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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."

Comment Re:FTFA (Score 1) 611

by Thomas Miconi (#48605803) Attached to: Waze Causing Anger Among LA Residents

FTFA:
Killeen said her four-mile commute to UCLA, where she teaches a public relations class, can take two hours during rush hour.

>4 miles
>Sunny LA

GET A FUCKING BICYCLE!

--
BMO

Biking in a densely urbanized portion of Southern California: suicide never felt so hip!

(Disclaimer: Admittedly the UCLA campus area is surprisingly human-friendly. But not over a four-mile radius.)

Submission + - '94 Harvard Crimson: Require CS or Grads of 'Much Shittier Schools' Get Jobs

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: Produced by Code.org, Computer Science Education Week kicks off on Dec. 8th, which its organizers explain is all about extending CS beyond 'the lucky few'. It's quite a pivot from more than 20 years ago, when the Harvard Crimson reported on a call from a Code.org co-founder for mandatory CS coursework to essentially extend Computer Science to 'the lucky few' in an effort to prevent people from 'much shittier schools' than Harvard from getting hired for computer-related jobs. From the 1994 Crimson article: "It would not be bad if there was some sort of simple math or science or statistic or computer science course required," says Ali Partovi '94. "It is really going to be a big thing in the future. People from much shittier schools will get jobs because they know more about computers." It's nice to see things are pivoting towards computer-science-for-all — heck, Codecademy notes that Asian and White boys are now the only students Google says don't count towards the $1,000 funding bonuses Google's offering to public school teachers who get 10 students to take a JavaScript course!
Businesses

LinkedIn Study: US Attracting Fewer Educated, Highly Skilled Migrants 338

Posted by samzenpus from the best-and-brightest dept.
vinces99 writes The U.S. economy has long been powered in part by the nation's ability to attract the world's most educated and skilled people to its shores. But a new study of the worldwide migration of professionals to the U.S. shows a sharp drop-off in its proportional share of those workers – raising the question of whether the nation will remain competitive in attracting top talent in an increasingly globalized economy. The study, which used a novel method of tracking people through data from the social media site LinkedIn, is believed to be the first to monitor global migrations of professionals to the U.S., said co-author Emilio Zagheni, a University of Washington assistant professor of sociology and fellow of the UW eScience Institute. Among other things, the study, presented recently in Barcelona, Spain, found that just 13 percent of migrating professionals in the sample group chose the U.S. as a destination in 2012, down from 27 percent in 2000.

Comment Re:About time for a Free baseband processor (Score 2) 202

by Safety Cap (#48388761) Attached to: Department of Justice Harvests Cell Phone Data Using Planes

Sure they don't sell bombers and guided missiles, but then if we ever get to that point, there won't be much of a military left for the gov't to use against us, because they are US.

LOL. It is so cute when someone who has never served brings out the "they'll never attack US citizens!!! DERP!" line.

Here's how it goes down. First, the military brass will come up with some disparaging name for the citizens who are the new enemy, just as they did for every other war:

"Haji" is the troops' term of choice for an Iraqi. It's used the way "gook" or "Charlie" was used in Vietnam. "From 'Gook' to 'Raghead'"

Next, the citizens (the bad ones) are depicted as subhuman. (The government will also direct the news to depict the new enemy as dangerous psychopaths, so the average citizen will not join in the revolt.)

Final step: 6-round burst, every time. Change barrels every 10 minutes.

Submission + - British Spies are free to target Lawyers and Journalists (firstlook.org)

Submitted by Advocatus Diaboli
Advocatus Diaboli writes: British spies have been granted the authority to secretly eavesdrop on legally privileged attorney-client communications, according to newly released documents. On Thursday, a series of previously classified policies confirmed for the first time that the U.K.’s top surveillance agency Government Communications Headquarters (pictured above) has advised its employees: “You may in principle target the communications of lawyers.” The country’s other major security and intelligence agencies—MI5 and MI6—have adopted similar policies, the documents show. The guidelines also appear to permit surveillance of journalists and others deemed to work in “sensitive professions.”

Submission + - Terrorists used false DMCA claims to get personal data of anti-islamic youtuber

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: German newspaper FAZ reports (google translated version) that, after facing false DMCA claims by "FirstCrist, Copyright" and threatened by youtube with takedown, a youtuber running the german version of islam-critic Al Hayat TV had to disclose their identity in order to get the channel back online, in accordance with youtube policy. Later, the channel staff got a mail containing a death threat by "FirstCrist, Copyright", containing: "thank you for your personal data. [...] take care your house gets police protection!". As the staff had already suspected that "FirstCrist, Copyright" were in fact islamists, they had tried to convince youtube youtube to find another way, but in vain.

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