"Banking giant HSBC has confirmed that top managers in its Canary Wharf HQ have lost their offices and will have to hot-desk on an open-plan floor," reports the BBC, noting it comes as the bank "pursues plans to shrink its office space by 40% in a post-pandemic shake-up." Boss Noel Quinn said the whole bank was embracing "hybrid working" and he would no longer come in five days a week. "My leadership team and I have moved to a fully open-plan floor with no designated desks," he said on Linkedin. Up to now, senior managers have been based on the 42nd floor of the building in east London in their own private offices. But in future, they will be jostling for workspaces two floors down, while their old offices have been transformed into client meeting rooms and other communal spaces. Mr Quinn told the FT that the old arrangement had been "a waste of real estate", adding: "Our offices were empty half the time because we were travelling around the world..." He added that most staff at the bank would be able to work part-time from home in future. "A minority of roles can be done wholly remotely. We estimate, though, that most of our roles could be done in a hybrid way — and that includes myself and the executive team of the bank..." Other firms in the sector have announced plans to embrace hybrid working as employees signal their desire to commute less. One big UK employer, the Nationwide building society, has indicated that it does not intend to force people to return to the office if they have been successfully able to work from home during the pandemic. It said about two-thirds of its 18,000 employees had been working from home for the past year. Forbes has more context: [HSBC's] Quinn wrote in a LinkedIn post, "Having spent more than a year working from home, the last thing I want is to be stuck in an individual office when I return to the building." The chief executive said, "I want to have people around me, to reconnect with colleagues and friends and to be able to speak to them informally..." Having a prime location in a prestigious city is highly expensive and a drag on earnings. If the costs of office space could be dramatically slashed, the banks would see significantly more free cash flow. The other driver is the acknowledgement that many people want to work part or full-time remotely for a variety of reasons. The last year served as a test case, which showed that it's possible to conduct business with a large segment of the workforce being remote... HSBC is not alone in shedding properties in Europe. Lloyds Bank is also moving toward a hybrid model. This entails a 20% cut in office space over the next two years. The move was made after about 77% of Lloyds' 68,000 employees said they wanted to work from home for three or more days a week.

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Hmmmmmm writes: China plans to launch its next robot lunar lander in 2024, and it will carry equipment manufactured by scientists from France, Sweden, Italy, and Russia, Hu Hao, the program's chief designer, told the Xinhua News Agency on Saturday. The country aims to position the lander, named Chang'e 6, near the lunar south pole where it will collect samples, per the official Xinhua News Agency. The Chang'e 6 lander is part of China's ongoing mission to successfully return moon samples back home "for comprehensive analysis and research," Hu said at a conference, Associated Press reported. For the 2024 mission, The China National Space Administration has invited scientists from around the world to take part in the program, offering to transport solicited payloads into space. So far, four payloads designed by the international scientists have been preliminarily chosen, the Xinhua News Agency reported.

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"NASA's Ingenuity Mars Helicopter continues to set records, flying faster and farther on Sunday, April 25, 2021 than in any tests it went through on Earth," reports NASA: The helicopter took off at 1:31 a.m. EDT (4:31 a.m. PDT), or 12:33 p.m. local Mars time, rising 16 feet (5 meters) — the same altitude as its second flight. Then it zipped downrange 164 feet (50 meters), almost half the length of a football field, reaching a top speed of 6.6 feet per second (2 meters per second). [Roughly 4.5 miles an hour.] After data came back from Mars starting at 10:16 a.m. EDT (7:16 a.m. PDT), Ingenuity's team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California was ecstatic to see the helicopter soaring out of view. They're already digging through a trove of information gathered during this third flight that will inform not just additional Ingenuity flights but possible Mars rotorcraft in the future. "Today's flight was what we planned for, and yet it was nothing short of amazing," said Dave Lavery, the project's program executive for Ingenuity Mars Helicopter at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "With this flight, we are demonstrating critical capabilities that will enable the addition of an aerial dimension to future Mars missions." NASA's chief pilot for the Mars helicopter calls this flight a big step "in which Ingenuity will begin to experience freedom in the sky," according to CNN. From the sky Ingenuity snapped a photo of its own shadow on Mars, and earlier sent back the very first aerial color image — taken 17 feet (5.2-metre) above the surface of Mars by Ingenuity's high-resolution color camera with a 4208-by-3120-pixel sensor.

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The New York Times reports: A major United Nations report will declare that slashing emissions of methane, the main component of natural gas, is far more vital than previously thought... It also says that — unless there is significant deployment of unproven technologies capable of pulling greenhouse gases out of the air — expanding the use of natural gas is incompatible with keeping global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, a goal of the international Paris Agreement... The reason methane would be particularly valuable in the short-term fight against climate change: While methane is an extremely potent greenhouse gas, it is also relatively short-lived, lasting just a decade or so in the atmosphere before breaking down. That means cutting new methane emissions today, and starting to reduce methane concentrations in the atmosphere, could more quickly help the world meet its midcentury targets for fighting global warming. By contrast, carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, lasts for hundreds of years in the atmosphere... While cutting back on carbon dioxide emissions will remain urgent, "it's going to be next to impossible to remove enough carbon dioxide to get any real benefits for the climate in the first half of the century," said Drew Shindell, the study's lead author and a professor of earth science at Duke University. "But if we can make a big enough cut in methane in the next decade, we'll see public health benefits within the decade, and climate benefits within two decades," he said... Carbon dioxide is the biggest driver of climate change, but methane is more potent in the shorter term, warming the atmosphere more than 80 times as much as the same amount of carbon dioxide does over a 20-year period. That's bad news, but it also means that cutting methane emissions may be one of the most effective ways to immediately slow rising global temperatures... Unlike carbon dioxide or most other air pollution, methane isn't released by burning fossil fuels, but comes from leaks and other releases from oil and gas infrastructure, among other sources... Fixing those leaks in theory should pay for themselves by saving money, because capturing the gas means companies capture more product. That potential makes plugging leaks from oil and gas infrastructure the most effective and cheapest way to slow emissions, the U.N. report says... Rolling back methane emissions would prevent more than 250,000 premature deaths, and more than 750,000 asthma-related hospital visits, each year from 2030 onward, the report finds. The lower emissions would also prevent more than 70 billion hours of lost labor from extreme heat and more than 25 million tons of crop losses a year. One professor of ecology and environmental biology at Cornell University tells the Times we've overestimated agriculture's role in methane while underestimating the fuel industry's role, while another researcher found that methane-reduction efforts in the top-polluting industries could slow global warming by 30 percent. "Over all, a concerted effort to reduce methane from the fossil fuel, waste and agricultural sectors could slash methane emissions by as much as 45 percent by 2030, helping to avoid nearly 0.3 degrees Celsius of global warming as early as the 2040s, the report says."

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My under-the-weatherness continues. Sleeping a lot, not eating much, drinking lots of water. A busy week coming up. It would be nice if this virus-like thing were to go away. And this is weird because I thought we weren't supposed to get virus-like things. Still maybe it's something I ate? Oy. Thanks for all the get well messages.

An easy way to make your writing better. Write the first draft as you think of the ideas. Then go back and delete all the connectives, all the things words you put in while your mind plotted out plots where you're going to take the writing next. And, delete every instance of the word very. Only leave the ones it where it's absolutely necessary to convey the veryness of the idea. Usually it adds nothing to the writing.

Long-time Slashdot reader destinyland writes: "More major corporations are abandoning the requirement of a four-year degree. At Apple, half of their employees don't have college degrees," reports NBC News. They also note that JP Morgan is "actively recruiting" people without a college degree for programs that train them for careers in areas like operations or consumer banking (showing one woman who ultimately got a $70,000-a-year position in Human Resources). NBC warns that "this path is untested. Many jobs still require a Bachelor's degree, and on average, a college graduate makes 67% more than a high school graduate." But they add that "as the cost of college rises, some say the returns aren't keeping pace" — cutting to their interview with Salesforce founder and CEO Marc Benioff. "To make a lot of money, you just need to get the skills. You don't need to go to college!" he tells them enthusiastically. "You can do it all online!" NBC provides the example of an immigrant from Colombia who went through free online training with Salesforce that led to a job. And earlier in the segment Benioff admits that "I only went to college because my parents made me go to college...! "Everybody thinks that if you don't have a college degree you can't be successful in the United States, and it's not true... You can create incredible value for the world without a college degree."

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HealthDay reports: There's no evidence of genetic damage in the children of parents who were exposed to radiation from the 1986 Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant disaster in Ukraine, researchers say. Several previous studies have examined the risks across generations of radiation exposure from events such as this, but have yielded inconclusive results. In this study, the investigators analyzed the genomes of 130 children and parents from families where one or both parents were exposed to radiation due to the Chernobyl accident, and where children were conceived afterward and born between 1987 and 2002. There was no increase in gene changes in reproductive cells of study participants, and rates of new germline mutations were similar to those in the general population, according to a team led by Meredith Yeager of the U.S. National Cancer Institute, in Rockville, Md.

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"Ville de Bitche is a town situated in northwestern France with a rich military history, pastoral landscape, and an unfortunate sounding name," reports Slate. (Adding that the "e" is silent....) "Recently tiny Bitche made international headlines after Facebook mistook the city's name for a swear word and deleted the town's Facebook page." The city's communication manager, Valêrie Degouy, contacted Facebook on March 19 to explain the situation and ask the company to reverse its decision — for the second time. (The page was previously deleted in 2016.) As she awaited Facebook's response — which apologized and reinstated the page Tuesday — Degouy set up a new page for her town, under the name of Marie 57230, her city's postal code. Although Facebook's mistake seems innocuous enough, for the towns located around Bitche, local Facebook pages serve as the main form of communication. Shutting the page down effectively creates a local news blackout. When Rohrbach-les Bitche — a nearby town in the region — heard about the deletion, it quickly rid "ls-Bitche" from its Facebook page name to avoid a similar fate... The residents of Bitche are far from alone in their reliance on Facebook for local news. In the United States alone, more than 2,000 local newspapers have closed over the past two decades, according to an estimate from Joshua Scacco, associate professor of political communication at the University of South Florida. In these news deserts, Facebook has risen as an alternative information source, allowing anyone with an account to share updates and post events... But Facebook is not only filling the local news void — it is tied to local papers' disappearance. "Social and digital media are a contributing factor in thinking about the declines of the presence of local newsrooms, as well as what that coverage looks like for the local newsrooms that remain," Scacco says. Facebook is moving advertising dollars away from local newspapers, and even driving the content local newspapers create. Local news coverage often panders to Facebook's algorithms when creating content and headlines, notes Ashley Muddiman, a communications professor at the University of Kansas.

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destinyland writes: Mystery Science Theater 3000 will be coming back — with a new home online. Though Netflix didn't pick them up for another season after 2019, "We still want to keep making new episodes," series creator Joel Hodgson explains in an online video on Kickstarter. (Also available through the URL MakeMoreMST3K.com.) And with 12 days left to go, 18,969 online fans have already pledged $3,348,705, funding six new episodes... But in addition the first $2 million funded the creation of the Gizmoplex, "our very own virtual online theatre," while the first stretch goal was also funded — the creation of MST3K apps for Android, iOS, and streaming services like AppleTV and Roku. "I'm tired of other people deciding if our show lives or dies," explains Crow T. Robot in the Kickstarter video. "I wanna do that." New host Jonah Heston adds, "If we want MST3K to keep going long-term, maybe networks aren't the most reliable option. Maybe it should be up to the fans to decide how long we keep going..." Their next stretch goal of $4.4 million would fund three more episodes, but will also allow them to also invite backers to the Gizmoplex for live monthly events, "for at least a year." And if they reach their goal of $5.5 million, they'll fund three more episodes — so an entire 12-episode season — as well as 12 short-subject films. The ultimate hope is to host frequent live screenings, premieres, and community events in the Gizmoplex — while fans can even host their own MST3K watch parties whenever they want. And their Kickstarter page even suggests they might someday extend the Gizmoplex into virtual reality (accessible on computer and headsets). I still remember how back in 2008 Joel Hodgson answered questions from Slashdot readers. "I've been a fan so long, I can't even remember when," posted CmdrTaco.

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Technology/space pundit Robert Cringely writes that SpaceX's winning bid on NASA's Artemis lunar lander contract was helped by its flexibility in how it would be paid — made possibly by SpaceX's cushy financial position. But he believes that's part of a larger story about SpaceX's "steadily crushing its competitors by building a hyper-efficient space ecosystem where the other guys are just building rockets," arguing that SpaceX has already won the global war of ISPs "at a net cost of ZERO dollars," if not a negative net cost, while realizing a dream of a satellite internet service that for 30 years has eluded investors like Bill Gates: SpaceX making a profit where one would not normally exist comes thanks to U.S. residents who pay telephone and Internet bills. The U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has been socking-away for a decade about $1.8 billion per year from you and me, saving-up to pay for expansions of rural telephony and broadband. There is now about $16 billion in this federal kitty and the FCC is starting to spend it with telephone and internet service providers, paying them to extend broadband and voice services to remote rural users who are presently underserved or unserved completely. All of this is both perfectly legal and even a good idea. Everybody wins. But circumstances are turning out to indicate that SpaceX is probably winning more than anyone else... So far SpaceX has won auctions for service in parts of 35 states for a total of $885 million... SpaceX just bid for potential customers in places where other companies typically didn't even bother to bid. They took the obvious remote customers and apparently won't be over-charging them or the government, either... There is no FCC rule saying Comcast couldn't sub-contract...difficult customers to Starlink... Instead of earning $885 million of those FCC subsidies, Starlink is more likely to gain half of the full $9.2 billion — money that can be used for any purpose including financing that Artemis lander. But remember that satellites are a global resource. If SpaceX launches 4000 or 12,000 Starlink satellites to serve the USA, they'll also serve anywhere else the satellites overfly, even North Korea. The same level of service Starlink offers in Omaha will be available in Vietnam or on tankers in the Pacific ocean. Once Starlink becomes effectively the dominant ISP in America, it will also become the dominant ISP in the world. And all at no cost to SpaceX since the expansion will have been financed from our phone bills. Cringely cites estimates that 40,000 satellites would be enough to serve every Internet user on Earth, as well as IoT devices and even future as-yet-uninvented network services. He also asks whether this might ultimately make it harder for China to censor the internet — and whether Apple might attempt a competing satellite-to-phone network, possibly using technology from Samsung.

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Friday on Richard Stallman's personal web site, he posed the question: Am I Doctor Stallman? He's received 15 doctorates honoris causa — doctorates "for honor" — in the company of others whose achievements impressed him... So I was shocked to read an article which describes this as a sleazy marketing scheme, and claims that recipients of these degrees are not supposed to call themselves "Doctor." The article says that universities hand out "honorary doctorates" readily to donors who have essentially bought them, and to performing artists so that they will entertain the students at graduation... But my experience is totally different. I am not an entertainer, except for a few minutes when I don the robe and halo of Saint iGNUcius, and that is comic relief for a long, serious talk. I never donated money to the universities that gave me doctorates, nor could they expect me to. What's more, I never saw such people receive degrees along with me. The other recipients, when there were others, were likewise being honored for their work, not as a quid-pro-quo. Why this difference? My doctorates come from universities in other countries, not in the US. I conjecture that buy-a-doctorate and sing-for-your-doctorate are found in the US only. (How sad for the US...!) [O]n reading that Florida Atlantic University explicitly says that recipients of doctorates honoris causa are not permitted the title of Doctor, I began to wonder about the policies of the universities which had given me degrees, so I asked people at some of those universities about their policies. The replies were quite disparate. One said, like Florida Atlantic, that it was not permitted. Another said I should write "Dr.(h.c.)." Another said it had no objection. So it seems that I am entitled to call myself Dr. Stallman. Why do I do that? The personal reason is that these doctorates recognize decades of work for an important cause, and I am proud of them. The reason that is beyond personal is so that people who know little or nothing of my career may decide, based on the title of "Doctor", to pay a little attention to that work and that cause, which is the free software movement. That may help us defeat the totalitarian control that today's digital technology is designed to impose.

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Earlier this week Greg Kroah-Hartman of the Linux kernel development team banned the University of Minnesota from contributing after researchers there submitted what he called "obviously-incorrect patches" believed to be part of a research project into whether buggy code would be accepted. Today the professor in charge of that project, as well as two of its researchers, sent an email to the Linux kernel mailing list saying they "sincerely apologize for any harm our research group did to the Linux kernel community." Our goal was to identify issues with the patching process and ways to address them, and we are very sorry that the method used in the "hypocrite commits" paper was inappropriate. As many observers have pointed out to us, we made a mistake by not finding a way to consult with the community and obtain permission before running this study; we did that because we knew we could not ask the maintainers of Linux for permission, or they would be on the lookout for the hypocrite patches. While our goal was to improve the security of Linux, we now understand that it was hurtful to the community to make it a subject of our research, and to waste its effort reviewing these patches without its knowledge or permission. We just want you to know that we would never intentionally hurt the Linux kernel community and never introduce security vulnerabilities. Our work was conducted with the best of intentions and is all about finding and fixing security vulnerabilities... We are a research group whose members devote their careers to improving the Linux kernel. We have been working on finding and patching vulnerabilities in Linux for the past five years... This current incident has caused a great deal of anger in the Linux community toward us, the research group, and the University of Minnesota. We apologize unconditionally for what we now recognize was a breach of the shared trust in the open source community and seek forgiveness for our missteps. We seek to rebuild the relationship with the Linux Foundation and the Linux community from a place of humility to create a foundation from which, we hope, we can once again contribute to our shared goal of improving the quality and security of Linux software... We are committed to following best practices for collaborative research by consulting with community leaders and members about the nature of our research projects, and ensuring that our work meets not only the requirements of the Institutional Review Board but also the expectations that the community has articulated to us in the wake of this incident. While this issue has been painful for us as well, and we are genuinely sorry for the extra work that the Linux kernel community has undertaken, we have learned some important lessons about research with the open source community from this incident. We can and will do better, and we believe we have much to contribute in the future, and will work hard to regain your trust. Their email also says their work did not introduce vulnerabilities into the Linux code. ("The three incorrect patches were discussed and stopped during exchanges in a Linux message board, and never committed to the code.") And the email also clarifies that their research was only done in August of 2020, and "All the other 190 patches being reverted and re-evaluated were submitted as part of other projects and as a service to the community; they are not related to the 'hypocrite commits' paper. These 190 patches were in response to real bugs in the code and all correct — as far as we can discern — when we submitted them... Our recent patches in April 2021 are not part of the 'hypocrite commits' paper either."

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"Just before the end of the Trump administration, an obscure Florida company began announcing routes to IP addresses owned by the Pentagon," writes long-time Slashdot reader whoever57. The Washington Post calls it "a huge unused swath of the Internet that, for several decades, had been owned by the U.S. military." What happened next was stranger still. The company, Global Resource Systems LLC, kept adding to its zone of control. Soon it had claimed 56 million IP addresses owned by the Pentagon. Three months later, the total was nearly 175 million. That's almost 6 percent of a coveted traditional section of Internet real estate — called IPv4 — where such large chunks are worth billions of dollars on the open market... "They are now announcing more address space than anything ever in the history of the Internet," said Doug Madory, director of Internet analysis for Kentik, a network monitoring company, who was among those trying to figure out what was happening... The change is the handiwork of an elite Pentagon unit known as the Defense Digital Service, which reports directly to the secretary of defense. The DDS bills itself as a "SWAT team of nerds" tasked with solving emergency problems for the department and conducting experimental work to make big technological leaps for the military... Brett Goldstein, the DDS's director, said in a statement that his unit had authorized a "pilot effort" publicizing the IP space owned by the Pentagon. "This pilot will assess, evaluate and prevent unauthorized use of DoD IP address space," Goldstein said. "Additionally, this pilot may identify potential vulnerabilities...." The specifics of what the effort is trying to achieve remain unclear... What is clear, however, is the Global Resource Systems announcements directed a fire hose of Internet traffic toward the Defense Department addresses... Russell Goemaere, a spokesman for the Defense Department, confirmed in a statement to The Washington Post that the Pentagon still owns all the IP address space and hadn't sold any of it to a private party.

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