mknelson

lkrupp said:

WTF is a ‘digital epidemiologist’? Sounds like a bureaucracy on steroids. First we had the French ‘digital technology minister’. Now we have a Swedish ‘digital epidemiologist’. here in the U.S. we call them ‘czars’ I guess. Any differences other than expanding the bureaucracy exponentially?

Instead of asking questions to spread doubt you could actually provide helpful information:

"The term digital epidemiology was defined by Marcel Salathé as epidemiology that uses data that was generated outside the public health system, i.e., with data that was not generated with the primary purpose of doing epidemiology (Salathé 2018; Eckmanns et al. 2019)."

Ok. that particular sentence highlighted by Google isn't particularly helpful, but you can read the whole article:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/322254109_Digital_epidemiology_what_is_it_and_where_is_it_going

It's not a bureaucratic term - it's more of a job title in a particular research discipline.

The Alberta Government released a tracing app this week - it's using a similar protocol to the Apple/Google solution in that it uses BlueTooth to get anonymous information from Apple/Android devices running the same App within ~6ft.

The Android App works in the background. The iOS version only works if the phone is unlocked and the AB Tracetogether app is running in the foreground.

That means it's pretty much useless as it shuts off any time your phone sleeps or you use a different app.

They will need to switch to the Apple API to make it work.

Quite a few cross platform developers are moving to Vulkan and there are at least two libraries that allow you to easily recompile Vulkan to Metal. Quite a few games have done that with great success. ~30% speed boost vs OpenGL even though they weren't written directly for Metal.

Unity has had Metal support for many years.

buckkalu said:

Over the last 10 years, everyone from celebrity influencers including Elon Musk, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Al Gore, to major technology brands including Apple, have repeatedly claimed that renewables like solar panels and wind farms are less polluting than fossil fuels.

But a new documentary, “Planet of the Humans,” being released free to the public on YouTube today, the 50th Anniversary of Earth Day, reveals that industrial wind farms, solar farms, biomass, and biofuels are wrecking natural environments. 

“Planet of the Humans was produced by Oscar-winning filmmaker Michael Moore. “I assumed solar panels would last forever,” Moore toldReuters. “I didn’t know what went into the making of them.” 

The film shows both abandoned industrial wind and solar farms and new ones being built — but after cutting down forests. “It suddenly dawned on me what we were looking at was a solar dead zone,” says filmmaker Jeff Gibbs, staring at a former solar farm in California. “I learned that the solar panels don’t last.” 

Like many environmental documentaries, “Planet of Humans” endorses debunked Malthusian ideas that the world is running out of energy. “We have to have our ability to consume reigned in,” says a well-coiffed environmental leader. “Without some major die-off of the human population there is no turning back,” says a scientist. 

In truth, humankind has never been at risk of running out of energy. There has always been enough fossil fuels to power human civilization for hundreds and perhaps thousands of years, and nuclear energy is effectively infinite. 

https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2020/04/21/new-michael-moore-backed-documentary-on-youtube-reveals-massive-ecological-impacts-of-renewables/#16384bed6c96

The trick here is also about recycling. Recent reports were talking about how windmill blades were going into landfills. That's because there hadn't been a market demand/supply to recycle them so there weren't any plants.

There are now plants in construction to recycling windmill blades (into insulation). That is also happening with solar panels as they begin to reach end of life.

Odd if the iOS exploit was only used this year (or maybe only noticed?) when iOS was patched in July 2019. They wouldn't have had many vulnerable devices to exploit.

Although, since they really only need to be able to crack one end of the communication there is a multiplier effect.