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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for SoyCow1337:Amazon's Choice Products Aren't Always What They Claim to Be:

martyb writes:Greetings!To those of you who may be celebrating a holiday at this time of year, on behalf of the staff at SoylentNews, please accept my best wishes to you and those you hold dear.For Fun:With glee I am pleased to announce that @The Mighty Buzzard: has given a gift to all registered users on the site. These are good until 2019-12-26 00:10:00.Thank You!As the end of the year approaches, I extend my humble thanks to all of you who have subscribed to SoylentNews!As of this writing, we have received $1799.47 towards a goal of $2000.00 for the second half of the year. All funds received go directly to supporting the site: web hosting, domain name renewal, tax preparation, etc. Nobody has ever received any money for their work on SoylentNews. We are staffed entirely by volunteers who give of their free time to keep the site running and the story queue filled. By my estimate, we have probably passed the minimum funds received that are needed to support the site for this half of the year... but actually reaching the goal would give us a bit of a cushion against the unexpected. To those who have let their subscription lapse and to those who may have never subscribed before: please subscribe and help us meet our goal.Folding@Home:Rarely mentioned, but SoylentNews does have a folding@home team which recently surpassed one billion points earned and now holds 218th place in the entire world! Here are views of their progress individually and as a team. Their efforts contribute to helping medical research into Alzheimer's disease, Huntington's disease, and many forms of cancer, among other diseases.This Year So Far:The SoylentNews web site has been available 24 hours day, 7 days a week... except for a couple relatively brief unplanned outages. Further our IRC (Internet Relay Chat) has been available throughout this time, as well. (There may have been a brief downtime due to scheduled Linode maintenance on our servers.) Also, behind the scenes, all the supporting back-end stuff has been chugging along: web servers, databases, caches, E-Mail processing, and lots more. Those of you who have been with us since the start remember the frequent site crashes of those early days. Often several times per day! The rarity of site crashes, now, is a testament to the hard work of many people who gave of their time and expertise to make SoylentNews so stable, today.These are the folk who quietly mind the underpinnings of and automate everything so well you don't even know they are there and would likely feel embarrassed if attention were brouht to them. Please join me in thanking them, anyway!Some Numbers:The editorial staff at SoylentNews has posted 4,884 stories to SoylentNews since 2019-01-01. With a very conservative estimate of 5 minutes per story, that amounts to 407 hours' time. Put another way, that is 10 full-time person-weeks.Please join me in thanking the editors who have so generously given of their free time to make this happen!Thanks Again!Lastly, I am taking advantage of this opportunity to again thank everyone who offered their support during my recent health issue. I'm still a little wobbly typing with my left hand's pinky, but as things could have gone, I'll take this any day of the week, instead! It is my sincere hope that by sharing my experience, it may help someone else make a change in their life and avoid my experience or much worse.Original SubmissionRead more of this story at SoylentNews.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for SoyCow1337:Facebook removes accounts with AI-generated profile photos:

takyon writes:Universal Notifies Theaters 'Cats' Is Being Updated With "Improved Visual Effects"

takyon writes:Trump signs defense bill establishing U.S. Space Force: What comes next

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for SoyCow4408:No, Spotify, you shouldn't have sent mysterious USB drives to journalists – TechCrunch:

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for SoyCow1337:Why I dislike what "quantum supremacy" is doing to computing research:

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for SoyCow4408:Plenty of Fish app leaked profile data set to private – TechCrunch:

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Cascade:Video analytics paves way for smart cities:

takyon writes:SpaceX ships Starship hardware from Florida to Texas to speed up production

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for SoyCow1337:Giant surveillance balloons are lurking at the edge of space:

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for chromas:Overspill of fat shown to cause Type 2 diabetes:

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for chromas:This startup claims its deepfakes will protect your privacy:

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Runaway1956:Smart Home Tech, Police, and Your Privacy: Year in Review 2019:

barbara hudson writes:CBC is reporting that Boeing's CEO is gone. While offially he resigned, there's little doubt he had much say in the matter.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:Apple could be exploring the idea of launching satellites.

An Anonymous Coward writes:https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/08/crazy-90-percent-of-people-dont-know-how-to-use-ctrl-f/243840/

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Runaway1956:Boeing's failed Starliner mission strains 'reliability' pitch:

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Cascade:Bing's Top Search Results Contain an Alarming Amount of Disinformation:

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Runaway1956:'Epilepsy demon' discovered on 2,700-year-old clay tablet in Iraq:

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

An Anonymous Coward writes:https://www.matthewdean.com/bricklink-acquisition

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

An Anonymous Coward writes:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5030227/

canopic jug writes:Assistant professor Jeff Huang has written a sort of manifesto for preserving content on the web. He goes over seven points that should be familiar to all yet will nevertheless be found to be novel by some. New or not, they are essential to follow if one wishes to future-proof a web site. Like other best practices, such as usability design and accessibility design, which are also currently increasingly ignored, the points in the manifesto are also less work to follow than to ignore.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Runaway1956:Pressure on FAA to approve its 737 Max jets backfires for Boeing:

An Anonymous Coward writes in with the following story:

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for chromas:Merck receives FDA approval for Ebola vaccine:

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for chromas:U.S. Justice Department and FCC fight state effort to block merger of Sprint, T-Mobile:

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Runaway1956:Archaeologists unearth gold-lined Mycenaean royal tombs in Greece:

RandomFactor writes:Phys.org reports on a recent study draughted for the pages of the journal Chemical Communications "which solve[s] a long-standing mystery related to the lifetime of foams."

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Runaway1956:Physicists measured forces behind why Cheerios clump together in your bowl:

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Submitted via IRC for BytramChanges in the immune system explain why belly fat is bad for thinking

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for chromas:FDA warns of breathing risks with popular nerve drugs:

"upstart" writes:Submitted via IRC for FatPhilYear in Review: Digital Events in 2019

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for chromas:'Grow and prune' AI mimics brain development, slashes energy use:

einar writes:The Inquirer is shutting down. After nearly two decades of witty technology news, the inq comes to an end. This is a pity. Many enjoyed the website for their refreshingly honest look at technology. In a time when far too many technology sites bent over backwards to get access to samples and early access, the inq felt different. Critical journalism, not just blogging. Armed with an utter lack of respect for anyone. Never condescending but often hilariously mocking. The inquirer was fun to read. The website will be missed.https://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/3084741/the-inquirer-reaches-end-of-lifeOriginal SubmissionRead more of this story at SoylentNews.