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Two major tech conferences scheduled to book thousands of hotel rooms in crime-infested San Francisco have been canceled. The San Francisco Business Times reports that the “IBM-owned open-source software giant Red Hat Inc. has canceled plans to host its annual technology summit at San Francisco’s Moscone Center in 2024 and 2025.” Two years wiped off the books. The report adds that both the 2024 and 2025 conferences would have generated around 40,000 hotel nights. Instead, the conferences are moving to Denver in 2024 and Orlando in 2025.

New cars and trucks are packed with sensors and technology that protect and pamper drivers and passengers. But those features are also raising the cost of repairs after accidents. The average cost of making damaged cars good as new has soared 36% since 2018, and may top $5,000 by the end of this year, according to Mitchell, a company that provides data and software to insurance companies and auto repair businesses. That big increase is the main reason that insurance premiums have been soaring — up 17% in the 12 months through May. New SUVs and pickup trucks, including a...

Magic Mushrooms. LSD. Ketamine. The Drugs That Power Silicon Valley. Entrepreneurs including Elon Musk and Sergey Brin are part of a drug movement that proponents hope will expand minds, enhance lives and produce business breakthroughs Elon Musk takes ketamine. Sergey Brin sometimes enjoys magic mushrooms. Executives at venture-capital firm Founders Fund, known for its investments in SpaceX and Facebook, have thrown parties that include psychedelics. Routine drug use has moved from an after-hours activity squarely into corporate culture, leaving boards and business leaders to wrestle with their responsibilities for a workforce that frequently uses. At the vanguard are tech executives...

Alber’s letter enumerated those steps: "1) Divide the nation philosophically. 2) Foment racial strife. 3) Cause distrust of police authority. 4) Swarm the nation’s borders indiscriminately and unconstitutionally. 5) Engender the military strength to weaken it. 6) Overburden citizens with more unfair taxation. 7) Encourage civil rioting and discourage accountability for all crime. 8) Control all balloting. 9) Control all media."

An expert and entrepreneur in the field of artificial intelligence warned that while the new technology has the potential for massive benefits, it could also prove "too powerful and too disruptive" for humanity, expressing doubt about the federal government's ability to address such a challenge. Kevin Baragona worked as a software engineer but recognized the potential impact of AI, which led him to start DeepAI in 2016 to help bring the new technology to fruition. The free online service is growing rapidly, with users increasing tenfold over the past year. DeepAI was the first company to offer an online AI...

A few related questions for our FReeper computer gurus: Has anyone tried upgrading a fairly competent* Windows computer with an older processor from Win 10 Pro to Win 11 Pro? Are significant "tricks involved?** Then were there any subsequent problems with following updates (immediately after installation of Win 11 Pro?) *The 1st computer in question has an i7 6600u processor, 16gb DDR4 RAM, and a 512GB NVME SSD. (Pretty quick machine.) Then my immediate family & I have a few slightly "lesser" Win 10 Pro machines (which run great, and is as my custom I'll likely keep Win 10 Pro...

Australian government agencies' use of Chinese-made technology has been making headlines again. This time, the potential threat comes from DJI drones produced by China-headquartered company Da Jiang Innovations. A cessation order signed earlier this month will see the Australian Defence Force (ADF) suspend its use of DJI products, pending a six-month security audit of the force's supply chain. DJI drones were being used for training and military exercises. DJI joins a growing list of Chinese technology producers spurring anxiety in Australia and among allies. But the disproportionate focus on Chinese-made technologies might not be doing Australia's national security much good....

The germanium-tin processor was fabricated at the Helmholtz Nano Facility, the Helmholtz Association's central technology platform for the manufacturing of nanostructures and circuits. Credit: Forschungszentrum Juelich Scientists at Forschungszentrum Jülich have fabricated a new type of transistor from a germanium–tin alloy that has several advantages over conventional switching elements. Charge carriers can move faster in the material than in silicon or germanium, which enables lower voltages in operation. The transistor thus appears to be a promising candidate for future low-power, high-performance chips, and possibly also for the development of future of quantum computers. Over the past 70 years, the number...

Latest job cuts point to ongoing weakness in tech sector.. SAN JOSE — Hundreds more tech and biotech layoffs have rattled the Bay Area job market, cutbacks that hint the sectors are still wobbly and have yet to shift back into hiring mode. IBM, Accenture, Amplitude and Myovant Sciences are among the most recent companies to reveal staffing cutbacks in the Bay Area, according to documents on file with the state’s labor agency. The most recent layoffs produced a combined total job loss of just over 300 positions in the Bay Area. ... All told, starting in July 2022, tech...

The 13-year-old Utah boy hung out in the typical online spaces for someone his age: The chat app Discord. The gaming platform Roblox. And, of course, Twitter. But for more than two months last year, on those very platforms, the boy was being sexually groomed by an adult who was 13 years older and hundreds of miles away. It started in private messages then moved into public view on Twitter. It ended in a horror story. The boy’s father went to check on him one night and found him missing, his window open, the bedroom freezing. The boy was allegedly...

https://ublockorigin.com/ is a Chrome extension. I hate ads and I thought that others here may appreciate. My apologies if this is bad Freepettiqute.

The FBI is warning consumers about “juice jacking,” where bad actors use public chargers to infect phones and devices with malware. The law enforcement agency says consumers should avoid using public chargers at malls and airports, and stick to their own USB cables and charging plugs.

Google, Twitter, Meta and TikTok’s executive ranks have included over 200 former employees of surveillance government agencies, creating an employment pipeline between the government and Big Tech companies, a Daily Caller investigation found. The technology companies recruited 248 employees from the DOJ, FBI, CIA and DHS, a LinkedIn search revealed. The hiring occurred mostly between 2017-2022, with several filling top director positions after having decade-long careers in the surveillance agencies. Google hired 130 former DOJ, DHS, CIA and FBI employees, the Daily Caller’s key term cursory search on LinkedIn found. Meta, the company that owns Facebook and Instagram, employed 47...

1 With its current pace of development, artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to replace millions of jobs rather than simply automating specific tasks, according to an executive coaching firm, with the report coming out amid a tightening of the labor market. Chicago-based Challenger Gray asked OpenAI’s popular chatbot, “What jobs can ChatGPT replace?” to which the AI answered with a list. The firm took the list, acquired the numbers of people employed in the specific jobs from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, and added up the information to arrive at 4.8 million—reflecting the number of jobs potentially threatened...

The Challenger, Gray and Christmas job cuts report is out for March and it revealed a year-over-year (YoY) increase in US job cuts of 319%. That is the largest increase in job cuts for a non-recession month. In other words, this feels like a recession. Where were the job cuts in March? Technology got blasted followed by financial. Can we get someone to get Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen to lose HER job? Silly me, of course not!

The government says it is working "at pace" on a plan to prevent UK tech firms caught in the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank from running out of cash. The Treasury said it wanted to "minimise damage to some of our most promising companies in the UK" after the US bank's failure on Friday. Firms could start to run into problems on Monday morning without intervention. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, Chancellor Jeremy Hunt and Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey "were up late last night" and have been "working through the weekend to come up with a solution" to the...

The aftermath of the pandemic-era tech boom has taken another San Francisco victim. Autonomous trucking software company Embark Trucks is laying off 230 workers and moving toward a total shutdown, the firm announced Friday, less than 16 months after it went public at a $5.2 billion valuation. Friday’s layoff round represented about 70% of the company, according to an email to employees from CEO Alex Rodrigues. Workers will receive severance pay through June 2, health benefits through the end of August and help figuring out visas, if needed, Rodrigues said. Embark is also shuttering offices in southern California and Houston....

The online job and social site listed the top skills in areas such as IT, as well as engineering, recruiting, sales, and marketing.LinkedIn today released an exhaustive list of skills employers prioritize when recruiting, posting, and hiring for jobs on the company's website.“It's true that topics like layoffs are trending on LinkedIn and conversations around 'recession' are up nearly 900% since last year," the company said in the report. "The rate of global LinkedIn member job change has flatlined for the first time since March 2021. No matter the setback, looming re-org, or change in strategy, learning in-demand skills can...

The Remote Kiss device, created by the Changzhou Vocational Institute of Mechatronic Technology in China, allows users to share kisses over a long distance with use of a set of silicon lips and a smartphone app. Photo courtesy of Taobao Feb. 27 (UPI) -- A Chinese company is selling a remote kissing device designed to allow long-distance lovers to share their smooches via a cellphone app. The Remote Kiss device, created by the Changzhou Vocational Institute of Mechatronic Technology, uses a set of silicon lips to replicate the pressure, movement and temperature of a kiss that is then replicated by...

A research team from the UK's Nottingham Trent University, the Australian National University and the University of New South Wales Canberra has developed a proof-of-concept display technology that could replace the LCD panels common to many of today's big-screen TVs. Though some modern high-end televisions may sport quantum-dot displays or OLED panels, many of the cheaper models available will use LCD (liquid crystal display) technology, polarizing filters and LED backlighting. But the researchers say that the limit has been reached for development of this kind of technology. "The capability of conventional displays has reached its peak and is unlikely to...