Submission + - A Texas Cell Phone Bill Would Bar Warrantless Collection of Location Data (vice.com)

Submitted by

pigrabbitbear

on Thursday March 07, 2013 @01:22PM

pigrabbitbear writes: "The Supreme Court may have approved the warrantless wiretapping of American citizens for just about forever, but the good old state of Texas isn't going to take that lying down. Texas lawmakers don't believe that cell phone location data is fair game for law enforcement, and a couple identical bills filed in Texas's House and Senate would provide sweeping protections for private cell users."

Submission + - Japan Is Going to Restart Its Nuclear Power Plants, But Don't Freak Out About It (vice.com)

Submitted by

pigrabbitbear

on Monday March 04, 2013 @06:52PM

pigrabbitbear writes: "Areva, the French nuclear fuel company, helps supply Japan with a lot of its juice. And Areva's chief executive says that Japan is going to restart up to six reactors by the end of the year. Eventually, it's going to power up at least two thirds of them. Japan's prime minister Shinzo Abe has been a little cagey, but he recently told the press that yes, despite the upcoming March 11th anniversary of the Fukushima crisis, the nuke plants are coming back online.

Bloomberg Businessweek reports that "half a dozen reactors may restart by the end of this year in addition to the two that resumed operations in 2012." Luc Oursel, the Areva CEO, said at a press conference that “I think two-thirds of reactors will restart” within several years. This is probably a good thing:

First, consider Japan's alternative: loads of coal, oil, and gas power. Japan has been importing fossil fuels to make up for the lost supply; burning all of the above pumps out climate change-causing greenhouse gas emissions. Currently, Japan is entertaining plans to build 12.5 gigawatts worth of coal-fired power. That would be a disaster in climate terms. Eventually, solar and wind could feasibly pick up the slack, but it takes years to build out that kind of infrastructure."

Submission + - Farmers In England Are Growing Their Own Internet Because They Have To (vice.com)

Submitted by

pigrabbitbear

on Wednesday February 27, 2013 @11:32AM

pigrabbitbear writes: "Look outside of your window: if you see miles of farmland, chances are you have terrible internet service. That’s because major telecommunications companies don’t think it’s worth the investment to bring high-speed broadband to sparsely populated areas. But like most businesses, farms increasingly depend on the internet to pay bills, monitor the market and communicate with partners. In the face of a sluggish connection, what's a group of farmers to do?

Grow their own, naturally.

That’s what the people of Lancashire, England, are doing. Last year, a coalition of local farmers and others from the northwestern British county began asking local landowners if they could use their land to begin laying a brand-new community-owned high-speed network, sparing them the expense of tearing up roads. Then, armed with shovels and backhoes, the group, called Broadband for the Rural North, or B4RN (it's pronounced "barn"), began digging the first of what will be approximately 180,000 meters of trenches and filling them with fiber-optic cable, all on its own."

Submission + - Global Warming Will Make the World Too Hot to Get Any Work Done (vice.com)

Submitted by

pigrabbitbear

on Tuesday February 26, 2013 @12:47PM

pigrabbitbear writes: "It’s a good thing that robots are stealing our jobs, because in about thirty-five years, nobody in their right mind is going to want to do them.

Scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration just published a report in Nature Climate Change that details how a warming climate impacts the way we work, and the results are pretty clear—we do less of it. NOAA discovered that over the last 60 years, the hotter, wetter climate has decreased human labor capacity by 10%. And it projects that by 2050, that number will double."

Submission + - Wikipedia Will Soon Be Available Via Text Messages (vice.com)

Submitted by

pigrabbitbear

on Monday February 25, 2013 @04:13PM

pigrabbitbear writes: "Even as we all love to debate the scholarly merits of Wikipedia, there's no denying that it's an immensely powerful research and learning tool. That goes doubly so in poor nations, where access to education materials can be limited to nonexistent.

To that end, Wikimedia started the Wikipedia Zero project, which aims to partner with mobile service providers to bring Wikipedia to poor regions free of charge. It's a killer strategy, because while computer and internet access is still fleeting for much of the world, cell phones are far more ubiquitous. Wikimedia claims that four mobile partnerships signed since 2012 brings free Wiki service to 330 million cell subscribers in 35 countries, a huge boon for folks whose phones have web capability but who can't afford data charges."

Submission + - Will Internet Poker Make a Comeback by Going Brick-and-Mortar? (vice.com)

Submitted by

pigrabbitbear

on Tuesday February 19, 2013 @12:47PM

pigrabbitbear writes: "It's the most modern lament in retail: Brick-and-mortar shopping has gone the way of the dodo as everyone buys their junk online. But for the once-booming online gambling market, salvation may require a reversal of that trend. For one online gaming giant, buying a casino in Atlantic City is the first step to bring Internet poker back to the US.

In 2006, playing online poker for real cash was deemed illegal. While that didn't stop more serious players from playing, especially once the big hosts started funneling cash offshore, the FBI and DoJ's crackdown on April 15, 2011 did. The big trio of online poker–PokerStars, Full Tilt, and Absolute Poker–were all shut down, domains seized, and executives arrested on charges related to fraud, money laundering, and illegal gambling. While PokerStars and others continued operations in foreign, legal markets, the U.S. poker craze pretty much collapsed.

That doesn't mean the lucrative market has gone away. Now, the Rational Group, which owns both PokerStars and Full Tilt, may be hinting at a workaround: the company is looking to buy a struggling casino in Atlantic City. Rational faces a rather large mess of regulatory hurdles, but if it does end up acquiring the Atlantic Club Casino Hotel, it would have a huge foothold in New Jersey's young market for internet gambling."

Submission + - Listen to Baby Ants Talking (vice.com)

Submitted by

pigrabbitbear

on Tuesday February 12, 2013 @11:44AM

pigrabbitbear writes: "Complex, socially-tiered societies require complex communication. So perhaps it’s unsurprising that eusocial animals like ants are also incredibly communicative—more so than we previously understood, according to a new study in Current Biology. Many ants begin communicating acoustically from a very young age, in fact, in such a way that scientists suggest may be very important to their survival.

As explained in an article by Carrie Arnold at ScienceNow, scientists believed until only recently that ants communicated only through pheromones, leaving, for example, scent trails behind them for other ants to follow—hence the phenomenon of single-file marching ants. (They can also, newer research suggests, use magnetic and vibrational landmarks to guide themselves around.)"

Submission + - The FCC Wants to Blanket the Country in Free Wi-Fi (vice.com)

Submitted by

pigrabbitbear

on Monday February 04, 2013 @01:30PM

pigrabbitbear writes: "Internet access is an essential need on par with education access, but at what point do regulators recognize that? When will government officials acknowledge that widespread, guaranteed access is essential to fostering growth in the country? Somewhat surprisingly, that time is now, as the FCC is now calling for nationwide free wi-fi networks to be opened up to the public.

The FCC proposes buying back spectrum from TV stations that would allow for what the Washington Post is dubbing "super wi-fi," as the commission wants to cover the country with wide-ranging, highly-penetrative networks. Essentially, you can imagine the proposal as covering a majority of the country with open-access data networks, similar to cell networks now, that your car, tablet, or even phone could connect to. That means no one is ever disconnected, and some folks–especially light users and the poor–could likely ditch regular Internet and cell plans altogether."

Submission + - The Silk Road Is Showing Cracks (vice.com)

Submitted by

pigrabbitbear

on Friday February 01, 2013 @11:31AM

pigrabbitbear writes: "It always sounded like a hoax, didn't it? Silk Road: an Internet website where you can buy any drug in the world? Yeah, right. But it's real. It was almost two years ago that we first heard about the site, which hosts everything from Adderall to Ketamine, LSD to MDMA and tons and tons of weed. After it started to pick up a ton of press and exposure, we all thought that certainly the Silk Road would get shut down. It's super illegal to sell drugs or even to help people sell drugs. But it didn't. Silk Road survives to this day. However, with the arrival this week of the first conviction of a Silk Road-related crime, you have to wonder if Silk Road's days might be numbered after all.

The trouble is brewing in Australia, where a guy named Paul Leslie Howard is facing as many as five years in prison for selling drugs on Silk Road. We're not talking millions of dollars worth of drugs, but we are talking about thousands of dollars worth. And just as Silk Road natives had feared, Howard was one of those Silk Road n00bs who read a newspaper article about the site and decided to try it out for himself."

Submission + - Free Wi-Fi: The Movement to Give Away Your Internet for the Good of Humanity (vice.com)

Submitted by

pigrabbitbear

on Wednesday January 30, 2013 @12:39PM

pigrabbitbear writes: "We are strangely territorial when it comes to our wireless networks. The idea of someone siphoning off our precious bandwidth without paying for it is, for most people, completely unacceptable. But the Open Wireless Movement wants to change all that.

“We are trying to create a movement where people are willing to share their network for the common good,” says Adi Kamdar, an activist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “It's a neighborly thing to do.”

That's right, upstanding citizen of the Internet, you can be a good neighbor just by opening your wireless network to strangers--or so the line goes. The ultimate vision is one of neighborhoods completely void of passwords, where any passerby can quickly jump on your network and use Google Maps to find directions or check their email or do whatever they want to do (or, whatever you decide they can do)."

Submission + - North Korea's Prison Camps Are Now on Google Maps (vice.com)

Submitted by

pigrabbitbear

on Tuesday January 29, 2013 @04:09PM

pigrabbitbear writes: "It's been nearly a decade since Shin Dong-hyuk, an ex-prisoner of North Korea's Camp 14, crawled over the electrocuted body of a friend lying dead on a fence, a boundary he was born inside of and lived within for 23 years. He made his way across the Chinese border on foot and was granted political asylum and citizenship in Seoul. Now, thanks to updated Google maps of the region, you can actually (if somewhat loosely) retrace the steps of his incredible escape.

Through its Map Maker program, which crowdsources cartographic info, Google has published finer details of some North Korean roads. More notably, it has included shaded-in locations of the country's notorious prison camps. The data has flowed in from a few different sources, including defected North Korean expats now living in Seoul. Geographically-minded tourists and visitors of North Korea have weighed in, and historic map data from pre-partitioned Korea into has also been helpful. (Google maintains that the recent trip to Pyongyang by CEO Eric Schmidt had nothing to do with this project.)"

Submission + - Robert Vicino Built an Underground City Where You Can Ride out the Apocalypse (vice.com)

Submitted by

pigrabbitbear

on Thursday December 20, 2012 @06:58PM

pigrabbitbear writes: "“I was inspired with a very powerful message around 1980 that I needed to build a shelter for 1,000 people deep underground to survive something that was coming that was going to be an extinction event,” he explained in an extensive phone interview. “That’s it, that’s all I had. But it was powerful. So powerful that I had a successful business with 100 employees and I took time off to go up into the mountains and search on weekends looking for an underground mine or cave that could be cartoned and converted.”

Today, Vicino is the owner and founder of Vivos, a company that sells space in luxury survival complexes around the country. It's what he likes to call “life assurance”--mini underground cities, in effect, for people ride out the end of civilization in a community setting with good food, television, even a potential dating pool. He says demand has increased 1,000 percent this year compared to last—itself a 1,000 percent increase over the year before."

Submission + - The World's Fastest-Growing Cause of Death Is Pollution from Car Exhaust (vice.com)

Submitted by

pigrabbitbear

on Tuesday December 18, 2012 @11:58AM

pigrabbitbear writes: "Cars, once again, are killing us. They're killing us in crashes and accidents, yes, and they're encouraging us to grow obese and then killing us a little more slowly. But, more than ever before, they're killing us with their pollution.

Particulate air pollution, along with obesity, is now the two fastest-growing causes of death in the world, according to a new study published in the Lancet.

The study found that in 2010, 3.2 million people died prematurely from the air pollution–particularly the sooty kind that spews from the exhaust pipes of cars and trucks. And of those untimely deaths, 2.1 million were in Asia, where a boom in car use has choked the streets of India and China's fast-expanding cities with smog."

Submission + - Urbanization Has Left the Amazon Burning (vice.com)

Submitted by

pigrabbitbear

on Tuesday December 11, 2012 @05:22PM

pigrabbitbear writes: "Farming, logging, and strip mining has long altered much of the Amazon rainforest, with slash-and-burn land-clearing techniques turning large portions of the forest into patchworks of pastures, second-growth forest, and degraded land. Now, rural people are increasingly moving to booming Amazonian cities; paradoxically, the land they're leaving behind is being ravaged by wildfires.

A new paper published in PNAS shows that in the Peruvian Amazon, land use changes and depopulation have let large wildfires fly through converted land. It puts a damper on those optimistic that the urbanization of the Amazon may allow parts of the forest to recover, by centralizing populated areas and leaving old converted land to be slowly gobbled up by the encroaching forest."

Submission + - All of Your Devices Are Bumming You Out (vice.com)

Submitted by

pigrabbitbear

on Friday December 07, 2012 @01:42PM

pigrabbitbear writes: "A new study from Michigan State University shows that media multitasking exhibits a strong correlation with social anxiety and depression/a.

Importantly, the direction of causality remains to be seen: Does multi-tasking make us more anxious and depressed? Or, as the study’s leader, Mark W. Becker, an assistant professor of psychology, put it in an email, “are depressed and anxious [people] turning toward media multitasking as a form of distraction?”

The results of this study aren’t conclusive in that regard, he says. But they’re an important step. “While that question will not be easy to answer, it is worth pursing because the practical implications of the findings depend on the causal direction,” he said."

Submission + - A Texas Cell Phone Bill Would Bar Warrantless Collection of Location Data (vice.com)

Submission + - Japan Is Going to Restart Its Nuclear Power Plants, But Don't Freak Out About It (vice.com)

Submission + - Farmers In England Are Growing Their Own Internet Because They Have To (vice.com)

Submission + - Global Warming Will Make the World Too Hot to Get Any Work Done (vice.com)

Submission + - Wikipedia Will Soon Be Available Via Text Messages (vice.com)

Submission + - Will Internet Poker Make a Comeback by Going Brick-and-Mortar? (vice.com)

Submission + - Listen to Baby Ants Talking (vice.com)

Submission + - The FCC Wants to Blanket the Country in Free Wi-Fi (vice.com)

Submission + - The Silk Road Is Showing Cracks (vice.com)

Submission + - Free Wi-Fi: The Movement to Give Away Your Internet for the Good of Humanity (vice.com)

Submission + - North Korea's Prison Camps Are Now on Google Maps (vice.com)

Submission + - Robert Vicino Built an Underground City Where You Can Ride out the Apocalypse (vice.com)

Submission + - The World's Fastest-Growing Cause of Death Is Pollution from Car Exhaust (vice.com)

Submission + - Urbanization Has Left the Amazon Burning (vice.com)

Submission + - All of Your Devices Are Bumming You Out (vice.com)

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