Michigan. But most of that car's parts — including the battery, motor and drive unit — are produced overseas. But that could easily change, said Kristin Dziczek, vice president of industry, labor and economics at the nonprofit Center for Automotive Research. If Biden succeeds in making every car in the federal fleet electric, he would increase the total number of electric vehicles in the United States by more than 50 percent. "One of the big questions for companies is, 'Is the consumer there?' Well, [the government] is a big consumer," Dziczek said. "Now they know there's some solid demand from the government to support their early launches of new vehicles...." With 640,000 nonelectric vehicles, the federal fleet represents the annual output of about three or four automotive plants, Dziczek said. That's not exactly the million jobs Biden promised in his announcement Monday. But it might be sufficient to convince car manufacturers to change their supply chains or shift their production to U.S. facilities.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

What if they had blue checkmarks for people who pass a basic math literacy test.