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The Almighty Buck

George Lucas Building Low-Income Housing Next Door To Millionaires 540

Posted by samzenpus from the rich-and-poor dept.
BarbaraHudson writes His neighbors wouldn't let him build a film studio on his land, so George Lucas is retaliating in a way that only the cream of Hollywood could — by building the largest affordable housing development in the area — and footing the entire $200 million bill, no government subsidies or grants. The complex of affordable housing, funded and designed by Lucas, would sit on 52 acres of land and provide homes to 224 low-income families, and there's very little his fellow Bay Area residents can do about it, because the land is zoned residential.
The Internet

Ask Slashdot: What Features Would You Like In a Search Engine? 276

Posted by timothy from the esp-heads-the-list dept.
New submitter nicolas.slusarenko writes Nowadays, there is one dominant search engine in the world among few alternatives. I have the impression that the majority of users think that it is the best possible service that could be made. I am sure that we could have a better search engine. During my spare time I been developing Trokam, an online search engine. I am building this service with the features that I would like to find in a service: respectful of user rights, ad-free, built upon open source software, and with auditable results. Well, those are mine. What features would you like in a search engine?
Sony

Hacked Sony Emails Reveal That Sony Had Pirated Books About Hacking 59

Posted by timothy from the elephant-books-all-the-way-down dept.
An anonymous reader writes Sony has done a lot of aggressive anti-piracy work in their time, which makes it that much funnier that pirated ebooks were found on their servers from the 2014 hacks that just went on to WikiLeaks. Better yet, the pirated books are educational books about hacking called "Inside Cyber Warfare" and "Hacking the Next Generation" from O'Reilly publishers.

Comment But (Score 1) 179

by uvajed_ekil (#49490505) Attached to: Cyanogen Partners With Microsoft To Replace Google Apps
But Cyanogen can't even seem to get bluetooth to work properly on my 3 year-old LG Optimus G. The BT MAC address is always an incorrect value, causing major connection and audio streaming issues. I have been a big fan of CM roms for 5-6 years now, but there are too many bugs they can't seem to rectify these days for me to take them completely seriously. This is especially true if they want to do Android without Google.

Good luck to them, but dancing with the devil (and undisputed king of unresolved bugs) doesn't seem like the way to perfect Android, even if it means taking the lead away from Google. This is disappointing, to say the least.
Education

LA Schools Seeking Refund Over Botched iPad Plan 325

Posted by Soulskill from the good-luck-with-that dept.
A reader sends news that Los Angeles Unified School District is asking Apple for a refund of the district's effort to equip students with iPads. The project was budgeted at around $1.3 billion to equip its 650,000 students, though only about 120,000 iPads have been purchased so far. After the program went bad, the FBI launched an investigation into their procurement practices. The iPads weren't standalone education devices — they were supposed to work in conjunction with another device carrying curriculum from a company named Pearson. But the district now says the combined tech didn't meet their needs, and they want their money back. Lawyers for the local Board of Education are looking into litigation options. They've also notified Apple and Pearson they won't pay for any new products or services.
Stats

IT Worker's Lawsuit Accuses Tata of Discrimination 294

Posted by timothy from the not-all-discrimination-is-invidious dept.
dcblogs writes An IT worker is accusing Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) of discriminating against American workers and favoring "South Asians" in hiring and promotion. It's backing up its complaint, in part, with numbers. The lawsuit, filed this week in federal court in San Francisco, claims that 95% of the 14,000 people Tata employs in the U.S. are South Asian or mostly Indian. It says this practice has created a "grossly disproportionate workforce." India-based Tata achieves its "discriminatory goals" in at least three ways, the lawsuit alleges. First, the company hires large numbers of H-1B workers. Over from 2011 to 2013, Tata sponsored nearly 21,000 new H-1B visas, all primarily Indian workers, according to the lawsuit's count. Second, when Tata hires locally, "such persons are still disproportionately South Asian," and, third, for the "relatively few non-South Asians workers that Tata hires," it disfavors them in placement, promotion and termination decisions.
Businesses

Video IT Consultant Talks About 'Negotiating for Nerds' (Video) 61

Posted by Roblimo from the paying-it-forward dept.
Matt Heusser did a Slashdot video interview back in 2013 titled How to Become an IT Expert Companies Seek Out and Pay Well. Despite noise from a few yammerheads about Matt getting 'free advertising' on Slashdot, which is unlikely since the vast majority of Slashdot users are more likely to compete with him than to hire him, most of the people who saw that video (or read the transcript) knew he was giving helpful advice to peers who might want to get out of the cubicle and work for themselves.

Today, Matt is with us again. This video is about 'Negotiating for Nerds.' Matt talks about negotiating a pay raise or consulting fee increase, starting with learning who has the actual power to negotiate with you. This is essential knowledge if you are employed (or self-employed) in IT and want to make sure you're getting all you are worth.
Open Source

Linux Getting Extensive x86 Assembly Code Refresh 209

Posted by Soulskill from the code-run-through-de-spaghettifier dept.
jones_supa writes: A massive x86 assembly code spring cleaning has been done in a pull request that is to end up in Linux 4.1. The developers have tried testing the code on many different x86 boxes, but there's risk of regression when exposing the code to many more systems in the days and weeks ahead. That being said, the list of improvements is excellent. There are over 100 separate cleanups, restructuring changes, speedups and fixes in the x86 system call, IRQ, trap and other entry code, part of a heroic effort to deobfuscate a decade old spaghetti assembly code and its C code dependencies.
The Internet

Republicans Introduce a Bill To Overturn Net Neutrality 441

Posted by Soulskill from the not-neutrality dept.
New submitter grimmjeeper writes: IDG News reports, "A group of Republican lawmakers has introduced a bill that would invalidate the U.S. Federal Communications Commission's recently passed net neutrality rules. The legislation (PDF), introduced by Representative Doug Collins, a Georgia Republican, is called a resolution of disapproval, a move that allows Congress to review new federal regulations from government agencies, using an expedited legislative process."

This move should come as little surprise to anyone. While the main battle in getting net neutrality has been won, the war is far from over. The legislation was only proposed now because the FCC's net neutrality rules were just published in the Federal Register today. In addition to the legislation, a new lawsuit was filed in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit by USTelecom, a trade group representing ISPs.

Comment Ellen Pao is an idiot (Score 1) 892

Ellen Pao is either lying about her motivation by attempting to underpay her workforce, or perhaps she is just an idiot. When she says, "Men negotiate harder than women do and sometimes women get penalized when they do negotiate," she is first being sexist, then undermining her own credibility as a policy setter within the company. First off, it is blatantly and horribly sexist to make a ludicrous blanket comment like that when she claims to be striving for equality. To then admit that her underlings might penalize women for negotiating for themselves is an admission of failure.

That, or she is simply looking for an excuse to refuse to negotiate in good faith, thus making it easier to underpay everyone across the board (and miss out on valuable talent, of course). What a load of crap, which should not be unexpected considering this is Reddit we are discussing, I guess.
Crime

AT&T Call Centers Sold Mobile Customer Information To Criminals 92

Posted by samzenpus from the was-that-wrong? dept.
itwbennett writes Employees at three call centers in Mexico, Colombia and the Philippines sold hundreds of thousands of AT&T customer records, including names and Social Security numbers, to criminals who attempted to use the customer information to unlock stolen mobile phones, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission said. AT&T has agreed to pay a $25 million civil penalty, which is the largest related to a data breach and customer privacy in the FCC's history.
The Courts

9th Circuit Rules Netflix Isn't Subject To Disability Law 278

Posted by samzenpus from the not-subject-to-your-laws dept.
An anonymous reader writes with news that the US Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit has ruled that Netflix doesn't have to caption their videos. "A federal appeals court ruled (PDF) yesterday that the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) doesn't apply to Netflix, since the online video provider is 'not connected to any actual, physical place.' Donald Cullen sued Netflix in March 2011, attempting to kick off a class-action lawsuit on behalf of disabled people who didn't have full use of the videos because they aren't all captioned. A district court judge threw out his lawsuit in 2013, and yesterday's ruling by the US Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit upholds that decision. The decision is 'unpublished,' meaning it isn't intended to be used as precedent in other cases. However, it certainly doesn't bode well for any plaintiff thinking about filing a similar case in the 9th Circuit, which covers most of the Western US."
Networking

Comcast Planning 2Gbps Service, Starting With Atlanta 208

Posted by timothy from the which-tradeoffs-do-you-prefer dept.
joemite points out a PC Mag article which begins "There's been a lot of talk about Google's 1Gbps "gigabit" Internet service, but Comcast said today that it is planning a 2Gbps service, beginning in Atlanta," and writes: All of the ISPs seem to be "out-doing" each other in terms of offering faster and faster service, but why can't they compete on reasonable rates for "slower" speeds? My 5Mbit service from Comcast is currently costing me $50/month, about what it was 10 years ago. Seems that if they can push a 2 Gigs for a few hundred dollars, I could get at least get 50Mbit for what I'm paying now.

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