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Education

L.A. Science Teacher Suspended Over Student Science Fair Projects 253

Posted by timothy from the science-is-sometimes-dangerous dept.
An anonymous reader writes "A high school science teacher at Grand Arts High School in Los Angeles was suspended from the classroom in February, after two of his science fair students turned in projects deemed dangerous by the administrators. "One project was a marshmallow shooter — which uses air pressure to launch projectiles. The other was an AA battery-powered coil gun — which uses electromagnetism to launch small objects. Similar projects have been honored in past LA County Science Fairs and even demonstrated at the White House."
Businesses

California Utility May Replace IT Workers with H-1B Workers 220

Posted by Soulskill from the if-california-falls-into-the-ocean-would-that-count-as-offshoring dept.
dcblogs writes: "Southern California Edison is preparing to offshore IT jobs, the second major U.S. utility in the last year to do so. It will be cutting its staff, but it hasn't said by how much. The utility is using at least two offshore outsourcing firms, according to government records. SCE's management culture may be particularly primed for firing its IT workers. Following a workplace shooting in SCE's IT offices in 2011, the utility conducted an independent audit of its organizational and management culture. One observation in this report, which was completed a year later, was that 'employees perceive managers to be more concerned about how they 'look' from above, and less concerned about how they are viewed by their subordinates. This fosters an unhealthy culture and climate by sending a message to employees that it is more important to focus on how things look from the top than how they actually are down below.'"
Power

MIT Designs Tsunami Proof Floating Nuclear Reactor 218

Posted by samzenpus from the riding-the-waves dept.
First time accepted submitter Amtrak (2430376) writes "MIT has created designs for a nuclear plant that would avoid the downfall of the Fukushima Daiichi plant. The new design calls for the nuclear plant to be placed on a floating platform modeled after the platforms used for offshore oil drilling. A floating platform several miles offshore, moored in about 100 meters of water, would be unaffected by the motions of a tsunami; earthquakes would have no direct effect at all. Meanwhile, the biggest issue that faces most nuclear plants under emergency conditions — overheating and potential meltdown, as happened at Fukushima, Chernobyl, and Three Mile Island — would be virtually impossible at sea."

Comment Re:As a Linux Mint proponent, I say no. (Score 1) 452

by frisket (#46719843) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: How To Start With Linux In the Workplace?

However I continually run into limitations from it just not being windows.

This is the biggest problem. Not just the Window-only applications (that's an organisational problem) but the UI behaviour.

To be a candidate for Windows replacement, Linux interfaces need to do things the way Windows people expect them, like opening the right application when you click on an email attachment or a web link. I've seen Chrome open Mutt instead of Thunderbird in order to follow a mailto: link, and Thunderbird open Libre Office in order to handle a .eml attachment, instead of opening it itself. I won't even get into what happens when you click on a https link in a PDF when using Okular...

If you're prepared to fix all this kind of stuff and preconfigure every application to work sensibly, you might just make it.

Comment Re:Danger Danger Danger (Score 1) 452

by frisket (#46719755) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: How To Start With Linux In the Workplace?

You are getting yourself in a world of pain!

XP users will bitch and moan enough already if they have to use Windows 7 or 8. Giving them Linux would be much worse.

Not necessarily. Run up a couple of demo machines, half with Win8 and half with Linux. Let the users try them out, and go with whichever one they feel most comfortable with.

A dime gets a dollar that's Win8. It's management's problem if the employees' productivity falters because they are using an incompetently-designed UI that management imposed on them; it's IT's job to recommend the best course of action for the business — if management choose to pick a loser, don't blame IT (unless they also recommended the loser, which they sometimes do :-)
Communications

New French Law Prohibits After-Hours Work Emails 477

Posted by timothy from the annual-non-performance-review dept.
Hugh Pickens DOT Com (2995471) writes "Lucy Mangan reports at The Guardian that a new labor agreement in France means that employees must ignore their bosses' work emails once they are out of the office and relaxing at home – even on their smartphones. Under the deal, which affects a million employees in the technology and consultancy sectors (including the French arms of Google, Facebook, and Deloitte), employees will also have to resist the temptation to look at work-related material on their computers or smartphones – or any other kind of malevolent intrusion into the time they have been nationally mandated to spend on whatever the French call la dolce vita. "We must also measure digital working time," says Michel De La Force, chairman of the General Confederation of Managers. "We can admit extra work in exceptional circumstances but we must always come back to what is normal, which is to unplug, to stop being permanently at work." However critics say it will impose further red tape on French businesses, which already face some of the world's tightest labor laws." (Continues)
Crime

Hewlett-Packard Admits To International Bribery and Money Laundering Schemes 139

Posted by samzenpus from the was-that-wrong? dept.
First time accepted submitter CP (1315157) writes "Hewlett-Packard has admitted to [bribery and money laundering] in order to profiteer off of lucrative government contracts in Russia, Poland, and Mexico, according to court documents. HP's guilty plea carries with it a $108 million penalty — a combination of SEC penalties, as well as criminal fines and forfeitures paid out to the Department of Justice. Thus far no criminal charges have been brought against American HP executives. The multi-agency investigation, which was conducted by multi-national law enforcement partners, the FBI, IRS, and SEC, has revealed kleptocracies in the three foreign governments and corruption and dishonesty among HP corporate fat cats."
United States

Cuba: US Using New Weapon Against Us -- Spam 139

Posted by samzenpus from the filling-the-pipes dept.
mpicpp (3454017) writes in with news about accusations from Cuban officials about a spamming campaign against the country by the U.S.. "Cuban officials have accused the U.S. government of bizarre plots over the years, such as trying to kill Fidel Castro with exploding cigars. On Wednesday, they said Washington is using a new weapon against the island: spam. 'It's overloading the networks, which creates bad service and affects our customers,' said Daniel Ramos Fernandez, chief of security operations at the Cuban government-run telecommunications company ETECSA. At a news conference Wednesday, Cuban officials said text messaging platforms run by the U.S. government threatened to overwhelm Cuba's creaky communications system and violated international conventions against junk messages. The spam, officials claim, comes in the form of a barrage of unwanted text messages, some political in nature. Ramos said that during a 2009 concert in Havana performed by the Colombian pop-star Juanes, a U.S. government program blanketed Cuban cell phone networks with around 300,000 text messages over about five hours."
The Almighty Buck

SF Evictions Surging From Crackdown On Airbnb Rentals 319

Posted by samzenpus from the and-stay-out dept.
JoeyRox (2711699) writes "The city of San Francisco is aggressively enforcing its ban on short-term rentals. SF resident Jeffrey Katz recently came home to an eviction notice posted on his door that read 'You are illegally using the premises as a tourist or transient unit.' According to Edward Singer, an attorney with Zacks & Freedman who filed the notice against Katz, 'Using an apartment for short-term rentals is a crime in San Francisco.' Apparently Airbnb isn't being very helpful to residents facing eviction. 'Unfortunately, we can't provide individual legal assistance or review lease agreements for our 500,000 hosts, but we do try to help inform people about these issues,' according to David Hantman, Airbnb head of global public policy. SF and Airbnb are working on a framework which might make Airbnb rentals legal, an effort helped by Airbnb's decision last week to start collecting the city's 14% hotel tax by summer."
Earth

How a 'Seismic Cloak' Could Slow Down an Earthquake 101

Posted by Soulskill from the shake-rattle-and-roll dept.
Daniel_Stuckey writes "The United States is currently gripped in a bout of earthquake mania, following a series of significant tremors in the West. And any time Yellowstone, LA, or San Francisco shakes, people start to wonder if it's a sign of The Big One to come. Yet even after decades of research, earthquake prediction remains notoriously hard, and not every building in quake-prone areas has an earthquake-resistant design. What if, instead of quaking in our boots, we could stop quakes in their tracks? Theoretically, it's not a crazy idea. Earthquakes propagate in waves, and if noise-canceling headphones have taught us anything, it's that waves can be absorbed, reflected, or canceled out. Today, a paper published in Physical Review Letters suggests how that might be done. It's the result of French research into the use of metamaterials—broadly, materials with properties not found in nature—to modify seismic waves, like a seismic cloaking device."

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