Weird News Compilation

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In summary, a man who used to be a Fox News guest analyst and claimed to be a CIA agent was sentenced to 33 months in prison for lying about his security clearance, criminal history, and finances.
  • #421
Don't take these on the flight home.:nb)
https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/TSA-bans-Star-Wars-Galaxy-s-Edge-thermal-14395551.php

 
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Physics news on Phys.org
  • #423
  • #424

Hurry hurry its on fire!
 
  • #425
nsaspook said:
Hurry hurry its on fire!
I hate to see young people haven't paid any attention in their basic physics classes!
 
  • #426
  • #427
fresh_42 said:
Acute psychotic illness triggered by Brexit Referendum
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2019-10-acute-psychotic-illness-triggered-brexit.html
This is why I refuse to watch The Trump Show on the nightly news. :oldwink:

If You Watch “THE NEWS”… I Have Some Bad News For Your Success & Happiness

To me, nothing captures our news and social media ecosystem quite like this photo:
0*kTuhp_ahGfIQ94h_.jpg
 
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  • #428
Oh, Oh.
Someone assaulted a trash can!
Refuse might have been stolen.
 
  • #429
It looks like it's opened a crack in the Earth as well, and hot molten lava is starting to seep through from below... :woot:
 
  • #430
Fly, you fools!
 
  • #432
Had I not read the article, I wouldn't have posted this, as, well, it's one of the most mundane things, ever, IMHO.

Mats Järlström of Beaverton says yellow lights are too short in the United States​

It was the following that startled me:

"Still, Järlström faced fines from Oregon’s Board of Examiners for Engineering, which accused him of practicing engineering without a license for trying to share his research."​

I practice engineering almost every day. And lots of times, I shared my results. Am I going to "engineering" jail?
 
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  • #434
fresh_42 said:
I have looked for an alternative read for EU readers. I found
https://www.oregonlive.com/commuting/2014/12/beaverton_mans_federal_lawsuit.html
Although the "fine print" says "Updated Jan 10, 2019; Posted Dec 02, 2014", I can't see that anything new has been added in the last 5 years.

Updates from my listed article:

"The Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE), which makes the traffic control policies for the United States and other countries, notified Järlström that he’s right: drivers often get caught in a no man’s land when trying to make a turn and they end up running red lights."​

The following is pretty funny:

"Järlström forged ahead and got a big victory several years ago when Professor Alexei Maradudin — one of the engineers who wrote the original formula used to determine the duration of yellow lights — told ITE his 1959 equation was never meant to regulate vehicles making turns."​

So, it took someone born in Sweden, now living half way around the world, to fix a 60 year old engineering problem.

---

ps. Professor Alexei Maradudin was born on Dec 11, 1931, and would have been about 28, when this "yellow light" formula, was formulated.

He's currently @ University of California, Irvine
Research Professor, Physics & Astronomy
[ref]
 
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  • #435
OmCheeto said:
Although the "fine print" says "Updated Jan 10, 2019; Posted Dec 02, 2014", I can't see that anything new has been added in the last 5 years.

Updates from my listed article:

"The Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE), which makes the traffic control policies for the United States and other countries, notified Järlström that he’s right: drivers often get caught in a no man’s land when trying to make a turn and they end up running red lights."​

The following is pretty funny:

"Järlström forged ahead and got a big victory several years ago when Professor Alexei Maradudin — one of the engineers who wrote the original formula used to determine the duration of yellow lights — told ITE his 1959 equation was never meant to regulate vehicles making turns."​

So, it took someone born in Sweden, now living half way around the world, to fix a 60 year old engineering problem.

---

ps. Professor Alexei Maradudin was born on Dec 11, 1931, and would have been about 28, when this "yellow light" formula, was formulated.

He's currently @ University of California, Irvine
Research Professor, Physics & Astronomy
[ref]
He's almost 90 and still doing research? Wow!
 
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  • #438
WWGD said:
Is that the right to be forgotten?
I guess so. Those things happen if a bunch of jobless bureaucrats make laws about things they have as much knowledge of as da Vinci had of an A380. Similar damage is currently done in several countries by abandoning net neutrality. We have reached a stage at which technological developments outrun political personal of ancient Athens.
 
  • #439
fresh_42 said:
I guess so. Those things happen if a bunch of jobless bureaucrats make laws about things they have as much knowledge of as da Vinci had of an A380. Similar damage is currently done in several countries by abandoning net neutrality. We have reached a stage at which technological developments outrun political personal of ancient Athens.
I hear google gets tons ( hundreds of thousands) of requests over the last frw years for them to remove info about themselves( the people).
 
  • #440
WWGD said:
I hear google gets tons ( hundreds of thousands) of requests over the last frw years for them to remove info about themselves( the people).
I can imagine. But this doesn't mean that I understand it. It's like those people drinking diet coke or eating fat reduced cheese. Either you don't drink or eat it at all, and there may be reasons for it, or you accept that coke has sugar and cheese has fat. If you don't want to tell the world who you are, then just ... ... shut up.
 
  • #441
fresh_42 said:
If you don't want to tell the world who you are, then just ... ... shut up.
This isn't the right to be forgotten, it's the right to privacy. You need to offer an opt-out for all the data collection done for "behavioural advertising", since it turns out to be personally identifying even when anonymised. A few US sites seem to implement this by saying "your custom is important to us... go away".
 
  • #442
Ibix said:
This isn't the right to be forgotten, it's the right to privacy.
Then it's the cookie annoyance, not much better. I don't think it makes a lot of sense to ask for acceptance each time you want to read something. I hate this extra click.
 
  • #443
fresh_42 said:
Then it's the cookie annoyance, not much better. I don't think it makes a lot of sense to ask for acceptance each time you want to read something. I hate this extra click.
I like being able to turn off tracking cookies. However, I have to say I don't see why they didn't just require browsers to set "do not track" as default on machines intended for/downloading from the EU and add legal consequences to companies that don't respect it.
 
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  • #444
OmCheeto said:
So, it took someone born in Sweden, now living half way around the world, to fix a 60 year old engineering problem
Your agency in Oregon has a stuck-up problem, ( or had one )
Another engineer that has had trouble with them:
"In another black mark on the agency, it just had to issue an apology to former Republican gubernatorial candidate Allen Alley. OSBEELS had also investigated Alley for calling himself an engineer in a campaign ad. Like most engineers in Oregon and around the country, he does not have a Professional Engineer license. Most companies don’t require the designation and Alley worked for years as an engineer for multiple companies"

Also, this might be related.
"The typically-overlooked Oregon State Board of Examiners for Engineering and Land Surveying is facing scrutiny as its leader has been placed on administrative leave"
"Board Administrator Mari Lopez was placed on administrative leave back in November, but the action just came to light in documents released this week which contain the minutes of a special board meeting held the day before Thanksgiving." ( news item several months back, but which came first )
https://www.koin.com/news/head-of-embattled-state-agency-placed-on-leave/amp/
Totally weird.
 
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  • #445
fresh_42 said:
Then it's the cookie annoyance, not much better. I don't think it makes a lot of sense to ask for acceptance each time you want to read something. I hate this extra click.
I don't understand why you have to get the acceptance of someone who chooses to save a piece of information (the cookie) on his/her computer. The website can send as many cookies as it wants, it cannot force anyone to save it, the browser does.

So how come a browser let me choose if I accept or not that some website can send me notifications or can geolocalize me, but cannot do the same thing with cookies? I would love to see a little pop-up saying 'This site wants to save a cookie on your computer, accept it? Here is a link to its privacy policy.' [OR 'This site have no privacy policy']. The privacy policy link would be sent via HTTP header with the cookie. Of course, one could choose to accept all cookies by default if one finds that too annoying (just like we all do now). But just setting black & white lists of cookies as you surf the web would remove a lot of notifications, quickly.
 
  • #446
jack action said:
So how come a browser let me choose if I accept or not that some website can send me notifications or can geolocalize me, but cannot do the same thing with cookies? I would love to see a little pop-up saying 'This site wants to save a cookie on your computer, accept it?
This is exactly what usually happens, only that the little pop-up isn't so little and covers the entire page, and in some cases, site owners preferred to code the one liner "if EU then BLOCK" instead. The website asks you to accept cookies. It's annoying. I have to clean the cookie stack anyway from time to time, even if I would always choose the "no" option, because I'm not surfing exclusively on EU sites and even then, I often want to read the site regardless of the cookies. It's annoying. And it is senseless. It's like shopping a load of "normal" food and plus a fat-free yoghurt on top and pretending it is healthy. Ridiculous. If you don't want to get wet, don't go swimming! Nobody is forced to surf on the internet. Buy a newspaper instead!
 
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  • #447
fresh_42 said:
It's like shopping a load of "normal" food and plus a fat-free yoghurt on top and pretending it is healthy. [insert]+1[/]insert]Ridiculous. If you don't want to get wet, don't go swimming![insert]+2[/insert] Nobody is forced to surf on the internet.[insert]+3[/insert] Buy a newspaper instead!
Hear, hear!
 
  • #449
fresh_42 said:
This is exactly what usually happens
Not really, because the management of the decision you took is left to the website owner. If it was done at the browser level, once you accept or not a cookie from a given URL, the decision is stored in your browser, easy peasy, you will never be asked again.

Managing this on the server side is a nightmare. You have to keep track of every visitor that ever came to your site and record their preferences. If the visitor erases your cookie that identified him in your database, then you have no way of knowing that and keep useless info. The website owner is also responsible for that information (security, privacy). Plus the website owner have to keep track of every third-party that may send a cookie, which is virtually impossible, especially for small websites. The easy choice is then to send a pop-up that asks to accept everything that is sent, to every visitor, valid for the present session only.

On the other hand, your browser is the one who is recording the cookie on your computer and knows exactly who send it. Since the info is on your computer, the website cannot even know if you refused its cookie or if you are a new visitor (the only you can fully protect your privacy).
 
  • #450
Sure. My point is that I do not want to bother at all, regardless of client or server side. To manage browser settings for any website I end up on is a nightmare as well, only that it is my nightmare. I consider cookies as the prize to be paid for information which is otherwise (almost) free of costs. It's like complaining about the ads on a tv coverage of a super bowl. If you do not like the concept of data tracking, do not participate. Instead lawmakers have chosen to torture all of us for the decision of a few nutcases might make. I couldn't even explain to my mother what she is asked to do! She regularly thinks she has a fatal error. As a consequence I advise her to click "accept" to whatever comes up - as long as she doesn't enter personal data. Now what is the greater benefit? To protect some fanatics who still think they can fight nowadays' data gathering, or to protect old people who don't understand this nonsense? It is an old fashioned and out-of-time perspective on today's world. My suggestion for those tree huggers is to re-establish the medieval usance of letting people who can read read their letters for money, instead of forbidding everyone else to read theirs. I am completely liberal here: take it or leave it, but don't bother me.
 
  • #452
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  • #454
Tghu Verd said:
Stranger uses bank transfers to return man's lost wallet

Ingenious use of micro-payments, I'd say!

https://www.upi.com/Odd_News/2019/1...o-return-mans-lost-wallet/6601571255550/?sl=3
I am impressed even more by the determined kindness of the Stranger. One's wallet contains much of a modern person's identity and 'pocket money' in the form of rf chips and magnetic strips along with government issued licenses and ID cards.

We likely have the technology and ability to embed or otherwise secure an rf "wallet" in/on a person; something I expect to experience within my (age-limited) lifetime depending on social acceptance and the odd miniaturization technique.
 

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