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The Almighty Buck

The Vicious Circle That Is Sending Rents Spiraling Higher 940

Posted by samzenpus from the rent-is-too-damn-high dept.
jones_supa writes: Skyrocketing rents and multiple roommates — these are the kinds of war stories you expect to hear in space-constrained cities such as New York and San Francisco. But the rental crunch has been steadily creeping inland from coastal cities and up the economic ladder. Bloomberg takes a look at the vicious cycle that keeps rents spiraling higher. People paying high rents have a harder time saving for a down payment, preventing tenants from exiting the rental market. Low vacancy rates let landlords raise rents still higher. Developers who know they can command high rents (and sales prices) are spurred to spend more to acquire developable land. Finally, higher land costs can force builders to target the higher end of the market. The interesting question is how long can this last before we reach a level that is not affordable to the majority of the demographic that is being serviced.
Data Storage

When Will Your Hard Drive Fail? 297

Posted by timothy from the worst-possible-moment dept.
jfruh writes: Tech writer Andy Patrizio suffered his most catastrophic hard drive failure in 25 years of computing recently, which prompted him to delve into the questions of which hard drives fail and when. One intriguing theory behind some failure rates involve a crisis in the industry that arose from the massive 2011 floods in Thailand, home to the global hard drive industry.
Wireless Networking

Sprint Begins Punishing Customers For FCC's Net Neutrality Rules 272

Posted by Soulskill from the unintended-regulatory-consquences dept.
ourlovecanlastforeve writes: A few days ago Sprint announced their intent to stop throttling certain customers' bandwidth in the wake of the FCC fining ATT $100,000,000 for doing the same. Sprint has now begun circulating an internal memo to their front-line reps that the 12-month warranty on non-branded accessories, a featured selling point, will be eliminated. Additional rumors are emerging that Sprint may increase prices on unlimited data plans and stop offering wireline long distance service.
Programming

Ask Slashdot: What's the Harm In a Default Setting For Div By Zero? 1067

Posted by timothy from the as-long-as-it's-a-big-zero dept.
New submitter CodeInspired writes: After 20 years of programming, I've decided I'm tired of checking for div by zero. Would there be any serious harm in allowing a system wide setting that said div by zero simply equals zero? Maybe it exists already, not sure. But I run into it all the time in every language I've worked with. Does anyone want their div by zero errors to result in anything other than zero?
Businesses

FCC To Fine AT&T $100M For Throttling Unlimited Data Customers 205

Posted by samzenpus from the pay-up dept.
New submitter Wargames writes: According to the article in the New York Times, AT&T is getting fined $100,000,000 for its doublespeak redefinition of the word "Unlimited". The FCC says AT&T failed to adequately notify its customers that they could receive speeds slower than the normal network speeds AT&T advertised and that these actions violated the FCC's 2010 Open Internet Order. “Unlimited means unlimited,” Travis LeBlanc, the F.C.C.’s chief of the enforcement bureau, said in a statement on Wednesday. “As today’s action demonstrates, the commission is committed to holding accountable those broadband providers who fail to be fully transparent about data limits.”
Privacy

Privacy Advocates Leave In Protest Over U.S. Facial Recognition Code of Conduct 161

Posted by samzenpus from the all-the-better-to-identify-you-with dept.
Taco Cowboy writes: Nine privacy advocates involved in the Commerce Department process for developing a voluntary code of conduct for the use of facial recognition technology withdrew in protest over technology industry lobbyists' overwhelming influence on the process. "At a base minimum, people should be able to walk down a public street without fear that companies they've never heard of are tracking their every movement — and identifying them by name — using facial recognition technology," the privacy advocates wrote in a joint statement. "Unfortunately, we have been unable to obtain agreement even with that basic, specific premise." The Commerce Department, through its National Telecommunications and Information Administration, brought together "representatives from technology companies, trade groups, consumer groups, academic institutions and other organizations" early last year "to kick off an effort to craft privacy safeguards for the commercial use of facial recognition technology."

The goal was "to develop a voluntary, enforceable code of conduct that specifies how the Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights applies to facial recognition technology in the commercial context." But after a dozen meetings, the most recent of which was last week, all nine privacy advocates who have participated in the entire process concluded that they were thoroughly outgunned. "This should be a wake-up call to Americans: Industry lobbyists are choking off Washington's ability to protect consumer privacy," Alvaro Bedoya, executive director of the Center on Privacy & Technology at Georgetown Law, said in a statement. "People simply do not expect companies they've never heard of to secretly track them using this powerful technology. Despite all of this, industry associations have pushed for a world where companies can use facial recognition on you whenever they want — no matter what you say. This position is well outside the mainstream."

Comment Friendliness (Score 5, Insightful) 367

by Meneth (#49927445) Attached to: The Future of AI: a Non-Alarmist Viewpoint

The article's viewpoint is dangerous. We must solve the Friendliness problem before AGI is developed, or the resulting superintelligence will most likely be unfriendly.

The author also assumes an AI will not be interested in the real world, preferring virtual environments. This ignores the need for a physical computing base, which will entice any superintelligence to convert all matter on Earth (and then, the universe) to computronium. If the AI is not perfectly friendly, humans are unlikely to survive that conversion.
Businesses

Apple Will Pay More To Streaming Music Producers Than Spotify -- But Not Yet 141

Posted by timothy from the first-three-are-free dept.
Reader journovampire supplies a link to Music Business Worldwide (based on a re/code report) that says Apple's new Apple Music service, after a trial period during which the company has refused to pay royalties, is expected to pay a bit more than 70 percent of its subscription revenue out to the companies supplying it, rather than the 58 percent that some in the music industry had feared. Notes journovampire: "If 13% of iOS device users in the world paid $9.99-per-month for Apple Music, it would generate more cash each year than the entire recorded music biz manages right now."
China

Report: Russia and China Crack Encrypted Snowden Files 546

Posted by timothy from the parallel-efforts dept.
New submitter garyisabusyguy writes with word that, according to London's Sunday Times, "Russia and China have cracked the top-secret cache of files stolen by the fugitive US whistleblower Edward Snowden, forcing MI6 to pull agents out of live operations in hostile countries, according to senior officials in Downing Street, the Home Office and the security services," and suggests this non-paywalled Reuters version, too. "MI6 has decided that it is too dangerous to operate in Russia or China," writes the submitter. "This removes intelligence capabilities that have existed throughout the Cold War, and which may have helped to prevent a 'hot' nuclear war. Have the actions of Snowden, and, apparently, the use of weak encryption, made the world less safe?"
EU

Microsoft Lets EU Governments Inspect Source Code For Security Issues 143

Posted by samzenpus from the take-a-look dept.
itwbennett writes: Microsoft has agreed to let European governments review the source code of its products to ensure that they don't contain security backdoors, at a transparency center in Brussels. The second of its kind, the new center follows on the heels of the first, built last June in Redmond, Washington. Part of Microsoft's Government Security Program, the company hopes the centers will create trust with governments that want to use Microsoft products. "Today's opening in Brussels will give governments in Europe, the Middle East and Africa a convenient location to experience our commitment to transparency and delivering products and services that are secure by principle and by design," said Matt Thomlinson, Vice President of Microsoft Security.
Bug

Typing 'http://:' Into a Skype Message Trashes the Installation Beyond Repair 225

Posted by Soulskill from the bug-of-the-year dept.
An anonymous reader writes: A thread at the Skype community forums has brought to light a critical bug in Microsoft's Skype clients for Windows, iOS and Android: typing the incorrect URL initiator http://: into a text message on Skype will crash the client so badly that it can only be repaired by installing an older version and awaiting a fix from Microsoft. The bug does not affect OS X or the 'Metro'-style Windows clients — which means, effectively, that Mac users could kill the Skype installations on other platforms just by sending an eight-character message.
Space

Does a Black Hole Have a Shape? 108

Posted by timothy from the how-long-is-a-piece-of-string-theory? dept.
StartsWithABang writes: When you think about a black hole, you very likely think about a large amount of mass, pulled towards a central location by the tremendous force of gravity. While black holes themselves may be perfectly spherical (or for rotating black holes, almost perfectly spherical), there are important physical cases that can cause them to look tremendously asymmetrical, including the possession of an accretion disk and, in the most extreme case, a merger with another black hole.
Science

There Is a Finite Limit On How Long Intelligence Can Exist In Our Universe 205

Posted by timothy from the never-outlives-the-ballot-box dept.
StartsWithABang writes: The heat death of the Universe is the idea that increasing entropy will eventually cause the Universe to arrive at a uniformly, maximally disordered state. Every piece of evidence we have points towards our unfortunate, inevitable trending towards that end, with every burning star, every gravitational merger, and even every breath we, ourselves, take. Yet even while we head towards this fate, it may be possible for intelligence in an artificial form to continue in the Universe for an extraordinarily long time: possibly for as long as a googol years, but not quite indefinitely. Eventually, it all must end.
Android

The Tricky Road Ahead For Android Gets Even Trickier 344

Posted by samzenpus from the careful-around-the-bends dept.
HughPickens.com writes: Farhad Manjoo writes in the NYT that with over one billion devices sold in 2014 Android is the most popular operating system in the world by far, but that doesn't mean it's a financial success for Google. Apple vacuumed up nearly 90 percent of the profits in the smartphone business which prompts a troubling question for Android and for Google: How will the search company — or anyone else, for that matter — ever make much money from Android. First the good news: The fact that Google does not charge for Android, and that few phone manufacturers are extracting much of a profit from Android devices, means that much of the globe now enjoys decent smartphones and online services for low prices. But while Google makes most of its revenue from advertising, Android has so far been an ad dud compared with Apple's iOS, whose users tend to have more money and spend a lot more time on their phones (and are, thus, more valuable to advertisers). Because Google pays billions to Apple to make its search engine the default search provider for iOS devices, the company collects much more from ads placed on Apple devices than from ads on Android devices.

The final threat for Google's Android may be the most pernicious: What if a significant number of the people who adopted Android as their first smartphone move on to something else as they become power users? In Apple's last two earnings calls, Tim Cook reported that the "majority" of those who switched to iPhone had owned a smartphone running Android. Apple has not specified the rate of switching, but a survey found that 16 percent of people who bought the latest iPhones previously owned Android devices; in China, that rate was 29 percent. For Google, this may not be terrible news in the short run. If Google already makes more from ads on iOS than Android, growth in iOS might actually be good for Google's bottom line. Still, in the long run, the rise of Android switching sets up a terrible path for Google — losing the high-end of the smartphone market to the iPhone, while the low end is under greater threat from noncooperative Android players like Cyanogen which has a chance to snag as many as 1 billion handsets. Android has always been a tricky strategy concludes Manjoo; now, after finding huge success, it seems only to be getting even trickier.

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It's a naive, domestic operating system without any breeding, but I think you'll be amused by its presumption.

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