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Submission + - First Lawsuits Challenging FCC's New Net Neutrality Rules Arrive (washingtonpost.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A small ISP based in Texas and an industry trade group have become the first to file lawsuits challenging the FCC's recent net neutrality rules. The trade group, USTelecom, argues that the regulations are not "legally sustainable," while Alamo Broadband claims they're facing "onerous requirements" by operating under Title II of the Communications Act. Such legal challenges were expected, and are doubtless the first of many — but few expected them to arrive so soon. While some of the new rules were considered "final" once the FCC released them on March 12, others don't go into effect until they're officially published in the Federal Register, which hasn't happened yet.

Submission + - Why Not Utopia? Mark Bittman on basic income and increasing automation (nytimes.com)

Submitted by Paul Fernhout
Paul Fernhout writes: Mark Bittman wrote an op-ed in the New York Times suggesting a basic income as a solution to increasing automation leading to job loss. He concludes: "We have achieved a level of social equality barely imagined by progressives 50 years ago, but economic equality has gotten much worse. No one knows what the world will look like in 50 years, but if we resign ourselves to dystopia — in which capital has full control, as it nearly does now — we'll surely have one. Let's resolve to build something better. In the long run we know that we'll make the transition from capitalism to some less destructive and hopefully more just system. Why not begin that transition now? If there is going to be a global market that will further enrich capitalists, there must be guarantees that the rest of the population can at least afford housing and food. And things can be even better than that: We'll have the robots work for us."

Comment Word missing. (Score 2) 165

by Futurepower(R) (#49322393) Attached to: RMS Talks Net Neutrality, Patents, and More
"monstrous surveillance engine" He left out evil. Should be: "evil monstrous surveillance engine"

But Facebook can be useful: Are you too happy? Is it uncomfortable being happier than everyone else? Do you want to be miserable like everyone you see around you?

Facebook has an answer. Read Facebook use predicts declines in happiness, new study finds. Or download the scientific paper.

Submission + - Deep Time, Long Term Thinking, and the Oldest Living Things in the World

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: Rachel Sussman has an interesting article at Nautilus about her nine year quest to find and photograph the oldest living things in the world. To qualify for inclusion, each organism must have gone through at least 2,000 years of continuous life as an individual. "I selected 2,000 years as my minimum age specifically to draw attention to the gentleman’s agreement of what “year zero” means. In other words, 2000 years serves both as an all-too-human start date, as well as the baseline age of my subjects," writes Sussman, an American fine art photographer. "The requirement of endurance on an individual level was an important consideration, because we all innately relate to the idea of self. This was a purposeful anthropomorphization that would further imbue the organisms with a reflective quality in which we could glimpse ourselves." Sussman went searching for 5,500-year-old moss in Antarctica, a 2,000-year-old brain coral in Tobago, an 80,000-year-old Aspen colony in Utah, a 2,000-year-old primitive Welwitschia in Namibia, and a 43,600-year-old shrub in Tasmania that’s the last of its kind on the planet, to name a few.

Sussman writes that one of her primary goals was to create a little jolt of recognition at the shallowness of human timekeeping and the blink that is a human lifespan. "Does our understanding of time have to be tethered to our physiological experience of it? writes Sussman. "The more we embrace long-term thinking, the more ethical our decision-making becomes." Sussman says that the dialogue with environmental conservation is a perfect example of the importance of blending art, science, and long-term thinking. "We hear these things like carbon-dioxide levels are rising. You hear "400 parts per million," and it doesn't really register what that means. But when you can look at this organism and say, "Wow, this spruce tree has been living on this mountainside for 9,500 years and, in the past 50, got this spindly trunk in the center because it got warmer at the top of this mountainside," there's something that's a very literal depiction of climate change happening right in front of you . It's observable. So I hope that that's going to be a way that people can connect to that as an issue."

Comment Re: "Drama of mental illness" (Score 2) 353

I went to a library the other day, and all the kids stared at their books the entire time, never looking at or talking to anyone around them.

At least the kids on phones were constantly chatting with friends elsewhere via texts & IM. Sounds much healthier than hiding from the world with your nose in a book..

Or maybe I should just learn to stop judging them by my own preconceived notions.

Submission + - Greenpeace Co-Founder Declares Himself a Climate Change Skeptic. (heartland.org) 5

Submitted by PensacolaSlick
PensacolaSlick writes: A co-founder of Greenpeace, seven-year director of Greenpeace International, with other very pro-environmental credentials, has come out with a brief rationale for why he is "skeptical that humans are the main cause of climate change and that it will be catastrophic in the near future." He argues instead that in a historical context, human activity has saved the planet, declaring that "at 400 parts per million, all our food crops, forests, and natural ecosystems are still on a starvation diet for carbon dioxide."

Submission + - DuckDuckGo Donates $100,000 Among Four FOSS Projects

Submitted by jones_supa
jones_supa writes: As the search engine company's annual habit, DuckDuckGo has chosen to advance four open source projects by donating them. The primary focus this year was to support FOSS projects that bring privacy tools to anyone who needs them. $25,000 goes to The Freedom of the Press Foundation to support SecureDrop, which is an whistleblower submission used to securely accept documents from anonymous sources. Electronic Frontier Foundation was given $25,000 to support PrivacyBadger, which is a browser add-on that stops advertisers and other third-party trackers from secretly tracking your surfing habits. Another $25,000 arrives at GPGTools to support GPG Suite, which is a software package for OS X that encrypts files or messages. Finally $25,000 was donated to Riseup to support Tails, which is a live operating system that aims at preserving your privacy and anonymity.

Comment What could go wrong? 6 possibilities. (Score 2) 90

by Futurepower(R) (#49298843) Attached to: Amazon Wins US Regulators' Approval To Test-fly Drone
1) Dog runs from bushes and attacks drone, destroys it. Who pays?

2) Child runs to drone, is hurt. Whose fault?

3) Drone fails in flight, crashes, kills people, destroys property. Amazon pays more than all profits from drone delivery.

4) Teenager is in a field trying a BB gun, shoots at drone. Drone crashes. What then?

5) Someone is testing a Tesla coil in his garage. The huge sparks emit electromagnetic interference, making communication with the drone impossible. Drone cannot be controlled, destroys property. Who pays?

6) Drone is stolen.

Submission + - To avoid NSA, Cisco gear gets delivered to strange address (computerworld.com.au) 1

Submitted by angry tapir
angry tapir writes: One of the most successful U.S. National Security Agency spying programs involved intercepting IT equipment en route to customers and modifying it. It appears some Cisco Systems customers have taken steps to prevent NSA tampering, including having Cisco ship gear to addresses that appear unrelated to the customer.

Submission + - The stolen credit for what makes up the Sun

Submitted by StartsWithABang
StartsWithABang writes: Sure, it's easy today to look at the Sun and know it's a ball of (mostly) hydrogen, generating energy by combining those protons in a chain into helium through the process of nuclear fusion. But before we even knew that nuclear fusion was possible, we needed to figure out what the Sun was made out of, a more difficult task than you'd imagine. The credit was given to Henry Norris Russell (of Hertzsprung-Russell diagram fame), but he completely stole the work from a woman you never heard of, his student, Cecilia Payne, after discouraging her from publishing her work on the subject four years prior.

Submission + - United flight costs less due to IT glitch, customer charged more after the fact (flyertalk.com)

Submitted by ugen
ugen writes: This is a discussion on Flyertalk. Evidently, a United passenger accepted an attractive offer of upgrade when booking a flight on United.com. After flight was complete, United decided that the fare offered was an IT glitch, and charged the customer's credit card additional $1200 without prior notice.

Submission + - LaTeX is Dead

Submitted by Jace Harker
Jace Harker writes: For decades, LaTeX was the tool of choice for writing scientific articles. But LaTeX's strength and weakness is its focus on the "page" as a unit of content. In today's web-centric world, is LaTeX still useful? Or will it be replaced by other, better writing systems?

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