New submitter v1 writes: "Governor Ron DeSantis issued an executive order Friday forbidding local governments and businesses from requiring proof of a COVID-19 vaccine," reports WTXL-TV. In addition to local businesses and governments, this move is certain to rub the restarting cruise ship businesses the wrong way. Let the lawsuits begin! The executive order reads, in part: "No Florida government entity, or its subdivisions, agents, or assigns, shall be permitted to issue vaccine passports, vaccine passes, or other standardized documentation for the purpose of certifying an individual's COVID-19 vaccination status to a third party, or otherwise publish or share any individual's COVID-19 vaccination record or similar health information." The full executive order can be found here (PDF)

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Environmental campaigners dub the 1,572 locations across Wales "ticking time bombs".

Both monsters have grown in size over the years, and they reach new heights in Godzilla vs. Kong. But could they ever exist in real life? From a report: The last time the pair squared off, in the 1962 Japanese stop-motion release King Kong vs. Godzilla, Kong was 148 feet tall, compared to just 25ft tall in Peter Jackson's 2005 film King Kong, according to online estimates. In 2017's Kong: Skull Island, the great primate was around 104ft; almost four times smaller than the current iteration of Godzilla, who clocks in at 393ft. While the skeletons of Kong's parents in Skull Island suggest 100ft is roughly their species' genetic limit, the producers of the series have retconned the franchise by explaining that Kong is an adolescent in that film, leaving room for him to grow into a worthy opponent for Godzilla some 40 years down the movie timeline. Scaling up Kong to match Godzilla makes sense. It would be a short film if Godzilla stomped the big ape to death in the opening minutes. But how does that explain Godzilla's own growth spurt from 328ft in 2014 to 393ft today? And, crucially, is any of this based in science? There are some things the films get right. James Rosindell from the faculty of natural sciences at Imperial College London points to a theory called 'Cope's Rule' which holds that evolution will increase a species body size over time. "[Being larger] gives competitive advantages and is often naturally selected for," he explains. However, larger creatures need more food and typically reproduce at a slower rate, meaning few individuals can be supported by any one ecosystem. So Kong and Godzilla being the last of their species -- and Kong slowly maturing over 40 years -- fits the science. But that's about the only thing that holds together. It turns out that Godzilla and Kong's biggest foe may not be each other, but physics. Specifically, the laws of gravity and biomechanics. The largest animal alive today, the blue whale, is found in our oceans. "The size limit of aquatic animals is closely tied to the ability to eat enough food to sustain their chonky bodies," explains David Labonte, a researcher in the department of bioengineering, also at Imperial College. Labonte has a specific interest in the interaction between physical laws and body size. For example, why there are no climbing animals heavier than geckos that can cling upside down to smooth surfaces? When it comes to the blue whale, Labonte explains that their large mouths and a technique known as 'lunge feeding' enables them to obtain enough food to sustain their bodies. This has allowed some blue whales to grow up to 180 tonnes (Kong was around 158 tonnes in his last film). An aquatic environment bestows other advantages, namely, buoyancy. Having its weight suspended in water is one of the key reasons why the blue whale is able to grow so large. It's also the reason that when whales beach, the most common cause of death is internal damage from the weight of their own bodies. Gravity, then, is a problem our terrestrial animals are yet to overcome. It's the reason our largest land animal, the African elephant tips the scales at a relatively puny six tonnes.

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In an interview, San Francisco Fed President Mary Daly addressed Silicon Valley heavyweights like Elon Musk and others who have bemoaned California's COVID-19 restrictions and taxes and said they're taking their ball and moving to places like Miami or Brownsville, Texas, or the 140-square-foot Hawaiian island they own. Daly said: I've been working at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco since 1996 and when I arrived in 1996 there was a series of books written that said Silicon Valley was dead, it was over. People were going to move to Austin, Texas, and Portland, Oregon, and Boston and that was going to be the end of Silicon Valley. It had reached its peak and it was on the demise. Of course, it didn't happen. What happens is that absolutely tech firms move to other parts of the country, they relocate, and some of it is the business climate that they cite, some of it is that it's easier to get a workforce if you spread it around the United States than if you're all in one area. That concentration does raise housing values, and housing prices because people want to live here. All of these things are true and yet year after year, decade after decade, you see Silicon Valley robustly continuing to grow and continuing to thrive.

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The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has updated its domestic travel guidance for fully vaccinated people, lifting certain testing and self-quarantine requirements and recommending precautions like wearing a mask and avoiding crowds. But health officials continue to discourage nonessential travel, citing a sustained rise in cases and hospitalizations. From a report: The CDC updated its website on Friday to reflect the latest scientific evidence, writing that "people who are fully vaccinated with an FDA-authorized vaccine can travel safely within the United States." The announcement comes less than a month after the CDC first released updated guidance about gatherings for fully vaccinated people, which it described as a "first step" toward returning to everyday activities. The CDC considers someone fully vaccinated two weeks after they receive the last dose of vaccine. Those individuals will no longer need to get tested before or after travel unless their destination requires it, and do not need to self-quarantine upon return. The new guidance means, for example, that fully vaccinated grandparents can fly to visit their healthy grandkids without getting a COVID-19 test or self-quarantining as long as they follow other recommended measures while traveling, according to CDC Director Rochelle Walensky.

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Waymo Chief Executive John Krafcik is leaving the company after more than five years [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source], bringing an end to the former auto executive's leadership of Google parent Alphabet driverless car effort. From a report: The company said Friday that it is promoting its chief technology and operating officers, Dmitri Dolgov and Tekedra Mawakana, to lead a decade-old effort to make self-driving cars a reality. They will share the title of co-chief executive. Under Mr. Krafcik, Waymo broadened its business beyond years of mapping roads and designing software to begin running robotaxis around a segment of Phoenix. He also led Waymo's conversion into an independent subsidiary of Alphabet and raised an external investment round of $3.25 billion. In a blog post, Mr. Krafcik said he will serve as an adviser to Waymo, adding that "Dmitri and Tekedra have my full confidence and support."

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In major international tests, the physics-defying EmDrive has failed to produce the amount of thrust proponents were expecting. In fact, in one test at Germanyâ(TM)s Dresden University, it didn't produce any thrust at all. Is this the end of the line for EmDrive? Popular Mechanics: The crux of the EmDrive is if you bounce microwaves around inside the tube, they exert more force in one direction than the other, creating a net thrust without the need for any propellant. And when NASA and a team at Xi'an in China tried this, they actually got a small-but-distinct net force. Now, however, physicists at the Dresden University of Technology (TU Dresden) are saying those promising results showing thrust were all false positives that are explained by outside forces. The scientists recently presented their findings in three papers at Space Propulsion Conference 2020 +1, with titles like "High-Accuracy Thrust Measurements of the EmDrive and Elimination of False-Positive Effects." (Other two studies here and here) Using a new measuring scale and different suspension points of the same engine, the TU Dresden scientists "were able to reproduce apparent thrust forces similar to those measured by the NASA team, but also to make them disappear by means of a point suspension," researcher Martin Tajmar told the German site GreWi. The verdict: "When power flows into the EmDrive, the engine warms up. This also causes the fastening elements on the scale to warp, causing the scale to move to a new zero point. We were able to prevent that in an improved structure. Our measurements refute all EmDrive claims by at least 3 orders of magnitude."

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US chipmaker AMD advised customers last week to disable a new performance feature if they plan to use CPUs for sensitive operations, as this feature is vulnerable to Spectre-like side-channel attacks. From a report: Called Predictive Store Forwarding (PSF), this feature was added to AMD CPUs part of the company's Zen 3 core architecture, a processor series dedicated to gaming and high-performance computing, which launched in November 2020. The feature implements a technique called speculative execution, which works by running multiple alternative CPU operations in advance to make results available faster, and then discarding "predicted" data once deemed unneeded.

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A federal appeals court on Thursday rejected New York City's effort to hold five major oil companies liable to help pay the costs of addressing harm caused by global warming. schwit1 shares a report: Ruling in favor of BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Exxon Mobil and Royal Dutch Shell, the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan said the regulation of greenhouse gas emissions should be addressed under federal law and international treaties. It rejected the city's efforts to sue under state nuisance law for damages caused by the companies' "admittedly legal" production and sale of fossil fuels, and said the cityâ(TM)s federal common law claims were displaced by the federal Clean Air Act. "Global warming presents a uniquely international problem of national concern," Circuit Judge Richard Sullivan wrote for a three-judge panel. "It is therefore not well-suited to the application of state law." Sullivan added that while the Clean Air Act did not address emissions from outside the country, foreign policy concerns and the risk of courts "stepping on the toes of the political branches" barred the city's lawsuit.

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The H-1B visa ban introduced by President Donald Trump last year expired on Wednesday, with President Joe Biden allowing the rules to come to an end. From a report: In an update on Thursday, the US Department of State said visa applicants who were previously refused due to Trump's freeze may reapply by submitting a new application. Visa applicants who have not yet been interviewed will have their applications prioritized and processed under the State Department's phased resumption plan. The Trump administration in June 2020 stopped the government issuing H-1B visas through an an executive order linked to the coronavirus pandemic. In October, Trump then placed new restrictions on H-1B visas for highly skilled foreign workers -- rules that were struck down by a federal judge in December who said the administration failed to show "good cause" for issuing the rules on an emergency basis.

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I wonder if we could help one of the newsletter distribution companies support the Metaweblog API or equivalent.

I'd be happy to help design it, and would implement an editor as open source example code to help seed the market.

This would be an easy upgrade for the web, and good publicity for an innovative platform. Let's create a great new market for writing tools for the web. All it takes is one developer to get this going. It's something I would support with all the influence I have.

Writing tools for the web have been languishing. This is easy to fix, it just requires a little leadership.

I can always watch Babe. Total feel-good movie.

An anonymous reader shares a report: In the world's largest gaming market, China, console games play a relatively small part as their revenue has been meagre compared to mobile and PC games for years -- at least by the official numbers. There remains a community of hardcore console lovers, but they are finding it harder to get hold of devices and cartridges recently. A handful of grey market videogame console vendors on Taobao stopped selling and shipping this week, according to checks by TechCrunch and online posts by gamers.

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I feel so sad about what's happening to Stallman.

He's 68. I know what that's like, I'm 65.

He has fixed his whole existence on a single idea that software should be free. Not free of charge, but free to use and to adapt. It's not that far from the kind of openness I believe in, that I believe is an ethical responsiblity for developers.

It's useful to have a person like Stallman around, consistently marking the most extreme view. It's like knowing there's a North Star, you may not be going to it, exactly, but knowing where it is makes it possible to go other places. And some people agree with Stallman in total, and to them he's their leader.

Now, if you step back and look at what's being said about him, basically people don't like things he says or the questions he asks. I read these things completely factoring out the non-factual stuff, where they tell you what his questions mean in some pure sense, when what they're really saying is what these questions mean to them. To a reasonable person imho they're just questions. Some people don't argue with questions, they just ask them. For the people who attack him, it's quite the opposite, their questions are accusations.

I think Stallman is actually a naive innocent, almost child-like harmless person. That's based on years of observing him, being connected through communities. Maybe he did terrible things I don't know about. But maybe you have too. Is this how we're going to coexist? All of us worrying about who's going to make a credible case for destroying each others' lives? This isn't about Stallman, it's about your sense of justice and how far it extends, and how unfair that is for the rest of us who are potentially judged by you.

PS: A quote from a 1994 blog post: "I try not to get offended on principle." I was quoting someone else, but I've remembered that. Just because I should be offended, doesn't mean, if I'm not actually offended, that I have to pretend I was.

PPS: If you still think Stallman should be destroyed, go see Lives of Others, a wonderful film about intellectuals living in East Germany during the Cold War.

The asteroid that killed off the dinosaurs gave birth to tropical rainforests, a study suggests.