Saturday Sindonology Singularism

Japan To Begin Testing Fingerprints As 'Currency'

 Starting this summer, the government will test a system in which foreign tourists will be able to verify their identities and buy things at stores using only their fingerprints. 

The government hopes to increase the number of foreign tourists by using the system to prevent crime and relieve users from the necessity of carrying cash or credit cards. 

It aims to realize the system by the 2020 Tokyo Olympic and Paralympic Games.

 The experiment will have inbound tourists register their fingerprints and other data, such as credit card information, at airports and elsewhere.

 Tourists would then be able to conduct tax exemption procedures and make purchases after verifying their identities by placing two fingers on special devices installed at stores.

 The Inns and Hotels Law requires foreign tourists to show their passports when they check into ryokan inns or hotels. 

The government plans to substitute fingerprint authentication for that requirement.

***

Notice that NASA's own data shows the icecap increasing not shrinking!

 NASA BS: Global Warming Is Now Changing How Earth Wobbles

A new study from NASA finds global warming is shifting the way the Earth wobbles on its polar axis.

 Melting ice sheets are changing the distribution of weight on Earth, which has caused both the North Pole and the wobble, called polar motion, to change course.

 Since 1899, scientists and navigators have been accurately measuring the true pole and polar motion and for almost the entire 20th century they migrated a bit toward Canada.

 That migration has changed with this century -- now they're moving toward England, said study lead author Surendra Adhikari at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab.

 "The recent shift from the 20th-century direction is very dramatic," Adhikari said. NASA scientist and the study's co-author Eirk Ivins said, Greenland has lost on average more than 600 trillion pounds of ice a year since 2003 and that affects the way the Earth wobbles in a manner similar to a figure skater lifting one leg while spinning.

And yet on the other hand the phony propaganda is saying...

 
"London is calling. The planet’s North Pole mysteriously changed the direction of its travel in 2000, turning eastwards towards the Greenwich meridian. It now seems that this change in direction is down to the redistribution of water on land as well as to melting polar ice."

***

Meanwhile the Military Warhawk support team is still hard at it as always.

Discovery Magazine reports that researchers at North Carolina State University have developed a super strong armor material that literally turns bullets to dust upon impact. 

The armor plating is made in part from composite metal foams, or CMFs, which are both lighter and stronger than traditional metal plating used in body and vehicle armor. 

The armor -- only an inch thick -- features a ceramic strike face, Kevlar backing, and CMFs in the energy-absorbing middle layer.

 "We could stop the bullet at a total thickness of less than an inch, while the indentation on the back was less than 8 millimeters," says Afsaneh Rabiei.

 "To put that in context, the NIJ standard allows up to 44 millimeters indentation in the back of an armor." 

CMFs are very effective at shielding X-rays, gamma rays and neutron radiation. Other applications include space exploration and shipping nuclear waste which both require a material to be not only light and strong, but also capable of withstanding extremely high temperatures and blocking radiation. 

A video shows a 7.62 x 63 millimeter M2 armor-piercing projectile that was fired using standard testing procedures established by the Department of Justice for evaluating armor types.

***

This is one mighty fine FREE operating system!


To celebrate the launch of Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, due for release later this month, on April 21, Canonical put together an interesting infographic, showing the world how popular Ubuntu is. 

From the infographic, it looks like there are over 60 million Ubuntu images launched by Docker users, 14 million Vagrant images of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS from HashiCorp, 20 million launches of Ubuntu instances during 2015 in public and private clouds, as well as bare metal, and 2 million new Ubuntu Cloud instances launched in November 2015.

 Ubuntu is used on the International Space Station, on the servers of popular online services like Netflix, Snapchat, Pinterest, Reddit, Dropbox, PayPal, Wikipedia, and Instagram, in Google, Tesla, George Hotz, and Uber cars.

 It is also employed at Bloomberg, Weta Digital and Walmart, at the Brigham Young University to control the Mars Rover, and it is even behind the largest supercomputer in the world.

So what does that tell you?

That this is one mighty fine free operating system!

***

Ubuntu BSD maintainer and lead developer Jon Boden is now looking for a way for his operating system to contribute to the Ubuntu community and, eventually, become an official Ubuntu flavor.

 Just two weeks ago, [Softpedia] introduced the ubuntuBSD project, whose main design goal is to bring users an operating system powered by the FreeBSD kernel while offering them the familiarity of the Ubuntu Linux OS. 

Right now, ubuntuBSD is in heavy development, with a fourth Beta build out the door, and it looks like the developer already seeks official status and wants to contribute all of his work to the main Ubuntu channels. [Canonical has yet to respond.]