California Bullet Train Boondoggle
March 11th, 2018Via: Los Angeles Times:
The price of the California bullet train project jumped sharply Friday when the state rail authority announced that the cost of connecting Los Angeles to San Francisco would be $77.3 billion and could rise as high as $98.1 billion — an uptick of at least $13 billion from estimates two years ago.
The rail authority also said the earliest trains could operate on a partial system between San Francisco and Bakersfield would be 2029 — four years later than the previous projection. The full system would not begin operating until 2033.
The disclosures are contained in a 114-page business plan that was issued in draft form Friday by the rail authority before public hearings and formal submission to the Legislature in about 60 days.
The new estimates will force California’s leadership to double down on its political and financial commitments if it wants to see the system completed, against a backdrop of rising costs, years of delays, strident litigation and backlashes in communities where homes, businesses, farms and environmental preserves will have to give up land to the rail’s right-of-way.
Palantir Wins $876 Million U.S. Army Contract
March 11th, 2018Via: Bloomberg:
Billionaire investor Peter Thiel got a fresh victory in Washington. His data-mining startup, Palantir Technologies Inc., won a much-contested contract to provide software to the U.S. Army.
Palantir will work with Raytheon Co. to replace the troubled Distributed Common Ground System now in effect. They beat out seven other proposals for a decade-long, $876 million contract, according to the U.S. Defense Department.
The Massive Prize Luring Miners to the Stars
March 11th, 2018The sci-fi fan in me decided to post this one, but, no, this isn’t going to solve peak cobalt, or peak-whatever anytime soon.
Via: Bloomberg:
Sending a spacecraft to the far reaches of our solar system to mine asteroids might seem like an improbable ambition best left to science fiction. But it’s inching closer to reality. A NASA mission is underway to test the feasibility on a nearby asteroid, and a niche group of companies is ramping up to claim a piece of the pie.
Industry barons see a future in finding and harnessing water on asteroids for rocket fuel, which will allow astronauts and spacecrafts to stay in orbit for longer periods. Investors, including Richard Branson, China’s Tencent Holdings and the nation of Luxembourg, see a longer-term solution to replenishing materials such as iron and nickel as Earth’s natural resources are depleted.
Millions of asteroids roam our solar system. Most are thought unsuitable for mining, either because they’re too small, too inaccessible to Earth or because the materials that make up the asteroid have little value. But we know of almost 1,000 asteroids that show potential. Timing is everything, though. The varied orbits of these asteroids mean that many are nearby only once every several years.
Self-Driving Cars Attacked by Angry Californians
March 9th, 2018Via: Guardian:
Two of the six collisions involving autonomous vehicles in California so far this year involved humans colliding with self-driving cars, apparently on purpose, according to incident reports collected by the California department of motor vehicles.
On 10 January, a pedestrian in San Francisco’s Mission District ran across the street to confront a GM Cruise autonomous vehicle that was waiting for people to cross the road, according to an incident report filed by the car company. The pedestrian was “shouting”, the report states, and “struck the left side of the Cruise AV’s rear bumper and hatch with his entire body”.
No injuries occurred, but the car’s left tail light was damaged.
In a separate incident just a few blocks away on 28 January, a taxi driver in San Francisco got out of his car, approached a GM Cruise autonomous vehicle and “slapped the front passenger window, causing a scratch”.
The police were not called in either case.
Trump Says Prepared to Meet North Korea’s Kim in First-Ever Summit
March 8th, 2018Via: Reuters:
President Donald Trump said on Thursday he was prepared to meet North Korean leader Kim Jong Un for the first U.S.-North Korea summit, marking a potentially dramatic breakthrough in nuclear tensions with Pyongyang.
Kim has committed to “denuclearization” and to suspending nuclear or missile tests, South Korea’s National Security Office head Chung Eui-yong told reporters at the White House after briefing Trump on South Korean officials’ meeting with Kim on Monday.
“A meeting is being planned,” Trump tweeted after speaking to Chung, who announced that Trump expressed a willingness to sit down with Kim in what would be his biggest foreign policy gamble since taking office.
Chung said Trump, in response to Kim’s invitation, had agreed to meet by May, and a senior U.S. official later said it could happen “in a matter of a couple of months, with the exact timing and place still to be determined.”
FBI Used Geek Squad Technicians as Informants
March 8th, 2018Via: EFF:
After the prosecution of a California doctor revealed the FBI’s ties to a Best Buy Geek Squad computer repair facility in Kentucky, new documents released to EFF show that the relationship goes back years. The records also confirm that the FBI has paid Geek Squad employees as informants.
EFF filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit last year to learn more about how the FBI uses Geek Squad employees to flag illegal material when people pay Best Buy to repair their computers. The relationship potentially circumvents computer owners’ Fourth Amendment rights.
The documents released to EFF show that Best Buy officials have enjoyed a particularly close relationship with the agency for at least 10 years. For example, an FBI memo from September 2008 details how Best Buy hosted a meeting of the agency’s “Cyber Working Group” at the company’s Kentucky repair facility.
Google’s AI Is Being Used by U.S. Military Drone Program
March 8th, 2018“For non-offensive uses only.”
*snort*
Via: Guardian:
Google’s artificial intelligence technologies are being used by the US military for one of its drone projects, causing controversy both inside and outside the company.
Google’s TensorFlow AI systems are being used by the US Department of Defense’s (DoD) Project Maven, which was established in July last year to use machine learning and artificial intelligence to analyse the vast amount of footage shot by US drones. The initial intention is to have AI analyse the video, detect objects of interest and flag them for a human analyst to review.
Drew Cukor, chief of the DoD’s Algorithmic Warfare Cross-Function Team, said in July: “People and computers will work symbiotically to increase the ability of weapon systems to detect objects. Eventually we hope that one analyst will be able to do twice as much work, potentially three times as much, as they’re doing now. That’s our goal.”
Project Maven forms part of the $7.4bn spent on AI and data processing by the DoD, and has seen the Pentagon partner with various academics and experts in the field of AI and data processing. It has reportedly already been put into use against Islamic State.
A Google spokesperson said: “This specific project is a pilot with the Department of Defense, to provide open source TensorFlow APIs that can assist in object recognition on unclassified data. The technology flags images for human review, and is for non-offensive uses only.”
High Level Government Pedophile Ring in Lithuania
March 8th, 2018I think that this is the main Reddit thread: A family is being persecuted for exposing high ranking pedophiles (2018)
Via: YouTube:
My mom, Neringa Venckien?, a former Lithuanian judge and Parliament member, fled Lithuania with me from political persecution, and we arrived in the U.S.A. in 2013 when I was just 13-years-old. As my mom filed for and has been waiting here for a political asylum hearing to take place, I became more hopeful and at ease because I was not afraid for her safety or mine anymore as was a daily reality back in Lithuania where my uncle (my mom’s brother)
was murdered because he was trying to expose pedophiles among high-ranking Lithuanian officials who molested his daughter Deimant?. My mom became a target after she publicly started speaking about the bribery and corruption in the Lithuanian courts, the government and its media did not succeed in intimidating her. My 8-year- old cousin Deimant?, whose father was murdered, was abducted by government forces from my mother’s care. My mother was her legally appointed guardian at that time. The government called it “a child’s return to her mother operation,” but that was actually an elimination of an inconvenient witness operation with the help of 240 special forces and the intimidation of everyone in Lithuania who sought the truth in the pedophilia and murder case (more people were murdered in this case than just my uncle). My cousin was returned to the person she was testifying against. I was really scared and could not even imagine what is going to happen to Deimant?.
To stop the anti-corruption and truth movement, government forces had to eliminate my mom because she was not intimidated. The Lithuanian people elected her to Parliament to fight against corruption and to seek the truth. She proposed many laws among which there was stricter punishment for pedophiles, but all of them were blocked by the dominant parties in Parliament. When the prosecutors brought charges against my mom, all of her opponents announced that they’ll support the removal of her legal immunity, before the investigation took place. We moved to U.S.A. to find safety and to have a fair hearing,
where she would defend herself and expose the terrible crime in Lithuania that the government was seeking to cover up.
Two weeks ago my mom was was arrested, and the Lithuanian government is seeking her extradition, before the political asylum case is over.
Related:
2012: Lithuanian Police Arrest 39 in Child Custody Case
Wikipedia: Case of Dr?sius Kedys
Tepco’s ‘Ice Wall’ Fails to Freeze Fukushima’s Toxic Water Buildup
March 8th, 2018Mmm hmm.
This was treated like comedy gold on Cryptogon when it was announced.
And now, not only has it not worked, but the problem is worse.
Via: Reuters:
A costly “ice wall” is failing to keep groundwater from seeping into the stricken Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant, data from operator Tokyo Electric Power Co shows, preventing it from removing radioactive melted fuel at the site seven years after the disaster.
When the ice wall was announced in 2013, Tepco (9501.T) assured skeptics that it would limit the flow of groundwater into the plant’s basements, where it mixes with highly radioactive debris from the site’s reactors, to “nearly nothing.”
However, since the ice wall became fully operational at the end of August, an average of 141 metric tonnes a day of water has seeped into the reactor and turbine areas, more than the average of 132 metric tonnes a day during the prior nine months, a Reuters analysis of the Tepco data showed.
Self Driving Uber Trucks Start Shuttling Goods Across Arizona
March 6th, 2018Via: USA Today:
Uber has been sending self-driving trucks on delivery runs across Arizona since November, the first step in what promises to be a freight transportation revolution that could radically reshape the jobs of long-haul truckers.
After testing its technology earlier in 2017, Uber began contracting with trucking companies to use its own autonomous Volvo big rigs to take over loads as they traverse the state, it disclosed.
In Uber’s current program, a trucker meets the self-driving truck at the Arizona state border, which then takes the load across the state before handing it off to a second conventional trucker for the short-haul trip. During the autonomous trip, an Uber employee rides in the driver seat of the autonomous truck to monitor — but not to drive.
If one day both the technology and regulations play out in favor of self-driving trucks, two scenarios emerge.
The first would find self-driving trucks handling long-haul highway legs with no one at the wheel as they meet up with conventional truckers, who then drive the deliveries into city centers. The other possibility is Uber could sell its technology to trucking owner-operators, who then use it to sleep while the truck handles the bulk of long-distance driving.
