By BeauHD from
Slashdot's act-of-retaliation department:
Tesla has fired a female engineer who accused the company of ignoring her complaints of sexual harassment and paying her less than her male counterparts. AJ Vandermeyden, who went public with her discrimination lawsuit against Tesla in February, was dismissed from the company this week. The Guardian reports: Vandermeyden had claimed she was taunted and catcalled by male employees and that Tesla failed to address her complaints about the harassment, unequal pay and discrimination. "It's shocking in this day and age that this is still a fight we have to have," she said at the time. In a statement to the Guardian, Tesla confirmed the company had fired Vandermeyden, saying it had thoroughly investigated the employee's allegations with the help of "a neutral, third-party expert" and concluded her complaints were unmerited. "Despite repeatedly receiving special treatment at the expense of others, Ms Vandermeyden nonetheless chose to pursue a miscarriage of justice by suing Tesla and falsely attacking our company in the press," a Tesla spokesperson said. "After we carefully considered the facts on multiple occasions and were absolutely convinced that Ms Vandermeyden's claims were illegitimate, we had no choice but to end her employment at Tesla."
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By BeauHD from
Slashdot's architectural-statement department:
dryriver quotes a report from CNN: Google has released designs for a new 11-story, 1 million-square-foot headquarters in London near King's Cross railway station, complete with a sprawling, landscaped rooftop garden. The facilities will include a cafe, gym and pool as well as a rooftop track and ground-floor retail spaces, according to the company's application for permission to build. The campus has been designed by an all-star team that includes Thomas Heatherwick, the British designer behind London's 2012 Olympic cauldron, and Danish architect Bjarke Ingels' BIG firm. The two are also collaborating on Google's Mountain View campus in California. The company currently has a smaller headquarters in the area, along with another nearby building. Google had submitted designs for a new headquarters in 2013, but they were later scrapped. If the new application is approved by Camden Council, construction will start next year.
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By BeauHD from
Slashdot's here-we-go-again department:
The German government has accused Audi of cheating emissions tests with its top-end models, marking the first time the company has been accused of such wrongdoing in its home country. Reuters reports: The German Transport Ministry said it has asked Volkswagen's (VOWG_p.DE) luxury division to recall around 24,000 A7 and A8 models built between 2009 and 2013, about half of which were sold in Germany. The affected Audi models with so-called Euro-5 emission standards emit about twice the legal limit of nitrogen oxides when the steering wheel is turned more than 15 degrees, the ministry said. It is also the first time that Audi's top-of-the-line A8 saloon has been implicated in emissions cheating. VW has said to date that the emissions-control software found in its rigged EA 189 diesel engine does not violate European law. The 80,000 3.0-liter vehicles affected by VW's emissions cheating scandal in the United States included Audi A6, A7 and Q7 models as well as Porsche and VW brand cars. The ministry said it has issued a June 12 deadline for Audi to come up with a comprehensive plan to refit the cars. Ingolstadt-based Audi issued a recall for the 24,000 affected models late on Thursday, some 14,000 of which are registered in Germany, and said software updates will start in July. It will continue to cooperate with Germany's KBA motor vehicle authority, Audi said.
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By msmash from
Slashdot's going-forward department:
A US spacecraft will swoop inside the Sun's corona, its superheated outer atmosphere, on a pathfinding mission to learn more about how stars work. Nasa's $1.5bn Parker Solar Probe, which will be protected by a shield that can withstand temperatures of 1,400C, will journey within 6m km of the Sun's surface, seven times closer than any previous spacecraft. From a report: Set to kick off next July, the plan is to plunge the Parker Solar Probe into the Sun's corona -- the hazy bit you can see around the edges of the Sun during a total solar eclipse -- to study this phenomenon. The car-sized spacecraft will get closer to the Sun than any other mission ever has. Travelling at the dizzying speed of more than 720,000 kilometres per hour, the probe will eventually come within less than 6.4 million kilometres of the Sun's surface. We've been studying the Sun for thousands of years, and even though we now have remote sensing observatories and spacecraft that examine it in spectacular detail, many questions still remain. The two big ones are: 1. Why is the corona on the outside of the Sun at least 300 times hotter than the surface? 2. Why does the solar wind speed up?
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By msmash from
Slashdot's done-deal department:
It's official. President Donald Trump announced today that the United States will withdraw from the Paris climate agreement, following through on a pledge he made during the presidential campaign. Trump said the Paris agreement "front loads costs on American people. In order to fulfill my solemn duty to protect America and its citizens, the United States will withdraw from the Paris climate accord but begin negotiations to reenter either the Paris accord or an entirely new transaction on terms that are fair to the United States," the president said. "We are getting out. But we will start to negotiate, and we will see if we can make a deal that's fair. And if we can, that's great. Trump said that the United States will immediately "cease all implementation of the non-binding Paris accord" and what he said were "draconian financial" and other burdens imposed on the country by the accord. This means that Elon Musk will leave Trump's Business Advisory Council. On Wednesday, Musk said he did "all he could to advise directly to Trump." Apple CEO Tim Cook also made a phone call yesterday to Trump in an attempt to change his mind. Twenty-five companies, including Adobe, Apple, Facebook, Google, HP, Microsoft, Salesforce, Morgan Stanley, Intel signed on to a letter which was published on the New York Times and Wall Street Journal today arguing in favor of climate pact. Update: Former president Barack Obama said the U.S. "joins a small handful of nations that reject the future."
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By msmash from
Slashdot's interesting-moves department:
Skype on Thursday became the latest app in the growing list of services that are copying features straight from Snapchat. Microsoft-owned service announced a major redesign of its mobile app, which now comes with a feature called "Highlights" that lets users share photos and videos that will only be temporarily visible to their friends. The feature, as you can imagine, carries a strong resemblance to Snapchat's "Stories," a format that has been growing in popularity among young audiences. All of Facebook's consumer-focused services, including Instagram and WhatsApp, also offer a similar feature in their apps. What will be interesting to see in the coming weeks is whether the redesign and the new feature will give Skype a boost among users. Analysts are skeptical. Jan Dawson of Jackdaw Research offers a reality-check: Skype is one of those odd products -- a fairly sizable communications property owned by a major tech company, and yet one which doesn't make much money, isn't growing much, and hasn't really been focused on either messaging or social communication. [...] The new design puts social sharing and messaging much more prominently in the app, but that's no guarantee that people will actually use those features more or even see Skype as a natural place to do that kind of sharing.
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By msmash from
Slashdot's how-they-see-it department:
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales and Baywatch were never going to be critical darlings. Both movies led the domestic box office to its worst Memorial Day weekend showing in nearly 20 years. Quartz adds: In the fallout, are Hollywood producers blaming the writers? The actors? Themselves? (Of course not.) No, they are blaming Rotten Tomatoes. They say the movie-review site, which forces critics to assign either a rotten or fresh tomato to each title when submitting reviews, regardless of the nuances of their critiques, poisoned viewers against the films before they were released. "Insiders close to both films blame Rotten Tomatoes, with Pirates 5 and Baywatch respectively earning 32% and 19% Rotten. The critic aggregation site increasingly is slowing down the potential business of popcorn movies. Pirates 5 and Baywatch aren't built for critics but rather general audiences, and once upon a time these types of films -- a family adventure and a raunchy R-rated comedy -- were critic-proof. Many of those in the industry severely question how Rotten Tomatoes computes the its ratings, and the fact that these scores run on [the movie-ticket buying site] Fandango (which owns RT) is an even bigger problem," Deadline reported. [...] The site has a separate score that measures audience reception, which it displays next to the critic rating. And quite a few smell what The Rock is cooking -- 70% of Baywatch viewers on Rotten Tomatoes said they liked it. But the critic score is what many people look to when deciding whether to spend their hard-earned money at the cinema. Also read: Hollywood Producer Blames Rotten Tomatoes For Convincing People Not To See His Movie.
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By msmash from
Slashdot's what's-at-stake department:
Justin Gillis, and Nadja Popovich, writing for The New York Times: The United States, with its love of big cars, big houses and blasting air-conditioners, has contributed more than any other country to the atmospheric carbon dioxide that is scorching the planet. "In cumulative terms, we certainly own this problem more than anybody else does," said David G. Victor, a longtime scholar of climate politics at the University of California, San Diego. Many argue that this obligates the United States to take ambitious action to slow global warming. Against that backdrop, factions in the Trump administration are engaged in a heated debate over whether to remain a party to the 195-nation agreement on climate change reached in Paris in 2015. President Trump promised on Wednesday to announce his decision at 3 p.m Thursday in the White House Rose Garden. A decision to walk away from the accord would be a momentous setback, in practical and political terms, for the effort to address climate change. Several news outlets, citing people in the administration, reported on Wednesday that the US is likely to pull out of the agreement.
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By BeauHD from
Slashdot's denial-of-service department:
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Hill: A group of Democratic senators is asking the FBI to investigate an alleged cyberattack on the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) website earlier this month. In a letter to acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe sent Wednesday, the senators asked the bureau to "investigate the source" of the distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack. "Any cyberattack on a federal network is very serious," Democratic Sens. Brian Schatz (Hawaii), Al Franken (Minn.), Patrick Leahy (Vt.), Ed Markey (Mass.), and Ron Wyden (Ore.) wrote. "This particular attack may have denied the American people the opportunity to contribute to what is supposed to be a fair and transparent process, which in turn may call into question the integrity of the FCC's rulemaking proceedings," they wrote. In the Wednesday letter to McCabe, the senators asked to be briefed by the FBI on the matter by June 23. "We ask that the FBI prioritize this matter and investigate the source of this attack," they wrote. On May 8, the FCC claimed that it was a victim of "multiple" DDoS attacks. The alleged attacks occurred after comedian John Oliver spurred millions of Americans to file comments with the FCC in favor of net neutrality. "Many had attributed the website's slowdown to the volume of comments produced by Oliver's segment, but the FCC instead blamed malicious actors days later," reports The Hill.
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