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gewg_ writes:

The San Diego Union-Tribune reports

The San Diego City Council voted Monday to override Mayor Kevin Faulconer's veto of gradual increases in the local minimum wage to $11.50 an hour by 2017, starting the clock on a referendum campaign that business leaders have said they'll pursue.

If opponents can collect the 34,000 valid signatures required for a referendum by Sept. 17, the wage increases will be held in abeyance pending an election in June 2016.

If the signature drive falls short, the wage hikes will go into effect in January with an increase for local minimum wage workers from $9 an hour to $9.75.

Faulconer's veto, which he issued Aug. 8, was overridden by six members of the council, the two-thirds of the nine-member panel required by city law. All of those who voted to override are Democrats.

Of the council's three Republicans, two voted against the override and one — Lorie Zapf — was absent from the vote. The mayor is a Republican.

Bob Filner, a Progressive Democrat who previously represented a San Diego district in Congress, got himself elected mayor in 2012.
There would have been a lot less drama to this workers' rights issue if he hadn't had to resign after a groping scandal.

WillAdams writes:

I've been trying to research 3D printing for a page on the Shapeoko wiki on 3D printing, with a reasonable bit of success, but now am stymied by trying to browse through all the posts to the 3D Printing Community on Google+. The default is for such Circles to show the newest posts, and for older posts to be added at the bottom as one scrolls down, but attempting to do that to access the entire archive results in an unmanageably long page which brings the performance of the web browser to a crawl and makes it awkward to pull out the specific posts as distinct URLs — is there some feature I'm not finding which would allow browsing all these posts?

gewg_ writes:

One News Page reports:

A reporter for Glenn Greenwald's news agency, the Intercept, is the latest to be targeted by police in Ferguson, Mo.

Intercept editor-in-chief John Cook said a St. Louis County police tactical team shot reporter Ryan Devereaux in the back with a non-lethal projectile and subsequently arrested while him while his hands were raised in the air and he shouted, "Press! Press! Press!"

Cook said the police also shot Lukas Hermsmeier, a German reporter for De Bild, with a projectile and arrested him.

The Freedom of the Press Foundation reports that at least 13 journalists have been arrested in Ferguson, Missouri since August 13 amid the protests.

c0lo writes:

RT and many others report that China's coal consumption dropped for the first time in this century. These reports echo an analysis produced by Lauri Myllyvirta and Greenpeace International for the first half of this year:

China’s coal use doubled in the past 10 years, causing more than half of rapid global CO2 growth over the period, bringing the country’s per capita emissions at par with the EU and culminating in the current air pollution crisis.

[...] China’s coal consumption was seems to have dropped in the first half of 2014. The growth of imports ground almost to a halt, while domestic production dropped by 1.8% [in Chinese]. While there is uncertainty over the changes in coal stockpiles - running down stockpiles could have enabled consumption to grow while production and imports declined - stockpiles are reported to be high and increasing, making it very likely that consumption did indeed drop.

[...] Two easy short-term explanations have been offered for the slowing coal demand. The first is that China’s economic growth is slowing and coal consumption growth will resume when the economy picks up. However, there are signs that the link between coal consumption and economic growth has changed substantially. In the first five years of the century, coal use and GDP grew almost hand in hand. In the second half of last decade, while coal consumption growth remained incredibly fast, a gap opened between the growth rates of coal and GDP, widening in the first years of this decade. Finally, in the first half of 2014, the Chinese economy registered a year-on-year growth rate of 7.4% while coal consumption remained stable.

I hope that we are just witnessing the peak coal consumption in China.

AnonTechie writes:

Ars Technica reports:

Dozens of UPS stores across 24 states, including California, Georgia, New York, and Nebraska, have been hit by malware designed to suck up credit card details. The UPS Store, Inc., is a subsidiary of UPS, but each store is independently owned and operated as a licensed franchisee.

In an announcement posted Wednesday to its website, UPS said that 51 locations, or around one percent of its 4,470 franchised stores across the country, were found to have been penetrated by a “broad-based malware intrusion.” The company recorded approximately 105,000 transactions at those locations, but does not know the precise number of cardholders affected.

UPS did not say precisely how such data was taken, but given the recent breaches at hundreds of supermarkets nationwide, point-of-sale hacks at Target, and other major retailers, such systems would be a likely attack vector. Earlier this month, a Wisconsin-based security firm also reported that 1.2 billion usernames and passwords had been captured by a Russian criminal group.

gewg_ writes:

Recently, there has been a circle-jerk of clickbait, gleefully consumed and hyperlinked by the anti-FOSS crowd. The claim is that a certain (unspecified) number of city employees are whining that Linux isn't Windows and FOSS apps aren't good enough and that Munich city fathers have decided to go back to Windows. It's all wishful nonsense from Microsoft fans.

Nick Heath at TechRepublic spoke to city council spokesman Stefan Hauf.

He said the council's recently elected mayor Dieter Reiter has instead simply commissioned a report into the future IT system for the council.

"The new mayor has asked the administration to gather the facts so we can decide and make a proposal for the city council how to proceed in future," he said.

"Not only for LiMux but for all of IT. It's about the organisation, the costs, performance and the useability and satisfaction of the users." [...] "Nothing is decided because first we have to see the report and then we can decide," he said, adding the review has not been triggered by any dissatisfaction with LiMux but is rather part of a review of how to proceed now the LiMux migration project is complete.

In the Spring of 2013, Munich noted that over 94 percent of its computers were running Linux and that the city had already saved more than €10 million over what they would have paid for EULA-ware--even with the fire sale prices initially offered by Ballmer personally.

That anyone thinks the mayor would survive re-election after blowing tens of millions on MSFT licenses and tens of millions more for more-powerful hardware to run it defies all logic.

...and, as Nick notes there, it was never about money; the move to Linux was always about freedom.

freesword writes:

According to the article on Engineering.com Italian aerospace company Avio (a part of GE Aviation) is using an electron gun 10 times more powerful than the laser beams currently used for printing metal parts to fabricate blades for jet engine turbines.

The material used is called titanium aluminide (TiAl) which is 50 percent lighter than the nickel-based alloys typically used for low pressure turbine blades. But titanium aluminide is also notoriously hard to work with. Companies normally use lost-wax casting or spin casting to make TiAl parts. However, the material has a very high contraction ratio and can become fragile and prone to cracks as it cools.

The electron beam melting or EBM technology created by Avio together with Sweden's Arcam solves these problems.

gewg_ writes:

The Electronic Frontier Foundation reports

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of Adam Carolla's Settlement with the Podcasting Troll

Adam Carolla has settled(PDF) with the podcasting patent troll Personal Audio. Although the settlement is confidential, we can guess the terms. This is because Personal Audio sent out a press release(PDF) last month saying it was willing to walk away from its suit with Carolla. So we can assume that Carolla did not pay Personal Audio a penny. We can also assume that, in exchange, Carolla has given up the opportunity to challenge the patent and the chance to get his attorney's fees.

EFF's own challenge to Personal Audio's patent is on a separate track and will continue. Our case is before the Patent Trial and Appeal Board at the Patent Office. We are on schedule for a hearing in December with a ruling likely by April 2015. Carolla's settlement does not impact our case.

Carolla and Personal Audio have agreed to a "quiet period" where they won't make any public statements about the settlement before September 30, 2014. Not coincidentally, Personal Audio is still scheduled to go to trial against a number of television companies (NBC, CBS, and Fox) in September. Since Carolla is muzzled, we'll do our best to explain the significance of the settlement. In short, it's a mixed result.

AnonTechie writes:

The amount of personal data traveling to and from the Internet has exploded, yet many applications and services continue to put user information at risk by not encrypting data sent over wireless networks. Software engineer Tony Webster has a classic solution — shame.

Webster decided to see if a little public humiliation could convince companies to better secure their customers' information. On Saturday, the consultant created a website, HTTP Shaming ( http://httpshaming.tumblr.com/ ) , and began posting cases of insecure communications, calling out businesses that send their customers' personal information to the Internet without encrypting it first.

Hugh Pickens writes:

AP reports that wildlife investigators who watched as birds burn and fell at the Ivanpah Dry Lake Solar Tower Plant are urging California officials to halt the operator's application to build a still-bigger version until the full extent of the deaths can be assessed. Estimates per year now range from a low of about a thousand "streamers" by the plant operator to 28,000 by an expert for the Center for Biological Diversity environmental group. Those statistics haven’t curbed the enthusiasm of the Obama administration for the solar-power plant, which granted Ivanpah a $1.6 billion federal loan guarantee. The deaths are "alarming. It's hard to say whether that's the location or the technology," says Garry George, renewable-energy director for the California chapter of the Audubon Society. "There needs to be some caution." Federal wildlife officials say the plant might act as a "mega-trap" for wildlife, with the bright light of the plant attracting insects, which in turn attract insect-eating birds that fly to their death in the intensely focused light rays.

The $2.2 billion plant at Ivanpah Dry Lake near the California-Nevada border is the world's biggest plant to employ so-called power towers. More than 300,000 mirrors, each the size of a garage door, reflect solar rays onto three boiler towers each looming up to 40 stories high. The water inside is heated to produce steam, which turns turbines that generate enough electricity for 140,000 homes. While biologists say there is no known feasible way to curb the number of birds killed, the companies behind the projects say they are hoping to find one — studying whether lights, sounds or some other technology would scare them away, says Joseph Desmond, senior vice president at BrightSource Energy. Power-tower proponents are fighting to keep the deaths from forcing a pause in the building of new plants when they see the technology on the verge of becoming more affordable and accessible (PDF). When it comes to powering the country's grids, "diversity of technology ... is critical," says Thomas Conroy, a renewable-energy expert. "Nobody should be arguing let's be all coal, all solar," all wind, or all nuclear. "And every one of those technologies has a long list of pros and cons."

gewg_ writes:

ThinkProgress reports:

In their television ads, for-profit colleges promise to deliver credentials that will jump-start students' careers. The people lured in by that marketing end up deeper in debt than community college students but fare no better with hiring managers, according to a new study. In fact, for-profit graduates don't even gain a job hunting advantage over applicants with no college experience at all.

The study results(PDF) are based on a simple experiment that the authors believe is the first of its kind performed on for-profit schools. Researchers sent nearly 9,000 fake resumes in response to job postings in six different categories of work and compared the response rates their fake applicants got to see if a for-profit college degree would be worth more in the job market than an equivalent community college certification. Some of the fictional resumes listed no education beyond high school in order to evaluate the claim from for-profit supporters that the industry "draws some students into postsecondary schooling who otherwise would not have attended college at all" and should therefore be viewed as a useful bridge to economic mobility.

lhsi writes:

PeerPub (the post-publication peer review forum in which users can anonymously point out alleged flaws in the published scientific literature) has been threatened with legal action and have disabled some topics focused on some specific groups of people.

Vanderhoth writes:

After an update released last Tuesday, August 12 some users are reporting a Stop 0x50 error on some systems, mostly on Windows 7 PCs running the 64-bit version of the OS. Microsoft is asking users to avoid the update if it hasn't already been installed. If you are suffering from the the 0x50 error here's a link from the article to Microsoft's support page for the bug MS14-045: Description of the security update for kernel-mode drivers: August 12, 2014

Microsoft urges customers to uninstall 'Blue Screen of Death' update

qwerty writes:

Exoskeletons are a great idea, but perhaps they are a lot of hard work to use. Finally, an exoskeleton for the rest-of-us. ( http://www.cnn.com/2014/08/20/tech/innovation/the-chairless-chair/index.html ) "It's like a chair that isn't there, but magically appears whenever you need it. It's called the Chairless Chair and you wear it on your legs like an exoskeleton: when it's not activated, you can walk normally or even run. And then, at the touch of a button, it locks into place and you can sit down on it. Like a chair that is now there."

RobotMonster writes:

phys.org reports that Researchers have found security flaws in backscatter X-ray scanners.

In laboratory tests, the team was able to successfully conceal firearms and plastic explosive simulants from the Rapiscan Secure 1000 scanner. The team was also able to modify the scanner operating software so it presents an "all-clear" image to the operator even when contraband was detected. "Frankly, we were shocked by what we found," said J. Alex Halderman, a professor of computer science at the University of Michigan. "A clever attacker can smuggle contraband past the machines using surprisingly low-tech techniques."

It seems these machines suffer from security by obscurity:

"The system's designers seem to have assumed that attackers would not have access to a Secure 1000 to test and refine their attacks," said Hovav Shacham, a professor of computer science at UC San Diego. However, the researchers were able to purchase a government-surplus machine found on eBay and subject it to laboratory testing.

An expensive security product that's not all it's cracked up to be? Shock Horror!

I'm reminded of the fake bomb detectors that were being sold to security forces in Iraq and Afghanistan for a mere $60,000 each.