Should the US Military Be Recruiting On Twitch?

The U.S. military has for years been using streaming channels and video gaming to recruit people. “Several branches of the military — with the exception of the Marines — have had esports teams since 2018,” reports The Verge. “And according to Military.com, the Army’s esports efforts alone generated 3,500 recruiting leads in fiscal year 2019.” But the question is… should they…

Russian Elite Given Experimental COVID-19 Vaccine Since April

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Scores of Russia’s business and political elite have been given early access to an experimental vaccine against Covid-19, according to people familiar with the effort, as the country races to be among the first to develop an inoculation. Top executives at companies including aluminum giant United Co. Rusal, as well as billionaire tycoons…

Slack Accuses Microsoft of Illegally Crushing Competition

Microsoft is undeniably one of the Big Tech elite, given its size, wealth and stock market value. But the software giant has stood apart from Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple in one important respect: Microsoft, once the bully of the tech world, has escaped antitrust scrutiny so far. Now Slack, whose popular chat and collaboration software has become embedded in the…

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt Wants To Create a Government-Funded AI University

The U.S. government’s approach of letting Silicon Valley drive the country’s technological boom has left the government itself scrambling for tech talent. Now, a federal commission led by ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt and former Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert O. Work wants to create a university to train new government coders. From a report: The school would be called the U.S….

Could Pine64’s Cheap Linux Smartphone Replace Your PC?

TechRadar reports on Pine64’s new “PinePhone Convergence Package” handset, calling it “a Linux desktop you can keep in your pocket” that can be used as a PC when plugged into an external display and a keyboard. The device costs just $199 and is aimed primarily at Linux enthusiasts. The PinePhone Linux smartphone is based on the Alpine Linux-based PostmarketOS that can…

‘If War Breaks Out on Top of the World’

The United States Air Force’s elite “PJ” pararescue units and Alaska National Guard units “are ready to respond if war breaks out on top of the world,” reports a new article in Popular Mechanics: With much of the ice cap melted, the Arctic is teeming with competitive activity because it’s no longer an impenetrable land of glaciers — void of economic…

Eyes on the stars: UAE’s Mars probe a first for the Arab world

The oil-rich United Arab Emirates has built a nuclear power programme and sent a man to space, and now plans to join another elite club by sending a probe to Mars. Source: https://phys.org/news/2020-07-eyes-stars-uae-mars-probe.html…

Venture Capitalists’ Critiques of Journalism Secretly Leaked to Journalists

A confrontation between venture capitalists and journalists has been slowly playing out on Twitter — and in an incendiary article on VICE US. It started when… A luggage startup’s co-CEO complained on Instagram about young reporters who “forgo their personal ethics.”
A New York Times reporter called the posts “incoherent” and “disappointing.”
Angel investor Balaji S. Srinivasa (also the former CTO of Coinbase)…

Stone Age ruling elite in Ireland may have had incestuous marriages

DNA analysis of the 5000-year-old bones of a man buried in the Newgrange passage tomb in Ireland suggest the ruling elite at the time married within their family like some ancient Egyptian rulers Source: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2246227-stone-age-ruling-elite-in-ireland-may-have-had-incestuous-marriages/?utm_campaign=RSS%7CNSNS&utm_source=NSNS&utm_medium=RSS&utm_content=home…

Why One of Kubernetes’ Creators Moved From Google To Microsoft

Long-time Slashdot reader destinyland writes: One of the three Google employees who created Kubernetes — the open source container-orchestration platform now maintained by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation — was software engineer Brendan Burns. But in 2016 Burns became an engineer at Microsoft (where since March he’s been a corporate vice president at Microsoft). This week in a new podcast interview…