Posted by BeauHD from Slashdot
From the not-looking-good department: The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration on Monday declared that Earth is in the midst of a "4th global coral bleaching event" that's been documented over the last 14 months in every major ocean basin, including off Florida in the United States, in Australia's Great Barrier Reef and in the South Pacific. "As the world's oceans continue to warm, coral bleaching is becoming more frequent and severe," said Derek Manzello, a coral reef ecologist who coordinates NOAA's Coral Reef Watch Program, in a news release. "When these events are sufficiently severe or prolonged, they can cause coral mortality, which hurts the people who depend on the coral reefs for their livelihoods." NBC News reports: Corals are critical ecosystems that support a vast array of fish and aquatic species, which help feed coastal communities and attract tourists. The economic value of reefs is estimated at $2.7 trillion per year, according to a 2020 report from the Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network. "They protect our coastline. They offer protection from storms and hurricanes. They have a great value for our economy and safety," [Ana Palacio, an assistant scientist at the Cooperative Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Studies, a research institute that is based at the University of Miami in partnership with NOAA] said.
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Posted by msmash from Slashdot
From the does-feel-that-way department: Film data researcher Stepehen, writing on his blog: This may surprise some, but since 2000, just over half of all movies released have been original screenplays. The most common source for adapted screenplays was real-life events, accounting for almost a fifth of movies made between 2000 and 2023. (Typically, in these cases, the filmmakers will have paid for the rights to a nonfiction book or two that covered those events, but we will classify that as 'based on real-life events' in this analysis.) Other sources include fictional books/articles (8.9%), previous movies (11.8%), stage productions (including plays, musicals, and dance performances) (1.5%), and TV/Web shows (0.9%). In the chart below, 'Other' includes myths, legends, poems, songs, games, toys, and more.
How has this changed over the years? Forty years ago, about the same proportion of movies being made were original screenplays as they are today. That's quite surprising -- both because I assume that many people expected it to be lower in recent years, but also because little stays the same in the film industry over such a long period of time. But when we look at a time series by year, we can see that it hadn't plateaued. During the late 1990s and 2000s, original screenplays declined markedly and only rose again in the 2010s.
Posted by BeauHD from Slashdot
From the failed-economics department: An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Federal prosecutors indicted a Nebraska man on charges he perpetrated a cryptojacking scheme that defrauded two cloud providers -- one based in Seattle and the other in Redmond, Washington -- out of $3.5 million. The indictment, filed in US District Court for the Eastern District of New York and unsealed on Monday, charges Charles O. Parks III -- 45 of Omaha, Nebraska -- with wire fraud, money laundering, and engaging in unlawful monetary transactions in connection with the scheme. Parks has yet to enter a plea and is scheduled to make an initial appearance in federal court in Omaha on Tuesday. Parks was arrested last Friday. Prosecutors allege that Parks defrauded "two well-known providers of cloud computing services" of more than $3.5 million in computing resources to mine cryptocurrency. The indictment says the activity was in furtherance of a cryptojacking scheme, a term for crimes that generate digital coin through the acquisition of computing resources and electricity of others through fraud, hacking, or other illegal means.
Details laid out in the indictment underscore the failed economics involved in the mining of most cryptocurrencies. The $3.5 million of computing resources yielded roughly $1 million worth of cryptocurrency. In the process, massive amounts of energy were consumed. [...] Prosecutors didn't say precisely how Parks was able to trick the providers into giving him elevated services, deferring unpaid payments, or failing to discover the allegedly fraudulent behavior. They also didn't identify either of the cloud providers by name. Based on the details, however, they are almost certainly Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. If convicted on all charges, Parks faces as much as 30 years in prison.
Posted by BeauHD from Slashdot
From the new-reality department: An anonymous reader quotes a report from Electrek: In a major clean energy benchmark, wind, solar, and hydro exceeded 100% of demand on California's main grid for 30 of the past 38 days. Stanford University professor of civil and environmental engineering Mark Z. Jacobson has been tracking California's renewables performance, and he shares his findings on Twitter (X) when the state breaks records. Jacobson notes that supply exceeds demand for "0.25-6 h per day," and that's an important fact. The continuity lies not in renewables running the grid for the entire day but in the fact that it's happening on a consistent daily basis, which has never been achieved before.
At the two-week record mark, Ian Magruder at Rewiring America made this great point on LinkedIn: "And what makes it even better is that California has the largest grid-connected battery storage facility in the world (came online in January ...), meaning those batteries were filling up with excess energy from the sun all afternoon today and are now deploying as we speak to offset a good chunk of the methane gas generation that California still uses overnight." On April 2, the California Independent System Operator (ISO) recommended 26 new transmission projects worth $6.1 billion, with a big number being devoted to offshore wind. In response, Jacobson predicted on April 4 that California will entirely be on renewables and battery storage 24/7 by 2035.
We’re about halfway through April, which means another wave of titles is up for grabs for Xbox Game Pass subscribers. You’ve got a hockey sim, a JRPG, a tower defense action-strategy game, and more, as well as that hilariously silly crustacean Soulslike. It’s a pretty good month, to be honest, as there’s a little… 
We’ve all bought a second or maybe even third copy of a game we really, really love. Longtime Kotaku readers know of my obsession with re-buying Resident Evil 4. But I’m not sure there’s a game I love so much that I would buy thousands of copies of it. And there’s definitely not a game out there that I adore enough to… 
Information about Sony’s upcoming PS5 Pro codenamed Trinity is continuing to trickle out. Although nothing we’ve learned so far about the device makes it sound like a must-have upgrade, details corroborated by The Verge point toward several enhancements that games running on a PS5 Pro will have. Some of these… 
The Nintendo Switch has been around the block. To hammer that point home, Nintendo’s ultra-successful console celebrated its seventh release anniversary just last month. The little console that is still widely loved for its innovative controllers and portable form factor, so much so the long-speculated Nintendo Switch… 
Dawntrail—the next expansion for Square Enix’s masterfully designed MMORPG Final Fantasy XIV—doesn’t release until July 2, but fans can get a taste of what’s to come right now. The official benchmark for the game is available as of April 14, and will let players experience some of the expansion’s most anticipated… 
Blizzard’s customer service is in hot water after a series of exchanges about Overwatch 2’s profanity rules caught the attention of the community and subsequently went viral. Apparently, profanity of any kind is considered against the hero shooter’s code of conduct, and if someone reports it, seemingly regardless of… 
The similarities between Nier: Automata and Shift Up’s upcoming PlayStation 5 exclusive, Stellar Blade, are evident—and not just because the former inspired the latter. Both games center women piecing together a world at its collapse, which makes the two sisters of a sort. And as it does between sisters, jealousy… 
After helping my childhood friend, Cloud, through a reality-bending experience to reclaim his identity, I listen as he apologizes for his worst actions and explains to a room full of people why he misled everyone. Yes, his mind was under the influence of an invasive presence, but this confession comes from a place of… 
Ubisoft’s decision to keep a mission featuring everyone’s favorite intergalactic crime lord, Jabba the Hutt, behind the most eye-wateringly expensive versions of Star Wars Outlaws caused widespread internet panic in recent days. Given how much of the game’s promotion has featured the grumpy space worm, was the key… 
What makes a good video game adaptation? For some, it’s a rock solid story set in a well-known world, but for a very vocal group of gamers, it’s a faithful, beat-by-beat recreation of beloved source material. Those who fall into that latter school of thought are the same people who are angry that Master Chief had sex… 
Fun fact: The standard North American NAD83 coordinate system is misaligned from the actual Earth, off-center by about 7 feet. Someone knows where I am, and I'm in the wrong place. 
