ComicBook.com reports: Back in 2019, Avengers: Endgame hit theatres and after a couple of months, it ended up knocking Avatar out of the highest-grossing film spot. The James Cameron movie was number one for an entire decade before the Marvel film came along, but thanks to a recent re-release in China, Avatar is back on top... When the news broke yesterday, many people took to social media to point out that the "real" winner was actually Zoe Saldana, who plays Gamora in the Marvel Cinematic Universe and Neytiri in Avatar. No matter which movie ultimately wins the box office wars, Saldana can't lose... Saldana is expected to return for both Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 and Avatar 2. Deadline reports the directors of Marvel's Avengers: Endgame, Joe and Anthony Russo, "have graciously saluted James Cameron's film Avatar for edging past them in the all-time worldwide box office totals," by tweeting a custom piece of artwork merging the Avatar and Avengers logos. James Cameron himself shared the tweet he'd received from Marvel Studios congratulating "ALL of Na'vi Nation for reclaiming the box office crown" (which also included a memorable line from Avengers: Endgame). Deadline says it's part of a long-standing Hollywood tradition: A practice of taking out ads to pat each other on the back began in 1977 when Steven Spielberg congratulated buddy George Lucas after Star Wars overtook Jaws at the domestic box office. It carried on from there including when Lucas later gave a shout-out to Cameron as Titanic unseated Star Wars in 1998. In 2015, Disney/Marvel and The Avengers paid tribute to Universal's Jurassic World and its record-smashing opening weekend. Later that year, Uni returned the hat tip as Disney/Lucasfilm's The Force Awakens rode past the dinosaurs, moving to social media for the first time. Then in 2019, Cameron saluted Endgame for overtaking Titanic and in July that year Cameron again said bravo when Endgame crossed Avatar.

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I wonder if they have arguments within the NYT Editorial Board about whether or not "the public" is something they can fudge. When they say "the public" is losing confidence in the governor, should they back that up with data, or just say it because it feels right to them.

The ThreadViewer docs are ready.

"Google failed to win dismissal of a lawsuit alleging it collects users' data on internet activity even when they browse in a browser's private incognito mode," reports CNET: The lawsuit, filed in June, alleges Google violates wiretapping and privacy laws by continuing to "intercept, track, and collect communications" even when people use Chrome's incognito mode and other private web browser modes. A federal judge on Friday denied the tech giant's request for dismissal of the lawsuit, which seeks class action status. "The court concludes that Google did not notify users that Google engages in the alleged data collection while the user is in private browsing mode," US District Judge Lucy Koh in San Jose, California, wrote in her ruling... The lawsuit, which seeks at least $5 billion from Google and its parent company, Alphabet, alleges the company surreptitiously collects data through Google Analytics, Google Ad Manager, website plug-ins and other applications, including mobile apps. Google "cannot continue to engage in the covert and unauthorized data collection from virtually every American with a computer or phone," the complaint said. Reuters reported in June that the proposed class action likely includes "millions" of Chrome users who had tried browsing the internet in a private mode — and seeks $5,000 damages per user "or three times actual damages, whichever is greater, for violations of federal wiretapping and California privacy laws."

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An anonymous reader shared this report from Live Science: A U.S. Air Force base in Texas has taken the first steps to guard against an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack. But what, exactly, is an EMP, and how big is the threat...? An EMP is a massive burst of electromagnetic energy that can occur naturally or be generated deliberately using nuclear weapons. While many experts don't think EMPs pose a big threat, some people argue that these types of weapons could be used to cause widespread disruption to electricity-dependent societies. "You can use a single weapon to collapse the entire North American power grid," said defense analyst Peter Pry, who served on the Congressional EMP Commission, which was set up to assess the threat of EMP attacks but shut down in 2017. "Once the electric grid goes down, everything would collapse," Pry told Live Science. "Everything depends on electricity: telecommunications, transportation, even water.... We've arrived at a place where a single individual can topple the technological pillars of civilization for a major metropolitan area all by himself armed with some device like this," he said... The threat posed by EMPs is far from settled, though. A 2019 report by the Electric Power Research Institute, which is funded by utility companies, found that such an attack would probably cause regional blackouts but not a nationwide grid failure and that recovery times would be similar to those of other large-scale outages... "There are other ways that adversaries can achieve some of the same outcomes, some of which would be cheaper and some of which would be less discernible," Frank Cilluffo, director of Auburn University's McCrary Institute for Cyber and Critical Infrastructure Security, told Live Science. Such alternatives might include cyberattacks to take out critical infrastructure, including the electric grid, or even efforts to disrupt space-based communications or the GPS system that modern society is so reliant on. Work to protect against EMPs makes sense... but these upgrades shouldn't distract from efforts to shore up defenses against more probable lines of attack, Cilluffo said.

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Well haha I believe I have all the issues worked out with the ThreadViewer app. Here's my test thread, viewed in ThreadViewer.

"The Border Gateway Protocol was first described in 1989...," according to Wikipedia, "and has been in use on the Internet since 1994." But now long-time Slashdot reader jovius reports that a startup named Syntropy "aims to replace BGP as the default routing method of the internet, by using nodes around the world to constantly gather data of the inefficiencies of the current network." The intelligence is then used to route data via the most efficient routes. Actual tests with hundreds of servers have proved that latencies can be reduced by tens to hundreds of milliseconds. The connections are by default encrypted, and jitter is also reduced. Eventually, the company-run servers are augmented with tens of thousands of nodes run by users/smart devices, who are rewarded for their work. The team was recently joined by former SVP at Verizon Shawn Hakl and former Chief Product Officer at AT&T Roman Pacewicz. One of the founders of Syntropy is the co-founder of Equinix and NANOG Bill Norton. Syntropy is an Oracle and Microsoft partner, and transforming into a foundation and DAO to govern the protocol work. Decentralised autonomous routing protocol (or DARP) has just been opened for community testing, and the system is live on https://darp.syntropystack.com/.

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The Verge reports: A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launched the latest batch of 60 Starlink satellites into orbit Sunday, and returned to Earth successfully, landing on its Of Course I Still Love You drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean, the company announced. Sunday's mission marked a record ninth flight and landing for this Falcon 9 booster, SpaceX said... Sunday's launch from NASA's Kennedy Space Center was the second in the past few days for SpaceX, which sent another of its Falcon 9 rockets skyward from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on Thursday. That launch also brought 60 satellites into orbit. Sharing a video about the mission, CNET calls it "a new standard for rocket recycling." The first stage that boosted the satellites is a veteran of five previous Starlink missions, Crew Dragon's first demonstration flight, a SiriusXM satellite launch and a Canadian Space Agency satellite mission. The fairing, or nose cone, also previously flew on the Transporter-1 ride-share mission.

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BTW the people who said I'd like Ted Lasso were right. I'm through episode 4 now. Hooked. I thought at first it was like Brockmire, but later realized it's actually more like The Good Place.

"A federal judge in Washington blocked the Defense Department from restricting U.S. investment in the Chinese smartphone manufacturer Xiaomi Corp," reports Bloomberg: In the final days of the Trump administration, the Defense Department placed Xiaomi on a list of companies with alleged links to the Chinese military, triggering financial restrictions that were scheduled to go into effect next week. But on Friday, U.S. District Judge Rudolph Contreras put a temporary halt to the ban, siding with Xiaomi in a lawsuit that argued that the move was "arbitrary and capricious" and deprived the company of its due process rights. Contreras said Xiaomi was likely to win a full reversal of the ban as the litigation unfolds and issued an initial injunction to prevent the company from suffering "irreparable harm." After the ban was announced, the smartphone manufacturer faced the prospect of being de-listed from U.S. exchanges and deleted from global benchmark indexes. Xiaomi is the third-largest smartphone manufacturer in the world by volume. In the third quarter, it surpassed Apple Inc. in smartphone sales, according to the International Data Corporation.

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"We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it," declared the Agile Manifesto, nearly 20 years ago. "Through this work we have come to value..." * Individuals and interactions over processes and tools * Working software over comprehensive documentation * Customer collaboration over contract negotiation * Responding to change over following a plan Today a new ZDNet article asks how far the tech industry has come in achieving the vision of its 12 principles — and why Agile is often "still just a buzzword." The challenge arises "because many come to agile as a solution or prescription, rather than starting with the philosophy that the Agile Manifesto focused on," says Bob Ritchie, VP of Software at SAIC. "Many best practices such as automated test-driven development, automated builds, deployments, and rapid feedback loops are prevalent in the industry. However, they are frequently still unmoored from the business and mission objectives due to that failure to start with why." Still, others feel we're still nowhere near achieving the vision of the original Agile Manifesto. "Absolutely not at a large scale across enterprises," , says Brian Dawson, DevOps evangelist with CloudBees. "We are closer and more aware, but we are turning a tanker and it is slow and incremental. In start-ups, we are seeing much more of this; that is promising because they are the enterprises of the future." Agile initiatives "all too often are rolled out from, and limited to, project planning or the project management office. To support agile and DevOps transformation, agile needs to be implemented with all stakeholders." Some organizations turn to agile "as a panacea to increase margins by cutting cost with a better, shinier development process," Ritchie cautions. "Others go even further by weaponizing popular metrics associated with agile capacity planning such as velocity and misclassifying it as a performance metric for an individual or team. In these circumstances, the promises of the manifesto are almost certainly missed as opportunities to engage and collaborate give way to finger pointing, blame, and burnout." What's missing from many agile initiatives is "ways to manage what you do based on value and outcomes, rather than on measuring effort and tasks," says Morris. "We've seen the rise of formulaic 'enterprise agile' frameworks that try to help you to manage teams in a top-down way, in ways that are based on everything on the right of the values of the Agile Manifesto. The manifesto says we value 'responding to change over following a plan,' but these frameworks give you a formula for managing plans that don't really encourage you to respond to change once you get going."

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"The Spanish government on Thursday announced legislation that classifies food delivery riders as employees of the digital platforms they work for, not self-employed," reports the Associated Press: The Minister for Labor, Yolanda Díaz, said the new law is "pioneering" and is part of "a modernization of the labor market" in Spain, updating regulations in accordance with technological developments to ensure workers' rights are upheld... The legal changes are the latest affecting companies and workers in the gig economy. Last month, Britain's top court ruled that Uber drivers should be classed as "workers" and not self-employed, in what was seen as a major setback for the ride-hailing giant. The Spanish government agreed on the new law with the country's main business groups and trade union confederations. But the law, which is expected to come into force within months, was quickly contested by an association of digital platforms providing food delivery services and by some riders who prefer the flexibility of being self-employed. The Association of Service Platforms calls the rule "an assault on the most basic principles of the freedom to do business..."

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Earlier today the NYT published an editorial about Cuomo saying: "The governor has lost his political allies and the public’s confidence." There's no question about the first part, lots of Democratic office-holders in New York have called for him to resign. No one has, as far as I know, offered support for letting the process develop. But there are no polls that show that he's lost the confidence of the voters. For a few days last week I thought it was over, he should resign, because they're never going to let him be a functioning governor again. But I get an email from him every day, and he's going forward with the business of helping New Yorkers deal with the pandemic. Without him, we'd be as adrift as every other state. So I say, stay in office Governor Cuomo. Let the investigation run its course, let the people see, clearly, what the charges are, and then we'll talk. The idea that such a huge decision that has so much affect on New Yorkers, should be made in a rush, without our participation, no one has made that case yet. This is our decision to make, collectively. Times editors get one vote, the same as every other voter in New York.

The CBC Radio show Quirks and Quarks shares an interesting theory: If you find yourself pondering the marvel of aerodynamics when you fly on a plane, or if you concentrate on the structure of music as it plays, rather than simply listening, you may score high on measures of "systemization," according to University of Cambridge neuroscientist Simon Baron-Cohen. And if so this may reflect abilities that he thinks may have first evolved in humans between 70,000 and 100,000 years ago, when our human ancestors took a cognitive leap forward. This new capacity enabled them to analyze and understand patterns in the world that would, among other things, facilitate the invention of complex tools from bows to musical instruments. In Baron-Cohen's new book, he argues that humans became "the scientific and technological masters of our planet" because of our brain's "systemizing mechanism." Also, some individuals — particularly those with Autism Spectrum Disorder, are the "hyper-systemizers" of our world. He suggests this should cause us to re-evaluate the capacities and strengths of people with autism... "[F]or the longest time, autism has been really just characterized as a disability, which it is, but with a focus on all the things that autistic people find difficult, what they struggle with. But we know that autism is more than just a disability, that autistic people think differently. Sometimes they have strengths... "The fact that we can now see a link between those strengths in autism and human invention may change the way we look at autistic people. We might want to see them for who they are, people who think differently and have contributed to human progress."

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Today much of the world honors an annual tradition: setting their clocks backwards by one hour. "I hope you enjoy it," writes Boston Globe Jeff Jacoby. In an essay titled "Heed the science and abolish daylight saving time," Jacoby writes "I also hope this is the last year we have to go through this business of shifting our clocks ahead, and that by this time next year we'll be back on standard time for good." I am not a fan of daylight saving time, and if the polls are accurate, neither are most Americans. According to a 2019 survey by the Associated Press and the National Opinion Research Center, 71 percent of the public wants to put an end to the twice-yearly practice of changing clocks... Most of the rest of the world doesn't want it either. In Asia, Africa, and South America, it's virtually nonexistent. Most of Australia and many of the nations of the South Pacific eschew it, as do Russia and most of the former Soviet republics. The European Parliament voted by a large margin to end daylight saving time across the European Union, though whether to implement that change is left up to each EU member state... The point of "saving" daylight was to save fuel: Congress believed that by shifting the clock so daylight extended later into the evening, the law would reduce demand for electricity and thereby conserve oil. But researchers attempting to measure the effects of clock-changing on energy savings have found them pretty elusive... But daylight saving time doesn't just fail to deliver the single most important benefit expected of it. It also generates a slew of harms. In the days following the onset of daylight time each March, there is a measurable increase in suicides, atrial fibrillation, strokes, and heart attacks. Workplace injuries climb. So do fatal car crashes and emergency room visits. There is even evidence that judges hand down harsher sentences. All of which helps explain the growing chorus of scientists calling for an end to daylight saving time. The public-health problems stem not just from the loss of an hour of sleep once a year but from the ongoing disruption to the human circadian clock... We should no longer be thinking about "springing forward" and "falling back" in terms of personal preference or convenience but should be focusing instead on the proven degradation to human well-being. Scientists now understand vastly more about the workings and importance of circadian rhythm than they did when clock-shifting was instituted decades ago. There is a growing medical consensus that what we've been doing with our clocks each spring is unhealthy. It's time to stop doing it.

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