Calli is 10 years old (ish) today!

 

Our precious pup Calli (Callista) is 10ish years old today! When you adopt or rescue a dog, often the true date of birth is often unknown - so it's an estimate. Calli is the dearest dog, so gentle & loving. Generally perfect health. Gets on well with everyone. We are truly blessed to have her in our family.

People often ask Kim & me what breed is Calli, and where did we get her from? Calli is a "Bitzer", from Zakynthos, Greece and was rescued by Sue & her team while still very young. Please consider supporting Healing Paws Animal Rescue.

If you are considering bringing a furry friend into your home & family, PLEASE consider rehoming / adopting. Thank you!

Click HERE for more Calli stories on this Blog

Data Centres are sucking up huge amounts of power - so what's the solution?...

In a remarkable topical twofer, not only is Microsoft turning to nuclear power to run its data centres, it's commissioned the restarting of the infamous Three Mile Island station – the site of the worst commercial nuclear accident in US history.

These power-hungry servers and databases were already becoming a drain on the electrical grid, but the explosion of AI has compounded the problem, with estimates data centres in the United States will suck as much as 35 GW of electricity by 2030, or almost twice the amount in 2022. 

That might not seem like much, but that would equate to about 9% of the projected average power draw of the entire US in 2030. Since a lot of energy and environmental planning is based on estimated power consumption, a lot of sums will need to be redone. Worse, the current policy in many parts of the developed world relies heavily on conversion to renewable sources like wind and solar, which are intermittent, while these data centres must run 24/7 without interruption. READ MORE...

www.newatlas.com

Car software patches are over 20% of recalls, study finds

 

Software fixes are now responsible for more than 1 in 5 automotive recalls. That's the key finding from a decade's worth of National Highway Traffic Safety Administration recall data, according to an analysis from the law firm DeMayo Law. While that's a sign of growing inconvenience for drivers, the silver lining is that a software patch is usually a much quicker fix than something requiring hardware replacement.

"Our analysis suggests we're witnessing a shift in how automotive recalls are handled. The growing number of software-related recalls, coupled with the ability to address issues remotely, could revolutionize the recall process for both manufacturers and vehicle owners," said a spokesperson for DeMayo Law.

In 2014, 34 of 277 automotive recalls were software fixes. The percentage of software recalls floated around 12–13 percent (apart from a spike in 2015) before growing steadily from 2020. In 2021, 16 percent of automotive recalls (61 out of 380) were for software. In 2022, almost 22 percent of recalls were software fixes (76 out of 348), and last year topped 23 percent (82 out of 356).

Come back olden days - when a car repair involved a chap with a bag of spanners. As an IT Consultant - I really do not want all this tech in my bike or car. These computer systems get baked in the summer, frozen / damp in the winter, ratted to death by potholes, etc... Then we rely on these electronic "get out of jail cards" to save our bacon, and wonder why they often fail...

www.arstechnica.com

"Self Driving" cars - or are they?...

You may be surprised to learn that "self-driving" cars don't always drive themselves.

Because these systems are far from infallible, companies like Amazon's robotaxi service Zoox often depend on a behind-the-scenes team of human technicians to remotely control their cars when they struggle to pilot themselves.

Today this facet of self-driving operations is more of an open — but closely-guarded — secret. But as The New York Times reports, for years these companies avoided mentioning that their supposedly autonomous vehicles were occasionally controlled by humans at all.

It's only been relatively recently, following several high profile debacles in the autonomous driving industry, that industry leaders, like Waymo this May, have acknowledged the role of human technicians.

And according to the NYT, none of these companies have shared just how many of these remote-technicians they employ, or how often they depend on them. In short, we don't know how deep this practice goes — and it's possible that the smoothest "self-driving" experiences out there are substantially undergirded by hidden human drivers.

General Motors' Cruise division effectively embarrassed the entire industry when one of its robotaxis injured a pedestrian last October, leading to a federal investigation into just how widespread these accidents were — and eventually the pulling of all 400 hundred of its vehicles off the streets.

To some degree, we can probably blame that blunder for the small degree of insight we're now afforded into the robotaxi industry's reliance on human intervention.

According to the NYT's sources, Cruise staffed about 1.5 workers per vehicle, including remote assistant techs. Zoox staffs at least one team of around three dozen people overseeing its handful of fully driverless robotaxis.

That seemingly undermines one of the economic selling points of robotaxi services compared to ride-hailing services like Uber: that they don't need humans behind the wheel.

"It may be cheaper just to pay a driver to sit in the car and drive it," Thomas W. Malone, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Center for Collective Intelligence, told the NYT.

www.futurism.com

A few days off for our Wedding Anniversary

Kim & I have taken a few day off for our wedding anniversary. We're enjoying what is probably the last of the summer :0).

A few days off: with friends & family, gym, motorcycling, cycling, eating out, shopping, BBQ, playing with dear Calli. Just goes to show you don't always need a "holiday" as such. A change is as good as a rest!

Hope you too can enjoy some time away from the bustle of day to day living.

With Blessings, DKC x

Reading for today: on the reconciliation of our problems

Heaven will solve our problems, but not, I think, by showing us subtle reconciliations between all our apparently contradictory notions. The notions will all be knocked from under our feet. We shall see that there never was any problem.

By C S Lewis

From A Grief Observed

Chinese electric vehicles ‘could be weaponised’ in Britain

Chinese electric vehicles being driven in Britain could be “weaponised” and should be banned from government use, a report has warned.

Modules within Chinese-made electric vehicles - could transmit sensitive data back to the country or even be remotely controlled, the China Strategic Risks Institute (CSRI) warned.

The think tank called for an end to Chinese carmakers being able to win government contracts. Last year it emerged that the Ministry of Defence used electric cars made by Chinese-owned MG.

Whitehall departments are buying up electric cars in an attempt to decarbonise their fleets. The report said the vehicles present a potentially greater security risk than petrol-powered vehicles because they are more likely to be equipped with internet-connected modules capable of collecting data and controlling the car’s functions.

“The UK public remains largely unaware of the dependency, disruption, and data security risks Chinese EVs pose via Chinese manufactured Cellular Internet of Things Modules (CIMs) within them,” it said.

Meanwhile in other news: Lord Mandelson (honorary president of the Great Britain–China Centre) has promised warmer UK relations with China...

www.telegraph.co.uk

Reading for today: The Soul, and God's love

This signature on each soul may be a product of heredity and environment, but that only means that heredity and environment are among the instruments whereby God creates a soul. I am considering not how, but why, He makes each soul unique. If He had no use for all these differences, I do not see why He should have created more souls than one. Be sure that the ins and outs of your individuality are no mystery to Him; and one day they will no longer be a mystery to you. 

The mould in which a key is made would be a strange thing, if you had never seen a key: and the key itself a strange thing if you had never seen a lock. Your soul has a curious shape because it is a hollow made to fit a particular swelling in the infinite contours of the Divine substance, or a key to unlock one of the doors in the house with many mansions. 

For it is not humanity in the abstract that is to be saved, but you—you, the individual reader, John Stubbs or Janet Smith. Blessed and fortunate creature, your eyes shall behold Him and not another’s. All that you are, sins apart, is destined, if you will let God have His good way, to utter satisfaction. The Brocken spectre ‘looked to every man like his first love’, because she was a cheat. But God will look to every soul like its first love because He is its first love. Your place in heaven will seem to be made for you and you alone, because you were made for it—made for it stitch by stitch as a glove is made for a hand.

By C.S. Lewis

From The Problem of Pain

Compiled in A Year with C.S. Lewis

Ford seeks patent for tech that listens to driver conversations to serve ads

Ford Motor Company is seeking a patent for technology that would allow it to tailor in-car advertising by listening to conversations among vehicle occupants, as well as by analysing a car’s historical location and other data, according to a patent application published late last month.

“In one example, the controller may monitor user dialogue to detect when individuals are in a conversation,” the patent application says. “The conversations can be parsed for keywords or phrases that may indicate where the occupants are traveling to.”

The tech — labelled as “in-vehicle advertisement presentation” — will determine where a car is located, how fast it is traveling, what type of road it is driving on and whether it is in traffic. It also will predict routes, speeds and destinations to customize ads to drivers, the application said.

The system could pull data from “audio signals within the vehicle and/or historical user data, selecting a number of the advertisements to present to the user during the trip,” the patent application said.

www.therecord.media

Americans lost $5.6 billion last year in cryptocurrency fraud scams, the FBI says

Americans were duped out of more than $5.6 billion last year through fraud schemes involving cryptocurrency, the FBI said in a report released Monday that shows a 45% jump in losses from 2022.

The FBI received nearly 70,000 complaints in 2023 by victims of financial fraud involving bitcoin, ether and other cryptocurrencies, according to the FBI. The most rampant scheme was investment fraud, which accounted for $3.96 billion of the losses.

“The decentralized nature of cryptocurrency, the speed of irreversible transactions, and the ability to transfer value around the world make cryptocurrency an attractive vehicle for criminals, while creating challenges to recover stolen funds,” wrote Michael Nordwall, assistant director of the FBI’s criminal investigative division.

Scammers will often make contact through dating apps or social media to build trust over several weeks or months before suggesting cryptocurrency investing, the FBI said. Once the relationship is built, they convince the targets to use fake websites or apps to invest their money, sometimes even allowing the victims to withdraw small amounts of money early on to make it seem legitimate.

www.apnews.com