President corrects ‘great injustice’ with clemency for military personnel ‘convicted simply for being themselves’

Joe Biden has moved to correct a “great injustice” by pardoning thousands of US veterans convicted over six decades under a military law that banned gay sex.

The presidential proclamation, which comes during Pride month and an election year, allows LGBTQ+ service members convicted of crimes based solely on their sexual orientation to apply for a certificate of pardon that will help them receive withheld benefits.

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© Photograph: Tiziana Fabi/AFP/Getty Images

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© Photograph: Tiziana Fabi/AFP/Getty Images

Jacob Geller analyzes every torture scene in the Call of Duty series. And breaks down the "philosophy of torture" the series presents, and the worldview that underlies it.

Mr. Geller, previously. CW: for torture, violence in general, and militarism.

MattSparkes shares a report from NewScientist: The Russian invasion of Ukraine has seen so many landmines deployed across the country that clearing them would take 700 years, say researchers. To make the task more manageable, Ukrainian scientists are turning to artificial intelligence to identify which regions are a priority for de-mining, though they expect some may simply have to be left as a permanent "scar" on the country. The model considers vast amounts of data, including tax and property ownership records, agricultural maps, data on soil fertility, logs from the military and emergency services of where bombs and shells have landed, information gleaned from satellite images and interviews with local civilians and the military. Even climate change models and data on population density derived from mobile phone operators could be assessed. The AI then weighs factors such as civilian safety and potential economic benefits to determine the importance of a given piece of land and how urgent it is to make it safe. Ihor Bezkaravainyi, a deputy minister at Ukraine's Ministry of Economy, is leading the team, and he likens the task of de-mining during an ongoing war to designing and building a submarine entirely underwater, except that the water is on fire. "It's a big problem," he says.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Popsci: (on the Tesla Cybertruck upgrades for police cruisers) "With the all-wheel drive Cybertruck's current $79,990 price, it stands to reason the combined taxpayer cost for a vehicle and new UP.FIT features could easily top $90,000. While UP.FIT's website doesn't offer any price ranges, Unplugged Performance lists similar products on its online store. A 50-inch, 48V double row LED light bar for the Cybertruck, for example, costs $1,293.75, while a front bull bar retails for $1,995. UP.FIT details at least 25 upgrades in its standard "Patrol Cybertruck" tier as well as multiple recommended and optional additions. For comparison, a brand-new 2024 Ford Explorer 4WD Police Interceptor costs roughly $47,000." (Police Cruiser Manual Override Exit Tool: $6.29)

During the Cold War, the US Navy tried to make a secret code out of whale song.

The basic plan was to develop coded messages from recordings of whales, dolphins, sea lions, and seals. The submarine would broadcast the noises and a computer—the Combo Signal Recognizer (CSR)—would detect the specific patterns and decode them on the other end. In theory, this idea was relatively simple. As work progressed, the Navy found a number of complicated problems to overcome, the bulk of which centered on the authenticity of the code itself.

The message structure couldn’t just substitute the moaning of a whale or a crying seal for As and Bs or even whole words. In addition, the sounds Navy technicians recorded between 1959 and 1965 all had natural background noise. With the technology available, it would have been hard to scrub that out. Repeated blasts of the same sounds with identical extra noise would stand out to even untrained sonar operators.

In the end, it didn’t work.