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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."

Submission + - Digital Humanities articles to be published visually (digitalhumanities.org)

Submitted by frisket
frisket writes: Digital Humanities Quarterly is making its articles available as a "set of visualizations which will be published as a surrogate for the article", according to editor Julia Flanders of Northeastern University. "[This] helps address a growing problem of inequity between scholars who have time to read and those whose jobs are more technical or managerial and don’t allow time to keep up with the growing literature in DH. By removing the full text of the article from view and providing a surrogate that can be easily scanned in a few minutes, we hope to rectify this imbalance, putting everyone on an equal footing. A second, related problem has to do with the radical insufficiency of reading cycles compared with the demand for reading and citation to drive journal impact factor."
Government

Why US Gov't Retirement Involves a Hole in the Ground Near Pittsburgh 142

Posted by timothy from the it's-just-that-simple dept.
Increasing automation worries some people as a danger to the livelihood of those who currently earn their livings at jobs that AI and robots (or just smarter software and more sophisticated technology generally) might be well-suited to, as the costs of the technology options drop. The Washington Post, though, features an eye-opening look at one workplace where automation certainly does not rule. It's "one of the weirdest workplaces in the U.S. government" — a subterranean office space in what was once a limestone mine, where 600 Office of Personnel Management employees process the retirement papers of other government employees. The Post article describes how this mostly-manual process works (and why it hasn't been changed much to take advantage of advancing technology), including with a video that might remind you of Terry Gilliam's Brazil. As the writer puts it, "[T]hat system has a spectacular flaw. It still must be done entirely by hand, and almost entirely on paper. The employees here pass thousands of case files from cavern to cavern and then key in retirees’ personal data, one line at a time. They work underground not for secrecy but for space. The old mine’s tunnels have room for more than 28,000 file cabinets of paper records."
Open Source

Neovim: Rebuilding Vim For the 21st Century 248

Posted by timothy from the vigor-next-to-be-upgraded dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Neovim is a major overhaul of the vim editor to provide better scripting, cleaner support for plugins and integration with modern graphical interfaces. Modernising the large and complex codebase of Vim is a formidable task, but the developer has a clear plan, and has already begun work. There's a Bountysource fundraiser running to support the effort. If Vim is your editor of choice, check it out." (The crowd-funding effort has only one more day to go, but has well exceeded already the initial goal of $10,000.)
Earth

Forests Around Chernobyl Aren't Decaying Properly 167

Posted by Soulskill from the this-is-what-happens-when-forests-aren't-educated-properly dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Smithsonian Magazine has an article about one of the non-obvious effects of the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown: dead organisms are not decomposing correctly. 'According to a new study (abstract) published in Oecologia, decomposers—organisms such as microbes, fungi and some types of insects that drive the process of decay—have also suffered from the contamination. These creatures are responsible for an essential component of any ecosystem: recycling organic matter back into the soil. Issues with such a basic-level process, the authors of the study think, could have compounding effects for the entire ecosystem.' The scientists took bags of fallen leaves to various areas around Chernobyl and found that locations with more radiation caused the leaves to retain more than half of their original weight after almost a year. They're now beginning to worry that almost three decades of dead brush buildup is contributing to the area's fire risk, and a large fire could distribute radioactive material beyond Chernobyl's exclusion zone."
Security

Apple Refuses To Unlock Bequeathed iPad 465

Posted by samzenpus from the cooperation-in-3-2-1 dept.
mrspoonsi writes "A man whose mother bequeathed her iPad to her family in her will says Apple's security rules are too restrictive. Since her death, they have been unable to unlock the device, despite providing Apple with copies of her will, death certificate and solicitor's letter. After her death, they discovered they did not know her Apple ID and password, but were asked to provide written consent for the device to be unlocked. Mr Grant said: 'We obviously couldn't get written permission because mum had died. So my brother has been back and forth with Apple, they're asking for some kind of proof that he can have the iPad. We've provided the death certificate, will and solicitor's letter but it wasn't enough. They've now asked for a court order to prove that mum was the owner of the iPad and the iTunes account.'"

Comment Re:Wouldn't work (Score 1) 313

by frisket (#46378599) Attached to: Should programming be a required curriculum in public schools?
My kids did Logo extramural classes at the local school, so they learned what a program is, how to express Boolean logic, and why programs sometimes fail. The eldest "got it" and is now a fully-qualified (although not practising) COBOL programmer (work for a *bank*? the ignominy :-) but still working in IT. The other two are in unrelated fields, but the legacy of having learned how to make a computer do something means they have no problems in understanding pretty much anything user-level IT can throw at them, and often a lot more.
Science

Whole Foods: America's Temple of Pseudoscience 794

Posted by Soulskill from the pseudoscience-makes-pretty-good-cakes dept.
__roo writes "Many Americans get riled up about creationists and climate change deniers, but lap up the quasi-religious snake oil at Whole Foods. It's all pseudoscience — so why are some kinds of pseudoscience more equal than others? That's the question the author of this article tackles: 'From the probiotics aisle to the vaguely ridiculous Organic Integrity outreach effort ... Whole Foods has all the ingredients necessary to give Richard Dawkins nightmares. ... The homeopathy section has plenty of Latin words and mathematical terms, but many of its remedies are so diluted that, statistically speaking, they may not contain a single molecule of the substance they purport to deliver.' He points out his local Whole Foods' clientele shop at a place where a significant portion of the product being sold is based on simple pseudoscience. So, why do many of us perceive Whole Foods and the Creation Museum so differently?"
United States

Privacy Lawsuits Over NSA Spying Force Retention of Metadata 59

Posted by samzenpus from the keeping-it-a-bit-longer dept.
jfruh writes "Under the U.S.'s previously secret program of gathering phone call metadata, that information was only retained for a period of five years. Now the government has petitioned the court system to retain it longer — not because it wants to, it says, but because it needs to preserve it as evidence for the various privacy lawsuits filed against the government. Federal lawyers have suggested several ways the information can be preserved without being available to the NSA."
Programming

Does Relying On an IDE Make You a Bad Programmer? 627

Posted by samzenpus from the speak-up dept.
itwbennett writes "Writing about his career decisions, programming language choices, and regrets, Rob Conery says that as a .NET developer he became more reliant on an IDE than he would have with PHP. Blogger, and .NET developer, Matthew Mombrea picks up the thread, coming to the defense of IDEs (Visual Studio in particular). Mombrea argues that 'being a good developer isn't about memorizing the language specific calls, it's about knowing the available ways to solve a problem and solving it using the best technique or tools as you can.' Does using an IDE make you lazy with the language? Would you be better off programming with Notepad?"

Comment Re:Why now? (Score 2) 105

by frisket (#46326401) Attached to: Nokia Announces Nokia X Android Smartphone

If they fuck it up (and fuck the users over) like they did with the N800, N9, and Meego, then forgeddit.

but it's hard to see why Nokia would be working on such a project at this time

Because they suffer from what my medical colleagues refer to as Glutaeo-Humeroid Distinction Disability (the medical term for not knowing your ass from your elbow). They had exactly what was needed three times (a pocket computer that was also a phone, or could at least run Skype) and threw it away three times. There is precisely zero evidence that they are even marginally competent nowadays to run a phone company,

Comment Re:Reward if Found (Score 1) 250

by frisket (#46318883) Attached to: Slashdot Asks: Do You Label Your Tech Gear, and If So, How?

On a visit to CERN many years ago I noticed all their keyboards, monitors, etc (stuff in plastic boxes, basically) was not engraved but branded with a heated device that melted their name deep into it. Virtually impossible to remove or obliterate.

Expensive stuff I label with "There is a reward for returning this device to XYZ Corp" followed by a contact number. The only time I lost such an item it was returned anonymously in the mail, so thank you to whoever that was.

Cheaper stuff just gets a label with my company name and contact number.

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