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Comment Medallion cabs vs car services (Score 1) 264

Uh, most people (and the TLC itself) are ignoring the distinction between medallion cabs vs car service/'black cars."

Medallion cabs: yellow, spend $1mm for a medallion (a bit cheaper for an "owner-driven" medallion, where the owner promises to drive one shift a day), have meters with regulated fares, famously won't usually take you out of Manhattan, and cruise Manhattan/Downtown Brooklyn, looking for street hails.

Car service: not yellow, almost anyone can get a license, not allowed to pick up street hails (MUST use a base/radio), go anywhere/pick up anywhere, and charge whatever they want.

Uber is targeted to the latter.

Image

UK Police To Allow Gun Users To Renew Licenses With iPhone App 271

Sussex police are creating a number of iPhone apps for the public, including one to renew your gun license. Unsurprisingly, the plan has some anti-gun groups upset. Lyn Costello, of Mothers Against Murder and Aggression (MAMAA), said, "This isn't suitable, especially in light of what happened in Cumbria. We've got to be extra careful giving gun licenses. We have this attitude that gun murders don't happen very often so it's OK to be lax, but it is not OK and we've got to do everything in our power to stop it happening again. We can't put money before life and if you start to do that we are losing our humanity. It is a really stupid idea.''
Encryption

EFF Warns TI Not To Harass Calculator Hobbyists 405

Ponca City, We love you writes "The EFF has warned Texas Instruments not to pursue legal threats against calculator hobbyists who perform modifications to the company's programmable graphing calculators. TI's calculators perform a 'signature check' that allows only approved operating systems to be loaded, but researchers have reverse-engineered signing keys, allowing tinkerers to install custom operating systems and unlock new functionality in the calculators' hardware. In response, TI has unleashed a torrent of demand letters claiming that the anti-circumvention provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act require the hobbyists to take down commentary about and links to the keys. 'This is not about copyright infringement. This is about running your own software on your own device — a calculator you legally bought,' says EFF Civil Liberties Director Jennifer Granick. 'Yet TI still issued empty legal threats in an attempt to shut down discussion of this legitimate tinkering. Hobbyists are taking their own tools and making them better, in the best tradition of American innovation.'"

Comment Re:Complexity (Score 1) 223

"Why is this so hard to understand? Moving to another desktop won't help since Ubuntu is trying to use a video mode that the monitor doesn't understand. If it can't show the initial desktop, why would changing to another desktop help?"

Because the text-only desktop plays by different rules. Even if your GUI is toast, you can (probably) still use text.
Communications

Submission + - How IT makes you productive

BeerBuddy writes: In a path breaking study reported in Computerworld, researchers at Boston University and MIT analyzed how IT makes people more productive. They gathered more than 125,000 email messages, 5 years of project data, and survey responses to see what factors predicted revenue generation and completed projects. Read the originals here and here. Among the surprises, IT didn't necessarily make projects faster but it did dramatically increase productivity by facilitating multitasking. They also found that IT-supported social networks predicted productivity better than experience. Now you can tell your boss the project's late but your productivity is up, and beers with the buddies really matter!
Music

Submission + - EMI: ditching DRM to cost you

33rpm writes: EMI has told online music stores that selling its catalog without DRM is going to cost them a lot of money. 'EMI is the only major record label to seriously consider abandoning the disaster that is DRM, but earlier reports that focused on the company's reformist attitude apparently missed the mark: EMI is willing to lose the DRM, but they demand a considerable advance payment to make it happen. EMI has backed out of talks for now because no one will pay what they're asking.'
The Almighty Buck

An Ad Upstart Forces Google to Open Up a Little 58

The Firehose brought us a link from the NYTimes about Quigo. As the Times feed says: "Yahoo and Google are facing a challenge from a tiny adversary named Quigo Technologies over contextual text ads online." And while obviously not in the same financial league, it is good to see more competition in this space.
Security

Campaign Sites Full of Vulnerabilities 36

An anonymous reader writes "Bloggers have been buzzing about the new wave of "Web 2.0" campaign sites, but it seems that a lot of presidential candidates haven't bothered to protect themselves from cross-site scripting attacks. A blogger has found a collection of XSS vulnerabilities including the websites of Barack Obama, Joe Biden, John Edwards, Mitt Romney, John Cox, Newt Gingrich, Tom Tancredo, the Democratic National Committee, and even a surprise from Whitehouse.gov. Some of the holes are low-risk, but others would allow a user's accounts on the affected website to be compromised. A victim would simply have to click on a maliciously crafted link that appears to lead to the candidate's site."

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