Sales And Repair
1715 S. 3rd Ave. Suite #1
Yakima, WA. 98902
Mon - Fri: 8:30-5:30
Sat - Sun: Closed
Sales And Repair
1715 S. 3rd Ave. Suite #1
Yakima, WA. 98902
Mon - Fri: 8:30-5:30
Sat - Sun: Closed
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Instead of doing absolutely absurd amounts of damage, this time hackers have figured out how to gain access to unreleased characters and skins. And publisher WB Games is reportedly issuing DMCA takedown notices against any assets that have found their way online.
As reported by IGN, one hacker discovered how to play as Deathstroke, one of the four characters developer Rocksteady Studios teased for an upcoming Suicide Squad season… There were also unreleased skins for The Joker and King Shark that folks have somehow accessed, all of which began circulating on Reddit and X/Twitter on April 4.
Not long after, the assets were removed, with folks believing WB Games was behind the strikes. YouTuber TrixRidiculous, who primarily covers DC- and Marvel-related RPGs, had their posts on X/Twitter swiftly taken down by a DMCA strike.”I posted three pics to Twitter,” TrixRidiculous told Kotaku over email. “Within probably 30 minutes, I received a DMCA strike from WB Games [Kotaku saw a screenshot of this notice]. Please just bring attention to the fact that the leaderboard is riddled with hackers/cheaters that have gone unbanned since launch, as that’s all I was trying to do anyway.”
This sentiment is shared across the game’s official subreddit, with folks posting about “losing interest” in Suicide Squad due to hackers flooding the leaderboards.
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The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) led the Blueprint’s development in collaboration with the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Environmental Protection Agency, and other federal agencies. The Blueprint is the first sector-wide strategy for building decarbonization developed by the federal government… “America’s building sector accounts for more than a third of the harmful emissions jeopardizing our air and health…” said U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer M. Granholm. “As part of a whole-of-government approach, the Department of Energy is outlining for the first time ever a comprehensive federal plan to reduce energy in our homes, schools, and workplaces — lowering utility bills and creating healthier communities while combating the climate crisis.”
Buildings account for more than one third of domestic climate pollution and $370 billion in annual energy costs… The Blueprint projects reductions of 90% of total greenhouse gas emissions from the buildings sector, which will save consumers more than $100 billion in annual energy costs and avoid $17 billion in annual health costs.
Just for example, the Department of Energy’s Affordable Home Energy Shot program “aims to reduce the upfront cost of upgrading a home by at least 50% and reduce energy bills by 20% within a decade.” (Meanwhile, the federal government’s role in making more change happen faster includes financing, funding R&D on lower-cost technologies, expanding markets, and “supporting the development and implementation of emissions-reducing building codes and appliance standards.”)
Besides the national blueprint, the Department also announced an expansion of its Better Buildings Commercial Building Heat Pump Accelerator initiative. In this program, “manufacturers will produce higher efficiency and life cycle cost-effective heat pump rooftop units and commercial organizations will evaluate and adopt next-generation heat pump technology.”
U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer M. Granholm said the program “builds on more than a decade of public-private partnerships to get cutting edge clean technologies from lab to market, helping to slash harmful carbon emissions throughout our economy.”
On average, between 20% and 30% of the nation’s energy is wasted, presenting a significant opportunity to increase energy efficiency. Through the Better Buildings Initiative, DOE partners with public and private sector stakeholders to pursue ambitious portfolio-wide energy, waste, water, and/or emissions reduction goals and publicly share solutions. By improving building design, materials, equipment, and operations, energy efficiency gains can be achieved across broad segments of the nation’s economy.
The Accelerator initiative was developed with commercial end users like Amazon, IKEA, and Target, and already includes manufacturers AAON, Carrier Global Corp., Lennox International, Rheem Manufacturing Co., Trane Technologies, and York International Corp. The Accelerator aims to bring more efficient, affordable next-generation heat pump rooftop units to market as soon as 2027 — which will slash both emissions and energy costs in half compared to natural gas-fueled heat pumps. If deployed at scale, they could save American businesses and commercial entities $5 billion on utility bills every year.
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You can watch a trailer here.
Across four episodes, the story of the ticking-clock of Columbia’s final mission is told in dramatic detail, beginning months before the troubled launch, unfolding across the sixteen days in orbit, and concluding with the investigation into the tragic loss of the seven astronauts’ lives. Weaving together intimate footage shot by the astronauts themselves inside the orbiter, exclusive first-hand testimony from family members of the Shuttle’s crew, key players at NASA — some of whom have never spoken before — and journalists who covered the story on the ground, the series paints an intimate portrait of the women and men onboard and uncovers in forensic detail the trail of events and missed opportunities that ultimately led to disaster.
CNN says the first two episodes will livestream tonight at 9 p.m. EST (time-delayed on the west coast until 9 p.m.PST) — and then be available on-demand starting Monday — “for pay TV subscribers via CNN.com, CNN connected TV and mobile apps.” CNN’s web site offers a “preview” of its live TV offerings here.
They’re promising “the inside story of one America’s most iconic institutions, uncovering how financial pressures and a culture of complacency may have contributed to the events of February 1, 2003. The series also reflects on the legacy of the Space Shuttle era, serving as a timely exploration of the challenges and inherent dangers that remain relevant to space travel today.”
On its web site CNN has also published two companion articles — one by Rice history professor Douglas Brinkley arguing that NASA “was America’s crown jewel. After the Columbia disaster it was never quite the same.”
Because other shuttle missions had returned safely with “shredded” surface tiles — and because the stalwart Columbia had brought astronauts home from 27 previous flights — many NASA officials were lulled into complacency. They went so far as to assure the pilot and commander via email that “there is no concern … We have seen the same phenomenon on several other flights and there is absolutely no concern for entry.”
NASA officials also decided against enlisting spy satellite photography to examine the shuttle damage more thoroughly. If they had, it’s possible that the astronauts could have repaired the spaceplane or at least abandoned it for refuge on the International Space Station…
As the Columbia Accident Investigation Board (CAIB) noted in its final report, “the NASA organizational culture had as much to do with this accident as the foam.” All of NASA’s launches were suspended for two years. While the shuttles eventually flew again, post-Columbia, the program was stunted and curtailed.
The article notes that since then SpaceX, Blue Origin, and the United Launch Alliance (Lockheed Martin and Boeing) “are thriving today in the space industry,” along with Virgin Galactic and Axiom Space. “NASA, far from feeling threatened, has encouraged many of the private companies with massive contracts. The agency already had a long history of dealing with sub-contractors, using its pocketbook to steer aerospace development; that tradition has adjusted seamlessly to the current space economy.”
In the other article CNN Space & Science writer Jackie Wattles notes that when America later retired its Space Shuttle program in 2011, “no U.S. astronaut would travel to space on an American-made rocket for nearly a decade.”
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So then, as explained by RockDoctor (Slashdot reader #15,477) “they propose a number of standardised units of comparison for journalists describing ‘death from the skies'”.
An excerpt from that April 1 newsletter:
In the absence of a handy skyscraper, animals commonly used have included giraffes, corgis and an entire colony of penguins. But how do these comparisons stack up? Let’s look at some of our favourite unusual suspects:
– Corgi: At around 30 cm tall, a space rock the size of a corgi wouldn’t pose much of
a threat.
– Half a giraffe: An adult giraffe can reach up to 5.5 metres in height, so half a giraffe
would be about 2.75 metres. While not as impressive as a full skyscraper, an
asteroid that size could certainly destroy a building or two…
– Elephants: An adult African elephant can reach 7 metres at the shoulder. Ninety
elephants stacked on top of each other would form a staggering pile over 630
metres high, creating a devastating but probably not planet-ending event.
As this menagerie of animals can cause a lot of confusion, we at the NEOCC
recommend the use of a Standardised Giraffe Unit (SGU, 1 SGU = 5 penguins) for ease
of comparison.
RockDoctor shares this additional thought in his original submission about the newly proposed standardized unit.
“The world may be turtles all the way down, but it’s giraffes all the way up.”
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“The cost? Signing up for the league’s ‘facial authentication’ software through its ticketing app.”
The Giants are using MLB’s new Go-Ahead Entry program, which intends to cut down on wait times for fans entering games. The pitch is simple: Take a selfie through the MLB Ballpark app (which already has your tickets on it), upload the selfie and, once you’re approved, breeze through the ticketing lines and into the ballpark. Fans will barely have to slow down at the entrance gate on their way to their seats…
The Philadelphia Phillies were MLB’s test team for the technology in 2023. They’re joined by the Giants, Nationals and Astros in 2024…
[Major League Baseball] says it won’t be saving or storing pictures of faces in a database — and it clearly would really like you to not call this technology facial recognition. “This is not the type of facial recognition that’s scanning a crowd and specifically looking for certain kinds of people,” Karri Zaremba, a senior vice president at MLB, told ESPN. “It’s facial authentication. … That’s the only way in which it’s being utilized.”
Privacy advocates “have pointed out that the creep of facial recognition technology may be something to be wary of,” the article acknowledges. But it adds that using the technology is still completely optional.
And they also spoke to the San Francisco Giants’ senior vice president of ticket sales, who gushed about the possibility of app users “walking into the ballpark without taking your phone out, or all four of us taking our phones out.”
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The money comes from the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund established by President Biden’s signature climate law, the Inflation Reduction Act. The fund seeks to leverage public and private dollars to invest in clean-energy technologies such as solar panels, heat pumps and more.
The program is potentially one of the most consequential — yet least understood — parts of the climate law…
Simply put, the program allows people to access low-interest loans for clean-energy projects that they might not otherwise have received. Imagine a community group that wants to install electric vehicle charging stations at its neighborhood recreation center but can’t get a loan from a bank or a lender. As is often the case, potential lenders say they’re hesitant to support a novel green technology or a business without a track record of success. Low-income and minority communities have long encountered such obstacles in trying to attract private capital. The program aims to overcome this problem by providing a huge influx of federal cash — $27 billion in total — for nonprofit organizations to dole out to clean-energy projects nationwide. Each nonprofit will serve as a “green bank” that offers more favorable lending rates than commercial banks. “It’s just really hard to get banks to bring capital into low-income communities, especially for these new projects that they’re not used to financing,” said Adrian Deveny, the founder of the firm Climate Vision and the former director of energy and environmental policy for Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), a key architect of the Inflation Reduction Act….
The EPA is awarding money to eight nonprofits, which have committed to leverage nearly $7 in private capital for every $1 of federal investment. The nonprofits have also pledged to ensure that at least 70 percent of the funds will benefit disadvantaged communities, and that the financed projects will reduce up to 40 million metric tons of carbon dioxide a year — equivalent to the annual emissions of nearly 9 million gasoline-powered cars… [The nonprofit] Coalition for Green Capital, will use a $5 billion award to establish a “national green bank,” co-founder and CEO Reed Hundt said. “We’re going to be able to cause about $100 billion of total additional investment over a seven-year time period with that number, because we can leverage it,” Hundt said.
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Alongside the new rules on emulators, Apple also updated its rules around super apps, such as WeChat. It now says that mini-games and mini-apps within these apps must use HTML5, clarifying that they can’t be native apps and games.
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Last year’s methane’s jump of 11.1 parts per billion was lower than record annual rises from 2020 to 2022. It averaged 1922.6 parts per billion last year. It has risen 3% in just the past five years and jumped 160% from pre-industrial levels showing faster rates of increase than carbon dioxide, said Xin “Lindsay” Lan, the University of Colorado and NOAA atmospheric scientist who did the calculations. […] The third biggest human-caused greenhouse gas, nitrous oxide, jumped 1 part per billion last year to record levels, but the increases were not as high as those in 2020 and 2021. Nitrous oxide, which lasts about a century in the atmosphere, comes from agriculture, burning of fuels, manure and industrial processes, according to the EPA.
“Studies of the specific isotopes of methane in the air show much of the increased methane is from microbes, pointing to spiking emissions from wetlands and perhaps agriculture and landfills, but not as much the energy industry, Lan said.”
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State-level enforcement of net neutrality rules can benefit consumers, the FCC said. The order said that “state enforcement generally supports our regulatory efforts by dedicating additional resources to monitoring and enforcement, especially at the local level, and thereby ensuring greater compliance with our requirements.” […] In the order scheduled for an April 25 vote, the FCC said the California law “appears largely to mirror or parallel our federal rules. Thus we see no reason at this time to preempt it.” That doesn’t mean the rules are exactly the same. Instead of banning certain types of zero-rating entirely, the FCC will judge on a case-by-case basis whether any specific zero-rating program harms consumers and conflicts with the goal of preserving an open Internet. The FCC said it will evaluate sponsored-data “programs based on a totality of the circumstances, including potential benefits.”
The FCC order cautions that the agency will take a dimmer view of zero-rating in exchange for payment from a third party or zero-rating that favors an affiliated entity. But those categories will still be judged by the FCC on a case-by-case basis, whereas California bans paid data cap exemptions entirely. Despite that difference, the FCC said it is “not persuaded on the record currently before us that the California law is incompatible with the federal rules.” The FCC also found that California’s approach to interconnection payments is compatible with the pending federal rule. Interconnection was the subject of a major controversy involving Netflix and big ISPs a decade ago. The FCC said it found no evidence that the California law has “unduly burdened or interfered with interstate communications service.” When it comes to zero-rating and interconnection, the FCC said there is “room for states to experiment and explore their own approaches within the bounds of our overarching federal framework.” The FCC said it will reconsider preemption of California rules if “California state enforcement authorities or state courts seek to interpret or enforce these requirements in a manner inconsistent with how we intend our rules to apply.”
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