Private Prisons Back In Mix For Federal Inmates
February 23rd, 2017Via: NPR:
New Attorney General Jeff Sessions is rescinding an Obama-era memo that directed the Justice Department to reduce the use of private prisons, NPR’s Carrie Johnson reports
Sessions writes in the order that returning to the Bureau of Prisons’ earlier approach would provide flexibility.
“The memorandum changed long-standing policy and practice, and impaired the Bureau’s ability to meet the future needs of the federal correctional system,” Sessions writes.
U.S. WC-135 Nuclear Sniffer Plane Left UK, Heading Towards Norway and the Barents Sea
February 23rd, 2017Via: The Aviationist:
The WC-135 Constant Phoenix has launched from RAF Mildenhall earlier today for a mission towards northern Europe and the Barents Sea. Interestingly, an RC-135W spyplane has launched from the same base on the same route. What’s their mission?
…
Whereas it was not the first time the Constant Phoenix visited the British airbase, the deployment to the UK amidst growing concern about an alleged spike in iodine levels recorded in northern Europe fueled speculations that the WC-135 might be tasked with investigating the reason behind the released Iodine-131.
AI Learns to Write Its Own Code by Stealing from Other Programs
February 23rd, 2017Via: New Scientist:
OUT of the way, human, I’ve got this covered. A machine learning system has gained the ability to write its own code.
Created by researchers at Microsoft and the University of Cambridge, the system, called DeepCoder, solved basic challenges of the kind set by programming competitions. This kind of approach could make it much easier for people to build simple programs without knowing how to write code.
“All of a sudden people could be so much more productive,” says Armando Solar-Lezama at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who was not involved in the work. “They could build systems that it [would be] impossible to build before.”
Ultimately, the approach could allow non-coders to simply describe an idea for a program and let the system build it, says Marc Brockschmidt, one of DeepCoder’s creators at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, UK.
AMD’s Ryzen Launches March 2
February 22nd, 2017My nine year old son has watched me build a few high end PCs and he wants to build his own so badly that he can practically taste it.
For months, I’ve been saying, “Wait for Ryzen, you must, young Padawon.”
After many years, AMD will again be offering strong alternatives to Intel’s CPUs. Ryzen 7 are the high end chips. Midrange Ryzen 5 and low end Ryzen 3 will be released later.
I haven’t built a PC based on an AMD CPU since around 2002. I’m looking forward to Intel having to compete again.
Via: PC World:
Ryzen is here. AMD said Wednesday that it plans a “hard launch” of its first three Ryzen processors on March 2. The highly anticipated chips promise to outperform high-end parts from Intel and undercut their prices by as much as 54 percent.
AMD executives confidently unveiled the first three desktop chips to attack Intel’s Core i7, supported by several top-tier motherboard vendors and boutique system builders. In many cases, executives said, AMD will offer more for less, as early Ryzen benchmarks prove. The top-tier Ryzen 7 1800X will cost less than half of what Intel’s thousand-dollar Core i7-6900K chip does—and outperform it, too. You can preorder Ryzen chips and systems from 180 retailers and system integrators today.
Tesla Will Double Number of Supercharger Locations in North America in 2017
February 22nd, 2017Via: The Verge:
Tesla will double the number of Supercharger locations in North America in 2017, the company revealed today in its quarterly letter to shareholders. The company currently has 2,636 Superchargers at 373 locations across the United States, Canada, and Mexico, and plans to have twice as many locations open by the end of 2017.
Tesla’s Supercharging network allows owners of its Model S and Model X vehicles (as well as future Model 3 owners) to rapidly charge their vehicles while on long road trips, providing as much as 170 miles of range after just 30 minutes of charging.
French Military Trains Eagles to Hunt Drones
February 22nd, 2017Via: Reuters:
In a battle between ancient arts and modern technology, France’s army is teaching birds of prey to bring down remote-controlled drones when they enter no-go urban airspace.
Four golden eagles are getting military training for combat against battery-charged drones that just about anybody can buy in a local store, and fly into security-sensitive zones such as presidential palaces, wittingly or not.
“These eagles can spot the drones several thousand meters (yards) away and neutralize them,” Jean-Christophe Zimmerman, a French air force general, told reporters.
The idea, he says, was inspired by Dutch police trials.
UPS Tries Arming Its Brown-Clad Drivers With an Octocopter Drone
February 21st, 2017Via: Bloomberg:
United Parcel Service Inc. sees a day when your latest purchase may be dropped off not by a brown-clad delivery driver, but by an octocopter drone.
The world’s largest courier took a step closer to that future on Monday, launching an unmanned aerial vehicle from the roof of a UPS truck about a quarter-mile to a blueberry farm outside Tampa, Florida. The drone dropped off a package at a home on the property, and returned to the truck, which had moved about 2,000 feet.
The test shows how UPS is looking to drones as a way to cut costs and ease delivery in hard-to-reach places. Deploying the aircraft in rural areas — where the distance between stops drives up fuel and labor costs — is one of the more promising applications.
“Drones won’t replace our uniformed service providers,” says Mark Wallace, UPS’s senior vice president of global engineering and sustainability. “That’s key, but in this case, it really is there to assist.”
Philadelphia: Heroin Hellscape
February 21st, 2017Via: Philly News:
Along a half-mile gorge cut by a Conrail line that runs through Kensington and Fairhill, tens of thousands of used syringes and their tossed off orange caps cover the sloping ground like a plague of locusts. The contaminated needles make conditions so hazardous that even some police officers are reluctant to traverse the embankments to get to dead overdose victims at the bottom.
The squalor and chaos along the rail line resembles a scene from Hieronymus Bosch. Addicts – many with needle marks so fresh that still-drying blood glistens in the sun – twist their bodies into unnatural forms to crouch and teeter on the trash-covered banks as they shoot up. Others sleep under nearby bridges or in makeshift shelters surrounded by garbage, drugs, and death.
At a plywood shack known to denizens as “the hospital,” users too squeamish to inject themselves can pay a few dollars to a Ray-Ban-wearing addict who looks like he stepped out of a Mad Max movie.
“People come here when they have trouble to hit themselves,” said the 45-year-old man, who declined to give his real name. “So I hit them in the neck, you know what I mean? So I’m like the doctor. So they pay me.”
This apocalyptic terrain, sometimes called El Campamento, is home to 75 to 125 addicts at any given time. Many more transient users come each day to get high. It is the festering epicenter of Philadelphia’s heroin epidemic, a benighted territory the DEA considers the East Coast’s largest heroin market, smack dab in an area often referred to as the Badlands. And it has gone largely ignored for three decades.
Florida Man Charged With Plotting to Bomb Target, Wanted to Buy Stock Cheap
February 21st, 2017Via: Reuters:
A Florida man has been charged with plotting to plant bombs in at least 10 Target Corp stores and then profit when the blasts caused the company’s stock price to fall, federal prosecutors have said.
Charles Barnett, 48, of Ocala, had asked a law enforcement informant to put the homemade bombs on the shelves of Target stores from Florida to New York state, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Middle District of Florida said in a statement on Thursday.
“Barnett theorized that the company’s stock value would plunge after the explosions, allowing him to cheaply acquire shares of Target stock before an eventual rebound in prices,” the statement said.
Robots Poised to Take Over Wide Range of Military Jobs
February 21st, 2017Via: San Diego Union Tribune:
The wave of automation that swept away tens of thousands of American manufacturing and office jobs during the past two decades is now washing over the armed forces, putting both rear-echelon and front-line positions in jeopardy.
“Just as in the civilian economy, automation will likely have a big impact on military organizations in logistics and manufacturing,” said Michael Horowitz, a University of Pennsylvania professor and one of the globe’s foremost experts on weaponized robots.
“The U.S. military is very likely to pursue forms of automation that reduce ‘back-office’ costs over time, as well as remove soldiers from non-combat deployments where they might face risk from adversaries on fluid battlefields, such as in transportation.”
