The Death of the Mind

Enlarge / Google CEO Sundar Pichai uses his phone during the Allen & Company Sun Valley Conference on July 12, 2018, in Sun Valley, Idaho. (credit: Getty Images | Drew Angerer )
The US Department of Justice and 14 state attorneys general yesterday asked a federal judge to sanction Google for misusing attorney-client privilege to hide emails from litigation.
“In a program called ‘Communicate with Care,’ Google trains and directs employees to add an attorney, a privilege label, and a generic ‘request’ for counsel’s advice to shield sensitive business communications, regardless of whether any legal advice is actually needed or sought. Often, knowing the game, the in-house counsel included in these Communicate-with-Care emails does…

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Enlarge / The US Food and Drug Administration in Silver Spring, Maryland. (credit: Getty | Xinhua News Agency)
Vaccine-makers Moderna and Pfizer have now both submitted requests to the US Food and Drug Administration to authorize fourth doses—second boosters—of their COVID-19 vaccines.
Pfizer and its vaccine partner BioNTech announced Tuesday that they had asked the FDA to authorize fourth doses for adults age 65 and above. The move followed days of Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla saying in press interviews that a fourth shot is “necessary” for everyone.
Late Thursday, Moderna announced that it, too, had asked the FDA to authorize fourth doses—for all adults. In the announcement, Moderna described the request as intended to “provide…

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It’s arguably long overdue, but landing today within Mesa 22.1 is support in the V3D driver for Mesa’s on-disk shader cache functionality. By adding this shader cache to V3D it can help with the performance of this Gallium3D open-source driver most notably used by the Raspberry Pi 4 and newer single board computers…

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A pilot plant near the Salton Sea in California pairs lithium extraction with geothermal energy production. Michael McKibbenGeothermal energy has long been the forgotten member of the clean energy family, overshadowed by relatively cheap solar and wind power, despite its proven potential. But that may soon change – for an unexpected reason. Geothermal technologies are on the verge of unlocking vast quantities of lithium from naturally occurring hot brines beneath places like California’s Salton Sea, a two-hour drive from San Diego. Lithium is essential for lithium-ion batteries, which power electric vehicles and energy storage. Demand for these batteries is quickly rising, but the U.S. is currently heavily reliant on lithium imports from other countries – most…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://theconversation.com/how-a-few-geothermal-plants-could-solve-americas-lithium-supply-crunch-and-boost-the-ev-battery-industry-179465

Tuning of the max_wal_size configuration parameter in PostgreSQL can have a profound effect on performance, but it’s often overlooked or not given the priority it deserves in favour of other parameters, such as those that are easier to understand. In this blog we’ll discuss what the parameter does, how to tune it, and how to monitor the system to ensure the tuning is effective. [Continue reading…]

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At TorrentFreak we do our best to keep readers updated on the latest copyright and piracy news, highlighting issues from different points of view.
We report on the opinions and efforts of copyright holders when it comes to online piracy and have active dialogues with anti-piracy outfits. At the same time, we also make room for those who oppose them. That’s how balanced reporting works in our view.
There is probably no site on the Internet that reports on the negative consequences of piracy as much as we do and but for some reason, the term “pro-piracy” is sometimes attached to our reporting.
In most cases we shrug off these characterizations, concluding that those who portray us in this…

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SUVs and pick-up truck drivers are three to four times more likely to hit a pedestrian when they make a turn than the drivers of smaller cars, a new study finds — and researchers think it’s because federal regulators aren’t scrutinizing the common design features that make it impossible for megacar drivers to see walkers passing right in front of them.
In a new study of federal crash data by the Insurance Institute of Highway Safety, researchers found that crashes in which a driver kills a walker are three times more likely to involve a left turn if that motorist was piloting an SUV at the time of impact, compared to fatal walking crashes involving the drivers…

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Enlarge / With better alignment, the test star has been joined by a whole host of background stars and galaxies. (credit: NASA/STScI)
Today, NASA announced that it has successfully completed two further steps to align the mirrors of the Webb telescope. The resulting performance indicates that Webb will meet or exceed its design goals. “So far, we’re finding that the performance is as good [as] or better than our most optimistic projections,” said Lee Feinberg, the Webb optical telescope element manager.
The announcement was accompanied by a spectacular image that showed a sharp focus on the target star and included many in-focus galaxies in the backdrop.
Get in line
The Webb telescope’s primary mirror is made…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://arstechnica.com/?p=1841522

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