A filing in an antitrust lawsuit against some of the nation's top universities alleges the schools overcharged students by $685 million in a "price-fixing" scheme, raising serious questions about their past admission and financial aid policies. From a report: Documents and testimony from officials at Georgetown University, the University of Notre Dame, the University of Pennsylvania, MIT and other elite schools suggest they appeared to favor wealthy applicants despite their stated policy of accepting students without regard for their financial circumstances. That "need-blind" policy allowed the schools to collaborate on financial aid under federal law, but plaintiffs in the case say the colleges violated the statute by considering students' family income.

Every year, according to a motion filed in federal court Monday night, Georgetown's then-president would draw up a list of about 80 applicants based on a tracking list that often included information about their parents' wealth and past donations, but not the applicants' transcripts, teacher recommendations or personal essays. "Please Admit," was often written at the top of the list, the lawsuit contends -- and almost all of the applicants were. Former students accuse 17 elite schools, including most of the Ivy League, of colluding to limit the financial aid packages of working- and middle-class students. The claimed damages of $685 million, which were detailed in the court filing Monday night, would automatically triple to more than $2 billion under U.S. antitrust laws.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Fast Company: Insurance companies that stopped providing home coverage to hundreds of thousands of Californians in recent years as wildfires became more destructive will have to again provide policies in fire-prone areas if they want to keep doing business in California under a state regulation announced Monday. The rule will require home insurers to offer coverage in high-risk areas, something the state has never done, Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara's office said in a statement. Insurers will have to start increasing their coverage by 5% every two years until they hit the equivalent of 85% of their market share. That means if an insurer writes 20 out of every 100 state policies, they'd need to write 17 in a high-risk area, Lara's office said.

Major insurers like State Farm and Allstate have stopped writing new policies in California due to fears of massive losses from wildfires and other natural disasters. In exchange for increasing coverage, the state will let insurance companies pass on the costs of reinsurance to California consumers. Insurance companies typically buy reinsurance to avoid huge payouts in case of natural disasters or catastrophic loss. California is the only state that doesn't already allow the cost of reinsurance to be borne by policy holders, according to Lara's office. [...] The requirement is under review by the Office of Administrative Law before it takes effect within 30 days. "Californians deserve a reliable insurance market that doesn't retreat from communities most vulnerable to wildfires and climate change," Lara said in a statement. "This is a historic moment for California."

Opponents of the rule say that could hike premiums by 40% and doesn't require new policies to be written at a fast enough pace. The state did not provide a cost analysis for potential impact on consumers. "This plan is of the insurance industry, by the insurance industry, and for the industry," Jamie Court, president of Consumer Watchdog, said in a statement.

Generation Beta, starting in 2025 and lasting until around 2039, will grow up deeply immersed in AI and smart technology, facing pressing societal challenges like climate change and global shifts while potentially being shielded from excessive screen time by tech-savvy Gen Z parents. NBC News reports: Start and end dates of generations can be murky, but Generation Beta will keep being born until around 2039. Before them, Gen Alpha stretched from 2010 to 2024, Gen Z from around 1996 to 2010, and millennials from 1981 to 1996. The upcoming generation "will inherit a world grappling with major societal challenges," wrote demographer and futurist Mark McCrindle in a blog post. "With climate change, global population shifts, and rapid urbanisation at the forefront, sustainability will not just be a preference but an expectation." [...]

Just like Gen Z and Gen Alpha, Gen Beta will grow up with social media, though it's still unknown how those mediums will evolve in the next decade-plus. But other experts predict that Gen Z parents might choose to shield their kids from being chronically online, a stereotype that has come to define Gen Alpha. While older millennial parents tend to integrate technology into their Gen Alpha kids' lives, McCrindle wrote that Gen Z parents might take a different approach with their future Gen Beta children. "Generation Z know more about both the positives and challenges that come with social media use from a young age," McCrindle wrote. "As the most technologically savvy generation of parents, Gen Z see the benefits of technology and screen time, but equally they see the downsides of it and are pushing back on technology and the age at which their children access and engage with it."

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority has announced plans to retire its iconic R46 subway cars, triggering nostalgia among New Yorkers who cherished their distinctive seating arrangement. The fleet -- which has served A, C, N, R, Q, and W lines for five decades -- will be replaced by R211 cars expected for delivery in 2027.

The R46's perpendicular seating configuration, designed for comfort during long trips to destinations like Coney Island, encouraged social interaction among passengers, according to New York Transit Museum director Concetta Bencivenga. The new R211 cars will feature longitudinal seating to improve passenger flow and reduce platform waiting times. Currently, 696 of the original 754 R46 cars remain in service. The replacement R211 cars will include security cameras, wider seats, improved signage, and better lighting.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from KrebsOnSecurity: Federal authorities have arrested and indicted a 20-year-old U.S. Army soldier on suspicion of being Kiberphant0m, a cybercriminal who has been selling and leaking sensitive customer call records stolen earlier this year from AT&T and Verizon. As first reported by KrebsOnSecurity last month, the accused is a communications specialist who was recently stationed in South Korea. Cameron John Wagenius was arrested near the Army base in Fort Hood, Texas on Dec. 20, after being indicted on two criminal counts of unlawful transfer of confidential phone records. The sparse, two-page indictment (PDF) doesn't reference specific victims or hacking activity, nor does it include any personal details about the accused. But a conversation with Wagenius' mother -- Minnesota native Alicia Roen -- filled in the gaps.

Roen said that prior to her son's arrest he'd acknowledged being associated with Connor Riley Moucka, a.k.a. "Judische," a prolific cybercriminal from Canada who was arrested in late October for stealing data from and extorting dozens of companies that stored data at the cloud service Snowflake. In an interview with KrebsOnSecurity, Judische said he had no interest in selling the data he'd stolen from Snowflake customers and telecom providers, and that he preferred to outsource that to Kiberphant0m and others. Meanwhile, Kiberphant0m claimed in posts on Telegram that he was responsible for hacking into at least 15 telecommunications firms, including AT&T and Verizon. On November 26, KrebsOnSecurity published a story that followed a trail of clues left behind by Kiberphantom indicating he was a U.S. Army soldier stationed in South Korea.

[...] Immediately after news broke of Moucka's arrest, Kiberphant0m posted on the hacker community BreachForums what they claimed were the AT&T call logs for President-elect Donald J. Trump and for Vice President Kamala Harris. [...] On that same day, Kiberphant0m posted what they claimed was the "data schema" from the U.S. National Security Agency. On Nov. 5, Kiberphant0m offered call logs stolen from Verizon's push-to-talk (PTT) customers -- mainly U.S. government agencies and emergency first responders. On Nov. 9, Kiberphant0m posted a sales thread on BreachForums offering a "SIM-swapping" service targeting Verizon PTT customers. In a SIM-swap, fraudsters use credentials that are phished or stolen from mobile phone company employees to divert a target's phone calls and text messages to a device they control.

The Arbor Day Foundation will plant 10 million trees across six U.S. states over four years to replace those destroyed during the devastating 2024 Atlantic hurricane season, the non-profit organization announced.

The restoration program, targeting Tennessee, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia and Florida, marks the group's largest undertaking in its 50-year history. The initiative will involve state and local governments, corporate sponsors and community volunteers. The 2024 hurricane season claimed 375 lives and caused an estimated $500 billion in damage and economic losses, making it the deadliest mainland U.S. season since Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

The U.S. Justice Department has filed a complaint and announced a civil enforcement action against financial technology company Dave and its CEO Jason Wilk for alleged violations of federal law. From a report: The Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission alleged the company lured users to its personal finance app by advertising cash advances of up to $500 that many never receive.

The complaint, filed by the Justice Department, seeks unspecified amounts of consumer redress and monetary civil penalties from the defendants and a permanent injunction to prohibit them from engaging in future violations, the Justice Department said. The government alleges that Dave misled consumers by deceptively advertising its cash advances, charging hidden fees, misrepresenting how Dave uses customers' tips and charging recurring monthly fees without providing a simple mechanism to cancel them.

Politico: Joe Biden spent the first half of his presidency enacting plans to steer at least $1.6 trillion to transform the economy and spur a clean-energy revolution -- only to watch those programs become afterthoughts in the 2024 election. Now the core of his domestic legacy stands unfinished, with hundreds of billions of dollars left to deploy, and imperiled as Donald Trump prepares to take office.

A wide-ranging examination of the Biden administration's spending and tax policies reveals signs that his efforts could leave a lasting mark, but also ways in which his agenda has yet to take hold -- after unleashing money for batteries, solar cells, computer chips and clean water; luring foreign-owned factories to U.S. soil; and turning some red-state Republicans into supporters of green energy projects.

Throughout 2024, POLITICO's "Biden's Billions" series has documented the halting pace, uneven progress and genuine economic impact of a spending blueprint rivaling Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. With just weeks left in Biden's term, it's not at all certain his legacy will endure in the same way. Much of it remains a work in progress.

Solar installations have surged to record levels, but the country is not adding enough zero-carbon electricity to meet Biden's climate targets. A $42 billion expansion of broadband internet service has yet to connect a single household. Bureaucratic haggling, equipment shortages and logistical challenges mean a $7.5 billion effort to install electric vehicle chargers from coast to coast has so far yielded just 47 stations in 15 states.

Americans check their phones an average of 205 times a day, a 42.3% increase from last year. Millennials are leading the charts in frequency, attachment, and anxiety over phone use, while Gen Z spends the most time daily on their devices at over six hours. PCMag reports: There's a good chance that you're currently reading this article on your phone. If you're like one of the Americans surveyed by Reviews.org, this is one of 205 times today that you'll be checking the device in your hand. To spare you opening the calculator app, that's about once every five minutes you are awake or two and a half full months out of your year.

That's an alarming 42.3% rise from last year when the reviews company asked the same question and found people checked their phones 144 times per day. Some of the ways they spend those 205 moments are:

- 80.6% check their phones within the first 10 minutes of waking up
- 65.7% use their phone on the toilet
- 53.7% have texted someone in the same room
- 38.1% use or look at their phone while on a date
- 27% use or look at their phone while driving

And, of course, there are those many, many times when people check their notifications, with 76% checking their phones within five minutes of receiving one. Millennials are the fastest on the draw, with 89.5% of them checking within 10 minutes. Gen Z and Gen X have found common ground (finally), with 84% of each group looking at notifications shortly after receiving them. Boomers and the Silent Generation aren't as anxious to see who is trying to reach them, with 69% and 53.3%, respectively, checking their notifications within a few minutes.

South Korean officials said Monday they will conduct safety inspections of all Boeing 737-800 aircraft operated by the country's airlines, as they struggle to determine what caused a plane crash that killed 179 people a day earlier. From a report: Sunday's crash, the country's worst aviation disaster in decades, triggered an outpouring of national sympathy. Many people worry how effectively the South Korean government will handle the disaster as it grapples with a leadership vacuum following the recent successive impeachments of President Yoon Suk Yeol and Prime Minister Han Duck-soo, the country's top two officials, amid political tumult caused by Yoon's brief imposition of martial law earlier this month.

New acting President Choi Sang-mok on Monday presided over a task force meeting on the crash and instructed authorities to conduct an emergency review of the country's aircraft operation systems. "The essence of a responsible response would be renovating the aviation safety systems on the whole to prevent recurrences of similar incidents and building a safer Republic of South Korea," said Choi, who is also deputy prime minister and finance minister.

Nvidia has completed its acquisition of Run:ai, a provider of GPU cloud orchestration software for AI workloads, and announced plans to open-source the platform. The deal, valued at $700 million, brings the Israel-based startup under Nvidia's umbrella after their collaboration since 2020.

Run:ai's software helps enterprises manage and schedule Nvidia GPU resources for AI applications across cloud and on-premises environments. Founded in 2018, the company's platform currently supports only Nvidia GPUs, but open-sourcing will enable expansion to other AI ecosystems, according to founders Omri Geller and Ronen Dar. The acquisition strengthens Nvidia's software portfolio as the company, now valued at $3.56 trillion, expands beyond its core graphics chip business into AI infrastructure management.

President-elect Donald Trump has defended the H-1B visa program for skilled foreign workers. "I've always liked the visas. I have many H-1B visas on my properties... It's a great program," Trump told The New York Post.

His comments follow recent support for the program from Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy. The H-1B program allows 85,000 skilled workers to immigrate annually, including 20,000 spots for those with U.S. advanced degrees. Trump's businesses have received approval to hire over 2,100 foreign workers since 2008, with about 70 positions through H-1B visas, mostly over a decade ago.

America's aerospace industry is overseen by the Federal Aviation Administration (or FAA) — which also handles safety warnings from the industry's whistleblowers. But the Seattle Times says an analysis of reports to Congress found "an overwhelmed system delivering underwhelming results for whistleblowers... More than 90% of safety complaints from 2020 through 2023 ended with no violation found by the FAA, while whistleblowers reported them at great personal and professional risk." Aside from the FAA's in-house program, employees of Boeing, Spirit and the FAA can report safety hazards to the Office of Special Counsel, which has no FAA ties, or through internal employer complaint programs, such as Boeing's Speak Up and Spirit's Quality 360, to trigger company reviews... In the aftermath of the door-plug blowout over Portland, Boeing specifically asked its employees to use the Speak Up program or the FAA's internal process to report any concerns, according to Boeing spokesperson Jessica Kowal. Both have done a poor job protecting whistleblowers from retaliation, according to a congressionally appointed expert panel... While both were designed to guard against retaliation, critics say they have instead become enablers of it...

A panel of aviation safety experts in February rebuked Boeing's Speak Up program in a report to Congress. Whistleblower advocates criticized Speak Up for commonly outing whistleblowers to the supervisors they're complaining about, exposing them to retaliation. Managers sometimes investigated complaints against themselves. Employees mistrusted the program's promise of anonymity. Collectively, the befuddling maze of whistleblower options sowed "confusion about reporting systems that may discourage employees from submitting safety concerns," according to the expert panel's report....

[Boeing quality inspector Sam Mohawk, who alleged the 737 MAX line in Renton was losing track of subpar aircraft parts], continues to pursue his FAA claim, originally submitted through Boeing's Speak Up program. Months passed before Boeing addressed Mohawk's complaint. When it did, Mohawk's report was passed to the managers he was complaining about, according to Brian Knowles, Mohawk's South Carolina-based lawyer. "If you do Speak Up, just know that your report is going to go straight to the guys you're accusing of wrongdoing. They aren't going to say, 'Thanks for speaking up against us,'" Knowles said.
The article includes this quote about the FAA's in-house whistleblower program from Tom Devine, a whistleblower attorney with nearly a half-century of experience across a spectrum of federal agencies, and legal director of the nonprofit Government Accountability Project, which helps whistleblowers navigate the federal system. "It's been a disaster from the beginning. We tell everyone to avoid it because it's a trap... We've warned whistleblowers not to entrust their rights there."

Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter has died. Born in 1924, he had just celebrated his 100th birthday on October 1st. If you want to catch a glimpse of his political charisma, YouTube has a clip of Carter's appearance on "What's My Line" when he was still only governor of Georgia. Within five years he'd be president of the United States, serving from 1977 to 1981.

But it seems like today everyone has a story to tell. More than two decades later, long-time Slashdot reader destinyland saw Jimmy Carter speak in Las Vegas in 2001 on the final day of the CTIA Wireless tradeshow. "I feel thrilled to be a part of this," 77-year-old Carter had said.... Carter applauded the work of "entrepreneurs and scientists and engineers that are transforming the face of the globe." And he noted their technologies could address problems targeted by the Carter Center.

Interrupted by a few cellphone rings, the former President conversed on a stage at the Sands Expo and Venetian Hotel with Tom Wheeler, the president of the wireless communications trade association. Wheeler reminded the audience of Carter's decidedly nontechnical background, discussing An Hour Before Daylight, Carter's memoir about growing up on a farm in Georgia during the Great Depression. "We were the only family blessed with an outhouse," Carter told the crowd.

Wheeler also asked a question many in the technology community could relate to. Carter, he pointed out, had been involuntarily retired. "What's it feel like?" The former President told the audience he'd re-focussed his energies into humanitarian efforts through the Carter Center, which is active in providing health services around the world as well as monitoring elections. Carter donated his appearance fee to the Carter Center...

Midway through the hour-long discussion, the former President touted his administration's record of deregulating several industries, including transportation, energy, and communications, saying "If it hadn't been for that deregulation, this environment in which you all live wouldn't have been possible." Carter also shared with the business crowd that it was a belief in free enterprise that made him want to enter politics, drawn from his experiences selling peanuts as a young boy for a dollar a day.

The audience greeted the former president warmly, giving him a standing ovation both when he took the stage and when he left. Carter joked it was almost enough to make him want to get back into politics.
Everyone has their own opinion. When a friend of mine was in high school, she got to meet Jimmy Carter early in his presidency. He'd seemed unusually kind and good, she said, but remembered her first reaction. "They're going to eat you alive." And yet then, pointing to the humanitarian work he would continue for four decades, she said he was also clearly America's very best ex-president.

And the liberal blog Talking Points Memo argues Carter's accomplishments as president are being re-evaluated: Some found him to be distinctly unsung, with little attention given to his brokering of peace with the Camp David Accords and emphasis on global human rights. And some just liked him. A serious, intelligent, faithful, deeply honest man who spurned political expediency and burned through hundreds of pages of memos a day, he preached self-restraint, stewardship and commonality to an electorate that cast him off four years later for the glib excesses of Ronald Reagan.... "People assume that because he wasn't warm and cuddly with Congress that he didn't get much through," said John Alter [who wrote the first independent Carter biography in 2020]. "He signed more legislation in four years than Clinton or Obama did in eight. He has the most prodigious legislative record since World War II, with the exception of Lyndon Johnson."

That record includes, by Alter's count, 14 major pieces of environmental legislation. In one of Carter's more creative moves, he dusted off the 1906 Antiquities Act to keep pristine 56 million acres of Alaskan wilderness. His piecemeal approach, cloaked in distinctly unsexy bills like the 1978 Public Utilities Regulatory Policies Act, planted the seeds for a changing national energy system in the face of climate change. Carter had started underlining passages in scientific journals about what is now the most existential crisis of our time as early as 1971. What's most wrenching about Carter's improvements in energy and environmental policy now is what he wasn't able to accomplish. On his way out of office, he issued a report that included recommendations for cutting carbon emissions — at exactly the same rate the Paris Climate Accords coalesced behind 35 years later....

His Carter Center has virtually eradicated certain devastating diseases on the African continent, part of the work for which he received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002. He and Rosalynn have also helped build and repair over 4,000 homes for Habitat for Humanity, work that continued well into his 90s.
I've got my own story. As a young boy I saw Jimmy Carter give a speech in 1977 — just six months after he'd assumed the presidency. A crowd of teenagers thrilled to see the president gave him a long, loud round of applause. And when it finally died down, Carter said...

"I wish I got that kind of reception from Congress."

The Washington Post shares some good news from 2024: Researchers were able to detect a significant dip in atmospheric levels of hydrochlorofluorocarbons — harmful gases that deplete the ozone layer — for the first time, almost 30 years after countries first agreed to phase out the chemicals.

A new satellite launched in March to track and publicly reveal the biggest methane polluters in the oil and gas industry — an important step in tackling the greenhouse gas that accounts for almost a third of global warming. The NASA/Carbon Mapper satellite, which measures CO2 and methane emissions, also launched, providing detailed images from individual oil and gas facilities across the world.

Back on Earth, the world's largest plant for pulling carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere opened in Iceland. Norway became the first country to have more electric than gas-powered vehicles, while one Japanese island began using a new generation of batteries to help stockpile massive amounts of clean electricity.

There were also small but important victories for animal conservation. The Iberian lynx, a European wildcat once on the brink of extinction, is no longer classed as an "endangered" species — in what experts have hailed as the "greatest recovery of a cat species ever achieved through conservation...."

Despite a large number of powerful tornadoes to hit the United States in early 2024, the death tolls were fortunately not as high as meteorologists feared, in part due to improved forecasting technology.
The article also notes America's Food and Drug Administration approved a new therapy which uses a patients' own cells to attack skin cancer for adults for whom surgery isn't an option. "Experts said the decision could open the door to similar treatments for far more common cancers."

And one more inspiring story from 2024: 105-year-old Virginia Hislop, of Yakima, Washington received her master's degree from Stanford University...

A Linux Foundation project focused on understanding the health of the open source community just studied the outcomes for three projects that switched to "more restrictive" licenses and then faced community forks.

The data science director for the project — known as Community Health Analytics in Open Source Software (or CHAOSS) — is also an OpenUK board member, and describes the outcomes for OpenSearch, Redis with fork Valkey, and Terraform: The relicensed project (Redis) had significant numbers of contributors who were not employed by the company, and the fork (Valkey) was created by those existing contributors as a foundation project... The Redis project differs from Elasticsearch and Terraform in the number of contributions to the Redis repository from people who were not employees of Redis. In the year leading up to the relicense, when Redis was still open source, there were substantial contributions from employees of other companies: Twice as many non-Redis employees made five or more commits, and about a dozen employees of other companies made almost twice as many commits as Redis employees made.

In the six months after the relicense, all of the external contributors from companies (including Amazon, Alibaba, Tencent, Huawei and Ericsson) who contributed over five commits to the Redis project in the year prior to the relicense stopped contributing. In sum, Redis had strong organizational diversity before the relicense, but only Redis employees made significant contributions afterward.

Valkey was forked from Redis 7.2.4 on March 28, 2024, as a Linux Foundation project under the BSD-3 license. The fork was driven by a group of people who previously contributed to Redis with public support from their employers. Within its first six months, the Valkey repository had 29 contributors employed at 10 companies, and 18 of those people previously contributed to Redis. Valkey has a diverse set of contributors from various companies, with Amazon having the most contributors.
The results weren't always so clear-cut. Because Terraform always had very few contributors outside of the company, "there was no substantial impact on the contributor community from the relicensing event..." (Although the OpenTofu fork — a Linux Foundation project — had 31 people at 11 organizations who made five or more contributions.)

And both before and after Elasticsearch's relicensing, most contributors were Elastic employees, so "the 2021 relicense had little to no impact on contributors." (But the OpenSearch fork — transferred in September to the Linux Foundation — shows a more varied contributor base, with just 63% of additions and 64% of deletions coming from Amazon employees who made 10 or more commits. Six people who didn't work for Amazon made 10 or more commits, making up 11% of additions and 13% of deletions.")

So "Looking at all of these projects together, we see that the forks from relicensed projects tend to have more organizational diversity than the original projects," they conclude, adding that in general "projects with greater organizational diversity tend to be more sustainable..."

"You can dive into the details about these six projects in the paper, presentation and data we shared at the recent OpenForum Academy Symposium.

Thursday New York's governor signed new legislation "to hold polluters responsible for the damage done to our environment" by establishing a Climate Superfund that's paid for by big fossil-fuel companies.

The money will be used for "climate change adaptation," according to New York state senator Liz Krueger, who notes that the legislation follows "the polluter-pays model" used in America's already-existing federal and state superfund laws. Spread out over 25 years, the legislation collects an average of $3 billion each year — or $75 billion — "from the parties most responsible for causing the climate crisis — big oil and gas companies."

"The Climate Change Superfund Act is now law, and New York has fired a shot that will be heard round the world: the companies most responsible for the climate crisis will be held accountable," said Senator Krueger. "Too often over the last decade, courts have dismissed lawsuits against the oil and gas industry by saying that the issue of climate culpability should be decided by legislatures. Well, the Legislature of the State of New York — the 10th largest economy in the world — has accepted the invitation, and I hope we have made ourselves very clear: the planet's largest climate polluters bear a unique responsibility for creating the climate crisis, and they must pay their fair share to help regular New Yorkers deal with the consequences.

"And there's no question that those consequences are here, and they are serious," Krueger continued. "Repairing from and preparing for extreme weather caused by climate change will cost more than half a trillion dollars statewide by 2050. That's over $65,000 per household, and that's on top of the disruption, injury, and death that the climate crisis is causing in every corner of our state. The Climate Change Superfund Act is a critical piece of affordability legislation that will deliver billions of dollars every year to ease the burden on regular New Yorkers...."

Starting in the 1970s, scientists working for Exxon made "remarkably accurate projections of just how much burning fossil fuels would warm the planet." Yet for years, "the oil giant publicly cast doubt on climate science, and cautioned against any drastic move away from burning fossil fuels, the main driver of climate change."
"The oil giant Saudi Aramco of Saudi Arabia could be slapped with the largest annual assessment of any company — $640 million a year — for emitting 31,269 million tons of greenhouse gases from 2000 to 2020," notes the New York Post.

And "The law will also standardize the number of emissions tied to the fuel produced by companies," reports the Times Union newspaper. "[F]or every 1 million pounds of coal, for example, the program assigns over 942 metric tons of carbon dioxide. For every 1 million barrels of crude oil, an entity is considered to have produced 432,180 metric tons of carbon dioxide." Among the infrastructure programs the superfund program aims to pay for: coastal wetlands restoration, energy efficient cooling systems in buildings, including schools and new housing developments, and stormwater drainage upgrades.
New York is now the second U.S. state with a "climate Superfund" law, according to Bloomberg Law, with New York following the lead of Vermont. "Maryland, Massachusetts, and California are also considering climate Superfund laws to manage mounting infrastructure costs." The American Petroleum Institute, which represents about 600 members of the industry, condemned the law. "This type of legislation represents nothing more than a punitive new fee on American energy, and we are evaluating our options moving forward," an API spokesperson said in an emailed statement... The bills — modeled after the federal Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act, known as Superfund — would almost certainly spur swift litigation from fossil fuel companies upon enactment, legal educators say.

Slashdot reader DevNull127 writes: This year the London Stock Exchange got a new listing for "Raspberry Pi Holdings plc." It's the computer-making commercial subsidiary of their larger educational charity, the Raspberry Pi Foundation. "Access to the public market will enable us to build more of the products you love, faster," explained CEO Eben Upton in June. And in May Foundation head Philip Colligan added that beyond the $50 million already donated to their educational charity by the commercial subsidiary, the IPO would allow the conversion of some stock sales to "an endowment that we will use to fund our educational programmes... The Foundation will use any funds that we raise through the sale of shares at the IPO — or subsequently — to advance our ambitious global strategy to enable every young person to realise their full potential through the power of computing and digital technologies."

So how's that working out? A finance site called Proactive Investors UK reports that in September Raspbery Pi Holdings plc "reported underlying profits (EBITDA) of US$20.9 million, up by 55% from a year ago, on revenues up 61% to US$144 million... The Pi 5 single-board computer (SBC), launched at the end of last October [2023], sold 1.1 million units in the first half, with overall unit growth at 31%."

And then in December its stock price suddenly shot up to more than double where it was at the end of November — giving Raspbery Pi Holdings plc a valuation "just under £1.3 billion."

ewhac (Slashdot reader #5,844) writes: Retraction Watch is reporting that the entire editorial staff (save one) for the Journal of Human Evolution has resigned in protest over creeping harmful changes imposed by its publisher, Elsevier.

In an open letter posted to social media, the editors recount Elsevier's changes to their journal's scientific and editorial processes (inserting itself into those processes) — along with staff and budget reductions negatively impacting their ability to review and publish submissions. The letter alleges that when the editorial board complained of Elsevier's eliminating support for a copy editor, Elsevier responded that the editors shouldn't be paying attention to language, grammar, readability, consistency, or accuracy of proper nomenclature or formatting. When the editors fiercely protested Elsevier's ending of JHE's dual-editor model, Elsevier allegedly responded that it would support a dual-editor model by cutting the compensation rate by half.

But perhaps most damning is a footnote revealing Elsevier's use of so-called "AI" in the publication process. "In fall of 2023, for example, without consulting or informing the editors, Elsevier initiated the use of AI during production, creating article proofs devoid of capitalization of all proper nouns (e.g., formally recognized epochs, site names, countries, cities, genera, etc.) as well italics for genera and species. These AI changes reversed the accepted versions of papers that had already been properly formatted by the handling editors. This was highly embarrassing for the journal and resolution took six months and was achieved only through the persistent efforts of the editors. AI processing continues to be used and regularly reformats submitted manuscripts to change meaning and formatting and require extensive author and editor oversight during proof stage."

Except for one unnamed associate editor, the editorial board for the Journal of Human Evolution determined that the situation with Elsevier was no longer tenable, and resigned.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Lyft is suing the city of San Francisco, claiming the city unfairly charged the ride-hailing company over $100 million in taxes, Bloomberg reports. The lawsuit alleges that, over the course of five years, San Francisco unfairly labeled money earned by Lyft drivers as company revenue. In the complaint, Lyft maintains that its drivers are its customers, not employees. "Accordingly, Lyft recognizes revenue from rideshare as being comprised of fees paid to Lyft by drivers, not charges paid by riders to drivers," the complaint reads.