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SoylentNews is People

Pending submission by chromas (from IRC) at 2018-08-03 19:22:40
/dev/random

teste test 6

soylentnews.org [soylentnews.org]:

The House of Representatives has combined the largely good Music Modernization Act with the CLASSICS Act, which would add new royalties and penalties to recordings made before 1972, without giving anything back to the public. That same mistake was replicated in the Senate with S. 2823 .

The CLASSICS Act would extend federal copyright restrictions and penalties to sound recordings made between 1923 and 1972, making it so that songs recorded in that era would, for the first time, not be able to be streamed online without a license. Currently, various state laws govern this relationship, and those laws don't give record labels control over streaming.

The CLASSICS Act gives nothing back to the public. It doesn't increase access to pre-1972 recordings, which are already played regularly on Internet radio. And it doesn't let the public use these recordings without permission any sooner. While some recording artists and their heirs will receive money under the act, the main beneficiaries will be recording companies, who will control the use of classic recordings for another fifty years. Important recordings from the 1920s, 30s, and 40s won't enter the public domain until 2067. And users of recordings that are already over 90 years old will face the risk of federal copyright's massive, unpredictable penalties.

Meanwhile, Oracle is about the same size it was four years ago and the stock is just above where it was trading at the end of 2014. Oracle shares dropped by about 1 percent after the initial report Wednesday.

[...] The primary issue Amazon has faced on Oracle is the inability for the database technology to scale to meet Amazon's performance needs, a person familiar with the matter said. Another person, who said the move could be completed by mid-2019, added that there hasn't been any development of new technology relying on Oracle databases for quite a while.

Amazon's infrastructure is certainly not foolproof. The company's constant need for capacity upgrades turned into a near crisis during Amazon's Prime Day shopping extravaganza last month, when the company's systems proved incapable of handling a sudden traffic surge.

[...] The two companies have been in a heated war of words. Last year Oracle executives boasted about the cost advantages of using its database software. AWS CEO Andy Jassy fired back a few weeks later in an interview with CNBC, saying that Oracle is "a long way away in the cloud."

The US has a shameful record when it comes to caring for its moms. As Ars has reported before, the rate of women dying during pregnancy or childbirth is higher—much higher—than in any other developed country. By some estimates, mothers die in the US at a rate six-times that seen in Italy and three-times the rate in the UK, for instance. And of those that survive, tens of thousands suffer devastating injuries and near-death experiences each year.

Nevertheless, health researchers, hospital organizations, policy makers, and state task forces have been working to understand and reverse the horrific numbers—often doing so with limited resources and reliance on volunteers. While reports have offered glimpses of the problem, a new investigation by USA Today provides one of the sharpest pictures yet.

Many of the pregnant women and mothers who suffer and die in this country do so from easily preventable, common complications—and hospitals know exactly what safety features and practices are needed to spare mothers' lives and suffering, they just aren't using them. Women are left to bleed to death because doctors don't bother monitoring blood loss. Women suffer strokes and seizures and even die because doctors and nurses fail to treat their high blood pressure in time. The bottom line is stunning, simple negligence.

[...] While high blood pressure is one of the top causes of maternal deaths and complications, experts estimate that up to 60 percent of hypertensive deaths are preventable.

Hemorrhaging is another common but easily treatable complication. Women can bleed to death in as little as five minutes during childbirth. Yet experts estimate that 90 percent of maternal deaths from extreme blood loss are preventable. Such strategies to avoid harms are simple things, like weighing bloody pads to monitor blood loss (not relying on inaccurate visual estimates), having medications and supplies to curb blood loss readily available in a mobile cart, and responding promptly to signs of trouble.

Such simple steps have been recommended by experts for years. But in interviews with USA Today , many hospitals admitted they weren't following guidelines.

To put the data in real terms, USA Today told the story of 24-year-old Ali Lowry, who bled internally for hours after delivering by Cesarean section in an Ohio hospital in 2013. Her blood pressure registered at alarmingly low levels—52/26, 57/25, 56/24, 59/27—for more than three hours before staff responded. By the time she was airlifted to another hospital for life-saving surgery, her heart had stopped and she needed a hysterectomy. She eventually settled a lawsuit with her doctor and the hospital, which denied wrongdoing.

The official rate of unemployment in America has plunged to a remarkably low 3.8% . The Federal Reserve forecasts that the unemployment rate will reach 3.5% by the end of the year.

But the official rate hides more troubling realities: legions of college grads overqualified for their jobs, a growing number of contract workers with no job security, and an army of part-time workers desperate for full-time jobs. Almost 80% of Americans say they live from paycheck to paycheck, many not knowing how big their next one will be.

[...] The typical American worker now earns around $44,500 a year , not much more than what the typical worker earned in 40 years ago, adjusted for inflation. Although the US economy continues to grow, most of the gains have been going to a relatively few top executives of large companies, financiers, and inventors and owners of digital devices.

[...] Not even the current low rate of unemployment is forcing employers to raise wages. Contrast this with the late 1990s, the last time unemployment dipped close to where it is today, when the portion of national income going into wages was 3% points higher than it is today .

[...] By the mid-1950s more than a third of all private-sector workers in the United States were unionized. In subsequent decades public employees became organized, too. Employers were required by law not just to permit unions but to negotiate in good faith with them. This gave workers significant power to demand better wages, hours, benefits, and working conditions. (Agreements in unionized industries set the benchmarks for the non-unionized).

[...] Today, fewer than 7% of private-sector workers are unionized, and public-employee unions are in grave jeopardy, not least because of the supreme court ruling. The declining share of total US income going to the middle since the late 1960s – defined as 50% above and 50% below the median – correlates directly with that decline in unionization. (See chart below).

[...] This great shift in bargaining power, from workers to corporations, has pushed a larger portion of national income into profits and a lower portion into wages than at any time since the second world war. In recent years, most of those profits have gone into higher executive pay and higher share prices rather than into new investment or worker pay. Add to this the fact that the richest 10% of Americans own about 80% of all shares of stock (the top 1% owns about 40%), and you get a broader picture of how and why inequality has widened so dramatically.

[...] It is no coincidence that all three branches of the federal government, as well as most state governments, have become more "business-friendly" and less "worker-friendly" than at any time since the 1920s. As I've noted, Congress recently slashed the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%. [...] The federal minimum wage has not been increased since 2009, and is now about where it was in 1950 when adjusted for inflation.

One week after celebrating the defeat of an Ebola outbreak in Équateur province, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) has four new confirmed cases of the disease 2500 kilometers across the country in North Kivu province. The DRC's health ministry says there's no indication of a link between the outbreaks. "It's sad," says Yap Boum, a microbiologist based in Yaoundé who works with Doctors Without Borders, a nongovernmental organization that helped run an Ebola vaccine campaign against the previous outbreak.

Ebola is endemic in the DRC, which now has had 10 outbreaks since the virus first was discovered there in 1976. "Although we did not expect to face a 10th epidemic so early, the detection of the virus is an indicator of the proper functioning of the surveillance system," a DRC Ministry of Health communique said. Boum adds that the DRC villages today are much more connected than in the past, and many previous small outbreaks may have gone undetected.

The current outbreak is centered in Mangina, a village about 30 kilometers from the city of Béni, which is close to the famed Virunga National Park and the border of Uganda. The North Kivu health division notified the DRC Ministry of Health on 28 July that there were 26 cases of hemorrhagic fever in the area, with 20 deaths. The National Institute of Biomedical Research in Kinshasa confirmed that samples from four hospitalized patients tested positive for Ebola.

In the US alone, more than 1,400 people are waiting for a lung transplant - there simply aren't enough donor lungs available to meet the need. Soon, though, patients might have a new source for brand new lungs: the lab.

[...] To grow the lungs, the researchers first created four lung scaffolds. To do this, they removed all of the cells and blood from pig lungs using a mix of sugar and detergent. This left them with just the proteins of each lung - essentially, its skeleton.

In April, Rome completed the installation of LibreOffice alongside the proprietary alternative on all of its 14,000 PC workstations. This means that city staff can try out LibreOffice and gradually get familiar with the office suite. Staff members who use the proprietary office suite intensively will not be forced to switch.

As part of the change management approach, the city is partly relying on 112 staff members who are in favour of free and open source. This means that, on average, the city has two such innovation champions per department. They help explain the reasons for the change to LibreOffice, and encourage their colleagues to find out more by pointing them to a Moodle-based eLearning portal. Last month, the champions received a two-day training course to boost their LibreOffice expertise and prepare them to help train their colleagues.

OpenWrt is a Linux-based operating sytem targeted at replacing the firmware for low-end consumer-grade router hardware . For a while, OpenWRT had started to drift outside the router market and into a more general single-board computer market causing a split in 2016 which resulted in the LEDE project. LEDE focussed more on the routers as well as worked to increase transparency of operations. At the beginning of 2018, LEDE merged back into OpenWRT and the combined project operates under LEDE's guidelines.

tets


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