Follow Slashdot stories on Twitter

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:Oh Goodie (Score 1) 33

by SpzToid (#48593651) Attached to: Facebook Drops Bing Search Results

No, this seems like very relevant and horrible news, at least to this Slashdotter. I do NOT(!) use Facebook, but my family loves it, posting photos and all that shit. Now I need to be worried about about how I am perceived via the Facebook Walled Garden(tm) to perspective employers doing requisite background checks, since I work in I.T. Like I didn't have enough genuine concerns given my field, market, and knowledge.

Facebook sucks.

Submission + - Should IT professionals be exempt from overtime? (pbs.org) 1

Submitted by Paul Fernhout
Paul Fernhout writes: Nick Hanauer's a billionaire who made his fortune as one of the original investors in Amazon. He suggests President Obama should restore US overtime regulations to the 1970s to boost the economy (quoted by PBS NewsHour):
"In 1975, more than 65 percent of salaried American workers earned time-and-a-half pay for every hour worked over 40 hours a week. Not because capitalists back then were more generous, but because it was the law. It still is the law, except that the value of the threshold for overtime pay--the salary level at which employers are required to pay overtime--has been allowed to erode to less than the poverty line for a family of four today. Only workers earning an annual income of under $23,660 qualify for mandatory overtime. You know many people like that? Probably not. By 2013, just 11 percent of salaried workers qualified for overtime pay, according to a report published by the Economic Policy Institute. And so business owners like me have been able to make the other 89 percent of you work unlimited overtime hours for no additional pay at all.
    The Obama administration could, on its own, go even further. Many millions of Americans are currently exempt from the overtime rules--teachers, federal employees, doctors, computer professionals, etc.--and corporate leaders are lobbying hard to expand "computer professional" to mean just about anybody who uses a computer. Which is almost everybody. But were the Labor Department instead to narrow these exemptions, millions more Americans would receive the overtime pay they deserve. Why, you might ask, are so many workers exempted from overtime? That's a fair question. To be truthful, I have no earthly idea why. What I can tell you is that these exemptions work out very well for your employers. ...
    In the information economy of the 21st century, it is not capital accumulation that creates growth and prosperity, but, rather, the virtuous cycle of innovation and demand. The more innovators and entrepreneurs we have converting ideas into products and services, the higher our standard of living, and the more people who can afford to consume these products and services, the greater the incentive to innovate. Thus, the key to growth and prosperity is to fully include as many Americans as possible in our economy, both as innovators and consumers.
    In plain English, the real economy is you: Raise wages, and one increases demand. Increase demand and one increases jobs, wages and innovation. The real economy is simply the interplay between consumers and businesses. On the other hand, as we've learned from the past 40 years of slow growth and record stock buybacks, not even an infinite supply of capital can persuade a CEO to hire more workers absent demand for the products and services they produce.
    The twisted irony is, when you work more hours for less pay, you hurt not only yourself, you hurt the real economy by depressing wages, increasing unemployment and reducing demand and innovation. Ironically, when you earn less, and unemployment is high, it even hurts capitalists like me. ..."

If overtime pay is generally good for the economy, should most IT professionals really be exempt from overtime regulations?

Submission + - NASA Orion Capsule Succesfully Lifts off from Florida Space Coast (nbcnews.com)

Submitted by PaisteUser
PaisteUser writes: NBC News writes: America's most powerful rocket launched a robotic test version of NASA's Orion deep-space capsule on its first flight on Friday, a day after a series of snags forced a scrub of the first attempt. The United Launch Alliance Delta 4 Heavy rocket's liftoff from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station had to be postponed on Thursday — at first due to gusty winds, and later due to a balky fuel valve. But on Friday, no technical issues or weather snags got in the way of an on-time 7:05 a.m. ET launch, even though the clouds were thick over Florida's Space Coast.

"Liftoff at dawn! The dawn of Orion, for a new era of American space exploration!" launch commentator Mike Curie said as the rocket blasted through the clouds just after sunrise.

Article include a live feed from the NASA TV channel, NTV-1.

Submission + - Taxi Medallion Prices Plummet Under Pressure From Uber

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: Most major American cities have long used a system to limit the number of operating taxicabs, typically a medallion system: Drivers must own or rent a medallion to operate a taxi, and the city issues a fixed number of them. Now Josh Barro reports at the NYT that in major cities throughout the United States, taxi medallion prices are tumbling as taxis face competition from car-service apps like Uber and Lyft. The average price of an individual New York City taxi medallion fell to $872,000 in October, down 17 percent from a peak reached in the spring of 2013, according to an analysis of sales data. "I’m already at peace with the idea that I’m going to go bankrupt,” said Larry Ionescu, who owns 98 Chicago taxi medallions. As recently as April, Boston taxi medallions were selling for $700,000. The last sale, in October, was for $561,000. “Right now Uber has a strong presence here in Boston, and that’s having a dramatic impact on the taxi industry and the medallion values,” says Donna Blythe-Shaw, a spokeswoman for the Boston Taxi Drivers’ Association. “We hear that there’s a couple of medallion owners that have offered to sell at 425 and nobody’s touched them."

The current structure of the American taxi industry began in New York City when “taxi medallions” were introduced in the 1930s. Taxis were extremely popular in the city, and the government realized they needed to make sure drivers weren’t psychopaths luring victims into their cars. So, New York City required cabbies to apply for a taxi medallion license. Given the technology available in the 1930s, It was a reasonable solution to the taxi safety problem, and other cities soon followed suit. But their scarcity has made taxi medallions the best investment in America for years. Where they exist, taxi medallions have outperformed even the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index. In Chicago, their value has doubled since 2009. The medallion stakeholders are many and deep pockets run this market. The system in Chicago and elsewhere is dominated by large investors who rely on brokers to sell medallions, specialty banks to finance them and middle men to manage and lease them to drivers who own nothing at all. Together, they’re fighting to protect an asset that was worth about $2.4 billion in Chicago last year. “The medallion owners seem to be of the opinion that they are entitled to indefinite appreciation of their asset,” says Corey Owens, Uber’s head of global public policy.. “The taxi medallion in the U.S. was the best investment you could have made in the last 30 years. Will it go up forever? No. And if they expected that it would, that was their mistake.”

Submission + - Researchers Find The Tech Worker Shortage Doesn't Really Exist (businessweek.com)

Submitted by Beeftopia
Beeftopia writes: From the article: "For a real-life example of an actual worker shortage, Salzman points to the case of petroleum engineers, where the supply of workers has failed to keep up with the growth in oil exploration. The result, says Salzman, was just what economists would have predicted: Employers started offering more money, more people started becoming petroleum engineers, and the shortage was solved. In contrast, Salzman concluded in a paper released last year by the liberal Economic Policy Institute, real IT wages are about the same as they were in 1999. Further, he and his co-authors found, only half of STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) college graduates each year get hired into STEM jobs. “We don’t dispute the fact at all that Facebook (FB) and Microsoft (MSFT) would like to have more, cheaper workers,” says Salzman’s co-author Daniel Kuehn, now a research associate at the Urban Institute. “But that doesn’t constitute a shortage.”

Submission + - Both NY and LA Times write that Silicon Valley can't find enough talent. 2

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The New York Times has featured Zenefits in an article about the need for more H1-B visas, because they can't find enough qualified U.S. workers to fill their active positions, even after President Obama's recent Executive Actions. The Los Angeles Times has done similarly. Why are so many jobs, primarily in Silicon Valley it seems, going unfilled in 2014?

Submission + - Amsterdam Airport Deploys Fully-Automated Solar-Power Green Lasers Against Birds

Submitted by operator_error
operator_error writes: Seven out of every 10,000 flights near Amsterdam involve a collision with birds, upon either take-off or landing. Therefore bird control is such an issue, as many as 7000 geese have to be gassed annually, as more humane methods have been sought. Now Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport has started to deploy solar-powered, fully-automated bird-scanning green lasers, (that will not interfere with aircraft vision).

Submission + - Activists Discover Evidence of St. Petersburg's River of Poop (globalvoicesonline.org)

Submitted by Okian Warrior
Okian Warrior writes: Two weeks ago, a group of St. Petersburg ecologists conducted a test in Novoye Devyatkino, a suburb about 12 miles outside the city, of the local sewer system. In a study they titled “Feces Travel,” the activists dropped ten miniaturized, waterproofed GPS-tracking units down the toilet of a single apartment home and began mapping the devices’ signals.

On their website, the ecologists claim the trackers spilled out directly into the open-air waterways outside the building, without encountering even the most rudimentary sewage filtration. From Novoye Devyatkino, five of the devices reached the open waters of Neva Bay, where the units’ batteries appear to have died.

Comment Re:Update to Godwin's law? (Score 1) 575

by SpzToid (#48041435) Attached to: Obama Administration Argues For Backdoors In Personal Electronics

Don't forget about the person that asked Apple's Siri voice activated search engine, "what's the best place to hide a dead body"?

Can't send this before I remind others here of the Slashdot comment to that piece, clarifying that the person who did this was Florida college student who failed to understand how many alligators and crocodiles live in the area.

The example just seems so classic I had to add this comment.

Comment Re:GIMP runs better then ever on Linux (Score 1) 197

by SpzToid (#48034009) Attached to: Adobe Photoshop Is Coming To Linux, Through Chromebooks

And since you AC care to challenge my career in publishing production let me give you some advice, that I realized and adopted for myself years ago.

There's the difference between print publishing and electronic publishing. You know it for what it is, but I'll elaborate, and to make my point, I'd have to say your photoshop work falls into the Print Category (for this example anyway), and there's nothing wrong with that. I've spent my time with the CLUTs and calibrations, before the technology of Lithography matured to what we know today. To clarify the difference between Print and Digital Publishing, (and you can figure out for yourself where you fit in), I'll define Print being dead tree, deadline then go to press stuff, *and* a Typo Stays(!).

Of course everyone did the best they could, including the proofreader, but it is impossible to remove the typo, or whatever error is that hypothetically just slipped past, and the cost of the print run to the client is huge. Jobs could be lost as a result of a typo. But typos can and do happen, every day. Some are just more important than others. The fact remains, typos and any other kind of error cause a lot of stress and risk. And life is short.

Now in Digital Media, we have all kinds of cool technology to solve our evolving problems, such as Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery. We have things like typos too! Except the Digital Publishing business model is so much better, because typos are totally excepted and are in-fact known as 'bugs', and we get paid to come back every day to fix them. And on Fridays everyone goofs off and drinks beer and goes home early.

Get off my lawn.

Comment Re:GIMP runs better then ever on Linux (Score 1) 197

by SpzToid (#48033959) Attached to: Adobe Photoshop Is Coming To Linux, Through Chromebooks

Here's a quote from my post you replied to:

Sure, pros will want Photoshop for the hours they spend time with it

Not everyone has requirements like yours while many others are still working professionally with graphics and require good tools. Meanwhile GIMP keeps improving and fixing its faults.

Submission + - Hong Kong protesters use a mesh network to organise (newscientist.com)

Submitted by wabrandsma
wabrandsma writes: from New Scientist:

Hong Kong's mass protest is networked. Activists are relying on a free app that can send messages without any cellphone connection.

Since the pro-democracy protests turned ugly over the weekend, many worry that the Chinese government would block local phone networks.

In response, activists have turned to the FireChat app to send supportive messages and share the latest news. On Sunday alone, the app was downloaded more than 100,000 times in Hong Kong, its developers said. FireChat relies on "mesh networking", a technique that allows data to zip directly from one phone to another via Wi-Fi or Bluetooth. Ordinarily, if two people want to communicate this way, they need to be fairly close together. But as more people join in, the network grows and messages can travel further.

Mesh networks can be useful for people who are caught in natural disasters or, like those in Hong Kong, protesting under tricky conditions. FireChat came in handy for protesters in Taiwan and Iraq this year.

Slashdot Top Deals

"No matter where you go, there you are..." -- Buckaroo Banzai

Close