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Submission + - LA Mayor Proposes Earthquake Retrofits on Thousands of Buildings 1

HughPickens.com writes: The LA Times reports that Ls Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti has proposed the most ambitious seismic safety regulations in California history that would require owners to retrofit thousands of buildings most at risk of collapse during a major earthquake. "The time for retrofit is now," says Garcetti, adding that the retrofits target buildings “that are known killers. Complacency risks lives. One thing we can’t afford to do is wait.” The mayor’s plan calls for thousands of wood buildings to be retrofitted within five years, and hundreds of concrete buildings to be strengthened within 30. The retrofitting requirements must be approved by the City Council, and would have to be paid for by the building owners, with the costs presumably passed on to tenants and renters. The costs could be significant: $5,000 per unit in vulnerable wooden buildings and $15 per square foot for office buildings, Business owners, who have expressed concern in the past that these kinds of programs may be unaffordable, said the cost of retrofitting some buildings could easily exceed $1 million each. “This will cost us billions of dollars in the private and public sector,” says Garcetti. “But we cannot afford not to do it.”

The last major earthquake in Los Angeles was the 6.7-magnitude Northridge quake, which killed close to 60 people in 1994. But it was not close to the catastrophe that seismologists predict if there is a major shift on the San Andreas fault, and the fact that it has not produced a major quake in recent years has fed a sense of complacency. Seismologists now say a 7.5-magnitude event on the Puente Hills would be "the quake from hell" because it runs right under downtown Los Angeles and have estimated that would kill up to 18,000 people, make several million homeless, and cause up to $250 billion in damage. “We want to keep the city up and running after the earthquake happens,” says Lucy Jones aka "The Earthquake Lady," a seismologist with the United States Geological Survey and something of a celebrity in a city that is very aware of the potential danger of its location. “If everything in this report is enacted, I believe that L.A. will not just survive the next earthquake, but will be able to recover quickly.”

Submission + - Cisco slaps Arista Networks with suit for "brazen" patent infringement (networkworld.com)

alphadogg writes: Cisco today filed two lawsuits against data center switch competitor Arista Networks for allegedly violating its intellectual property. One suit is for patent infringement, which charges Arista with violating 14 Cisco patents for 12 features in the Arista EOS operating system. The second suit is for extensive copying of Cisco’s user manuals and command line structures, right down to the grammatical errors within them. “This is not an accident but a strategy,” says a source familiar with the matter. “It was a deliberate, brazen and blatant intellectual property violation in order to gain competitive advantage in the marketplace. Arista’s shortcutting to get to market and win share.”

Submission + - HP Unveils Industrial 3D Printer 10X Faster, 50% Cheaper Than Current Systems (computerworld.com)

Lucas123 writes: HP today announced an 3D industrial printer that it said will be half the cost of current additive manufacturing systems while also 10 times faster, enabling production parts to be built. The company also announced Sprout, a new immersive computing platform that combines a 23-in touch screen monitor and horizontal capacitive touch mat with a scanner, depth sensor, hi-res camera, and projector in a single desktop device. HP's Multi Jet Fusion printer will be offered to beta customers early next year and is expected to be generally available in 2016. The machine uses a print bar with 30,000 nozzles spraying 350 million drops a second of thermoplastic or other materials onto a print platform. The Multi Jet Fusion printer uses fused deposition modeling, an additive manufacturing technology first invented in 1990. the printer works by first laying down a layer of powder material across a build area. Then a fusing agent is selectively applied with the page-wide print bar. Then the same print bar applies a detailing agent at the parts edge to give high definition. The material is then exposed to an energy source that fuses it.

Feed Techdirt: Sheriff Slams EFF As 'Not Credible,' Insists ComputerCOP Isn't Malware & Wou (google.com)

Okay, so we thought the response from San Diego's District Attorney Bonnie Dumanis was pretty bad to the revelations about ComputerCOP. After all, she was responding to the news that she had purchased and distributed dangerous spyware masquerading as software to "protect the children" -- and the best she could come up with was that her "security" people still thought it would protect kids? But apparently Damanis has nothing on Sheriff Mike Blakely of Limestone County, Alabama.

Blakely, in a bit of unfortunate timing, just announced that his department had purchased 5,000 copies of the spyware earlier this week, so perhaps it's understandable that this "perfect election and fundraising tool" might actually turn into something of a liability. But Blakely's not going down without a fight. When presented with the news that he's proudly handing out tools that are making the children he's supposed to be protecting less safe, Blakely went with an ad hom the messenger approach, attacking EFF's credibility, and calling them "liberals."

Blakely referred to the EFF criticism politics as an "Ultra-liberal organization that is not in any way credible on this. They're more interested in protecting predators and pedophiles than in protecting our children."
Anyone even remotely familiar with EFF recognizes that basically every word in that statement is ridiculous, but what are you going to do? The idea that EFF isn't credible on security issues is laugh out loud funny (and, indeed, despite attending a conference and being in a room full of people, I literally laughed out loud upon reading it). However, Blakely insists his IT people are sure the software's fine:

"We have had the key logger checked out with our IT people. They have run it on our computer system." He said. "There is no malware."
Reread that a few times. "We had the key logger checked out... there is no malware." Dude. A keylogger is malware. That's what it does. From the description here, it sounds like his "IT people" ran some anti-malware software on the computer they installed ComputerCOP on, and because it didn't flag it, they insist it's not malware. But a keylogger is malware by definition. And the fact that this malware happens to pass unencrypted text, including passwords and credit card numbers, over the internet makes it really, really bad.

But don't tell that to Sheriff Blakely. He insists that ComputerCOP might have stopped Columbine. I'm not joking.

On the phone Wednesday he added "There are some parents out in Columbine Colorado, if they had this kind of software, things would have turned out differently."
That comment is so off it defies a coherent response.

Meanwhile, I'm sure that Sheriff Blakely's "IT People" are trustworthy, given that his website looks like it was designed in 1997 and hasn't been touched since. It even has a visitor counter and a "this site best viewed in Internet Explorer" badge. I'm not joking. And a scroll. The only thing it's missing is an under construction gif and the blink tag: And, uh, note that text there:

You are not permitted to copy, broadcast, download, store (in any medium), transmit, show or play in public, adapt or change in any way, the content of these web pages for any other purpose whatsoever without the prior written permission of the site webmaster.
And there's a copyright notice below it. Of course, anyone who views the website has copied, downloaded, stored and transmitted the webpage in some manner -- so, I'm not quite sure what to do other than to say, that most of those demands are completely bogus and not based on any actual law. As for the copyright -- well, while technically only federal government works are exempt from copyright, and state and local governments can get a copyright in some fashion, it's generally not considered the appropriate role of government officials to be copyrighting official government works. Furthermore, in such cases, there would likely be a very strong presumption of fair use for a whole host of reasons.

Oh, but it gets worse. Not only are you not supposed to copy any of the text on Sheriff Blakely's website, the terms of service on his website say he might put you in jail if you do:

The unauthorized use, copy, or reproduction of any content of this site inclusive, may be punishable by both fine and imprisonment.
Under what legal theory is that happening? As a sheriff, aren't you supposed to, you know, actually know what the law is? Maybe work on that before slamming the good folks at EFF while distributing dangerous spyware that makes kids less safe. And find someone who's built a website in the last decade.

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Submission + - F.C.C., in Net Neutrality Turnaround, Plans to Allow Fast Lane (nytimes.com)

Dega704 writes: "The Federal Communications Commission will propose new rules that allow Internet service providers to offer a faster lane through which to send video and other content to consumers, as long as a content company is willing to pay for it, according to people briefed on the proposals.

The proposed rules are a complete turnaround for the F.C.C. on the subject of so-called net neutrality, the principle that Internet users should have equal ability to see any content they choose, and that no content providers should be discriminated against in providing their offerings to consumers."

It would seem that fears about Tom Wheeler's lobbyist background were well-founded after all.

Feed Google News Sci Tech: Intel Sells Its Online-TV Unit to Verizon - Wall Street Journal (google.com)


AFP

Intel Sells Its Online-TV Unit to Verizon
Wall Street Journal
Verizon will buy the intellectual property rights of Intel's cloud TV platform and will offer jobs to about 350 employees working for the Intel Media division based in Santa Clara, Calif., the companies said in a joint statement Tuesday. Though terms weren't...
Intel sells Internet TV business to VerizonLos Angeles Times
Verizon to buy Intel's TV productsUSA TODAY
Intel TV is dead. Long live Web TV.CNET
Newsday-PC Magazine-Forbes
all 98 news articles

Submission + - Soylent: No Food For 30 Days (vice.com) 1

Daniel_Stuckey writes: Senior Editor of Motherboard, Brian Merchant, went an entire month without eating regular food. Instead, the journalist whisked up a concoction called soylent, an efficient take on the future of nourishment and nutrition.

Merchant says: "It was my second day on Soylent and my stomach felt like a coil of knotty old rope, slowly tightening. I wasn’t hungry, but something was off. I was tired, light-headed, low-energy, but my heart was racing. My eyes glazed over as I stared out the window of our rental SUV as we drove over the fog-shrouded Bay Bridge to Oakland. Some of this was nerves, sure. I had twenty-eight days left of my month-long all-Soylent diet—I was attempting to live on the full food replacement longer than anyone besides its inventor—and I felt woozy already.

We were en route to Soylent HQ, where the 25-year-old Rob Rhinehart and his crew were whipping up the internet famous hacker meal—the macro-nutritious shake they think will soon replace the bulk of our meals."

Data Storage

Submission + - IBM Makes Spintronics Memory Breakthrough (computerworld.com)

CWmike writes: "In a paper set to be published this week in the scientific journal Nature, IBM researchers are claiming a huge breakthrough in spintronics, a technology that could significantly boost capacity and lower power use of memory and storage devices. Spintronics, short for 'spin transport electronics,' uses the natural spin of electrons within a magnetic field in combination with a read/write head to lay down and read back bits of data on semiconductor material. By changing an electron's axis in an up or down orientation — all relative to the space in which it exists — physicists are able to have it represent bits of data. For example, an electron on an upward axis is a one; and an electron on a downward axis is a zero. Spintronics has long faced an intrinsic problem because electrons have only held an 'up or down' orientation for 100 picoseconds. A picosecond is one trillionth of a second [one thousandth of a nanosecond.] One hundred picoseconds is not enough time for a compute cycle, so transistors cannot complete a compute function and data storage is not persistent. In the study published in Nature, IBM Research and the Solid State Physics Laboratory at ETH Zurich announced they had found a way to synchronize electrons, which could extend their spin lifetime by 30 times to 1.1 nanoseconds, the time it takes for a 1 GHz processor to cycle."

Comment Re:From a buffoon (Score 1) 721

The biggest reason is financial.. Diesel is needed for large vehicles, trucks, etc. Depending on how you look at refining gasoline is a byproduct of diesel productions. If you get 2 usable fuels from the base crude oil, society needs consumers of each fuel. Thus consumer vehicles are typically gasoline and commercial large vehicles are typically diesel. If all consumptions switches to diesel price of diesel would be incredible and price of gasoline would be cheap.

Comment Re:Which is what, exactly? (Score 1) 2247

Should the people of California pay to subsidize the roads of many rural states? What about telephone subsidies for those states?

Ironically, the states that tend to complain the most and produce federal revenue on the lower end per-capita get more return on their federal dollars than the higher federal revenue producing states like California.
Software

Submission + - NYC mayor demands $600M refund on software project (networkworld.com)

alphadogg writes: New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg is demanding that systems integrator Science Applications International Corporation reimburse more than $600 million it was paid in connection with the troubled CityTime software project, a long-running effort to overhaul the city's payroll system. "The City relied on the integrity of SAIC as one of the nation's leading technology application companies to execute the CityTime project within a reasonable amount of time and within budget given the system's size and complexity," Bloomberg wrote in a letter Wednesday to SAIC CEO Walter Havenstein. CityTime was launched in 2003 at a budget of $63 million, but costs swelled dramatically as the project stumbled along for nearly a decade.

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