funny – Page 163

Woman Built House From the Ground Up Using Nothing But YouTube Tutorials

schwit1 quotes a report from Digital Trends: In this generation of self-starters and self-made women and men, do-it-yourself isn’t just an option, it’s a way of life. And if there’s not an app for that, chances are there’s a YouTube video for it. That was certainly the case for a woman named Cara Brookins, who is living proof that if you’re willing to learn, you absolutely can. In 2008, Brookins was in the midst of a family struggle, having left a husband she called “violent and abusive.” Looking to make a fresh start for herself, she took the idea of rebuilding quite literally, perhaps using the physical experience of constructing a house as an extension of her emotional and mental journey. Though she had no previous experience in construction or architecture, Brookins found a series of YouTube tutorials on building a home and got to work. Over the course of nine months, Brookins worked tirelessly with the help of her four children to build a new home for themselves. “I had rented this cabin for a Thanksgiving getaway, ” the mother of four told CBS News. “And driving there, we passed this house that had been ravaged by a tornado. It was this beautiful dream house and it was sort of wide open. You don’t often get the opportunity to see the interior workings of a house, but looking at these 2x4s and these nails, it just looked so simple. I thought, “I could put this wall back up if I really tried. Maybe I should just start from scratch.'” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Woman Built House From the Ground Up Using Nothing But YouTube Tutorials

Scientist Investigate A Brand New Form of Matter: Time Crystals

The discovery of “non-equilibrium matter” could re-write the rules of physics. Long-time Slashdot reader jasonbrown quotes ScienceAlert: For months now, there’s been speculation that researchers might have finally created time crystals — strange crystals that have an atomic structure that repeats not just in space, but in time, putting them in perpetual motion without energy. Now it’s official — researchers have just reported in detail how to make and measure these bizarre crystals. And two independent teams of scientists claim they’ve actually created time crystals in the lab based off this blueprint, confirming the existence of an entirely new form of matter. Both teams — one at Harvard and the other at the University of Maryland — have submitted their findings to peer-reviewed publications, according to the article, and “the fact that two separate teams have used the same blueprint to make time crystals out of vastly different systems is promising.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Scientist Investigate A Brand New Form of Matter: Time Crystals

Microsoft’s Market Value Tops $500 Billion Again After 17 Years

Microsoft’s market capitalization topped $500 billion for the first time since 2000 on Friday, after the technology giant’s stock rose following another quarter of results that beat Wall Street’s expectations. From a report: Shares of the world’s biggest software company rose as much as 2.1 percent to $65.64, an all-time high, in early trading, valuing the company at $510.37 billion. The last time Microsoft was valued more was in March 2000, during the heyday of the dotcom era, when it had a market value of a little above $550 billion, according to Thomson Reuters data. Despite the gains, Microsoft still lags Apple’s market capitalization of about $642 billion and Google-parent Alphabet’s market value of a little more than $570 billion. Microsoft reported second-quarter results on Thursday that beat analysts’ average estimate for both revenue and profit, mainly due to its fast-growing cloud computing business. The company’s profit and revenue have now topped Wall Street’s expectations in seven of the last eight quarters. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Microsoft’s Market Value Tops $500 Billion Again After 17 Years

Google Translate Is About To Get a Lot Better, Thanks To Its Machine Learning Push

Google CEO Sundar Pichai is offering a big new update that should affect anyone who’s ever used Google’s translation services. From a report on CNBC: The new version will be rolling out in 2017 via Google Cloud, Pichai said. “We have improved our translation ability more in one single year than all our improvements over the last 10 years combined, ” Pichai told investors in a quarterly call, after parent company Alphabet reported mixed results. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

China Is Splashing $168 Million To Make It Rain

China, the world’s second largest economy, is pouring 1.5 billion yuan ($168 million) into a program aimed at making it rain in its usually arid northwestern region. From a report: No stranger to using technologies like cloud seeding to influence and even control weather patterns, China’s top economic planners recently gave the go ahead for what will be one of the country’s largest weather-modification projects, reports the South China Morning Post. According to the Post, a feasibility study by the country’s meteorological agency concluded that the three-year program could see a rise in precipitation over an area of 960, 000 sq km, or as much as 10% of the country’s landmass. The multi-million dollar budget allocated by the National Development and Reform Commission will reportedly cover the cost for four new aircraft and updates to eight existing planes, nearly 900 rocket launch systems and over 1, 800 digital control devices. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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China Is Splashing $168 Million To Make It Rain

FTC Dismantles Two Huge Robocall Organizations

Billions of robocalls came from two groups selling extended auto warranties, SEO services, and home security systems over the last seven years — many to numbers on the “Do Not Call” list — but this week the Federal Trade Commission took action. Trailrunner7 shares this report from OnTheWire: Continuing its campaign against phone fraud operations, the FTC has dismantled two major robocall organizations… They and many of their co-defendants have agreed to court-ordered bans on robocall activities and financial settlements… The FTC and the FCC both have been cracking down on illegal robocall operations recently. The FCC has formed a robocall strike force with the help of carriers and also has signed an agreement to cooperate with Canadian authorities to address the problem. “The law is clear about robocalls, ” says one FTC executive. “If a telemarketer doesn’t have consumers’ written permission, it’s illegal to make these calls.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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FTC Dismantles Two Huge Robocall Organizations

Female Shark Learns To Reproduce Without Males After Years Alone

An anonymous reader quotes a report from New Scientist: A female shark separated from her long-term mate has developed the ability to have babies on her own. Leonie the zebra shark (Stegostoma fasciatum) met her male partner at an aquarium in Townsville, Australia, in 1999. They had more than two dozen offspring together before he was moved to another tank in 2012. From then on, Leonie did not have any male contact. But in early 2016, she had three baby sharks. Intrigued, Christine Dudgeon at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, and her colleagues began fishing for answers. One possibility was that Leonie had been storing sperm from her ex and using it to fertilize her eggs. But genetic testing showed that the babies only carried DNA from their mum, indicating they had been conceived via asexual reproduction. Some vertebrate species have the ability to reproduce asexually even though they normally reproduce sexually. These include certain sharks, turkeys, Komodo dragons, snakes and rays. However, most reports have been in females who have never had male partners. In sharks, asexual reproduction can occur when a female’s egg is fertilized by an adjacent cell known as a polar body, Dudgeon says. This also contains the female’s genetic material, leading to “extreme inbreeding”, she says. “It’s not a strategy for surviving many generations because it reduces genetic diversity and adaptability.” Nevertheless, it may be necessary at times when males are scarce. “It might be a holding-on mechanism, ” Dudgeon says. “Mum’s genes get passed down from female to female until there are males available to mate with.” It’s possible that the switch from sexual to asexual reproduction is not that unusual; we just haven’t known to look for it, Dudgeon says. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

5G Internet is the ‘Beginning of the Fourth Industrial Revolution’

Next-generation 5G mobile internet technology marks the beginning of the “fourth industrial revolution, ” the chief executive of Turkey’s leading telecoms player told CNBC on Thursday. From a report: 5G is viewed as a technology that can support the developing Internet of Things (IOT) market, which refers to millions — or potentially billions — of internet-connected devices that are expected soon to come on to the market. Kaan Terzioglu, the chief executive of Turkcell, which has a market capitalization of $23 billion, touted the potential of the technology, saying that while 4G revolutionized the consumer market, 5G could transform the industrial space. “I think this is the beginning of the fourth generation of the industrial revolution. This will be the platform linking billions of devices together, ” Terzioglu told CNBC at the World Economic Forum in Davos. Turkcell has been working on 5G technologies since 2013 and this week completed a test in partnership with Ericsson, using the next-generation internet. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Hackers Corrupt Data For Cloud-Based Medical Marijuana System

Long-time Slashdot reader t0qer writes: I’m the IT director at a medical marijuana dispensary. Last week the point of sales system we were using was hacked… What scares me about this breach is, I have about 30, 000 patients in my database alone. If this company has 1, 000 more customers like me, even half of that is still 15 million people on a list of people that “Smoke pot”… ” No patient, consumer, or client data was ever extracted or viewed, ” the company’s data directory has said. “The forensic analysis proves that. The data was encrypted — so it couldn’t have been viewed — and it was never extracted, so nobody has it and could attempt decryption.” They’re saying it was a “targeted” attack meant to corrupt the data rather than retrieve it, and they’re “reconstructing historical data” from backups, though their web site adds that their backup sites were also targeted. “In response to this attack, all client sites have been migrated to a new, more secure environment, ” the company’s CEO announced on YouTube Saturday, adding that “Keeping our client’s data secure has always been our top priority.” Last week one industry publication had reported that the outage “has sent 1, 000 marijuana retailers in 23 states scrambling to handle everything from sales and inventory management to regulatory compliance issues.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Hackers Corrupt Data For Cloud-Based Medical Marijuana System

Thousands Of Cubans Now Have Internet Access

There’s been a dramatic change in one of the world’s least-connected countries. An anonymous reader quotes the AP: Since the summer of 2015, the Cuban government has opened 240 public Wi-Fi spots in parks and on street corners across the country… The government estimates that 100, 000 Cubans connect to the internet daily. A new feature of urban life in Cuba is the sight of people sitting at all hours on street corners or park benches, their faces illuminated by the screen of smartphones connected by applications such as Facebook Messenger to relatives in Miami, Ecuador or other outposts of the Cuban diaspora… Cuban ingenuity has spread internet far beyond those public places: thousands of people grab the public signals through commercially available repeaters, imported illegally into Cuba and often sold for about $100 — double the original price. Mounted on rooftops, the repeaters grab the public signals and create a form of home internet increasingly available in private rentals for tourists and cafes and restaurants for Cubans and visitors alike. The article also points out that last month, for the first time ever, 2, 000 Cubans began receiving home internet access. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Thousands Of Cubans Now Have Internet Access

Ken May

Tag: funny