Delta Air Lines earlier this month revamped its SkyMiles program to prioritize dollars spent over miles flown for status. This shift positions SkyMiles more as a program for high spenders than frequent flyers, causing dissatisfaction among many, including industry insiders.

Historically, airline regulations, controlled by the government, ensured fair pricing until deregulation in 1978. This deregulation spurred airlines to introduce competitive strategies, transforming frequent-flyer programs into intricate points systems. These programs now, a piece in The Atlantic argues, closely resemble financial systems, with airlines minting and selling points for profit. From the report: Here's how the system works now: Airlines create points out of nothing and sell them for real money to banks with co-branded credit cards. The banks award points to cardholders for spending, and both the banks and credit-card companies make money off the swipe fees from the use of the card. Cardholders can redeem points for flights, as well as other goods and services sold through the airlines' proprietary e-commerce portals.

For the airlines, this is a great deal. They incur no costs from points until they are redeemed -- or ever, if the points are forgotten. This setup has made loyalty programs highly lucrative. Consumers now charge nearly 1 percent of U.S. GDP to Delta's American Express credit cards alone. A 2020 analysis by the Financial Times found that Wall Street lenders valued the major airlines' mileage programs more highly than the airlines themselves. United's MileagePlus program, for example, was valued at $22 billion, while the company's market cap at the time was only $10.6 billion.

Is this a good deal for the American consumer? That's a trickier question. Paying for a flight or a hotel room with points may feel like a free bonus, but because credit-card-swipe fees increase prices across the economy -- Visa or Mastercard takes a cut of every sale -- redeeming points is more like getting a little kickback. Certainly the system is bad for Americans who don't have points-earning cards. They pay higher prices on ordinary goods and services but don't get the points, effectively subsidizing the perks of card users, who tend to be wealthier already.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Ford Motor Company on Monday halted construction of a $3.5 billion electric vehicle battery plant project in the Marshall area amid months of battles with local residents, Republicans in Congress over its use of Chinese technology and an auto industry strike in its second week. "We're pausing work, and we're going to limit spending on construction at Marshall until we're confident about our ability to competitively run the plant," Ford spokesman T.R. Reid told The Detroit News on Monday. Reid said a "number of considerations" were at play in the company's business decision, but wouldn't say whether the United Auto Workers' ongoing strike of Ford and its crosstown rivals was a factor. "We haven't made a final decision about the investment there," Reid said of the Marshall site. The pause in construction is effective Monday, Reid said.

The Dearborn-based automaker announced on Feb. 13 that it planned to invest about $3.5 billion in an electric vehicle battery plant park in Marshall. As part of the deal, Ford secured about $210 million in direct tax incentives plus a 15-year property tax abatement worth about $775 million over the life of the tax break. There was also roughly $750 million set aside for site prep at the location, with a $299 million earmark allocated for the Marshall Area Economic Development Alliance and a $330 million earmark pushed toward the Michigan Department of Transportation budget for expanding roadways and freeway connections for the presumed Ford plant's truck traffic. Another $120 million was routed to MAEDA earlier this month through the SOAR fund. [...] The 2.5-million-square-foot battery park was to be run by a wholly-owned subsidiary of Ford called "Blue Oval Battery Park Michigan." The plant would employ 2,500 people with pay ranging from $20 to $50 an hour.

Twenty years ago, a group of friends shot a Matrix fan film on a limited budget. Sharing their creation with the rest of the word initially appeared to be too expensive, but then they discovered a new technology called BitTorrent. Fast forward two decades and their "Fanimatrix" release is the oldest active torrent that's still widely shared today. Ernesto Van der Sar writes via TorreantFreak: The oldest surviving torrent we have seen is a copy of the Matrix fan film "The Fanimatrix." The torrent was created in September 2003 and will turn 20 years old in a few days. A truly remarkable achievement. The film was shot by a group of New Zealand friends. With a limited budget of just $800, nearly half of which was spent on a leather jacket, they managed to complete the project in nine days. While shooting the film was possible with these financial constraints, finding a distribution channel proved to be a major hurdle. Free video-sharing services didn't exist yet and server bandwidth was still very costly. Technically the team could host their own server, but that would cost thousands of dollars, which wasn't an option. Luckily, however, the group's IT guy, Sebastian Kai Frost, went looking for alternatives.

Frost had a bit part in the film and did some other work as well, but the true breakthrough came when he stumbled upon a new technology called BitTorrent. This appeared to be exactly what they were looking for. "It looked promising because it scaled such that the more popular the file became, the more the bandwidth load was shared. It seemed like the perfect solution," Frost told us earlier. After convincing the crew that BitTorrent was the right choice, Frost created a torrent on September 28, 2003. He also compiled a tracker on his own Linux box and made sure everything was running correctly. Today, more than twenty years have passed and the torrent is still up and running with more than a hundred seeders. As far as we know, it's the oldest active torrent on the Internet, one that deserves to be in the history books. "I never expected to become the world's oldest torrent but now it's definitely become a thing I'd love to keep carrying on. So I'll be keeping this active as long as I physically can," Frost tells TorrentFreak. "It's really heartening seeing the community pull together around this torrent, despite its usually low transfer count, and work together to keep it alive and kicking. It warms my heart on the daily."

"We're super pumped that it's still going and that people still take an interest in it. Looking forward to the 25th and having something special to share with the world," Frost concludes.

The United States Space Force reportedly discussed setting up a hotline with China to prevent crises in space, according to Reuters, citing U.S. commander General Chance Saltzman. From the report: The chief of space operations said a direct line of communication between the Space Force and its Chinese counterpart would be valuable in de-escalating tensions but that the U.S. had not yet engaged with China to establish one. "What we have talked about on the U.S. side at least is opening up a line of communication to make sure that if there is a crisis, we know who we can contact," Saltzman said, adding that it would be up to President Joe Biden and the State Department to take the lead on such discussions. The U.S. Space Force, founded in 2019, also does not have a direct line of communication with its Russian counterpart.

Mark Tyson writes via Tom's Hardware: A future version of [Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) technology] is likely to include full neural rendering, hinted Bryan Catanzaro, a Nvidia VP of Applied Deep Learning Research. In a round table discussion organized by Digital Foundry (video), various video game industry experts talked about the future of AI in the business. During the discussion, Nvidia's Catanzaro raised a few eyebrows with his openness to predict some key features of a hypothetical "DLSS 10." [...]

We've seen significant developments in Nvidia's DLSS technology over the years. First launched with the RTX 20-series GPUs, many wondered about the true value of technologies like the Tensor cores being included in gaming GPUs. The first ray tracing games, and the first version of DLSS, were of questionable merit. However, DLSS 2.X improved the tech and made it more useful, leading to it being more widely utilized -- and copied, first via FSR2 and later with XeSS. DLSS 3 debuted with the RTX 40-series graphics cards, adding Frame Generation technology. With 4x upscaling and frame generation, neural rendering potentially allows a game to only fully render 1/8 (12.5%) of the pixels. Most recently, DLSS 3.5 offered improved denoising algorithms for ray tracing games with the introduction of Ray Reconstruction technology.

The above timeline raises questions about where Nvidia might go next with future versions of DLSS. And of course, "Deep Learning Super Sampling" no longer really applies, as the last two additions have targeted other aspects of rendering. Digital Foundry asked that question to the group: "Where do you see DLSS in the future? What other problem areas could machine learning tackle in a good way?" Bryan Catanzaro immediately brought up the topic of full neural rendering. This idea isn't quite as far out as it may seem. Catanzaro reminded the panel that, at the NeurIPS conference in 2018, Nvidia researchers showed an open-world demo of a world being rendered in real-time using a neural network. During that demo the UE4 game engine provided data about what objects were in a scene, where they were, and so on, and the neural rendering provided all the on-screen graphics. "DLSS 10 (in the far far future) is going to be a completely neural rendering system," Catanzaro added. The result will be "more immersive and more beautiful" games than most can imagine today.

Emma Roth reporting via The Verge: Facebook can be sued over allegations that its advertising algorithm is discriminatory, a California state court of appeals ruled last week. The decision stems from a class action lawsuit filed against Facebook in 2020, which accused the company of not showing insurance ads to women and older people in violation of civil rights laws. The case centers around Samantha Liapes, a 48-year-old woman who turned to Facebook to find an insurance provider. The lawsuit alleges that Facebook's ad delivery system didn't show Liapes ads for insurance due to her age and gender.

In a September 21st ruling, the appeals court reversed a previous decision that said Section 230 (which protects online platforms from legal liability if users post illegal content) shields Facebook from accountability. The appeals court concluded that the case "adequately" alleges that Facebook "knew insurance advertisers intentionally targeted its ads based on users' age and gender" in violation of the Unruh Civil Rights Act. It also found significant similarities between Facebook's ad platform and Roommates.com, a service that exceeded the protections of Section 230 by including dropdown menus with options that allowed for discrimination. "There is little difference with Facebook's ad tools" and their targeting capabilities, the court concluded. "Facebook does not merely proliferate and disseminate content as a publisher ... it creates, shapes, or develops content" with the tools.

Bill Toulas writes via Bleeping Computer reports: Google is notifying Gmail users that the webmail's Basic HTML view will be deprecated in January 2024, and users will require modern browsers to continue using the service. After that date, all users of the popular webmail service will automatically be redirected to the more modern Standard view, which supports all the latest usability and security features.

The basic HTML view is a stripped-down version of Gmail that does not offer users chat, spell checking, keyboard shortcuts, adding or importing contacts, setting custom "from" addresses, or using rich text formatting. This feature is designed for people living in areas with internet access, using older hardware with limited memory, or using legacy web browsers that do not support current HTML features.

However, one of the biggest reasons users use HTML view is that text-to-speech tools used by users with visual impairment are more reliable, as the Standard view introduces technical complexities that are harder for these tools to manage. Nonetheless, Google has decided to retire Gmail's HTML view without providing specific reasons.

Reddit announced a contributor program on Monday, which awards users actual, real money for their fake internet points. From a report: Now, eligible users will be able to convert their Reddit gold and karma into fiat currency (no, not crypto), which is dispersed once per month. So far, the Reddit contributor program is limited to users in the United States (to start, at least) who are over the age of 18 and can verify their identity via Persona and Stripe. Accounts must have existed for over 30 days, and only safe for work posts can be monetized.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Following the launch of the iPhone 15 series today, a few readers of our website have reached out to highlight that the devices support USB-C to Ethernet adapters, allowing for a wired internet connection with faster download speeds than Wi-Fi. Apple confirmed this information in a support document last week, with USB to Ethernet adapters listed as compatible with iPhone 15 models. When an iPhone is connected to an Ethernet cable, an otherwise hidden Ethernet menu appears in the Settings app with IP-related information and various configuration options.

During World War II, "Los Alamos was the perfect spot for the U.S. government's top-secret Manhattan Project," remembers the Associated Press.

"The community is facing growing pains again, 80 years later, as Los Alamos National Laboratory takes part in the nation's most ambitious nuclear weapons effort since World War II." The mission calls for modernizing the arsenal with droves of new workers producing plutonium cores — key components for nuclear weapons. Some 3,300 workers have been hired in the last two years, with the workforce now topping more than 17,270. Close to half of them commute to work from elsewhere in northern New Mexico and from as far away as Albuquerque, helping to nearly double Los Alamos' population during the work week... While the priority at Los Alamos is maintaining the nuclear stockpile, the lab also conducts a range of national security work and research in diverse fields of space exploration, supercomputing, renewable energy and efforts to limit global threats from disease and cyberattacks...

The headline grabber, though, is the production of plutonium cores. Lab managers and employees defend the massive undertaking as necessary in the face of global political instability. With most people in Los Alamos connected to the lab, opposition is rare. But watchdog groups and non-proliferation advocates question the need for new weapons and the growing price tag... Aside from pressing questions about the morality of nuclear weapons, watchdogs argue the federal government's modernization effort already has outpaced spending predictions and is years behind schedule. Independent government analysts issued a report earlier this month that outlined the growing budget and schedule delays.
"A hairline scratch on a warhead's polished black cone could send the bomb off course..." notes an earlier article.

"The U.S. will spend more than $750 billion over the next 10 years replacing almost every component of its nuclear defenses, including new stealth bombers, submarines and ground-based intercontinental ballistic missiles in the country's most ambitious nuclear weapons effort since the Manhattan Project."

In GNOME Shell there's a dark background for the Quick Settings menu, the calendar applet, and desktop notification-- but in Ubuntu 23.10, "the default Yaru theme uses a light style for GNOME Shell elements," according to the blog OMG Ubuntu.

"But there's a new GNOME extension that lets you change this without affecting the rest of your desktop..." You can make GNOME Shell dark in Ubuntu by turning the 'Dark Style' toggle on but that also makes apps use a dark theme too. Not everyone wants that; they want a 'mixed' look... [I]f you would like to use dark GNOME Shell elements in Ubuntu 23.10 without using the dark mode preference (which, as said, will turn your apps dark too) then the Dark Style GNOME extension is exactly what you need.
It only works with Ubuntu 23.10 and GNOME 45.

At 11 a.m. Friday in Orlando Florida, a train completed its 240-mile journey from Miami, inaugurating a new line from Brightline that reaches speeds of up to 125 miles per hour and reduces the journey to just under three hours. "This is going to revolutionize transportation not just in the country and the state of Florida but right here in Central Florida and really just make our backyard bigger," Brightline's director of public affairs Katie Mitzner told a local news station.

Ironically, within hours a different Brightline train had struck and killed a pedestrian. "Brightline trains have the highest death rate in the U.S.," reports one local news station, "fatally striking 98 people since Miami-West Palm operations began — about one death for every 32,000 miles its trains travel, according to an ongoing Associated Press analysis." A police spokesperson said the death appeared to be a suicide.

"None of the accidents have been determined to be Brightline's fault," writes The Points Guy, "and the company has spent millions of dollars on safety improvements at grade crossings. It also launched a public-relations push to encourage all residents along its corridor to commit to staying safe. However, it is a very real and ongoing element of this service in Florida. We hope these efforts will continue to further reduce these incidents in communities that see frequent Brightline trains coming through."

The Points Guy also shared photos in their blog post describing what it was like to take a ride on America's only privately owned and operated inter-city passenger railroad: When the train ultimately pulled out of the station, a surreal feeling washed over me. Those of us on the inaugural service were the first passengers to ride the rails along this stretch of Florida's east coast in more than 55 years. Florida East Coast Railway, which still owns the tracks and operates frequent freight trains along them, ceased passenger service on July 31, 1968... Each seat has multiple power outlets, and the Wi-Fi truly was high-speed based on my experience and the test I ran. I was even able to successfully join (and participate in) our morning editorial team call on Zoom...

The scenery along the route was simply spectacular... With no grade crossings and fencing on both sides, we reached 125 mph for the final stretch of the journey. The cars along the highway stood no chance of keeping up as we traversed the 30-plus miles in only 18 minutes as the tower at Orlando International Airport came into view... With plans to expand to Tampa and construction underway on its planned Los Angeles-to-Las Vegas route, we likely haven't heard the last from Brightline as it seeks to transform train service in the United States.
"I think what Brightline has done here has laid the blueprint for how speed rail can be built in America with private dollars versus government funding," investor Ryn Rosberg told a local news site. "It's much more efficient and it gets done a lot quicker."

"There have been colorful station openings, lawsuits, threats of lawsuits, threats of legislation and yes, fatal accidents," writes the Palm Beach Post, "but Brightline train passengers can now take the train from any of its five South Florida stations to visit the Disney World, Universal Studios or Sea World tourist attractions."

Long-time Slashdot reader 140Mandak262Jamuna shared this article from the Washington Post: There is a theoretical, magic tipping point for adoption of electric vehicles. Once somewhere between 5 and 10 percent of new car sales are all-electric, some researchers say, huge numbers of drivers will follow. They predict that electric car sales will then soar — to 25 percent, 50 percent and eventually to close to 80 percent of new sales. Early adopters who love shiny new technologies will be replaced by mainstream consumers just looking for a good deal. Last year, the United States finally passed that elusive mark — 5 percent of all new cars sold in the fourth quarter were fully electric. And earlier this year, all-electric vehicles made up about 7 percent of new car sales...

If the pattern holds, the United States should start to see rapid growth in the next few years. And automakers have gone all-in on the transition. As of early 2023, U.S.-based car companies have announced about $173 billion in spending to shift to electric vehicles. Volkswagen, Ford, BMW, General Motors, and many more car companies are all making electric cars. There are more than 40 all-electric models on offer in the United States.
The article points out that in Norway, more than 80% of cars purchased are now fully electric.

For comparision, in the first half of 2023 in California, about 25% of new-car purchases were electric vehicles.

Six months ago Republican Senator Josh Hawley proposed legislation banning downloads of TikTok in the U.S. But this week he told the Wall Street Journal that "TikTok and its dark-money cronies are spending vast amounts of money to kill these bills."

The newspaper argues that TikTok's "friends" in the U.S. government — backed by billionaire financier Jeff Yass — "helped stall attempts to outlaw America's most-downloaded app." Yass's investment company, Susquehanna International Group, bet big on TikTok in 2012, buying a stake in parent company ByteDance now measured at about 15%. That translates into a personal stake for Yass of 7% in ByteDance. It is worth roughly $21 billion based on the company's recent valuation, or much of his $28 billion net worth as gauged by Bloomberg.

Yass is also one of the top donors to the Club for Growth, an influential conservative group that rallied Republican opposition to a TikTok ban. Yass has donated $61 million to the Club for Growth's political-spending arm since 2010, or about 24% of its total, according to federal records. Club for Growth made public its opposition to banning TikTok in March, in an opinion article by its president, at a time when sentiment against the platform among segments of both parties was running high on Capitol Hill... With many Democrats already skeptical of a ban, the whittling away of Republican support killed momentum for several bills, including the bipartisan Restrict Act backed by the Biden administration...

TikTok's own lobbying efforts in Washington have included hundreds of meetings and other contacts, according to a person familiar with the matter. One of its main arguments to Republicans has been that a majority of ByteDance's shareholders are Americans, and some are well-connected conservatives, this person said. The lobbying appears to have helped push House Republican lawmakers to back away from the idea of a ban on TikTok and focus instead on legislation that would put new legal protections in place for users' personal data...

The Biden administration hasn't indicated any change in its effort to ban the app or force its sale. It could still try to use executive powers to ban it, or force a sale to remove Chinese control. But without legislation, analysts say those orders could be overturned in court.

America's Department of Defense recently exercised a contract option with X-energy, a private nuclear reactor engineering company, seeking "a thorough analysis of design options" for a transportable micro nuclear reactor. The Department says its ultimate goal is "a reactor design which is ready for licensing by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for both commercial ventures and military resiliency."

Their announcement also notes that additional work is already underway by another company, BWX Technologies, on a prototype micro reactor: "Due to their extraordinary energy density, nuclear reactors have the potential to serve multiple critical functions for meeting resiliency needs in contested logistical environments," said Dr. Jeff Waksman, Project Pele program manager. "By developing two unique designs, we will provide the Services with a broad range of options as they consider potential uses of nuclear power for both Installation and Operational energy applications in the near future."

The Defense Department uses approximately 30 Terawatt-hours of electricity per year and more than 10 million gallons of fuel per day — levels that are only expected to increase due to anticipated electrification of the vehicle fleet and maturation of future energy-intensive capabilities. A safe, small, transportable nuclear reactor would address this growing demand with a resilient, carbon-free energy source that does not add to the Defense Department's fuel needs, while supporting mission-critical operations in remote and austere environments...

"The Strategic Capabilities Office specializes in adapting commercial technology for military purposes," said Jay Dryer, director. "By nurturing and developing multiple micro reactor designs, SCO will not just provide options for the military Services, but will also help jumpstart a truly competitive commercial marketplace for micro reactors."

The use of AI in the economy presents many unanswered questions for policymakers though there is some evidence that it could improve labor productivity, according to Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook. From a report: "The impact of AI on the economy and monetary policy will depend on whether AI is just another app or something more profound," Cook said in remarks prepared for delivery at the National Bureau of Economic Research's conference on artificial intelligence in Toronto Friday. "Empirical evidence is still patchy, but there is work showing that generative AI improves productivity in a variety of settings."

Cook, the first Black woman to serve on the Fed's board, was among central bank officials who on Wednesday voted unanimously to hold rates steady in a range of 5.25% to 5.5%. President Joe Biden named Cook as a governor on the board last year. She was endorsed for a full 14-year term in a 51-47 Senate vote earlier this month. Cook predicted that greater use of AI will be similar to the spread of computation in the workplace and could present "a difficult transition for some workers. [...] Any large change in the labor force will generate disruptions and challenges that will need to be addressed to help workers adapt and thrive."

The Federal Communications Commission is taking steps to restrict Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) providers from easily accessing US telephone numbers. Over the past several years, robocallers have exploited VoIP providers to inundate US citizens with unwanted calls, many of which come from falsified numbers. Previously, the regulations allowed VoIP services relatively uncomplicated access to US phone numbers. ArsTechnica: But under rules adopted by the FCC yesterday, VoIP providers will face some extra hurdles. They will have to "make robocall-related certifications to help ensure compliance with the Commission's rules targeting illegal robocalls," and "disclose and keep current information about their ownership, including foreign ownership, to mitigate the risk of providing bad actors abroad with access to US numbering resources," the FCC said. The FCC order will take effect 30 days after it's published in the Federal Register. A public draft of the order was released ahead of the FCC meeting.

In his first major public interview since the DMV cut their San Francisco fleet in half, Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt said "we cannot expect perfection" from the self-driving cars, and vaguely threatened to leave town if regulators curtail them any further. From a report: The self-driving robotaxis of GM subsidiary Cruise and Google-owned Waymo seemed like they were heading in a successful direction when they won approval from the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) last month to run their self-driving robotaxis at all hours in SF without restrictions. But barely a week later, the California DMV demanded Cruise cut it SF fleet in half, following post-Outside Lands stalling incidents, a night of multiple accidents, and SF City Attorney David Chiu filing a motion to get the CPUC to reverse their decision.

Cruse CEO Kyle Vogt sat down for a (very friendly) 40-minute interview Wednesday at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference, which can be seen in its entirety above. And he seems to be going on offense against the regulatory pushback his company is getting from SF and California lawmakers. "It's kind of fun as a society to poke at the differences between AVs (autonomous vehicles) and humans, but if we're serious about safety in our cities, we should be rolling out the red carpet for AVs," Vogt said, according to the SF Standard.

Brazilian engineer Luiz Andre Barroso, who ripped up the rulebook at Google, has died. His radical ideas for data centers laid the foundations for cloud computing. Wired: Luiz Andre Barroso had never designed a data center before Google asked him to do it in the early 2000s. By the time he finished his first, he had overturned many conventions of the computing industry, laying the foundations for Silicon Valley's development of cloud computing.

Barroso, a 22-year veteran of Google who unexpectedly died on September 16 at age 59, built his data centers with low-cost components instead of expensive specialized hardware. He reimagined how they worked together to develop the concept of "the data center as a computer," which now underpins the web, mobile apps, and other internet services.

Jen Fitzpatrick, senior vice president of Google's infrastructure organization, says Barroso left an indelible imprint at the company whose contributions to the industry are countless. "We lost a beloved friend, colleague and respected leader," she writes in a statement on behalf of the company.

FrankOVD writes: Google is being sued by a widow who says her husband drowned in September 2022 after Google Maps directed him over a collapsed bridge in Hickory, North Carolina. Google failed to correct its map service despite warnings about the broken bridge two years before the accident, according to the lawsuit filed Tuesday by Alicia Paxson in Wake County Superior Court. Philip Paxson "died tragically while driving home from his daughter's ninth birthday party, when he drove off of an unmarked, unbarricaded collapsed bridge in Hickory, North Carolina while following GPS directions," the complaint said.

The Snow Creek Bridge reportedly collapsed in 2013 and wasn't repaired. Barricades were typically in place but "were removed after being vandalized and were missing at the time of Paxson's wreck," according to The Charlotte Observer. The lawsuit has five defendants, including Google and its owner Alphabet. The other defendants are James Tarlton and two local business entities called Tarde, LLC and Hinckley Gauvain, LLC. Tarlton and the two businesses "owned, controlled, and/or were otherwise responsible for the land" containing the bridge, the lawsuit said.