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Submission + - A State-By-State Guide To Restrictive Community Broadband Laws

Submitted by blottsie
blottsie writes: On Tuesday, Obama will unveil a dramatic push to improve broadband Internet service for people around the country through community-built municipal broadband networks. Problem is, state legislatures around the country have passed laws making it considerably more difficult for these public Internet projects to get off the ground. In some states, building municipal broadband is prohibited altogether. This piece dives into the state laws standing between us and more competitive Internet service markets.

Submission + - French Premier Declares 'War' on Radical Islam 1

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: The NYT reports that Prime Minister Manuel Valls has declared that France is at war with radical Islam after the harrowing sieges that led to the deaths of three gunmen and four hostages. “It is a war against terrorism, against jihadism, against radical Islam, against everything that is aimed at breaking fraternity, freedom, solidarity,” says Valls. The French government said it would put 500 additional troops on the streets over the weekend amid preparations for a giant unity rally in Paris expected to draw over 1,000,000 people. A number of European officials say they will attend, including Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu of Turkey, the most prominent Muslim leader scheduled to be there, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel. "This will be an extraordinary demonstration ... which must show the power and the dignity of the French people who are going to proclaim their love of freedom and tolerance," says Valls. The crisis and its aftermath presented a major challenge to President François Hollande and his government, which are facing deep religious and cultural rifts in a nation with a rapidly growing Muslim population while simultaneously coping with the security threats stemming from Islamic extremists. Large numbers of French citizens have been traveling to Syria and Iraq to fight with the Islamic State, also known as ISIS. Hollande, appealing for unity, has warned against seeing Muslims as the enemy. "These madmen, fanatics, have nothing to do with the Muslim religion," says Hollande.

Submission + - The luxury of a bottomless bucket of bandwidth for Georgia schools

Submitted by Lemeowski
Lemeowski writes: The IT departments at all the University System of Georgia institutions have a luxury that most CIOs could only dream of — access to about 2,800 miles of free fiber and a private cloud that they an always count on. The private cloud configuration allows CIOs in the system the perk of not focusing on bandwith. "Our local CIOS even take some pleasure in telling telecom company representatives, 'If you can beat free, then I’m willing to listen.' That tends to shut down most conversations,"writes USG CIO Curt Carver, who explains how the technology is now becoming an educational equalizer across the state. In 2015, Georgia school districts are expected to have a 33-fold increase in bandwith available to them through the program. "This will help to flatten the state. No more haves or have-nots in terms of bandwidth going into the school districts."

Submission + - Major Terrorist Attack Strikes France (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Terrorist gunmen claiming to be from the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria have stormed the building of a French publication Charlie Hebdo that had recently published a cartoon of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. The gunmen are known to have killed eleven hostages so far and the situation is still ongoing. Currently, the BBC has the most information out of English news outlets. French speakers can consult the headline at Le Monde for more current news.

Submission + - Hackers Steal $5M In Bitcoin During Bitstamp Exchange Attack (itworld.com)

Submitted by itwbennett
itwbennett writes: After a weekend hack forced the Bitcoin exchange Bitstamp to shut down, Bitstamp has revealed that $5 million worth of bitcoin was stolen during the attack. And that's not all the bad news for Bitcoin this week: Canadian Bitcoin exchange Vault of Satoshi announced it is is no longer accepting new deposits and will close Feb. 5. But in this case the operators are pursuing new business opportunities, saying in a post that the shutdown 'has absolutely nothing to do with insolvency, stolen funds, or any other unfortunate scenario.'

Submission + - NASA Robonaut 2 can't use it's space legs upgrade. 1

Submitted by BarbaraHudson
BarbaraHudson writes: Robonaut 2, now in orbit on board the International Space Station, has run into problems with the software controlling its new legs

The machine ran into a few technical errors. According to NASA, the ground teams deployed Robonaut’s software and received telemetry from the robot, but were unable to obtain the correct commands for the leg movement, which are vital to performing every day tasks aboard the International Space Station. Ground teams have begun assessing how to move forward with this issue, though it is unclear if they currently have a fix in mind. In the meantime, the crew has begun posting images of themselves on Twitter alongside the robot, sporting thumbs ups and smiles on their faces.

Submission + - When FISA Court Rejects A Surveillance Request, The FBI Issues A NSL instead (techdirt.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: At the same time, we've also been talking plenty about Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act, which allows the DOJ/FBI (often working for the NSA) to go to the FISA Court and get rubberstamped court orders demanding certain "business records." As Ed Snowden revealed, these records requests can be as broad as basically "all details on all calls." But, since the FISA Court reviewed it, people insist it's legal. And, of course, the FISA Court has the reputation as a rubberstamp for a reason — it almost never turns down a request.

However, in the rare instances where it does, apparently, the DOJ doesn't really care, knowing that it can just issue an NSL instead and get the same information. At least that appears to be what the DOJ quietly admitted to doing in a now declassified Inspector General's report from 2008. EFF lawyer Nate Cardozo was going through and spotted this troubling bit:

Submission + - #metalgate SJWs prove their real purpose: censorship (deathmetal.org)

Submitted by hessian
hessian writes: Social Justice Warriors (SJWs) comprise the driving force behind the incursion into metal against which #metalgate is a reaction. Metalheads do not want to be told what to think by a self-appointed cabal determining what is “true” based on their ideological agenda. It does not matter which agenda that is, only that it swallows up truth and metal equally and uses them as means toward its real goal, which is power and control.

Submission + - The Magic of Pallets

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: Jacob Hodes writes in Cabinet Magazine that there are approximately two billion wooden shipping pallets in the holds of tractor-trailers in the United States transporting Honey Nut Cheerios and oysters and penicillin and just about any other product you can think of. According to Hodes the magic of pallets is the magic of abstraction. "Take any object you like, pile it onto a pallet, and it becomes, simply, a “unit load”—standardized, cubical, and ideally suited to being scooped up by the tines of a forklift. This allows your Cheerios and your oysters to be whisked through the supply chain with great efficiency; the gains are so impressive, in fact, that many experts consider the pallet to be the most important materials-handling innovation of the twentieth century." Although the technology was in place by the mid-1920s, pallets didn’t see widespread adoption until World War II, when the challenge of keeping eight million G.I.s supplied—“the most enormous single task of distribution ever accomplished anywhere,” according to one historian—gave new urgency to the science of materials handling. "The pallet really made it possible for us to fight a war on two fronts the way that we did." It would have been impossible to supply military forces in both the European and Pacific theaters if logistics operations had been limited to manual labor and hand-loading cargo.

To get a sense of the productivity gains that were achieved, consider the time it took to unload a boxcar before the advent of pallets. “According to an article in a 1931 railway trade magazine, three days were required to unload a boxcar containing 13,000 cases of unpalletized canned goods. When the same amount of goods was loaded into the boxcar on pallets or skids, the identical task took only four hours.” Pallets, of course, are merely one cog in the global machine for moving things and while shipping containers have had their due, the humble pallet is arguably "the single most important object in the global economy."

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