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Best Buy is running a 3-day sale with discounts on laptops, tablets, TVs, and a whole bunch of other products. But you can also score some pretty good deals on laptops if you buy directly from Lenovo or HP right now, with both companies running their …
Best Buy is running a 3-day sale with discounts on laptops, tablets, TVs, and a whole bunch of other products. But you can also score some pretty good deals on laptops if you buy directly from Lenovo or HP right now, with both companies running their own sales. One thing to note is that I […]
The post Daily Deals (12-08-2023) appeared first on Liliputing.
It’s only one truck and one thermostat, but it could be the start of a V2H wave.
Enlarge / It's a hefty plug, but it has to be so that an F-150 Lightning can send power back to the home through an 80-amp Ford Charge Station Pro. (credit: Ford)
Modern EVs have some pretty huge batteries, but like their gas-powered counterparts, the main thing they do is sit in one place, unused. The Ford F-150 Lightning was built with two-way power in mind, and soon it might have a use outside emergency scenarios.
Ford and Resideo, a Honeywell Home thermostat brand, recently announced the EV-Home Power Partnership. It's still in the testing phases, but it could help make EVs a more optimal purchase. Put simply, you could charge your EV when it's cheap, and when temperatures or demand make grid power time-of-use expensive (or pulled from less renewable sources), you could use your truck's battery to power the AC. That would also help with grid reliability, should enough people implement such a backup.
The F-150 Lightning already offers a whole-home backup power option, one that requires the professional installation of an 80-amp Ford Charge Station Pro and a home transfer switch to prevent problems when the grid switches back on. Having a smart thermostat allows for grid demand response, so the F-150 would be able to more actively use its vehicle-to-home (V2H) abilities.
Musk’s last-ditch effort to terminate settlement over “funding secured” tweets.
Enlarge / Elon Musk at an AI event with Britain Prime Minister Rishi Sunak in London on Thursday, Nov. 2, 2023. (credit: Getty Images | WPA Pool )
Elon Musk yesterday appealed to the Supreme Court in a last-ditch effort to terminate his settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Musk has claimed he was coerced into the deal with the SEC and that it violates his free speech rights, but the settlement has been upheld by every court that's reviewed it so far.
In his petition asking the Supreme Court to hear the case, Musk said the SEC settlement forced him to "waive his First Amendment rights to speak on matters ranging far beyond the charged violations."
The SEC case began after Musk's August 2018 tweets stating, "Am considering taking Tesla private at $420. Funding secured" and "Investor support is confirmed. Only reason why this is not certain is that it's contingent on a shareholder vote." The SEC sued Musk and Tesla, saying the tweets were false and "led to significant market disruption."
Annual showcase highlights “captivating science,” “breathtaking beauty” of fluid motion.
Enlarge / Harvard University graduate student Yue Sun won a Milton Van Dyke Award for her video on the hydrodynamics of marbled paper. (credit: Y. Sun/Harvard University et al.)
Marbled paper is an art form that dates back at least to the 17th century, when European travelers to the Middle East brought back samples and bound them into albums. Its visually striking patterns arise from the complex hydrodynamics of paint interacting with water, inspiring a winning video entry in this year's Gallery of Fluid Motion.
The American Physical Society's Division of Fluid Dynamics sponsors the gallery each year as part of its annual meeting, featuring videos and posters submitted by scientists from all over the world. The objective is to highlight "the captivating science and often breathtaking beauty of fluid motion" and to "celebrate and appreciate the remarkable fluid dynamics phenomena unveiled by researchers and physicists."
The three videos featured here are the winners of the Milton Van Dyke Awards, which also included three winning posters. There were three additional general video winners—on the atomization of impinging jets, the emergent collective motion of condensate droplets, and the swimming motion of a robotic eel—as well as three poster winners. You can view all the 2023 entries (winning and otherwise) here.
A literal life-or-death balance, playing out at the level of individual genes.
Enlarge / A large family can come with some unfortunate downsides (in addition to that weird cousin). (credit: Oliver Rossi)
Analysis of genomic and behavioral data from the vast UK Biobank finally demonstrates that genes that promote reproductive behaviors come with the ultimate price.
Aging stinks. You get marks on your skin, you’re slower, you forget stuff, and everything hurts. Your joints crack and pop. Evolution has achieved so many remarkable things; how is it possible that we still have to put up with growing old?
The antagonistic pleiotropy hypothesis states that your body falls apart when you’re old to pay the cost of being reproductively fit when you’re young. If the same gene has different effects (called pleiotropy) at different times of life—if it enhances your chances of reproduction when you’re young but is deleterious somehow once you get older—that gene will still undergo positive selection and remain in the population because reproduction is that important.
Ein Himmelskörper statt unendlich viele: Das Entwicklerstudio Hello Games hat sein nächstes Spiel Light No Fire vorgestellt. (Hello Games, Rollenspiel)
Ein Himmelskörper statt unendlich viele: Das Entwicklerstudio Hello Games hat sein nächstes Spiel Light No Fire vorgestellt. (Hello Games, Rollenspiel) Google takes heat for a misleading AI demo video that hyped up its GPT-4 competitor.
Enlarge / A still from Google's misleading Gemini AI promotional video, released Wednesday. (credit: Google)
Google is facing controversy among AI experts for a deceptive Gemini promotional video released Wednesday that appears to show its new AI model recognizing visual cues and interacting vocally with a person in real time. As reported by Parmy Olson for Bloomberg, Google has admitted that was not the case. Instead, the researchers fed still images to the model and edited together successful responses, partially misrepresenting the model's capabilities.
"We created the demo by capturing footage in order to test Gemini’s capabilities on a wide range of challenges," a spokesperson said. "Then we prompted Gemini using still image frames from the footage, & prompting via text," a Google spokesperson told Olson. As Olson points out, Google filmed a pair of human hands doing activities, then showed still images to Gemini Ultra, one by one. Google researchers interacted with the model through text, not voice, then picked the best interactions and edited them together with voice synthesis to make the video.
Right now, running still images and text through massive large language models is computationally intensive, which makes real-time video interpretation largely impractical. That was one of the clues that first led AI experts to believe the video was misleading.
A new law passed in Italy during the summer promised a new dawn in the war against pirate IPTV providers. It soon transpired that Piracy Shield, the all-new, massively hyped anti-piracy system poised and ready to eliminate piracy had a minor flaw; it wasn’t actually ready. By law, it had to launch yesterday, and reportedly it did just that, albeit with a couple of tiny caveats….
From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.
When Italian lawmakers finally passed new law in the summer designed to crack down on pirate IPTV providers once and for all, powerful Serie A football clubs, broadcasters, and influential business associates, breathed a joint sigh of relief.
The tools needed to avert the imminent destruction of Italian football had finally been enshrined in law following a massive lobbying and media campaign.
Four years earlier, a similar ‘Piracy Kills Football‘ campaign launched to dire warnings that the destruction of Italian football was imminent then. Yet somehow, against all odds, football somehow managed to survive before coming face to face with another crisis.
That’s one of the interesting things about anti-piracy campaigns and subsequent lobbying; fortunes can suddenly pivot in unexpected ways, despite whatever was claimed earlier.
For example, as Italian football faced imminent demise between 2019 and 2021, authorities announced unprecedented success after raids reportedly “blacked out” an estimated 80 percent of the illegal IPTV flow into Italy. Just six months later in early 2022, authorities reportedly “dismantled” an IPTV operation servicing 500,000 subscribers and then followed up by shutting down another with 900,000 subscribers a few months later.
Running parallel to these huge successes, reported consumption of pirate IPTV services in Italy apparently increased year-on-year according to studies commissioned by rightsholders. Italian football was again facing a worst-case scenario if piracy couldn’t be brought under control.
When rightsholders want new powers that most governments don’t award themselves, Armageddon can suddenly find itself more imminent than ever before with implications for entire countries. On the plus side, solutions are usually available to end the nightmare, if only the law permitted their use.
This summer a long process to convince anyone who mattered that technologically advanced internet blocking, carried out on an unprecedented scale, needed to be authorized by law, came to an end. New legislation was signed, and quickly approved by telecoms regulator AGCOM.
All rightsholders had to do was roll out their anti-piracy system to show it could do all the things people claimed it could do, and get ready to take out the pirates.
For reasons that still haven’t been made clear, the full system was nowhere near ready. It still wasn’t ready at the start of the new football season on August 8 despite monitoring capability having been fully operational for years.
At the end of August, an insider acknowledged the delay and then added that the system was “insane” and would “solve digital piracy” when it launched in September or October. A technical roundtable did go ahead in early September, but there was no launch in September and no launch in October either.
Now dubbed ‘Piracy Shield‘ the system had to launch no later than yesterday, December 7, 2023.
As reported by DDAY.it, telecoms regulator AGCOM informed Italy’s ISPs that Piracy Shield would go live on December 7, as required by law. And it did – albeit with a couple of tiny caveats.
“According to our information, Agcom has sent notification to all providers that the platform is finally online and at the same time has activated on its website, via SPID, the authentication procedure for users who will have to use the platform,” DDAY.it reports.
“However, active does not mean fully operational and automated, because the feeling is that ISPs may still need some time to integrate the mechanisms that avoid human intervention.”
Only during the last few days have Piracy Shield operation manuals been sent out to those authorized to file copyright complaints and those tasked with executing the blocks, Italy’s ISPs.
“For security reasons, it is likely that providers will still take a few weeks to carry out all the implementations at a technical level, although the timing obviously changes from provider to provider: the larger ones are certainly better equipped and could be ready in a very short time,” DDAY.it concludes.
Tonight’s big game between Juventus and Napoli, a classic north/south rivalry in Serie A, is what the beautiful game is all about. All games in Serie A are important, but matches like this elevate heart rates and as passions soar, Serie A needs fans to go legal and support the sport, despite cheaper yet illegal offers already on the table.
Before Piracy Shield even existed as a market-ready product, big claims about what this type of system could achieve were regular parts of the discussion. There’s no question that those tasked with ensuring its competence in a live environment have relevant experience and will do whatever is reasonably possible. Unfortunately, some lofty claims made over the past 12 months have set an unreasonably high bar that in practical terms will be hard to achieve.
That IP address lists pertinent to tonight’s game may end up being circulated via text files and then blocked manually by ISPs, is a far cry from the glittering promises made during the past year. But these are still early days and the fight against IPTV piracy is a marathon event, not a sprint.
That being said, the coming months will be pivotal. Piracy Shield simply has to deliver but how that will be measured is far from clear. Reporting how many streams it blocks seems a likely candidate, but the real test lies in TV subscriber numbers, which are directly linked to fans’ willingness to pay, not necessarily the availability of pirate streams.
From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.
Auf der Solar Solutions gibt es Solaranlagen, klar, aber auch immer mehr Produkte drumherum – bis hin zu Solaranlagen-Putzrobotern und einem Rasenmäher, der an Alien erinnert. Ein Bericht von Mario Keller (Energiewende, Messe)
Auf der Solar Solutions gibt es Solaranlagen, klar, aber auch immer mehr Produkte drumherum - bis hin zu Solaranlagen-Putzrobotern und einem Rasenmäher, der an Alien erinnert. Ein Bericht von Mario Keller (Energiewende, Messe) Digitale Bilderrahmen teilen Erinnerungen und gemeinsame Momente auf moderne Weise. Auf Amazon ist einer mit fast 40 Euro Rabatt im Angebot. (Technik/Hardware, Digitaler Bilderrahmen)
Digitale Bilderrahmen teilen Erinnerungen und gemeinsame Momente auf moderne Weise. Auf Amazon ist einer mit fast 40 Euro Rabatt im Angebot. (Technik/Hardware, Digitaler Bilderrahmen) 
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