S3 Inventory Adds Apache ORC output format and Amazon Athena Integration
Interesting to see Amazon are kind of putting their money behind ORC as a new public data interchange format with this
Spot Fleet now supports Target Tracking
Awesome, nice feature
(tags: spot-fleet spot-instances ec2 amazon aws scaling ops architecture)
IBM urged to avoid working on ‘extreme vetting’ of U.S. immigrants
ICE wants to use machine learning technology and social media monitoring to determine whether an individual is a “positively contributing member of society,” according to documents published on federal contracting websites. More than 50 civil society groups and more than 50 technical experts sent separate letters on Thursday to the Department of Homeland Security saying the vetting program as described was “tailor-made for discrimination” and contending artificial intelligence was unable to provide the information ICE desired.
(tags: civil-rights politics usa trump ice ibm civil-liberties immigration discrimination racism social-media)
Cordyceps even creepier than at first thought
Hughes’s team found that fungal cells infiltrate the ant’s entire body, including its head, but they leave its brain untouched. There are other parasites that manipulate their hosts without destroying their brains, says Kelly Weinersmith from Rice University. For example, one flatworm forms a carpet-like layer over the brain of the California killifish, leaving the brain intact while forcing the fish to behave erratically and draw the attention of birds—the flatworm’s next host. “But manipulation of ants by Ophiocordyceps is so exquisitely precise that it is perhaps surprising that the fungus doesn’t invade the brain of its host,” Weinersmith says. [….] So what we have here is a hostile takeover of a uniquely malevolent kind. Enemy forces invading a host’s body and using that body like a walkie-talkie to communicate with each other and influence the brain from afar. Hughes thinks the fungus might also exert more direct control over the ant’s muscles, literally controlling them “as a puppeteer controls as a marionette doll.” Once an infection is underway, he says, the neurons in the ant’s body—the ones that give its brain control over its muscles—start to die. Hughes suspects that the fungus takes over. It effectively cuts the ant’s limbs off from its brain and inserts itself in place, releasing chemicals that force the muscles there to contract. If this is right, then the ant ends its life as a prisoner in its own body. Its brain is still in the driver’s seat, but the fungus has the wheel.
(tags: biology gross cordyceps fungi fungus ants zombies infection brain parasites)
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‘I think you want a Unicomp […] They bought the old IBM model M factory line, it’s a model M with USB’ — a classic IBM-style clacky full size keyboard — https://twitter.com/SwartzCr/status/932678394021535751
Tech Leaders Dismayed by Weaponization of Social Media – IEEE Spectrum
“We have passed the fail-safe point,” McNamee said. “I don’t think we can get back to the Silicon Valley that I loved. At this point we just have to save America.”
(tags: propaganda fake-news facebook twitter social-media us-politics brexit internet russia silicon-valley usa)