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Submission + - Librarians: The Google Before Google

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: NPR has an article about the questions people ask librarians. Before the internet, the librarian was your best bet for a quick answer to anything on your mind. "We were Google before Google existed," NYPL spokesperson Angela Montefinise explains. "If you wanted to know if a poisonous snake dies if it bites itself, you'd call or visit us." The New York Public Library in Manhattan recently discovered a box of old reference questions asked by patrons and plans to release some in its Instagram account. Here are a few of the best:
  • I just saw a mouse in the kitchen. Is DDT OK to use? (1946)
  • What does it mean when you dream of being chased by an elephant? (1947)
  • Can you tell me the thickness of a U.S. Postage stamp with the glue on it? Answer: We couldn't tell you that answer quickly. Why don't you try the Post Office? Response: This is the Post Office. (1963)
  • Where can I rent a beagle for hunting? (1963)

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."

Comment Re:And where is my money?? (Score 1) 51

by cduffy (#48639445) Attached to: T-Mobile To Pay $90M For Unauthorized Charges On Customers' Bills

More like $20, and that's for people who don't look up how much they were actually charged.

And cash, not a voucher. I'm a former T-Mobile customer, and they looked up my new contact information and got in touch to let me know that this was available (how to ask them to research my actual charges, vs how to accept the default amount).

A lot of these settlements are BS, but you might do a bit of homework for claiming that this is just more of the same.
NASA

11 Trillion Gallons of Water Needed To End California Drought 330

Posted by Soulskill from the everybody-send-2,000-gallons-of-water-to-california dept.
mrflash818 points out a new study which found that California can recover from its lengthy drought with a mere 11 trillion gallons of water. The volume this water would occupy (roughly 42 cubic kilometers) is half again as large as the biggest water reservoir in the U.S. A team of JPL scientists worked this out through the use of NASA's Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellites. From the article: GRACE data reveal that, since 2011, the Sacramento and San Joaquin river basins decreased in volume by four trillion gallons of water each year (15 cubic kilometers). That's more water than California's 38 million residents use each year for domestic and municipal purposes. About two-thirds of the loss is due to depletion of groundwater beneath California's Central Valley. ... New drought maps show groundwater levels across the U.S. Southwest are in the lowest two to 10 percent since 1949.
Biotech

Brain Stimulation For Entertainment? 88

Posted by Soulskill from the volunteer-your-neighbors-as-guinea-pigs dept.
An anonymous reader writes: Transcranial magnetic stimulation has been used for years to diagnose and treat neural disorders such as stroke, Alzheimer's, and depression. Soon the medical technique could be applied to virtual reality and entertainment. Neuroscientist Jeffrey Zacks writes, "it's quite likely that some kind of electromagnetic brain stimulation for entertainment will become practical in the not-too-distant future." Imagine an interactive movie where special effects are enhanced by zapping parts of the brain from outside to make the action more vivid. Before brain stimulation makes it to the masses, however, it has plenty of technical and safety hurdles to overcome.
Electronic Frontier Foundation

Federal Court Nixes Weeks of Warrantless Video Surveillance 440

Posted by timothy from the if-you-watch-someone-long-enough dept.
An anonymous reader writes with this news from the EFF's Deep Links: The public got an early holiday gift today when a federal court agreed with us that six weeks of continually video recording the front yard of someone's home without a search warrant violates the Fourth Amendment. In United States v. Vargas local police in rural Washington suspected Vargas of drug trafficking. In April 2013, police installed a camera on top of a utility pole overlooking his home. Even though police did not have a warrant, they nonetheless pointed the camera at his front door and driveway and began watching every day. A month later, police observed Vargas shoot some beer bottles with a gun and because Vargas was an undocumented immigrant, they had probable cause to believe he was illegally possessing a firearm. They used the video surveillance to obtain a warrant to search his home, which uncovered drugs and guns, leading to a federal indictment against Vargas.

Comment Re:Supply and demand (Score 1) 190

by cduffy (#48602319) Attached to: Why Didn't Sidecar's Flex Pricing Work?

Did you miss the part where (per said driver's assertion) Sidecar paid a better post-deduction base rate even without the temporary promotion?

Also, it's not exactly like there are substantial costs associated with switching which service a driver chooses to work from. If rational economic decisions were being followed, one would expect a driver to want to double their money while it was possible to do so, and then switch back to a different service if that paid better the rest of the time.

Comment Re:Supply and demand (Score 0, Troll) 190

by cduffy (#48601343) Attached to: Why Didn't Sidecar's Flex Pricing Work?

Except that drivers aren't making more money with Uber or Lyft.

Saturday night I took a Sidecar home, and our driver was talking about how Sidecar is currently offering better base rates (after accounting for deductions -- Uber shows drivers the price a customer is paying before their cut is taken out), and currently offering double payouts from their marketing budget as a limited-time promotion to attract more drivers.

The premise that Uber or Lyft pays better is, presently, false.
Canada

Govt Docs Reveal Canadian Telcos Promise Surveillance Ready Networks 74

Posted by samzenpus from the we'll-do-it-for-you dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Michael Geist reports that Canadian telecom and Internet providers have tried to convince the government that they will voluntarily build surveillance capabilities into their networks. Hoping to avoid legislative requirements, the providers argue that "the telecommunications market will soon shift to a point where interception capability will simply become a standard component of available equipment, and that technical changes in the way communications actually travel on communications networks will make it even easier to intercept communications."
Google

Eric Schmidt: To Avoid NSA Spying, Keep Your Data In Google's Services 281

Posted by samzenpus from the no-snooping-zone dept.
jfruh writes Google Chairman Eric Schmidt told a conference on surveillance at the Cato Institute that Edward Snowden's revelations on NSA spying shocked the company's engineers — who then immediately started working on making the company's servers and services more secure. Now, after a year and a half of work, Schmidt says that Google's services are the safest place to store your sensitive data.
Medicine

Judge Rules Drug Maker Cannot Halt Sales of Alzheimer's Medicine 266

Posted by timothy from the you-didn't-build-that dept.
HughPickens.com writes Andrew Pollack reports at the NYT that a federal judge has blocked an attempt by the drug company Actavis to halt sales of an older form of its Alzheimer's disease drug Namenda in favor of a newer version with a longer patent life after New York's attorney general filed an antitrust lawsuit accusing the drug company of forcing patients to switch to the newer version of the widely used medicine to hinder competition from generic manufacturers. "Today's decision prevents Actavis from pursuing its scheme to block competition and maintain its high drug prices," says Eric Schneiderman, the New York attorney general. "Our lawsuit against Actavis sends a clear message: Drug companies cannot illegally prioritize profits over patients."

The case involves a practice called product hopping where brand name manufacturers make a slight alteration to their prescription drug (PDF) and engage in marketing efforts to shift consumers from the old version to the new to insulate the drug company from generic competition for several years. For its part Actavis argued that an injunction would be "unprecedented and extraordinary" and would cause the company "great financial harm, including unnecessary manufacturing and marketing costs." Namenda has been a big seller. In the last fiscal year, the drug generated $1.5 billion in sales. The drug costs about $300 a month.

Submission + - $35 Quad-core Hacker SBC Offers Raspberry Pi-like Size And I/O (linuxgizmos.com)

Submitted by __aajbyc7391
__aajbyc7391 writes: Hardkernel has again set its sites on the Raspberry Pi with a new $35 Odroid-C1 hacker board that matches the RPI's board size and offers a mostly similar 40-pin expansion connector. Unlike the previous $30 Odroid-W that used the same Broadcom BCM2835 SoC as the Pi and was soon cancelled due to lack of BCM2835 SoC availability, the Odroid-C1 is based on a quad-core 1.5GHz Cortex-A5 based Amlogic S805 SoC, which integrates the Mali-400 GPU found on Allwinner's popular SoCs. Touted advantages over the similarly priced Raspberry Pi Model B+ include a substantially more powerful processor, double the RAM, a extra USB2.0 port that adds Device/OTG, and GbE rather than 10/100 Ethernet. More info is at Odroid-C1 product page.

Comment Re:America, land of the free... (Score 2) 720

by cduffy (#48548235) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Can a Felon Work In IT?

There is no law barring employment for felons â" on the contrary, the state goes out of its way to encourage employers to hire them, to reduce recidivism.

...but they do a rather bad job of it, as a great many of your larger employers have a zero-tolerance policy.

To be born and raised in the USA â" the country, to which millions of people dream of migrating (legally and otherwise) â" and waste your youthful years on crime?

The advice the OP is asking for applies to other folks as well. One of my friends has a felony record for running web hosting for a brothel a friend of his owned, and otherwise offering services and support to a business which was to the best of his knowledge strictly offering services between consenting adults... and not turning her in when he changed his mind about being willing to continue to provide that support. That folks who don't follow a libertarian philosophy could see that as a lapse of ethics is certainly granted -- but a lapse that should mean that 4/5ths of employment prospects are permanently off the table? That's harsh.

That said -- he's working today, for an employer well aware of the entirety of his background (including his meticulous attention to detail and corner cases in software design and development). So, yes -- fewer options, but some do still exist.
The Military

Man Caught Trying To Sell Plans For New Aircraft Carrier 388

Posted by Soulskill from the bet-you-wish-you'd-stood-in-bed dept.
New submitter cyberjock1980 tips news that an engineer has been caught trying to deliver schematics for an aircraft carrier to the Egyptian government. The 35-year-old civilian received security clearance four months ago after working for the U.S. Navy since February. FBI agents made contact with him, pretending to be with the Egyptian government. They struck a deal to buy documents about the U.S.S. Gerald R. Ford, the first in a new line of improved, nuclear-powered aircraft carriers. The man sold four CAD drawings for the carrier, and was later seen photographing another set of schematics. A bond hearing is scheduled for Wednesday.
China

Chinese Government Moves To Crack Down On Puns 156

Posted by timothy from the where's-the-pun-in-that? dept.
FreedomFirstThenPeac (1235064) writes "A story in The Guardian tells us that in an Orwellian move to legislate language, the Chinese government is attempting to stop the use of puns because they are disruptive and may lead to chaos (not the mathematical kind) and as such are unsuitable for use. However, Chinese is rife with puns, with this example quoted in the story: "When couples marry, people will give them dates and peanuts – a reference to the wish Zaosheng guizi or 'May you soon give birth to a son.' The word for dates is also zao and peanuts are huasheng." The powerful date and peanut lobbies are up in arms, claiming that such a ban will cost them more than peanuts. Their claim? "If you outlaw puns. Only criminals will have puns."

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